Hacker News Reader

orbordeon The death of Intel Labs and what it means for industrial research

Patents are the solution our society seems to have chosen. I don't know whether they're "the" solution.

orbordeon How To Keep Your Domain Name Searches Safe From Poachers

The question is, did he switch his domain registrations away from them?

orbordeon How To Keep Your Domain Name Searches Safe From Poachers

What prevents the WHOIS database operator from doing the same query logging?

orbordeon What Larry Page really needs to do to return Google to its startup roots

I'll speculate that this is a problem with all large companies: the price of failure for the team involved is huge (unemployment?), but the benefit of success is small (continued employment and maybe a bonus). If the incentives are so structured, it's no surprise that you get risk-averse behavior.

orbordeon Ken Jennings on Watson

An incandescent light might take a nontrivial amount of time (tenth of a second?) to heat up and light after power is applied.

orbordeon Facebook Messaging: scorned by nerds, built for teens like candy-covered crack

It's the ultimate cure for hubris.

That doesn't sound at all like a downside.

orbordeon Cracking Passwords In The Cloud: Amazon’s New EC2 GPU Instances

I suspect the NSA doesn't care too much about bang-for-buck.

Bang-for-buck is pretty much the name of the game in brute-force cracking. You're right that NSA probably doesn't have any budget constraints, but they'd still be interested in getting the most hashes/second possible out of $10 million.

orbordeon The difficulties of providing 110-volt power to your airline seat

That's a good point; it might well outweigh the battery inefficiency's increase in power use.

orbordeon Reverse.jar

> Not a big believer in garbage collection.

This makes me seriously wonder whether you're trolling. Out of purest and most innocent curiosity, what sort of programming do you do?

orbordeon Ask HN: Anyone else here struggle with the alcohol?

Thank you for posting this.

orbordeon Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense

I think this comment is heavily downvoted because it's all self-righteousness and ad hominem ("ignorant college students") without real discussion.

You're probably getting downvoted elsewhere for claiming global warming is a myth, but you're making actual arguments, so those comments aren't in the karma hole. Your comment here is just bile without useful content.

orbordeon The difficulties of providing 110-volt power to your airline seat

You might have failed to consider conservation of energy here. The laptops use a steady amount of energy whether plugged in or not (more or less), and if they're unplugged for a while, then they'll draw more power during the time they are plugged in as they recharge their batteries. In fact, if the batteries are not perfectly efficient and thus don't provide the same energy that was used to charge them, you're now using more energy per time by running it through the batteries first.

Of course, doing the rolling blackouts might encourage less use of devices, reducing power use.

orbordeon The Happiness-Suicide Paradox

That's a pretty interesting narrative of suicide. Can you provide links to support it?

orbordeon Wikipedia Adds BitTorrent Powered Video Streaming

I want to know how I can get involved as a seed. I have bandwidth, and I'd love to donate it.

orbordeon How Loneliness is Contagious

That was worth watching. Thank you.

orbordeon TwentySomething: How my generation works

I know it's probably just you copy-pasting a link off Google without being too attentive, but please, please, please do not cite Conservapedia. Take a look at the site homepage to get a taste of why.

orbordeon Diaspora doesn’t have what it takes to topple Facebook

I don't think you can revoke a signature in a way that allows repudiation. You can only say, "I no longer stand by what I said," not "I never signed this."

I could be wrong, though. If you have links demonstrating this, please post them.

orbordeon Prosecutors withdraw warrant for WikiLeaks founder Assange

Link?

orbordeon Wikileaks founder Julian Assange accused of rape

I'm glad to see an actual news organization checking into this story by talking to Swedish police. It's a nice change from the thousand blogs reposting that single Swedish tabloid article and Twitter post.

orbordeon Ultraviolet light reveals how ancient Greek statues really looked

Are you sure that isn't just cruddy OCR?

orbordeon Sentience discovered in the Linux kernel

It's a joke article attributing the misbehavior of buggy suspend/resume on Linux to the kernel achieving sentience and expressing its desires through crashing (or not).

orbordeon Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

If you think about it, that's evolutionary theory in a nutshell. Organisms don't evolve due to any desire or goal to change; rather, random processes cause mutations, and traits that happen to result in more copies of themselves being made tend to become more common, and that's it. There is no purpose to the changes; they just are, and "better" ones happen to become more common because they duplicate more.

orbordeon Posterous is being DDoS'd

Google seems to provide plenty of examples. Even if it didn't, I don't understand why you see this extortion as a stretch.

orbordeon The rich are different from you and me

You could read the paper itself.

http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=pd...

It's probably behind a paywall for you, though.

orbordeon Why I’m giving up on Europe and moving my startup to China

I don't know about anyone else, but I tend to make arguments on rational grounds before I try ethical ones. Ethical arguments are less reliably convincing because not everyone is in agreement about what is ethical, and some people don't have any ethics at all.

orbordeon Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?

Could a startup trigger a similar 'white flight' in an established service by intentionally appealing to the most economically valuable demographic? Can we build good niche businesses by creating things like race-specific Twitter clients?

Would it be ethical to do so?

orbordeon Ask PG & other successful folks: how did your life change after FU money?

This is a stupid thread. It's addressing a problem that most HN readers would love to have, but don't, so it's simply a bunch of pleasant daydreaming, not a useful discussion of how to solve a real problem.

I understand that people on HN want to be rich; I'd rather see an HN filled with articles that help materially in getting there, not one talking about how great (or not?) it is to be rich.