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kschua

1,003 karma · joined January 14, 2009

Email : kschua 2000 AT hotmail DOT com http://hnofficehours.com/profile/kschua/
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kschua··on Show HN: Ip Man. Mac menu bar app displaying your IP
Are you Wing Chun practitioner? If you are, really good name :)
kschua··on Apple Maps vs. Google Maps vs. Waze
I have been using Waze for a couple of years and I turn it on for the same route to get my daughter to school in the morning and back home through traffic.

Recently, their routing algorithm has gotten so bad that I am on the verge of discarding it and probably try HERE maps.

The issues are

1) There was a railroad removal which block the road for several weeks. Waze didn't detect it and I arrived about 15 minutes later. I went home and tried to edit the map and to my surprise, I couldn't do it now whereas I was able to edit the maps once upon a time.

2) Recently, it has routed me to another supposed faster route to my daughter's school. I took that route once and we were late for school. From then on, I took the route which I am familiar with (which incidentally was what Waze had always been showing me till recently) and I keep seeing the ETA dropping. The ETA for the my regular route is about 5 minutes faster than the new Waze suggested route which is about 35 minutes

kschua··on Ask HN: Best books you read in 2017?
Shoe Dog - Phil Knight

I read this book based on the recommendation of Bill Gates. It was one of the best books I have read in a while

kschua··on Chinese umbrella-sharing startup loses most of its 300,000 umbrellas in 3 months
Not necessary. Though it is quoted "an umbrella costs the company 60 yuan ($8.82 USD) each to replace"

It doesn't mean they are going to replace it. The 60 yuan probably factor in cost like manpower etc rather than just the cost of the umbrella.

So like some of the readers pointed out, it could possibly be a good way to sell umbrellas whilst crying out wolf that they are losing money as a way to prevent copycats

kschua··on Can I Talk to that William Fellow? He was so Helpful (2009)
I was thinking along that line too! I have only really heard of Bill Gates after Windows 3.1 came out
kschua··on Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
Norton Utilities 8.0 and Norton Commander.

I loved the DiskEditor which enabled me to recover lost files by manipulating the FAT table, hack byte codes to bypass copy protection in the days when copy protection was done by reading in bad sectors in floppy disks.

Norton Commander for the ease of use to navigate file system in DOS days. I use TotalCommander now which is the best $40 I ever spent.

kschua··on Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
Poltergeist Room problem.

Back in the CRT monitor days, I was working for a computer repair company. There was this particular client (in the defence industry) who had monitors that started flickering and having a greenish hue at its sides after a week.

Every week, we had to go to his office to swap the monitors and bring the faulty ones back to recalibrate (it was costly, but hey, its a Defence contract and those pay big bucks)

It didn't matter whether the monitor was brand new or recalibrate ones, it just started flickering and had greenish hue after a week, and it only happened in that room. Other monitors outside that room and in other levels were fine, thus the room was dubbed the Poltergeist Room (as they blamed spirits for messing with it).

One day after the monitor exchange, I returned to the office and my supervisor queried me as to why I didn't reply to his multiple pages (we were using pagers back then). I realised I was in the Poltergeist Room when the pages were sent and therefore did not receive any page. It then dawned on me, "Could it be some electro magnetic interference from another level directly above or below that was playing havoc".

I went back to the client the next day to tell him what I thought and he (being electronics trained) realised that above him was a defence lab carrying out EMF experiments, which could have caused the monitor problems. He got to work to build a simple Faraday cage to prevent EMF from getting to the monitor. Since then, the monitors worked perfectly.

kschua··on Why Singapore banned chewing gum
Just to clarify on the ban.

The ban is on the sale and import of chewing gum, not on the consumption of chewing gum itself. The maximum penalty is a jail term, not a death penalty nor caning.

Though the link below doesn't mention about the sale, I do remember that the sale itself is prohibited.

(http://statutes.agc.gov.sg/aol/search/display/view.w3p;page=...)

kschua··on Microsoft Changes Tack, Making Office Suite Free on Mobile
I have done VBA before. It is not the worst.

The worst was maintaining a Hotel front office guest system written in GW-Basic

kschua··on How con artists trick your mind
It's the Hare Krishna not the Dalai Lama
kschua··on July 20, 1969: One Giant Leap For Mankind (2013)
Good luck Mr Gorsky
kschua··on Google Offers A Free Crash Course In Android Development
It isn't very clear. But at the bottom of the page https://www.udacity.com/course/ud853

You can see the feature matrix for the Free vs Paid

Click on View Course Ware and you can get the free version

kschua··on Where have you gone, Peter Norton?
Peter Norton was my hero way back in the late 80's to early 90's.

I remember the first time I used Unerase to recover a deleted file and was fascinated by it. Then I discovered DiskEdit and began poking around in the FAT system and found out more about how DOS actually deletes a file. It actually marks the first character with a ?. Thus started my hacking days.

