Hacker News Reader

greatreorxon The Story of BankSimple

Yes, I've never seen them admit to it, but I think lead gen has to be part of their business plan. Mint predicted (and got) about $30/user per year from lead gen. If banksimple can be the trusted first place people go to for financial advice and products (mortgage, retirement planning, etc), they should have no problem getting extra revenue on top of the usual bank checking and savings revenue that goes to their partner.

greatreorxon I'm so close...

So this delay has been due to delays in being approved as hardware for the iPhone?

I remember being excited that Apple was opening the 30-pin dock to 3rd parties, but it seems like that was over a year ago and the only things released that I can name are Square and Pedal Brain. Am I right to assume that hardware approval is much more difficult than normal app store approval.

greatreorxon Is This the Birth of the Copyright Troll?

After reading more about this, it sounds like they are going after sites who have not followed requirements to get safe harbor under the DMCA... specifically registering correct contact info with the US Copyright Office and clearly posting contact info on their site.

greatreorxon Save My Life: an update

In your original post you said that your thyroid issue is being treated and in normal range. I'm not sure if the blood work you posted is the most recent, but it shows a TSH of 4.1 - which the lab considers in normal range, but some doctors would not.

"In November 2002, American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists(AACE) published revised guidelines that provided a new range for normal thyroid function. Until this time, doctors had relied on a normal TSH level ranging from 0.5 to 5.0 to diagnose and treat patients with a thyroid disorder who tested outside the boundaries of that range. AACE encouraged doctors to consider treatment for patients who test outside the boundaries of a narrower margin based on a target TSH level of 0.3 to 3.04. AACE believes the new range will result in improved accuracy of diagnosis for millions of Americans who suffer from a mild thyroid disorder, but have gone untreated." http://www.aace.com/public/awareness/tam/2004/tsh.php

Most of your symptoms don't seem thyroid related, so it wouldn't surprise me if this is more of a down stream symptom from whatever else is going on with you.

greatreorxon Ask HN: Is this an idea worth pursuing further?

I like the idea. Not sure about making money from it, but definitely see it as useful.

typo on home page... "Also contact us if you want to contribute by helping uns organizing the links."

Can you add more specific information to your search results lists? For me right now, this page... http://www.learntoplayanything.com/component/tag/green%20day returns 20 results that all are "Boulevard of Broken Dreams " - would be more useful if there was some additional info to differentiate.

On this page: http://www.learntoplayanything.com/component/tag/green%20day... Which is the third page, the paginated link to page 1 actually goes back to the third page. The link to page 1 on all paginated results pages seems to link to the current page instead of page 1.

greatreorxon Twitter Sued For Patent Infringement by TechRadium Messaging company.

Their earliest patent was filed in 2005. Maybe I have a poor memory, but I feel like anyone 'skilled in the art' of web/mobile technologies would have anticipated applying and combining existing technologies in this way back in 2005.

There was a recent supreme court case - KSR v. Teleflex - that hopefully comes into play... http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2007/05/01/ksr-v-teleflex-the-supre... "Now, all knowledge in the relevant field — technical knowledge, changes in implementing technologies, consumer demand — will be available to show whether the invention was truly innovating or just the product of connecting the dots in the prior art."

If their patent had been filed 10 years ago, I could maybe see an argument. But 4 years ago, not so much.

greatreorxon Why Google Bothered to Appeal a $761 Small Claims Case (and Won)

Agreed. IANAL and I don't know anything about CA small claims court or what grounds the appeal was on, but I would have asked the judge to not allow that evidence. Usually you can't present evidence on appeal that you could have presented in the original case. If they refused to provide that evidence in the original case, you could argue they waived their right to present it in the future.

It defeats the whole purpose of small claims court if large corporations can just ignore the original case and lose and then appeal and bring in lawyers to put on their real case in front of the appeals court.

greatreorxon Hacker News Disease

"Now I’m not saying any of that is the case. For all I know, this was all just done by some automated software or a low-level grunt"

I think you missed this part. He readily admits he doesn't know who or what was responsible for Warner's actions.

greatreorxon Why your tiered password scheme is flawed, and what to do about it.

I started using SuperGenPass a few months ago from a recommendation here and have been really happy with it.

http://supergenpass.com/about/

It's a bookmarklet so you can review the code behind it and use it on any computer. You only have to remember your master password and it converts to a new password for each site. Usability-wise it's usually only 1 extra click - you put your master password into the web form's password field and the bookmarklet writes the generated password for that site over it.

