Hacker News Reader

rubypayon Show HN: Web-controlled Christmas Lights with Node.js, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi

Also relevant: http://www.cheerlights.com/

rubypayon Show HN: Switcheroo, exchange your stories with others, anonymously.

It seems that in the anonymous email that was sent to me, the user's apostrophes weren't formatted correctly, and turned into "'". Otherwise, I like the service!

rubypayon The Real War 1939-1945, by Paul Fussell (1989)

Same article, but reformatted to make it easier to read (for me at least): http://www.readability.com/articles/ikavpsvz

rubypayon Show HN: A site for code reviews

One minor problem I found is that when commenting, the submit button shouldn't actually submit if the captcha is blank -- otherwise the entire comment gets lost as the page is reloaded. Otherwise, the site looks great!

rubypayon Compromised Linode, thousands of BitCoins stolen

Could this have been a vulnerability in Lish, which can be run from a browser using Linode's AJAX console?

http://library.linode.com/troubleshooting/using-lish-the-lin...

I've completely ruined networking and disabled root logins on a Linode VPS, but could still access that same VPS as root using Lish.

rubypayon New multiferroic alloy turns waste heat into green electricity for free

This doesn't lower the temperature of a nuclear reactor or any heat source. The new material will still experience an increase in temperature, and the same amount of heat will still be released into the environment.

rubypayon Big Banks target Paypal

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

rubypayon Evidence of Dark Matter Found in Minnesota mine

I find it interesting how the theorist says "The finding does not constitute a discovery of dark matter", the journalist titled the article "Signs of dark matter from Minnesota mine", and then to_jon posted this on Hacker News as "Evidence of Dark Matter Found in Minnesota mine".

rubypayon Reclaim and reuse your Facebook data

This is a third-party application that allows you to export your data. It was not created by Facebook.

rubypayon Ask HN: Review the prerelease demo of my new web app

It logs data from people rather than sensors, and displays maps, charts, and feeds with that data.

rubypayon The Wall Street Leviathan

I read it more as "The six most profitable financial institutions in the US now account for 55 percent of all banking assets" which makes sense to me.

rubypayon ThingSpeak: an open source "Internet of Things" API

Thanks for the comments, we moved the news section up a bit more. Glad you like our implementation, if you have any feature requests let us know.

rubypayon Show HN: Newtiny - Forget Bookmarking and Record your whole Web History

Interested in the code for a Firefox extension that does the same thing as your Chrome extension? I made this exact service two years ago, while also saving visual snapshots of every webpage. The database which stored text from webpages quickly became massive, but nobody was willing to pay for the service so I shut it down.

rubypayon The Truth about California: It's actually saving the rest of the USA

Fiscal facts aren't all that matters. Investors' perceptions can also have an impact--if California is perceived to be in trouble, investors demand higher premiums on bonds, and the costs for California to borrow money increase. This can lead to a detrimental cycle of destruction, akin to what happened to Lehman Brothers.

rubypayon Netflix's Advice on Moving to Amazon Web Services

Anyone know how many AWS instances (and what types) are being run? Are these the same servers that account for up to 20% of downstream bandwidth in the U.S.?

rubypayon Hidden limitations of Google App Engine

The biggest limitation I had was while writing to the database, the database would sometimes return an error for no apparent reason. I'd then be forced to catch these errors, and resubmit. But if you had lots of traffic and resubmit too quickly, Google App Engine would throw more errors back at you. This was all over a year ago, not sure how it is now, I would never go back to using it.

From http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/life_of_write.html

There is an expected failure rate on writes as Bigtable tablets are sometimes unavailable, for example, when they are being moved or split. The presence of more indexes increases the probability of hitting an unavailable tablet as an exception will be raised if a write fails for any of the indexes. In those situations, your application will need to decide how to handle the exception. One option is to add a task to the task queue to retry the write at a later point in time. Another idea would be to respond with an error from the app and have the client retry. This tends to work with things like AJAX requests where there is client side logic which can handle an error message from the server.

rubypayon Antimatter atoms produced and trapped at CERN

The "object you use to contain the antimatter" is not very large, it can be wheeled around in a lab. The "energy required to contain the antimatter" is not very significant, liquid helium cooled inside a liquid nitrogen shell, and some rather ordinary (in terms of power usage) electric and magnetic fields. 100 grams of antimatter has a yield similar to a 4 megaton hydrogen bomb.

rubypayon Antimatter atoms produced and trapped at CERN

I call bullshit. The cost is not "very high", it's astronomically high.

