Hacker News Reader

dmoneyon Buzz Aldrin calls for humans to colonise Mars

The cycler station is an interesting idea. Seems to me you'd still have to accelerate the crew and supplies to an Earth-Mars orbit every time, but the habitat would only have to be accelerated to that orbit once.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_cycler

dmoneyon A useful program, 0 bytes long

There's a bug in this zero-byte program: the other program might not leave its memory in a correctly runnable state when it shuts down.

dmoneyon Log in to Yahoo by July 15th to keep your email address

Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by indifference.

dmoneyon Steve Jobs Ponders His Legacy In Never-Before-Seen 1994 Video

I bought the audio version a while ago and agree with most of this. I bought it through some other site (probably whatever the SV Historical Society site linked to) and found it virtually impossible to post a review, due to errors about illegal characters in the text. I did find the 15 or so minutes to be worthwhile, but I wished it had been clear that it wasn't an hour-long interview. The person who answered my e-mail was apologetic and comped me another interview.

dmoneyon Windows NT Kernel Contributor Explains Why Performance is Behind Other OS

What were the older incarnations of the cloud?

dmoneyon How to be more productive

The written word is immortal, but websites are not. Eventually your domain name and hosting will expire, your server will die. Presumably someone is keeping Aaron's site alive, but by default, things you write on your own website will go away when you're gone.

Maybe someone should do a kickstarter for large buildings where printed websites can be stored for posterity.

dmoneyon Are Bitcoins The Future?

The maximum value is approximately the cost of a machine for mining it, because if you have that amount of money, you could instead buy the machine and use it to mine more than one bitcoin. The minimum value is probably some function of its reliability. If hardware costs continue to fall, and bitcoins become more useful (i.e. people gain confidence in its security and reliability), the value should become more stable.

dmoneyon Standups are Not Poisonous

> Having nothing to report is fine.

In a meeting where you're supposed to say what you've been working on, at a job where you're paid to be working on it, in what way is it fine to have nothing to report?

dmoneyon Effective Django

Writing the server side of an AJAXy search was pretty straightforward. In your view function, Instead of rendering a template, you call json.dumps() (or the equivalent in XML), and set the content type of the HTTP response (i think "application/json"). Django won't generate your client side JavaScript for you (nor should it IMO), so use jQuery or whatever you want.

dmoneyon Wealth, risk, and stuff

Maybe it's to get experience running a business. Probably also a good opportunity for networking.

dmoneyon Suffering From Depression? Don't Do That Start-up

Suffering from depression? Don't get into that relationship. When you've invested years of your life, and a part of yourself, into someone, and you lose that person, it's harsh. Also, don't have children, because that could be stressful too. BS!

Some aspects of startups are probably unhealthy for people prone to depression: 80 hour weeks, risking everything on a business model without revenue, the culture that says you have to "change the world". If you start a company, though, you set the parameters. Work 40 hours a week. Choose a less risky business model, one that has revenue built in from the get-go. Have cofounders to share the burden; have a support system, preferably one that includes people outside your startup's reality distortion field. Realize that you have limits, that the startup can push those limits, and have a plan for dealing with that (both for steering clear of the limit, and for coping when you've crossed it). Know thyself.

We shouldn't pretend depression doesn't exist. But, like other chronic conditions there are ways to manage it, and, I submit, ways to do that while starting a startup.

dmoneyon Zuck, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey In Short Film To Inspire Kids To Learn How To Code

It may be helpful to get you past the initial Catch-22, but if you can manage to get a few years of experience (let alone 20), I doubt the degree would matter much. Lots of job postings have "Or equivalent experience" after their degree requirements.

dmoneyon Zuck, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey In Short Film To Inspire Kids To Learn How To Code

> A smarter population will lead to more peace and prosperity for the human race.

Or language wars fought with real weapons.

dmoneyon Terms of Service; Didn't Read

Could installing this extension, and therefore being "aware" of the TOS of a given site, make you more liable in the event that you inadvertently violate it? I.e., does it make a TOS any more legally binding than it already is?

dmoneyon First 5 MVPs greenlighted

It probably wouldn't be in their interest to accelerate a web startup accelerator. Maybe an accelerator for some other field. It would be interesting to watch this artificial organism reproduce.

dmoneyon Lesson Learned: Coding should be left to professionals

And there was an error in handling the error!

"Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request."

dmoneyon Should we talk about the fact that founder Jody Sherman didn't just die?

Not to take away from the tragedy of these founders' deaths, or from the negative effects of unrealistic expectations, but is there evidence that these expectations or the pressure they were under caused their suicides? Is their any data on the suicide rate in the startup community vs. the population at large?

dmoneyon Meet Watsi, Y Combinator's First Nonprofit

Why can Y distribute fewer pills if they have no overhead?

dmoneyon Meet Watsi, Y Combinator's First Nonprofit

I like to poke holes in ideas, so I hope that didn't come across as too negative. I partially funded a patient, and it strikes me as a good sign that I've been refreshing the page to see that she gets the rest of the funding she needs. So I hope you are successful (beyond the people you've already helped, so mad props for that!).

Also, I like the "tip" idea.

dmoneyon Meet Watsi, Y Combinator's First Nonprofit

Wow, I'm the embodiment of HN being bad at subtext! :P

On the one hand, I see your point, and I went and helped a little girl (as it happens, a different one). Maybe it doesn't need to be sustainable. It sounds like they've got it covered for now, and if they "only" help a few hundred people before they have to look for other work, that's pretty good.

On the other hand, I don't think it's off-topic to comment on the viability of a business model on a forum about startups. I know it's working in practice, but can it work in theory? :)

dmoneyon Meet Watsi, Y Combinator's First Nonprofit

So, the really cool part is this:

"At Watsi, 100% of your donations directly fund medical treatments. Watsi.org is separately funded. They pay all their operational costs from their own funding, and none from your donations. They even eat the credit card processing fees."

It doesn't sound (as) cool me if the founders can only do this until they go broke. It looks like they do accept direct donations to fund their operating costs, but it seems to me that the demand (if that's the right word for the desire to donate) might not increase at the same rate as the demand to fund treatments (and therefore costs for credit card fees, hosting, staff) increases. Better to take a percentage and be transparent about what you use it for.

dmoneyon IBM's Watson Memorized 'Urban Dictionary,' Then His Overlords Had to Delete It

I've heard it pronounced as rhyming with woeful-stomp.

dmoneyon Steve Yegge: Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

Just as you shouldn't limit yourself to being a "Python programmer" or a "Java programmer", limiting yourself to liberalism or conservativism is a bad idea. You may prefer more liberal or conservative projects, or companies, but that doesn't mean you won't face safety-vs-speed[1] tradeoffs on a regular basis.

[1] safety meaning certainty of correctness, and speed meaning speed of development (as opposed to execution)

dmoneyon Ask NH: 5 quick questions and we donate $2 to the charity of your choice

There's some special treatment of job ads for YC companies. Maybe this post was done using the same back door.

dmoneyon Building high-level features using large scale unsupervised learning

How does this work? I thought neural nets only learned when they got some kind of feedback that let them know whether what their classification was right (back propagation).

dmoneyon A course in how to deal with ferocious intensity at Google

I don't like the ribbon either.

dmoneyon We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m

Yes, in my experience of tech support, I often did have to tell the user what buttons to click.

I'm curious how it works in your country. What would a non-technical user do if they had a problem? What if you're a paying user of a web service and you start having a problem with it?

dmoneyon Hackers had 'full functional control' of Nasa computers

I'd like to know what "key NASA computers" means. This could mean a computer that can send commands to sattelites and rockets, or it could just mean a central e-mail or file server used by office workers.

dmoneyon Hackers had 'full functional control' of Nasa computers

The movies "Hackers" and "The Net" were released in 1995. "Hackers" used the term to mean "someone who penetrates computer security". The one use of the term in in "The Net" [1] was ambiguous as to whether it meant this sense, or Paul Graham's sense of the word[2]; but 90% of the movie was about security and counter-security. So I'd say that the [counter]security connotation was common usage by that time.

[1] http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/n/net-script-tran...

[2] http://paulgraham.com/gba.html

dmoneyon All your metaphors about computers are wrong

A computer is a machine for following instructions. At first it only knows a limited set of logical and arithmetical instructions. You can use these instructions to teach it new things to do, and new commands to follow (and if you buy a computer, somebody probably already has). However, if you phrase these instructions wrong, it will do what you say rather than what you mean.

So you could say that programming a computer is like training a new soldier or worker, and using a computer is like being in command.