Hacker News Reader

kiaon Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

There is a reason why I would never use such service like Prismatic. The main problem for me here is that it creates a confined universe for you where you are surrounded by only "relevant" information. For example I don't care much about fashion, but once in a while reading NY Times I stumble upon a very interesting articles about new trends in fashion or its history. It makes me think out of the box and expands my knowledge. There is no way a service like Prismatic would provide me with such articles based on my interests.

kiaon Where oh where is Windows Phone 8?

But what was a little surprising is that there were no handsets for the press to play with. There were some demonstration units carefully attended by PR personnel, and while we were able to get kind of close to them, the general rule was "you can look but you can't touch."

Looking at this [1] video I would say that this article is just another BS from Ars.

[1] http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/nokia-lumia-920-slate/45...

kiaon How a Mexican Drug Cartel Makes Its Billions

The big difference of drugs from alcohol and tobacco is their addictiveness. While you can't get addicted to alcohol or tobacco after one use, certain drugs cause severe addiction after first dose. Of course you can legalize only mild drugs. But it won't solve the problem because as we see this business is mostly about very addictive ones.

EDIT: typo

kiaon 50 Years Ago: The World in 1962

This is great:

Use j/k keys to navigate

kiaon Java.sun.com is down again - breaking bad apps across the land

For virtualbox.org it's planned maintenance from April 27th to April 30th. The announcement was on the main page.

kiaon Error handling style in C

Why goto is bad? Again this "structured programming" bullshit. Kernel uses 2 a lot to handle errors like here [1].

[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/mm/shmem.c#L99...

kiaon Russian Stock Market has suspended trading

It's just a technical failure. The trading was stopped for about 4 hours. After reopening the stock market fell 2.5 percent. No official statement was made about what caused the failure.

From here: http://echo.msk.ru/news/881684-echo.html

kiaon The Crisis in American Walking

In US (not counting downtowns of large Cities like NY or SF) it is much harder to enjoy walking compared to most other places in the world.

First you just look weird here when you walk somewhere and you are the only person walking in the street. Drivers usually look at you like you are crazy (especially if you walk in the evening when it's getting dark).

The second and most annoying thing is that sidewalks here can end suddenly without a warning. You can walk somewhere enjoying the nice weather and the sidewalk ends suddenly! WTF? You have to turn back or continue walking using the side of the road looking even more weird.

And the most strange thing is that Americans use their cars to drive to places located within just a couple of thousand feet from their home. For a person from Europe THIS is really weird.

kiaon Russian Scientist Claims Signs of Life Spotted on Venus

While he really seems to be a well known scientist, the photo of a "scorpion" [1] is not the best confirmation of his theories.

[1] - http://www.mk.ru/science/article/2012/01/20/662678-na-venere...

kiaon How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

There is an excellent book "Poorly Made in China: An Insider's Account of the China Production Game" by Paul Midler [1] for those who want to know more about behind-the-scenes of China's manufacturing.

[1] - http://www.amazon.com/Poorly-Made-China-Insiders-Production/...

kiaon Free screencasts about the text editor Vim

Previous discussion

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1228779

kiaon iPad Survives Fall From Edge of Space in Jaw-Dropping Video

Seems like the idea was to make the iPad rotate like falling maple seeds [1] so it would considerably slow down.

[1] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUEXKapAVcY

kiaon The World's Sexiest Stove

One problem with induction cooking is that you have to use cookware made of ferromagnetic metal. For other pots an interface ferromagnetic disk is required.

kiaon The quiz Daniel Kahneman wants you to fail

Question three about dates is pretty much Anchoring Effect:

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

Also an interesting reference about anchoring and electric cars from the above Wikipedia article:

http://www.treehugger.com/cars/nissans-leaf-creates-a-new-an...

kiaon New Year's Resolution: Full Disk Encryption on Every Computer You Own

Microsoft BitLocker in its most secure mode is the gold standard because it protects against more attack modes than other software. Unfortunately, Microsoft has only made it available with certain versions of Microsoft Windows.

Though MS says that BitLocker doesn't have back doors [1], I wonder how true this actually is...

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/si_team/archive/2006/03/02/542590.as...

kiaon Infographic examples, ca. 1920s

Just to add some more. Some examples of Soviet era infographics (in Russian):

http://community.gidlipetsk.ru/blog/view/6786

kiaon Russia building 10-petaflop supercomputer

Actually 10-petaflop barrier (LINPACK benchmark) was surpassed in November by Japanese K-computer:

http://www.riken.jp/engn/r-world/info/release/press/2011/111...

kiaon ISO updates C Standard (Now we have C11)

Here are major C11 Standard changes:

  - standard multithreading support (<threads.h> header)
  - atomic operations (<stdatomic.h> header)
  - type-generic macros (sqrt translates to sqrt, sqrtf, sqrtl depending on argument type)
  - Unicode support (char16_t and char32_t types)
  - gets function is removed from the standard (use gets_s)
  - static assertions
  - aligned memory allocation (aligned_alloc)
  - anonymous structures and unions
  - no-return functions (specify functions that never return)
  - exclusive access for opened files ("x" in fopen)
  - macros to create complex numbers
  - additional way to terminate the program (quick_exit and at_quick_exit)

kiaon Why is one loop slower than 2 in C?

