Hacker News Reader

theatraineon Where Pot Entrepreneurs Go When the Banks Say No

Pot seems like a natural fit for cryptocurrency. There's several currencies which are designed specifically for this space (e.g. HempCoin - http://www.hempcoin.org/ - THC). As far as I can tell the weed cryptos seem to be mostly speculative in nature as retailers are dealing in cash as the article states.

theatraineon Drinking 3-4 Cups of Coffee Is “More Likely to Benefit Health Than to Harm It”

I wonder what the health benefits are for different caffeine metabolizers (i.e. for different CYP1A2 genotypes). The source article only mentions that slow metabolizers have a higher risk of hypertension, but is that outweighed by the other benefits?

theatraineon Quitting Caffeine

With long-term use Stevens–Johnson syndrome is a risk.

theatraineon Azure Data Lake Store: a hyperscale distributed file service for analytics

I'm a data scientist at Microsoft and use the precursor to Azure Data Lake (internally called Cosmos) daily. It's a remarkably powerful and well-designed system.

theatraineon Moderate drinking associated with atrophy in brain related to memory, learning

The consensus among my University classmates was that moderate drinking was drinking until you are moderately drunk (say around 6 drinks). It seems like they were poorly informed.

theatraineon Show HN: Interactive map for architecting big data pipelines

Batch processing: Azure Data Lake(https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/data-lake/)

Stream processing: Azure Stream Analytics (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/stream-analytics/)

SQL server is mentioned, but Azure Cosmos DB should also be mentioned (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cosmos-db/)

theatraineon A Brief History of Who Ruined Burning Man

I went to Burning Man with a good friend of mine, who also had mainstream tastes, and his experience is well summed up by this comic:

https://i.redd.it/d003u7o3ivnx.png

theatraineon Pair Programming Is Not a Panacea (2014)

To quote DevOps Borat: "Pair programming is good concept but is involve too many programmer."

https://twitter.com/devops_borat/status/300037586523676672

theatraineon How Do Genetic Algorithms Work? [video]

I'm curious to see what people have used genetic algorithms for in practice. Personally I've used them for feature selection when I was trying to reduce a high amount of features to smaller amount for a classification problem.

Of course they're definitely great for evolving little cars, like this other example shows: http://rednuht.org/genetic_cars_2/

theatraineon Announcing TypeScript 1.8 Beta

The new Azure portal uses TypeScript heavily.

theatraineon Microsoft GraphView: Use SQL Server or Azure SQL to efficiently manage graphs

I wonder how this will compare with TitanDB?

http://thinkaurelius.github.io/titan/

theatraineon The employee experience at Microsoft: Aligning benefits to our culture

The benefits:

- Extending parental leave to 12 weeks for new fathers, and 20 weeks for new mothers.

- 2 additional paid holidays (Martin Luther King Day and Presidents Day).

- Increased 401(k) match from 50 percent of the first 6 percent that employees defer, to 50 percent of all regular deferrals.

theatraineon Why Docker Is Not Yet Succeeding Widely in Production

Azure App Service (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/app-service/) is Azure's Heroku competitor. It's quite close in features and ease-of-use. Disclosure: I work for this team.

theatraineon A 2-Minute Walk May Counter the Harms of Sitting

"scientists found that every hour that overweight adults spent watching television, which is a handy way to measure sitting time at home, increased their risk of becoming diabetic by 3.4 percent"

I think that should be every hour per day. It sounds quite dire otherwise. It reminds me of this satirical piece in The New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/switched-standin...

theatraineon Microsoft Is the New Google, Google Is the Old Microsoft

Most recently I can think of HoloLens (http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/en-us) and the Surface Hub (http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-surface-hub/en-us). Kinect was also a research project. Cortana also uses a lot of MSR tech. So do the Surface tablets, especially with handwriting recognition.

theatraineon Decrypting TLS Browser Traffic with Wireshark

I meant that Fiddler switches the original certificates with certificates that it generates. It's not a big deal if you trust them (on Windows Chrome and IE work automatically since it adds them to the trusted root store) and for Firefox you just have to trust the Fiddler issued certificate. However, if you inspect the certificate of an HTTPS site when Fiddler is running you see the CA is "DO_NOT_TRUST_FiddlerRoot".

theatraineon Decrypting TLS Browser Traffic with Wireshark

This is handy, but you can very easily do this automatically with fiddler. It automatically swaps out all of the certs though.

theatraineon Hundreds of South Carolina Inmates Sent to Solitary Confinement Over Facebook

There's limited political incentive to improve the lives of a non-voting group. Legally, a large amount of prisoners or former convicts can't vote since they're disenfranchised (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disfranchisement#United_States_...).

theatraineon Sway: A new presentation application from Microsoft

From their blog entry: "Sway’s built-in design engine takes the hassle out of formatting your content by putting all of it into a cohesive layout as you create. ... This is thanks to a lot of Microsoft Research technology we’ve brought together in the background. As you add more of your content, Sway continues to analyze and arrange it based on the algorithms and design styles we’ve incorporated."

