Hacker News Reader

shaddion "I modeled this website on the same principles of Walmart"

You can even watch a video from the founder on their "videos" section.

http://www.globalcommunity.me/videos/video/index.html

shaddion Google open sources Liquid Galaxy code

I remember when I first visited Google a friend of mine who worked there very excitedly showed this to me. I was terribly unimpressed because at the time I was interning at the Jet Propulsion Lab and I had already seen their version of this:

http://lucyabramyan.com/Site/Stage.html

One of my co-workers had built this awesome immersive environment using back-projection, so you didn't have any of the frame boundaries like the Google version did. It was particularly well-suited to viewing the panoramas sent back from the Mars rovers.

shaddion Asteroids JavaScript Bookmarklet to blow up any web site

Finally, Farmville can get what it has coming to it.

shaddion Ask HN: What Firefox/Chrome extensions do you use?

That last one is awesome -- thanks for pointing that out to me.

To add one I haven't seen on here yet, Switchy!, which lets you quickly switch proxy settings under Chrome. It supports SOCKSv5, which last I had checked before I started using it there was no easy way to do with Chrome.

shaddion How do i go back to regular Google?

True, but in this case the asker doesn't know what a soft drink or company is to begin with.

shaddion Google Code Project Hosting relaxes license policy

Certainly a change of heart -- we were trying to host an AGPL project on Google Code in 2008 and were told to find a new host or face deletion. There was a discussion that got a bit heated in fact, with with Chris DiBona at one point calling the AGPL "deeply flawed".

http://groups.google.com/group/google-code-hosting/browse_th...

shaddion [dead]

I'm glad danah took the time to write this; it's a compelling point particularly given her strong background in social factors and gender on the internet.

But I really wish she hadn't re-purposed the term ISP to refer to Craigslist.

shaddion Beta of "a startup" I'm working on: Billable. Easy invoicing.

A proper date picker for the date field would be good. Also, it took me a second to figure out you could edit the whole thing (if it hadn't been a Tell HN type thing, I would have bounced).

I like this idea, and the interface. Lots to do obviously but a cool start.

shaddion Is Greece entering a Death Spiral?

To me this is like the guy who spent all his money and had to be bailed out by his neighbors complaining that his neighbors aren't doing enough for him.

Arguably it's not merely like that, it is exactly that.

shaddion 1962 glass could be Corning's next bonanza seller

This was invented 48 years ago; would relevant patents have expired by now? What would prevent other companies from also manufacturing this glass?

shaddion Ask HN: Review my startup - Banksta

The logical player wouldn't start bidding, unless they bid first. The illogical player presumably would stop bidding when they get tired (or have changed their billing information so that they can't get charged for their bids!).

shaddion Ask HN: Review my startup - Banksta

I'm not an expert in game theory (I just had a half-completed econ degree once upon a time) but your analysis is spot on as far as I can tell. The pareto efficient outcome is for the first agent to bid $1 and for the second agent to quit without bidding. If there is a counter bid, then the first player will have an incentive to bid higher to avoid a loss. The second player would then have to counter bid in order to avoid a loss as well, and so on. At the $20 mark nothing changes: at that point both players are now trying to minimize loss. In any case, any other alternative from the pareto efficient $1 vs $0 bid will cause at least one agent to have a less preferable outcome, and hence that strategy would be chosen by a "logical" player.

Maybe more interesting would be to have each agent pick a bid in advance and reveal the bids simultaneously. Of course, the optimal strategy there would be to just bid as close to $20 as possible and hope for winnings to accumulate over time.

And in all of this it's not clear how the proprietor of this site will make money out of this deal.

Feel free to correct me if someone thinks this is wrong: perhaps there is a reason I never finished that degree. :)

shaddion Startup Country

Probably a lot of these "legacy systems" are an inherent result of trying to govern a large number of people with competing interests, perhaps analogous to the cultural difference between a 10k person company and a 3 person startup.

Even if you could start from a clean slate, you'd need to do that again periodically to avoid creating more "legacy systems".

shaddion Old School Color Cycling with HTML5

And if you mouseover the color swatches it highlights which pixels correspond to that color. Doing that really makes the intricacy of these images apparent.

Truly a wonderful piece of art.

shaddion Show HN: HackerNewsers,com, find other hackers near you

Very cool! I really liked the registration process, very smooth. I also like that you made it clear that I could delete my account if I wanted on the front page, before registration: that made me much more likely to sign up.

