HN user

nobodysfool

421 karma
Posts0
Comments255
View on HN
No posts found.
Who is Bigger? 12 years ago

So apparently Howard Stern is a better author than Angelina Jolie... I'm going to take this with a grain of salt here...

For measuring things so small such as fringe patterns, having this thing sitting in a non-temperature controlled room with a laser going through the room's air (which your breath and ambient humidity / dust can affect) and a webcam whose framerate may be variable, I'd say it's a whole lot of science with a not at all scientific control setup. Where's the beam splitter for the laser so he can get a reference value for the fringe pattern?

Well, one of my friends in Arizona has not necessarily his whole roof covered, but he is able to generate about 90% of his yearly energy usage. The only problem is that he doesn't have batteries installed, so he's selling his electricity to the local power company and buying it back. With batteries and a slightly larger system, he'd meet all his energy needs himself. It's definitely possible. One thing that helps is the hot water heater is solar powered as well.

In short, Deep Blue had 'preparation' against Kasparov from all his game histories, while Kasparov did not have the same benefit.

Kasparov had the benefit of playing all those games as well. ;)

As for your allegations of unfairness, code tweaks were allowed between games. It was part of the rules. Just not during games. And if Kasparov didn't think the rules were fair he could have declined the match.

[dead] 12 years ago

Yeah, and all those things exist for Python, yet you don't see people using Pyjamas everywhere instead of javascript... people are not going to switch to ruby to do front end work that will work fine in javascript, especially when you have all these plugins in javascript that are great.

Reminds me of myself a few years back, but it was a different tactic. Ok maybe it was 13 years ago, but still... I was offered $14/hr for some job at a factory as computer support. I had an interview with the customer, and the agency accidentally forwards me what they were making. I asked for $17/hr or no deal. It was a fair deal because I knew how much they were making and their profit was still good. They threatened to get someone else, I hung up, they called back later and accepted the deal. After working there for a while I found the timesheets of the previous person ... at $17/hr. So I was glad that I held out. It was a fine moment of negotiation on my part. I could have asked for more, but I gave them a fair number that I knew they couldn't refuse.

I think it's a bit premature to be bought out at this time. You're still a young company, and had just started to get traction, and I doubt you are profitable yet. A couple more years of not being profitable and your plug is pulled. That's just how it is in the corporate world. You look at all those yahoo acquisitions and notice most of them aren't around anymore. They weren't profitable, and so they were shut down. Good for you, but you had capital to last a few more years, and you could afford to be a bit more aggressive, but that didn't happen.

I believe the word you mean is improbable. Nothing is impossible. And you may be using the later versions of the test. I'm not saying he was the smartest in the world, in fact, it may have been a flaw of the test. It was when the tests were being first developed. Regardless of what his intelligence was (it's far lower now thanks to a stroke he had a few years back) I'm just saying that it doesn't mean as much as it did.

Supposedly 'Albert Einstein' had an IQ of around 160. My father's IQ was tested to be around 200. Yet you wouldn't know who the hell my father was even if I told you his name. It would place him as 1 in 4 billion according to these charts... http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/iqtable.aspx

However, Einstein would be 1 in 11,000. If the chart is to be believed, then people with an IQ of 160 or above would be about 655,000 (according to the current world population).

In any case, it doesn't matter so much anymore. My father is nearly broke, sick, and in poor health right now and lives with his parents. He was somewhat successful as a business man, but not overly so. He was well known within his community, and he certainly could do anything he wanted. He was a scuba diver, a pilot, an engineer, he speaks three languages, can play the piano and saxophone, he can program a computer and rebuild engines. Having super intelligent people will not make that much difference in the world, except in the cases where those people lead countries. Until we elect leaders who have such high intelligence, we won't see society change much at all. Intelligence does not equal money, and it doesn't equal power. It just means you can figure out things faster than others. With computers, an average person can solve complex mathematical problems faster than the highest IQ people could 100 years ago. IQ is far less relevant in today's world.

In any case, even if these high IQ people were elected, what happens when one of them has a stroke and all of a sudden their IQ is only half what it was (500)? Should we have a vote of no confidence and shun them from society? This just ends up as eugenics all over again. If you don't know what I am talking about, read about it here. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/14/science/haunted-files-the-...

tiles.ice.org was good, now they have a new site, but it's not quite there yet, the forums are filled with spam. It was a collaborative art project, where either you were given a tile to draw of a larger piece. Either you were shown only the edges of the adjacent tiles, or you were only shown the adjacent tiles, but you had to fill in the blanks. It was fun to participate.

