Hacker News Reader

iyulaevon Are Malls Over?

Not sure how long you've lived there but the mall I think you're referring to (utc) was remodeled not long ago. The clientele in the area has gotten more upscale and the re-design and new stores (upscale restaurants, tesla, etc) reflects on this. Fwiw based on trying to go there for lunch, foot traffic has never been better.

iyulaevon No Moore? A golden rule of microchips appears to be coming to an end

Why not Gallium Nitride?

iyulaevon Copper enables the ARM server ecosystem

Bay Trail atom is already competitive with tablet-focused ARM. I've got a Samsung 500T that runs "real" windows. It weighs as much as an iPad and has ~10 hour run time, same as the iPad. The whole microarchitecture thing is less of an issue for power consumption and performance than most people think.

iyulaevon Copper enables the ARM server ecosystem

"Hitting The Market" != "there is no general availability of the Dell "Copper" servers at this time."

iyulaevon Healthcare.gov failed despite agile practices

Why don't we take the brilliant hackers and programmers at the NSA and task them to fix and re-build the ACA exchange system?

Building a database to track the communications of ever single person in the US and ever foreigner they talk to? Piece of cake.

Building a database to track the health insurance policies for a subset of Americans? Over budget, behind schedule, still doesn't really work yet.

Priorities.

iyulaevon Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

My Atom-powered Windows x86 tablet weighs 1.5 lbs (same as iPad) and gets ~10 hours of run-time. How does Windows suck at power again?

iyulaevon The San Francisco Exodus

Change isn't intrinsically bad. Change is bad when it removes characteristics of the neighborhood that caused people to move there in the first place.

Isn't this NIMBYism, just from a different demographic?

iyulaevon The San Francisco Exodus

Furthermore, unless you get stuck out multiple times a week half the rent cost still puts you way ahead.

QFT. The thousand-plus dollar difference in rent buys a heck of a lot of "I got stranded" Uber/Taxi rides.

iyulaevon A list of free programming books

Algorithms by S. Dasgupta, C.H. Papadimitriou, and U.V. Vazirani looks really promising as an introductory algorithms textbook. I wonder if anyone has experience using it in class?

We used this in our upper-division intro to algorithms course. Solid book, goes over important algorithms while remaining short and concise, A+ would read again.

iyulaevon Encouraging interviewees to say “I don’t know” improves performance

True. But generally the cost of guessing and doing something wrong is much higher than saying "I don't know" and asking someone else or Googling the result. School, through homeworks and especially exams, trains us to do our best without outside help. I would argue that this behavior is maladaptive to engineering in the real world.

iyulaevon Encouraging interviewees to say “I don’t know” improves performance

Barely. IIRC it's 0 points if blank, -0.25 if wrong, so if you eliminate 1 choice it's worth it to guess. I'd like to see it be -5 points if wrong, since this is more reflective of the real world. When I entered the industry as an electrical engineer this was a difficult transition for me. In school, you're incentivized to guess and BS. But in the real world, the penalty for being wrong is HUGE.

iyulaevon What I've been up to for the past year

Thought this at first but seems like the model is pretty different. Bandcamp sells direct and allows tons of free streaming. This service is geared towards placement in "stores" like iTunes and Amazon.

Also the community feature of bandcamp will be harder to beat.

iyulaevon ‘Sitting is the new smoking’

What about lying down? A few years ago, BBC covered a scientific study[1] showing that sitting at a 135-degree angle dramatically reduced spinal disk movement. Anecdotally, I found that this sitting position, midway between sitting and lying down, is most comfortable for prolonged periods of time. Maybe at my next workplace I'll insist that my office be fitted with a lounge chair.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6187080.stm

iyulaevon My Internship Experience as a 13-Year-Old

Agree that it will look better, and is probably a better experience. Sadly college admissions is a game, and it is risky to ignore it.

iyulaevon My Internship Experience as a 13-Year-Old

Also, a good internship will look much better on a college app than a few extra points.

Sadly, nope, unless you're applying to a high-end private school. I know the UC system doesn't care at all about your work experience, and even if you founded a company when you were in HS, that would at best be worth 150-300 SAT points.

Now that I think about it, it's scary that I still remember this.

iyulaevon 10x Engineer

Have you ever taken compilers, operating systems, or some other project-heavy class? If so I'm pretty sure you've noticed several individuals completing a project with ease while the rest of the class, working in teams, struggles with. You can visit any decent CS program, any semester, and see this happen. It's no myth.

iyulaevon Amazon’s Music Download Site is Cheaper Than iTunes 78% of the Time

Is anyone else bothered by the lack of lossless audio availability on Amazon and other music distributors? This has been a stumbling point for me. Why doesn't Amazon offer FLAC or similar? I can't imagine the bandwidth and storage requirements are beyond what they can (inexpensively) handle.

