h4pless's comments

h4pless | 12 years ago | on: Hyperloop Alpha [pdf]

Yeah, I believe this is the best point in the argument against pod transport. Even taking doctors out of the equation, if someone were to go into cardiac arrest on a plane, pretty much anyone on the plane would be qualified to operate an automatic external defibrillator and all flight attendants are required to be trained in CPR. The opportunity for first aid in this situation is the difference between life and death and it is unavailable in this pod design. 3 minutes without oxygen to the brain and serious brain damage is likely; 15 minutes without oxygen and you're pretty much guaranteed never to recover if you aren't already dead. If you have a cardiac episode on the hyperloop and need to be resuscitated, there's a good chance that the only good that those EMTs will do when the train arrives at its destination is to remove your dead body from the train.

h4pless | 12 years ago | on: Legal Weed is Hurting San Francisco's Hippies

$200/oz is hard proof that medical marijuana(MMJ) has driven down prices. I live in Colorado and used to be friends with the proprietor of an MMJ dispensay and he used to buy it for $4000 a pound or $250 an ounce and that was their per pound wholesale price. It was common when the MMJ businesses were starting up in CO for dispensaries to sell for ~$400 an ounce and grams at $20 which I believe was mostly comparable with street prices. The prices were driven down as more and more dispensaries entered the market and the competition became more fierce as a result of the market saturation to the point where they were advertising sub-$10 grams and sub-$200 ounces.

That $200/oz price may not be cheap to you, but it is half of what it used to cost and less than half of what these hippies can make selling it in New York.

h4pless | 12 years ago | on: Ask PG: Will you post an update to "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund"?

An even better question to help is: Who is working on the new greatest technology, and how can I help?

Paul Graham and Steve Jobs weren't magical people... they are/were people who addressed the needs of the masses. Start looking at things that annoy you and figure out a way to fix them. That is way to better society.

h4pless | 12 years ago | on: Ask PG: Will you post an update to "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund"?

Not to be snarky or anything but in short: we're currently working on the new ideas. Please give us a little bit of time before you ask Mr. Graham to give us a synopsis of the most logical projects to address. Trust me, whatever he wants done: there are people working on it. "What do you want to contribute?" is the more relevant question. What are your ideas for "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund"? and start working on those.

h4pless | 12 years ago | on: Frameworks Round 6

I was just looking at Revel too. But from the homepage:

Development Status: Early adopters only. Pull requests welcome. Development is closing in on the "final" 1.0 design, but the rate of change is still high. Expect to get your hands dirty.

Wouldn't quite appeal for people looking for a Go based Rails yet, but I would have to agree.. it does look very promising.

h4pless | 12 years ago | on: Show HN: Chicken chicken chicken – chicken chicken programming language

chicken = 0 and chicken = chicken/0 are both declarative which will break your chicken loop. Also, anything divided by 0 is undefined. Try:

chicken(chicken = 0; chicken < chicken/chicken; chicken++){

  chicken chicken;
}

Which in pure chicken chicken would be:

chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken

chicken chicken chicken

chicken

[Edit: Add chicken chicken interpretation]

h4pless | 12 years ago | on: Bottled-water purchase leads to night in jail for U.Va. student

I think you misunderstand the meaning of the term "Hacker" in the context of this site. From Google:

Hacker: 1. An enthusiastic and skillful computer programmer or user. 2. A person who uses computers to gain unauthorized access to data.

It sounds to me like you are confusing the second definition with the first. This is a site for people to find the the most relevant news regarding technology and anything else that people with such interest would find intellectually stimulating. The article has nothing to do with technology but does fit into the intellectually stimulating category if people here are interested in it but do not confuse that with this being a place to discuss "disobedience" as you put it.

