Hacker News Reader

pndmnmon Show HN: Lunch Money, a personal budgeting tool with multi-currency support

Great to hear. I signed up to check it out but I'm also of the view that I can't give direct access to online banking credentials to third parties (at least in the US, you're liable for wire transfers that can be initiated from those credentials). A service that distinguished itself in that way would happily have my business.

pndmnmon Thinkpad X62

I have a summer 2009 MBP whose battery failed in... 2013, I think. I removed the battery and have been running it off just the Magsafe adapter ever since (just as a low-power home server).

pndmnmon How tinkerers brought PID temp control to espresso machines

I saw this at Boxcar last time I was in Denver -- a couple articles about their setup:

http://www.freshcup.com/high-altitude-brewing/

http://sprudge.com/in-colorado-delicious-meticulously-brewed...

pndmnmon Chiara Vigo: The last woman who makes sea silk

Good collection of links on the topic a few weeks ago at Metafilter: http://www.metafilter.com/151993/It-was-necessary-also-to-fi...

pndmnmon Printer's key

I've found this to be fairly uncommon, but I usually notice since I eschew bookmarks in favor of remembering what page I'm on. I've never seen it not correspond to the physical number of page sides preceding the first numeral (occasionally not including a flap page against the cover). So the number is "correct", it's just that the preceding pages had no numbers printed.

pndmnmon Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

Borges is what actually got me interesting in literary criticism -- because of the nature of his output, it's actually possible to read nearly all of his major work (poetry and nonfiction included). This makes reading lit-crit about him infinitely more satisfying. If you're remotely interested, I'd highly recommend "The Narrow Act", "Invisible Work", and particularly "The Mystery To A Solution", though this last one also requires a lot of Poe and even more patience.

pndmnmon My Quest to Reengineer a Legendary Beer in a Dirty Kitchen

A classic for a reason! If anyone is interested in the more complex brewing process and chemistry of lambic beer, Jeff Sparrow's "Wild Brews" is another great read.

pndmnmon A New Kind of Conspicuous Consumption

Sigh. I grew up on the Olympic Peninsula (far western Washington) and this is basically my whole wardrobe. Moved to the bay area over the summer and now I feel gross wearing it. Hopefully fashion moves on soon and I can wear the clothes I have and like in peace.

pndmnmon Open source USB Type-C to HDMI Adapter

Not specifically video-adapter-related, but on a tangential note this teardown by Ken Shirriff of an Apple charger and imitation Apple charger is interesting: http://www.righto.com/2014/05/a-look-inside-ipad-chargers-pr...

pndmnmon On Being the Right Size (1928)

One of my favorite essays! Anyone interested in the topic should find themselves a copy of D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's book "On Growth and Form" and give it a read. Fascinating discussion of the sizes & shapes of living creatures from physical principles.

pndmnmon India's tiger population sees 30% increase

On a tangent, this is pretty great article about wild honey gathering in the Sunderbans (including some stories about tigers): http://blog.longreads.com/2014/09/28/the-honey-hunters/

pndmnmon Half of stars lurk outside galaxies

A couple short stories: Arthur C. Clarke's "Crusade" is set on a starless planet between galaxies. A.E. van Vogt's "Black Destroyer" has as a minor plot point the idea that a civilization developing in a single-planet solar system extremely far away from any others would never develop interstellar travel because there would be no stepping stones.

pndmnmon The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences (1960)

each particle and each subset of particles would have their own individual laws governing their interactions.

An interesting (philosophical science fiction) read on this topic is Stanislaw Lem's "The New Cosmogony" (in the book "A Perfect Vacuum").

pndmnmon Everything you need to know about the Shellshock Bash bug

Many systems still use passwordless sudo to permit certain users to run specific commands -- but now, if those commands are shell scripts run via bash, the users can execute arbitrary commands (this isn't an uncommon class of privilege escalation problem, though).

pndmnmon Impossible Cookware and Other Triumphs of the Penrose Tile

As a result, quasicrystal coatings have found their way into nonstick cookware.

I remember reading about these pans back a decade or so (Sitram Cybernox). At the time I tried to find a place where I could actually test one out (they got mixed reviews), but wasn't able to, and eventually just got good at cooking on stainless & cast iron. It looks like their site is still up but I recall seeing something a couple years ago about the pans in question being discontinued or unavailable.

pndmnmon Is Borges the 20th Century’s most important writer?

