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DonGateleyon Show HN: Learn Web Development for Free with The Odin Project

Please include node.js in your curriculum.

DonGateleyon Solitary confinement’s psychological effects

Secure confinement to eliminate the danger a prisoner might present to another need not require social and sensory isolation. That is purely punitive and futile at best, contributory at worst.

DonGateleyon The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage

Time to demonstrate once and for all the fraud that the H1B visa has always been. All it does is push older engineers out of the field so they can be replaced very cheaply.

That needs to stop but having the best congress money can buy pretty much assures that it won't.

DonGateleyon New Oculus Rift dev kit goes on sale for $350 today, likely ships in July

Praising, for sure. I was afraid my comment might be taken as an underestimation. Not so, I'm just blown away by the extraordinarily accomplished people he has brought on board and know that, smart though he may be, many of them have accrued far more impressive technical track records.

His early work demonstrated potential with contemporary, off the shelf technology along with a visionary template. His growing team is taking it so much further. I consider that kind of talent acquisition and management a form of genius.

I just expect it to be a really tough herd to manage in a collective fashion and for it to get increasingly difficult as time makes room for the inevitable ego expansions and the elbowing for power, influence and credit. But then it also appears that he has placed some very alpha managers at the top of the executive team.

DonGateleyon Storage Pod 4.0: Direct Wire Drives – Faster, Simpler and Less Expensive

What an amazing degree of disclosure. Tim Nufire is an engineer's engineer. He gets me to thinking of how I might be able to justify the cost of one. :-)

DonGateleyon New Oculus Rift dev kit goes on sale for $350 today, likely ships in July

It's beyond commendable that Palmer et.al. seem to have no problem at all employing people smarter than he is wherever they can be found and enticed away from what they are doing. I've gotta wonder, though, if he's looking up at everyone around him and seeing not only stellar talent but stellar ambition and ego how he'll stay on top of it.

I've got a DK1 and had a whole lot of fun with it despite its laughable resolution but as much as I want to play with the DK2 and follow application development (which is all I'm capable of) I'm going to await the store shelf version. I think. :-)

DonGateleyon Python 3.4.0 released

When there's a release with a bullet item saying "Full compatibility with 2.7 libraries" I'll get interested.

DonGateleyon Have Gravitational Waves Been Detected?

Are their no other testable aspects of GR that would show gravity changes to have finite propagation speed?

DonGateleyon Have Gravitational Waves Been Detected?

What has always puzzled me about this is why anyone would think that a local change in a gravitational field would not propagate as a wave. What the hell else could it do?

I do believe there are differential equations involved that make the field at one point dependent on the field at another point after a period of time and that's all that's required.

DonGateleyon TunnelBear VPN app

How about giving us a clue rather than just being cryptic.

DonGateleyon TunnelBear VPN app

Hey, Ivan, have you folks fixed the security hole yet where your tunnel can potentially drop and the connection simply reverts to clear without the user knowing it? Have you yet included a function similar to VPNCheck which blocks traffic in that event?

Unfortunately, because TunnleBear uses it's own client rather than the standard Windows VPN mechanism VPNCheck can't be used with it. While I love your company and the generous touch of humor and whimsy you bring to a normally somber market, I can't live with a product with that gaping a security hole. If and when that's fixed and if the performance is about an order of magnitude better than it was when I tested it a year or so ago I'll be on board in a heartbeat.

DonGateleyon Soylent Update 3/13

Have they published a bulk cost breakdown? From what I've read the price seems too high but I'd like to see the data.

It's impact on poverty world wide could be like the potato was to Europe and the Islands. On second thought...

DonGateleyon Soylent Update 3/13

Too bad they aren't interested in assisting the poor. This could have been a godsend. The market their price targets will likely show little interest. They like and can afford food.

DonGateleyon A software engineer's website

Wow! Thanks for that, his TinyCC might be the solution to creating something I want badly, a full C language version of Cokos ReaJS VST plugin creator. Any aspiring programmer want to take on a cool project? :-)

DonGateleyon Stephen Colbert at RSA Conference 2014 – Full Audio

It was founded by the inventors.

DonGateleyon Alleged Mt.Gox code leaked on IRC node by Russian Hacker

Looking at that code makes me yearn for Cobol.

DonGateleyon How pCell works and why its a bigger deal than anyone realizes

Isn't this also instant and incorruptable net neutrality?

DonGateleyon How pCell works and why its a bigger deal than anyone realizes

Once you begin exploring the implications and the possible applications to things other than communications it begins to look like possibly the biggest breakthrough in history.

Only one in energy could surpass it.

DonGateleyon How pCell works and why its a bigger deal than anyone realizes

Which leads me to wonder about it's possible application to audio. Headphone free ideal headphones with everybody in the room hearing a different source.

