Hacker News Reader

orbordeon The frequent fliers who flew too much

I don't quite understand the purpose here. Is the idea that you can keep rolling your credit card debt forward interest-free indefinitely?

orbordeon Nobody Wants to Learn How to Program

> What I would like is to walk the class through implementing a naïve Brainfuck interpreter, optimizing it, then implementing a Brainfuck-to-C compiler and optimize that.

Nowadays, I would find that an awesome assignment, but your high school students would hate you.

orbordeon Tiny Robotic Bee Assembles Itself Like Pop-Up Book

This is intensely interesting but completely off topic.

orbordeon Magnet-hashes for all torrents on The Pirate Bay: 164 MB

SOPA/PIPA tried to do that.

orbordeon Cartels Are an Emergent Phenomenon, Say Complexity Theorists

Seems like there could be a mobile app that tells drivers the gas prices at stations in their vicinity

There is: http://gasbuddy.com/

orbordeon End Piracy, Not Liberty – Google

Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3477968

orbordeon Why Data Structures Matter

What is the word splitting task mentioned here?

orbordeon We work for the Internet

I'm on my phone, and the mobile site only has the pictures. I have no idea what this is supposed to be about.

orbordeon Why do pilots still die from not knowing which end is up?

That was very good. I couldn't deduce what was going on until the last moment, which is (I assume) exactly the experience of pilots in this situation.

orbordeon Why are restaurant websites so awful? Because of restaurant culture.

> create a separate google voice number for the business and put that on the website, then forward it to the existing biz line

Good idea; just make sure to check that Google Voice allows that kind of commercial use before hanging a business off it.

orbordeon Why Minecraft Works (Design Concepts)

What does NDF stand for?

orbordeon Yet Another "People Plug in Strange USB Sticks" Story

In this particular case, you can think what you want of the people plugging in strange USB sticks, but no amount of calling them idiots will ever solve the problem.

orbordeon "Yes, but what are your credentials, Mr Stross?"

> just recently, someone from Johnson Space Center spoke up on a Reddit thread about the space shuttle, when a Redditor asked why the shuttle wasn't left there for additional storage or as an escape vehicle. Of the various reasons that the qualified person gave in answering the question, I think maybe one of them was one that I'd thought of ahead of time.

Care to link the thread?

orbordeon Former GM exec, Bob Lutz: Fire the MBAs and let the engineers run the show

> The corporate culture of exploiting engineers will soon come to an end.

That seems exceedingly unlikely. Care to elaborate?

orbordeon Why scientific programming does not compute

The biggest howler I saw was "The SSI unites trained software developers with scientists to help them add new lines to existing codes, allowing them to tackle extra tasks without the programs turning into monsters."

orbordeon Wikipedia is Adding a Love Button Next Week

NFC? Near-field communication?

orbordeon Research into hallucinogenic drugs begins to shake off decades of taboo

Ask the grandparent, not the parent. Parent is simply trying to explain what the grandparent was saying.

orbordeon AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

That is disturbingly brilliant.

orbordeon IndexTank / 80legs Crawlathon (developer contest)

What's the goal of the contest? "Build the most awesome app on our platform"?

It's not clear to me reading the post.

orbordeon Ask HN: Why isn't average karma displayed in my profile?

I can see it in mine.

orbordeon Dwolla Grid is here. Cash just got more secure than plastic.

Yes, actually. Thanks for explaining!

orbordeon Dwolla Grid is here. Cash just got more secure than plastic.

I went ahead and upvoted the link anyway. I'm hoping that someone who knows what it is will see it on HN and inform the rest of us poor souls.

orbordeon This Guy Has My MacBook

Posting pictures on the internet is a great way to get a lynch mob going. Those people assuming this man stole the laptop can cause real harm as a result, and I'm not convinced that a smug "I never actually said that this man stole my laptop" should be an acceptable defense for the provocateur.

orbordeon This Guy Has My MacBook

You're right. To me, it's not their use of (effectively) plaintext that is worrisome. It's that the developer characterizes base64 as "encryption", which tells me that they don't even understand the security implications. As an example of a non-worrying response, here's Pidgin's documentation on their choice not to encrypt passwords: http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/PlainTextPasswords

orbordeon N-Queen Problem: Python 2.6.5 vs PyPy 1.5.0

Why is there so much CPU time being spent in system? And why is the rest divided between User and Nice in a single-threaded process?

orbordeon CEOs vouch for Waiter Rule: Watch how people treat staff

The funny thing about this is that it's almost completely sidestepping the "win the conversation" game anyway. Frequently, asking questions in feigned ignorance is genuinely educational, not just an effective ploy for shutting down opposition. In fact, you can gain lots of "cred" by not deigning to play stupid zero-sum conversational status games and instead trying to make everyone involved look good.

A real master figures out how to win without making someone else lose.

orbordeon Weight vs. Value of U.S. coins

This looks like the knapsack problem writ large, using heuristics to get its complexity under control. Clever!

orbordeon Stallman's Dystopia

Skip a step and scan the Kindle.

orbordeon AusCERT arrest - yes, "arrest"

Short answer: No. Destruction of evidence is a crime. See the second bolded point of the EFF's advice here: https://ssd.eff.org/your-computer/protect/retention