It sounds like they're doing some more complication computation on the fly than typical responsive CSS. I suspect that it's related to some of the "Reading mode" work that they've done with IE.

theatraineon How Much Should a Landlord Pay a Tenant to Move Out of an Apartment?

That's why you sign a lease. You can't raise rent for the duration of the lease. Your landlord should give you notice that the rent will be going up, thus giving you ample time to find a new place. If a tenant wants more stability, then they should consider buying a place.

Also, as a counterpoint, Seattle has no rent control, and the fastest growing population of any large American city yet is able to provide good housing options to people of all incomes. This of course may be due to more liberal zoning laws allowing new housing to be built.

theatraineon DocumentDB

I wouldn't be surprised if it happens, Microsoft has on-premise versions of several Azure offerings (i.e. WebSites, IaaS, Service Bus) which are released in Windows Azure Pack (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/products/windows...). It might take some time though.

theatraineon The San Francisco Rent Explosion: Part II

Seattle is the fastest growing large American city, according to estimates from the Census bureau: http://blogs.seattletimes.com/fyi-guy/2014/05/22/census-seat...

Seattle seems to have much better planning than SF though. There's a large amount of high density housing being built, and there's not the same restrictions on rent, or prohibitions against micro-apartments.

theatraineon The boy who stole Half Life 2 source code (2011)

From the previously linked AmA:

"This was actually one of the interview questions, don't know why they didn't use the answer. I work as a software developer and a bit of a system administrator. I work in a company that does physical security, like fire alarms and such. Most of the work I do is programming PC control software for our systems and also quite some firmware development for various uCs. I know quite a bit of different assemblers. Measurement and automation is another field that I'm currently learning more and more."

theatraineon Southern New Hampshire University offers the $10,000 degree

Isn't that only in-state tuition? If you don't already live in the same state as the school that you'd like to go to, then you're going to have to pay much more.

Edit: some students are starting to do it: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/06/25/america...

Also work permits are readily available for international students after 6 months of study: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/study/work-offcampus.asp

theatraineon Southern New Hampshire University offers the $10,000 degree

As a Canadian, this seems ridiculous to me. I paid $8,500/year in tuition for my undergraduate degree (Mathematics and Computer Engineering, Queen's University) and $7,000/year in tuition for my MASc (Computer Engineering, University of Toronto), although my stipend and graduate scholarships more than covered that (~$20,000/year). I wonder how many American students go North? Even with international student fees, Canadian schools are cheaper, and offer one of the highest-quality educations in the world.

theatraineon Running Out of Power in a Tesla on the Side of a Highway

I'm surprised that the author didn't mention or try to draft. As Mythbusters showed, drafting can save quite a bit of fuel, might have been a better idea than trying to pass the trucks.

"drafting behind an 18-wheeler truck was tested and results showed that traveling 100 feet (30 m) behind the truck increased overall mpg efficiency by 11%. Traveling 10 feet (3.0 m) behind the truck produced a 39% gain in efficiency"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drafting_%28racing%29

theatraineon After seven years, exactly one person gets off the government no-fly list

"As explained in Alsup's opinion, the whole dispute stemmed from an errant check placed on a form filled out by FBI agent Kevin Kelly" This sounds very similar to what happened in the movie Brazil, where an errant fly resulted in the incarceration and death during interrogation of Mr. Archibald Buttle instead of the suspected "terrorist", Archibald Tuttle. Albeit the movie was an highly exaggerated and over-the-top evil bureaucracy, it's a disturbing parallel.

theatraineon Show HN: I built an HTML 5 Guitar Tuner

I used this tuner to test it: http://www.audionotch.com/app/tune/ (and this chart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_key_frequencies) Seems to work well! Good work.

theatraineon MtGox's Bitcoin price drops to $260 (others at $600+)

Does this represent an arbitrage opportunity? (it appears not, since MtGox is limiting transactions due to a bug in their implementation of the protocol.) Also, I wonder if anyone has used bots to perform HFT using bitcoin in the same manner that was used on traditional stock exchanges.