DonGateleyon Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]

This I understand. I would like to see the code that implements the loop.

DonGateleyon Ask HN: Can a Stack Overflow moderator give us Stack Overflow back?

I avoid Stack Exchange totally now because I can't stand the anger I feel when I find that two out of three things I search for and just about anything I post are "moderated" into oblivion for reasons having more to do with condescension than anything else. I think its moderators for the most part self select for personality disorder the same way that cops tend to do. But it's even worse than the cop syndrome because of the personal anonymity.

I sure like your reason on the other hand because it's the other hand.

DonGateleyon Spritz – read 500 words per minute without any training

Having had detached retinas that were caught early and tacked back in place by a laser I too have a heavy dose of floaters from blood leaking and clotting. It's more like drifting and jerking, variably transparent clouds than what people usually think of with point or wiggler floaters. What annoys me the most with this problem is their motion into and out of my foveal region in response to eyeball rotations and the resulting variation of tranparency. This especially bugs me while reading. Well, driving is worse but that's another topic.

What I immediately noticed with the Spritz demo was that since I wasn't moving my eyes there was no particular change in transparency in the foveal region once the little beasts settled into place. I found this a much improved situation which indicates that it is not the partial occlusion itself that bothers me but rather the constant changes in it due to moving my eyes about the page.

In brief, I like what this method does for my problem.

DonGateleyon Spritz – read 500 words per minute without any training

I get pretty bad dry eye from blink inhibition just using a display. I'm pretty sure this would exacerbate that problem by a significant factor. I would need to use it in conjunction with a wearable blink detector/stimulator which doesn't yet exist.

DonGateleyon Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]

I would sure like to see the code for its repl. If it's all he says, that loop should be uniquely tiny.

DonGateleyon Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]

Wow! That is a helluva pitch. My fear is that it _is_ the mind of Stephen Wolfram and unless you have that the whole thing will be one big mystery.

DonGateleyon Christine: The World's Most Modular PC Design

Viewing that required moving my browser window to my 2560x1600 monitor and maximizing it. How utterly stupid. I'm coming to hate HTML5. Apparently rescaling is beyond it's capabilities or beyond those of the designer.

DonGateleyon Cryptographic obfuscation and 'unhackable' software

What immediately came to my mind is the attack potential of this methodology. Is there one? Seems to me it makes possible the writing of undetectable malware, no?

DonGateleyon [dead]

Quite simply because it is possible.

If the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, and there is no known reason why it couldn't be even if it might always remain untestable, every time there is a quantum level interaction (erroneously called an "observation") the wave function does not collapse at all as in the Copenhagen interpretation but instead remains in the superpostion of all possible outcomes. That whole mess propagates and some of those possibilities interact with some of the possibilities of what is described by the wave function of other quantum interactions ad infinitum. This is called the "many worlds hypothesis." There aren't really many worlds in any usual sense although all the possibilities continue to exist and exercise their influence on every other possibility that has an intersecting causal tree.

The net of all this is that everything that can happen does. It's just our perception that gives the illusion of a single path through the whole schmere.

The philosophical ramifications of that world are enormous. It puts paid once and for all the whole "free will" nonsense but it leaves a certain despondence because it doesn't much matter what you do in terms of the perception you are "experiencing." You do everything you can possibly do and experience all possible joys and sufferings as consequences.

Ever wonder why you continue to exist despite the ridiculous odds of you having survived all the close calls you can remember. Because it's possible and from your perceptual tree you don't see the ones in which you didn't. In my personal case I find this observation the closest thing to a proof of many worlds that I could need to be persuaded of its correctness. It just ain't possible that I'm still here after all this time and all those things that happened yet...

Also there are a nearly infinite number of point's in your past from which you live forever if from the initial state of the universe a path of possibility exists to that state. Whether or not such a path must exist is where it gets hazy for me. It doesn't mean however that any of your descendents from "this" particular perceptual point will necessarily persist ad nauseum even if there were points in the past where they could.

DonGateleyon Julia for Matlab users

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/julia-users/7DXD7Qbk...

Starting with Stefan Karpinski's first comment.

DonGateleyon Julia for Matlab users

Julia intrigues me and I'm on their mailing list but daily perusal of activity on that list has shown me clearly that Julia is still a long way from deciding what it will be when it grows up.

I quite like it and look forward to all the conceptual issues being settled and a stable version delivered. Lotsa' smart people providing input on that but that's both a blessing and a curse.

To much variety of intrinsic data aggregates for me but they justify that on it being compiled and very performance sensitive. Thus a lot of "you can do x on an A but not y. But if you must y, a B is provided instead.'