Peter Renshaw › Comments

""... I was only a few dollars away from having to rummage through Dumpsters to find my next meal. I was -- by conventional first-world definitions -- poor ..." I was talking to a mate while working on his property and the talk moved around to some friends we'd gone to school with. One in particular, "R" went to medical school, expensive anywhere. He mentioned the lecturer asked "R" one day why he wasn't writing anything down and found out he couldn't afford a pen. Now "R" saved for all the required medical books, clothed & fed himself but had nothing left for things like pens & paper. It didn't stop him from becoming a surgeon and rotating as an Army surgeon through the ADF. "... To me, the van was what Kon-Tiki was to Heyerdahl, what the GMC van was to the A-Team, what Walden was to Thoreau. It was an adventure. ..." "Kon-Tiki" ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... is a papyrus boat sailed from Morocco to Barbados by Heyerdahl as shown the film, "The Ra Expedition" ~..." - Peter Renshaw

"look here to see a picture of grizzled McCarthy and other AI luminaries ~ http://www.nytimes.com/2009......" - Peter Renshaw

"http://www.tinker.it turns this article on it's head cf: "Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work?" ~ http://www.wired.com/techbiz......" - Peter Renshaw

""... How does that article evaluate after these are place? ..." Ask pjf yourself is one way to find out. If I get the chance I'll ask." - Peter Renshaw

""... I've rarely been letting other sites access my Facebook data ... because I don't really trust them ..." Here's why figital is cautious, "Dark Stalking on Facebook" ~ http://pjf.id.au/blog... (author http://news.ycombinator.com/user...)" - Peter Renshaw

""... I've rarely been letting other sites access my Facebook data ... because I don't really trust them ..." Here's why figital is cautious, "Dark Stalking on Facebook" ~ http://pjf.id.au/blog... (author http://news.ycombinator.com/user...)" - Peter Renshaw

"Earlier in the year I posted a hardware story on a homemade Arduino laptop from Liquidware Antipasto with an OLED screen and a keyboard ~ http://antipastohw.blogspot.com/2008....... Well this time it's modular motherboards. You can also read a Wired article on the topic ~ http://www.wired.com/gadgetl..." - Peter Renshaw

""... This doesn't really explain why these chains succeed in America, though. ..." How about "acceptance of a lower standard of coffee?", different culture (Melbourne historically more influenced by Europe than America) and the relative youth of "business franchises" in Australia? "... I'm fairly likely to go to Starbucks simply because I know what I'll get there (a slightly overpriced, slightly over-bitter, but adequate, latte), while experience has shown that picking an unknown local coffeeshop leads to, on average, a worse cup of coffee, with high variation. ..." That's a good explanation - take the safe, reliable option even if it's not quite the real thing. I'd offer another, theory. Starbucks also happens to choose their locations near known coffee locations to offer customers an alternative customers with the hope of putting them out of business. This is what happened in Melbourne and it backfired. The competition was too great ~..." - Peter Renshaw

""... English novelist George Orwell was remarkably prescient about many things, and one of the most disturbing aspects of his masterpiece 1984 involved the blatant perversion of objective reality, using constant repetition of propaganda by a militaristic government in control of all the media. ..." I added this article to highlight a new phase in science that is occurring - advocacy. Why advocacy and not just science? Because it's getting to the point where mere "facts" isn't good enough to bring about the changes necessary. It's not the science where the problems lie. Science can be refuted by bad evidence. Scientific theory becomes fact when the evidence gathered by observation or experiments be supports the theory. The problem we have now is a "people" problem where people who don't see or want changes made to our carbon economy. The change from pure science and scientific reporting to scientific activism is a feature of scientists in recent history and include Richard Dawkins..." - