Hacker News Reader

Oculuson Google Project Lets You Program a Simulated Quantum Computer

Google also released a video[1] describing their joint investment in a D-Wave "quantum computer" (given the debates I've left it in quotes) with NASA. It talks about some cool potential applications and attempts to break down the very basics.

What I'm wondering is if the investments into quantum computing by Google is merely them sinking left over R&D cash or if they believe that powerful quantum computers can be achieved relatively soon?

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMdHDHEuOUE

Oculuson Show HN: Boxes

I think it'd be nice to see the NPC board even if it's just a grid of blank squares.

Oculuson Google Fiber: Working with content providers to minimize buffering

This is basically a giant fuck you to the whole Comcast/Time-Warner/net neutrality issue.

Oculuson Ask HN – What do you do to stay fit while working?

Everyday, I do 100 pushups - 50 when I wake up & 50 before I go to bed. It takes 2 - 3 minutes from your day so you have no excuse. If I have extra free time I'll go swim at the local pool.

Adam Savage (of Mythbusters fame) does a really awesome podcast on which they discussed fitness/well-being one week[1]. The main takeaway is in order to become and more importantly stay healthy you have to change your mindset to always be thinking about what you eat.

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A1rpGGqYew

Oculuson Word Lens (Quest Visual) is Joining Google

Despite its actions historically, Google has shown the ability to incubate a startup and provide the resources it needs to reach levels of success previously unimaginable. Two such examples are Google Maps [1] & Android [2].

1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps#Acquisition

2 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#Hist...

Oculuson Word Lens (Quest Visual) is Joining Google

As a thank you to everybody who supported us on our journey, we've made both the app and the language packs free to download for a limited time

Anyone who doesn't have Word Lens yet should certainly download it now as this is an awesome deal that rarely happens with other startups once they're acquired!

Oculuson Rackspace Hires Morgan Stanley to Evaluate Options

I really hope Mailgun will survive any acquisition or merger Rackspace goes through. I love the quality of service they provide.

Oculuson $10 Of Free Bitcoin For College Students

This reminds me of a very similar campaign Paypal did to help jumpstart the online payments market. Paypal offered $20 to anyone for opening an account or referring a new user[1]. This served to help rapidly grow a market of Paypal users before one existed.

1 (I highly recommend watching the full conversation as it's immensely interesting) - http://youtu.be/vDwzmJpI4io?t=11m21s

Oculuson Seeing Future in Fuel Cells, Toyota Ends Tesla Deal

In an interview at Ted with Chris Anderson, Elon Musk was asked the same question:

CA: Most of American electricity comes from burning fossil fuels. How can an electric car that plugs into that electricity help?

EM: Right. There's two elements to that answer. One is that, even if you take the same source fuel and produce power at the power plant and use it to charge electric cars, you're still better off. So if you take, say, natural gas, which is the most prevalent hydrocarbon source fuel, if you burn that in a modern General Electric natural gas turbine, you'll get about 60 percent efficiency. If you put that same fuel in an internal combustion engine car, you get about 20 percent efficiency. And the reason is, in the stationary power plant, you can afford to have something that weighs a lot more, is voluminous, and you can take the waste heat and run a steam turbine and generate a secondary power source. So in effect, even after you've taken transmission loss into account and everything, even using the same source fuel, you're at least twice as better off charging an electric car, then burning it at the power plant.

Url: http://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_mind_behind_tesla_spa...

Oculuson Disqus: It's Still About Realtime, But Go Demolishes Python

I imagine at their size they're using raw Go without any framework.

Oculuson Disqus: It's Still About Realtime, But Go Demolishes Python

Node was not selected because it does not handle CPU intensive tasks well

I'm curious to hear what sort of CPU intensive tasks Disqus does.

Oculuson Ask HN: What to do in L.A.?

Happened to land in the afternoon one and was not a fun experience.

Oculuson PostgreSQL partitioning explained

I see, thanks for clearing that up!

Oculuson PostgreSQL partitioning explained

So in large web applications would the partitioned tables be distributed among multiple DB servers?

Oculuson Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (May 2014)

SEEKING WORK - Toronto/Kitchener or Remote

I'm a full stack web developer based in Toronto/Kitchener.

Skills: AngularJS, D3.js, Node.js, Express.js, Android, jQuery, pure Javascript, Photoshop, PostgreSQL, Nginx Experience: I've written RESTful APIs, survey Widgets, web applications, and Android apps. I also have experience with Arduino (maze solving car), 8085 Assembler, and C (both at a basic level). I'm always open to learning anything that gets the job done.

