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korussian

137 karma · joined May 9, 2009

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korussian··on Why were there no PlayBook lineups? Because RIM cares about its customers
Remember that thing you really, really wanted as a kid... how one day, on Christmas or on your birthday, you opened up the box to see wow there it is - all the waiting and dreaming and there it is!...

... should have just pre-ordered.

korussian··on Awesome Posterous Phishing Attempt?
It turns out to be legit. But it feels so scammy. This is not the way to convince technical users (people comfortable updating A Records) to make significant changes with regard to your site.
korussian··on An Interactive Voice Response System for $0.00 in 10 Minutes
Awesome, thanks!
korussian··on Back to the Future for iPad
The screenshots look fantastic, but don't forget to check out the reviews before you buy: folks are disappointed that the game runs choppily on iPad, and amounts to an interactive movie rather than a game. Props for voice acting, though.
korussian··on An Interactive Voice Response System for $0.00 in 10 Minutes
This is brilliant! I just wish Twilio supported international numbers.
korussian··on Host Your Static Website on Amazon S3
Perhaps try: http://www.lefora.com/
korussian··on An update to Google Social Search
I'd like to be able to add not just my own accounts from other websites (like twitter), but those of others as well. So, for example, if one of Brian's Twitter folks posted a video, I want that ranking higher in my search results. It would be nice to be able to add Brian's twitter to my social search.
korussian··on Jeopardy Champion Ken Jennings Q&A about IBM Watson
Wait a second, did anyone else catch this?:

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Quote: THE OUTCOME

My understanding is that the shows are taped and you obviously know the outcome. You made the recent comment on MSNBC that in order to win you had to play and bet recklessly. Do humans have an advantage in terms of betting (game theory) Your comment seems to be a tell that a human won, any guidance appreciated. – February 15, 2011 10:59 AM Permalink

A. KEN JENNINGS : I would say that Watson has the wagering edge--like you say, it's all game theory and math, and even a cheap PC is pretty good at doing math at high speeds. That said, a human player might be more willing to take risks that Watson is too smart to try. In the practice games I saw, betting big on Daily Doubles and Final Jeopardy seemed like the only way to cancel out Watson's big buzzer advantage.

* * * *

HE DIDN'T ANSWER THE QUESTION! Is this confirmation that Ken Jennings wins?

korussian··on Is California the most miserable US state to live in?
The Forbes List (minus the 20 clicks needed to read it)

1. Stockton, California *

2. Miami, Florida

3. Merced, California *

4. Modesto, California *

5. Sacramento, California *

6. Memphis, Tennessee

7. Chicago, Illinois

8. West Palm Beach, Florida

9. Vallejo, California *

10. Cleveland, Ohio

11. Flint, Michigan

12. Toledo, Ohio

13. Fort Lauderdale, Florida

14. Youngstown, Ohio

15. Detroit, Michigan

16. Washington, D.C.

17. Fresno, California *

18. Salinas, California *

19. Jacksonville, Florida

20. Bakersfield, California *

http://www.forbes.com/2011/02/02/stockton-miami-cleveland-bu...

korussian··on Use Lifehacker with old layout
When Lifehacker changed their layout, I stopped using it. It even broke my Flipboard. It's a fantastic site that I used almost every day, but now it's just hard. I hope they'll work out the UX soon.
korussian··on Show HN - socl.in
That's a really tough url/name.
korussian··on How to 'impregnate' potential co-founders
ESL Student: "The firefighter ran into a burning building and came out pregnant"

ESL teacher: pregnant = "with child", but you can't just bandy the term about

korussian··on Hipmunk’s Official Round: $4.2 Million Led By Ignition & Online Travel Experts
I adore hipmunk, especially the multi-tab functionality. But frankly, the prices I get for here in Asia are NEVER as good as I get from a travel agent.

Adioso.com is much better and more flexible, but their coverage is extremely limited.

If Hipmunk were as flexible as Adioso (i.e. queries that show me flights from "ICN to anywhere before February 12"), then I'd be all about Hipmunk. As it stands, doing exact searches in Hipmunk get me "good" deals, but not "great" deals.

korussian··on Playboy Magazine coming to iPad in uncensored form
I don't understand. Why would anyone read playboy on an internet machine? That's like getting an iPhone and calling a special number to hear what the temperature is in your city.
korussian··on Still Hiring
I think this is his website: http://keithclarksolutions.wordpress.com/
korussian··on Google’s decreasingly useful, spam-filled web search
Where's the best place to post sample queries?
korussian··on Douglas Crockford: The JavaScript Programming Language
I'd really like to download these and watch them on the go. What's the best way to get these from Yahoo Video?
korussian··on Why Writing Your Own Search Engine Is Hard
Why wouldn't they? She proved she's awesome at difficult stuff. Ultimate failure didn't unprove that.
korussian··on Why Writing Your Own Search Engine Is Hard
I think for most people writing a search engine is overkill when there are existing options out there.

