jphackworth
Re:Ask HN: Is there a market for batched distributed Monte Carlo compu...
on Sunday February 19, 2012 @02:43PM (#3610148)
Sorry, but my guess is that there is no demand for this. You could test this simply - just offer to run these sorts of batched calculations to people and don't specify how they will be run. If anyone takes you up on the offer, then you have some demand. If nobody takes you up on the offer, then you should think of something else.
Re:The story of the hardest platform game ever
on Tuesday February 14, 2012 @02:35AM (#3589049)
I was hoping this would be about Battletoads, which IMO is the hardest platform game I have ever played. Even on an emulator, with the ability to freeze frames and save/reload game state, I could not beat Battletoads.
Re:Over the Hill at 35
on Sunday February 05, 2012 @12:57AM (#3553416)
The lady’s husband, a semiconductor engineer, has been unemployed for three years, yet people in his field are being brought in on H-1Bs. She doesn’t think this makes any sense.
My nephew, an avid basketball player, has been unemployed for three years, yet the NBA is bringing in basketball players from other countries!
This article makes the incorrect assumption that if two people have the same job title, they must have the same skills. I was initially surprised that a "leading authority on H-1B visas" would make this mistake, but it turns out he is a professor rather than someone with any experience in the software industry, which explains why his arguments are driven by statistics without any understanding of how the industry works.
Re:Gemfury A/B testing their landing page
on Saturday January 28, 2012 @09:16PM (#3524176)
They say "please don't take this seriously" and pretend it's a parody. Yet... the product is real, and the "see plans and pricing" button still takes you to a payment page. So because they're promoting their site on HN instead of on Techcrunch they think it's okay? This is like building a knockoff MacBook with an Apple logo on it, and pasting a "parody" sticker on it.
I guess the GemFury folks just wish they could get as much publicity as CureBit did, even if it's mostly negative.
Re:The problem with startups is that they can’t solve the big problems.
on Saturday January 28, 2012 @09:09PM (#3524159)
You don't think Apple and Google are solving big problems? They were startups too, once. I think the flaw in your logic is that once a startup successfully solves a big problem, they quickly stop being a startup, and become a big company. It's a mistake to conclude "startups can't solve big problems".
Re:Beautiful web type: highlighting the best of the Google web fonts d...
on Saturday January 28, 2012 @06:50PM (#3523831)
I really appreciate that this site uses interesting quotes rather than lorem ipsum. It makes it less boring to trawl through different fonts.
Re:SPJ: Escape From the Ivory Tower, Haskell From 1990 to 2011
on Saturday January 28, 2012 @06:48PM (#3523822)
Really interesting slides. As someone who has only briefly played around with Haskell, I do envy some of its features, particularly the type inference. I wish there were more languages that could combine the ease of scripting languages with the maintainability of compile-time typechecking.
Re:Steve Jobs personally asked Eric Schmidt to stop poaching employees
on Saturday January 28, 2012 @05:25PM (#3523503)
An interesting article - thanks for the link.
In summary, these practices are extremely common, and Ben Horowitz recommends them. However, they are technically illegal in California.
Re:YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals
on Saturday January 28, 2012 @04:03PM (#3523270)
Referencing images and code from another site without permission
This is not illegal, merely poor form and also a bad technical decision because the other site can then control you.
If this were illegal, you would have to get permission from other sites to use iframes. Things like stumbleupon's web version couldn't exist.
Re:YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals
on Saturday January 28, 2012 @04:00PM (#3523262)
It's also often a very successful strategy for companies to copy the design of competitors, and differentiate on other things. Zynga copying competitors' games is a great example.
In this case, Curebit was only copying the design of a landing page, so it was probably not worth pissing off DHH even if that landing page was legally usable and worked better. Although it really seems that DHH was more pissed off by Allan's tweets and posts about it than by the design itself.
Re:YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals
on Saturday January 28, 2012 @03:55PM (#3523235)
At what point does this become unacceptable?
Look at what Zynga did with FarmVille. At first, it was exactly like FarmTown. Same appearance, same menu layout, same gameplay. They weren't actually serving assets from FarmTown's servers, but besides that, the design was exactly the same.
Was this illegal? Probably not - design like this generally can't be copyrighted.
Was this successful? Yes - this sort of strategy led Zynga to be worth billions of dollars.
Was this ethical? I think intelligent people will differ.
Either way, DHH certainly uses his audience to attack people who come too close to the design of 37signals. A similar thing happened when Google launched Huddle, and DHH complained it was too similar to Campfire. In the end, Google rebranded it as a PR move and nobody cared any more.
Whether it's ethical or not, it certainly seems like a tactical PR mistake for a startup to annoy DHH this much.
Re:Doing Y Combinator a second time
on Saturday January 28, 2012 @12:26PM (#3522595)
I feel like SOMA is now the center of mass of the tech startup scene. Try 21st Amendment.
Re:Steve Jobs personally asked Eric Schmidt to stop poaching employees
on Saturday January 28, 2012 @12:14PM (#3522556)
So let's say I am running a startup with two employees. A friend of mine is also running a startup and needs to hire people. Is it wrong for me to ask him not to hire my employees?
Re:Rekindling (on my experience with burnout)
on Thursday January 19, 2012 @03:15AM (#3483641)
That sucks - chasing payments sounds really frustrating, because it's not even like you're doing something wrong, it's just this situation that you shouldn't even have to deal with, but you do. It sounds really stressful. Good luck with everything.
