Hacker News Reader

turbodogon The Cheap Android Phone Is Here, But It's Not What You'd Expect.

As I understand subsidized vs. unsubsidized, yes it is. I can buy the phone without entering into a contract. I can terminate service with VM after 30 days. I can sell the phone to someone else who can choose to buy service from VM or not.

True it isn't unlocked, but I'm not aware of anyone saying unsubsidized == unlocked.

turbodogon The Cheap Android Phone Is Here, But It's Not What You'd Expect.

I have the Virgin Mobile LG Optima V, which is $150 now and goes on sale for less periodically. That's $150 unsubsidized and with a month-to-month, no contract plan. It's not the greatest phone in the world but I'm largely satisfied with cost/performance tradeoff.

Covered here previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2171107 My write up on how to activate the Optimus for WiFi use only: http://blog.gerundinganimal.com/2011/01/cheap-wifi-only-andr...

turbodogon What You Don't Get About the Job Search: Voices of the Jobless

Don't be obtuse. A PhD means you've done research towards improving the ability to educate others.

turbodogon [dead]

I disagree, at least in the startup case. In my experience, unless you know the person very well and they have demonstrated that they can deliver what they need to, you're only adding extra headache for yourself. If someone's work is drifting away from what you intend, it's a lot easier to spot that over their shoulder and change courses on the spot rather than wait for code to land in your repo and find out after a lot of time and effort has been wasted.

turbodogon [dead]

Maybe they are expecting something more than a worker who can keep in sync with others? If the very small team is the whole company, they may be expecting someone they can brainstorm with at random times without having to get you on Skype. Why would they want to take an extra step to keep you in sync when the rest of the in-office team already is?

turbodogon Audio on NPR - Master Hacker Kevin Mitnick Shares His 'Addiction'

Paragraph 3 of TFA: That story appears in Mitnick's new memoir, Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker.

turbodogon New CPU technology lowers voltage to the error point to save 64% on power.

Here's a direct link to the PDF: http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.arp0015a/Ra...

turbodogon Futuristic Location Platform Geoloqi Lands Funding

No, a great team with a lot smarts for using mobile location data for new and creative uses scores $350k.

turbodogon Cloudant (YC S08) Releases In-Database, Distributed Search

Nice! I really appreciate the tone of Tim's post in that it acknowledges both the strengths and weaknesses of NOSQL in general and of Cloudant Search in particular in an honest manner.

turbodogon [dead]

In Stonebraker’s opinion, “old SQL (as he calls it) is good for nothing” and needs to be “sent to the home for retired software.” After all, he explained, SQL was created decades ago before the web, mobile devices and sensors forever changed how and how often databases are accessed.

He lost me here.

turbodogon Which Apps are threatened by iOS 5

Just get them into the App Store quick before Apple adds them to iOS 5.x or 6.

turbodogon Twitter and Facebook Both Quietly Kill RSS

So I'm supposed to use the NYT's custom API to get articles when RSS has, for years, provided a "general" method for me to do the same thing for not only the NYT but millions of other sources?

turbodogon Tumblr "Disappears" Microsoft's Danah Boyd

Um, no. These people were disappeared: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rettig_Report

Apparently her blog was only moved. Inconvenient, yes. Gross human rights violation, no. See also: comparing yourself to Rosa Parks.

turbodogon [dead]

"Democrats and advocates of civil rights are using the media to further an agenda".

The agenda that America's long record of comparing African-Americans to apes or monkeys, ie sub-human brutes unlike real, white Americans, isn't OK? How terrible!

Googling "black people monkeys" gave me 3.2 million hits. Do I win? "black people apes" rings in at 1.9 million. I just ran "george bush monkey" and only got 2.7m, so I guess I do win the Internet.

turbodogon Dilbert creator outed for using sock puppets on Metafilter and Reddit

Do notice that a MeFite correctly called him on this way upthread. I don't think the mods got involved until Adams outed himself. http://www.metafilter.com/102472/How-to-Get-a-Real-Education...

turbodogon How to Turn a Boeing 747 Into an Indoor Water Park

The museum is awesome. It's amazing what you can accumulate if you put your mind to it and have a ton of money to back up your intentions.

They were hoping to get one of the space shuttles, but that didn't work out. Seattle's Museum of Flight lost out on that one as well.

turbodogon Open Source at Google: Introducing CityHash

From http://code.google.com/p/cityhash/source/browse/trunk/src/ci...

// WARNING: This code has not been tested on big-endian platforms!

// It is known to work well on little-endian platforms that have a small penalty

// for unaligned reads, such as current Intel and AMD moderate-to-high-end CPUs.

// By the way, for some hash functions, given strings a and b, the hash

// of a+b is easily derived from the hashes of a and b. This property

// doesn't hold for any hash functions in this file.

turbodogon Collect HN: Aprils Fools

http://joeloncoal.com/

turbodogon GeigerCrowd: Collaborative radiation measurement project [Japan]

http://www.rdtn.org/

turbodogon AT&T to Acquire T-Mobile USA for $39 Billion

I also have the VM Optimus V and the main issue I see is losing data connectivity occasionally then the phone not being able to get back onto the data network. However, turning airplane mode on then off usually gets things working again.

turbodogon No Contract: $149 Android phone, $25 unlimited data and 300 min

Yes, you can use WiFi only without ever activating it or paying VM. I did it myself: http://blog.gerundinganimal.com/2011/01/cheap-wifi-only-andr...

turbodogon No Contract: $149 Android phone, $25 unlimited data and 300 min

VM USA is owned by Sprint, so you get the same coverage as a Sprint customer minus the ability to roam off Sprint's network.

turbodogon The Future of Cheap Androids Begins Now

I got mine at Target this past weekend. Call ahead and they can put one on hold for you if it's in stock.

turbodogon The Future of Cheap Androids Begins Now

I have this phone and have no complaints so far. It's not a high-end phone, but the display is nice and performance is snappier than my old G1.

What wasn't mentioned in the article is that you can use this phone with WiFi only and no plan if you choose. http://blog.gerundinganimal.com/2011/01/cheap-wifi-only-andr...

I'm not sure how many phones let you do that, but I don't think it's very many. Certainly not at the $150 price for a new device with Android 2.2.

turbodogon Amazon S3 - Bigger and Busier Than Ever

Is cloud storage the factor that is driving companies to AWS? I'm sure that's huge for NetFlix, but they are an outlier. My bet would be on EC2 usage as being a better growth metric.

turbodogon Regex Visualization: give it a regex and see the state diagram

It would be more useful if the state diagram page displayed the original regex.

turbodogon RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried

I'm the maintainer of the project and it's homepage is http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/

turbodogon Subdomain Me - add www with an A record

Godaddy-specific instructions here: http://help.godaddy.com/article/422

turbodogon RSS isn't dead it just needs to be repurposed.

If you assumed that the label "RSS", included RSS of various flavors, Atom and PubSubHubHub, how would you describe a good alternative to that?

My assumption is debatable for sure, but I'd like to hear what folks think is lacking.