In scientific computing it's not unusual to get 2x-3x speedups by doing simple optimizations like this one. For desktop applications it's nothing, but when your simulation is taking a week to complete then 2x-speedup is a huge improvement.

kiaon Indian Railways stations, trains and schedules database in JSON and SQL formats

Suggestion: add archives in more Unix friendly format (xz, gz, bz2). Not everyone has zip installed on their Unix box.

kiaon Declassified Bunker of the USSR

There is a lot of this stuff under Moscow:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro-2

kiaon Microsoft spends $7.5m on IP addresses

I think strategically it's a wise move. For MS 7.5m is a small sum. In case IPv6 will not be deployed at the speed we all want their investment will pay off tenfold because IPv4 addresses will be gold. They try to hedge the address exhaustion risk.

kiaon Why the world of scientific research needs to be disrupted

Unless scientists and researchers start to put the interests of collaboration and “open science” ahead of their desire to be promoted or win tenure the system will not change

This is the main problem because most won't.

kiaon Ring Counter Clock: still running after 40 years

There's even a list of long-lasting bulbs on Wikipedia [1].

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest-lasting_light_bulbs

kiaon In honor of Dennis Ritchie, 50% off all C/C++ ebooks

It's not only C/C++ but also books about vim, git, linux kernel, shells, etc.

kiaon Linux From Scratch 7 Released

I am using LFS as a primary OS for Linux development and on servers. I can tell my story how I ended up with LFS in the forest of Linux distributions.

Some time ago when I started to learn Linux I have tried a lot of different distributions. All of them had their quirks. Some were buggy. Some were slow. Some had extremely weird and bloated configuration systems. Imagine several layers of abstraction above plain standard configuration files when you have to learn everything basically from the beginning with a different distribution. For example on top of standard config files they may have some configuration system (like YaST in SUSE) on top of which the GUI sits (so 3 layers just to change the screen resolution). Many distros have their own "unique" way of configuring the system. And when something will brake you will have no idea where the problem might be. Is it a bug in the package or in some layer of configuration system or somewhere else? I understand that they try to make the system more user friendly. Well, every one has its own niche.

With LFS you just learn the configuration of basic packages once. The way that package creator intended. Plain text files and nothing more. As an additional bonus you have great performance and security because you only have the packages you need. Plus everything is optimized for your architecture. If you have ever used some distribution in a virtual machine on a slow notebook you know what I am talking about.

When I built LFS for the first time I did everything by hand. It was a very useful experience and a nice way to learn. Of course now I don't do it manually. You can use automated tools (jhalfs for example) which extract instructions from the book and do everything for you. I don't use any graphical environment so no need to build a lot of stuff beyond the base system.

Of course LSF has its own issues. Lack of package management is one of them. But if you like minimalistic and fast systems you should give LFS a try.

kiaon Linux From Scratch 7 Released

Announcement:

http://linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/lfs-dev/2011-October/0...

kiaon Why Can't We Drink Sea Water?

I down voted because you give a dangerous advice. The concentration of salt in sea water is higher than in urine. Drinking sea water rises the level of sodium in blood very quickly which sends signal to your kidneys to get rid of that salt. But as kidneys can't produce urine with the concentration of salt higher than certain level you need more body water to excrete the amount of salt you consumed with sea water. Roughly speaking you need 1.5 liters of fresh water to excrete the salt you got with 1 liter of sea water. Eventually the concentration of salt will become dangerously high in you blood and you will die of heart failure or seizure. So I would say that drinking sea water will actually DEPRIVE you of extra day of survival which may be lifesaving.

Modern survival guides consistently advice against drinking sea water.

Speaking of Alain Bombard. The most likely explanation here is that he consumed enough FRESH water (with fish and rain water) to dilute sea water he drank to safe levels for his body.

So if you are on a boat in the middle of the sea NEVER drink sea water. This can save your life.

kiaon GitLab - an open source clone of GitHub

Funny. Potential GitHub competitor uses GitHub to store its source code [1].

[1] - http://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq

kiaon Metroid Source Code Expanded

For those who don't want to download: it's 1.7 MiB of assembler instructions with comments. Looking at this you start to understand how hard game development was in 80's (this game is from 1986).