===Past Projects===

OrgoShmorgo (Organic Molecule Visualizer - D3.js): http://emils.github.io/orgoShmorgo/

Gekko (Market Share Visualizer - AngularJS/D3.js): http://emils.github.io/gekko/

2048-Multiplayer (Real-time Multiplayer - SockJS/Node.js/PostgreSQL): http://emils.github.io/2048-multiplayer/

Portfolio: http://stolarsky.com

Github: https://github.com/EmilS

Email: emil.stolarsky@gmail.com

Oculuson Skype group video calling becomes free

won't be costing Microsoft a lot of money in support calls

I think you've got it backwards, there's nothing Microsoft loves more then support calls because that's where their real cash cow is: charging enterprise monstrous yearly support fees.

Oculuson US Nuclear Missile Silos Still Use Floppy Disks

I'm wondering if it works better then current technology. If the old tech is more stable and easier to upkeep than upgrading to a modern system, then power to them. I suspect it's more of a priorities thing where the DoD rather throw money at drones or a cyber unit then on nuclear weapon systems since those are more relevant to today's world.

Oculuson Ask HN: Describe your web development stack

===Frontend===

- AngularJS (with the almost always necessary library AngularUI) for big projects. jQuery for everything else

- D3.js for graphs and pretty things

===Backend===

- Express.js (Node.js framework) for anything that's more then a tiny api

- Nginx to serve static files and proxy requests to Express.js

- PostgreSQL for my database needs

- Redis for session/temp storage

===Dev===

- Vagrant for development environments

- Chef to help with provisioning vagrant machines and once I become more comfortable, to help with server setup :)

Oculuson Freelancer.com is destroying my life

I'd imagine there is, but for a payment of 4 figures I doubt litigation is a realistic method of obtaining payment. In any case, you should never have to threaten to sue a freelancing site to get the money that is owed to you. This is a minor issue amplified into serious fuck-up by the lack of half decent customer service. I hope it gets figured out soon for the author's sake.

Oculuson Ask HN: What is the most difficult tech/dev challenge you ever solved?

I've built a maze traversing car with an arduino. The maze was just black lines on a large white sheet. The code was fairly straightforward (Depth First Search), but this was my first time working with hardware. The car used a row of LDRs to know its location relative to the lines of the maze which was the main source of issues. After countless rebuilds of the car and tweaks in the code we finally got the car to work which was an extremely gratifying moment.

Oculuson Graph of Netflix speeds shows the importance of net neutrality

You must keep in mind that all it takes is a another player attempting to enter the movie streaming market (e.g. Amazon) that is willing to pay the ISPs. This just creates a whole slew of issues that Netflix might not be willing to deal with.

Oculuson Apple Announces 7 For 1 Stock Split

How is a company like Amazon able to constantly funnel cash back into their company while Apple's reserves just grow? Do you think it's the nature of the business (small margins for Amazon, giant for Apple) or different company priorities?

Oculuson Apple Announces 7 For 1 Stock Split

You're absolutely right, with the margins Apple enjoys, they could just have more money then they know what to do with.

Oculuson Apple Announces 7 For 1 Stock Split

Isn't the goal of Apple's huge piles of cash to finance & consolidate their manufacturing as well as distribution? Could we interpret this as a signal that there aren't any new products coming down the line that would require such expenditures?

By new products I mean the release of a totally new line (e.g. iPhone 1) rather then an iteration upon a current line (e.g. iPad mini).

Oculuson Mail-in-a-box: easy to set up modern SMTP/SMTPS server stack

After toying with the idea for a while, I've settled on using a service like Mailgun or Sendgrid is the best decision when it comes to setting up email. Otherwise, it's just too much work for little in gain (as far as I'm aware). I'm curious to hear what others think.

Oculuson Depth data viewer for Google Camera

This is absolutely phenomenal, really cool!

Can't remember where I read that images to 3D is hard, but this application really gives a good visualization of that problem. It's not the obvious parts that are difficult, but the relatively flat surfaces that are a little distant that cause the big issues.

Oculuson OS X Beta Seed Program

Any insight on how stable the pre-releases are? I'm tempted to sign-up because updates seem very infrequent on OSX, but I'd hate to have to fight more bugs when working.

Oculuson Ask HN: Your favorite YouTube channels?

I haven't been able to find any programming channels I'm absolutely in love with (comeback everyday to), but I do have a couple channels that keep me entertained:

Seananners - https://www.youtube.com/user/SeaNanners

GassyMexican - https://www.youtube.com/user/GassyMexican

TheMrSark - https://www.youtube.com/user/TheMrSark

Oculuson Node.js cluster versus JXcore multithread

Well by experimental feature the Node.js team means that the API to access clustering features isn't set in stone - not the stability of the code.

Oculuson TurboTax Maker Intuit Funnels Millions to Lobby Against Easier Tax Returns

This makes me wonder how much of the government's incompetence is from companies lobbying for the government to keep its old ways.