tb · HackerTrans

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

You do have a sliding scale, in the form of the hosting cost pass through. Your average restaurateur is entirely unqualified to estimate the AWS hosting costs of your software in relation to his/her restaurant, so these costs are completely opaque. (As patio11 puts it, "Metered pricing is none of predictable, transparent, or fair.") You, on the other hand, probably have a very good idea of the costs relative to e.g. size or popularity of establishment. In the interests of transparent pricing, you ought to consider factoring these costs into your price and charge your customer a fixed predictable amount, tiered according to the relevant parameter.

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

This suggestion comes up whenever the topic of self-driving cars arises, but I wonder if access to a fleet of self-driving cars would be more akin to a cheaper taxi service than a replacement for car ownership. I suspect that many people would still prefer to own their own (self-driving) car rather than rent one from a fleet only when required. However the privately owned self-driving car could still drive itself to the nearest charging station when not in use so I agree with your premise that self-driving and electric car technology has some synergies. Being a high-tech automaker, Tesla would be an obvious licensee for Google's self-driving technology once it matures.

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

Default risk. The price for a bitcoin that is currently held by Mt.Gox factors in the market's expectation that said bitcoin will be able to be redeemed from Mt.Gox. Analogous to why your bank charges you a higher interest rate on a loan if you have a poor credit score, to compensate them for the perceived risk that you fail to repay the loan.

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

For anyone who's interested in why this is the case, here is the classic article on this situation: http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

OP uses a fresnel lens and gives instructions on how to focus the HUD at infinity to avoid this problem.

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

"However, although important for the local economy in Congo, the contribution of coltan mining in Congo to the world supply of tantalum is usually small. The United States Geological Survey reports in its yearbook that this region produced a little less than 1% of the world's tantalum output in 2002–2006, peaking at 10% in 2000 and 2008."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantalum

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

It's to keep all the railway clocks in sync. You could have one that's running up to 1.5s slow and it will still be able to keep up with all the rest, and they're all resynchronised with each other every minute. This is important when it could be the difference between catching a train or not.

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

See elsewhere in the thread [1] where I discussed this.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4738558

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

The camera is on the end of the arm at the bottom left in [1]. By comparing that to this picture you can see where part of the arm is in the self-portrait, above and to the left of the front-most wheel. The third-person perspective in the self-portrait comes about because the robot arm will always move out of the way of any photo that the camera is taking.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PIA15279_3rovers-stand_D20...

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

Very OT, but why in God's name do some people/countries feel it appropriate to use imperial units rather than metric units? The reasons are the same - historical usage and inertia against change.

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

> Some other particle may interact with nothing we are familiar with -- and thus we could never study it. Is it even "real" then?

Philosophically, this is equivalent to the question of whether other universes, which do not interact with ours and therefore we cannot study, exist or are "real". It is not a question that Science can answer.

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

Most modern cars will have lots of separate controllers. Many of the functions of the car are largely independent and having them on separate boards means they can be physically closer to the things they are controlling, and the number of functions that each is responsible for is reduced which simplifies design, coding and test.

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

You are referring, of course, to this excellent (and somewhat frightening) article: http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

I absolutely agree. I now have an instinctive reaction to reach for my pocket whenever I'm feeling the slightest bit impatient, and I have caught myself on a couple of occasions reaching for my pocket when I already have my phone out, because I'm waiting for a page to load in the mobile browser.

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

It's an art piece, not a serious piece of espionage equipment, hence its form reflects its (symbolic) function.

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

Exactly. You might make 10 for your early prototypes but it's not unusual to make 100 or more for the final test run.

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

Aha, thank you. As most of my C code has been written for a single compiler and a single platform I was less aware of the pitfalls than I should have been. I will know now to be extra vigilant if I ever have to port that code.

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

I completely agree with everything you've said except for "any use of bitfields." The comma operator is ok in this circumstance, mixing unsigned and signed is a big no-no, but what have you got against bitfields? They're very useful when it comes to pulling sub-byte fields out of network packets.

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

"Selecting those with most artistic potential" were the exact words I used. The fundamental question is whether "found art" is copyrightable.

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

I love the small print at the bottom:

  Text copyright (c) 2004 Scott Nesin.
  Drawings copyright (c) 2004 Guy Nesin, used with permission.

You just know he did actually ask his 4-year-old son for permission to use his drawings on the web.

tb

Submissions

Ask HN: Foreign startup collecting payments from US companies?

The eyes have it - a tale of 3 vision problems

New Languages Considered Harmful: "Learning new languages is a waste of time."

The Erlang Challenge

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