Hacker News Reader

abstractbillon Email exchange between Edward Snowden and former GOP Senator Gordon Humphrey

I would take Snowden's claims more seriously in general if he were on United States soil preparing to face trial for his alleged wrongdoing, ready to bring forward any defenses he thinks he has to possible criminal charges.

I'm not convinced we would be hearing anything from him at all - claims or otherwise - were he currently on US soil.

abstractbillon Elon Musk to publish hyperloop design by August

Though I think pg's advice is exactly right for things that don't need to be started with a big bang, I don't think it applies universally. I can't imagine, for example, the Apollo Program being successful without rallying a huge number of people behind the idea beforehand.

abstractbillon Heathrow shut after Boeing Dreamliner 787 fire

From this video, if it was the batteries, the new containers don't look very fireproof: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23295115

abstractbillon The Grep Test

This has nothing to do with static vs dynamic typing. In Java, for example, you can easily invoke a method named by a string that's not defined at compile time (using the reflection api).

abstractbillon Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

Just to help me better understand what you're saying, can you give an example of a program that's very popular, and which has bad effects?

abstractbillon A Cold War Hero: Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski

What was the original title?

abstractbillon Hospital creates bidding war by posting pricing online

Aggregate essentials (food, shelter) are generally inelastic. You don't choose if you need food or not.

Right. And there were a lot of famines in the past. It's only by "flood[ing] the market with supply (using technology to both drive down costs and replace what people do)" that we've managed (in the West, at least) to ensure that most people no longer have to worry about food.

abstractbillon How Rap Genius Raised $1.8M in Seed Funding Without Knowing What We Were Doing

Confidence is the only really defensible trait of the three. Lawyers, surgeons, accountants, and so on probably need to project at least that one, but nobody cares if those people seem energetic or excited.

Even the ability to project confidence isn't a universal requirement though. Nobody gives a rat's ass what an athlete in a solo sport projects.

abstractbillon How Rap Genius Raised $1.8M in Seed Funding Without Knowing What We Were Doing

This seems like it should be true, but actually I can think of dozens of counterexamples just off the top of my head. There are in fact many fields of human endeavor where, if you're sufficiently good at your core competency, nobody cares if you project energy, excitement, and confidence.

abstractbillon Ecuador says letter of safe conduct for Snowden is unauthorized and invalid

You give a different version of the document to each person, with unique typos in each one. If the document gets leaked, you know who did it - the typos form a "signature".

Sometimes a typo is just a typo though.

abstractbillon We were wrong

You can (and probably should) seduce someone you've been married to for years.

abstractbillon Stratasys Acquiring MakerBot

They sold for about a 10x multiple of annual revenue. That's not atypical for a startup that's growing quickly.

abstractbillon Fix Things, Never Force It: Lessons From Grandpa

My wife and I bought a fixer-upper house last year, and I've been really enjoying working on it. But I always keep in mind that kind of work is more of a hobby than a financially savvy thing to do, since I can hire someone else to work on the house at less than 1/4 of my software consulting rate!

abstractbillon US intelligence mining data from 9 US Internet companies in broad secret program

Reply links don't appear until a few minutes after a comment is made. It's intended to have a dampening effect on flame wars.

abstractbillon Seriously.js

OK Go has cornered the market on "cool web tech" demo music videos.

Actually there have been some other very nice ones recently:

http://donottouch.org/

http://lights.elliegoulding.com/

abstractbillon Show HN: It's hard to make friends offline, so we built a solution

Worked for me just now.

abstractbillon Ask HN: and now what?

We have some things in common - I'm 37 and started programming aged 9. I also got very burnt out, without realizing it, and then tried to start a bunch of "startups" without recovering properly.

I took about six months of very minimal contract programming work, at the same time as doing a lot of physical work on a "fixer-upper" house my wife and I bought in a cheap area. Then I settled on a project which I hope will turn into a startup, but which I'd be completely happy just working on anyway even if it never turns into a business - I'm just that interested in it. Consulting is still there to pay the bills.

Good luck!

abstractbillon Soylent Campaign

It's a great example. Cars started out needing much more maintenance than they do now, but they're steadily getting better, and so should food.

abstractbillon Soylent Campaign

Hear hear.

I resent having to frequently stop what I'm doing - what I'm really excited about - to spend time attending to the endless whining of my body. And I resent even more the things my body does if I don't give in and feed it perfectly every damn time (so far, gastric ulcers and frequent heartburn). Food currently sucks. It could be so much better. It could "just work".

I'm also in for $65.

abstractbillon Hacker News is depressing

It seems like there are some more subtle ways of doing it though. If Dave had a mechanism for proving to HN that he was the owner of a particular URL (e.g. by adding something to its html), then perhaps he could tell HN what to do with that url: Don't allow links to it at all; Link, but don't have a comment thread, etc.

Come to think of it, if it was successful this could be generalized to a mechanism that all forums could be expected to support, just like search engines are supposed to honor robots.txt

abstractbillon Is this what it’s supposed to feel like?

Out of every startup advertising jobs right now, I think 500friends gets this better than anyone else: They simply acknowledge that their best hires are likely to want to start something of their own, and actually offer to fund it: http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/10/founders-beware-500friends...

abstractbillon Soylent Month Three

You don't need big muscles to pick fruits and vegetables though, just endurance (I've done it for a couple of summers as a job).

abstractbillon Soylent Month Three

Well, he's making something people want; I'm an existence proof, as are a few other commenters on this thread.

abstractbillon Soylent Month Three

The implicit "by hand" was pretty obvious to me, fwiw. I don't think that assertion is disconnected from reality at all.

abstractbillon Caught in the System, Ex-Hacker Is Stalked by His Past

Yes, absolutely. After we're "done" fixing gay rights (because it's hard to get everyone behind more than one thing at a time), there's a very strong case that we need to fix felons' rights.

abstractbillon Grad Student Who Took Down Reinhart and Rogoff Explains Why They're Wrong

CRUD is often used as a pejorative though.

abstractbillon Salary at Venture-Backed Companies

Absolutely agreed, and I've been on both sides of the table. I even had another manager argue with me that we should push extra hard on offering the lowest possible compensation we could get away with, so that we could be sure of only hiring people who were "really desperate to work for our company". Sigh.

abstractbillon Co-founder breakups

A good co-founding relationship has much in common with a good marriage. Think of the output as being a happy family life. You can create that all by yourself, by adopting one or more children as a single parent. But it'll most likely be a lot harder than if you find a good partner.

abstractbillon Founders: You don't own your employees

...otherwise there's no 100% commitment to your project.

If you want employees to be 100% committed, you'll have to stop thinking of it as "your" project.

abstractbillon Ask HN: Why would a government have created bitcoin?

1. You haven't worked in government. Their code is worse than Yahoo! or virtually any startup. Bitcoin isn't.

I bet the NSA and NASA both write code that's orders of magnitude better than anything Yahoo does, just to pick two counterexamples.