I still wouldn't use it for banking or my email, but for most other things it's worked well.

greatreorxon TicketMaster and Live Nation Agree to $2.5 Billion Merger

Yeah, it is lock-in. Live Nation owns The Fillmore (and 130 odd other live music sites). So they aren't going to be interested in any web solution you could come up with. They don't care about any new customer friendly features because there's no where else for customers to go. If you want to see your favorite artist, it's not like you can buy tickets to the other show at the venue across the street the next night.

greatreorxon Good programmers aren’t lazy

What if I decide to take the elevator? Some would say I'm lazier than the person who takes the stairs, but if the goal is only getting to the 6th floor, then being lazy (resistant to exertion) was more efficient.

greatreorxon Ask HN: What sucks about snow shovels?

The fact that after a certain amount of snow depth, you have to use your back to lift and throw the snow.

I was doing some Googling on this out of curiosity and ran into this...http://www.wovel.com which I feel like I've seen before but didn't really understand the advantage. Without seeing the video of it in use, it looks just like a shovel attached to a wheel. But the wheel gives you different leverage points so that you can use your body weight to throw the snow. That wasn't obvious without seeing the video.

greatreorxon How Palm Designed Around Apple's iPhone Patents for the Pre

I'm pretty sure this is incorrect. That section he is referring to in Apple's patent is just the part where Apple describes possible ways their invention might be used. In fact, if you read the intro to that section in the patent, it says "However, it will be apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art that the present invention may be practiced without these specific details." The patent claims are what's important and most of them don't hinge on whether or not the gesture area displays a visual output.

greatreorxon Ask HN : Where do you work (if freelance) ?

I've had Bose QC2s for about 4-5 years now and it might be the $300 I've ever spent. I worked for several years in an office with an open floorplan and without my headphones, any time someone in the office had a conversation it would distract me. With them, I could completely zone out and get stuff done. The active noise canceling was only part of it, just the fact that they completely wrap around your ears makes a difference. There are obviously cheaper ones that do that, but I don't think they are as comfortable as the QC2.

greatreorxon Ask HN: 5-7 months of living expenses left; terrified. Advice?

Go to events and talk to as many people as you can there... http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech/ and other smaller tech meetups http://nextny.org/

Nate Westheimer (http://innonate.com/) is the new organizer of the NY tech meetup. He has started an experiment doing office hours to have short (15 minute) meetings with people. http://innonate.com/2008/12/15/office-hours/ Sign up and go talk to him, I can almost guarantee he knows a handful of people who are looking for part time programming help.

greatreorxon How Plentyoffish Conquered Online Dating (Hint: Its Founder Works Just One Hour a Day)

I don't see how anyone can read this blog post by Markus from 2006 about faking site traffic rankings and not think his current traffic stats are severely manipulated.

http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/competitive-int...

I'm not saying I don't respect what Markus has done. I just don't think his stats are anything near what is reported.

greatreorxon Comfort with meaninglessness the key to good programmers

I think they are using 'meaningless' as 'lack of significance' more than 'lack of meaning'. Programming rules obviously always mean something, but they don't always seem significant. People who get programming are comfortable with that lack of significance and just go about following rules. People who don't get programming try to find significance where it's not and end up being inconsistent.

greatreorxon Six Apart acquires and shuts down Pownce

I always thought Pownce was a solid product. Design, UI/UX, the site copy and marketing - overall I thought it was really well done. If it wasn't for the overwhelming success of Twitter or how easily Facebook launched the same features, things could have turned out much differently for them.

It wouldn't surprise me if within 3-6 months, Six Apart launches a rebranded version of Pownce geared towards companies and enterprise to compete with Yammer. As much as it pains me to agree with Arrington and Calacanis, I'll admit that Yammer has a good business model. And I can't imagine that it would take a tremendous amount of development time to make Pownce ready for those types of customers.

greatreorxon When Is A Small Sample Really A Small Sample?

So if we had 4 purely random macbooks, and 3 of them failed, then that would be a meaningful indication that the failure rate is higher than 10%?

The issue is both small sample and lack of randomness.

greatreorxon When Is A Small Sample Really A Small Sample?

"If I put the purchases of hundreds or thousands of them in chronological order, then found 4 in a row that had failed, it wouldn't mean much (like the Aces example)."

But this is exactly what happened to your friend. You can't ignore the thousands of other Macbooks that were sold to calculate one number, but then try to apply that rate to those thousands.

"If I have a sample of only 4, and 3 failed, that means quite a bit more."

That means quite a bit more for that specific sample of 4 Macbooks - but no one cares about the failure rate for your 4 specific Macbooks. You proved that failure rate for those 4 Macbooks was exactly 75%. Nothing more, nothing less.

greatreorxon Ask YC: Open source platform for a social network with lots of UGC(structured)

It's only about 6 months old. My only experience was getting it up and running locally and testing out the functionality. It took a couple of hours to get going (mostly due to updating gem versions). From my standpoint I was happy with how it looked. I had considered Wordpress and Drupal, but I liked the smaller, more manageable codebase - even if it meant I may be fixing bugs in the project code as I went.

