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chromic

69 karma · joined October 24, 2010

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chromic··on How Reddit was created: ‘I wanted to make the world suck less’
The article is quite superficial, so not much unless you were clueless to the beginnings of reddit. That said, a lot of things are actually out of your control. You can't make everyone like the thing you want to work on and people often don't even know what they want to see next. Its not about doing projects just because they are fun and lucking out. These guys were actively trying to make a successful product and had to pivot from their original direction.
chromic··on Einstein's list of conditions for staying together with his wife
He wanted to remain together just for the children. It's pretty safe to conclude he would not have done so if he had no children and that her presence is detrimental to him in some fashion. The terms listed are harsh, but they reflect his priorities quite well. Calling him a jerk is a bit out of line when he's prioritizing his children highly enough to try being a father when that isn't his most important goal.
chromic··on CryEngine 3 soft-body physics simulator
Blame both laptops and consoles. The reasoning is the same: both have less powerful hardware and developers want to maximize the availability of their game.
chromic··on How do you take breaks? Try singles Bughouse
Play with a time increment per move. I play casually at work with 2 minutes on the clock and 5 seconds per move.
chromic··on Adobe's 9% Flash tax
Perfect, another nail in flash's coffin.
chromic··on SSL broken. (TLS 1.0 cryptographic attack that works. Not just fake certs.)
One of the main purposes of SSL is to prevent someone who may control the route from server to client from eavesdropping or injecting their own data, so the article assumes this situation: only the server and client are trusted. It's trivial to inject something into an unencrypted stream if you own the network, but they're saying they can slip in some arbitrary JS to an encrypted stream with about 10 minutes of work.
chromic··on 90 Percent of People Don't Know How to Use CTRL+F (or CMD + F)
Funny, I blanked out when I read CTRL+F. Guess it's just muscle memory now.
chromic··on Unemployment Beats Having A Lousy Job
His version is a bit more realistic analogy of what people do.
chromic··on The patent system isn’t broken — we are
"is broken" equates to "allows or encourages something that wasn't originally intended". That's an apt description of the patent system and the current situation.
chromic··on Why don't rich people do more awesome things?
There's value given to a cause if someone important endorses it. Sure, a wealthy individual can write a check and cover the entire amount with ease, but why should he/she? You won't be rich for long if you hand out money every time you're asked. In the end, even the most generous wealthy individuals have to prioritize:

  -"I support X so much that I'll donate $100k."
  -"I like what Y is doing, I'll associate my name with it."
  -"I don't care for Z much/Z might be a scam, ignore them."
And sometimes the money will go toward a new house or a car. It's their money, and I assure you it's a lot harder to see from their perspective than you think.
chromic··on Porting Node to Windows With Microsoft’s Help
This is my preferred unix-in-windows setup as well. Free VMWare player and your favorite distro of linux and you're good to go.
chromic··on ASCII diagram creator
Awesome! Bookmarked for future usage.
chromic··on Node.js is Backwards
Off the top of my head benefits:

  -No mental context switch when working on both ends
  -Easier serialization (though JSON is pretty portable...)
  -Sharing code
They aren't exclusive to Node and JS, but browsers run JS and will continue to for the foreseeable future. Since the front end can't budge its language at the moment, the back end has to.
chromic··on Poll: Best site to use to run a public event
The referenced post brings up a good point, but for many purposes (including your event) it's irrelevant. If your guests are likely to be on facebook, then facebook is a perfectly valid choice.
chromic··on My Email Canary
If he's cautious enough to do two-factor auth, he probably doesn't leave his accounts logged in. Plus you have a whole lot of other problems if someone owns your personal machine.
chromic··on LulzSec Exposed
Low-hanging fruit simply means "reward" for little effort. The low-hanging fruit may very well be the biggest, sweetest of the bunch.
chromic··on Ask HN: Where are the great scientific theories of our lifetime?
I'd say it's because you consider the 'GREATNESS' of a discovery is correlated how well it answers a simple question that almost anyone can come up with. Evolution is a great answer to simple questions about life for anyone willing to accept it, but subatomic particle research just doesn't have immediate implications to most people.