You can think of this site as being "Technology Enthusiast News" with startups being one of the primary focuses of discussion.

h4pless | 12 years ago | on: Hijacking a Facebook Account with SMS

Some bugs are incredibly complex, however I do not think that exposing the user id in an HTML form and having a skeleton key style confirmation code that is not directly linked to a specific user is a complex bug. I agree that you can't just pay some large sum of money to have everything fixed before release: bugs happen. But security should be one of the number one priorities when designing and developing a new feature. This seems like little more than negligence on the part of the dev team and I think it is right that people are upset/bewildered that a security bug like this could be put into a production feature.

h4pless | 12 years ago | on: Is Wine Bullshit?

Your app idea is a method I have used in the past. I started a note in Evernote and when I tried a new bottle of wine, I would take a picture of the bottle, write a comment of it's quality [Avoid, Okay, Pretty Good, Fantastic], write down it's basic characteristics, and then write what food I thought it would pair well with.

One thing I have noticed about wine though is that even with a bottle of wine that I really like, the next bottle I get of the same vintage might be terrible. What the article does not mention is how important environmental conditions are for storing wine and how a case of wine can sometimes get ruined in shipping, sitting on a store shelf or not allowed to breathe properly.

Because of the amount of variation in wine quality I have adopted the habit of just buying $6 - $15 bottles and when I find something I like, I stick with it until I stop liking it. If it's a special occasion, I will put my faith in a nicer brand that I have tried and liked before that I believe will pair well with whatever food is being served but for the most part, buying expensive wines is too much of a gamble for me. Especially considering that my wine palate is not much more complex than your 3-star system.

h4pless | 12 years ago | on: Snowden Leaves Hong Kong on Commercial Flight to Moscow

You know what? I agree. I think now it was wrong of me to suggest he was unpatriotic at all. He is a patriot and he is equally afraid of the consequences for being so. It is not my place to judge what level of commitment defines a patriot. This man has definitely served his country (I have never questioned his heroism) and his actions have cause international discussion. His actions will always be up for dispute whether or not they were the right course of action, but nobody will question the man who stopped the "big brother is watching you" argument from being a conspiracy theory into being a public fact that must be dealt with. The man is a world-wide patriot in that regard.

h4pless | 12 years ago | on: Snowden Leaves Hong Kong on Commercial Flight to Moscow

This was a man who was running before facing a trial or even charges. Not a man in the justice system. Who knows what really happened to him? Nobody. Because he was being secretive about his actions. He has allowed nothing but conjecture to his fate. I have been under investigation by the FBI; it doesn't mean they're going to kill you.

h4pless | 12 years ago | on: Snowden Leaves Hong Kong on Commercial Flight to Moscow

Hey insuffi,

Thanks for the reply. To your response:

1) I am not trying to say that he should have stayed in the country to begin with necessarily because his act could obviously be construed as treason and be silenced immediately if jailed. I was also not trying to suggest that he is not a hero to this country (because by many accounts, he is) but rather I was trying to suggest that a patriot does not abandon the country to which he claims patriotism [because that would be completely illogical].

Now, Snowden is a very public international figure. If he were jailed, people would be watching his case very closely. Snowden's situation is different from Bradley Manning's because when a judgement is made, everyone will care because he did in fact give himself enough time to find refuge in another country and spread a full story and reveal himself to the world. He is now a popular culture figure for many countries.

However, the reason he invites claims of espionage is that he claims refuge in other countries. A patriot does not need to turn himself over to the government but must turn himself over to the people of the united states. By running he only makes himself appear more guilty in many people's minds. And by running he also opens himself up to a lot of conjecture as to why he's running.

2) The government is doing damage control by charging him. They have an unanswered opinion that can be broadcast to most of the country because he is fleeing (this old adage still applies to many people: An innocent man has nothing to hide). He is ruining his patriotic reputation by running from the country because he is giving everyone a chance to step back and insight any opinion they may about his patriotism, mental stability or really anything.

