Hacker News Reader

gorlothon A high-dimensional sphere spilling out of a high-dimensional cube

Higher dimensional geometry can show up in lower dimensional problems. This numberphile video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_yU9eJ0NxA) involves a puzzle about throwing darts at a dart board which is solved by using the volumes of 4+ dimensional spheres.

gorlothon Error messages in Haiku?

  Error 404:
  The item you are seeking
  Cannot be found here

gorlothon New Grad vs. Senior Dev

Taking the difference between normal complexity and asymptotic complexity to the extreme you have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_algorithm which do have the best asymptotic performance, but only on values of n so large they never come up in real life.

gorlothon Japan's Plan for Centimeter-Resolution GPS

This seems to be similar to the usage of WAAS in the US (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Augmentation_System), just on a smaller geographic scale. One of the bigger sources of error in GPS today is due to various atmospheric effects that bend the signal and increase the signals propagation delay. A ground stations in a known position can generate correction for the errors but the farther it's from the ground station the less useful the correction is. I've seen GPS systems used in farming applications that use a local tower that can provide corrections to give a very accurate position for the local area.

gorlothon Very Short Reply Expected

personally I find "short reply OK" to be preferably. It comes across as less harsh, it tells the other party that you are ok with removing the random fluff if they want to. VSRE is a demand that all the fluff be removed

gorlothon How to Destroy an Arduino

I've had similar experiences with AVRs, they are quite robust and will handle shorts, reversed polarities and the like rather well. They seem to be rather conservative on the datasheets probably as they are guaranteed over a much larger temperature range than most people use their chips at.

gorlothon A circuit and PCB editor in the browser

I second the recommendation, I've been using lean's service for a rather long time (I've go boards from back before he worked out the right purple color) and I've always been happy with the speed and quality, it's a great service.

gorlothon Room Temperature Superconductivity Found in Graphite Grains

This is not entirely true, in an ideal world a CMOS device just sitting there not switching would use basically no power, but in actual application there is some leakage (both form not being fully off and some current jumping from the gate). This leakage gets worse as the transistors get smaller and when you have billions of transistors even the tiniest amount of leakage adds up, the result is leakage current can be a significant amount of the power used by a modern processor.

gorlothon College was my biggest mistake

I completely agree with the sentiment about high college costs, the state school I went to cost ~44k for all four years, add in various scholarships (some of which I got as I'm pretty sure I was the only person to apply for them) and internships and I graduated college with no debt and more money than I started. Going to college does not necessitate taking on crushing debt, it just requires some extra legwork and picking a school that more fits your budget.

gorlothon An FPGA implementation of a Microbee

This is true, the flexibility you get form being able to reconfigure things does result in less efficiency (speed, size, power) than some dedicated hardware. An FPGA can be more efficient than general processor if it can be tailored to the specific computational task, but it will still be slower than if you made an IC with the specially tailored hardware.

gorlothon Turn anything into a videogame controller, even a banana

The microcontroller being used can be setup to appear as a standard USB mouse/keyboard, so this should work with anything that supports a USB keyboard and mouse.

gorlothon SparkFun Gets A Subpoena

"It was very surreal. Just a small csv file emailed to the investigator."

from Nate down in the comments section

gorlothon GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

The thing that drives me crazy with the new design is the separate scrolling areas, when I use the mouse wheel or hit the up/down arrow keys I want the entire thing to scroll, not whatever chunk I happen to my mouse in. This is especially annoying as I have a low res screen (old computers) and thus I can't much of any of the chat list, I used to just be able to scroll down to see it. I wish knew CSS magics to try and fix it with stylish or something (I'm a c programmer all the way)

gorlothon It’s time to place the web in safer hands

I've seen the idea of a distributed DNS system mentioned a few times but I still don't see how it would work out. What happens in the case of multiple people wanting the same domain? How are disputes between what foo.com points to resolved? With no central authority who collects payment? and without payment of some kind what it to stop someone from gathering up an inordinate number of domains as there is no cost to do so.

gorlothon Why Gmail's new design is unsuitable for heavy use

The new gmail interface really feels like it's made for a touchscreen, problem is a touchscreen UI feels awkward on a system with a mouse.

Question for all you web people out there, what would the difficulty of making a stylish/greasemonkey/something script to keep the old layout/look? I'm a programmer but I work on embedded systems in C, I don't have to worry about this fancy internet stuff.

gorlothon Apple MacBooks Can Be Hacked Through The Battery

I had an internship at a company that made lithium battery packs. The control boards on the packs have primary cell protection provided by a specialized micro controller that monitors cell voltages and prevents over/under charge levels and monitors current, however they also have secondary protection ICs that are hardware based that will shut down the pack should the cells reach dangerously high levels, as well as fuses to prevent dangerous levels of current.

Net result, changing battery firmware can reduce usefulness of battery (higher charging degrades cell life, blow fuses etc) but the packs should have hardware based protection from being a safety hazard

gorlothon ASUS Eee PC X101 runs Linux, costs only $200 (video)

A friend of mine recently got a lenovo thinkpad and it had a BIOS flag to allow swapping of the Fn and control key, sadly the physical keys are different size so you can't swap them to match the new function but at least it's an option

gorlothon Why your mom might like Google+

I think a "geek" and a "non geek" view privacy differently

a geek is concerned with their privacy in regards to how a company uses their data, they want it stored in a secure way, deleted when they tell them to etc.

a non technical person is concerned with privacy in regards to who else can run across their data, they want to know that content they intend to be private isn't accessible to the general public.

gorlothon This blogger.com profile is squatting YC founder's names

Seems it was selling domains (that's what happens when skimming and not paying attention to URLs) but blogger was being used as a placeholder and directory type thing, so that probably falls into the category of "exploit for any commercial purposes"

gorlothon This blogger.com profile is squatting YC founder's names

Selling accounts like he was seems to be in violation of the blogger terms of use, relevant section: "7. No Resale of the Service. Unless expressly authorized in writing by Google, you agree not to reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, trade, resell or exploit for any commercial purposes (a) any portion of the Service, (b) use of the Service, or (c) access to the Service."

Although I didn't see any way to report the violation.