Hacker News Reader

slayed0on It’s Comcastic, Or: I Accidentally Bought a House Without Cable

This actually fits in nicely with the Comcast "rinse and repeat" method. Keep calling back asking the same question until you get the answer you want.

Maybe he should have just submitted phantom requests from every address on his street under different pseudonyms. Eventually someone might have made the mistake of initiating the construction... or a regional manager may have unlocked the project due to perceived demand!

slayed0on It’s Comcastic, Or: I Accidentally Bought a House Without Cable

Situations like this are all I can think of when considering offloading more and more work to machines. I am all for automation, and maybe it is the lesser of two evils, but there is a certain human problem solving/reasoning element that desperately needs to be figured out.

slayed0on The US government's web traffic

Turns out for most people stability and cost are much more important than having something incrementally better

Or, rather, people have different definitions of better. For many people, cost and stability are huge components of their personal calculation. I think it would be more appropriate for you to say:

having something incrementally NEWER

slayed0on We Buy Broken Gold

Sounds like you'll make a great husband some day

slayed0on Hertz puts cameras in its rental cars, says it has no plans to use them

The article states that the video conferencing feature would only be available for use when the vehicle is stopped. In other words, any time you were able to use it you would also be legally allowed to use a cell phone.

slayed0on My Roommate, the Darknet Drug Lord

In his defense he has to cohabitate with the new tenant, not just collect rent checks from him.

slayed0on USB Typewriter

It sounds like you're describing a typewriter. Where does the difference lie?

slayed0on [dead]

This seems like a great idea. In fact, I think it would make sense for companies to profile the roles of existing employees (or even better, have the employees build the profile themselves). In this way, companies can gain a better understanding of what everyone does and what it takes to keep everything running smoothly. Even the employee themselves may gain a better understanding of their job requirements after taking some time to build something like this.

slayed0on How Madden Ratings Are Made

It's amazing that a big studio like EA has allowed a single developer to maintain such a stranglehold over one of their largest franchises for so long. It makes you wonder how often they quietly call meetings behind his back that are solely focused on replacing the mad scientist.

slayed0on Baseball’s Fight with Fatigue

Average MLB Career is 5.6 years[1] * $3.8M/year = $21.28M

Divide that by 40 (assuming a career from 25-65) and you still have $532k/year.

[1] http://www.ramfg.com/RAM-Financial-Group-Solutions-Professio...

slayed0on Apple to build huge €850m 'data centre' in Ireland's fields of Athenry

How about paying a monthly fee for a search engine that DID profile users but gave these users full control over how the data is used?

slayed0on List of available 2 letter domain names

It's hard to identify the product name in the url which leads to a lack of trust. Just my opinion.

slayed0on Harvard stores 700 terabytes of data into a single gram of DNA (2012)

Great explanation, thank you

slayed0on Harvard stores 700 terabytes of data into a single gram of DNA (2012)

Both functions (2^x and 4^x) have exponential growth, but their exponential growth is not linearly related.

2*(2^x) != (4^x)

slayed0on Harvard stores 700 terabytes of data into a single gram of DNA (2012)

I don't think that's right. Assuming we had 5 characters to encode data,

with base2 we get 2^5 = 32 possible combinations

with base4 we get 4^5 = 1024 possible combinations

slayed0on Harvard stores 700 terabytes of data into a single gram of DNA (2012)

If they have possible values: TGAC, why not convert everything into base4? Wouldn't you get astronomical gains in storage?

slayed0on I have no idea what I'm doing

Cached version as the page is beginning to load slowly: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:IoQN9XY...

slayed0on Capital One Fraud Researchers May Also Have Done Some Fraud

If Google wanted to do this they have much more powerful tools at their disposal than Wallet transaction data.

slayed0on Gotham Air: Manhattan to JFK in 6 minutes for $99

I think getting stuffed into the back of a windowless Russian military helicopter may conflict with some of the appeal that the service is trying to market.

slayed0on Drone carrying drugs crashes near US-Mexico border

Although this was clearly a failure, I imagine there are a lot of these that are successfully getting across. It's not hard to see where obvious mistakes were made.

slayed0on Elon Musk donates $10M to keep AI beneficial

It seems it would be very hard to place an arbitrary restriction like that (2x human intelligence vs 100x human intelligence) on something that is learning. I think the idea here is that the AI would begin to learn on its own and become smarter at a frightening pace, not that we would set out to create something that had exactly 2x human intelligence.

How do you quantify human intelligence like that anyway? We are very similar to proposed AI/machine learning techniques in that we form predictive models from observation, but how can that really be measured?

slayed0on I Owe It All to Community College

debt =/= bankruptcy. Unrecoverable debt is bankruptcy. While the argument could be made that our debt is past a recoverable point, it is not a certainty.

slayed0on Google Wants to Sell You Auto Insurance

Although slightly off topic, you are missing a key point when you bring up the idle time of passenger cars. Passenger travel is not uniformly distributed throughout the day. There are peak times where extremely high bandwidth (everyone gets in their car in the morning to go to work and then again to go home at ~8am and ~5pm respectively) is needed. While ride shares will be easier with autonomous cars, we still cannot reduce current fleets by the amount you are hinting at with your '95%' estimate.

slayed0on Farm 432

I think it's more about the idea of grouping humans together by a generic number.

slayed0on Uber drivers say rideshare surge pricing backfired on New Year’s Eve

a more dynamic pricing system that reduced fare multipliers as demand sagged

This is supposedly exactly how it works. Fare multipliers are updated every couple of minutes and fluctuate according to number of available drivers on the road (supply) and number of ride requests (demand).

slayed0on Tesla Is Working on Robotic Snakes That Emerge from the Wall to Charge Your Car

Allowing the car to be charged with no human interaction in paramount to creating a system of driver-less cars. Imagine the car drops you off at work and then parks itself in a charging area a few blocks away where it can plug itself in. (this is just a theoretical example of course but I hope it demonstrates the value of a system like this).

slayed0on Hacking Hacker News

The post on the 2nd day was the one that had 8x the previous post's upvotes.

slayed0on Attack Is Suspected as North Korean Internet Collapses

The smae way they decide in a normal war. They keep going until a treaty is signed. Typically the side who is worse off "throws in the towel" so to speak by signing a treaty that holds the favor of the stronger side.

slayed0on Scans of North Korean IP Space

The people being oppressed do not have internet access. Internet access is reserved for the upper echelons in NK.

slayed0on Ask HN: I’m visiting Bay Area and I dislike the “hacker” culture. Please help

Actively being a "hater" is very different from politely listing groups or ideologies that you are trying to avoid.