Hacker News Reader

sadgaon Data Mining 3.4 billion Web pages for $100 of EC2

AWS Spot Instances are incredible. They make you a liquidity provider, and reward you for it.

Paying list price for any load that isn't mission-critical and needed immediately is insane.

sadgaon Amateur astronomers discover a planet with four suns

A team at McGill made a "game" to find patterns in I think protein-folding or genome data, to leverage humans to identify patterns that their algorithms could not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylo_(video_game)

sadgaon Show HN: What would Paul Graham do?

TC W13 folks:

http://wwpgd.com/?q=dinner

> Organic Startup Ideas

sadgaon Master Keys

Fire crews have bolt cutters to handle the common case of a door with a small lock of any sort.

sadgaon Felix Baumgartner: The best photos and videos from the edge of space

Are these photos artificially curved / lens-angled (perhaps intentionally deceptive?), making the Earth appear more curved and the altitude appear higher than it would to a human observer at the camera's position?

http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/felix- baumgartner-jumps-from-red-bull-stratos-balloon-640x353.jpg

sadgaon A/B Testing the Effect of Sender Race on Email Response Rates

AirBnB owes its multi-multi-milliondollar growth to an email campaign that used fake women's names as the sender.

sadgaon Big-O Misconceptions

This is why you care about the lower bound:

If I say something is O(n^n)), you may come back and say "I wonder if it is O(n^2)

If you say Omega(n^2), I know not to bother.

sadgaon Rejected by Kickstarter? 'Roll your own' with Selfstarter instead

Fraud, mostly.

sadgaon A Proposal For A System To Replace Ordinary Record Merchandising (1983)

> the idea of creating a new church that would take everything all the other religions said you could not do and made it OK.

detailed in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land

Also, Unitarian Universalism (a religion formed because Unitarianism and Universalism weren't broad enough!) is basically the most dilute religion. They have churches and services and community activities but no liturgy beyond a vague spirituality.

sadgaon What’s really so bad about bubble sort?

Selection sort is simpler than Insertion sort.

sadgaon Show HN: I made Unmentionables, a free Taboo game for iPhone

Game mechanics are not copyrightable. A concrete expression of the rules is copyrightable (you can't copy-paste Monopoly's rule book), as is artwork.

"Play-alike" games are in the clear. "Look-alike" games are not.

I wouldn't say "play monopoly". I'd say "play a property-trading game like Monopoly".

sadgaon GET /browser.exe

So, Native Client?

sadgaon The world’s fastest Rubik cube solver is made from Lego

> the starting permutations are different for different contestants,

This seems silly, why? Because they don't solve simultaneously so there is a risk of information leakage?

sadgaon How Jeff Atwood works

> - Every Tuesday and Friday: Move trash kerbside.

Oh crap, I forgot to do this yesterday!

sadgaon Show HN: Mantaphrase, an app that lets you converse in a foreign language

I'm sure the vendor was deeply offended, and would have much preferred the backpacker walk on by without spending any money or trying to communicate.

sadgaon An Intuitive Guide to Linear Algebra

Huh. What other was is there to describe it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenvalues_and_eigenvectors

sadgaon An Intuitive Guide to Linear Algebra

I think an intuitive guide should have more diagrams of affine transformations. Don't just visualize the matrix, visualize the transformation.

sadgaon Google Consumer Survey

more accurate results, or more plausible-looking random results?

sadgaon Richard Hamming: You and Your Research (1986)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw

> Intro: I have given a talk with this title many times, and it turns out from discussions after the talk I could have just as well have called it "You and Your Engineering Career," or even "You and Your Career." But I left the word "Research" in the title because that is what I have most studied"

sadgaon Living in a Van

FWIW, he could have rented an apartment and showered at home, and the cost would have been to delay retirement by maybe 10% of his tenure.

sadgaon Living in a Van

Let's suppose, for the sake or argument, that 40% of the population of the "Badlands" are truly evil murderous thieves, who have no compunction firing a pistol into your car as you drive by, and suppose further that every day each one of them partakes of this pastime.

A horrible, dangerous place, seething with evil, yes? Far worse than the reality, no doubt, but let's go with it.

What do you make of the other 60%?

sadgaon Facebook has 1 billion monthly active users

Why?

sadgaon Facebook confirms it is scanning your private messages to increase Likes

the hubbub over "scanning" here is silly. Obviously Facebook's systems scan your everything. The issue is that FB considers a "private mention" as a "Like", but it's old news that a "Facebook Like" is not an "English like"

sadgaon So, You Don’t Have Any Disabled Users?

Just "deaf" here. "deaf" people who aren't part of "Deaf cultre" are just as unable to hear as "Deaf people". In fact, the average "Deaf" person may be more likely to be able to hear, since "Deaf" is cultural (can be opted-into) and "deaf" is biological.

sadgaon So, You Don’t Have Any Disabled Users?

Seems the solution hear is Google Voice or some client software that receives the phone call on behalf of the user, and sets up the relay. Relay should be a "hook-in" feature of my phone, not a concern of the caller.

sadgaon The Most Revealing Job Interview Question

That's extreme. You spend over half your life at work. It is personal. The most popular employers make an effort to contribute to employee's personal lives.

sadgaon The Most Revealing Job Interview Question

> That's pretty unfairly tilted in favor of the company.

You seem to be assuming that the company's goal is to find a reason to reject someone. That's not correct.

If anything, it's tilted in favor of candidates that have the same hobbies as interviewers.

sadgaon Ancestry.com Acquires 1000memories (YC S10)

> most profiles are inactive

Beautiful euphemism for "died before the Internet was invented"

sadgaon The Z3 theorem prover is now open source

> The above I can understand. MSFT claims ownership of any modifications you make to its software. Be aware.

MSFT claims a non-exclusive right to use your modifications.