Hacker News Reader

obsaysdittoon Jesus Christ, Use a Password Manager Already

To add, American Express puts a cap at 8 characters on their online services.

obsaysdittoon Ask HN: Who's hiring? (September 2010)

I was hired by Tom after emailing him through a previous HN Who's Hiring thread. We had a couple of email exchanges followed by a phone and lunch interview. Working here has been fun and challenging.

I would certainly encourage anyone in the Philadelphia area to apply.

obsaysdittoon Gmail adds video chat for Linux

Tried it out and works very well on first run. Installed the .deb package and restarted Chrome.

obsaysdittoon What is LaTeX and Why You Should Care

If you use vim then look at the vim-latex suite http://vim-latex.sourceforge.net/

obsaysdittoon Ask HN: Share a gem. Teach me and you.

"Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind." - Henry David Thoreau

obsaysdittoon Too many laws, too many prisoners

from: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

I think this would fit under intellectual curiosity, but who's to judge.

obsaysdittoon Finite Difference Methods - Derivative Approximation

I would suggest adding more visual aids, especially when talking about grid spacing/nodes. I'll try to keep up with it and suggest more things.

obsaysdittoon Finite Difference Methods - Derivative Approximation

I hope no one was trying to learn from that. FD can be tough to handle for people not mathematically trained.

Heat equation? Why? Any second order differential equation would suffice since there is no real example with materials, temperature, properties, boundary conditions, etc. Mine as well just been reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_difference_method

obsaysdittoon Facebook Lawyer `Unsure' Whether Founder Mark Zuckerberg Signed Contract

Do you think most users will care about this? They'll just want to know if they can still see what their friends are doing, who has posted new photos, etc.

obsaysdittoon Ask HN: Music while coding

http://xerxes-music.com/

obsaysdittoon Full Trailer For Facebook Movie ‘The Social Network’ Hits The Web

That cover of Radiohead's Creep by Scala & Kolacny is awesome.. listen to full song if you want http://grooveshark.com/#/s/Creep/2sx1OB

obsaysdittoon Skype Opens Up SkypeKit SDK To All Devices And Desktop Apps

I think they're concentrated on the mobile environment.

SkypeKit for consumer electronic device makers will be available tomorrow, June 23, based on the Linux OS. For desktop software developers, SkypeKit will be available for Windows and Mac in the next few weeks.

http://blogs.skype.com/devzone/2010/06/skypekit_beta.html

obsaysdittoon Music Biz Wants Google To Stop Linking To The Pirate Bay - TorrentFreak

Rather than supplying very specific URLs where infringing material could be located as is the norm with these type of requests, the BPI provided whole site URLs such as http://megaupload.com, http://sendspace.com and http://hotfile.com.

This seems absurd, however I do wonder what the percentage of files hosted on these sites are copyrighted.

obsaysdittoon No anti-virus software? No Internet connection

Implementing it in the fall at Villanova http://www.villanovan.com/software-to-monitor-network-1.1342...

obsaysdittoon FanPulse (YC S10) Launches Web App In Time For The World Cup

Well the twitter folks did meet with some YC companies

http://twitter.com/ycombinator/status/15872989072

http://twitter.com/kineticac/status/15878495455

obsaysdittoon SparkleShare: Open Source Dropbox clone coming soon

I was exactly wondering about mono when I viewed the README. The toolsets needed are already there.

Perhaps this was done to make it easier to port to other OS later?

obsaysdittoon Fisher–Yates (Knuth) Shuffle

Jeff Atwood has a related post: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/12/the-danger-of-naive...

obsaysdittoon AI That Picks Stocks Better Than the Pros

The research paper, which is a pretty good read, can be found here http://www.robschumaker.com/publications/IEEE%20Computer%20-... [pdf]

obsaysdittoon Can You Swim Faster in Water or Corn Syrup?

you can read the study here http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/10966786... [pdf]

obsaysdittoon Stallman on SaaS [video]

Genocide of the native population wasn't the initial thought I had in mind.

obsaysdittoon [It is official:] Russian math genius ignores $1 million Millennium Prize

Perhaps... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1213150

obsaysdittoon 13 Stripes and 51 Stars

Why does DC need to become a state?

obsaysdittoon Stallman on SaaS [video]

I don't think any radical idea was ever good.

What? Something that seems radical today is the norm of tomorrow.

Columbus looking for new trade routes was radical, but good. Ending world hunger is a pretty radical idea, but it will be good. Being an entrepreneur is radical.

obsaysdittoon Pitt professor wants BP to try his filter

Shouldn't the main focus be on stopping the source. The rate of oil flowing out is far more than what can be collected from separation techniques. The USCG is already using cutters equipped with skimming booms to essential vacuum up the oil and store it.

obsaysdittoon Ask HN: Review my startup Readness.com - a last.fm for news [chrome/fb connect]

With all the talk about privacy issues recently, the user should be prompted after they connect via Facebook to set their profile as Open, Delayed, or Private.

I am still trying to figure out how to do stuff and maybe that is a sign to help the user through it. Like, what does unlock and level up mean in the settings?

obsaysdittoon Free lifetime software upgrades are bad for customers

Valid point but should all upgrades be non-free? The most notorious free upgrade systems are the open source communities. They are mostly back by a company (eg Canonical, Red Hat) with paid developers, but take for example RHEL, who benefits immensely from the open source version Fedora where the community of non-paid developers have a passion for the project.

I guess if you have passion, does the amount of money matter?

obsaysdittoon Digg is Deadd

There is no intellectual conversation on Digg. The commenting design is too one dimensional and the users don't contribute. Yes, even on reddit there are 'stupid' comments but within specific subreddit there is definitely some good conversation.

obsaysdittoon Richard Stallman agrees to do an AMA on reddit

that's great and all but that's not everyone. Often, especially while skiing or taking road trips far away from a major city I can have horrible service if not none at all

obsaysdittoon Rally HN: help build an independent Privacy Scanner for Facebook

nice work... Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.19) Gecko/2010033100 Iceweasel/3.0.6 (Debian-3.0.6-3)