Hacker News Reader

abstractbillon Larry Page: I’d Rather Leave My Billions to Elon Musk Than to Charity

Y Combinator invests in non-profits.

abstractbillon Zesty (YC W14) Launches Healthy Catering Service

Congrats guys, we are loving Zesty :)

abstractbillon Why Cars Will Kill 30,000 Americans This Year

What they currently do is crumple zones. That's not what I was talking about (the entire skin of the car being a honeycomb sandwich).

abstractbillon Why Cars Will Kill 30,000 Americans This Year

I've often wondered about this. Instead of just having a single thin metal skin that deforms, wouldn't it be even better to have multiple skins sandwiching a kind of honeycomb structure? That way you have even more stuff to deform and absorb the impact.

abstractbillon Why ‘Cosmos’ Host Neil deGrasse Tyson Has the World in His Hands

I fear popular science...

The same arguments were made when Carl Sagan was busy popularizing science. But Neil Degrasse Tyson says he was hugely inspired by Sagan. Who knows how many other scientists were? Who knows how many future scientists will be inspired by Neil Degrasse Tyson?

abstractbillon Why ‘Cosmos’ Host Neil deGrasse Tyson Has the World in His Hands

Submissions don't move down the front page as quickly as this did (I think it went from #3 to about #25 in less than a minute) without getting flagged a bunch.

abstractbillon Why ‘Cosmos’ Host Neil deGrasse Tyson Has the World in His Hands

But we've been fucking around with nature for a long time without fully understanding it. In fact a lot of that fucking around has led to us understanding nature better!

abstractbillon Why ‘Cosmos’ Host Neil deGrasse Tyson Has the World in His Hands

This is the second time in a few days Cosmos has made it onto the front page and then received a ton of flags very quickly. Can someone explain why?

abstractbillon Sam Altman for President

Congrats Sam, and congrats YC!

abstractbillon Technology and Wealth Inequality

Well I don't think the whole system has to be broken down and rebuilt from scratch. There are lots of pretty basic ideas floating around for getting money out of politics.

abstractbillon Technology and Wealth Inequality

"But it feels really unfair. People seem to be more sensitive to relative economic status than absolute. So even if people are much better off being poor today than king 500 years ago, most people compare themselves to the richest people today, and not the richest people from the past."

I don't think this is the whole story. It's not just that it feels unfair, it's that it really is unfair. Rich people can buy political representation, and unlike wealth, representation is a zero-sum game.

abstractbillon A member of our community is missing, help find him

There's a YC startup for everything these days: http://www.7cupsoftea.com/

abstractbillon Show HN: Our little bootstrapped startup is powering CNN's ticker for NYE

Very nice Randall, congrats!

abstractbillon My thoughts on SF after living here for six months

Not anymore - the girls and culture are all moving to Oakland!

abstractbillon Life At A Startup (part 2)

Hah! As it happens, I had just started experimenting with designing a new Lisp dialect when I got Emmett's email! It was working out pretty well, and I was having a lot of fun, but I think the world needs livestreamed creativity more than it needs yet another Lisp :)

abstractbillon Notch Playing Ludum Dare [video]

If you're interested in streaming more general programming, check out twitch's sister site, justin.tv - more specifically the new Creativity category (http://www.justin.tv/directory/creativity). We have a bunch of awesome people doing live coding already, and we're very interested in helping more people get started. Feel free to email me - bill@justin.tv - if you need any help.

abstractbillon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2013)

Justin.tv / San Francisco / Full-stack engineer.

Two years ago Justin.tv created Twitch, a website that's become the most successful application of live streaming video so far. Now we're working on doing the same thing again, for a different niche. We have access to the impressive resources of the Twitch juggernaut, but Justin.tv is still a small and largely independent group, so we get to make our own rules when we want to get things done quickly. It's easily the most fun I've had in my career, and I think the other guys on our team would say the same.

Contact: bill@justin.tv

More information: http://www.jobscore.com/jobs/justintv/full-stack-software-en...

abstractbillon We're auctioning off a chance for your kid to come to a YC dinner

...otherwise you would presumably have chosen to auction off a different prize.

Do you have something in mind? An invite to a YC dinner is free and, much more importantly, costs nobody at YC very much time.

abstractbillon A "Hacker's" Guide to the Bay Area

The YMCA gyms are also incredibly family friendly - way more so than any other gym we ever found in the Bay Area.

abstractbillon Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

I believe these are very different problems.

Aubrey de Grey believes they are not different.

If he's right, the only way you could keep people perfectly healthy up to age 80 without them living much longer would be to execute on his plan (or a similar one), and then kill people once they got old enough.

abstractbillon Why I'm Getting a PhD

Ten years after getting mine, I'm still glad I did, even though I wound up deciding not to be a professor after all.

abstractbillon U.S. measles cases in 2013 may be most in 17 years

...this in in turn caused mostly by a combination of ignorance and bizarre religious beliefs...

It's actually better/worse than that (depending on your perspective). People were mislead by a fraud. And not fraud with any kind of a noble purpose - it was for money.

abstractbillon Dropbox opening my docs?

One question would be if you could upload the document once and then somehow trigger a very tiny edit that causes them to rescan it.

That does seem likely - dropbox tries to only upload diffs, when a file gets changed: https://www.dropbox.com/help/8/en

abstractbillon Dropbox opening my docs?

The machine isn't the only thing at risk. Given this setup, it seems possible to use dropbox nodes to ddos an external target, just by uploading lots of documents, each containing lots of these links. It doesn't seem like they should be fetching external resources at all.

abstractbillon The Student Loan Bubble is Starting To Burst

This one is going to be messy.

As someone who really hasn't thought about it very much, I'd love for someone to expand on this. What's the expected fallout? In the housing bubble, many people lost the places where they lived. But it's not like someone can "take back" your education if you default on the loan, so what happens instead?

abstractbillon Applications open for Startup School

But I feel both pg and yc have been quite consistent about this: They're not trying to optimize for proven consistently good performance, they're looking for potential to be great. They're trying to discover the next Einstein, not merely put together a decent physics faculty.

abstractbillon Airlines offer no-crying sections

Compared to most other animals, human babies are born more helpless and dependent on those around them (for example, most other species have young that are able to crawl or walk already).

I believe the theory I've heard goes something like: It was beneficial for humans to start walking upright, but that development puts selective pressure on having a narrower pelvis for increased stability. Having a narrower pelvis implies having a smaller birth canal, which in turn puts pressure on having a shorter gestation period.

abstractbillon Why does NASA use gold foil on equipment and gold-coated visors?

The question and answer are both quite fascinating. But I think they hint at something potentially even more interesting: To figure out that they needed to coat visors with gold, without doing it by trial-and-error and frying a few retinas in the process, the level of planning and attention to detail in the early days of NASA must have been phenomenal. I'd love to know more about how they knew they had asked all the right questions.

abstractbillon HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

I first came on here to learn about Arc. It was just tech. Then it became tech+business.

It was tech+business before it was tech: The site started out as "Startup News" (which is when I personally have my fondest memories of it).

abstractbillon The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science

If you can't provide a basic list of races, and a repeatable procedure for determining which race(s) a given individual belongs to, then I don't see how you can claim this has anything to do with science.