Hacker News Reader

pchiverson US Government: You're Scaring Web Businesses Into Moving Out Of The US

The U.S. government has already shut down non-U.S. .com domains (PokerStars, Fult Tilt Poker, Cereus).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg

pchiverson After traveling to over 25 countries I created an app I wanted

On first look I thought it was a rainbow penis sticking out of the ground. It took a second or two before I realized what the picture was.

pchiverson Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to get extra-long desktop support cycle

Which distros work like that? (speaking as a Ubuntu user that has never tried any other distros)

pchiverson Ask HN: Can I Help You with Anything?

I agree with the last suggestion. The "Talk to me at: (email address)" part looks strange.

pchiverson Python Requests: HTTP for Humans

Link to previous discussion on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2882301

pchiverson “Our Marketing Is Up Fog Creek” And What We Did About It

I think there is a spelling mistake in the article:

"That worked very well for many years, but recently it hasn’t been the slam dunk it has been in the best."

Should this be, "it hasn’t been the slam dunk it has been in the past"?

pchiverson 7% of Americans Subscribe to Netflix, Now Larger than any Cable Company

In Canada there is zip.ca (http://www.zip.ca).

pchiverson Ubuntu 10.04: The Perfect Consumer Operating System?

-/etc/fstab --> needed to get secondary hard drives to automount during boot

-/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist --> needed to install my wireless card

pchiverson Disintermediating Doctors: Going direct to the lab?

The article says these tests can be "at a cost that is as much as 80 percent less than going through a doctor", what can explain that kind of discrepancy besides rampant corruption in the "official" medical lab work market?

The difference is that one is paid for by a health insurance company, and the other is paid for out of pocket by the consumer. The second group is much more price sensitive.

pchiverson Bingo Card Creator Annual Report

So you made $18,525 in profits, and figure that worked out to $125-$150 an hour. That means you worked somewhere between 124 and 148 hours over the entire year, or less than 3 hours a week. Is this correct? If so, then it is very impressive...

pchiverson Why Happy Shoppers Buy Extended Warranties

I think you overestimate the ability of the average person to understand the mathematics of risk.

pchiverson Improved conversions by 25%. Thanks Hacker News!

The "Stop emailing yourself" headline looks funny to me. It had to look at it a second time because when I first loaded the page I thought it was an ad and subconsciously skipped it.

I don't know why that is. I think maybe it's the font, coupled with the fact that it's on a white background.

pchiverson How to run a small consultancy / freelancing business

The title of the document is not correct English.

Instead of "To Be a Consultant, a freelancer or an independent contractor", I would change it to something like, "How To Be a Consultant, Freelancer or Independent Contractor".

pchiverson Majority of US Healthcare Costs Are Caused by Bad Eating Habits

As a Canadian who visits the United States often, I can definitely say the portion sizes are a lot larger in the United States. Every time I go to the US I go into a state of shock when I see the portion sizes.

You would think that after 20-30 trips to US I would have learned to adjust my expectations by now, but it is still amazing to me to witness how much food Americans eat no matter how many times I see it.

pchiverson Why underdogs should take more chances

Mostly the style of offense. Teams are much more content to keep the ball around the outside and shoot threes all night than to a) drive into the paint and make something happen on the inside, or b) score points off of fast breaks.

pchiverson Why underdogs should take more chances

A Malcolm Gladwell quote from the article:

The consistent failure of underdogs in professional sports to even try something new suggests, to me, that there is something fundamentally wrong with the incentive structure of the leagues.

This pretty sums up why I generally don't watch professional sports. I love basketball, but the way that it is played in the NBA is so conservative that it's about as interesting as watching paint dry.

I would love to see the pro sports leagues implement financial incentives in order to reward teams that are taking risks. The only organization I know that does this is the UFC (via their "Fight of the Night", "Knockout of the Night" and "Submission of the Night" bonuses), and perhaps not coincidentally, that is the only sport I find interesting enough to watch on a regular basis.

pchiverson To Be a Baby

Seed: You describe children as being “useless on purpose.” What do you mean by that?

Obligatory Onion article:

http://www.onion.demon.co.uk/theonion/other/babies/stupidbab...

