Hacker News Reader

chaudon Dreaming of a Linux Ultrabook? Meet the New ZaReason UltraLap 430

Sure, but other windows ultrabooks will do 8 to 11 hours of battery life. Unless I really want Linux, or don't need battery life, there is no reason to buy this. Even the MBP has slightly better battery life.

chaudon Dreaming of a Linux Ultrabook? Meet the New ZaReason UltraLap 430

Up to 6 hours of battery life does not seem fitting for a new Ultrabook.

chaudon Prepaid Cellphones Are Cheaper. Why Aren't They Popular?

"T-Mobile and Sprint can give good deals but have really patchy coverage"

I am using Boost (Sprint network) and it doesn't seem to roam. Using only Sprint towers, I get one or two bars in most places and drop off of 3G along one segment of my commute. Well worth it though for how little I use it outside of areas with Wifi.

chaudon Show HN: Use DuckDuckGo for !bangs and Google for everything else

Less of the low quality sites, but I would expect one of these URLs to be on the first page:

1) http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/2806-Mists-of-Pandaria-B...

2) http://www.wowhead.com/news=204099/mists-of-pandarias-first-...

3) http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/05/25/mists-of-pandaria-new-wrat...

It does better (at least as far as the first result or two go) when you don't have to guess the acronym though:

1) https://blekko.com/ws/tier+14+sets+%2B%2Fwow

2) https://blekko.com/ws/challenge+mode+sets+%2B%2Fwow

For more standard searches it is okay, but DDG/Bing and Google are better. In these results I especially like potstuck and fabien potencier posts.

1) https://duckduckgo.com/?q=php+dependency+injection+container...

2) https://blekko.com/ws/php+dependency+injection+container+exa...

3) https://www.google.com/#hl=en&safe=off&sclient=psy-a...

It is nice to see alternatives developing though, should the day ever come that I want to leave Google behind!

chaudon Bitcoin price soars 40% in the last month

I can't think of anything legal that would net you 7% a week in a remotely safe manner. He has been going for a while now and only recently reduced his interest rates, so it may go on until there aren't enough new people signing up anymore.

I got in before the spike last summer and sold on the way down, netting some free hardware and USD, so I put what was left from that in. Worst case, I lose money that I earned through luck. Best case, new computer hardware!

chaudon Bitcoin price soars 40% in the last month

You can go to several banks, Wal-Mart, CVS, 7-11, and other places and buy them, albeit indirectly: https://www.bitinstant.com/home

chaudon Bitcoin price soars 40% in the last month

I would imagine it also has something to do with the guy that has been paying people 7% interest per week to hold on to their bitcoins: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=50822

chaudon Show HN: Use DuckDuckGo for !bangs and Google for everything else

When I search for something on DDG, I generally find one or two good results somewhere in the first set and all the rest are spammy/junk sites that repost content from other larger sites or just poor quality results.

DDG also doesn't understand context or acronyms, like MoP. I work for a gaming site, so my example is gaming related.

Google knows when I search for "mop legendary" I am looking for information relating to a legendary item in the Mists of Pandaria expansion for World of Warcraft. DDG doesn't make that connection of MoP -> Mists of Pandaria. I do get some amusing results like this though: http://www.buy.com/th/swiss-legend-diamond-mop.html

chaudon City of San Francisco Will No Longer Buy Apple Products

Discussion from this afternoon: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4225338

chaudon The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir. [pdf]

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4179982

chaudon Ask HN: Where Can I Find an API for Hardware Benchmarks?

I don't know of one, and doubt one exists, but I would love for someone to show me that I am wrong.

If you just want to do the occasional comparison, AnandTech has a great Bench page: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/2

chaudon Show HN: Bubbles - An option for people who don't want to write emails.

It looks like LinkedIn plus fancier messaging.

I can't imagine a case where I would prefer to open a PDF from an email or go to another site rather than directly read an email though.

chaudon Show HN: Bubbles - An option for people who don't want to write emails.

The pricing page needs larger prices. It took me a few seconds to actually locate the price for each plan. The titles / list of what you get at each price point don't fit the site style and are not pleasing to read because of the font / all caps.

chaudon Google offering consumer surveys

They announced this in April: http://googlesmb.blogspot.com/2012/03/fast-accurate-and-affo...

chaudon An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs

How heavily were you using the laptop? Did it fail from running out of write cycles or something else?

Some people over on xtremesystems have done Endurance testing, and the 64 GB m4 took over 700TB of writing to for failure to occur, and 172 TB to reduce the MWI to 0.

