Hacker News Reader

jjson Zuckerberg responds to privacy concerns

It appears that you can fix that now in the privacy settings.

That said, I still consider the initial "outing" of fan pages to be a huge breach of trust.

jjson The Minimum Viable Product from our lean, bootstrapped startup - comments?

Does "Viable" mean you have sales data to share? ;)

jjson What happens to an unprotected human body in space?

You're looking for the Ideal Gas Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_gas_law), which is derived from Boyle's Law (relation between gas pressure and volume), and Charles's Law (expansion of gas when heated).

The related concept here is that liquids remain liquid when the vapor pressure of the substance is less than the atmospheric pressure.

So, by the above laws, you can make water boil by (a) heating the water to increase the vapor pressure, or (b) reducing the atmospheric pressure to less than the existing vapor pressure of the water, or (c) some combination of (a) and (b).

jjson What happens to an unprotected human body in space?

How long did it take for Dave Bowman to exit the pod and pressurize the airlock? :)

(SPOILER if you haven't seen 2001: A Space Odyssey)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e92vSua8XJY

In this clip, he ejects at about 0:20 and hits the lever around 0:27. You can see him go limp just after 0:34, before the chamber has finished pressurizing. 14 seconds.

So regardless of why the real-life (1965) test subject blacked out after 14 seconds, it appears that the makers of the (1968) film had done their homework!

jjson Making a million bucks/year in revenue

Is there much advantage starting out defining how rich you want to be?

Yes.

Quantifying your goal helps you answer questions like "How can I get there from here?", "How long will it take?", "Will I ever make it there at my current trajectory?", and "Do I still need to work anymore?"

And it will also tell you, "How much do I have to charge, and to how many customers?", which will help you avoid low-margin, hard-sale markets, and get you thinking about recurring revenue.

jjson Making a million bucks/year in revenue

I like your general point.

I'm sure there are unforeseen expenses in all of those scenarios that would require some padding to insure against, but the contracting scenario is the one I'm most experienced with, and the assumptions behind your numbers have bitten me in the past.

jjson Google's Microsoft Moment - Why Google Made Android

I'm thinking more along the lines of a general accomplishment. This "doing well by doing good" thing could inspire people who run companies in other industries as well.

jjson Making a million bucks/year in revenue

bill at $52/hour

If you have year-round, full-time contract work with no downtime due to acquiring new clients or negotiating new jobs with existing ones, then you probably don't have enough clients to be truly independent.

jjson Google's Microsoft Moment - Why Google Made Android

This doesn't make the project any less worthy, but their OSS approach shouldn't veil their corporate gain.

On the contrary, that actually makes it more worthy, since they're providing a clear example of how a publicly-traded company can profit by being a good corporate citizen.

jjson 'Artificial life' breakthrough announced by scientists

Advancements like this make it feel exciting to be young and have so much time ahead of you.

What, you're still using your original telomeres?

jjson Unanswerable multiple choice question

0% chance.

Answering randomly may give you a result that coincidentally matches the truth, but you have provided no logical or epistemological support for your choice, nor any chain of reasoning that leads you from the available evidence to a conclusion that there even is a correct answer.

You have a 25% chance of randomly choosing the "right" answer, (C) 0%, but no paradox is created because you answered without establishing knowledge of the answer, and therefore your answer cannot rightly be called correct.

jjson M.I.A.'s album "/\/\/\Y/\" is ungoogleable

    *  (latest-album 'sigur-ros)
    
    NIL

jjson Apple: iPad and Emacs

I'm curious what a native port of Emacs on an iPad actually contributes over an Screen/SSH session on a "real" machine with "real" compilers and tool-chains.

To get it running, you'd need (a) the ability to modify, redistribute, compile, and install arbitrary code (including GPL'd code), and (b) the ability to run interpreters and virtual machines (emacs lisp).

So emacs itself is just a bellwether for the things he really wants in a computer.

jjson Things you shouldn't do: Two pointers in one field.

But maybe you should stick with the Ruby. I hear there's money in that.

Come on, Mike. That sort of snipe just isn't like you.

jjson Ask HN: Hacker Hobbies?

Does writing blog posts making fun of people who get crypto wrong count as a hobby? ;-)

I believe that's more of a public service. :)

jjson Are We Really Dumb Zucks?

The author is presuming that the IMs that an anonymous person on the internet claims they have access to are real.

