HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

dmoney

1,638 karma · joined August 24, 2007

Software developer, temporarily retired. Undercover space alien. I play with music and surf the web too much.

http://dking.org/blog cathodion@gmail.com

submissionscomments
dmoney··on The Web in 2050
Then the question is whether he can beat the Rock in the primary.

Who do you think the Democratic nominee will be? Clinton again?

dmoney··on The Web in 2050
It's possible now to run Linux in a web page. How long before every web page has an Linux running in it?
dmoney··on Explaining React's license
Let me make sure I understand this: The license means that Facebook grants you the right to use the patents on React, but if you sue Facebook for patent infringement, you lose the right to use React?
dmoney··on Hy – A Lisp-flavored Python
Unicode identifiers make me uncomfortable. I have no idea how I would type that circular one in the "sharp macro" section (short of copying and pasting), and I'm imagining seeing those missing-character boxes all over the place.
dmoney··on Hy – A Lisp-flavored Python
As a Python-lover who previously played with Common Lisp and Clojure, lispy syntax took less getting used to than having no end tags, but I'm still not used to prefix math.
dmoney··on Want to Build a Side Business? Just Buy Great Domain Name
> all I can say is, buy a B+ domain name, expect B+ results.

Fair enough. I guess the expense could be justifiable if a good domain name really helps. I'm just wondering about quantifying the risks/costs.

If it fails, you can resell it, but how often do domain names increase vs. decrease in value?

Also, how often do you end up not using an expensive domain name, or find out it was a dud?

dmoney··on Want to Build a Side Business? Just Buy Great Domain Name
> Personally, I think buying domains that seem good, and then brainstorming ideas for them is risky.

Your ideas have to come from somewhere, but I think it's risky too. That's why I suggested buying a cheaper domain to vet the idea before buying an expensive one (if at all).

dmoney··on Want to Build a Side Business? Just Buy Great Domain Name
Ad-supported site where people vote on ideas for making a quick buck.
dmoney··on Want to Build a Side Business? Just Buy Great Domain Name
I like the idea of using expiring domain names to generate business ideas (especially domain names that are fetching a good price).

But what if, instead of buying the domain name, you... didn't buy it? What if, instead of dropping $5K on an exact match, you spent $10 on a B+ domain name, where you can set up a landing page to see if there's interest in the business idea you've generated?

That way, if you are getting signups, or even actual customers, then you try to get a better domain name; but if not, you're not out $5K.

Or am I missing something? I guess you can still sell the domain if you don't end up doing something with it, but what if it declines in value?

edit: punctuation

dmoney··on Kalzumeus Software Year in Review 2016
Me too. I hope someone in this thread will guess it, or something else equally interesting.
dmoney··on Spec-ulation – Rich Hickey [video]
Also part of the C4 methodology: https://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:22/C4/

* A patch that introduces new features to a Public Contract SHOULD do so using new names.

dmoney··on Ask HN: What are your passive income sources?
What's a good resource on how to do this? How does the "income" part actually come back to you? Do you sell a little stock each month?
dmoney··on Ask HN: What is your favorite internet rabbit hole?
I see someone already posted http://www.everything2.com/ (my used-to-be favorite) and http://www.fusionanomaly.net/fusion.html .

Another older one: (somewhat NSFW horror stuff): http://deathandhell.com/

TBH my current rabbit holes are YouTube and repeatedly clicking "random" on http://www.smbc-comics.com/ .

edit: Another couple old haunts:

http://www.chaosmatrix.org/

https://qntm.org/

dmoney··on Ask HN: What should I ask Elon Musk for HTBTF?
How do we find the cheat codes for the simulation?
dmoney··on MentalHealthError: an exception occurred
I've found that reading sci-fi/fantasy before going to sleep helps me transition to sleep mode. I think it's because sci-fi problems are really somebody else's problem, so my brain can let them drop when I put the book down.
dmoney··on Yahoo to Say It's Exploring Strategic Alternatives
That's why they call it neg-otiating.
dmoney··on We need less powerful languages
You can write any abstraction in any language (more or less). But working in some languages you're less likely to encounter code written by people who realize that.
dmoney··on What Blocks Ruby and Python from Getting to JavaScript V8 Speed?
Why do we need so many different VMs anyway? Is it it just history and politics? Are, e.g. Python and Ruby so different that, if implementing from scratch today it would make sense for each of them to have its own VM? What about the CLR vs the JVM: are their respective functions so different that it would make sense for both of them to exist if not for the need for Oracle and Microsoft to maintain mutual incompatibility?
dmoney··on The Cost of Scalability in Graph Processing
An example of "scaling in" is this talk, "How to speed up a Python program 114,000 times": https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e08kOj2kISU
dmoney··on Exploding Offers Suck
The relevant bit:

