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thestranger

81 karma · joined January 19, 2011

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thestranger··on Party (round) all the time?
I'm confused as to what is being shown in the first graph. How can the number of party rounds be greater than the total number of rounds in some places? Why does the y-axis have different numbers on the left and right sides?
thestranger··on Amazon's German Workers Strike
I agree with you, but the article is about Wales
thestranger··on How I attacked a fellow student
But did you purposely misspell "recruiting" or was that just a typo.
thestranger··on Show HN: Bateman, a stock trading system I'm working on
Reminds me of an article I read awhile back that pointed out a correlation between news about Anne Hathaway and an increase in Berkshire Hathaway stock.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/does-a...

thestranger··on Rahul Tyagi: Jericho Emails
"Rahul Tyagi starts his Blog Rahul Tyagi White Hat in year 2008 and in few years he bang the world wide web"
thestranger··on Fogcreek is shutting down webputty.net and has pushed the source code to github
I'm following the step-by-step instructions to run it on my google app engine account, but I get an error when I run "fab deploy." It asks me for my email and does a bunch of stuff, but then this happens:

Zipping ziplibs. Traceback (most recent call last): File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/fabric/main.py", line 712, in main args, kwargs

  File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/fabric/tasks.py", line 327, in execute
    results['<local-only>'] = task.run(*args, **new_kwargs)

  File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/fabric/tasks.py", line 112, in run
    return self.wrapped(*args, **kwargs)

  File "/Users/swiss/webapps/WebPutty/fabfile.py", line 53, in decorated_func
    return func(*args, **kwargs)

  File "/Users/swiss/webapps/WebPutty/fabfile.py", line 66, in deploy
    ziplibs(env.deploy_path)

  File "/Users/swiss/webapps/WebPutty/fabfile.py", line 178, in ziplibs
    os.path.walk(to_zip, add_file, (zip_file, os.path.dirname(to_zip)))

  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/posixpath.py", line 224, in walk
    func(arg, top, names)

  File "/Users/swiss/webapps/WebPutty/fabfile.py", line 177, in add_file
    zip_file.write(os.path.join(dir_name, name), os.path.join(dir_name[len(common_base):], name))

  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/zipfile.py", line 1024, in write
    fp = open(filename, "rb")
IOError: [Errno 21] Is a directory

Any idea what the problem is?

thestranger··on Uncovering an advertising fraud scheme. Or "the Internet is for porn"
What do you mean, he's not trying to sell us anything, is he?
thestranger··on Tell HN: You can have 80% of my startup for $1
I'll take it! In all seriousness I am extremely interested in the idea. I am a programmer who has been considering startups in the education space and I think classparrot is something that could really make an impact on modern schooling.

Additionally, I have a team of talented programmers ready to get behind the project and capital is not an issue for us. You can email me at sawsym at hotmail.com. Thanks for your consideration.

thestranger··on Show HN: My Weekend Project
I've got 100 visitors in the past hour but no sales, does anyone have any advice for me?
thestranger··on Show HN: My Weekend Project
After hearing the news of Steve Jobs's death, I used the posts on here regarding a guy who created a site selling Snowpocalypse t-shirts as guidance for creating a site selling t-shirts commemorating Steve Jobs. I tried to do this in the most ethical way possible. Half of all revenue will go to the Lustgarten Foundation for pancreatic cancer research.
thestranger··on Buying Real Estate in College
What do you guys think of buying real estate near a major university as an investment?
thestranger··on Show HN: Weekend Project - Monthly Startup T-shirt Subscription
Would be nice if you ironed the shirts before the pictures.
thestranger··on 13-Year-Old Makes Solar Power Breakthrough by Harnessing the Fibonacci Sequence
Well he did say in the source article that he moved the test location around a few times, but another flaw is that the height of the solar "tree" means that it would put the "flat" design in its shade at times. I wonder if he controlled for that, although the images would suggest he did not.
thestranger··on Does Marijuana Make You Stupid?
A large number of my friends in High School smoked. Many of them were not accepted into college, or are now on academic probation. I always assumed that marijuana was at least contributing to their poor performances in school.

Now I am in the honors college of a fairly good public school, and I am surprised at how many of my fellow honors students smoke.

