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spolettoon Ask HN: What are your other interests?

Do you know about http://www.reddit.com/r/history? There are subreddits for many different interests. I've found them to be of similar quality to HN. Great communities of people communicating around a shared interest. :)

spolettoon The Wonder Of It All

This is my favorite commencement speech. I've revisited it many times. Each time I do, it adds perspective to the way I live my life.

I thought HN might enjoy it as well. :)

spolettoon Announcing the First Beta Release of Persona

If I understand correctly, the browser stores a certificate that proves you own your email address. These certificates are only valid for a certain amount of time, even if you check that you own this computer. So what happens when your cert expires? Do you have to go back to your email and re-click the link that gives you a new cert to be stored in your browser?

Also, if I'm using a public computer, is there a way for me to manually revoke a cert when I'm done using the machine? It seems that even a 1hr expiry is too long for this case.

spolettoon Using AWS and Bit.ly to Eliminate Server State

I'm basically using Bit.ly as a key-value store and short URL generator. The Billr server doesn't maintain a database.

spolettoon Using AWS and Bit.ly to Eliminate Server State

The images that are being sent contain the amounts, tax, subtotal, tip and total for up to 16 individual people. Here's an example: http://billr.me/J7W5uY

spolettoon Using AWS and Bit.ly to Eliminate Server State

S3 is pretty cheap as well. $0.125 per GB of storage. Considering the images are ~80KB on average, S3 hosting is also just pennies per month. :)

spolettoon Show HN: My side project for splitting restaurant bills

Glad to hear it! Let me know if you have any feedback on how it works!

spolettoon Show HN: My side project for splitting restaurant bills

I experimented with Tesseract OCR: https://github.com/rcarlsen/Pocket-OCR/

In my field studies, I found it was not very reliable. Text recognition would often fail even on printed receipts. Also, several of the restaurants I went to used hand-written receipts. So I ultimately decided against OCR. If it had worked well, I do think it would be a nice feature for the app.

spolettoon Show HN: My side project for splitting restaurant bills

Thanks for the feedback! I'm working on other problems as well, but this was a real pain point for me last semester. I'm a senior in college and eat out in groups quite frequently. It's always a real pain when the check comes and everyone seems to have forgotten basic math. I made an iOS app for myself to solve the problem, and then my friends Ivy and Nicholas convinced me to polish it and put it on the app store. So hopefully other people find it useful too!