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akronimon Login to your Google account by scanning a QR code

If I was writing one I'd just be logging posted form fields with a transparent proxy, almost seems easier than a key logger.

akronimon What really happened aboard Air France 447

If you want to get into root cause analysis, it sounds like the incorrect radar setting got them in the situation in the first place. Obviously the way the pilots dealt with that situation from then on was suboptimal, but avoiding situations where there is a chance for bad decision making is also important.

akronimon Ask HN: good, quick algorithms course to prepare for big tech interviews?

If you can't remember merge sort, quick sort or heaps, a easy starting point is wikipedia, and then code them up in your language of choice. It shouldn't take long, and you'll learn it better by doing than by reading about it.

akronimon Why Leo Apotheker will be fired from Hewlett Packard (February 2011)

Is it worth having service contracts if you have thousands of machines? I would have thought it's analogous to car hire companies not having insurance on their cars (because with enough cars the distribution of accident costs evens out)

akronimon How Linux mastered Wall Street

If you read the article you'll see it's talking about exchanges, not those trading with them.

akronimon Xkcd Password Generator

given how prone people are to mis-hearing song lyrics, the corpus isn't the full text of all published song lyrics as you suggest.

akronimon Bootstrapping an Ultra Low Latency Trading Firm, Part 3.1

I get a login screen from that link...

akronimon Ask HN: Why are patents transferable?

    Why are patents transferable beyond the original creator?

This allows the creator to benefit in the case they can't personally exploit their work. If I invent some CPU fabrication process, I won't have the capital to invest to realize it and benefit - but maybe I can sell it to someone who can, which means the invention is actually used, and also I get some benefit.

    why wouldn't a patent become public domain once the creator dies

What if the patent is a joint creation, or created while working for a company, i.e. the company owns it?

akronimon Bootstrapping an Ultra Low Latency Trading Firm, Part 3

Is interactive brokers actually fast enough? Or do you really need colocation? (for these types of strategy)

akronimon Why I'd never work for Google, Twitter, or Facebook

or in comic form, http://xkcd.com/192/

akronimon Why I'd never work for Google, Twitter, or Facebook

Assuming the government is still going to fund a TV station, not having a license for BBC would just mean it was funded out of general taxation revenue. Having a license system or not is irrelevant, it's still being funded by taxation either ay.

akronimon Was Steve Yegge Right?

But when those students arrive at Big Corp they're most likely to be issued a PC laptop. A more interesting stat would be the market share of purchases where the person paying is the person who'll use the machine.

akronimon I tried DomainPolish. Here are the results

Is this different at all to feedback army? (http://www.feedbackarmy.com/)

akronimon Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM [video]

The issue they have doesn't seem to be scaling, in that RoR is scaling linearly. But if you have hundreds of machines, raw performance saves real money, which means RoR is maybe not ideal for massive deployments and the JVM languages give you more performance on the same hardware. Though unless you're working on a top 50 site I wouldn't worry so much.

akronimon Ask HN: Can there be another gmail?

Do you have to offer migration initially? I don't think it's something that every service has launched with. And there's a steady stream of new email users every year.

A few non-techy people have asked me if there are email services that don't read your email for contextual ads, and they would be willing to pay. So I think there's a market there, albeit a smaller one that the free email provider one.

akronimon What happened to all the female developers?

If you work at a bank there's a good chance you'll next laid off en masse as soon when there's a really bad year.

akronimon Google Deletes Last 7 Years Of User's Digital Life, Shrugs

Actually the domain you own is almost certainly firstname.lastname.name, but the email is setup so firstname@lastname.name works. It's particular to the .name TLD.

akronimon Greece defaults

what constitutes default will be pretty clearly defined in the contract - which is more in terms of credit "events" rather than just default. See for example the ISDA definitions: http://credit-deriv.com/isdadefinitions.htm

akronimon Why We Do Pushups

I don't think you're supposed to get fit, the benefit is more that it stops you sitting in your chair for 8 hours straight.

akronimon Why I will never pursue cheating again

isn't this why you have closed book exams?

akronimon Dear Recruiters: (a canned response to recruiting emails)

I'm surprised you have to go via recruiters? I would have thought you have enough of a name that you would get applications (if you made enough noise about hiring). Maybe having a tweet or blog post in the last 6 months saying you're hiring might be cheaper than 25% :)

akronimon Google+ Technological Details

GWT is awesome if you have a team of Java developers who aren't really web developers. You can be productive without having all the HTTP/css/javascript/html skills you would need otherwise (though you still want someone on your team who can look at the details underneath the abstraction).

But if you want something as fast and as scalable as possible, of course you can do better by working at a lower level.

akronimon Kind of Screwed

No. Once his own costs reached a limit where he had to settle, the other side would have had similar if not greater legal costs racked up. Continuing at that point is a double or nothing bet, which might make sense if the odds are in your favour (i.e. you think you'll win) and you can diversify over many such bets. But for a single individual in a single case, it's a huge risk.

akronimon Why your company should have a single email address

Just use bayesian filtering, grouping email into topics rather than ham/spam.

akronimon Twitter Shifting More Code to JVM, Citing Performance and Encapsulation

They may have very little functionality, but do it at scale. e.g. even searching tweets (which doesn't seem to work that great...) is a massive undertaking (not astoundingly little) that they're obviously still working at.

akronimon Kind of Screwed

I'm guessing he did pay.

akronimon Atlassian rivals Google as best place to work in survey

ah ok, that was quite creative journalism then. What you're describing sounds much more sensible.

akronimon Atlassian rivals Google as best place to work in survey

Last year, the company dropped staff ratings and bonuses, shifting to a flat 8% annual salary rise with monthly “coaching conversations” between managers and team members.

While I guess that's generous, it sounds almost like a public service style seniority system in effect.

akronimon 4800 Aussie sites evaporate after hack

Having backups that are accessible if you get hacked doesn't really cut it. I'm guessing there wasn't a huge amount of data involved here, and if there was a set of tapes in a safe somewhere a lot of people would be much happier right now.

Maybe this isn't viable for budget hosting. But even the host's website is unavailable, obviously that is critical for their business and it appears it itself wasn't securely backed up. And this is hardly a totally unexpected scenario, it should have come up pretty quickly in a "what could go wrong" stage of their backup planning.

akronimon Why perl has separate arrays and hashes: It's as if they thought it through

The results are random in order, but consistent between calls, so it's not all bad