As a patriot I would agree he is justly afraid. But what I meant to suggest that by running, he is proving himself as a saboteur or spy to people who agree with many media streams and is leaving many things up to justifiable question.

h4pless | 12 years ago | on: Snowden Leaves Hong Kong on Commercial Flight to Moscow

Thanks again infinity0,

I did not mean to suggest that he should stay behind to face the justice system which could be corrupt, I meant to say that he should stay behind and trust himself to the American populous, a lot of which considers him a hero.

When you are travelling around and running from something, things can happen. I've had a few friends die/be murdered while travelling in foreign countries so I have a personal reason to sort of understand when something happens or somebody dies while travelling. But at large in this country people have seen Taken or Hostel or some other anti-traveling movie that has conditioned them to think that travelling in inherently unsafe. By travelling you open yourself up to whoopsie-daisy style deaths in which it is just understood that you died because you were being incompetent in some fashion.

In the American legal system however, the jail which you are held in is responsible for your well being. And with somebody as high-profile as Ed Snowden, if something were to happen to him while he was in jail, everyone would know about it and some people would have to answer questions.

And if he were convicted of espionage while he was staying in this country, 1) His charges as a spy wouldn't make sense because it would be understood that he still considered himself a US citizen so he would have nobody to be accused to be spying for aside from the people of the US and 2) if he was convicted, imprisoned, executed or whatever could be the case, the laws and the legal system that did it would be under immense scrutiny by the ACLU, the EFF and anyone else the actions pissed off and would probably face extremely harsh repercussions.

h4pless | 12 years ago | on: Snowden Leaves Hong Kong on Commercial Flight to Moscow

Hey thanks for replying,

I agree that he would easily be found guilty of the charges if he were to present himself to a courtroom. But what I was trying to suggest was that if he admitted himself to the court system, and was found guilty, there is a much larger chance that there would be a lot more question as to whether or not the law was just (not to mention that if he stayed in country, espionage charges would make a lot less sense).

By running, he invites the comparison to being a spy. It will be a major talking point in the news to come. And it's generally unsafe. If he is still alive and well, he opens himself up to a lot of mortal vulnerability by travelling.

I wasn't trying to say that he wasn't a hero. In fact I think him one of sorts. I was just trying to say that he wasn't a patriot. A patriot does not fight against his country from a foreign country or abandon his land. I just believe that there is a major difference between being a patriot and being a national hero.

h4pless | 12 years ago | on: Snowden Leaves Hong Kong on Commercial Flight to Moscow

Snowden running is not something to be confused with an admission of guilt, but at the same time, it does prove that he is not a patriot. With his worldwide recognition: the safest course would be for him to publicly turn himself in to a US police station or deliver himself to a courtroom. He would have a very public trial and would have an even farther reaching message in this country. By running he shows that he has no faith in this country and no longer considers himself a citizen. Not only that but he opens himself up to a ridiculous amount of risk by being wide open in foreign countries where things are semi-expected to happen to travelers by this country. If something happens to him while he's in the legal system of this country, the people responsible for him would be crucified by the media and everyone else. Granted he could be silenced and have his reputation destroyed by the media while incarcerated in this country but I believe a patriot works with the system or fights within it, only a coward runs.

h4pless | 12 years ago | on: Ultimate Tic Tac Toe

I haven't tested all the cases but this method seems to win every time I've tested it against myself:

Start on an edge-center container [N,E,S,W], marking it with it's corresponding sub-board space. Employ the Orwin gambit to fill the initial edge container. When your opponent selects the last space in the first container, wherever you are sent: pick it's corresponding sub-board space and then employ the Orwin gambit again and then repeat the routine until the game is finished. Your opponent gets to pick your next moves but because they eventually must send you to a filled square on the second and third rounds, you have the ability to control the game's end.

Starting in the center gives you a tactical disadvantage because it only leaves you 4 paths to victory compared to your opponents 8 with him/her in a position affecting 4 lines, whereas by starting on a side piece, you have 7 paths to victory and your opponents position only benefits him on 2 lines.

page 3