Then I used DiskEdit to bypass copy protection hacking the byte codes.

DiskEdit rescued me again when I switch to DR-DOS, set passwords on my files and forgot the passwords (fwiw, it was just setting the next dozen or so bytes after the file name in the FAT to zero)

Such memomories, DiskEdit and SideKick were my two must have utilities in the days of DOS

kschua··on Show HN: Digitizing photos of whiteboards using the command line
Nice idea. It would be fantastic if this could be done on the phone during the image capture
kschua··on Ask HN: What under $100 item would you recommend everyone buy?
An Mp3 player with radio. Great for listening to music and podcast whilst driving or travelling on the bus.

Yes, I know most smart phones can do that, but not everyone owns a smart phone, and I prefer not to drain the battery on my phone

kschua··on Ask HN: Best Dotcom Bubble Stories
The CueCat for me http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
kschua··on How a movie changed one man’s vision forever (2012)
Strange. I can access it without problems from Australia
kschua··on Apple Literally Stole my Thunder
I can empathize with you. Back in 2009, I created a call filtering app for Blackberry which had the ability to determine if a call is urgent based on the frequency of the incoming call and to block the call if it was not urgent.

Guess what, in 2012, Apple put in an uncannily similar feature called "Repeated Call" in iOS 6

kschua··on The Girl Who Turned to Bone
I actually find this case far more intriguing. Probably 1 of 3 in the world

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

kschua··on Facebook's New Feed
It's Ctrl + Mouse wheel
kschua··on Ask HN: what is the most stupid line of code you saw?
Java code

if (obj instanceof java.lang.Object)

kschua··on What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project
Better shit code that gets the job done than beautiful code that gets nothing done
kschua··on Web browser market share of all times visualized
I was one of those who flipped from using Netscape to IE. I was using Netscape since 2.0 days. Comparing Netscape 3.0 to IE 3.0, Netscape won handsdown. It had far more features than IE 3.0 and was fast, responsive and easy to use.

Then came Netscape 4.0 and IE 4.0. This was were Netscape failed horribly.

Netscape 4.0 Communicator was slow and buggy and crashed often. When Netscape 4.0 Navigator crashed, it brought down the entire suite (Email client, Web Composer) along with it.

IE 4.0 on the other hand was really slick, stable and cool. It loaded up faster and rendered the pages faster (bear in mind those were the days of dialup).

It didn't matter that IE 4.0 was bundled into the OS. I was using Win 95 and I downloaded and installed IE 4.0 because I loved it.

To me, it wasn't the bundling of IE 4.0 into the OS that killed Netscape, it was just that Netscape 4.0 sucked compared to IE 4.0

After IE 4.0, I discovered Opera and have been using it since.

kschua··on 40 year old Plastic Surgeon with Stage 4 Cancer Shares his regrets
For those who prefer to read the transcript, it is here : https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=508465809163550&...

This photo can be viewed by anyone, no Facebook account needed

kschua··on Why Android 4.2′s Multiple User Account Switching Is Tablet-Only (Hint: Patents)
Phones are more personal compared with tablets.

How many people actually share their phones with someone else on a regular basis? I share my iPad with my family but we each have a phone.

Thus it makes more sense to have multiple user accounts on tablets (which is shared more often) than phones

kschua··on Samsung Executives Waited Four Days to Tell Chairman
I am pretty sure this is a myth for the simple reason that the chairman would have heard it in the news within those four days and would have summon the execs
kschua··on Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram
Why do I get a feeling I am living in a Matrix as a data storage device?
kschua··on Apple iOS6 Preview
If you are using a Blackberry, my Blackberry App (Callernizer) does exactly that.
kschua··on Math professor's side mirror that eliminates 'blind spot' receives US patent
This is just beautiful. Practical application of maths. I would love to get my hands on one of these when it is done.

Glad that he has a patent for that. He should be justly rewarded for coming out with this road safety feature.

To those that believe that there is prior art, do note that the patent granted is for "Wide angle substantially non-distorting mirror". It is not just any curve mirror, it is unlike normal curve mirror which distorts the image, from the picture, you can see that there doesn't appear to be any distortion, which is what makes his mirror unique

kschua··on Malcolm Gladwell asserts that Gates, not Jobs, will be remembered in 50 years
Do you have links which says that "a computer in every home" is Jobs' vision? Google search throws up Bill Gates. There is even a plaque for it http://www.flickr.com/photos/mwichary/2184937614/

Though I believe that there are others who should also be remembered, but I am of the opinion that rightly or wrongly history will remember and associate Gates with computers much like Edison is to lightbulbs, Wright is to planes and Bell is to telephones (this is what kids are still being taught)

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