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TheBurningOr

235 karma · joined March 1, 2010

Always been intensely interested in technology and Silicon Valley culture. Recently moved to the Bay Area to either found a startup or be found by one as a web developer.
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TheBurningOr··on Why does Amazon have more books from the 1880s than the 1980s? Blame copyright
FWIW

The Atlantic covered this story much better (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-ho...) and their coverage included two additional charts. One corresponds to your criticism of adjusting for titles vs versions. In that chart, the drop off in the mid 20th century is still evident but not as extreme. In the second chart, they account for differences in the number of books published per decade using third party sources. In that version, the divergance is actually much worse.

I don't think there were any responses to your criticism of the categories.

TheBurningOr··on LinkedIn suffers DNS hijack
Does anyone have any corroboration of this?
TheBurningOr··on Show HN: Facebook Unlike
Needs to have a more prominent share button so I can send this to my friends who have so helpfully 'liked' products that I'm now spammed with.
TheBurningOr··on New Apple maps app under fire from users
I had the same experience with my Incredible 1. It was wonderful for about 6 months until it became absolutely unusable. Random bugs all over the place. Updates not coming in. So much lagginess in the UI that the interface became basically unusable.
TheBurningOr··on After Two Startup Accelerators, What I Wish Someone Had Told Me
Ugh. Yeah. Got to that point in the article and closed the tab. It's a good article, but, sadly, that's the only thing I remember now about the article.
TheBurningOr··on CoffeePhysics: A JS/CS Physics Engine
The attraction and collision demos are both doing collision detection, which means N! calculations (for each particle check the location of all the other particles that have not been checked relative to this one). Whereas the chain, cloth and I can't recall the name of the third one, are on the order of N calculations (constant interaction with only a fixed number of other particles).
TheBurningOr··on Ace - Sinatra for Node with Fibers
This reminds me of Zappa.js (http://zappajs.org/), one of my favorite CoffeeScript implementations of a web server on Node (although it's mostly just a wrapper for express). I'd be curious, though what advantages there are in creating a totally new web server (this approach) from Zappa's backwards compatible with Express.js's approach.
TheBurningOr··on Ask HN: Anyone using Blekko instead of Google?
I tried Blekko for a bit this past fall and was not terribly impressed. I, frankly, don't understand what the /slash notation is doing. is it a filter? Is it a specific type of search?

However, I have been using DuckDuckGo almost exclusively for the past 2 months and I'm not sure that I'll be going back anytime soon. DDG is touted as being for the privacy conscious, but I can't say that was my primary motivation in switching. I have been increasingly unhappy with Google's 'bubbling' and my searches there increasingly felt like I was running in circles through crappy mailing list archives and spam sites and all their new 'features.'

DDG brought back memories of what drew me to Google in the first place, over a decade ago. It is clean, straightforward, and relevant. Yeah, I know it's running on Yahoo Search APIs which are running on Bing, but it's still a drastically different search experience.

Finally, doing a bit of research into DDGs extras and the !bang notation pages kind of sealed the deal for me. Want to know your IP address? just search "ip" Want lorem ipsum text, just search for that. Want to search the python documentation? Just use !python. Want to re-run your last search in Google? Just add !g Those features alone are enough to make it a true power user's search engine.

TheBurningOr··on Why we think there's a Multiverse, not just our Universe
Fascinating article, but I'd still like to know more about that 8th figure on the inflation model. We are told that the y-axis represents energy, but what is the x-axis? It clearly isn't time because it's being measured in phi over something measured in GeV.
TheBurningOr··on Web Designers should all be using this idea by now: Font Icons.
Do screen readers parse CSS in their reading? I would think this would avoid that problem by using the :before pseudo classes rather than injecting it into the dom directly.

edit: fuller thought.

TheBurningOr··on Hire For The Ability To Get Shit Done
This is one of the best comments on here. 'Talent' is not a one dimensional scalar.
TheBurningOr··on AdGrok is joining Twitter
I'm not sure that this is entirely true for Google. Recall that Google bought DoubleClick and that much of their current advertising empire is built on that foundation. I think Twitter is aiming to do something similar here.
TheBurningOr··on Twitter sued for ‘breaking’ UK super injunction. Oh yes.
Genuine question here. How is the right to privacy circumvented to allow for the CCTV cameras and other policies that seem, to me at least, to be a pretty clear invasion of privacy. Seems to me this policy is more about allowing aristocrats, celebrities and the wealthy to squash stories they don't want published about them.
TheBurningOr··on Remind me what your company does again?
Especially when I may often as not be getting this email from my phone where I don't necessarily want to have to click through to your web-app.
TheBurningOr··on Is gravity not actually a force? Forcing theory to meet experiments
Is it sad that my first thought on seeing this is "That's a valuable domain name!"
TheBurningOr··on Dear Continental Airlines, you have a broken funnel
>> we as consumers have brought this upon ourselves because more often than not, we don't distinguish based on features, we select based on price, so we have given airlines every incentive to pull these kinds of tricks.

