Hacker News Reader

lunchboxon Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran

I'm very curious who gets hired to write the code for a project like this. What caliber are they, what kinds of backgrounds do they come from, and how are they recruited to these positions? Is this more likely to be done by a government agency or a defense contractor?

I have always assumed that the world's most talented hackers work in places like Silicon Valley and Wall Street, but Stuxnet was clearly the work of some brilliant minds, so I'm curious.

lunchboxon California Senate votes to allow self-driving cars

this story is about California, not Nevada. (though Nevada did previously pass legislation allowing driverless cars.)

lunchboxon Things Not Strings -- Google Launches Knowledge Graph

> Non-programmers will likely not be poking around on Google's engineering blogs

This is the central "Official Google Blog", not an engineering blog. From the other articles on the blog (most of which are written by marketing and other non-engineering disciplines -- see the last lines), it's pretty clear that the intended audience is anyone who's interested in Google, not just programmers. I know lots of non-programmers who like to read these, especially since a lot of news sites link to and quote these articles.

lunchboxon Things Not Strings -- Google Launches Knowledge Graph

"Things, not strings" does not seem like an effective tagline for marketing this to the public. Are non-programmers used to the term "string" in the sense of "text"? And even for those who are, I still think the tagline is too abstract. I would prefer something like "Understanding the concepts behind the words you search" (or "Understanding the things").

IMO the linked video does a better job at introducing the feature than the article.

lunchboxon 2012 Salary Guide for Creative and Technology Professionals [pdf]

I fully agree with the principle, but note that these numbers indicate the market rate for salary, not necessarily cost of living. The two are correlated but not the same. Here is a table that lists cost of living as calculated by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics:

http://www.kiplinger.com/tools/bestcities_sort/index.php?sor...

For example, note that Honolulu has a salary coefficient of 92, but it's actually one of the most expensive places in the country to live. It has a cost of living coefficent of 171.

Another thing is that in addition to cost of living, one must consider state taxes, which you can calculate here:

http://letsrebuildit.com/index.php?option=com_jumi&filei...

WA, NV, TX, FL, and IL have very low state taxes (for me), whereas DC, CA, HI, NC, and NY have high state taxes.

lunchboxon Facebook Co-Founder Saverin Gives Up U.S. Citizenship Before IPO

> And the popular narrative is that Zuckerberg is the asshole? Huh.

Not sure what Zuckerberg has to do with this story, so bringing him into the discussion seems like a red herring. Whether Zuckerberg is a good guy is a separate question; maybe Saverin and Zuckerberg are both assholes (or maybe neither).

lunchboxon Why you should ALWAYS CC someone

Correct: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility

lunchboxon I am a statistician and I buy lottery tickets

That's a good question. Would be interesting to see if someone can dig up any studies on this. e.g what % of the country's wealth is owned by founders (and their heirs), divided by the % of people who are current or former founders.

My argument is founded not on experimental data but rather on the axioms of utility theory. If startups had higher risk AND lower expected payoff, it would make no financial sense to found or invest in one, since that would be a textbook example of a bad investment:

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

Yet there are lots of (otherwise) smart/rational people founding and investing in startups.

lunchboxon I am a statistician and I buy lottery tickets

The point of a lottery is to generate income for the government/company running it, which would not be possible if players collectively won more than they spent.

lunchboxon I am a statistician and I buy lottery tickets

>In the exact same sense than a lottery has a "higher expected return that a conventional job", just with slightly better odds.

A lottery has negative expected return, so I disagree that it's "higher expected return that a conventional job".

lunchboxon I am a statistician and I buy lottery tickets

> on average you'll make less money [in a startup] than if you take a "normal" job

I disagree. If he's using "average" in the sense of "mean" (not median), then he's saying that starting a startup has a lower expected return and is higher risk than working a normal job, meaning it's inferior in both regards (assuming diminishing marginal utility). Entrepreneurship is a classic "high risk, high return" venture. It has a higher expected return than a conventional job; that's what makes it financially attractive to founders and VCs in the first place. The astronomical success of the minority offsets the lack of success of the majority.

In a similar vein I disagree with his assertion that joining a startup (taking a risk) is like buying insurance (avoiding a risk). They are opposites.

lunchboxon What makes one appear smarter and more sociable?

Enjoying socializing (extraversion) != being good at it (social skills)

lunchboxon What makes one appear smarter and more sociable?

I don't know whether he has low social skills; I'm making a judgment based on his pic (as if I had seen it on judg.me).

lunchboxon What makes one appear smarter and more sociable?

