Hacker News Reader

sillysauruson The American-Western European Values Gap

I'd be interested to see the exact phrasing of each question.

sillysauruson Russ’ 10 Ingredient Recipe for Making 1 Million TPS on $5K Hardware

Is there a domain where this is applicable outside of high performance trading? I'm trying to think of another use case that would legitimately generate 1M queries/sec.

sillysauruson Patent US8296192 – Method for making money on the internet

Disregard, then fight it later if you grow big enough to matter.

That said, it can seriously screw you over if you get unlucky: http://www.k9ventures.com/blog/2011/04/27/modista/

sillysauruson What is new in IPython 1.0

How do you watch a YouTube or Vimeo video at 2x speed? Is there a browser extension or something? I've often wanted to do that.

sillysauruson Learn Emacs Lisp in 15 minutes

Well, the problem is that these bindings don't usually implement the corner case Vim functionality I've come to rely on over the years. Can it record macros perfectly? Does :%s/foo/bar/ work? How about selecting, then :s/foo/bar/gi? Does the period key reproduce all actions properly? How about :%s/foo$[0-9]+$/bar\1/ ? Do all of the basic actions do exactly the same thing as they do in a vim editor? Does % take you to the nearest parens or brackets, then cycle between the opening and closing one? If so, I'm sold. These aren't just random desires -- all of these are necessary for anyone who thinks in Vim.

A few years ago I tried some emacs vim simulator and it had glaring flaws in multiple categories. Vimpulse or Viper or something, I think.

It seems like it's a catch 22 because anyone sufficiently skilled with emacs to design a perfect vim simulator also has no reason to do so, since they're emacs masters.

(I'm on a phone else I'd check out evil now.)

sillysauruson xkcd Time - at your own pace

Could it have been by accident? I.e. Randall just happened to draw something that happened to roughly correspond to year ~13300? How unlikely is it? Really interesting!

sillysauruson Matlab is oversold as a general-purpose language

Serious. Super serious.

No, really, Mathematica is great. It can do some amazing things and it's really easy to write reusable code for.

sillysauruson Matlab is oversold as a general-purpose language

Mathematica, on the other hand, is brilliant. It's a wonderful language with wonderful libraries and functionality, and it's quite clear how to write robust code in it.

sillysauruson Big-O notation explained by a self-taught programmer

Well, you work in SF / SV. There's a whole Earth outside of those places. And those places are largely prejudiced against people who don't have degrees. I've experienced it firsthand.

"Well, move!" Except it's not that easy when you have family.

sillysauruson Big-O notation explained by a self-taught programmer

I understand where you're coming from, but unfortunately employers read articles like these and use them as justification to solidify their notion that self-taught programmers are less knowledgeable or less reliable than their peers with degrees, and hence should be paid less or not be hired at all. I've experienced it firsthand. You may argue "that's not a place you'd want to work at anyway," but unfortunately in a down economy one does not always have the luxury of rejecting work on principle. If you've ever looked into the eyes of your cat dying of cancer and felt ashamed that you didn't earn enough money to bring him the proper care to extend his life, then you'd possibly understand that prejudice against self-taught programmers who didn't have the opportunity to attend a university can be a real problem. Playing into the stereotype that we're all afraid to learn and happened to get lucky in getting a job isn't helpful.

The work you're doing is wonderful. The problem I had with it is that a simple modification to it (not phrasing it in a condescending way toward self-taught programmers) would've made it so much better.

sillysauruson Big-O notation explained by a self-taught programmer

Well, whether we like it or not, self-taught programmers are held to a higher standard. It doesn't help us to further the stereotype that self-taught programmers are afraid of the basics, haven't attained a general education in computer science on their own, or are less reliable than their peers who have degrees.

Not trying to berate the OP. I'm trying to say I wish OP had framed it better.

sillysauruson Big-O notation explained by a self-taught programmer

This sort of contributes to giving self-taught programmers a rather bad name. The writeup is good, but the idea that Big O is "scary" is just absurd. It's an elementary concept that every working programmer should be familiar with, regardless of whether they're self-taught. Algorithms are not "scary". If you can't reason about algorithms, you may not be a very good programmer yet.

To be clear, I really appreciate the writeup. I just wish it had been framed better. It should be clear that this is for beginner programmers, regardless of whether they have a degree or whether they're self-taught.

sillysauruson Russia won’t extradite Snowden to US – Kremlin

Yes.

