Hacker News Reader

Agathoson Netflix Switch – dim lights, turn on the TV, order food, and silence your phone

To be precise, it's Chicago. Being in the city means most deliveries will be to apartments. The door buzzers are often unlabeled, mislabeled, or just broken. But even if you're in a townhouse with a door facing the street, most drivers are firmly in the habit of calling.

Agathoson Netflix Switch – dim lights, turn on the TV, order food, and silence your phone

> order food, and silence your phone

Really? Around me, delivery drivers have pretty much given up on doorbells. If your phone is silent you may not get your food.

Agathoson State court orders Kickstarted game creator to pay $54k for failing to deliver

If you fund a company by buying debt, you can certainly sue them if they don't pay what was promised. If they're already bankrupt I wouldn't expect more than pennies on the dollar, but the option is there.

If you fund a company by buying equity, you have no recourse except possibly a share of whatever remains when the company is liquidated, after debtholders are paid. In exchange, you have an unlimited upside if the company does well.

Kickstarter commitments are much closer to debt than to equity.

Agathoson How to Become as Rich as Bill Gates (1999)

If you buy a stock and hold it, you don't have to pay capital gains along the way. But if you buy a mutual fund and hold it, capital gains will pass through to you whenever the manager sells stocks to adjust the portfolio. There are "tax efficient" mutual funds whose mission is to minimize that churn, but no fund can keep it at zero. I don't know how many tax efficient mutual fund options there were in 1982.

Agathoson “Stop reverse engineering our code”

You can be authentic and speak your mind without being arrogant, insulting, and condescending

If you are by nature arrogant, insulting, and condescending, then no, you can't.

Agathoson Saving Zelda (2012)

I actually just started it last week and was put off by all the scripted events and lecturing in the beginning. I even tried wandering off and was stopped and told it wasn't time to go that way yet. I put it down. I'll probably pick it up again soon and see how it is after things open up. But I can't figure out what compels the designers to offer such a bad first impression.

Agathoson How to smuggle $1K into North Korea

Yet another gratuitous cruelty: the killer [famine] targets the most innocent, the people who would never steal food, lie, cheat, break the law, or betray a friend. It was a phenomenon that the Italian writer Primo Levi identified after emerging from Auschwitz, when he wrote that he and his fellow survivors never wanted to see one another again after the war because they had all done something of which they were ashamed.

As Mrs. Song would observe a decade later, when she thought back on all the people she knew who died during those years in Chongjin, it was the “simple and kindhearted people who did what they were told—they were the first to die.”

-- Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick

Agathoson Reasons to work from home

"Your deployment notes were kind of long, so we didn't read them."

Agathoson SL-1: The only fatal nuclear reactor accident in US history

The title specifies "reactor accident," which is intentionally narrow. There have been several other fatal accidents involving nuclear material but not involving reactors. For example, the Demon Core experiments.

Agathoson Interview: Larry Wall

http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25

Agathoson What does it take to restore a World War Two Spitfire?

Bug or intentional design tradeoff? When you choose an inline V12 over a radial engine, you're implicitly choosing to be more sensitive to battle damage.

But the R-2800 Double Wasp is an engineering triumph in its own right. Hellcat, Corsair, Thunderbolt, Black Widow, Bearcat... they put it in everything.

Agathoson SpaceX – Launch Vehicle Failure

That name... it has Very Little Gravitas Indeed.

Agathoson What's the third most common element?

What are the six most common elements in the universe?

H, He, C, N, O, Ne

What are the four most common elements in living cells?

H, C, N, O

(We invited the noble gasses to play, too, but they said something along the lines of, "Go away you peasants you'll mess up our perfect orbitals.")

Agathoson Tell HN: The usage of “ninja” in Who is Hiring? comments has been increasing

Say you have a generator that emits random numbers in the range [0,6]. Now construct a fake timeseries by sampling that generator about 50 times. Fit a curve or moving average using the same method that you used here. What is the probability that your random series will exhibit an upward trend as great as the one you saw here?

Agathoson Spotify as a simple case study in making something people want

While we're at it, why are we being told that the average human blink takes 400 msec? That's a pretty slow blink.

Agathoson The End of the War on Drugs and the Emergence of the Cannabis Industry

There is only one lab in the US with a federal license to grow marijuana. It isn't Monsanto. So I doubt Monsanto has a stock of superior seeds, just ready to take over the market.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/05/18/government.marijuana.gar...

Agathoson Functional Programming Doesn't Work (and what to do about it) (2009)

Any cache that is provided by an external process, or even by a remote machine, such as memcached.

Agathoson An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia (2013)

It may be naive today but it wasn't a generation ago, when the numbers were more favorable to a young PhD. Something has changed, which is why people write articles to say, "Hey, stuff's changed!"

Agathoson An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia (2013)

> really the only way forward that doesn't result in eternal loss of control of your efforts to sociopaths with no interest in your happiness or society's well-being is to blaze your own path forward

That is exactly why a lot of academics chose the academic career in the first place. There was a lot more freedom to pick your own problem and work on it than you'd enjoy in the average corporate job. There still is, for the most part. But if that advantage is eroding, it's worth talking about.

Agathoson Kickstarter: They’re Like Wreck-It-Ralph in a China Shop

Black over a noisy grayscale background. It's the longest CAPTCHA I've ever seen.

Agathoson The B-52 Just Keeps on Flying

Perhaps it's powered by bumblebees.

Agathoson Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

I can survive on milliseconds of sleep every night. Preferably 27 to 28 million milliseconds, if you have to be so picky.

Agathoson Gigaom Closes Down

I have the same experience with Amazon whenever I buy a big-ticket item. When I interviewed with them, I asked them if they were working on that. "Yes, but it's hard."

A few years later my brother interviewed with them and they asked him how to solve that problem. I wonder if they were stumped, and if they were just looking for new ideas.

Agathoson Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

http://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions?page=2

Look who asked this question. "Not designed for this purpose," indeed. Joel and Jeff weren't sitting around trying to think of reasons for people NOT to use their site.

Agathoson Lenovo hit with lawsuit over Superfish snafu

And every affected computer would be a separate count, so that individual would be looking at a minimum sentence in the millions of years.

Agathoson Dell XPS 13 Review

I don't know of any ultrabook that lets you go past 8GB. Not this, not the Lenovo X1, not the MacBook Air. Do you know of one?

Edit: saw your pointer to the Asus UX303LN. Interesting.

Agathoson The Ken Thompson Hack

This inspires a major plot element in Ramez Naam's Nexus, a near future transhuman sci fi thriller. It's risky to run other people's code on your brain.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13642710-nexus

Agathoson TurboTax halts all state e-filing amid data breach probe

Its use of the singular is technically wrong. This is a downstream effect of the thousands of data breaches that have occurred in the past few years. Anything that provides a name and social security number could do it.

Agathoson Suspended jaccuzzi

Conventional Jacuzzi is much more amenable to static analysis. And just look at the startup time!

But I'll admit: these folks know how to scale.