Hacker News Reader

scotjeon Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

It's not impervious to bad weather, but pretty resilient. I'd say in the 2 years we've had ours the system has shut off maybe 3-4 times due to one of: a) very low and direct sun angle, b) very heavy rain, c) dense fog. Which, to be fair, are all difficult conditions for a human to drive in as well.

But I agree with the parent, the suite of driver assistance features is very good, but a long way from "self driving".

scotjeon A family converts a decommissioned school into a home and bed-and-breakfast

They also recently did a similar project in Bothell, WA: http://www.mcmenamins.com/AndersonSchool

scotjeon Dollar a Day

It appears that Network For Good largely operates this way as a "donor-advised fund":

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

scotjeon Dollar a Day

Do you know if there a legal/tax impediment to getting the pass-through classified as a not-for-profit? Or did you just mean it makes it harder to implement as a traditional startup?

scotjeon Ingredient delivery for restaurant recipes

I'm curious as to what your turnaround time from order to delivery is?

We actually tried something pretty similar last year here in Portland (the site is still alive at www.localplate.com although we have ceased operations), we found it pretty challenging just to get people to plan ahead far enough for our offering to be viable. (We came across some consumer research that something like 70% of households don't have a plan for dinner until sometime the same day.)

We eventually tried distribution through existing retail channels which definitely helped with the traction side but made the economics pretty challenging. :)

Best of luck though, it's an interesting space with a lot of people attacking it from different directions right now.

(E-mail is in my profile if you want to know any more about our experience.)

scotjeon Six tanks at Hanford nuclear site in Washington are leaking

Well, I haven't found a specific treaty or agreement covering the Naval reactors. It may be a less formal arrangement, I don't know.

But a did find a nice picture of the reactor pit: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-jYVl__lRp5s/Tfpf4Cyi6rI/AAAAAAAAA6...

scotjeon Six tanks at Hanford nuclear site in Washington are leaking

I had to do some Googling, but the PPRA treaty would appear to explain the valve cover inspections: http://dtirp.dtra.mil/tic/synopses/ppra.aspx

Still looking for what would apply to the Navy reactors.

scotjeon Six tanks at Hanford nuclear site in Washington are leaking

There are also a limited number of public site tours each year, focusing on the B Reactor. (The first full scale fission reactor in the world.)

http://manhattanprojectbreactor.hanford.gov/

I've gone twice and it is really fascinating. You get to stand about twenty feet from the face of the reactor core, walk around the control room, etc. I have some pictures and video I can share if anyone is interested, although I'm sure some Googling can turn up lots of them as well.

One of my favorite anecdotes is that the valve covers for all the cooling pipes are open and have to remain that way so that the Russian inspectors can verify each year that there is no evidence that the reactor has been in operation. (Not sure if these inspections are actually still happening.)

Also for arms control purposes, there is an open pit elsewhere on the site where decommissioned US Navy reactors are stored. (Russia can monitor the number and position of them via satellite.)

scotjeon Use Rails? Check yourself for the YAML exploit

See, in a very circular way I was just reporting the typo. :)

(Looks good now that I have the right release deployed, by the way.)

scotjeon Use Rails? Check yourself for the YAML exploit

Aha, well apparently I never merged that commit into my deploy branch, so it was still actually on 3.2.1. That combined with the fact that your page had said 3.2.1 was safe caused my brain to short circuit and not realize that 3.2.11 is what it needed to be on. :) I'll redeploy and check it again, thanks guys!

scotjeon Use Rails? Check yourself for the YAML exploit

I just tried this on one of my side project sites and it's reporting it as being vulnerable. However I upgraded the site to Rails 3.2.1 last week (and just confirmed that's the version in the bundle). Is there something that would cause a false positive or is my app really still vulnerable?

scotjeon How to not rely on Rubygems.org for deployment

Thanks, those are all fair points.

The reason I went with "vendor everything" several years ago was that I had to make some changes to a legacy codebase and discovered that one of the gems it depended on was no longer available. It wasn't the end of the world to refactor around it, but it motivated me to find a way to ensure I would always have a local copy of all the dependencies for each app.

Someone in the comments of the rubygems.org story yesterday mentioned using a submodule for vendor/cache which seems like an interesting idea to me. That could at least partially address #3.

scotjeon How to not rely on Rubygems.org for deployment

Steve, could you maybe expand a little bit on your reasons for not wanting to have the gems cached in your repo? Have you run into practical issues (deployment speed, etc.) or is it more of a philosophical thing?

scotjeon Ruby deploys temporarily disabled

If you use bundler, "bundle package" can help reduce or eliminate your dependency on external gem repositories. At least for deployments.