True, but at the same time, there is very little way of distinguishing between features. Policies like extra baggage charges are extremely poorly labelled for most major airlines such that charts like this one (http://www.airfarewatchdog.com/blog/3801089/airline-baggage-...) are not uncommon to make sense of all the different policies. Furthermore, policies like the charge for extra headphones or TVs seem to vary not from airline to airline, but airplane to airplane, depending on the media equipment that the plane is outfitted with.

I think consumers do want those extra perks and would be willing to pay more for them, but simply do not have the means to make sense of the byzantine airfare purchasing 'system' that we have. Hence, consumers go with the lowest price as the one thing of which they can be sure. This is why I think Hipmunk is so important as a startup. It's the first attempt by a flight search engine to rank and display flights not just by price, but also by some of these other features.

TheBurningOr··on Poll: Where do you work (physically)?
I work from home and hate it. I know that working from the comfort of your home is supposed to be the holy grail of workspaces but the thing I miss the most about working in an office is working in an office and being able to come home and have a space where my mind can unwind from my responsibilities and actually do the sort of relaxing that gives me good ideas
TheBurningOr··on Ask HN: Link to earlier post on visual design for hackers?
I found that one a bunch of times in my searches. As you can see from my solution link (above) it turns out the issue was that the term 'book' and 'app' did not appear in the title, despite being central to the meaning of the post.
TheBurningOr··on Ask HN: Link to earlier post on visual design for hackers?
Ah-ha! I found it!

http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=1928157

For reference, the title was: Lessons Learned: A non-designer's attempt at a redesign

I found it by doing a Google search for:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

TheBurningOr··on Vmail - A Gmail client in Vim
Don't you have this problem with any 3rd party email client that doesn't use OAuth? With bigger projects it's going to be pretty improbable that a malicious commit will get pushed to the trunk, but still, with small projects and hacks like this it's always a possibility.
TheBurningOr··on Don't shoot the messenger for telling the truth
I wonder too about the leaks we haven't seen yet either, but at the same time, wouldn't WikiLeaks want to release the most scandalous and head-line grabbing info first? That would go a long way towards vindicating their position in the public eye.
TheBurningOr··on My Favorite Engineering Interview Question
As someone who was recently on the job market, I will say I wish more employers did this as well. As a candidate it gives you much more information about what you will actually be doing at the company too. There is just as much buzzword packing in job descriptions as there is in resumes these days and sorting through the interesting from non-interesting jobs is not always easy.
TheBurningOr··on Status Of CrunchPad Litigation
A year ago I would have down-voted a thought like this, but every time something develops with this story, it sounds more and more like a movie plot and less like a real story.
TheBurningOr··on Git your act together
I feel like a better approach for that sort of solution would be to use a hash-tag based (#) tagging system. English has so many tenses and people mis-spell things anyways that basing your search purely off of the text of the commit message is always going to be tricky. Anyways, the point of the commit message is that it be human readable, not machine readable.

Personally, I like clever commit messages. They remind me that the project was written by humans for humans.

TheBurningOr··on How do I start off getting involved in open source?
Ach. Yeah. Oops. I was so concerned writing the working of the question, that I neglected the most important part :P
TheBurningOr··on The Men Who Stare At Screens (why going to the gym might not be good enough)
I'm finding with my standing desk that having good shoe support and a good soft carpet/pad to stand on is quite important for that very reason. It does help me to walk around more. I tend to move around quite a bit more than when I was just sitting.
TheBurningOr··on The Men Who Stare At Screens (why going to the gym might not be good enough)
I'm finding with my standing desk that having good shoe support and a good soft carpet/pad to stand on is quite important for that very reason. It does help me to walk around more. I tend to move around quite a bit more than when I was just standing.
TheBurningOr··on The Men Who Stare At Screens (why going to the gym might not be good enough)
I'm finding with my standing desk that having good shoe support and a good soft carpet/pad to stand on is quite important.
TheBurningOr··on Google working on a Facebook competitor: Google Me
I'm actually less concerned about Google having my data than, say Facebook. Google already has a ton of my data, but they don't sell it off to third parties. They practically define the analytics and targeted advertising. Facebook's problem is that they can't figure out how to actually make money with the data they have so they're resorting to selling it to third parties (Google, Bing, Yelp, Pandora, CNN, etc). That is what scares me at least.
TheBurningOr··on No, really, pi is wrong: The Tau Manifesto (Tau Day, 2010)
I would argue though that the torque example is a particularly problematic symbol conflict as any equations involving torque are by definition going to include many, many references to the circle constant. Yes there are other symbol conflicts in math, but usually they are separated by logical fields (you generally are not doing using e when dealing with the charge of an electron constant (except in the case that you are dealing with magnitude of the electric field as a function of distance) and even when you are, it is hardly a problem because you never use the natural logarithmic constant except as a power function).

I think the appropriate change here though would be to change the symbol for torque to say, 'q' or something. Probably not going to happen, but wouldn't be as much of an issue.

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