Hacker News Reader

chaosmachineon Show HN: I'll help you name your next startup/product for $50

I own PerfectAlias.com as well, but I felt StartupGods.com was more brandable, and would capture the attention of my target audience.

chaosmachineon Show HN: I'll help you name your next startup/product for $50

It was $20 for the first 7 customers, I've bumped it up to a more realistic $50 now.

chaosmachineon Show HN: I'll help you name your next startup/product for $50

Thanks, you're right, I've increased the price to $50 for new orders.

chaosmachineon Show HN: I'll help you name your next startup/product for $50

I do. Dot com availability is one of the major items on my checklist.

chaosmachineon Show HN: I'll help you name your next startup/product for $50

This is a weekend project of mine. It's an idea I had after seeing so many comments here about the lack of available .com names for startups.

As PG once said: "Take a luxury and make it into a commodity"[1]. So, I decided I'd try turning name consulting from something only large corporations could afford to something anyone could. I hope you'll take me up on it :)

If you'd like to see a few examples of my work, just check out the links in the site's footer.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

chaosmachineon [dead]

1. I'm more concerned about not getting any customers than I am about dishonest ones. I'd rather give people the benefit of the doubt. So, to answer your question, I don't register the names.

2. You can see a few of my other projects in the footer links, but obviously I'm just getting started, and gaining trust is the hard part. Hence the risk-free guarantee.

chaosmachineon Doom now playable on a TI-Nspire calculator

The Nspire is actually pretty powerful compared to the 6mhz z80 TI-8X's many of us grew up with.

It's running an ARM 9 CPU at 150 MHz and has 32MB of SDRAM.

chaosmachineon The Boy Who Stole Half-Life 2

I was in a similar position once, many years ago, in the early days of the web. I had managed to get parts of the source code to a popular online game (no real hacking here, they left a tarball in an open directory I stumbled upon), and being a foolish young kid, I decided to brag about my insider knowledge of unfinished features on a website. A few weeks later, the company contacted me with a job offer... they just needed my name and address to start sending me checks. Fortunately, I wasn't that dumb.

chaosmachineon 634 Diggs, 17 comments, and 100 comment upvotes for Viagra

That's an impressive number of fake accounts. Here's a permanent screenshot:

http://i.imgur.com/yHtLy.png

I wonder if they're using some kind of blackhat technique to trick regular users into upvoting it.

chaosmachineon The real HTML5 boilerplate

Except the highest level (h1 in this case).

http://html5doctor.com/the-hgroup-element/

chaosmachineon The real HTML5 boilerplate

PS: Here's a really simple HTML5 template I found useful: http://codesnipp.it/code/1513

chaosmachineon Poll: Which S/N improvements do you think would most improve HN?

I've been here close to 1000 days now. I've seen a lot of online communities get popular and lose what made them special, but so far, HN has been remarkably resilient in the face of serious growth.

HN has a lot going for it. The sparse look and scary name keep out most of the undesirables. It's hard to turn a place called "Hacker News" into yet another funny cat pictures board.

Looking at the front page right now, I'd say things are still very much on topic: Collision detection, hash tables, Amazon S3, C++ style guide, etc, etc... Sure there's a couple lame Techcrunch articles, and maybe a bit of current events, but if you go back and look, those things have always made the front page in limited numbers.

If there's one thing I'd do, it's make the "new" page time-based, instead of strictly limited to 30 items. Everything should get an hour to percolate before being pushed to page 2.

chaosmachineon Poll: Have you ever clicked the wrong upvote/downvote arrow?

Reddit has an appropriate solution: you can unclick the arrow.

chaosmachineon If Libya Shuts Down the Internet, What Happens To .ly Domains?

"most two-word combinations are taken by squatters"

Not true. Spend a few minutes playing with this: http://impossibility.org/

chaosmachineon How reddit became reddit - the biggest smallest community online

Is that floating Posterous bar[1] on the bottom of the page new? Geocities used to do the exact same thing...

[1] http://i.imgur.com/3JFeq.png

chaosmachineon How I made an HDTV antenna so I could watch Jeopardy last night

South end of Ottawa :)

chaosmachineon How I made an HDTV antenna so I could watch Jeopardy last night

1. Basically, I just wanted something I could wind a length of wire around and stick in my window. The tube did the trick. After the show, I tried a few other things, like wrapping the tube with tinfoil, but the basic wire around the tube design performed best.

2. The shielding is there to keep signal interference out, which is useful if you have a clean source to start with (ie: Cable TV or a properly designed antenna). In my case, I just wanted to pick up as much signal as possible, and this is what I had to work with.

chaosmachineon How I made an HDTV antenna so I could watch Jeopardy last night

Sure: http://i.imgur.com/jOiWI.jpg

chaosmachineon Day 1: IBM Watson Ties for first on Jeopardy

You're right, my mistake, it was 1080i.

chaosmachineon Day 1: IBM Watson Ties for first on Jeopardy

Thanks, I just wrote it up and took some pictures:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2222827

chaosmachineon Day 1: IBM Watson Ties for first on Jeopardy

After not being able to find a suitable online stream of this event (I don't have cable), I gave up and built a rudimentary antenna for my TV. Basically, I just wound a bunch of copper wire around a piece of cardboard and stuck it in the window. The other end of the wire went into the cable port on the back of my TV. Surprisingly, I was able to pick up the game in crystal clear, digital 1080p!

chaosmachineon IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

Is there somewhere to watch this online?

chaosmachineon Ask HN: In what scenarios use of node.js can be useful?

I use node.js to power my domain name generator:

http://impossibility.org/

It runs queries against a pool of lookup servers and aggregates/returns the results in real time. I'm also using it as a fast, low footprint HTTP server.

chaosmachineon Ask HN: Do you know Photoshop?

Layer styles are an incredibly underrated feature, IMO.

I actually built a small business around them: http://photoshoplayerstyles.com/

chaosmachineon How Angry Birds really took off: 200m minutes a day spent playing it

Artillery games go back a long, long way:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game

Anyone who grew up with DOS probably remembers Gorillas.BAS and Scorched Earth. These new games aren't much different.

In fact, aiming a projectile at a target is probably the oldest game in human history:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870377970457607...

chaosmachineon Google uses accelerometer API in Jules Verne Google Doodle

It would be interesting to log this data, and try to figure out how many users are leaning back, in a car, etc. I wonder what kind of patterns you'd see.

chaosmachineon Why do programmers write apps and then make them free

Nothing wrong with releasing free software, but if you're going to use it as a promotional vehicle, promote stuff that makes you money while you sleep (paid software), not stuff that eats your free time (consulting).

chaosmachineon Why do programmers write apps and then make them free

"Releasing free apps and working on open source programs are great advertisements for selling a product, namely you. (Alternatively phrased: free apps are a loss leader for selling your time.)"

This seems like a really backwards approach. If you can code, create a few good paid apps and start generating passive income. Then you'll no longer need to sell your time at all.

chaosmachineon .42: new experimental, all numeric top-level domain

I can only imagine how many regexes this will break.

chaosmachineon As HN: Startup name — dot com or not dot com?

"As everyone knows, it is incredibly difficult to get a good .com name."

I actually wrote a tool to solve this problem (it finds short, available .coms using real words):

http://impossibility.org/

Ironically, it's a .org :)

Basically, the reason you want a .com is so people will know you're a website. It's instantly parsable. "I work for Shoes.com" vs "I work for Shoe.ly... it's a website that sells shoes". It greatly simplifies advertising, press coverage, word of mouth, etc.