If you want to search a subset of sites, then Google CSE is really all you need + whatever bells & whistles you'd like to add around it. I've done that here: http://searchESLCafe.com, adding "recent searches", search via wildcard subdomain (i.e. foo.searchESLCafe.com or bar.searchESLCafe.com or foo_bar.searchESLCafe.com, etc), and customizing the heck out of Google CSE's options.

Is there a demand out there for the search engine to parse the results into something informative at-a-glance? I'm not so sure it's the user's first priority. Or, to put it another way, there's plenty of hard-to-reach info out there that you can hand users via a customized Google CSE, and they don't mind doing the leg-work of clicking on the query results and finding their own answers.

It's a lot more important to have an accurate search algorithm than drill-down-related bells & whistles.

Google does a great job of returning solid results for any subset of sites, so why not let Google handle it, and concentrate on the other stuff?

korussian··on Ask HN: What are you working on over the winter break?
A customized Google search-engine for ESL, Expat, and Korea-related info: http://searchESLCafe.com
korussian··on Official North Korean government web page for business
I tried to access it here from South Korea. Got the Korean Police warning page. No go.
korussian··on Ask HN What Web App Would You Like to See/Need?
I'm studying Korean. Learning Korean (or other Asian) words is hard because they usually don't sound anything like the words in other languages I know, making it tougher to create mnemonics for remembering them.

I want to build a super-simple webapp that works like a mad-lib, preferably based on excerpts from Hitchhiker's Guide, in order to hang vocab on memory hooks, using the Greek mnemonic method. User enters a bunch of nouns/verbs/adjectives/adverbs to remember, and the app replaces them into the excerpt. User reads the passage a bunch of times, and the weirdness of the words in the passage helps to give the words some context when remembering them. [Example below]

I'm not a developer, but I built this thing in vb.net reasonably okay. It's really meant to be a webapp though, and I'll bet a lot of language learners would use it.

Wanna design/build it together?

Example

  This 은행 has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the 고양이 living on it were 날씬 for pretty much all of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of 큰 pieces of 숙제, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the 큰 pieces of 숙제 that were 날씬.
korussian··on [dead]
True enough.

I live in Korea, where plenty of newborns notice me and stare specifically at me until I'm out of view. I'm definitely the first non-Korean they've ever seen.

korussian··on Ask HN: Where do you live?
Village next to the DMZ, South Korea. But only for another month or six.
korussian··on Tersus - an open source, purely visual IDE for iPhone and web apps
I love the idea of a visual IDE for web apps, but Tersus seems so heavy, with so many dependencies.

This may be a stupid question, but is there a good OS X-based visual IDE out there for creating web apps?

I don't care if it's for PHP or Python or anything else - I want to learn to create web apps, and I have to start somewhere. I'm trying out both Django and RoR, but it would be awesome if there were a visual way to start putting the pieces of an app together, and then building up the code from within.

korussian··on Has North Korea Started the First Cyber War?
The average Korean's internet usage seems to be stuck in something of a walled garden - Naver/Daum/CyWorld/"Cafes"... and that's pretty much it. Most folks around here like the comfort of treading in groups, always where others have trod before. I don't think that is likely to change any time soon, probably about the same time travel agents start to see a decline in package tours in favor of individual trips. In other words: probably never.

On the other hand, Koreans are never behind the state of the art - they do relish having the latest and greatest things to show off. You can count on one hand the number of second-hand stores in Seoul, mostly because new=good.

They simply have no problem conforming to the flock, which, in the case of internet security, is rarely a smart move. When eventually some high-level government official or TV channel will point this out, suddenly everyone will take notice, and they'll all move on, as a flock, to the next thing, and the next, and next.

korussian··on Has North Korea Started the First Cyber War?
I live here in South Korea next door to the DMZ. If this is a cyber war, it hasn't been very disruptive yet. I'm having no trouble accessing any of the standard Korean websites that were/are said to be under attack (Naver, KEB). My $35/month internet access package is today what it was last week - the fastest unlimited internet in the world.

What I can say is that we need to make it much more difficult to infect personal computers here.

If you show me a Korean government or non-trivial Korean corporate website, I'll show you a website that uses at least 3 activeX controls and is optimized for IE6. Most public computers and the majority of personal computers I've used here have been running IE6 or 7. I'll admit that in Seoul and larger cities like Pusan, Ilsan, and Gwangju, you'll sometimes catch people using Macbooks at Starbucks. Score one for security via obscurity, but non-IE folks can't use ANY banking website or government site (National Tax Service, National Pension, National Health, etc).

Even though I'm in the "most wired country in the world", the majority of high schoolers, uni students, and business people I've interacted with aren't more tech-savvy than your average grandma. Everyone runs the dubious AhnLab Anti-virus as a mandatory magical medallion that came with the computer.

We need to do better - Korea's great ability is overnight change on a massive scale. The day President Lee announces that all browsers should be upgraded to the latest version is the day that all browsers will be upgraded to the latest version. Seriously.

Barring that kind of concerted effort, should the day come when I see a non-IE browser or something other than WinXP/Vista on a Korean adult's primary/only computer, I will eat this hat. This one, right here.

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