For me, László Krasznahorkai, Carsten Jensen, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Roberto Bolaño are some of the best recent non-English writers around.

pndmnmon Lost Franklin expedition ship found in the Arctic

Absolutely agreed. There's another (non-fiction & not about Franklin, but excellent Arctic survival from the age of exploration) book that just came out by Hampton Sides called "In The Kingdom of Ice", which is really excellent. NYT review: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/17/books/review/in-the-kingdo...

pndmnmon Macroscopic quantum objects cannot exist if P ≠ NP?

Interesting and semi-related: http://www.opticsinfobase.org/oe/abstract.cfm?id=140598

Essentially, solving the traveling salesman problem in quadratic time using photon interference -- however, since the photons scale up as N^N, the Schwarzschild radius of the effect means it's not observable in less than exponential time.

pndmnmon SHA-3 NIST announcement controversy

The commenting system on Google Reader (despite being neither open or distributed) is the closest I've seen to a system that acts the way I'd like online. I can imagine a distributed version that would operate e.g. with each of us publishing a feed of things we read and commented on, to which friends could subscribe and publish their own comments on... there are some interesting scaling/complexity issues but it's not insoluble. Some combination of FOAF, RSS, and trackbacks conceptually.

I think the bigger problem is that the era of the semantic web/community standards like RSS, etc has largely passed us by. Participation now occurs on unmoderated sites like Twitter/Tumblr/etc, or on moderated community forums (and in a context where there's interesting content but I can't choose who specifically to follow, I prefer moderation).

pndmnmon File system that stores location of file in Pi

In fact, it's still not known if pi is normal (contains all finite patterns of numbers[π]), so you can't guarantee that any search will terminate.

π: Not quite the definition of normal, but equivalent.

pndmnmon A Server Naming Scheme

To this day, my favorite naming scheme I ever encountered was names of elements, everything CNAMEd to the elemental abbreviation, with the last octet of the IP address as the atomic number. It was for a geophysics group, which probably made it a little more discoverable/easily spellable.

pndmnmon Early Days on Street View

Wow, I didn't realize that Amazon Blockview (part of A9 at the time) was so short-lived. I used it all the time in Seattle when it was running.

pndmnmon Real-time lightning map, worldwide

The WWLLN has been around for awhile doing this sort of thing, though not in nearly as accessible a manner: http://wwlln.net/

They use VLF radio detection to triangulate strikes.

pndmnmon Tickets for Restaurants

Yes, but at Keller's restaurant it's not charged in advance -- it's just a "gratuity included" situation. The specific definition in the FLSA states that tips for an employee are "actually received by the employee", which is the main issue in counting prior ticket purchase as gratuity.

Also, Nick, if you're still reading -- do you think that the prepurchase model materially affects people's spending on e.g. upgrades and drinks? My wife and I did Alinea & Aviary on November, and I was definitely happier to spend a little more given that the original "purchase" was so many paychecks in the past.

pndmnmon LambTracker: Open Source EID for the sheep industry

I should probably just have written a blog post about this, but busy getting ready to move to SF ;)

I met the author of this software over the weekend -- she runs a single-breed sheep farm in the North Fork valley in Colorado, and gathers data for the USDA, tracks the genetic lines of all their sheep, and so on. She was telling me that the commercial alternatives for the electronic tag-reading hardware can cost $1000+, but they were able to build a reader that communicates via Bluetooth with an Android device for less than $100: https://github.com/OogieM/sheep_eid_hw

Apparently a similar situation with the software to absorb and process that data, which is why she's writing LambTracker. Cool to see an entire market I didn't realize existed getting renovated from the inside.

pndmnmon Loving what I used to hate

While the historical meaning of "ambivalence" (literally -- strength in two directions) does mean a contradictory complex of feelings, I now almost exclusively hear it used to mean a low level of feeling or lack of caring. When you say ambivalence, this is most likely what people will understand to be the meaning.

pndmnmon Show HN: Deaf? My iPhone app wakes you up if it hears an alarm

I really wish that the Fitbit Flex was more hackable -- if I could get a low-power bluetooth fob that could vibrate and display a few lights embedded in my watchband, that would really be all the smartwatch I need.

pndmnmon What if the critics win, and tech sector flees S.F.?

As a guy who is moving to SF for geographically-relevant reasons (wife is a medical resident) and who works tech remotely, I'd be all in favor of this.

pndmnmon The Couple That Pays Each Other to Put Kids to Bed

> Suppose the two partners have different ideas of what constitutes "cleaning the house".

This is essentially how my partner and I have divided up housework -- the person whose requirements for "done" are a superset of the other's does the chore. Fortunately we're fairly balanced in that regard.

pndmnmon Torus-Earth

In fact, it does -- to demonstrate, assume otherwise and use the definition of continuity.