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swwuon John "Captain Crunch" Draper, the Hacker's Hacker

Quite a few famous hackers seem to have this problem, eg Richard Stallman. I suppose there's a reason the "UNIX guy" stereotype exists.

swwuon [dead]

Layperson's explanation - this is a pretty important step to stopping aging in human beings. Telomerase lengthens telomeres, which are end-caps on DNA strands that are slowly whittled away as cells divide; without functioning telomerase human cells can only divide a finite amount of times before dying.

swwuon Ask HN: non invasive analytics tool?

AWStats (http://awstats.sourceforge.net/) is decent if you just want some simple log-based analytics.

Don't know what you mean by limited, but logfile-based analytics software doesn't have access to as much data as software that can use other data sources like cookies (ie it has difficulty tracking sessions).

If I might ask, why exactly do you need to make your analytics completely undetectable to users? In most cases tracking pixels and the like have no effect whatsoever on the user experience.

swwuon [dead]

Doesn't strip script tags or anything; lots of nasty stuff you could do with this. Somebody should notify them.

https://www.maybank2u.com.my/mbb/m2u/jsp/common/mbbReceipt.j...

swwuon Pay It Forward

I'd love to have one too, if you still have any.

swwuon Are 80% of Harvard Students First Borns?

Isn't Poisson rate-based, ie events over a fixed time period? I'm having trouble seeing where you got the rate from (children per lifetime? but that's hardly a "fixed time period") - all we have is a single number "children/household" with no time dimension.

And most other distributions, ie other than the uniform I'm assuming and the Poisson you're using, require >1 parameters. Since we only have one piece of data (the mean) we would have to make assumptions with these distributions that make no more sense than simply assuming a uniform distribution to begin with.

You'll have to excuse me for any incredibly stupid intuitive leaps; I haven't had a chance to wake up fully yet.

swwuon Are 80% of Harvard Students First Borns?

The "average number of own children under 18 per family" for "familes with own children under 18" was 1.86 in 2009 (and has been within 0.1 of that since 1978), which means about 1/1.86=~54% of all children are first-borns...

I don't think we have enough information here to actually verify but I suspect 80% vs 54% is still a statistically significant difference.

But it's pretty obvious that the 80% number is an arbitrary guess, so I'm not sure exactly where I stand here.

source: http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/hh-fam/fm3.csv

swwuon HN Rant: Come and Go Voting

The entire source of news.arc is open - eg http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc

Lines 1095-1098 control whether the downvote arrow is displayed or not.

So, to answer your question, yes, it bothers me that there's very rarely a clear enumeration or description of features.

On the other hand, it's been a wonderful opportunity to learn Arc.

(I'm only half joking - Arc was actually my first stab at functional programming and I probably wouldn't have tried it if pg had bothered to document HN's features)

swwuon The Scary New Rich

the ones with a bit of money will vote with their wallets

The problem with this (regarding China in particular) is that the "ones with a bit money" and the "people" sometimes intersect at very few points.

swwuon What is the mathematical expression of ascending sort?

Mathematically you could express the concept of a (partially ordered) set by something like <S,P(x1,x2)> (where P is some comparison function), so, for example, the sorted natural numbers would be <N,<>. I have no idea, though, if that's even remotely close to what you're asking.

swwuon Nepal Human Hair Solar Panel Hoax (CraigHyatt)

Actually, if you read the article, they mention using two probes made of the same metal to eliminate any current generated by the differences in redox potential between them.

swwuon Nepal Human Hair Solar Panel Hoax (CraigHyatt)

Then again, silicon is an atomic crystal, while hair's structure is defined on the cellular level, which makes doping silicon much more practical than doping hair. This is on top of the problem that solids without an atomic lattice of some form tend to have trouble allowing any kind of electron movement at all, regardless of what chemicals you add to it (there are quite a few exceptions, like chlorophyll, but even those tend to be well-defined at the molecular level).

Also, as the author mentions, hair soaked in salt water becomes conductive, not semiconductive - current running through it is simply passed on by the salt water - but this conductivity has nothing to do with the hair and everything to do with the water.

swwuon [dead]

That said, I don't think this is really a justified criticism we have here, pending further details.

swwuon [dead]

'Dummy' means 'pacifier' in some places, so 'spitting the dummy' literally refers to the temper tantrum of a baby. Hence, to 'dummy spit' is to throw a massive, immature temper tantrum.

swwuon US man 'stole 130m card numbers'

I see your point, but saying that a "'SQL injection attack'" was used to "penetrate networks' firewalls" really does conjure the image of somebody setting their IP to "' OR 1=1;".

swwuon US man 'stole 130m card numbers'

Also, SQL injection being described as "complicated"?

swwuon Signs that you're a bad programmer

Well, I only have experience with one college, but Stanford offers an introductory-level class in pure C and x86 assembler.

swwuon Wireless power system shown off

That's incredibly cool. I wonder, though, if these things produce a strong enough magnetic field to interfere with radios, cellphones, wireless internet, etc.

swwuon Amazon Buys Zappos

I find it vaguely surreal that I work at Amazon, yet I read about this on TechCrunch before I found out "officially".