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yish

225 karma · joined February 10, 2009

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yish··on Ask HN: Girlfriend is being shown ads depending on what we do together. How?
Did either one of you login to amazon, Facebook, google, etc on one of the other persons device? If so there is likely still a tracking cookie associating you with her device. And your searches are causing her device to be targeted.
yish··on Master Plan, Part Deux
How much data has Google and Apple collected using LIDAR and such on their mapping/street view vehicles?
yish··on 10,000 ints in 1 page of memory (4KB)
Additionally you could decide to only store up to 6 occurrences of each integer in the bit array, use the value of 7 as an indicator that there are 7 or more occurrences and store the actual counts for those cases in a sorted array occupied by the remaining 346 bytes left in the 4KB page.
yish··on How much did Twitteriffic for iOS cost to develop? Craig Hockenberry answers.
The other challenge is developing for all the variants on Android (OS version, different manufacture idiosyncrasies, hardware speeds, screen resolutions, orientation, virtual vs hardware keyboard) all increase the development time and especially the QA time on Android.
yish··on Making Posterous faster with Varnish page caching
Any opinions on pros/cons of using Varnish vs a CDN (Akamai/Limelight)
yish··on Why I don’t use TDD or BDD
On small projects where one has complete ownership and knowledge of the code, one can get by without testing. When you have a large project with tens to hundreds of developers, automated testing gives the developers the confidence and comfort to make large or deep changes with an accurate measure as to the overall stability of the product, even the areas where an individual developer may have little domain knowledge of.
yish··on Ask HN: Who's hiring? (September 2010)
Groupon is hiring for multiple engineering positions in Palo Alto and Chicago. Take a look at our job board or contact me directly at my username at groupon.com if you are interested in doing anything tech related.
yish··on Ask HN: Who's Hiring? (Summer Edition)
Groupon is hiring in our new Palo Alto offices.

Some listed below, but if you want to solve big problems (performance, scalability, personalization, etc), we have an abundance of great opportunities.

http://www.groupon.com/jobs

yish··on Dots Per Inch
DPI is a pointless term in comparing different medium. One of the comments mentions Dots per Radian of viewing angle which I think makes much more sense. Don't need/want my TV to have 300DPI, but 30 DPI would actually be pretty awesome there.
yish··on Nielsen Report: iPhone has the times Android's market share
I believe the biggest reason android adoption is so high is the availability of android devices on all major US carriers as opposed to the iPhone being an AT&T exclusive.
yish··on BigPipe: Pipelining web pages for high performance
I was more concerned with how this would be applicable to a non Facebook site, particularly one that relies significantly on SEO for traffic. I would think Facebook would have solved this for the pages they do want to SEO (Pages, Questions, etc)
yish··on BigPipe: Pipelining web pages for high performance
Wondering how this affects SEO and non javascript enabled browsers. I assume one would still have to implement the more traditional solution as a backup option.
yish··on Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
You pretty much describe exactly what I built. It's all installed in a wooden box I created that sits on my counter, the top has the PID display, on either side is a wall outlet, one controlled by the PID and one direct 120V current for the water pump. The temperature controller is on a long wire that just comes out of a whole I drilled on the front, though you can build the fancy headphone attachment as detailed in the link. All the other wiring is in the box too, including the relay which is nice since it muffles the sound of the relay switching on/off.

I tried using it with the rice cooker I had and the results weren't great. I found the temperature fluctuations too erratic but didn't really investigate too much since my rice cooker was gonna be too small for anything but eggs.

yish··on Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
Actually, what gave me the confidence to use the 1500 watt heating element was when I searched for the PID I was buying on google, I found a lot of links to home-brewers who used these heating elements drilled into the side of big aluminum/stainless steel pots. They were using even higher wattage units to get quicker boil times.
yish··on Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
Typically you would sear the fish/beef/chicken before/after for texture, flavor and color. Beef for instance will come out grey on the outside and look unpleasant unless seared (inside is still bright red/pink though).

The bigger risk is the time that the food is left in the danger zone of above 50 degrees and below 125 degrees (don't quote me on those numbers, going off memory). Basically any bacteria present in food in that temp range will start reproducing quickly. I have heard 4 hours as the time limit acceptable to have food in that temp range before being considered unsafe.

yish··on Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
Pretty easy once I got all the parts together. Assembled it all over the course of one night. Hardest part was drilling the hole into the side of the hotel pan for the water heater. Luckily my neighbor is an electrician and had a step bit that worked perfectly, took about 45 minutes.

