Hacker News Reader

william42on The Myth of Japan's lost Decade

One thing I've heard about Japan is that it has lifetime employment contracts.

william42on The Milky Way's black hole may spring to life in 2013

Considering the lightyears involved, I assume this means we'll see it in 2013?

william42on Teachers Don’t Like Creative Students

"both gifted kids as well as children who have emotional and behavioral disorders"

The two groups are not mutually exclusive.

william42on Hey Google, thanks for making my daughter cry.

Yeah, but if we leave, then the advertisers(their "real customers") will too, so it works out the same.

william42on MPAA Boss: If The Chinese Censor The Internet, Why Can't The US?

Nope, that's an urban myth. The law explicitly contains language saying that it doesn't override any previous laws on detention.

Don't trust things you see reblogged on tumblr, especially if they don't cite sources.

william42on Universal Censors Megaupload Song, Gets Branded a “Rogue Label”

Allowing corporations to be sued is exactly why corporate personhood exists, isn't it?

Not sure you could imprison a company though. That'd probably be the same as the death penalty.

william42on The condescending UI

I have to disagree very strongly with one of his suggestions: the differently sized buttons. The buttons have different sizes because they're used at different rates. You make things that are more often used bigger because it makes your interface faster: see Fitts's law.

william42on The condescending UI

I don't use Apples much but I'm pretty sure that the keyboard has a ⌥ symbol on the option button.

william42on Ted Dziuba's take on Hubot

Campfire's a webapp, so presumably https.

william42on Ted Dziuba's take on Hubot

You know what I dislike about this the most? That it's a fork. It's not a fork. It's a completely different project.

william42on Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

  william@aldebaran ~ $ ed
  bash: ed: command not found

william42on Harvard 1869 entrance exam

I think that at that point calculus was a grad-school-level thing. At the very least, it wasn't being taught in high schools. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's only taught in high schools today under the aegis of Advanced Placement classes, which give you college credit.

william42on You Can't Hack Photography

When you respond to a sentence using the words "generally", "tend to", or "usually" with one using the words "not all" or relatives, you are effectively conceding the point. Correlation cannot be denied with a mere counterexample.

william42on Dutch parliament refuses ACTA secrecy while the EU parliament meets in secret

I didn't even see HnNoPassMailer until I turned on showdead, and after I did I only saw an upvote link, not a downvote link. I think it's some feature of HN.

william42on Canonical drops CouchDB because they were unable to make it scale up

It blows my mind that something called Berkeley DB is owned by Oracle. You'd think it'd be a UC Berkeley project.

william42on Education pays ...

In fact, median is very very explicitly what you want to use, because outliers are just that and the vast majority of people aren't.

One study on UNC-Chapel Hill graduates in the 1980s said that the best-paying major was geography. Why? Michael Jordan majored in geography.

william42on The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

The page on notability seems to imply that notability means having sources that don't require original research; which is a reasonable thing to do but probably should have just been put under that rule.

Wikipedia avoids original research for a very good reason: to keep out physics cranks and the like, who would infest WP otherwise.

william42on Xmonad 0.10 was released

Try awesome[1]. It uses Lua, which is probably a more familiar language(I never learned Lua, but am still able to make minor changes to the config file, something I wouldn't try with Haskell). That, combined with a few other things, is what made me move from xmonad to awesome.

[1] http://awesome.naquadah.org

william42on The Sugru story

Too bad most software patents belong to either giant companies using them as a strategic hammer or patent trolls, then.

william42on The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

Please explain to me how to type the fraction (a^2+b^2-c^2)/(2ab), which is the simple $\frac{a^2+b^2-c^2}{2ab}$ in TeX, so that the numerator appears above the denominator in HTML. Or any non-TeX layout.

william42on The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

From what I can tell, the software limit is that everybody has a different set of custom macros and styles that they use, and that distributing extra code is a violation of Apple policy, one that can't be fixed unless you get rid of not only the reality of LaTeX but the idea of LaTeX as a macro system.

That, or Apple changes their policies.

william42on The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

I'm surprised that you don't use screen(or tmux, which I have yet to try out).

william42on Number of "Stop SOPA" letters sent by state

That's exactly what I was thinking.

william42on Facebook Privacy: Site Confirms It Tracks You After You Leave

I'm pretty sure this is exactly what Ghostery and the like block.

william42on Isaacs: try/catch is an anti-pattern

Didn't Knuth write TeX in a variant of Pascal?

william42on How the Plummeting Price of Cocaine Fueled the Nationwide Drop in Violent Crime

Well, except for the part where calculating income is still as difficult as it was. Somehow, I don't think the piecewise linear function that is progressive taxation is the cause of the difficult parts of the tax code.

william42on Generation Sell

Actually, seventy-something percent of the OWS protesters are employed.

william42on Generation Sell

How do you know this? The comments are anonymous.

william42on Bittorrent Launches Distributed Live Stream

Well, at the scales we're dealing with, healthcare is an infinite resource. Emergency rooms in the United States cannot turn anyone down, and even uninsured Americans will end up going to the hospital when something serious happens, because the choice is between debt and debilitating illness, people will pick the former.

Wouldn't it be a lot better if we could spend more resources on preventing disease by removing the disincentive for going to the doctor for early detection? Not to mention, with communicable diseases, herd immunity is a very real thing.

william42on Bittorrent Launches Distributed Live Stream

"We will have more people in the hospitals for things that don't require medical care with less room for people that actually need it."

That's actually the problem with the current American system. Because people have to pay, they avoid going to the doctor early when the care could be preventative, and instead end up in the emergency room. Healthcare is something that is cheaper when used frequently.