Re:Bitbucket Downtime Post-Mortem
on Thursday January 12, 2012 @07:47PM (#3458648)
Sort of a silly thing to bring up, but at my previous job bitbucket was down so often we started calling it sh*tbucket. At my current gig we're on github and it seems far more reliable.
Re:CodeSprint programming contest to match developers to companies
on Thursday December 22, 2011 @05:31PM (#3383612)
For people with experience and multiple job offers... there is no incentive
That's true. But think about a smart programmer who is fresh out of school, or maybe dropped out. If you don't have anything on your resume yet, this could be a reasonable way to break into the tech scene.
Re:What's really behind Twitter's staff exodus
on Tuesday December 20, 2011 @12:44AM (#3372444)
This emphasis on "culture" is fatuous horse excrement. Whenever you hear that word, reach for your resume.
The new twitter is a dreary testament to the deceased neurons of the new management.
This sort of comment doesn't belong on Hacker News. There's nothing here besides insulting Twitter in a way that uses interesting words.
Re:From zero to Go: launching on the Google homepage in 24 hours
on Tuesday December 13, 2011 @09:58PM (#3350372)
To be fair, you loadtested with ab, whereas the author launched his feature on the Google homepage.
Re:Hacking Scrabble (part 1)
on Tuesday December 13, 2011 @02:39PM (#3348876)
It's not that hard to memorize the 2-letter words. Most of them do have a meaning that makes sense. So it's easier to remember
aa = lava
ab = your abs
ad = tv ads
ae = scottish "one"
ag = agricultural
ah = ah that feels good
ai = a sloth
al = a tree
am = i am happy
an = an apple
ar = arrr i'm a pirate
as = as you were
at = where you at
aw = aww that's cute
ax = the weapon
ay = ay caramba
than it is to memorize "abdeghilmnrstwxy".
Re:MixRank (YC S11) Raises $1.5M from Mark Cuban, 500 Startups
on Tuesday December 13, 2011 @02:01PM (#3348701)
Quite an interesting product. I typed a competitor's name in and immediately saw a huge list of ads they were running. Very helpful in just ten seconds!
Re:Interactive shell to a running Python process
on Sunday December 11, 2011 @06:45PM (#3341528)
Very interesting. I would love to see this for other programming languages, especially Ruby (probably fairly easy) or Objective-C (may be quite hard).
Re:A Bill Gates Comeback?
on Friday December 09, 2011 @02:32PM (#3335196)
One prominent chief executive told Fortune he'd heard from someone close to Gates that he might be considering such a move.
It's hard to imagine a less reliable source. And that sentence is the only real news in the article!
Re:Myths About Introverts
on Tuesday December 06, 2011 @10:26PM (#3322284)
These aren't myths. This is the author attempting to redefine the meaning of the word "introvert". For example:
Myth #2 – Introverts are shy.
From dictionary.com:
noun: 1. a shy person.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/introvert
If you want to use the word "introvert" to support some psychological theory, that's fine. Just don't act like everyone else has been misusing the word all along.
Re:Elm: a functional reactive programming language that compiles to Ja...
on Tuesday December 06, 2011 @10:17PM (#3322270)
It seems pretty neat, certainly a cool senior thesis!
One suggestion if you take this further is to add a "dictionary" or "hash table" type. For practical programming problems, that is pretty necessary.
But a really neat project - it's cool to see a functional programming take on the CoffeeScript-style compiling-to-javascript.
Re:Math puzzle - two mathematicians guessing coin flips
on Tuesday December 06, 2011 @10:12PM (#3322260)
This is similar to some of the effects of entanglement in quantum mechanics, where you can't affect the probability of a single event, but you can guarantee the events are not independent.
(spoiler alert)
Once you figure the guesses have to be based on the coin flip you can see, it's pretty straightforward because there just aren't that many possible strategies. Sam always guesses that the coin he can't see is the same as the one he can see, whereas Dirk always guesses they are different. If they are the same, Sam is right and Dirk is wrong. Otherwise, Dirk is right and Sam are wrong. Each is right 50% of the time, they just ensure they are never right at the same time.
Re:Why are pornstars more notable than scientists on Wikipedia?
on Tuesday December 06, 2011 @08:49PM (#3322075)
I'm guessing that since The Lord Of The Rings movie, Viggo Mortensen is the most famous Dane.
Re:What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies
on Friday December 02, 2011 @07:39PM (#3306441)
I once worked on a site with 1/6th the users and only one machine. ;-) Counting users often doesn't match across sites, especially when an Instagram user is someone who has downloaded the app, and might never come back. That's why the 50 photo uploads per second peak is a useful benchmark.
Re:What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies
on Friday December 02, 2011 @07:10PM (#3306344)
I'm a little surprised so many machines are used to run Instagram. TechCrunch mentioned their peak has been 50 photo uploads per second (which they say go directly to S3, so Instagram's servers only need to pass a token). Of course there are other forms of requests, but just back of the envelope it seems like it should not require anywhere near "hundreds" of machines.
Not to be too harsh - it's just three engineers, so it makes sense if the setup is still evolving.
Re:How Heroku Works - Hiring
on Friday December 02, 2011 @02:14PM (#3305244)
Why pick on Heroku for this? Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and basically every other tech company do the same thing.