IsaacL

63 ms·

481.
by IsaacL 15y ago
My own id is quite high, however... About a year ago I wrote a script to scrape Facebook users and their friendship information. I wanted to get the social graph of my university (Warwick), so I seeded it with me and a few random friends fr
482.
by IsaacL 15y ago
Sorry for the late reply. Clayton Christensen, the person who invented the term, cited the automobile as an example of an innovation that was radical but not disruptive . The textbook disruptive innovation is the PC, since in terms of va
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by IsaacL 15y ago
A user's bitcoin "wallet" is really their private key. It seems they didn't lose their database, so they still have a record of how many bitcoins each user should have, but they don't have access to those coins.
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by IsaacL 15y ago
The term is 'disruptive innovation'. It's an often misunderstood concept - the key point is that not all innovation is disruptive. The defining feature of disruptive innovations is that they are initially worse than the technology they disp
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by IsaacL 15y ago
For me, the graph seems to follow almost perfectly the hype cycle you get with every new innovation (the main deviation being the dip around 2009, courtesy of the Great Recession). My belief is that web-based apps are entering the "plateau
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by IsaacL 15y ago
I'm confused, what's the technical challenge of the News Feed? Scaling? Efficiently determining the most relevant news per user?
487.
by IsaacL 15y ago
Yeah, that one stuck out for me. Pen and paper is a good way of solving problems in your own code. If your problem is interfacing with some external library/system/framework, which 95% of my difficult-to-fix problems seem to be, Google is o
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by IsaacL 15y ago
Some people (eg, college students) have access to unmetered electricity, but we don't see such people dominating current mining efforts (AFAIK). I'm guessing this is because of the cost of hardware, so I think your model should also take in
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by IsaacL 15y ago
These are also known as "taxis".
490.
by IsaacL 15y ago
"But what possibilities will it create? Could cars, or for that matter trucks, become like a subscription? You just subscribe and then if at any point and any where you need a ride, you just dial a number and a few minutes later a dirverles
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by IsaacL 15y ago
Google is very good at PR. Their image as being "naive and bad at marketing" might be part of their PR. http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/20/coloring-the-whole-egg-...
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by IsaacL 15y ago
That raises an interesting point. The nature of Bitcoin is supposed to prevent things like fractional reserve banking, since the nature of the system means you can't give people BTC you don't have. It's impossible to create bitcoins in any
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by IsaacL 15y ago
I'm also surprised that bitcoin is being covered in such a mainstream news source - I was under the impression that it was still only of interest to the techy early adopter crowd.
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by IsaacL 15y ago
I don't use Chrome extensions. I used to use a lot of FF add-ons, but when I switched to using Ubuntu over Windows I don't think I reinstalled any apart from Firebug. Now I feel like a Luddite, so do you or any HNers have any suggestions fo
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by IsaacL 15y ago
Ruby 1.9 hashes preserve insertion order, so you could use them as arrays. Not sure why you'd want to, Ruby still has separate arrays.
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by IsaacL 15y ago
Yeah, the article's method is very close to what I use for my computer science courses, in which I do very well. But I do a lot worse when applying the same technique to my Mandarin classes - despite all the people who've tried creative met
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by IsaacL 15y ago
Markov chains are always good fun to play with... a few months ago I worked on a class project which generated markov models from Final Fantasy SNES tracks. ( https://github.com/IsaacLewis/MidiMarkov ). I should blog about it at some point.
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by IsaacL 15y ago
Sounds like my own game, Shintolin ( http://www.shintolin.co.uk ). It was a mostly text-based multiplayer game set in the stone age, where players started from scratch but could gradually develop the tools to build a village and farm. I pla
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by IsaacL 15y ago
That sounds like an interesting approach, it would certainly be cool to play around with some actual hardware - I'll certainly think about trying it out of I have success with the software implementation.
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by IsaacL 15y ago
Looks like a good resource, cheers!
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by IsaacL 15y ago
This is a project to teach myself more about the inner workings of CPUs, so I'll need to learn a lot in the course of this project. So far I've just defined some basic components (logic gates, adders, latches), working from class notes, Wik
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Show HN: My summer project - simulated CPU built from NAND gates(github.com)
17 points by IsaacL 15y ago|8 comments
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by IsaacL 15y ago
China uses a lot of paper notes - paper 1 jiao (about 0.02 USD) are fairly common. They're also really annoying.
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by IsaacL 15y ago
Yes, it's quite inspiring to see how much it succeeded despite the overwhelming negative feedback. Just goes to show that judging the viability of ideas is hard , no matter how many experts there always seems to be in the TechCrunch/HN pea
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by IsaacL 15y ago
Certainly an impressive bunch - when I first saw the publicity for the 20 under 20 program, I was miffed that they weren't taking 21-year-olds. But I see now I'd have had no chance of getting accepted - no chance against people who were doi
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by IsaacL 15y ago
It was smarter than that, he'd patented the practice of using genetic algorithms to automatically patent all solutions within a given problem set. Interesting book!
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by IsaacL 15y ago
tl;dr : people will copy your idea, so focus on really listening to you customer's needs. Seriously, did we really need over 1000 words of "rah rah startups" to get to that point? This feels like it could be a good article - for example, I
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by IsaacL 15y ago
I'm can't if you're saying that banks are secure or insecure. BTW, your name is Guillame Maury, and your birthday is 03/07/1982. Anyway, I also live in China, and have had problems with banks being so secure that it becomes inconvenient. A
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by IsaacL 15y ago
Working together on commercial space technology is good. But space technology also has military uses, in which case both China and the US have strategic reasons for being competitive. Example: a few years ago China decommissioned one of its
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by IsaacL 15y ago
I think impressing the other students is a big factor as well. It's alternately humorous and depressing to hear the way people talk about their mate who got an internship at Goldman/Deutschbank/wherever. I guess if you've been pushed all th

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