F|R: I read that when you call Y Combinator winners, the founders have only five minutes to accept. ("If people turn us down," he says, "as far as we're concerned they've failed an IQ test.") Have startups turned you down? Are there any that have turned Y Combinator down and still gone on to succeed with a liquidity event?

Graham: You're confusing two separate things. The reason people are supposed to decide quickly whether or not to accept is that they already know everything except the percent we'll ask for. They've already seen the deal terms, and they already know as much as they're going to know about YC before actually working with us. So they should already know when we call what percentage they'd be ok with. Since all they have to do is subtract one integer from another, five minutes should be enough.

The "IQ test" quote refers not to how fast they have to decide, but the amount of equity we usually ask for. In the median case it's 6%. If we take 6%, we have to improve a startup's outcome by 6.4% for them to end up net ahead. That's a ridiculously low bar. So the IQ test is whether they grasp that.

There was one startup that turned us down because they received an acquisition offer during the weekend when we did interviews. It was a pretty good offer. I'd have taken it in their position, and they did. But other than that I don't know of anyone who turned us down and went on to succeed. There have only been about three others who turned us down.

dmoney··on All of Bach
I think it's his use of coutnerpoint and its ability to pleasantly overload the brain. Case in point, Toccatta and Fugue in D Minor. Close your eyes and try to play air organ to this: http://allofbach.com/en/bwv/bwv-565/detail/
dmoney··on Why Python is Slow: Looking Under the Hood
Related: "Python is only slow if you use it wrong" http://apenwarr.ca/diary/2011-10-pycodeconf-apenwarr.pdf [pdf]
dmoney··on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python
From the "choosing an interpreter" section:

> Also use Python 2.7.x if you’re starting to work on a new Python module.

Is this a generally accepted guideline? I'd have thought Python 3 would have caught on by now.

dmoney··on Quora in the next YC batch
I'm guessing 5k + 5k per founder for ~6% of the company wouldn't work for a later stage company. Would this be more like a Series A investment?
dmoney··on Doubling down on stress: launching a startup while going through a divorce
Two years of nights and weekends and the divorce was all her fault?
dmoney··on Ask HN: CTO wants me to leave
> But before telling someone to hire a lawyer, you should make sure that the case in question is not taking place in a country where doing this is generally taken as a big offense.

Interesting. Can you give an example of such a place, and how things tend to work there? What would be your advice to the founder if they were in that country?

dmoney··on I built an application to solve a problem but got nobody to buy it
"I found this product that does exactly what we need. I've tested it and it works. It's $250."

"Yeah, but our deadline's in 2 weeks and there's no way we could go through the procurement process by then. How's that custom solution coming?"

dmoney··on Alan Kay's Reading List
Imagine being Kay and having to watch GUIs get increasingly dumbed down, people using Object Oriented Programming to refer to things nothing like what you created, people not using computers to the full potential you thought you had enabled decades ago. "Guys! You're doing it wrong!"

But this means there's still a lot of room for "innovation" to build on top of his "inventions" (distinction he made in a talk that[1] was posted here yesterday: invention being creating new things, innovation being the task of bringing them to market). Or if that's not your deal, he laid out the kind of environment that's required to create new inventions. You could try to work in such an environment or create one.

It's probably too late to have the same "early life" that he did, but you've learned to read, if you're here you've probably learned to code, and chances are you've still got at least a couple "lives"[2] left in you.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7538063

[2] http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2722

dmoney··on Toward a better programming
What I'd like for programming is a universal translator. Somebody writes a program in Java or Lisp, and I can read and modify it in Python and the author can read my changes in their own pet language. I write an Ant script and you can consume it with rubygems. You give me a program compiled into machine language or Java or .NET bytecode and I can read it in Python and run my modified version in the JVM, CLR, Mac, iPhone, Android, browser. Transparently, only looking at what the source language was if I get curious.
dmoney··on Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only
People without siblings might be offended by that. We should try not to exclude people who didn't come from large families.
Page 1 of 19Next →