Hacker News Reader

crayzon 500k Bitcoins traded in 1h, Mt.Gox market hacked + crash

That's about 7% of the total number of bitcoins in circulation. Anyone have details on how this happened?

crayzon I Don't Want to be a Teacher Any More

Why is this seemingly not true in other western countries where they have cheaper, better-functioning public institutions? I think there's truth in what you're saying, but the idea that government itself is the sole problem is far too simple an answer

crayzon Physicists Discover Quantum Law Of Protein Folding

The idea that the mind is some sort of insanely complex, naturally evolved quantum computer is becoming increasingly credible

crayzon Google Maps for Mobile 5 unveiled, adds dynamic map drawing and offline mode

Wouldn't it be feasible to make an iPhone google map app that included a map caching tile server for offline mode?

crayzon Rethinking the scientific method

I downloaded it by signing up for a free account, and it's littered with their ads

crayzon Rethinking the scientific method

Here's a PDF of the full article: http://crayz.org/science.pdf

crayzon Bizarre sea slug is half plant, half animal

Right. If the genes were giving the snail sores, we'd call it a virus. Perception is reality

crayzon There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it

This is really a straw man argument. If you go read Drexler's blog(e.g. this series: http://metamodern.com/2009/12/19/molecular-manufacturing-whe...), he is very explicit that the path forward is studying natural self-assembly from DNA and then tearing that apart, finding how it works, and modularizing/modifying it for our own purposes. None of this appears to be a "crazy idea" or something out of humanity's reach til long after we're all dead, as this author claims

Drexler's egotistical to be sure. It doesn't make him wrong

crayzon Not another CSS Framework (CSS Layouts that always work)

Have you seen: http://github.com/chriseppstein/compass-960-plugin

crayzon Hey, Guys, It's Totally Okay If You Don't Get Rich

Exactly. Reading a comment right next to yours, "Are lower expectations supposed to be a good thing?". It's become ingrained in Western and especially American culture that money is one of if not the most important measure for judging success. We don't all see each others paychecks and bank account balances, so this manifests in various ways from wanting prestige jobs to conspicuous consumption

People need to ask themselves - what do I want out of life? What are my personal measures for success, that I can explain and justify to myself based on my beliefs. Instead almost everyone simply avoids thinking on that level and instead absorbs and adopts the measurements promoted by society

It's not that making money is bad. It's that far too many people blindly focus on making and spending money without considering the amount of time and sanity and other opportunities for living that's being consumed by their consumerism

crayzon [dead]

Why don't you just upload everything to github and let the best man (team) win?

crayzon Why I Like Ruby

Actually the ruby would just be "if myvariable" - I think it's more readable simply because it expresses the minimalist core of what that line of code is doing. I could also use Blub and say "IfConditionIsTrue(myVariable.booleanValueOfNullStatus())"

Yes, you're right that my mental model of the 'if' construct will be basically the same in any language, but it's fundamentally less work and less error prone for me to translate ruby than some other language into that model, and the same is true going the other direction

crayzon Ruby and .Net Developers solve two different kinds of problems

If a person doesn't understand the value of intellesense, they're not doing it right

I think the argument against a full-blown IDE which optimizes code-writing is, if it's possible for an IDE to make your code easier to read or write, why isn't it possible to simply improve the programming language itself to make the code easier to read or write? Some sort of automated code translation/compression/generation is improving the coding experience for you, the developer. So why can't that improvement be baked into your compiler/parser/libraries, so the program's code reflects that improvement regardless of the tool you use to view it?

crayzon Ruby and .Net Developers solve two different kinds of problems

I think the larger misconception he has is that Ruby developers solve the same kinds of problems as .Net developers. They don’t. Not even kinda.... In general, Ruby developers create small to medium size websites ... On the other hand, .Net developers create a lot of large scale enterprise applications.

OK, so what are some of the .NET enterprise applications that are too complex to be built in Ruby - or at least are better built in .NET?

crayzon Meditation: Why Bother?

I like my emotions goddammit, and this essay left me flustered and angry!

So this essay enabled you two experience two of your emotions, you must have enjoyed it

crayzon Meditation: Why Bother?

When he says they're 'faking' it, it's the wrong word. I would say more that in a meditative mindset, the cognitive dissonance and sheer mental noise most people are dealing with on a minute-by-minute basis becomes very apparent

Until you've been able to get your own mind to quiet down, to get rid of the nagging voices and tugging emotions and distorting filters in your head, it's very very difficult to notice this

If you've never experienced this sort of total perspective shift, I recommend that you read a bit more and reconsider your objections. Meditation is not about freezing to death in a cave

crayzon Our greatest shortcoming is our inability to understand the exponential function

We have the technology, the entire country has been geographically analyzed...

