Hacker News Reader

raghuson Tail->Dash: A fun word game

I wanted to share this word game I wrote for fun. I enjoy playing it and I hope others do too. No login required. (Once you pull it up, no internet connection required either!)

raghuson 37, the median value for the second prime factor of an integer

Interestingly, 37 also shows up in the Optimal Stopping / Secretary Problem.

raghuson The disappearance of a Soviet skiing party in 1959

I recommend this book: Dead Mountain by Donnie Eicher. It is a well-researched read of the incident: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17557470-dead-mountain

raghuson Ask patio11 anything

In addition to hiring new engineers, another challenge companies have is to get existing hires who have more context for the company's problems either get better or get more current with newer technologies.

raghuson Apple acquires sleep tracking company Beddit

"Oh please please please make a smart alarm that will make me up by only vibrating on my wrist" - Fitbit has done this for a while now. You can even snooze it. Fitbit calls them Silent Alarms.

raghuson Steve Jobs wasn't even okay with Google hiring former Apple engineers

Steve Jobs wasn't okay with Google hiring anyone who ever applied for a job at Apple. Or really, even people with last names that began with "Mac"

raghuson Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

I'm curious: how many 1000+ karma users are there on HN now i.e. how big is the pool of endorsers?

raghuson Amazon Prime Air

Amazon's page reads like a Google April 1st post.

Or maybe someday we'll look back at these comments like we do at http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/

raghuson Everpix is Shutting Down

https://www.thislife.com/

Pricing is here: https://www.thislife.com/pricing

Disclosure: I work at SFLY

raghuson Introducing Login and Pay with Amazon

Yes

raghuson This is What Happens When You Run Water Through a 24hz Sine Wave

Or this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mODqQvlrgIQ

raghuson Watch Darpa’s Robotic Dog Follow Its Master (Video)

Imagine being the prey of this robotic dog rather than its master...

raghuson An Interview with DuckDuckGo's founder, Gabriel Weinberg

The article mentions $115K in revenue last year. How is that close to self-sustainable for a 10-15 person company?

raghuson A New Species Discovered ... On Flickr

I can't help feeling that this story would have gotten more media attention if only the photo had been posted to Twitter or Instagram

raghuson Google Keeps Paying Deceased Employees' Families for a Decade

I think you may be confused.

raghuson Tarsnap outage post-mortem

For many of us, a datacenter losing power is the only effect we will see from this storm. For most of the people who were directly affected by the storm, it's the least of their worries.

Very well put. Good to put things in perspective.

raghuson Scaling PHP Book: I will teach you to scale PHP to millions of users

you can rent a 32GB server for less than $100 - where?

raghuson Google I/O Sells Out in 30 Seconds

30 seconds? Vic Gundotra's post on the page says Google I/O has officially sold out! It took just a bit over 20 minutes!

raghuson Walmart buys a Facebook-based calendar app to get a look at customers' dates

I think one over-estimates the degree to which a company with pots of money can bring that wealth to effectively bear against acquiring marketing data like this (customer dates etc).

This possibly makes obtaining that data faster and simpler and hence the acquisition.

raghuson Why Bootstrap might be very important

From http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/ : "Simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and Javascript for popular user interface components and interactions."

AKA: Allowing Programmers to take their website designs from nuclear-waste-bad to looks-decent-but-so-much-like-that-other-bootstraped-site-good

raghuson Great, Another Bootstrap Site

+1 (and a cookie). Average Joe is used to seeing sites like http://www.universityinnfresno.com/ or http://www.sunnyvalemetro.org/ and so, a clean site based on Bootstrap is a ton better than most of what he comes across. The # of Bootstrap-based sites is a tiny, tiny sliver of all sites out there and no one other than your dedicated HN-reader is going to come across a 2nd Bootstrap site the same day.

raghuson Tinytrunk - Hyperlocal Flea Market

Thanks for replying. I am not so much skeptical as I am jealous :-)

Anyway, I wish you all luck in hitting critical mass soon - I've requested an invite myself (email is in my HN profile) and if you can speed up my request to join, I'll be happy to post some stuff I've got and send you feedback on the process.

Good luck!

raghuson Tinytrunk - Hyperlocal Flea Market

This looks very nice which leads me to a somewhat tangential question: how is it that the photography on these sites is so gorgeous?

This is just supposed to be stuff from one's closet. I fancy myself as handy with a DSLR and even I wonder if I'd be taking such classy DOF-y Bokeh-y pics of watches and shoes to post on (an admittedly much niftier version of) Craigslist?

Just imagine what a poorer impression this site would make if the pics actually were like what you'd find on Craigslist? Is the front page curated like heck or what?

raghuson We are sorry

I would bold it too. That's at the heart of how sorry they really are. If they didn't delete the info, it would be PR blah.

raghuson This is what 864GB of RAM looks like now

The cache invalidation bit is going to be the interesting part of that write-up

raghuson Poll: Do you use app hosting or run your own server?

VPS (Linode) for hosting and Google Apps/Sendgrid for email

raghuson Why 37signals Doesn't Hire Programmers Based on Brainteasers

Don't know about the rest of HN but I found it strangely reassuring that even someone as talented as DHH can end up in front of a white board during an interview and feel stupid. I've been there...

raghuson Ask HN: What's a great email deliverability service?

SendGrid (http://sendgrid.com). My app's email needs are more modest (in the several thousands per month rather than the millions) but I've never ever had to worry one minute about an email not reaching the recipient since I went with SendGrid.

(Not affiliated with them - just a happy customer)

raghuson Redditors pledging to donate thousands to Wikimedia if they dump GoDaddy

A threatens to shoot B.

Most informed and enlightened people agree that this is a terrible idea.

However, companies C through Z actively support this/don't oppose this shooting.

The Internet gets really pissed with one such company G. A grassroots movement pillories G. Thousands of people donate time, passion and money to this effort. Amazingly this works and G's revenue plummets.

Meanwhile, A shoots B.