Let's not forget that it's Russia.

Still, Snowden can't afford to trust the US, so that leaves Russia as an alternative. But that's just a special case for this particular situation.

sillysauruson Feds tell web firms to turn over user passwords

It's a government. Their natural desire is to govern lives.

sillysauruson [dead]

I don't think so. It seems like software controls whether that little green light is on. Unless the green light is on whenever the webcam is powered.

sillysauruson Storage Space Doubled For All Linode VPS plans

It's incredible how much people are willfully ignoring Linode's gross incompetence in this matter.

sillysauruson Fake memory implanted in mice with a beam of light

Here's the full text PDF: http://freepdfhosting.com/bb20a253a5.pdf

sillysauruson As Feds Demand the Keys, Preparing for the Death of Public-Key Encryption

Sorry, I miscommunicated. I was saying that the person you responded to was being an idiot by calling the general public drunken fools (true or not) and that it's a bad thing to lower to that level of discourse by retaliating in such a content-free manner because you won't change anybody's mind that way. I.e. your position is good, but it's only through expressing ourselves well that we can have an influence on others.

Of course if it was just to feel good about calling out idiocy then it's not necessary to put in much effort countering it.

sillysauruson Watsi (YC W13) raises $1.2M first-of-its-kind 'philanthropic seed round'

That is actually an incredible idea.

sillysauruson Storage Space Doubled For All Linode VPS plans

That analogy is completely invalid. It was a trading platform. How do you propose they trade bitcoins without those bitcoins being accessible by the server?

sillysauruson As Feds Demand the Keys, Preparing for the Death of Public-Key Encryption

Not the point. Idiots will be idiots. It's better to hold yourself to a higher standard.

sillysauruson Storage Space Doubled For All Linode VPS plans

It was a bitcoin trading platform. Many bitcoins had to be accessible by a sever.

It wasn't the platform's fault that they lost the bitcoins. Linode's admin interface was the attack vector. This is roughly equivalent to getting robbed because your landlord left your apartment's master key under a doormat.

sillysauruson As Feds Demand the Keys, Preparing for the Death of Public-Key Encryption

If you don't feel like putting in a serious effort into presenting your argument, then I see no reason why anyone should take it seriously.

sillysauruson Storage Space Doubled For All Linode VPS plans

Counterpoint: Linode is incompetent at security. $228,000 worth of bitcoins were stolen because Linode's admin interface was compromised by an attacker. The reason you probably haven't heard about it is because Linode never publicly acknowledged that it happened, as far as I know. Those are two serious black marks against the credibility of Linode. Use at your own risk.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/03/bitcoins-worth-22800...

sillysauruson As Feds Demand the Keys, Preparing for the Death of Public-Key Encryption

With all the outcoming gov scandals, with government forcing you to vaccine your kids...

All other points aside for a moment: the government should force each and every parent to vaccinate their children. Herd immunity is a key factor in protecting most of the population from many awful diseases, and herd immunity is only effective if the vast majority are vaccinated. There's no credible evidence that vaccination causes autism or any other malady.

sillysauruson As Feds Demand the Keys, Preparing for the Death of Public-Key Encryption

Your comment leaves much to be desired.

sillysauruson As Feds Demand the Keys, Preparing for the Death of Public-Key Encryption

Vivtek's point was that most people don't care about this, and consider the Paula Deen incident far more noteworthy.

sillysauruson Defund the NSA - This Isn't Over

He's already been reelected, so he doesn't care what the general public thinks of him.

sillysauruson Next generation video: Introducing Daala, part 2

The human eye is more sensitive to intensity ("average RGB") than to color. You can drop most of the color info from a picture without significantly degrading its viewing quality.

One way to do that is to transform from (r,g,b) to (intensity, chroma1, chroma2) and then downsize the chroma1 and chroma2 channels by half. When you then transform back into (r,g,b), humans can't hardly tell the difference. Whereas if you tried to do that with the intensity channel, the picture would look awful.

sillysauruson How I Cured my RSI Pain (2010)

Unfortunately, there is risk that people may use alternative medicine as a replacement for real medicine and cause themselves unnecessary harm.

Of course. That's how Steve Jobs died.

The scientific method requires someone to check their hypothesis. If they ignore data, then they're not doing science.