I generally try to follow the "vendor everything" philosophy: http://ryan.mcgeary.org/2011/02/09/vendor-everything-still-a...

scotjeon AT&T Throttling Unlimited Plans after 2GB Data Use

Unless you have a 4S.

scotjeon Steam loses user database

I would say your customers can sue you regardless of what you say in an email or blog post. Using lawyers to hide from your customers seems less than optimal.

scotjeon Vidyard (YC S11) Is A YouTube For Businesses

Personally, I find the "Pricing" line of the comparison chart to be misleading. For $199 (a year) you get 50GB of space and 250k views with Vimeo Pro. Under the Free Viyard plan you get 1 video and 101GB of bandwidth. Also, the "Unbranded Player" line of the comparison is checked for Vidyard even though the pricing page says the Free plan uses a branded player.

Maybe just get rid of that pricing line in the comparison?

scotjeon Interesti.ng. The first .ng domain name has been registered.

Other than having to mail them a paper check(!), registering js.co.tt with the Trinidad and Tabago NIC was fairly painless. As others have mentioned though, you are pretty much always at the whim of the local government. If you wouldn't trust the local judicial system to fairly adjudicate any disputes, you might want to think twice before basing your business on their TLD.

scotjeon Hipmunk demos at Travel Innovation Summit (video)

Different people place importance on different things. The "people who buy airline tickets" market is probably large enough to withstand some segmentation.

scotjeon Reversal on Carbs: Scientists now blame carbohydrates for America's ills

I was trying to think of a good analogy before but just came up with this: imagine if the Minerals Management Service (theoretical regulator of the oil industry) was in charge of setting the fuel economy standards for cars and trucks.

scotjeon Reversal on Carbs: Scientists now blame carbohydrates for America's ills

Especially the USDA who's mission is to promote our agricultural industries. For some reason, we have the agency charged with supporting the producers of food setting the official recommendations for what and how much you should be eating.

scotjeon BankSimple Launches Preview Site

Unless it has changed recently, Gmail ignores the dots anyway. So if you find a form that wont validate your john.smith@gmail.com, you can use johnsmith@gmail.com and still receive it.

scotjeon Finnish EV Team Learns a $400,000 Lesson in Humility at Automotive X-Prize Race

So, if they had signed the agreement and won, would they have learned an $800,000 lesson in the evils of socialism or something?

They placed a bet on their car and it didn't pay off. Doesn't mean it was a bad bet. (In fact, since it sounds like they were the consensus favorites going into the competition, it was probably a good bet.)

scotjeon My short history of Engine Yard and my Resignation

Are you thinking of Yehuda Katz who works at EngineYard?

http://yehudakatz.com/

scotjeon The Startup Diet: How I Lost 35 Pounds While Working Overtime

Good Calories, Bad Calories has a pretty robust bibliography, and the author, Gary Taubes, is a well respected science reporter. It would be a mistake to characterize his book in the way you have. Check it out from the library and read some of it yourself. :)

scotjeon How we buy plane tickets and why it's ruining air travel

The in-flight WiFi on Virgin America (and most domestic carriers as far as I know) is a cellular based system, not satellite.

http://www.gogoinflight.com/gogo/cms/work.do

scotjeon Senior Apple engineer told Jobs antenna could fail

I'm not sure exactly what you meant, but a 30 day return window is already the refund policy for the iPhone:

http://store.apple.com/Catalog/US/Images/salespolicies.html#...

scotjeon Senior Apple engineer told Jobs antenna could fail

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/2

Edit: Here's a pertinent quote from that article...

"So, an entire day and more than a quarter tank of gas later, here are the results. Holding the iPhone 4 without a case, in your left hand, crossing the black strip can result in a worst case drop of 24 dB in signal. As we'll show in a second, how you hold the phone makes a huge difference across every smartphone - and we've tested thoroughly in 5 different positions.

Now, there are two vastly different possibilities for what happens to the bar visualization after you drop 24 dB. I happen to live less than one block from an AT&T UMTS tower (it's across the street, literally), and have exceptionally strong signal in all of my house - it's part of why I chose to live here, actually. Signal is above -65 dBm in every single room, in most cases it's at -51 dBm. When I incur that worst case drop of 24 dB from squeezing the phone, I fall down to -83 dBm, which is still visualized as 5 bars.

However, in locales that have less signal, but where iOS still displays 5 bars, the drop of 24 dB is visualized much differently. For example, at another test location, signal without holding the phone is -89 dBm, which is still displayed as 5 bars. Cup the phone, and you'll fall all the way to -113 dBm. All the bars dramatically disappear one after the other, people think they've dramatically lost all the signal, and you know the rest."

scotjeon Thoughts on OnLive

I wonder if the restriction is because EA already licensed the Mac publishing rights to someone like Aspyr?

scotjeon DuckDuckGo Sponsorship By The Numbers

I believe DDG doesn't set a referrer for privacy reasons.