HN user

blaincate

82 karma
Posts10
Comments31
View on HN

famous fat line patent !

https://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html

>> The chief blue suit orchestrated the presentation of the seven patents IBM claimed were infringed, the most prominent of which was IBM's notorious "fat lines" patent: To turn a thin line on a computer screen into a broad line, you go up and down an equal distance from the ends of the thin line and then connect the four points. You probably learned this technique for turning a line into a rectangle in seventh-grade geometry, and, doubtless, you believe it was devised by Euclid or some such 3,000-year-old thinker. Not according to the examiners of the USPTO, who awarded IBM a patent on the process.

Read the whole story and you will see how IBM makes money !

Hitchhikers guide to galaxy : (I remembered something along this lines)

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/92738/what-is-the-...

    [Ford] slowly drew out from the wallet a single and insanely exciting piece of plastic that was nestling amongst a bunch of receipts.

    It wasn’t insanely exciting to look at. It was rather dull in fact. It was smaller and a little thicker than a credit card and semi-transparent. If you held it up to the light you could see a lot of holographically encoded information and images buried pseudo-inches deep beneath its surface.

    It was an Ident-i-Eeze, and was a very naughty and silly thing for Harl to have lying around in his wallet, though it was perfectly understandable. There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant - a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn’t even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.

    Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology’s greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.

Just Realized : Face recognition unlock : Biggest Security Scare

- Case 1 : Imagine crossing security check or border crossing. Guards just take your phone and point it to you : UNLOCKED . No need to resis to give passwd

- Case 2 : drug the activist and point unconscious victim ! Voila !

- Case 3 : Steal the phone, and change the cover and flash it in front of the real owner !

could go on and on ...

iPhone X 9 years ago

Just Realized : Face recognition unlock : Biggest Security Scare

- Case 1 : Imagine crossing security check or border crossing. Guards just take your phone and point it to you : UNLOCKED . No need to resis to give passwd

- Case 2 : drug the activist and point unconscious victim ! Voila !

- Case 3 : Steal the phone, and change the cover and flash it in front of the real owner !

could go on and on ...

Uber Freight 10 years ago

There is a fundamental problem with uber freight : availability of trucks. In case of the uber taxi, most of US population owns the car and drivers working for uber already had a license.

for uber frieght : trucks are owned by companies, who will not work with uber, u need a special license to drive truck: these drivers will not work with uber.

who will work for uber freight?

the whole other angle I see that grocery business is very low margin and whole foods enjoyed the high margin for organic.

but go to Costco or Wal Mart, the organic section is way in front.

I suspect lot of whole food customers are Coscto members, so definitely there is a pressure on Whole foods

142857 11 years ago

you forgot

14285 + 7 = 14292; 1+4+2+9+2 = 18; 1+8 = 9

- I have to search for oAUTH and use it . And having used django user authentication, something similar would be really useful.

- mail : send email on behalf of app users : not supported. Need to integrate with sendgrid or third party libray . native support would be good.

- Image : I could use the blob earlier, but now blobs are deprecated, and need to use google cloud.

I am not regular web developer, so other people may have valid points.

I have been a python appengine user for last 2-3 years. It is really useful to get a prototype out fast.

But MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR Painpoints are:

- User : only google account supported

- email : only can use <appid>@appspotmail.com

- Image upload support

otherwise very nifty to get a site out in less than a day!

The way it works is : seller pay 5%-6% of commission to his agent. Seller agent then posts what the buyer agent will get. Buyer agent will get equal or more, as he to do more legwork.

now interesting part:

a buyer can negotiate with his agent to get some of the commission a buyer agent gets in range of 1.5%-2%. But buyer has to work with smaller agents, not affiliated with big firms : century 21. There is glut of agents, and you can get the deal. (me and some of my friends have)

needless to say : you have to do lot of legwork : finding house urself, and just the agent to do the paperwork.

Same goes with seller : he has to give 3% for buyer agent, but for his agent (seller agent) he can negotiate to 1% - 1.5% (know of that happening too)

while looking for a next house, I just made a aggregator to scrape multiple sites and let me know when new house is available in bay area. (http://www.twikstik.com/ : running on appengine)

:-) this data is equal path as measured by odometer : I was lazy and did not use longitude/latitude for distance. The data itself has miles travelled.

though a bit surprising : 45% of rides are single person rides. But then I wonder : what's surprising : is it low or is it high?