Hacker News Reader

markbnineon The Internet is Hard (RWW on users vs geeks)

I tried to explain to my wife why this story was funny yesterday. It was hopeless. She simply could not get it. Her sympathies were with the FB users, "Oh yeah. Facebook is constantly changing their interface. It drives me nuts too." Huh?

A few weeks ago, she really helped me understand this gap when she said, "I used to use email, now I use Facebook." I desperately wanted to explain the difference between a protocol and a web app, but then thought, why? She does not care. For her, FB is simply email plus.

markbnineon The tweet that infuriated Steve Jobs

Jobs was seen coming into the restaurant wearing what was described as "a very funny hat - a big top hat kind of thing."

Photo? Obviously, Jobs sees himself as a tycoon. Or perhaps, Willy Wonka.

markbnineon Google forced to use humans to support Nexus One

press one if you feel lucky.

markbnineon Ask HN: Who's Hiring?

Follow this with a post asking how many people scored jobs from HN.

markbnineon The War on the Young

Ugh. Equating technology with wealth is extremely naive. Standard of living refers to cost of food, housing, health care, etc.

markbnineon Astroinformatics: A 21st Century Approach to Astronomy

This is what I do every day. When your niche becomes a university degree, it must be growing. Maybe it's time to ask for a new title. Lead Astro-info-maniac?

Also note, regardless of the degrees offered, some schools are way ahead of the curve on this: ASU, AU, Brown. Wash U. They all have long-time relationships with NASA to store/analyze data.

markbnineon [dead]

Interesting how the woman walked inside to check the television? Sometimes reality must be verified.

markbnineon NASA’s Puffin Is Way Cooler Than a Jetpack

NASA has a long history of working on jet packs. Initially these were proposed for hopping around the moon:

http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/RPIF/beta/

markbnineon Random-walk Auto-generated Poetry

Looks like an Eddington Algorithm (likely misnamed, but taken from Eddington's quote about monkeys typing Shakespeare). It's done by hashing the entire text and then randomly stepping down a line. The size of your step (one word, two words, etc.) effects readability. I recall once seeing somebody's bot use this algorithm to occasionally spew out the bible on a religious chat channel. Drove the locals nuts.

markbnineon Jan. 8, 1942: Happy Birthday Stephen Hawking

From space.com today: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/100106-aas-black-hole-...

They could have at least given him some props.

markbnineon I hired 50 people today. This is what they look like

What if somebody asked people to write something profane? Or political? Or perhaps deface the image of an icon or religious leader? Once you move past written messages, you open up all sorts of avenues. Crowd-sourced politics? Crowd-sourced porn? Crowd-sourced violence? Etc. At what point does Amazon need to filter these requests?

markbnineon I hired 50 people today. This is what they look like

This makes me curious about Amazon's vetting process for requests.... taken one step further, I can imagine all sorts of ridiculous things to ask people to do.

markbnineon Designers are not Programmers

Being able to program corrupts your ability to focus solely on the human.

Lines like this make me think the whole thing is an overworked troll. Domain name included. I couldn't be bothered to read much more. That said, my favorite part is from the profile:

my current snowboard is from Lib Tech. I live in a small cottage in a remote part of the Swiss Alps

sweet...

markbnineon W3 gets new Look

Of course the first thing I did was validate it. Couldn't help myself... It passed.

markbnineon Darpa's latest challenge: Locate these 10 balloons

Our tax money at work. . .

markbnineon Will the Adult Industry Drive Android Adoption?

Speak for yourself...

markbnineon The Real Problem With the Climate Science Emails

Thought it interesting how the programmers hinted in their code at problems with the climate model. These were not informative comments. They were disclaimers. I see them all the time. People put them in their code when they are too lazy to properly figure something out. They often say something like, "Yeah, I know. This is an awful hack. Fix later."

Quote from article: Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU's Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" and "APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION." Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: "Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend - so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!"

markbnineon Let pedestrians define the walkways

Is this really a winning analogy? To let everybody bumble along until patterns appear seems like a myspace strategy. Another option is to put up fences. And set folks on a finite number of paths. And call it facebook.

markbnineon Linus Torvalds for Nobel Peace Prize?

"Linux helped sequence the human genome, helps protect the world computer infrastructure from viral attack, and is now the pathway for millions to learn computer programming and participate in new international efforts"

Using this logic, Bill Gates should also be up for the award (and considering his philanthropy, maybe he should).

There is a paradigm problem here. One does not award the builder of Mother Teresa's orphanage a peace prize (even if it is quite nice). The award goes to Mother Teresa.

markbnineon Reexamining what makes health care so expensive.

Health care has problems that go way beyond the Baumol Effect. Costs have well outpaced income. Many studies suggest this. . . e.g. http://southflorida.bizjournals.com/southflorida/stories/200...

markbnineon Street View: We can trike wherever you like

Wherever we like. . . Really?

How about a shanty town? Or a drug compound deep in the Colombian jungle? Or just a plain ordinary war zone? Come on Google. Where's your balls?

markbnineon Drupy: "Drupal" in Python

Drupy? And I thought Drupal was a bad name for a CMS. Can't wait to tell the boss that we are switching to Drupy. On the plus side, if somebody converts it back to PHP, they can call it Poopy.

markbnineon HN: share your unneeded Google Wave invites

To atone, instead of throwing up an invite sharing site, you should be forced to write an iphone app.

markbnineon jQuery Desktop

Now if only you could run emacs on your desktop in your browser on your desktop.