Edit: Also, what are your thoughts on technology? While it isn't a theory or scientific discovery, personal computing has had a major impact on society in the last couple of decades.

chromic··on Ask HN: 2x24" vs 1x27" (2560x1440) Which Monitor configuration do you prefer
Of the choices, I'd go with 2X24" since having a second screen for non-essentials, searching the web for info, comparisons is nice. I wouldn't worry about 27" being too big. I'd even go with a 30" for a primary and tack on a secondary to fit your needs.
chromic··on Glossy vs matte screens: why the PC industry’s out of touch
It depends on the screen. A cheap glossy screen might scratch easy, but something like a macbook screen probably has a pretty good anti-scratch layer. Glossy screens tend to get dirty easier, but also clean a bit easier with readily available materials (e.g. paper towel + water).
chromic··on Glossy vs matte screens: why the PC industry’s out of touch
I play FPSs very often, and a glossy screen really has no merits unless you are playing in the dark with no other light sources to reflect. I'd much prefer a matte display with good color reproduction.
chromic··on China piracy cost U.S. firms $48 billion in 2009
Yep. There are way too many other factors. Many people who pirate may never have considered paying for the material in the first place, and pricing would probably be quite different if piracy wasn't ever an option.

This is just more finger pointing from big corporations trying to blame consumers for all their woes. While movies aren't quite the same as software in general, they should take the hint from Netflix success that there is a legitimate problem on the supply side when much of what is watched on Netflix is easily pirated via upload sites and torrents.

chromic··on Being Frugal Makes You A Loser
You're missing the point. The author has nothing against saving money or being frugal. He is just pointing out that for a variety of reasons, people who can afford better alternatives that would make them substantially happier/healthier/more productive choose cheaper alternatives for cheapness' sake.
chromic··on JQuery 1.6.1 released...
This seems like the right choice. As nice as it is to force code to make explicit distinctions between the two methods, something as popular as jQuery shouldn't cause code breakage in a single update. Deprecate, hint at the better way to do things, and wait for users to move toward the more modern approach.
chromic··on ROME (Chrome experiments) tech showcase with WebGL
Wow, looks great.

A few more years of speed ups, a bit more bandwidth, and better client side web storage and we'll be playing multiplayer FPSs in our browsers.

chromic··on Ask HN: what should a CS student always remember?
Off the top of my head:

Know and understand commonly used algorithms and data structures, both what they are good for and what they are bad at. Most of the problems you'll solve reduce to something that's already been done plus maybe a little extra (My roommate loves this book for algorithms: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms.html).

Work on personal projects. They're great practice, very rewarding, help familiarize you with the language(s) used, and show you the practical side of CS.

chromic··on Google Chrome Hacked?
I think the version disclosure here was less of a "This version has a bug" and more of a "The latest version has a bug." It's a lot safer to tell people which haystack the needle is in than to give away the needle anyway.
chromic··on Google Chrome Hacked?
It's not like "hacked" is a much better to the professional technical community.
chromic··on Should top CS schools offer Software Engineering as a separate major?
No. While there's lot of value of offering more courses that teach the key aspects of software engineering, I can't see it ever being better than the experience at an internship at a real company, which an any serious industry-bound CS student at a top school should be able to find.
chromic··on Dry Erase White Board Paint for Offices
The cleaning is the biggest thing. I've seen this in a few places and there are always red and blue tints left over from erasing. Old writing tends to be a bit hard to take off without some kind of liquid spray.
chromic··on New Chrome extension: block sites from Google’s web search results
There are a few grease monkey scripts that the same thing. I wrote my own that does this and also fetches more results to fill in the gaps left by the "This site has been blocked" entries, but sadly I forgot to back it up before I upgraded hard drives and wiped the old one.
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