Oh, and the Radio Shack relay mentioned didn't work for me when hooked up to my PID's solid state relay (different PID then used in the link). The switching voltage wasn't enough but eventually got a relay that only needed 5V to switch. Short term I used the internal relay which worked fine, but was noisy and I wasn't comfortable driving that amount of amperage through it.

yish··on Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
I have made a modified sous-vide setup based on the following excellent instructions which I have not seen mentioned here. Total cost was under $75 for me since I simplified the setup a bit. Temperature accuracy is excellent.

http://seattlefoodgeek.com/2010/02/diy-sous-vide-heating-imm...

Quick overview of my modifications. I used a 6" deep full size hotel pan I got in chinatown as my water bath and a standard $9 1500 watt water heater element instead of the set of immersion heaters.

yish··on Apple May Have Traced iPhone to Finder’s Address
Interesting tidbit. Gizmodo didn't buy the device, only paid for exclusivity. Don't want to be a couch lawyer like so many others but wondering if that is meaningful to the possible case against them.
yish··on Ask HN: What are the best free and pay web charting libraries?
Protovis out of stanford (http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/) seems to be incredibly comprehensive while also being really slick and interactive. Haven't had the chance to use it on a project but have it bookmarked since it would be the first thing I would try when I do. Also, seems to be updated regularly. I know they didn't support IE for a long time as they are SVG based, but not sure if that has changed.
yish··on Ask HN: How much does it cost to outsource iPhone app development?
Actually, this is the rate for a good small team, agencies can go even higher (I've seen $180 quoted and have heard of, but never personally seen, higher).

I also think part of the challenge is that to have a stand out app, you now need a team with UI/VisD/Dev skills. Expectations of consumers have grown since the early app store days, and a lone developer rarely cuts it anymore unless they also have some real design chomps.

yish··on Ask HN: How much does it cost to outsource iPhone app development?
The going rate for a great developer/designer with lots of mobile experience here in SF is in the ~150 an hour range. I've seen this price go up significantly in the last couple months, primarily due to high demand at the moment. You can probably get a little cheaper outside the area and definitely less offshore, but even then a good offshore house will run you $60 and they often don't like doing fixed bids at those prices.

My experience is that app development for a medium to high complexity app with location features and accessing a 3rd party API for data would typically take 4-6 weeks including QA but really depends on the complexity.

I've done about 30+ mobile apps now so ping me if you need any advice

yish··on A 2.5 Year-Old Has A First Encounter with An iPad
She has used an iPhone before and played with many of these apps on the iPhone.
yish··on How Not To Sort By Average Rating
I agree, especially that the skew needs to be site dependent. For example the iPhone app store actually has the opposite problem where their rate on delete "feature", skews the average ratings way down. Reviews are heavily distributed along 1 star or 5 star ratings.

Would also be curious to see a comparison of different rating systems, for example i'd like to see what the distribution is on a site thumbs up/down rating site like digg vs a 5 star system.

yish··on Complete Notes to Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes | Higher Thought
Actually the notes indicate the opposite, that meat was more lean when it was free-range, hunted for and todays meat (grown in feed lots, etc) is much more fatty.
yish··on Teux Deux: slickly designed little to-do app
Wish there was a way to edit an existing todo, fixing a typo for instance, but think that would take away from the simple UI
yish··on Ask HN: Free calorie count API?
I haven't used it but had the Fat Secret site bookmarked for a while. They have an API here: http://platform.fatsecret.com/ Let us know how it looks once you try it.
yish··on Squareup
Interesting that all transactions show up as from squareup.com. This means that actual vendors are just virtual accounts and they could benefit from the economies of scale and can be provided those cost benefits that square up obtained. This most likely would be cheaper then any plan a small merchant would be able to get on their own.

I wonder what the overhead is per transaction (usually a small fixed fee as well as a percentage of the overall transaction). Having worked with some small retail shops, you usually trade off either a higher per transaction cost with smaller percentage fees for large ticket price items or the other way around for quick-serve restaurants for instance.

yish··on Nokia suing Apple over the iPhone
Interesting, they claim they own a bunch of patents related to 802.11, does that mean they can sue every laptop manufacturer, and any other device that is wi-fi enabled next?
yish··on Nokia suing Apple over the iPhone
Why would apple be responsible? Last I checked they were using a separate radio processor chip from someone else (I believe Broadcomm), so wouldn't Broadcomm either have already negotiated the patent rights or ultimately be the one responsible for any patent suit?
yish··on Django-SocialAuth - Login via twitter, facebook, google, etc. from single app
One challenge I have with all these logins options is that it becomes hard to remember which provider you logged in with. We have an issue already with Facebook connect and standard Django auth of duplicate accounts for a single user being created. Often times merging these can be rough. Has anyone come up with an elegant solution to this problem?
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