One point: your Google map uses custom icons, which are cool I suppose but I'd prefer the standard ones for the sake of consistency. More importantly, I'd like to see an info box appear when I click an icon on the map: it took me a bit to realize that full info was being displayed below. Otherwise this is a great tool!

shaddion BP finally stops oil spewing from Gulf gusher

If everything goes well, they (Adm. Allen) announced they would be leaving the cap in place. Only if things go wrong will they reopen the seals. Even if they need to reopen it, the plan is to capture the oil into ships using pipes connected to this new cap.

Edit: I can't remember the source for this; I believe I heard it on the Diane Rehm show yesterday. If I can find the source I'll update.

shaddion Ask HN: Please help and review my weekend project. Geosay.com

Yes. Or say (on the main page) that you should search for (whatever it is you call search results). If you autopopulate the map, I'd consider renaming that field "filter".

I also don't know what to search for. I typed "test" and it moved me to some result in New Mexico (several states west of where I am right now). I'd strongly recommend including some example searches that will consistently bring up good results.

shaddion Guide to where your cofounders should live in the SF Bay

Just to echo what keefe said, I successfully apartment hunted a few weeks ago and did what you're planning: crash with a friend for a week and obsessively read Craigslist. Something that helped me get a feel for the area was biking/walking around the general vicinity of where I was wanting to live (Berkeley). A lot of apartments have signs outside stating they're for rent too; in general though, Craigslist is pretty comprehensive.

One other point: come with your checkbook and be ready to put down a deposit on the spot. Don't rush your decision of course, but places go /fast/ and you'll want to act quickly to ensure the place you're looking for doesn't get taken.

shaddion Guide to where your cofounders should live in the SF Bay

I was apartment hunting in Berkeley a few weeks ago and only one of the eight places I looked at wanted to do a credit check.

shaddion One year of Amazon Prime free for students

Amazon Prime is a genius program, and I think Amazon Tote has the potential to be as well. Free weekly deliveries of anything you order is perfect for most folks, who probably go to the store once a week to stock up.

shaddion Ask HN: What are you working on today?

Genuinely curious: how is eBay not a real-time auction?

shaddion Intergalactic Computer Network - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Based on our current understanding of physics, latency would make two-way communication impractical. Even if you were willing to wait around a few thousand generations for the metaphorical ACK, you're not likely still interested in the response to your request. As far as I can tell, the only form of communication that would be relevant would be one-way broadcasts. Because of this, I would envision some kind of intergalactic CDN, continually updating caches in distant galaxies with the historical events of their senders. This information could then be queried by hosts within the neighborhood of these caches.

That said, I wouldn't want to be the one to aim that link... or stand anywhere near a transmitter powerful enough to be detected at intergalactic ranges. You'd probably need some kind of system that obscured the light of a very bright star in order for that to work.

shaddion A Very Scary Fireworks Show: Exploding H-Bombs In Space

Discussion from a few days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1478114

shaddion Quality & Gumption (Hacking vs. Programming)

Interesting comparison to Rand. When I read ZAMM I found the author's message to be diametrically opposed to that which I had taken from Rand.

Perhaps this just highlights how much of a work is what the observer brings to it, a la http://sivers.org/you-not-them.

shaddion [dead]

What is "mpbs"?

shaddion Russian Spies Hid Secret Codes in Online Photos

Seriously. I remember we had a stenography lesson at a summer program I participated in during high school, back in 2004. The software we used was pretty old, and the class was held at TN Tech and led by a guy from the Cooke Co. Sherrif's cybercrime division. Not exactly people on the front lines of internet security research.

shaddion An Internet 100 times as fast: A new network design could boost capacity

Essentially they're creating dedicated circuits between two endpoints to eliminate store-and-forward delay at backbone routers.

I think the title overdoes the impact of this: this isn't the kind of technology that is going to hook end systems to the core of the Internet, and this approach prevents routing from being done at the network level. I could imagine some kind of overlay routing scheme making use of this to connect points near the edge of the network. Or, as the article states, between big datacenters.

shaddion Crowdsourcing, the Gulf Oil Spill and the Arrogance of BP

Official word from Innocentive: http://blog.innocentive.com/2010/06/23/innocentive-oil-spill...

shaddion College students spend less and less time studying, leisure time on the rise

Surveys were administered to 4 large classes of students at a major public university in California.

Hmm... This is out of UCSB. Given it's location [1] I'd sure hope their students were taking ample time for leisure.

[1] http://is.gd/cZ6WR (gmap)

shaddion Mensch -- A coding font

I tried it out on my Ubuntu box and realized it's practically indistinguishable from the default Monospace font:

http://sha.ddih.org/f/monospace.png

http://sha.ddih.org/f/mensch.png