jzwinck

93 ms·

901.
by jzwinck 12y ago
Danger: the front page says the child will always be able to call "first responders," but the FAQ reveals that 911 is the only built-in one which the child cannot change. If you live outside the US, 911 may not work, leaving your
902.
by jzwinck 12y ago
Of course Hacker News will "win" this poll, because people who use HN a lot will be the most likely to complete the poll. It'd be interesting to have a poll which removes HN and asks to choose your first among the rest. Expe
903.
by jzwinck 12y ago
Likewise in America and elsewhere: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/your-car-tracked-...
904.
by jzwinck 12y ago
I don't live in America. When I did, I felt more similar to how you do now. Today I live somewhere with harsh penalties for crimes, and the effects are very visible. You can leave your smartphone on a table while you go buy food and
905.
by jzwinck 12y ago
I felt exactly the same way after a gang stole a camera lens from my bag while it was strapped onto my body in Russia. They (3-5 people) surrounded me on a street in broad daylight, shoved me in various directions, separated my $1000 lens
906.
by jzwinck 12y ago
If you want to reduce bicycle theft in the US, the solution is simple: drastically increase the penalties for perpetrators. Get caught stealing a bike? One year in jail. Adjust until the level of theft is where you want it to be. Stealin
907.
by jzwinck 12y ago
No need to do that, because Singapore and many other airports have screening at each individual gate. You go through a metal detector right before the waiting area at your specific gate.
908.
by jzwinck 12y ago
If connecting passengers never went through additional security, this man would still be alive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Tuong_Nguyen
909.
by jzwinck 12y ago
The program needn't be a shell script invoking awk--you can use a "shebang" line to make the entire thing an awk file. This will help if you use an editor which understands awk syntax (for highlighting etc.). Of course in 1
910.
by jzwinck 12y ago
The article mentions two possible paths forward, but I can think of a third. Make the spheres large enough that swallowing is impractical. 1.75 inches seems to be a standard for this. Would giant magnetic spheres not be fun to play with?
911.
by jzwinck 12y ago
This sentence worries me: > The United States health insurance system works better for costs that are spread out and predictable. So the insurance companies want to reduce their tail-event risk. It's almost like they should buy som
912.
by jzwinck 12y ago
Do you know how you got the disease?
913.
by jzwinck 12y ago
I wondered about this too. At a guess, perhaps they were doing a straight database dump from a production system which had sensitive information as well as public data. They would then run a script to delete the sensitive columns before p
914.
by jzwinck 12y ago
The stuff after the for-loop is reachable if the for-loop is never entered. You can consider it to be an if-block instead, with a return at the end.
915.
by jzwinck 12y ago
The article uses a simple sports betting example and gets it wrong: > At the start of the season you’ve made a bet that the Green Bay Packers will get to the Super Bowl, at odds of twenty to one. You put down ten bucks. The team advances
916.
by jzwinck 12y ago
If you (or someone you know) understands the cloud better than the existing investors and analysts, perhaps you should be trading shares of cloud companies yourself. Of course, if a deep technical understanding of such things does greatly
917.
by jzwinck 12y ago
This has a great application for travelers in certain areas. The article glosses over it with "even tourists can plug in their destinations and not have to stop to check their phones" but this could be a big deal for people who s
918.
by jzwinck 12y ago
> Hamas has already developed a new tactic, building tunnels under the border into Israeli towns and have 10-20 Hamas soldiers come with handcuffs and syringes with anastasia to kidnap Israeli civilians. I tried to dig up a source for th
919.
by jzwinck 12y ago
Ten years prior to that, Apple had a similar bug in one of its installer scripts on OS X. I have a hard time finding much about it online now, because it happened at a time when OS X and the Internet were a lot less popular than today, but
920.
by jzwinck 12y ago
As I was reading through your "for (elem : range)" proposal I became quite anxious to know how adding const would be handled. I was hoping that "for (const elem : range)" would be added to mean "for (const auto&amp
921.
by jzwinck 12y ago
Not when the A/C turns on and off, but rather the entire time it is running. The hot side would be exposed to the room, cold side to the duct (and vice versa when heating).
922.
by jzwinck 12y ago
Many times the actual cutout in drywall is smaller than the "vent" cover, which is mostly for aesthetics. So of course you can make a vent cover two feet long with only the center 50% being the actual vent and the rest being a th
923.
by jzwinck 12y ago
Why would floor vents be a problem? Existing, manual dampers in floor vents often have the moving parts recessed below floor level. The one extra issue might be increased chance of spilling liquids on the unit.
924.
by jzwinck 12y ago
Much is made in this article of the trust which users have in the Uber system. That is probably valid today, but is unlikely to scale. Anyone who used Craigslist or eBay over the past 10-15 years can tell you that as such systems grow fro
925.
by jzwinck 12y ago
Most Y2K issues were not about 8 bits vs. 32 bits, but about storing years as two-character strings. Otherwise we might have seen problems in years like 2028 or 2156. This story is proof that one cannot "patch over minor [...] errors
926.
by jzwinck 12y ago
5 cents per article is not realistic. The rate for a basic New York Times subscription is $3.75 per week. At 5 cents per article, their average user would have to elect to pay for 75 articles per week. I don't have access to the da
927.
by jzwinck 12y ago
Many Linux distros ship with /bin/sh being dash, but they also come with /bin/bash. A lot of scripts obviously depend on bash, so distro maintainers have had to either fix them to depend only on POSIXy "sh" or
928.
by jzwinck 12y ago
Some banks issue chip-and-pin cards which also have a magnetic stripe, but the magstripe is not activated unless you specifically ask for it. And you can do things like activate the magstripe for a specific country for a specific time fram
929.
by jzwinck 12y ago
I made some speakers when I was in high school. The tools I used were a table saw, a whole bunch of long clamps, a screwdriver, and a hand drill. But most important, this book: http://www.amazon.com/Building-Speaker-System
930.
by jzwinck 12y ago
More specifically, a billion instructions is one giga-instruction. A 2 GHz processor can execute roughly 2 billion instructions per second (this is a very rough estimate, thanks to superscalar, pipelining, uops, yada yada). So 12 billion

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