Nevertheless, I believe that smoking pot is still a bad habit. Many of my friends say that it makes them feel happy and that it makes them relax. That's all well and good, but to me it seems that they became dependent on pot to make them happy and relax. I see first-hand how stressed out many of them get without it, and I can't help but wonder if pot is the problem.

Regardless of whether it makes you dumber, it can kill your motivation because it seems like you've found what makes you happy and you no longer feel like working hard.

Note that I have never used marijuana and am basing my opinion on observations of my friends who do/did.

thestranger··on Facebook: Google+ has ‘no users’
If you read the article, Zuckerberg didn't say that, it was Sean Ryan, Facebook’s director of game partnerships.
thestranger··on Bullet-proof Human Skin
Pretty cool, but wouldn't it still severely damage your internal organs? It's not like the force of the bullet just disappears once it hits your skin.
thestranger··on Warren Buffett has me Confused
How about this? http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2008/05/the-dumbest-thin...
thestranger··on 8 grams of thorium could replace gasoline in cars
I guess being a realist earns you downvotes these days?

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F

thestranger··on 8 grams of thorium could replace gasoline in cars
Unfortunately, the oil companies are too powerful to allow something like this to succeed. I would be very surprised if anything ever came of this.
thestranger··on Facebook Wins “Worst API” in Developer Survey
As the article mentions, a lot of the rankings seem to be influenced by the popularity of the service. Twitter and Facebook are going to have more complaints simply due to the fact that more people use them.

Twitter in particular has a very good API, I have never used Digg's, LinkedIn's, or Paypal's, but I doubt very much they are better documented and easier to use than Twitter's. (I have had some problems with Facebook's API, so perhaps it is deserving of its title.)

A better way to run this survey would be to only allow people who have actually used all the API's to vote. It would be difficult in my opinion to vote for an API as the worst with no basis of comparison.

thestranger··on $1 chip tests for HIV in 15 minutes, fits in your wallet
Well kudos to you, good sir.
thestranger··on $1 chip tests for HIV in 15 minutes, fits in your wallet
Are you involved in the project?
thestranger··on Update: Internet Explorer IQ story was bogus
I like money.
thestranger··on Update: Internet Explorer IQ story was bogus
I'll probably get downvoted to oblivion for this, but here goes...

I think there may be some truth to this rumor. I do a lot of advertising on TrafficVance which is basically pop-up advertising on computers with adware. One thing I noticed regarding the traffic I received to my landing pages was that a disproportionately high number of my visitors were using Internet Explorer. The percentages were so disproportionate that some of the advertisers I was working with flagged it as "suspicious." (This was thankfully cleared up when I explained to them how I get my traffic.)

For whatever reason, it seems like more Internet Explorer users have adware on their computer than users of other browsers. To me this shows that users of other browsers are more technologically literate than IE users, as you wouldn't expect a technologically literate person to have adware on his/her computer.

Does technological literacy correlate with intelligence? I don't know, that's not really for me to say, but I don't think we should be so hasty to dispel this notion simply because a study was faked.

thestranger··on Series of photos of the interiors of refrigerators in homes across the US
Is that a snake at the top of the refrigerator in pic 7?
thestranger··on The Conclusion: A 6 Figure Business That Fell Apart When I Was 16
Question for the OP: Did anyone complain to you that he thought he was getting an ipod, but instead got a knock-off? I think that if nobody thought he was buying an ipod, it would be perfectly reasonable for you to sell your mp3 players. In my experience however, some sellers deliberately mislead customers on sites like ebay to buy cheap knock-off products.
thestranger··on Ask HN: Are there any sites where businesses can collaborate with suppliers?
Thank you for the link, there's some very useful information here.
thestranger··on How to Make Text Look Interesting: Minimalist Web Design
It looked really interesting though
thestranger··on How to Avoid Irreparably Destroying Your Reputation Before You Even Have One
HUH! I never think in that way!
thestranger··on 16 startup projects built over the weekend at Garage48
Blow the dust - Facebook | Twitter | Youtube Mobile game. Imagine gold miner going to a planet? Find nuggets, covered with layer of dust. Use power of your lungs to blow off the dust (via microphone of mobile phone). More interesting features might come (too fast, too slow). Lets figure out the mechanics, it's going to be a fun game.

Lol, gives me an idea for a similar "game"