A surprising new study released Monday by UCLA's Institute For Child Development revealed that human babies, long thought by psychologists to be highly inquisitive and adaptable, are actually extraordinarily stupid.

pchiverson Steve Blank: Founders and dysfunctional families

Take away quote from the article:

"My hypothesis is that most children are emotionally damaged by [growing up in a dysfunctional family]. But a small percentage, whose brain chemistry and wiring is set for resilience, come out of this with a compulsive, relentless and tenacious drive to succeed. They have learned to function in a permanent state of chaos. And they have channeled all this into whatever activity they could find outside of their home – sports, business, or …entrepreneurship."

pchiverson Why Antidepressants Don't Live Up to the Hype

I realize that a lot of people on Hacker News might consider this to be pseudoscience territory, but what about something like The Biology of Love by Arthur Janov?

http://www.amazon.com/Biology-Love-Arthur-Janov/dp/157392829...

His theory is that the primary cause of mental illness is intrauterine trauma, which negatively affects the structure of the emotional brain at a very crucial developmental stage. This trauma is undiagnosed and untreated in the newborn infant, and persists into adulthood, where it results in depression, addiction, panic attacks, etc.

-----------------------------------------

EDIT: asciilifeform, do you have some kind of axe to grind?

Anyways, here's a few links to scientific studies that support the relationship between intrauterine trauma and mental illness:

Relationship of maternal and perinatal conditions to eventual adolescent suicide

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2857957

Obstetric care and proneness of offspring to suicide as adults: case-control study

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9812930

Controversial, yes. Without any scientific support, no.

pchiverson Why Antidepressants Don't Live Up to the Hype

I think this blog post (linked from the original article) is more interesting than the article itself:

Antidepressants, Placebos and the Failure of Psychiatry

http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/2009/03/antidepressants-pla...

pchiverson Before test of rote memorization move your eyes from side to side for about 30 seconds.

Interesting article. There's a type of psychotherapy called EMDR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMDR) which claims that moving the eyes from side to side during the recall of traumatic experiences can help reprocess the trauma in a beneficial manner, but I've never known what to make of this theory. Maybe there is something to it after all.

pchiverson Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go

The author has written a follow-up article here:

Just Don't Go, Part 2

http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/03/2009031301c.htm

pchiverson Flickr Co-founder Unveils Her New Startup: Hunch

What about Uclue? I haven't used it myself, but it looks like a pretty good replacement for Google Answers.

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

http://uclue.com/

pchiverson Jakob Nielsen: Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well

"Chubby" is (American/Canadian) slang for an erection.

pchiverson Python Is Not Java

Yeah, I've done that as well.

Are there any security considerations to think about if using that approach?

pchiverson Python Is Not Java

XML is not the answer. It is not even the question.

I have a question for the Python hackers in the audience: what file format(s) do you use for configuration files? I've been using INI style files up until now, but I've been thinking of switching to XML for more complicated formats. For example, what about something like the following example. What format would you use to store this type of configuration data for a Python application?

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
  <directoriesToBackUp>
  	<directoryInfo>
		<directoryName>/media/programming</directoryName>
		<excludedDirs>
			<dir>/media/programming/log_files</dir>
			<dir>/media/programming/temp_files</dir>
		</excludedDirs>
	</directoryInfo>
	<directoryInfo>
		<directoryName>/media/documents</directoryName>
		<excludedDirs>
			<dir>/media/documents/archive</dir>
		</excludedDirs>
	</directoryInfo>
  </directoriesToBackUp>

pchiverson Tropicana abandons new packaging; Twitter is the new focus group medium.

I actually like the new Tropicana packaging (as shown at the top of the article). It looks more hip and healthy, like something that would be sold at Whole Foods, as opposed to the old packaging, which strikes me as more nostalgic (e.g. "Your Father's Orange Juice").

pchiverson Professor makes his mark, but it costs him his job

This article reminds of another Canadian university prof named David Noble who doesn't give grades either. He seems to have found a way to do it without getting fired though.

Giving Up the Grade - David Noble

http://www.policyalternatives.ca/MonitorIssues/2007/05/Monit...

Throughout the 30-odd years of my university teaching career I have always found ways around grading, primarily by giving all A’s, thereby eliminating grades de facto, if not de jure. Last year for the first time, after long bemoaning my “anomalous” practice, York University officials formally prevailed upon me henceforth to designate my courses “ungraded “ (a pass/fail option without the fail), thereby taking them off the radar screen and perhaps unintentionally establishing a promising academic precedent.

pchiverson EtherPad out of private beta

Ow! My eyes!

Please design a new favicon. The current one looks like an ode to mid-nineties shareware sites.

pchiverson Ask YC: Meditation Advice

Seconded. In my experience, meditation can lead you into some wonderful states of consciousness, but its effects on stress reduction are relatively minor compared to other options e.g. getting enough sleep, exercising, eating a healthy diet, removing causes of unnecessary stress.