Why quibble about whether he said those words, when he has expressed them so damningly in his actions.

jjson So You've Hired a Hacker

Or, The ESTJ's guide to managing an INTP.

jjson This is how Apple rolls

Eventually the platform will develop and mature, and perhaps in five years time or so, it might be powerful enough to replace a traditional computer for most people.

The frustrating thing is that it is powerful enough to be a computer for most people, but for non-technical reasons, Apple insists on keeping it Not A Computer.

jjson I’m graduating with a CS degree but I don’t feel like I know how to program.

I also learned C at that age, but I was excited about it. My motivation was thorough disgust at the limitations of QBasic and VB, which a friend and I had been running into in our more ambitious video game projects.

jjson Arrington : "You’re Welcome, You Bastards"

Reprints are contractual matters. Draw one up.

Email is wonderful because people don't understand that an agreement in writing doesn't have to mean ink on paper.

jjson New LLVM C++ Standard Library

With in-house processor design (Intrinsity), perhaps secrecy (and anti-jailbreak) is their aim:

In this scenario, they want to be able to ship an XCode and iPhoo SDK without having to distribute the source to their code generator.

jjson Ask HN: Review my startup - Scribd (YC S06)

- Text selection is really awkward, drag too far and you select unrelated stuff from nearby elements instead or as well

Same in Chrome. Perhaps making images into CSS background images of the slides would fix this.

jjson How I Monetized My Passion

HN died for you in 55 days?

jjson ‘time’ is created by human beings to make sense of gravity [TED Video]

Sure Ancient Hindu and Buddhist mystics had said this about time using the language of religion

Bear in mind that in the ancient world, there wasn't necessarily a sharp distinction between "philosophy" and "religion". There is evidence that the ancient Greeks and Romans considered the "Brahmanas" (Hindus) and "śramanas" (Buddhists) to be simply different schools of philosophers.

From wikipedia:

In the 2nd century CE, the Christian dogmatist, Clement of Alexandria recognized Bactrian Buddhists (śramanas) and Indian gymnosophists for their influence on Greek thought:

"Thus philosophy, a thing of the highest utility, flourished in antiquity among the barbarians, shedding its light over the nations. And afterwards it came to Greece. First in its ranks were the prophets of the Egyptians; and the Chaldeans among the Assyrians; and the Druids among the Gauls; and the śramanas among the Bactrians ("Σαρμαναίοι Βάκτρων"); and the philosophers of the Celts; and the Magi of the Persians, who foretold the Saviour's birth, and came into the land of Judea guided by a star. The Indian gymnosophists are also in the number, and the other barbarian philosophers. And of these there are two classes, some of them called śramanas ("Σαρμάναι"), and others Brahmins ("Βραφμαναι")." Clement of Alexandria "The Stromata, or Miscellanies" Book I, Chapter XV

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buddhism#Hellenistic...)

Before then few Westerners would have even heard of Buddhism.

To the contrary, see also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buddhism#Expansion_o...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buddhism#Greco-Buddh...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Greeks

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

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

jjson ‘time’ is created by human beings to make sense of gravity [TED Video]

I allude to that elsewhere in this thread. :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1317736

jjson ‘time’ is created by human beings to make sense of gravity [TED Video]

He has apparently re-discovered Kant's original claim that time is a creation of our own minds

If by "original" you mean, in response to Hume's earlier statements on the origins of the idea of time. :-)

http://seop.leeds.ac.uk/entries/kant-hume-causality/

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Treatise_of_Human_Nature/Book_...

jjson ‘time’ is created by human beings to make sense of gravity [TED Video]

"Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving." —The Gateless Gate, Koan 29

jjson The Ghost Protocol – Digital Identity for Immortals

Or perhaps "self" is the leaky abstraction.

jjson The Ghost Protocol – Digital Identity for Immortals

What if his name is Scotty, and rather than zapping you, he merely stored you in his transporter buffer and delayed beaming you to your destination for a moment?

What if he didn't delay at all? Did he kill you just by letting your atoms get ripped apart and reassembled elsewhere?

Or is this whole continuity-of-self thing a sham?

jjson The Ghost Protocol – Digital Identity for Immortals

Suppose that, in an instant, your body and mind ceased to exist. Just completely vanished.

And suppose further, that nobody witnessed this, and that one instant later, by some very unlikely process, some matter or energy spontaneously organized itself into an exact duplicate of you, down to every last quantum wobble, in exactly the same place that you were standing.

Would either this new you or the old you notice? Would "you" still be "you"?

And would it matter?