Hacker News Reader

ArikBeon What Worries Scientists

“We should worry that so much of our science and technology still uses just five main models of probability—even though there are more probability models than there are real numbers.” –Bart Kosko, information scientist

Which five models is he referring to?

ArikBeon Geometee

Maybe a bit off-topic but I enquired on Quora a few months ago on how one would go about simulating the CP1919 Cover. (I wanted it laser cut on my MacBook Pro through the services of uncover.com) and here's the answer:

http://www.quora.com/Data-Visualization/What-would-be-a-way-...

ArikBeon What a stupid idea

In 2008/2009 I was browsing Brian Gossett's website http://since78.briangossett.com/ . Back then he had a digital mood board, which was simply a giant collection of JPG files on a white background with appropriate spacing. I saw these same mood boards on other websites - usually belong to designers. Some things hit me while browsing that website.

Wouldn't it be awesome if there was a service that let you...

  - easily bookmark content from the web onto your personal "mood board", 
    probably using a booklet.
  - organize that content into collections
  - share it with a social network built around the original idea.

I shit you not, even my original design (which was mainly white on white) looked like Pinterest. I quit on it because I couldn't program at all.

I've had multiple experiences since where I thought of something and then something similar either already exists or it shows up soon after. The Pinterest example was the most extreme though, because I really had a copy of Pinterest (minus the identity ofc) in my mind and on paper. What this taught me is that I have a brain that is capable of thinking up stuff that is apparently wanted [1] and as such it has boosted my confidence. At the end of the day, the person who wins is the person who executes. Execution is key.

[1] Allow me to be very careful here. I may suffer from cognitive bias causing me to discount the amount of ideas that I've had that are probably absolutely shit, but in my own defence I'm the first person to shoot down my ideas. Also, knowing what the market wants requires you to test your assumptions. I'm well aware of this.

ArikBeon I made an example app to show how Google map URLs should look

In theory there should be only one high street per locality.

There was a story on Russian news a few weeks ago how there are multiple streets with the same name in the city of Sochi. They are tackling the problem before the olympics arrive, but your assumption is probably violated elsewhere as well.

ArikBeon The ethical coffee shop freelancer

Here in Amsterdam, NL the CoffeeCompany stores allow up to one hour of WiFi access per receipt. So you get a drink, the receipt contains a wifi password that will last you one hour. Need more? Get another drink.

...or grab a receipt someone left at your table. I've seen this happen.

ArikBeon Nokia announces Asha 210 with World's First Dedicated WhatsApp Button

Here's what I want in a phone:

  – Ability to place calls
  – Ability to text
  – Whatsapp
  – Google Maps

  – The ability to remove all other applications from the phone, including the browser.

If I can do that, then great. I'm a college student. I have an iPhone 3GS that is slowly dying with a 14 EUR (~18 USD) p/m plan. If I can just buy this thing cheap, then I'll stick to the dataplan I already have.

What OS does this phone use? I couldn't find that information.

ArikBeon Inside the Race to Build the World’s Fastest Bitcoin Miner

I'm not sure I follow, Bitcoins are mined at a rate of one block every 10 mins (on average). The difficulty setting adjusts based on how much processing power is thrown at the problem. Supply is constant.

ArikBeon ‘Human computer’ Shakuntala Devi has died

This is somewhat related. I remember watching an episode of "Stan Lee's Super humans" on the Discovery channel. They were with a man who was also able to do lightning fast calculations, not of the complexity as described in the article, but he could easily recall dates, multiply 5 digit numbers faster than someone with a calculator etc.

They put this man under an MRI scanner while giving him problems to solve. What they noticed was an unusually high activity in a part of the brain that is responsible for eye movement. So – perhaps not very scientifically responsible – the neurologist offered the explanation that he was using a part of his brain that is normally used to solve complex mathematics subconsciously in order to position our eyes properly throughout the day. Apparently this motor movement is very complex and he was leveraging the ability of this area to solve these arithmetic problems and engage in pattern matching in order to recollect past dates.