For this reason I've been really excited about bandcamp. That and it makes it really easy for (actually) independent artists to distribute their music.

iyulaevon Tim O'Reilly: How I Failed

Good observation but I disagree, to some extent. Technical books that teach low-level knowledge and technologies will always become obsolete quickly. But books that enable the reader to understand deep concepts rather than shallow technologies have a much longer half-life. This is similar to the complaint that engineering school is always "behind the technology curve" which is nonsense. You don't go to school to learn technology, instead, you learn the basis underlying it. This latter knowledge changes much more slowly. A good technical book should aim to teach the same.

iyulaevon Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

So why not have team members work shifts? Get 24 hour coverage in the office without having frazzled people making poor decisions. Besides, the people making the decisions aren't these banking interns nor the junior associates. The more junior guys and gals are, from what I understand, mostly just doing grunt work.

iyulaevon Asus' Transformer Book T100

Agree 100%. I bought a Samsung 500T under the same premise about 6 months ago. 1.5 lbs, 10 hour battery life, atom processor, and it runs "real windows". It's not as good a tablet as the iPad but it's a much better computer. Not sure what the advantage of Windows RT would be given the excellent battery life possible with x86 windows.

iyulaevon Apple Unveils The iPhone 5S

Which makes me wonder, aren't one's finger prints all over your iPhone exterior anyway. If someone steals one's phone wouldn't it be easier to dust it for prints than crack the security on the digital copy?

Ding ding ding! We have a winner.

Almost as silly as not using a biometric logic because "what if they use a backdoor to get a photo of my face?"

iyulaevon Potential major security flaw on HP laptop?

Nothing. SPI and I2S is usually not implemented with free-running clocks anyway, the clock only runs when there's data on the interface. Sorry, grandparent.

iyulaevon Potential major security flaw on HP laptop?

My best guess is that your sound is stimulating some capacitor connected to a voltage-controlled clock oscillator in the laptop. The voltage provides by the sound is causing the frequency of the VCO to move around slightly. 24M is a pretty common frequency in electronics for use as a general-purpose digital clock.

iyulaevon Developers are the autoworkers of our generation

To give some evidence to the parent, look at a chart of STEM graduates vs liberal arts, comparing 1985 to 2009 [1]. Across the board we've pushed a wider range of people into college. Nevertheless, in absolute terms the number of graduates has dropped in CS, Math, and sciences, while it has skyrocketed for arts, communications, and psychology. What we've found is that there just aren't very many scientists and engineers on the margin. In other words, there appear to be relatively few "potential" engineers that just need a nudge towards engineering. This seems especially true when you consider that across this time period (1985 - 2009), the career prospects for STEM graduates have been very good. Even this incentive doesn't seem to push any marginal college students towards these fields.

My takeaway is that there isn't a huge pool of potential programmers that just need a nudge towards programming. If offering huge salaries and making higher education a social requirement doesn't increase the number of people who chose the engineering career path, what does?

[1] http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/11/col...

iyulaevon Apartment Blockers: Parking Rules Raise Your Rent

That's why streets with many narrow storefronts are the most crowded with pedestrians.

Correlation != causation.

iyulaevon Youtube retires video responses

When the video/text ratio of a site rises above zero, I stop visiting.

Fixed that for you.

iyulaevon I’m Thinking. Please. Be Quiet.

IIRC Peopleware pointed out a study where they compared two groups of programmers, those working in a quiet environment and those working with music. Given identical assignments, both groups completed it in roughly the same (median) amount of time. However, the assignment was such that there was a "shortcut", i.e. if you thought hard enough about the requirements a much easier solution was possible. Only the programmers in the quiet group got this shortcut. Thought this was interesting.

iyulaevon How to Charge $546 for Six Liters of Saltwater

I think people already cross-shop dentists. When I had a root canal done I inquired at two places. And I'm not even very sensitive to it since I have dental insurance.

Good luck with the same at hospitals though...

iyulaevon Don't Fly During Ramadan

T.S.A. officials respond that the random searches are “special needs” or “administrative searches” that are exempt from probable cause because they further the government’s need to prevent terrorist attacks.

Sigh.

iyulaevon Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'

And engineers in Europe or the US have never had criticality incidents ;)