It hasn't changed at all. I have it enabled, its funny sometimes. The 2013 year end video brought a tear to my eye, and it changed some beach photos by adding in snowflakes (must have thought the white sand was snow).

Well, that's the thing - they are not providing packet traces even though they were doing a forensic investigation, putting their methodology into doubt. Also, there are no logs indicating that they were successful in what they were trying to do. Even if they were successful, they said that "headers of some of the packets"..." as the source" contained the ip of the server. If it was coming from the TOR network, that would not be the case. Furthermore, since HTTP is a request and response protocol, a request would first have to have been made to the host. A reply would not come without first making the request. That being said, supposedly it was the captcha box. However, that server was only setup to reply to 127.0.0.1 and the backend server. There's no way they would have gotten access to it from the regular web without going through tor, by the methods they describe. You can see the last date the files were modified, and since the "investigator" told what time they accessed the server, we can see that the server was configured not to allow access except through tor. Since he had made a log of ip leaks, I'm pretty sure the guy was on top of security issues, as this is not something he'd overlook.

Because it's not just USB flash drives. Any device, a cell phone, a mouse, a webcam, anything that connects via usb, could essentially connect as a USB HID (human input device) and start issuing commands on the computer as if it were a human. But that's not the only thing it could do. You should read the article.

I just don't understand the justification for this.

pre 2000

I'm pretty sure a lot of good technology is written pre-2000. Why you'd want to throw it away is beyond me. Just because something is old doesn't mean it's outdated.

difficult to experiment or fundamentally change

Generally with mature products this is true, so the solution is to use an immature product? Why not just take the time to learn the existing products so that you can experiment or make your changes.

security and performance are hard

It's always been that way, and it always will be. I doubt a new library/platform will change that. The only thing it will do is make the developer an expert on the system (since she designed it).

The diagrams don't make sense, and seem to miss the point. Not all scripts will cause the layout to change. Some may, but the renderer shouldn't be controlling the script, except in extreme or very specific cases.

ls is a file listing in unix/linux. a 'bindshell' would essentially open a telnet port that goes directly into a command line shell. So, if your system was attacked, you might (since it's the most often command typed) use the 'ls' command to list your files. When you do that, you also open a shell on a specific port on your computer that has root access.

Look at the top causes of bankruptcy...

#1 on that list is medical costs.

To quote the article: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/pf_article_109143.html "A study done at Harvard University indicates that this is the biggest cause of bankruptcy, representing 62% of all personal bankruptcies. One of the interesting caveats of this study shows that 78% of filers had some form of health insurance, thus bucking the myth that medical bills affect only the uninsured. "

So yea, fixing healthcare will also fix a lot of America's debt problem. There are only a couple ways to do that - decrease the costs or have a single payor. We've tried the 'decrease costs' part with college funding. That didn't work, because any time we subsidize funding to colleges, they request more money. College debt is huge now. So going the medical route and just subsidizing a broken system isn't going to fix it. It will only make the problem worse. We need to have medicare for everyone, and it should start before birth. If someone wants a college education, allow them to get it, only paying to re-take classes. That would wipe out most people's debts.

Emoji One 12 years ago

The monkey's hands are incorrect. Monkeys are not wearing a suit, so the back of their hands are generally the same color as their "sleeves".

Also the emoji used to tell your story are confusing to me at least. I had to read a few times to determine that the gun was a placeholder for 'kill' and not 'shoot' or 'gun'. I have no idea of that trophy is a substitute for a word, or just giving emphasis to the text that follows it. Why is there a monkey after the end of the first paragraph? Does it imply blindness, willful ignorance, stupidity, or monkeys in general? Perhaps it means 'doh!'. And the text is just as hard to read all the way through. I have to backtrack multiple times through a sentence to figure out what the emoji is supposed to represent, since they can have a 'literal' meaning (just the text of the word, which in itself is not so easy to determine which text is accurate), an implied meaning, an 'object' meaning and an 'action' meaning among others.

That's what happens when we don't hire americans to fill american jobs. When we depend on foreigners because they are less expensive and more loyal, we suffer for it. How many STEM majors are out of work now, yet people are complaining that we don't have enough H1Bs? and that we don't convert those H1Bs into immigrant visas? What happens when they too get better say in their jobs, unionize, and finally get laid off... will we just go about our business and hire more foreigners on a legally temporary basis? We'll have so many homeless that it would be ridiculous to even consider public welfare.