The entire country of Africa?

crayzon Rails 3 jQuery Setup Script

This would probably be better done as a template, but nice job

crayzon Ask HN: Feedback on a "weekend project" - funny Amazon reviews

Yeah, I'm aware this is a bit of a problem, but it seems an inescapable aspect of the format (maybe I'm just not thinking creatively enough about UI, though)

Anyhow, thanks for the feedback. This was sort of a trial run for shaking off my coding rust :)

crayzon Ask HN: Feedback on a "weekend project" - funny Amazon reviews

I whipped up a site to collect all the best funny/parody Amazon reviews. There seems to be something of an ad hoc community who've been posting parody, facetious or just plain caustic reviews on Amazon for years, and it seemed worth gathering them up in one place (with some basic voting/commenting/etc). And of course, hopefully make a few bucks off referral links

I'd be happy to hear some feedback, positive and negative, from HN people. Thanks

crayzon Apple’s Secret Cloud Strategy And Why Lala Is Critical

Would Apple actually store individual copies of each song, or would they use compression at some level so that if two users uploaded an identical MP3 rip of a song, it would "compress" down to only one copy on their servers?

Would it even be legal to swap one MP3 rip of a song for another(e.g. "upgrade" everyone to the 320kbps iTunes rip), assuming the source material was the same?

crayzon [dead]

Wow, way to fuck up the headline

No rise in the atmospheric fraction of CO2 - i.e. as we add more, carbon sinks are continuing to pull the same percentage out of the atmosphere as they did previously, according to this new study

The total amount in the atmosphere is still skyrocketing and many scientists question how long the oceans can continue absorbing the CO2(which is causing them to acidify)

crayzon [dead]

If you didn't get that it was tongue-in-cheek by the "Build Quality" category, you have no sense of humor

That was pretty over the top sarcasm, but still fairly amusing. I like that the Nexus One won only the eBook category

crayzon A Haml-inspired mini-language for jQuery: Jabs

And ruby's manifest destiny continues

Your current language is too ugly or verbose? There's a ruby DSL for that

crayzon Apple's Mistake

As Moore's law marches on, it's inevitable that the computing power needed by Joe Sixpack will fit into smaller and smaller packages. The rise of the desktop, then laptop, now netbook. Each iteration takes less time than the previous one. That asymptote will soon - a few years at the outside - hit the iPhone/PDA form factor

Apple must understand this, and they can't possibly believe they'll be allowed to maintain this sort of dictatorial control over people's primary general computing platform

crayzon For Hackers Who Don't Sleep

Well, try an experiment. Find a time of day when you are alert and well-rested, and lay still in your bed with no external entertainment for eight hours

I'm not saying the idea is correct, but your argument is sorely lacking in plausibility - creatures with complex nervous systems get bored staying still unless they lose consciousness (and actually, we spend a lot of sleep with our brains still active in dream-world). If evolution "wanted" to come up with a way to keep animals out of trouble for the part of the day they'd be vulnerable, sleep might be a reasonable and generic way of doing so

crayzon For Hackers Who Don't Sleep

Yes. I've been training for long-distance cycling for about a month, and did at least 8-10 hours total last week. Although a strenuous workout will generally get me asleep sooner (and for longer) than normal on the day I do it, it doesn't seem to have any permanent effect on my sleep patterns (I'm a serious night person - I like to stay up until it starts getting light out - and seem to have a natural 25/26 hour circadian rhythm)

crayzon Ask YC: Where are the open source consumer web apps?

Scoop, the software behind Kuro5hin and later DailyKos and many other 'community' social blog/news sites

crayzon Poll: Is your webapp running on an OS that is virtualized or bare metal?

Virtualized, Xen - the RH Xen tools seem less than polished, but it still beats bare metal by a long shot

crayzon For Scientists, a Beer Test Shows Results as a Litmus Test

So, it documents a correlation without explaining it, so maybe there is no correlation. You cann't take two facts and say there is a correlation, may be it simply a coincidence.

Huh? Did you read past the headline? Listen:

The results were not, however, a matter of a few scientists having had too many brews to be able to stumble back to the lab. Publication did not simply drop off among the heaviest drinkers. Instead, scientific performance steadily declined with increasing beer consumption across the board, from scientists who primly sip at two or three beers over a year to the sort who average knocking back more than two a day.

That's not "two facts" - it's a direct correlation between two variables. One may not cause the other, but it certainly doesn't appear to be a complete coincidence