I hadn't checked in on the project in awhile. I'm surprised it's not more active. FYI it looks like there was a fork recently and Luvfoo is being more actively developed (but no existing community)

http://www.justinball.com/projects/

greatreorxon Ask YC: Open source platform for a social network with lots of UGC(structured)

Unless you aren't interested in using Ruby on Rails, you might want to check out LovdByLess:

http://lovdbyless.com

greatreorxon How to get an idea for a startup

But completely unrelated ideas don't spawn the kind of creativity that is really useful.

I completely disagree. Intelligent people from differing fields getting together will yield creativity on par or better than when everyone from the same industry gets together. Unless your idea of useful creativity is 500 Bay area companies doing web feed readers from back a few years ago or everyone working on Facebook apps now. Alot of really great tech ideas don't come from the Bay area. You may not hear about them, but they are out there. So maybe your premise should actually be stated as:

"if you want to come up with an idea that everyone in the Bay area will like, than you should move to the Bay area."

greatreorxon Border Security: We can take your laptop anywhere we want for as long as we want

"Mind you the government does not have a right to your password"

They also don't have to let you back in the country. If your plan is to just not tell the agent your password, you might be in for an adventure. From Schneier's earlier article on this subject...

"The border agent is likely to start this whole process with a "please type in your password". Of course you can refuse, but the agent can search you further, detain you longer, refuse you entry into the country and otherwise ruin your day."

greatreorxon Ask HN: Best way to handle Email as a startup?

When an email bounces, do you flag it in your system so that you don't continue to send emails to it? Not speaking from personal experience, but I've read that certain major webmail companies will penalize your server if you keep trying to deliver mail to an invalid account within a certain time frame.

You seem to have everything else covered, that's the only thing that comes to mind.

greatreorxon Knol getting preferential placement in search results?

This moves reminds me more of Microsoft in the 80s. and then your question becomes, what is it about Microsoft that seems so successful that Google wants to emulate their business model?

greatreorxon Instapaper brings beautifully simple bookmarking to the iPhone

Earlier this week I was thinking about what type of iPhone app I could write to solve one of my own problems and this is basically it. Instapaper will make my commute (subway = no internet connection) much more bearable.

Did I miss something or is the registration system not at all secure? You don't set a password when you register and then you can sign in just by entering your username - or anyone else's that hasn't set a password. What is stopping someone from trying a bunch of email addresses or their friends' favorite usernames?

I understand that might be a user experience decision (especially when someone is on an iPhone), but I wouldn't mind a warning to the effect of 'hey - if you don't set a password, anyone can sign into your account by simply guessing your username'.

greatreorxon Why Paul Graham is wrong about New York City

"It would have made no sense for me to build Path 101 anywhere else but NYC, because my network is here."

So right... if you have spent your whole life in NYC, went to college there, and spent a year working at one of the most well known East coast VC firms (like Charlie has), then yes, Paul Graham is completely wrong about doing your start up in NYC. But what about the kid who just graduated from college and is deciding where to do his startup? Charlie's New York is not the same New York that a newcomer will experience.

I live in NY and love the city, but I agree with PG on this if your only goal in life is the success of your startup. If you have other goals though - like having interesting and diverse friends, or great experiences, and don't mind having to overcome more challenges than you would face in the Valley - then NYC is a great place for you.

greatreorxon Ask HN: Please review my webapp (Streetread)

"if you're at the top, you shouldn't scroll up,"

Why not? If I don't know I'm at the top, my only choice is to scroll up. You don't give any visual clues as to where I am vertically - it's impossible to tell if I'm at the most recent headline. If I want to go back to the very top, my only choice is to scroll up until I can't any more. Ideally if I'm already at the top and I scroll up and nothing happens, that tells me I'm at the very top of the window.

Assuming the user knows he's at the top and so then 'shouldn't scroll up' seems like a bad assumption.

greatreorxon Ask HN: Why be an option/futures/day trader when it is zero-sum?

"When you enter the game, you are assuming that you are better than at least half of the other players."

I think the difference is - at what point does that assumption become atleast somewhat provable. Shaquille O'Neal was probably an athletic 6'10" 280 lbs in high school. Just because the game of basketball itself is zero sum, does that make it irrational to think that he would become a decent professional basketball player?

My favorite part of Taleb's book is when he describes the investing world as if all player's had a random 50/50 shot of making money each year. There are millions of investors, by random chance thousands will do really well, a handful will do really, really well over the course of decades. How do you know Warren Buffet is not part of that handful that is successful purely by chance? It's been awhile since I've read the book, but I remember his philosophy being something like if you have a logical investing/hypothesis that gets proven results, then maybe we can say it's not by chance.

So to answer your question, if you think you have an objective theory/algorithm/etc for option trading and have done blind historical tests or have successfully paper traded for a year+, then you might be on to something. If you think you are just smarter than everybody else, or maybe had a couple successful stock trades, it's probably not a good idea.