The authors conflate "extroversion" and "social skills". For example, based on his pic I'd rate this guy high on extroversion but low on social skills:

http://madconfessionsofaman.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/douc...

Similarly, being introverted doesn't mean you have low social skills.

lunchboxon Aspirin Really Is Kind of a Wonder Drug, Studies Continue to Show

Inflammation is extraordinarily common. It underlies hundreds of diseases, from asthma to arthritis (in fact, any disease that ends in "-itis"). It often occurs inside the body (not just on the skin), so you could have inflammation right now and not know it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflammation#Inflammatory_disor...

lunchboxon Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?

I used the term "downvote" figuratively -- I don't mean literal downvotes on this poll (I don't think anyone can downvote a poll option anyway, and even if you could I wouldn't be able to isolate upvotes from downvotes since we just see the combined number); I mean votes for "least favorite language" in the other poll.

lunchboxon Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?

Here are the languages ranked by likes/dislikes ratio (I compared the above poll with the "dislike" poll: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3748961). For example, for each person who downvoted Clojure, there were 28.8 who upvoted it. This ranking is fairer to languages that are well liked by those who use them, but not as well known:

  Clojure        28.8
  Python         26.5
  Haskell        19.7
  C              17.3
  Lua            16.4
  Lisp           11.5
  Erlang          9.9
  Ruby            8.4
  Scheme          8.1
  C#              7.9
  OCaml           7.3
  Smalltalk       7.1
  Scala           6.4
  D               4.4
  CoffeeScript    3.6
  JavaScript      3.5
  Forth           3.2
  Groovy          2.9
  Assembly        2.5
  Ada             1.7
  Objective C     1.6
  Perl            1.6
  SQL             1.4
  Pascal          1.3
  Rexx            1.3
  Delphi          1.2
  C++             1.0
  Tcl             0.9
  Fortran         0.7
  PHP             0.7
  Shell           0.7
  Java            0.6
  Actionscript    0.6
  ColdFusion      0.4
  Cobol           0.1
  Visual Basic    0.1

lunchboxon Lessons I've Learned as a Patient Building a Vision Most Said Was Crazy

This looks like PatientsLikeMe (http://www.patientslikeme.com/), but specialized in Crohn's disease. I wonder how this site differentiates itself, and what aspects of it are unique to Crohn's vs. what could be generalized for other health conditions.

lunchboxon $900 DNA sequencing USB stick announced by OxNano

The keyword is human genome, not some other organism. Also the $900 product has not been released yet.

lunchboxon $900 DNA sequencing USB stick announced by OxNano

http://www.genome.gov/pages/der/sequencing_cost.xls

It's off this page: http://www.genome.gov/sequencingcosts/

lunchboxon $900 DNA sequencing USB stick announced by OxNano

Here is a graph that shows the fall in human genome sequencing costs over time:

http://www.genome.gov/images/content/cost_per_genome.jpg

It's surpassing Moore's law. Looks like pretty soon we'll reach the mythical $1000 mark.

lunchboxon 'Most Beautiful Woman' By Day, Inventor By Night

The patent is expired.

lunchboxon Where is the One Percent?

Double Click to zoom in; Shift + Double Click to zoom out.

lunchboxon Hell freezes over: Forrester urges IT to support the Mac

One of the two main cited reasons people prefer Macs was this:

> Many of today's corporate PCs are saddled with management, backup, and security agents that can bog down a PC. Employees want their PCs to boot in 10 seconds, not 10 minutes...They're drawn to uncluttered Macs...

I don't see how this shows superiority of Mac over PC; presumably if the Mac were running this software it would have these problems too.

lunchboxon How to Force Facebook into Handing Over their Secret Tracking Data

Facebook also tracks what profiles I view. Looks like that data isn't released here.

lunchboxon I have Crohn's, an incurable digestive disease, and built Crohnology

Similar concept to PatientsLikeMe: http://www.patientslikeme.com/

lunchboxon Show HN: Compare your perception of female attractiveness to that of others

Yes.

lunchboxon Show HN: Compare your perception of female attractiveness to that of others

After your comment, I changed it to be random.

lunchboxon Show HN: Compare your perception of female attractiveness to that of others

What's your Browser/OS? It is supposed to have pictures.

lunchboxon Show HN: Compare your perception of female attractiveness to that of others

I just changed it to be randomized based on your comment, and reset the ranking. Before that it ranked them based on average score, which has the problem of creating a winner-takes all situation. Thanks!