HN user

blogimus

1,620 karma

I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who.

"The Elephant's Child" -Rudyard Kipling

"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy." - Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

If reality appears arbitrary and capricious it is simply because we don't understand the rules. -me

My first comment on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=217822

http://news.ycombinator.com/classic http://news.ycombinator.com/lists http://news.ycombinator.com/ask http://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=767275 http://top.searchyc.com/

http://www.hackernewsers.com/users/blogimus.html

Posts114
Comments341
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news.nationalgeographic.com 15y ago

Eight Jules Verne Inventions That Came True

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www.pcr-online.biz 15y ago

Father and son team launch iPhone to edge of space

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rst.gsfc.nasa.gov 15y ago

Dr Nicholas Short's Remote Sensing Tutorial

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www.dominicsayers.com 16y ago

RFC-compliant email address validator

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www.nysm.nysed.gov 16y ago

The Knox Trail

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lifehacker.com 16y ago

Five Really Handy Google Command Line Tricks

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1000days.net 16y ago

Mariner Reid Stowe Returns From Record 1152 Days at Sea

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www.nasa.gov 16y ago

Delta Rocket Family Celebrates 50 Years of Durability

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www.mercurynews.com 16y ago

Apple's forgotten founder still wandering in the desert

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togetherville.com 16y ago

Togetherville, social networking for kids 6 - 10

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news.bbc.co.uk 16y ago

'Artificial life' breakthrough announced by scientists

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staticallytyped.wordpress.com 16y ago

Template Meta-Programming and Compiler Issues

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www.uvm.edu 16y ago

Spherical Cows Help to Dump Metabolism Law

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www.theatlantic.com 16y ago

The Facebook Privacy Wars Heat Up

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news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Ask HN Is Verizon blocking access to Hacker News?

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web.mit.edu 16y ago

Web sites that can take a punch

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www.technologyreview.com 16y ago

Creating Apps Just for Cars

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www.technologyreview.com 16y ago

Hunting Mobile Threats in Memory

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www.agocg.ac.uk 16y ago

The RadViz Approach to Visualization

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en.wikipedia.org 16y ago

Boiling Frog

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www.washingtonpost.com 16y ago

NOAA's Tsunami Warning System

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nctr.pmel.noaa.gov 16y ago

Tsunami Forecasting

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en.wikipedia.org 16y ago

Gini Coefficient

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www.scribd.com 16y ago

Sentiment Classification for Online Consumer Reviews

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www.theaccidentalsuccessfulcio.com 16y ago

Dealing With Vendors After You’ve Signed The Deal

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en.wikipedia.org 16y ago

Controversies over the term Engineer

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www.aqua.dtu.dk 16y ago

Free software helps prevent food poisoning

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antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov 16y ago

Frequently Asked Questions on Black Holes

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www.leafproject.org 16y ago

Leaf Project, A robotics project using artificial intelligence and vision

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www.computerworld.com 16y ago

Novel way to cool data centers passes first test

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Not exactly a geological timescale

A. Humans don't live on a geological timescale

B. .com TLD's are in the formidable first ~15 years of socializing the web the mass public.

Consider tablets and desktops versus notebooks and smartphones. Biggest impact is on notebooks whose vertical real estate is at a premium. Second are smartphone because of their form factor. As far as tablets and desktops: You can rotate your tablet and you can use a big monitor (or rotate that too if supported).

I think what the blogger is saying indirectly that is a test that is necessary but not sufficient to qualify a non-technical co-founder. If you ask this as the first question, then it will save you the time for the rest of the questions.

What kind of book? A math book? biography? romance fiction? In that respect, programming is also like cooking. For cooking, you can go from one extreme of food science, like NASA practices for food going up in space, to popping a frozen pizza into the oven, to many points in between. Programming allows a wide range of discipline to be executed in the process.

What might be important which I've observed is that no one of importance seems to read signature disclaimers. Or at least they didn't in my case.

As a grunt programmer while working for one large defense contractor some years ago, I put something similar to the following, embedded in a paragraph of mind-numbing boilerplate and no one up the food chain seemed to notice.

If you are not the intended recipient, you need not do anything. Men in black will come to erase your memory. Have a good day.

Did you read the article? The discovery was accidental. There were charts secreted away by Afghan geologists during the Taliban years.

In 2004, American geologists, sent to Afghanistan as part of a broader reconstruction effort, stumbled across an intriguing series of old charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country. They soon learned that the data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but cast aside when the Soviets withdrew in 1989.

That car data plot is an example of a multidimensional parallel graph. Too bad he didn't go into more depth on this since he showcased this visual representation in his blog post. Some more info you get your feet wet is here: http://filer.case.edu/~dbh10/eecs466/report.html

Parallel graphs were a starting point on multidimensional al visualization. They are useful only to a certain point of complexity, then they are counterproductive as it takes more time to analyze the graphs than to view a number of simpler graphs side by side or in series. Newer techniques involve radial visualization, such as

http://www.infovis-wiki.net/index.php?title=Radial_Hierarchi...

Something to consider with your animations is the cognitive load of animations of complex visualizations. See the following paper:

http://geoanalytics.net/GeoVisualAnalytics08/a15.pdf

To me, the thing that makes Hacker News, well, Hacker News is that the site is really simple, from a technology contraption point of view. It is controlled and shaped and molded (and whatever other verb you want to use) by us users (counting PG as, well, prime user?) and not shaped so much by arbitrary software constraints such as binning topics (putting in buckets). The touch to tuning this site has been light, with such adjustments as flagging and tuning the rise and fall of topics based on a variety of heuristics. Some tuning has been undone, such as color coding "most valued posters"

If anything, I would say if we were to change the site, the next experiment would be to put a greater collective downweight on titles or source sites if there is a strong local temporal grouping (glut within a timeframe) of those tags/keywords posted. Example: lots of facebook posts at one time then facebook posts drop off the front page a little faster than if there was only a small number of facebook posts. But even that, I'm not sold on this.

I've got two kids under 10 and I've got mixed feelings on networking sites for kids this young. On the one hand, they will have the opportunity to get familiar with the technology they will spend the rest of their lives using. On the other hand, why rush into it when they are happy without it (really, regardless of happy or not).

I'm a programmer (developer/engineer/whatever), been programming since I was about 10, but I've not encourages nor discouraged computer use for my kids. I figure the computer is there and they will pretty much decide how much they are into it.

I have to also confess that I've thought of developing a kids website that my kids can play with. What are your experiences or thoughts here?

I first heard about index funds from "The Motley Fool Radio Show." Figuring I have the choice of dedicating at least a good chunk of my free time to understanding financial markets and trading stocks, or just dropping my money into index funds until I decide I want to play games with my money and then use that time to surf the web and peruse Hacker News, I chose the later.

Spencer Trask & Co. will be holding a startup competition starting in July that will award the winner $25,000 to locate a business in that part of the city

I can imagine that 25K going really fast once you pull up out of your apartment and set up a "real" office. The idea sounds half-baked to me. I'm in the Boston area and would really like the startup culture to grow here, but I get the feeling that our local government just doesn't get it.

I struggle to think of somebody I know personally who couldn't do their job from anywhere in the world, if only they had the courage to demand it.

I have a friend who is going to college and paying for it with housekeeping. She could always unleash a roomba, but if she's going to clean the toilet, then we'll need some robotic tidy bowl man. For hands-on work, I guess if you are a surgeon, you might have more luck working remotely:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/04/worlds-first-remote-heart...