(Comments like this make me want to stop reading Hacker News.) Just because the "gunpowder" is expensive doesn't stop the production of containment vessels or delivery mechanisms:

http://articles.sfgate.com/2004-10-04/news/17447495_1_antima...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter_weapon

Additionally, "antimatter" can include positrons, which are much cheaper to produce than antiprotons.

My advisor also worked on creating antimatter traps at government labs, but none of the projects had any kind of defense related purposes.

Your advisor may not have been involved in all imaginable projects related to antimatter.

There are only a handful of interesting research questions about antimatter that exist at reasonable scales. Most of those are either fundamental physics or medical in nature.

Along with research into directly producing weapons, antimatter can also be used to initiate (micro)fusion, and has been researched for space travel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter_catalyzed_nuclear_pu...

rubypayon Antimatter atoms produced and trapped at CERN

For its size, it would be many times more powerful than a hydrogen bomb, by several magnitudes.

rubypayon Antimatter atoms produced and trapped at CERN

Although the cost to create antimatter is very high, our government is actually working on creating antimatter munitions. (I've worked on creating a portable antimatter trap, which was funded by the U.S. government.)

rubypayon Local newspaper boasts ultimate passive-aggressive paywall policy

Clicking on the subscribe link leads to a PayPal page with the cost: $0.00. Strange.

rubypayon Thanks for the feedback. I've closed the service

Just saw this post about our startup, I'll clarify some things since some people seem interested.

RubyPay was a points based payment system for digital content that anyone could use. Points were bought for cash, and redeemable for cash. It was released because we wanted to generate some feedback on the model.

RubyPay was closed so quickly because we realized some problems, and didn't want any live transactions going through our system that we'd later have to refund. Among some of the problems were:

1) allowing anyone to sell content without a screening process for them or the content

2) allowing consumers to redeem the points for cash, which brought a whole new set of laws into play

3) not anticipating all of the ways that fraud could propagate through the system

We're currently working on the service to address these and other issues. We've also discussed the business further with lawyers, became PCI-DSS compliant, and are in the process of forming industry partnerships. As always thanks for the feedback (there was another discussion thread on HN too), it helped us quickly pivot and iterate on our model, and probably saved us tons of time and headaches.

rubypayon Ask HN: Review my micropayments startup, RubyPay

Thanks for everyone's feedback. I've closed the service.

rubypayon Ask HN: Review my micropayments startup, RubyPay

Subscriptions are not available yet, but they will be in a few weeks. Just to clarify, the user does not pay per click, but rather per link. If a user has already paid for a link, clicking the link a second time will forward the user to the correct content.

rubypayon Ask HN: Review my micropayments startup, RubyPay

I added a demo area for you, hope it gives you a better idea of how the app works.

https://www.rubypay.com/pages/demo

rubypayon Ask HN: Review my micropayments startup, RubyPay

Thanks for the suggestion, for now if you'd like to see what a paid link looks like: https://www.rubypay.com/i/9c7wfUo4ACZ

rubypayon Review my weekend HTML5 project: DropMocks

I just read that you're the lead designer for Google Chrome, awesome work on that by the way!

rubypayon Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

1) Change the name of Microsoft Security Essentials so people will have an easier time finding it and knowing what it does. Market it better, while keeping it free.

2) Have more free options available for small businesses and teams running the .NET stack. BizSpark is a step in the right direction, but for cash-strapped startups who want to test ideas out in a production setting, it still doesn't compete with the free open-source alternatives.

3) Focus more on getting program installations done right. For example, SQL Server 2008 has taken a step backwards in terms of installation. Errors happen quite frequently during the install/upgrade process--it shouldn't take several hours of fighting one installer to get it working properly.

4) For popular third-party programs that work correctly with Windows, it would be nice if Microsoft had an online database of checksums that Windows can transparently check the program against. If everything looks good, don't present the user with "Confirm/Deny" choices, just install it. Otherwise users become jaded and used to clicking on "Confirm" even for popups that require more thorough inspection.

rubypayon Ask HN: Rate My Startup, Sprred

Are you doing a lot of on-the-fly processing of the images? Seems like they're the reason the site is slow. I think things could be improved with better caching (server and client side with http headers).

rubypayon Ask HN: Rate My Startup, Sprred

I really like the look of your Sprred, however it's not loading very quickly. What language and hosting setup are you running?