SamuelKillin's comments

SamuelKillin | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: I'm looking for a Spotify software engineer to speak to

The lack of command + F frustrates me roughly 15 times a day.

SamuelKillin | 11 years ago | on: Show HN: Perspective Mockups – Hipster-as-fuck perspectives for your mockups

This is super gangster

SamuelKillin | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: How can I sustainably run a website without charging a fee?

Surprised no one has mentioned App Engine. Their free tier will take you a long way.

SamuelKillin | 11 years ago | on: Delivering Breaking Bad on Netflix in Ultra HD 4K

Yikes you're right. Looks like 2 powers of 10.

SamuelKillin | 11 years ago | on: Delivering Breaking Bad on Netflix in Ultra HD 4K

Wait, my back of the envelope says you'll need to pull down around 650mb a second to stream 4K. That's uncompressed, sure, but anything in that power of ten isn't feasible.

SamuelKillin | 12 years ago | on: DevArt: Art made with code

I can't wait until code is no longer seen as this mechanical and mysterious thing. Stuff like this will no longer need to be explicitly be "Art with Code", instead it can just be "Art made by describing it"

SamuelKillin | 12 years ago | on: PopcornTime official website is back

Has the repo been moved from here? https://github.com/popcorn-team/popcorn-app

SamuelKillin | 12 years ago | on: Project Tango

It's not really an either/or situation

SamuelKillin | 12 years ago | on: Stanford Ovshinsky: the greatest scientist you've never heard of?

I'm pretty sure they even take a walk around his factory with him in the movie

SamuelKillin | 12 years ago | on: Silk Road 2.0: A concept of a distributed anonymous marketplace

That's very naive of you.

SamuelKillin | 12 years ago | on: World record solar cell with 44.7% efficiency

I'm in Australia. We have unlimited land and enough sun to power the solar system.

SamuelKillin | 12 years ago | on: World record solar cell with 44.7% efficiency

Good on them. In reality, however, fuel from the sun is free and we have unlimited land. Getting the cost down and economies of scale are what everyone is really focussed on.

SamuelKillin | 13 years ago | on: Pin Payments is Australia’s first all-in-one online payment API

There is a PHENOMENAL amount of money out in Perth. It may be small, but some of the wealthiest in the world (and the world's wealthiest woman) live there.

Largely due to mining, Australia's average wage is around $70k but our median wage is around $45k. Pretty crazy.

It's a similar atmosphere to Texas oil culture (I hear, anyway). Lots of secessionists saying Western Australia is keeping the country afloat. This is somewhat true (but not entirely), and they tend to forget 20 years ago WA was a shitheap with nothing going for it.

SamuelKillin | 13 years ago | on: Abusing hash kernels for wildly unprincipled machine learning

Writes one blog post - front page of HN

SamuelKillin | 13 years ago | on: Practical algorithms and code optimization: maze generation

A* all the things

SamuelKillin | 13 years ago | on: The Rise Of The Artist

There's some (small) wisdom in there. History shows there is less and less correlation between technology and jobs lost the more an industry relies on creativity.

SamuelKillin | 13 years ago | on: After Fires, Ban on phones and laptops looking possible on Boeing 787 flights

It won't happen here in Australia. QANTAS, our national airline, has just deployed iPads to every seat as the new iteration of their in flight entertainment

SamuelKillin | 13 years ago | on: Ask HN: A place like HN but with more nerdy stuff and less social stuff?

here here!

SamuelKillin | 13 years ago | on: Really Test Your Website for different browsers and devices

Pretty ironic that something to test a variety of platforms and browsers is only supported on windows and "recommends" use with IE 9.

SamuelKillin | 13 years ago | on: Make Steam Without Boiling Water - Just Add Sunlight and Nanoparticles

how long do you have? :)

So, them being 'black' isn't really the point. The point is the potential to get steam from water at lower temperatures, in less time.

If you are dealing with A LOT of water (if you were to scale this to power-plant scale), you are dealing with large 'thermal mass'. This means you need a lot of heat over time to raise all the water to a high enough temperature to create electricity.

If you run a power plant, you want flexibility. You want to switch on your power plant fast, and then shut it down when you want, without cost. This lets you speculate on the electricity market, and be more available if there is a sudden spike in electricity demand. If you're dealing with large thermal mass, you don't have this flexibility.

Also lots of advantages of lower cost - not needing heat exchangers etc but I'll leave it there.