News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

sadga

Re:Data Mining 3.4 billion Web pages for $100 of EC2 on Tuesday October 16, 2012 @08:05PM (#4662587)
AWS Spot Instances are incredible. They make you a liquidity provider, and reward you for it.

Paying list price for any load that isn't mission-critical and needed immediately is insane.

Re:Amateur astronomers discover a planet with four suns on Monday October 15, 2012 @07:01PM (#4657565)
A team at McGill made a "game" to find patterns in I think protein-folding or genome data, to leverage humans to identify patterns that their algorithms could not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylo_(video_game)

Re:Show HN: What would Paul Graham do? on Monday October 15, 2012 @06:22PM (#4657434)
TC W13 folks:

http://wwpgd.com/?q=dinner

> Organic Startup Ideas

Re:Master Keys on Monday October 15, 2012 @05:59PM (#4657356)
Fire crews have bolt cutters to handle the common case of a door with a small lock of any sort.
Are these photos artificially curved / lens-angled (perhaps intentionally deceptive?), making the Earth appear more curved and the altitude appear higher than it would to a human observer at the camera's position?

http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/felix- baumgartner-jumps-from-red-bull-stratos-balloon-640x353.jpg

AirBnB owes its multi-multi-milliondollar growth to an email campaign that used fake women's names as the sender.
Re:Big-O Misconceptions on Monday October 15, 2012 @02:19PM (#4656367)
This is why you care about the lower bound:

If I say something is O(n^n)), you may come back and say "I wonder if it is O(n^2)

If you say Omega(n^2), I know not to bother.

Fraud, mostly.
> the idea of creating a new church that would take everything all the other religions said you could not do and made it OK.

detailed in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land

Also, Unitarian Universalism (a religion formed because Unitarianism and Universalism weren't broad enough!) is basically the most dilute religion. They have churches and services and community activities but no liturgy beyond a vague spirituality.

Re:What’s really so bad about bubble sort? on Friday October 12, 2012 @06:02PM (#4647055)
Selection sort is simpler than Insertion sort.
Game mechanics are not copyrightable. A concrete expression of the rules is copyrightable (you can't copy-paste Monopoly's rule book), as is artwork.

"Play-alike" games are in the clear. "Look-alike" games are not.

I wouldn't say "play monopoly". I'd say "play a property-trading game like Monopoly".

Re:GET /browser.exe on Friday October 12, 2012 @04:57PM (#4646815)
So, Native Client?
Re:The world’s fastest Rubik cube solver is made from Lego on Wednesday October 10, 2012 @06:01PM (#4638428)
> the starting permutations are different for different contestants,

This seems silly, why? Because they don't solve simultaneously so there is a risk of information leakage?

Re:How Jeff Atwood works on Wednesday October 10, 2012 @05:18PM (#4638243)
> - Every Tuesday and Friday: Move trash kerbside.

Oh crap, I forgot to do this yesterday!

I'm sure the vendor was deeply offended, and would have much preferred the backpacker walk on by without spending any money or trying to communicate.
Re:An Intuitive Guide to Linear Algebra on Tuesday October 09, 2012 @07:57PM (#4634475)
Huh. What other was is there to describe it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenvalues_and_eigenvectors
Re:An Intuitive Guide to Linear Algebra on Tuesday October 09, 2012 @07:55PM (#4634472)
I think an intuitive guide should have more diagrams of affine transformations. Don't just visualize the matrix, visualize the transformation.
Re:Google Consumer Survey on Monday October 08, 2012 @07:30PM (#4629182)
more accurate results, or more plausible-looking random results?
Re:Richard Hamming: You and Your Research (1986) on Monday October 08, 2012 @06:42PM (#4629052)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw

> Intro: I have given a talk with this title many times, and it turns out from discussions after the talk I could have just as well have called it "You and Your Engineering Career," or even "You and Your Career." But I left the word "Research" in the title because that is what I have most studied"

Re:Living in a Van on Friday October 05, 2012 @05:25PM (#4618756)
FWIW, he could have rented an apartment and showered at home, and the cost would have been to delay retirement by maybe 10% of his tenure.
Re:Living in a Van on Friday October 05, 2012 @05:23PM (#4618748)
Let's suppose, for the sake or argument, that 40% of the population of the "Badlands" are truly evil murderous thieves, who have no compunction firing a pistol into your car as you drive by, and suppose further that every day each one of them partakes of this pastime.

A horrible, dangerous place, seething with evil, yes? Far worse than the reality, no doubt, but let's go with it.

What do you make of the other 60%?

Re:Facebook has 1 billion monthly active users on Thursday October 04, 2012 @03:41PM (#4613991)
Why?
the hubbub over "scanning" here is silly. Obviously Facebook's systems scan your everything. The issue is that FB considers a "private mention" as a "Like", but it's old news that a "Facebook Like" is not an "English like"
Re:So, You Don’t Have Any Disabled Users? on Thursday October 04, 2012 @03:32PM (#4613944)
Just "deaf" here. "deaf" people who aren't part of "Deaf cultre" are just as unable to hear as "Deaf people". In fact, the average "Deaf" person may be more likely to be able to hear, since "Deaf" is cultural (can be opted-into) and "deaf" is biological.
Re:So, You Don’t Have Any Disabled Users? on Thursday October 04, 2012 @03:25PM (#4613908)
Seems the solution hear is Google Voice or some client software that receives the phone call on behalf of the user, and sets up the relay. Relay should be a "hook-in" feature of my phone, not a concern of the caller.
Re:The Most Revealing Job Interview Question on Thursday October 04, 2012 @03:18PM (#4613865)
That's extreme. You spend over half your life at work. It is personal. The most popular employers make an effort to contribute to employee's personal lives.
Re:The Most Revealing Job Interview Question on Thursday October 04, 2012 @03:17PM (#4613859)
> That's pretty unfairly tilted in favor of the company.

You seem to be assuming that the company's goal is to find a reason to reject someone. That's not correct.

If anything, it's tilted in favor of candidates that have the same hobbies as interviewers.

Re:Ancestry.com Acquires 1000memories (YC S10) on Wednesday October 03, 2012 @06:27PM (#4609939)
> most profiles are inactive

Beautiful euphemism for "died before the Internet was invented"

Re:The Z3 theorem prover is now open source on Wednesday October 03, 2012 @05:49PM (#4609816)
> The above I can understand. MSFT claims ownership of any modifications you make to its software. Be aware.

MSFT claims a non-exclusive right to use your modifications.

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