Hacker News Reader

The site is slow to load for me, but here is the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJagxe-Gvpw

Also, this is pretty funny, and seems like it could be the same guy: http://kippo.rpg.fi/playlog/?l=20100316-233121-1847.log

chaosmachineon Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results—and denies it

I didn't say you did, Matt. It seems like my post is being misinterpreted, so I'll try to clarify: The parent post was concerned about "the privacy bit". What I'm pointing out is that the same information (search terms in the referrer) is captured by Google Analytics (and by Apache logs, and by advertisers, and by Facebook via "like" buttons, etc, etc). From a privacy standpoint, there's nothing particularly new going on here, IMO.

chaosmachineon Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results—and denies it

The thing is, Google monitors which search results you click, too. Bing's toolbar just does it via browser integration.

Google can and does track clicks from Bing via Google Analytics. Every time you click a result on Bing and land on a page using Google Analytics, Google knows about it, and they record your Bing search terms from the referrer. The same is probably true for pages with Google ads.

chaosmachineon Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results—and denies it

Will any Bing users suddenly switch to Google because of this? Probably not. Will people who've never heard of Bing be reading about them in the paper tomorrow? Yes. Will complaining about competition from underdogs make Google look bad to some? Yes.

I don't see how making this a public issue is a win for Google. Seems like something they should have kept in their back pocket. "Keep your enemies closer", as they say.

chaosmachineon Official Google Research Blog: Julia meets HTML 5

I keep zooming in, but it's just more of the same...

chaosmachineon Intel Recalls Sandy Bridge Chipset

It seems like this could really hurt the PC market. A lot of people were holding off buying a new system, because the advice for the last 6 months was "wait for Sandy Bridge". Now all those new systems are being recalled...

chaosmachineon Steve Jobs: Playboy Interview (1985)

JOBS: The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We're just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people—as remarkable as the telephone.

PLAYBOY: Specifically, what kind of breakthrough are you talking about?

JOBS: I can only begin to speculate. We see that a lot in our industry: You don't know exactly what's going to result, but you know it's something very big and very good.

chaosmachineon $3 million machine learning prize

"The winning algorithm will be able to predict patients at risk for an unplanned hospital admission with a high rate of accuracy."

Algorithm says no insurance for you.

chaosmachineon Google algorithm change launched

This is a situation I've seen many times in the past. Often the right site is on top, but it's showing the wrong result, meanwhile the scraper site surfaces the correct one.

It seems like just showing a few more results from the "real" site would solve the problem.

chaosmachineon Kinect is fastest-selling consumer electronics device in history

Furbies go anywhere. No one's kid is dragging their Kinect around with them.

chaosmachineon (Literally) Drawing the HTML 5 Logo in Canvas with Javascript

Click the redraw button a bunch of times while it's still drawing for an interesting effect.

chaosmachineon 24 Gigabytes of Memory Ought to be Enough for Anybody

$299 for 24 gigs of ram is ridiculous. I thought for sure that had to be the per-stick price, or something. Prices sure have dropped a lot since the last time I built a system.

chaosmachineon Testing of Tesla Model S

Close enough? http://i.imgur.com/e1zNY.jpg

chaosmachineon How I Found a Co-Founder, Built a Prototype, and Raised $5M in Less Than 4 Weeks

Well, it matches pretty closely with some of the other patterns it spits out:

"How I Closed My First Round of Financing In Less than a Week Using Only Ten Lines of Code"

chaosmachineon Tarsnap critical security bug

"if you roll your own crypto, and it breaks, you will look incompetent." - tptacek to cperciva, 313 days ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1183757

(not that I know anything about crypto)

chaosmachineon How I Found a Co-Founder, Built a Prototype, and Raised $5M in Less Than 4 Weeks

I thought for sure this was a joke headline from DanielBMarkham's linkbait generator: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2112277

chaosmachineon Threewords.me is up for private auction

Actual "directly measured" data:

http://www.quantcast.com/threewords.me

chaosmachineon A world without advertising

There are lots of ways to advertise that don't resemble cold calling, spam, or banner ads. Probably the simplest is article writing.

Write about a problem your customers have, and explain how your product can solve it. Write about a subject popular with your target audience and bring your product into the story (or just stick in a promo paragraph at the end).

If you write well and have a good product, people will find you, and they will tell their friends.

chaosmachineon Who is Using Node.js And Why? Yammer, Bocoup, Proxlet and Yahoo

I use it for my domain name generator: http://impossibility.org/

162k searches and counting :)

chaosmachineon Silk — Three Days Later

"Astonishingly, it has become one of the most-upvoted submissions of all time to Hacker News."

3 of the top 5 "most-upvoted submissions of all time" are from the last three days:

http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=500

It looks like there's been some significant growth in the number of voting users recently. If you check the top 10, nine of them are from the last month.

chaosmachineon How I Made My First 100 Sales

Several months. I probably spent too much time on the product, and not enough on the site. I originally launched with just the wood and marble styles, the metal and glass ones came later. I'm still not done, I have a bunch of other style packs in development.

chaosmachineon How I Made My First 100 Sales

"Here's some bland white text on a black background in photoshop."

I actually do have a page exactly like that: http://photoshoplayerstyles.com/tutorials

It's the "support" link in the main menu. It used to be labeled "tutorials", but I found it was distracting visitors and not helping sales. It's definitely something I should revisit.

chaosmachineon How I Made My First 100 Sales

About 4 months. I didn't sell anything the first couple weeks, which was a little scary. The Drupal.org case study really kicked things off, and it's been steady since.

chaosmachineon How I Made My First 100 Sales

Can you give me some ideas of examples you'd like to see? Something like this?

http://photoshoplayerstyles.com/silver-layer-styles

chaosmachineon How I Made My First 100 Sales

They don't, but their cut is even more obscene if you aren't willing to do it.

chaosmachineon How I Made My First 100 Sales

This is a follow-up to my launch post from a few months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1589320

chaosmachineon [dead]

Let me save you eight clicks:

Laser guns, moving 3d holograms, levitation, hoverboards, mind reading machines, teleportation, invisibility cloaks, commercial jetpacks.

Most of these are kinda-sorta technologies that don't really do what you expect, anyway.

chaosmachineon Wikipedia Raises $16 Million to Remain Ad-Free

They could definitely make a killing with just a single AdSense block at the bottom of every article. Maybe even just the top 1000 articles.

Instead, we get places like Answers.com mass-duplicating Wikipedia content and slapping big image ads on it.

chaosmachineon "Space Jam" movie website, untouched since 1996

You're not missing much:

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

You press enter and it 'shoots' the ball at the net. That's it. No aiming, no strength meter, etc. Those things jump back and forth in front of the net, but whether your ball actually goes in or not seems entirely random. And the animation is the same either way. Your only clue as to success or failure is a "yay" or "boo" sound effect.

All in all, it may be the worst game ever made.

chaosmachineon Ask HN: What has progressed in your field in 2010?

For me, it's Node.JS. Most useful new tool since jQuery. I wrote a domain name generator with it a couple months ago:

http://impossibility.org/

It handled simultaneous Reddit and HN front page traffic without any problem. I'm pretty sure server load never passed 10%. The script ran for more than a month straight and performed 120k+ searches without crashing.

Considering the first Node.JS release was only 18 months old, it's amazingly stable and scalable.