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A Startup's Guide to Time Hacking
Re:John "Captain Crunch" Draper, the Hacker's Hacker
on Wednesday November 17, 2010 @01:16PM (#1915095)
Quite a few famous hackers seem to have this problem, eg Richard Stallman. I suppose there's a reason the "UNIX guy" stereotype exists.
Re:Scientists successfully activate human telomerase
on Sunday September 12, 2010 @04:08AM (#1683278)
Layperson's explanation - this is a pretty important step to stopping aging in human beings. Telomerase lengthens telomeres, which are end-caps on DNA strands that are slowly whittled away as cells divide; without functioning telomerase human cells can only divide a finite amount of times before dying.
Re:Ask HN: non invasive analytics tool?
on Thursday September 02, 2010 @03:56AM (#1655554)
AWStats (http://awstats.sourceforge.net/) is decent if you just want some simple log-based analytics.
Don't know what you mean by limited, but logfile-based analytics software doesn't have access to as much data as software that can use other data sources like cookies (ie it has difficulty tracking sessions).
If I might ask, why exactly do you need to make your analytics completely undetectable to users? In most cases tracking pixels and the like have no effect whatsoever on the user experience.
Re:Malaysia's Largest bank exposed Paul Graham Transaction back in Via...
on Wednesday May 19, 2010 @02:45AM (#1360309)
Doesn't strip script tags or anything; lots of nasty stuff you could do with this. Somebody should notify them.
https://www.maybank2u.com.my/mbb/m2u/jsp/common/mbbReceipt.j...
Re:Pay It Forward
on Thursday April 15, 2010 @12:31AM (#1266982)
I'd love to have one too, if you still have any.
Re:Are 80% of Harvard Students First Borns?
on Sunday March 07, 2010 @02:36AM (#1173041)
Isn't Poisson rate-based, ie events over a fixed time period? I'm having trouble seeing where you got the rate from (children per lifetime? but that's hardly a "fixed time period") - all we have is a single number "children/household" with no time dimension.
And most other distributions, ie other than the uniform I'm assuming and the Poisson you're using, require >1 parameters. Since we only have one piece of data (the mean) we would have to make assumptions with these distributions that make no more sense than simply assuming a uniform distribution to begin with.
You'll have to excuse me for any incredibly stupid intuitive leaps; I haven't had a chance to wake up fully yet.
Re:Are 80% of Harvard Students First Borns?
on Saturday March 06, 2010 @12:42PM (#1171823)
The "average number of own children under 18 per family" for "familes with own children under 18" was 1.86 in 2009 (and has been within 0.1 of that since 1978), which means about 1/1.86=~54% of all children are first-borns...
I don't think we have enough information here to actually verify but I suspect 80% vs 54% is still a statistically significant difference.
But it's pretty obvious that the 80% number is an arbitrary guess, so I'm not sure exactly where I stand here.
source: http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/hh-fam/fm3.csv
Re:HN Rant: Come and Go Voting
on Saturday March 06, 2010 @11:37AM (#1171717)
The entire source of news.arc is open - eg http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc
Lines 1095-1098 control whether the downvote arrow is displayed or not.
So, to answer your question, yes, it bothers me that there's very rarely a clear enumeration or description of features.
On the other hand, it's been a wonderful opportunity to learn Arc.
(I'm only half joking - Arc was actually my first stab at functional programming and I probably wouldn't have tried it if pg had bothered to document HN's features)
Re:The Scary New Rich
on Saturday March 06, 2010 @11:13AM (#1171681)
the ones with a bit of money will vote with their wallets
The problem with this (regarding China in particular) is that the "ones with a bit money" and the "people" sometimes intersect at very few points.
Re:What is the mathematical expression of ascending sort?
on Saturday March 06, 2010 @10:14AM (#1171606)
Mathematically you could express the concept of a (partially ordered) set by something like <S,P(x1,x2)> (where P is some comparison function), so, for example, the sorted natural numbers would be <N,<>.
I have no idea, though, if that's even remotely close to what you're asking.
Re:Nepal Human Hair Solar Panel Hoax (CraigHyatt)
on Friday September 11, 2009 @01:01PM (#817679)
Actually, if you read the article, they mention using two probes made of the same metal to eliminate any current generated by the differences in redox potential between them.
Re:Nepal Human Hair Solar Panel Hoax (CraigHyatt)
on Friday September 11, 2009 @12:53PM (#817667)
Then again, silicon is an atomic crystal, while hair's structure is defined on the cellular level, which makes doping silicon much more practical than doping hair. This is on top of the problem that solids without an atomic lattice of some form tend to have trouble allowing any kind of electron movement at all, regardless of what chemicals you add to it (there are quite a few exceptions, like chlorophyll, but even those tend to be well-defined at the molecular level).
Also, as the author mentions, hair soaked in salt water becomes conductive, not semiconductive - current running through it is simply passed on by the salt water - but this conductivity has nothing to do with the hair and everything to do with the water.
Re:_why smashes Ruby Community Dummy Spit record
on Wednesday August 19, 2009 @07:26PM (#774067)
That said, I don't think this is really a justified criticism we have here, pending further details.
Re:_why smashes Ruby Community Dummy Spit record
on Wednesday August 19, 2009 @07:25PM (#774064)
'Dummy' means 'pacifier' in some places, so 'spitting the dummy' literally refers to the temper tantrum of a baby.
Hence, to 'dummy spit' is to throw a massive, immature temper tantrum.
Re:US man 'stole 130m card numbers'
on Monday August 17, 2009 @07:49PM (#769402)
I see your point, but saying that a "'SQL injection attack'" was used to "penetrate networks' firewalls" really does conjure the image of somebody setting their IP to "' OR 1=1;".
Re:US man 'stole 130m card numbers'
on Monday August 17, 2009 @06:49PM (#769323)
Also, SQL injection being described as "complicated"?
Re:Signs that you're a bad programmer
on Friday August 07, 2009 @02:38PM (#748261)
Well, I only have experience with one college, but Stanford offers an introductory-level class in pure C and x86 assembler.
Re:Wireless power system shown off
on Thursday July 23, 2009 @02:59PM (#720130)
That's incredibly cool. I wonder, though, if these things produce a strong enough magnetic field to interfere with radios, cellphones, wireless internet, etc.
Re: Amazon Buys Zappos
on Wednesday July 22, 2009 @05:29PM (#718603)
I find it vaguely surreal that I work at Amazon, yet I read about this on TechCrunch before I found out "officially".