ArikBeon Live: ISS Spacewalk

I turned off the feed, but I kept hearing a lady with a distinctive Russian accent speaking English, so I suppose that it's the other way around. Although maybe that's just for the spectator feed.

Edit: I listened to it again. The Russian communications are between two cosmonauts. One is most likely inside the ISS and the other is walking. The interpreter is translating their Russian communication to English.

ArikBeon Live: ISS Spacewalk

Is it possible to receive a Russian transmission? I speak Russian and so the interpreter is only ruining it for me because I hear too many people talking.

ArikBeon We built our startup out of hatred. Pure fury-fuelled hatred.

Some comments:

- When I click on "getbrandid.com" take me to getbrandid.com and not http://building.getbrandid.com/getbrandid-com/ . There's no useful information on that page. I expect to be taken to your product. This is a major oversight.

- The all caps COMMENTS is bothering me, it's not that important of an element. Maybe it's just me.

- I can't reach the footer easily because of the tweets that keep loading. Seriously, what's the point of having a footer if I have to keep scrolling to get there?? There's a "load more" button but it keeps loading without clicking it (heck I'm not even able to click it).

- This URL structure: https://www.getbrandid.com/#/keep/calm/wearepros

Is stupid. Semantics? Oh no! Additionally the back button doesn't work on that page.

A question:

Do the girls get paid a cut? I actually think this is a pretty nice concept. You're essentially paying an agent to do what they love to do (shopping) by letting another agent pay for the service to connect you to that agent. That's neat. And focusing this on men – at least in the early stage – is not stupid. I would reckon that most people who dislike shopping are men.* I'm not sure whether your brand positioning should be so explicit. Consider the income of the target audience and then consider whether they want to feel like they're being targeted by an offshoot of the Axe brand. I think you can find PLENTY of guys who don't need the whole "hurr durr I'm a man durr" and who would be willing to spend a lot more money having someone else buy this stuff for them. This way you may be missing out on those people and instead attracting less affluent/lower income males who are not the optimal target audience.

* I'm not one of them btw, men who dislike shopping that is.

ArikBeon Realtime Bitcoin Stats

My bad, edited.

ArikBeon Realtime Bitcoin Stats

You could attempt to replicate the analysis used in "Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph" by Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir. (http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf)

In 2012 they noted that:

“If we sum up the amounts accumulated at the 609,270 addresses which only receive and never send any BTC’s [bitcoins], we see that they contain 7,019,100 BTC’s, which are almost 78% of all existing BTC’s. Due to the way bitcoins can be repeatedly moved to fresh addresses, some of which can be very recent, we can not claim that all these bitcoins are out of circulation. However,76.5% of these 78% (i.e., 59.7% of all the coins in the system) are old coins", dened as bitcoins received at some address more than three months before the cut off date (May 13th 2012), which were not followed by any outgoing transac- tions from that address after they were received. One can also argue that very old dormant bitcoins were simply abandoned or lost by users who experimented with the system in its early days, when it was very dicult to buy anything or to exchange bitcoins into dollars. To be even more cautious with our estimation of dormant bitcoins, we decided to ignore all the transactions which took place prior to July 18th 2010, when Mt.Gox started its exchange and price quoting services. The sum of the balances of all the addresses which have not been active since that date is 1,657,480 bitcoins. Clearly, by considering all these bitcoins as "lost" rather than "hoarded" we are underestimating the number of bitcoins which are kept dormant in "saving accounts". By ignoring these very old bitcoins and repeating the same calculation, we found that 73% of all the remaining BTC's were accumulated at addresses which only receive and never send bitcoins, and that 70% of these 73% (i.e., 51%) are dormant bitcoins in the sense that they were received more than three months before our cuto date but after it became easy to exchange them. If instead of summing the transaction values we sum the nal balances of all the addresses that were active after July 18th 2010 but became inactive in the last three months, we get that 55% of all coins in the system are dormant in this sense. This is strong evidence that the majority of bitcoins are not circulating in the system, and since it is based on the address rather than the entity graph, this conclusion is not aected by possible inaccuracies in the way we associate addresses with users.”