Hacker News Reader

vinayan3on Italy’s rarest pasta

With all the talk of the loss of manufacturing jobs maybe they can instead talk about making this pasta. It might get some people to start producing it in the US.

vinayan3on Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast?

It doesn't have React. Is this an oversight or does it not count as framework in their definition?

vinayan3on Cheap MacBook chargers create big sparks

As people noted it's because likely you have a current leakage. Read this post for more information: http://superuser.com/questions/462244/electric-shock-mild-vi...

I recently experienced this while travelling to India. Turns out the house I was staying at had a grounding issue and I couldn't do anything. This is less likely for most people and it's just better to use the cable with the grounding pin.

vinayan3on A Silicon Valley Dream Collapses in Allegations of Fraud

It's really sad. I grew up in the Bay Area and felt like the propensity for fraud was very low if not non-existent. I guess it's not like that anymore or maybe it never was and I've been lucky to work for and with people who don't commit fraud.

vinayan3on Unlimited Vacation and Other Forms of Guilt-Based Management

For publicly traded companies the PTO which has not been taken is actually on the balance sheet as a liability. If that corporation moved to an unlimited vacation time they can make the balance sheets look better. Also, most companies would make people get paid out if they hit the cap. A good amount of people weren't taking vacation and took the extra pay checks.

A big tech company changed the polices when I used to work there for the aforementioned reasons.

vinayan3on Pillow-SIMD: improving the performance of image processing

What about compared to opencv's image handling functions? I've seen Opencv run about 4x faster than pillow for certain operations.

vinayan3on Books Recommended by YC Partners

This is a cool service. I've gotten a few recommendations from them and they are on my to read list!

vinayan3on Ask HN: What are you doing to improve your health?

I lift weights 3 days a week. I do one day for Back/Shoulder, Legs, Bicep/Chest. I do cardio exercises twice a week. It's either 30 - 40 min jogs or playing tennis.

The biggest change for my health has been improving what I eat. I generally try to eat salad and soup for lunch most days of the week. I eat relatively light for dinner at home. It's usually soup or a small portion of pasta with vegetables.

vinayan3on New services expand IBM Watson capabilities to images, speech, and more

Check out Clarifai. They have an image recognition API. It might be able to help detect people in the photo.

vinayan3on Show HN: Using computer vision to detect birds in parks

http://i.imgur.com/Svn2bZ4.jpg

Also, Matt Zeiler runs an image recognition startup which the image above was generated from. Check them out at http://clarifai.com/

vinayan3on An API wrapper to Clarifai's image recognition demo

They must have an army of trolls who are typing in tags.

vinayan3on Adobe releases emergency Flash update amid new zero-day drive-by attacks

Flash is the most distributed piece of software in the world. A few years ago it was installed on 1 billion devices. A very nice security target.

vinayan3on If developers are decision makers, they buy better tools

Only developers would read that title and be certain of the meaning :).

I agree with the bit about developers looking at software skeptically. Most of us do indeed think it doesn't work, it's a gimmick, and it could have been built better.

This isn't the first time people have said making developers happy was important... Anyone remember Steve Ballmer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8To-6VIJZRE

vinayan3on A spreadsheet in fewer than 30 lines of JavaScript, no library used

Terribly efficient.

vinayan3on Google urges fast adoption of VP9 video compression

Yes! Let's save some bandwidth. It is great that there is no licensing involved. What is also wonderful with the speed that browsers are being updated we can get a high percentage of adoption of new codecs without depending on proprietary browser plugins AKA Flash.

I'll also mention that the ON2 people write great code which is also well documented. I had an opportunity to work with their VP6 decoder in a previous career / life time.

vinayan3on Hangouts for iOS

If I use Adium on my Desktop and Hangouts on my phone will I see the group chats / google hangouts?

vinayan3on Mozilla and Samsung Collaborate on Next Generation Web Browser Engine

[quote]I don't think a DOM tree is necessarily all in memory. For performance reasons you might cache the tree in memory, but that's not a requirement.[/quote] Yes it is not a requirement. What browser have you heard of storing in the tree in something else than memory? Imagine if the browser used a the disk to store parts of the tree.

vinayan3on Bitcoin rises

Despite it rising who in the right mind would hold bit-coins besides for speculation? The exchange rates are so variable. As a very risky investment great idea but day to day currency? I suppose it isn't a bad way to pay people abroad and avoid foreign transactions.

vinayan3on Show HN: 6 months ago I quit my job to pursue indie dev. Here is our first game

Level 5 is super hard

vinayan3on Google Maps becomes the App Store’s most popular free app in 7 hours

I wonder how much data the iOS app uses for it's vector based tiles compared with the Google maps one? Google Maps does seem a lot quicker than before.

vinayan3on Apple's Module proposal to replace headers for C-based languages [pdf]

My concern is portability because that is the largest benefits of C at-least. C++ portability is less true however it is more portable than most languages.

vinayan3on San Francisco Approves 220-Square-Foot ‘Micro-Apartments’

The housing unit looks very sterile. Almost like a hospital room. Some of the character of SF wil be lost.

vinayan3on ShowHN:Battery, display battery percentage on tmux/terminal under OS X

Cool stuff! I don't use tmux but I might try it out just to see this :).

vinayan3on The entire win32 API in JavaScript

One would wish these distinctions could be forgotten with calling the Win32api from JS. However, that is a pipe dream and could have an impact on performance.

vinayan3on Reddit Considering Accepting Bitcoin

I don't see much of a downside as long as Reddit gives a price quote in bit coins and convert it the main currency Reddit uses, probably USD. The main problem for main-stream business using Bitcoin I think is the volatility. Losing money because the currency fluctuates around 10% every 30 days is horrible.

vinayan3on Announcing Instagram Profiles on the Web

I write a crawler for stats related to instagram profiles. This will make life much easier because soon enough all the other web profiles for Instagram will become less popular.

vinayan3on How I made $500k with machine learning and high frequency trading

Have you ever thought of making a trading system that would buy tons of stock when a flash crash happens? It is going to happen again. If your system is ready and you buy before they shut the market down or roll back orders you could make a hefty profit.

vinayan3on Escape from Callback Hell: Callbacks are the modern goto

Callbacks do lead to hell. The back traces half the lead you now-where. I have been writing a scrapy crawler and sometimes when an exception happens it takes some grepping around to figure out where the value that is wrong actually was generated.

Has anyone touched the Google Chrome code base? It is quite difficult to start debugging problems because of the sheer volume of callbacks. Add to that the stack-traces are massive because of the use of templates and other C++ language features.

Async coding needs to be an abstraction within the language. I am curious how languages manage the shared memory. What about the risk of dead locks?

vinayan3on Poll: Should we push the YC deadline back by a day because of the storm?

Yes. A side note the NFL office pushed the trading deadline to Thursday. It seems that deadlines across the board are being pushed back. We honestly don't know how the storm could have affected applicants.

vinayan3on Adobe's Source Code Pro Font

This thread could be social engineering to get someone to show some code in their editor which is 'secret sauce' to the project. :)