In a little over a year I have only written 4.1TB to my SSD in my desktop. Write cycles are very unlikely to run out for me before I replace the drive.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SS...

chaudon Not in Our Genes

If you don't have a background in this area and are interested in learning a little more about epigenetics, there is a good NOVA program on it: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/genes/

chaudon Real Life UX: Returning Items to Amazon Makes Me Smile

Compare their site to Newegg for purchasing computer hardware. Newegg's filtering system blows Amazon's away, making it possible to easily find what you are looking for.

Amazon likes to give me similar hardware when I search for a part, cluttering up the results with things I don't want. If I search for a 7850 GPU, I don't want results for a 6950, 7950, 6870, 7770, 7870, Intel 3570K CPU, GTX 670, Intel 2500K CPU, GTX 480, 6850, GTX 560 Ti, and GTX 560. That was all just on the first page of search results.

Granted, you do want similar products in other cases, but the same kind of failure applies elsewhere.

Another annoying thing is the duplicate items as separate listings. Sometimes I will go and look for something like a Water Filter replacement and find 3 or 4 different listings for the product with multiple sellers under each.

Using Amazon to find a specific product is an unpleasant experience. Thankfully once you find the product you are looking for everything else is great.

chaudon Refill cartridges cost more than a new (fully loaded) printer

You can buy a decent Brother monochrome laser printer (auto duplex, wireless, and wired networking) for ~$60-80 on sale and the generic toner for $10-20 for 2,600 pages.

For most people this is a far better option than buying the Brother brand toner. Worst case, it ruins the printer and you buy another one for that $50! I have had great success with the generic toner so far, nothing ruined or leaky yet.

chaudon Anti-Piracy Boss: TV Fans Are Unreasonable For Wanting Content Quicker

I'm not sure that was the case: http://dcurt.is/hbo-forbes-journalism

chaudon Hunting Down My Son's Killer

Fair enough, but who is to say those tools wouldn't have been developed if those people were doing bioinformatics research instead.

It is frustrating seeing all of the failed startups that thought their poorly thought out plan and execution would create a product that is actually useful. We would be much better off if someone would take the time to explain to people why their idea sucks and save them the time and money that would be wasted on executing it.

chaudon Hunting Down My Son's Killer

Sure, go in to bioinformatics research. You might even end up doing something that benefits humanity more than trying to make the next Facebook! Data is piling up faster than we know what to do with it.

There are a lot of problems to be solved that might benefit from computer science. De novo Protein structure and function prediction, better alignment from noisy data, drug target discovery, homology modeling in the twilight zone, better ways to share the data that we do have, better databases to store the data from high-throughput experiments, better ways to compare pathways and biochemical networks, and all of the other things that I could go on to list.

There is no shortage of problems to be solved, only shortages of good people and funding.

chaudon Ask HN: Why does page 2 of HN have discussions from 2 years ago?

Only on HN will people think a bug that has appeared several times is an unannounced feature.

chaudon Diablo 3 bug report: "Passwords not case-sensitive."

The game clients will lock an account out after ~20 or 30 attempts and I assume the website will do the same. No one is going to brute force an account.

chaudon Getting Real book is now free PDF

I assumed they didn't want people linking the download directly, so they were sending out personalized links. Apparently I assumed wrong!

chaudon IPhone Will Fail in a Late, Defensive Move (2007)

He is a financial journalist, not tech. He has a MarketWatch column now: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-bundesbank-will-stamp-o...

chaudon Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers

They still have the upcoming Titan game and another unannounced game that they are hiring for.

chaudon FireFox heading for 15% market share?

Automatic add-on compatibility went in with Firefox 10 and Silent updates will be here in the next few versions. Memshrink and Snappy and making significant progress towards the leaking. Work is being done to make it easier to identify which add-ons are leaking (Firebug is!).

I am using Aurora now and Netbeans and my IM client are using more memory than Firefox. Many of the problems from the past are gone now.

chaudon Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (January 2012)

Huntsville, AL - Curse

• .NET Team Manager

• .NET Web Developer

• PHP Web Developer

• Senior System Administrator

http://www.curse.com/jobs

Curse is one of the largest gaming-information properties worldwide, attracting more than 14 million unique visitors a month. Curse's mission is to provide information and tools to help core gamers succeed in online worlds.

chaudon Announcing Firefox Aurora 10

Take a look at Brian's blog post that goes through what is coming on this front: http://www.brianbondy.com/blog/id/125/

chaudon Demystifying Windows 8′s changes, additions, and features

Has anyone come across any benchmarks as far as battery life or performance go yet? I know benchmark3d has been including the leaked versions in their game benchmarks.

http://benchmark3d.com/benchmarks