Hacker News: lurker17

New comment by lurker17 in "Weekend project: A place to post crappy code. HatePaste "

lurker17 — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 21:04:14 +0000

Wow. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

New comment by lurker17 in "Rich Hickey's new project: datomic.com"

lurker17 — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 21:01:19 +0000

It's rather standard already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowly_changing_dimension

New comment by lurker17 in "StackOverflow"

lurker17 — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 21:26:49 +0000

The user you are talking to is "qwe123_troll"

qwe123[4] is a troll account name with a storied history: http://www.reddit.com/user/qwe1234

New comment by lurker17 in "StackOverflow"

lurker17 — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 21:24:33 +0000

Churches are also non-profit. As is Scientology. Just being a non-profit isn't insurance against evil.

New comment by lurker17 in "StackOverflow"

lurker17 — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 21:14:25 +0000

Surely this problem is trivial to fix by changing the linear scoring function "5 points per upvote" to a sublinear function, that decays as upvotes increase, or has hard max.

New comment by lurker17 in "Black and White"

lurker17 — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 17:51:23 +0000

We are on Paul Graham's Hacker News, this is already in the canon:

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

New comment by lurker17 in "Why Do Some People Learn Faster?"

lurker17 — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 23:48:22 +0000

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur

"In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind."

New comment by lurker17 in "How To Be Happy Anywhere"

lurker17 — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 23:06:47 +0000

Only if we care about getting reliablly correct answers.

New comment by lurker17 in "How To Be Happy Anywhere"

lurker17 — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 23:02:22 +0000

Pablum.

Kids are happy everywhere because they are carefree kids.

New comment by lurker17 in "Pretty Lisp"

lurker17 — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 22:49:31 +0000

the ovals are far too deeply colored. If they were closer to invisible (especially the horizontal segments) it wouldn't be so bad.

and the linebreak between "defun" and "hello" is just wrong. "hello" should be colored, and "defun" should be desaturated.

New comment by lurker17 in "Schmidt: If Google Gets It Right, There Will Be An Android In Every Pocket"

lurker17 — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 01:08:15 +0000

I don't know how idiomatic that phrase is, but Schmidt's statement is a direct rip off of Micro-Soft's mission statement https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=microsoft+computer+in+...

Google is the new Microsoft, indeed.

New comment by lurker17 in "Schmidt: If Google Gets It Right, There Will Be An Android In Every Pocket"

lurker17 — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 01:05:37 +0000

The sentence is excluding the possibility of Google getting it right while leaving some pockets empty.

New comment by lurker17 in "How PayPal and Apple’s Fraud Policies Punish the Honest User"

lurker17 — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 00:58:18 +0000

There are no "indie" iOS developers, because iOS developers are not independent. There are only "iOS contract developers", paid on a royalty basis, but retained at-will by Apple.

New comment by lurker17 in "Linus torvalds on security"

lurker17 — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 22:37:09 +0000

It's the same in US English. The issue is just that there are 1-10% of people who are sensitive to the issue, and computing has grown from a small club of close friends/enemies/frenemies to a more mainstream activity, there is a growing call for being more welcoming and "politicallyy correct" tone in conversation.

For example, on the official Mozilla Bugzilla, diverting from technical debate to non-technical vitriolic commentary is a bannable offense, regardless of the value of the user's technical contribution.

It's just a toxic way of communicating, and if someone can't package their thoughts for public consumption, it may be better to keep their thoughts (semi-)private and leave it to someone more tactful to spread the word more widely and effect positive change.

New comment by lurker17 in "Does being wealthy make you unethical? New research suggests it does"

lurker17 — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 21:24:04 +0000

Headline is completely false. Ars Technica made the mistake, and the submitter copied it. Editors, please fix.

The cited research shows that wealth is a predictor of unethical behavior. There were no exeperiments investigating the direction of causality, or whether becoming wealthy correlates to increased unethicality.

Also, the article closes with a complete non-sequitur about Bill Gates, one the most famously greedy individuals of the 20th Century, whose philanthropy (which has what to do with ethics, anyway)? only appeared after he accumulated more money than God.

New comment by lurker17 in "A Law Apple Would Like to Break"

lurker17 — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 01:26:18 +0000

The author was thinking of

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lawoflargenumbers.asp

but confused it with:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers

Apple has no need to grow its market cap forever. It could pay dividends from revenues.

New comment by lurker17 in "How Google's incredible recruiting machine works"

lurker17 — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 01:18:23 +0000

I thought everyone knew that Google had the most incompetent recruiting machine on the planet, just barely propped up by the mountain of money that towers over the recruiters' shoulders, which is what actually wins candidates.

> They're young, highly paid and, often, on a six month contract.

Huh. So this is why most Google candidates experience recruiter turnover during their interview process. No one at Google thought that it might make a bad impression to candidates to watch recruiters constantly getting fired mid-project?

Google's PR machine is incredible, though. Nice hit.

> Like so many projects at Google, data pumps through the recruiting organization's veins. An internally designed candidate-tracking program used by recruiters is said to be a thing of mathematical beauty. > ... > a happily-employed Google engineer finds a recruiting e-mail in her inbox — from her own employer.

Um, OK.

New comment by lurker17 in "Is Throttling Smartphones Pointless? Study Suggests So"

lurker17 — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 01:07:27 +0000

So the telephone network is secured by a $100 entrance fee charged to any DDOS attacker?

New comment by lurker17 in "Is Throttling Smartphones Pointless? Study Suggests So"

lurker17 — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 01:06:23 +0000

Why don't actual phone call minutes use all these expensive resources?

New comment by lurker17 in "Faster-than-light neutrino result may have been due to bad connection"

lurker17 — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 22:49:33 +0000

What sort of experiment could test the hypothesis "x > c" in a binary way without depending on a precise measurement in a complex system?

"x > c" is a binary test, BTW.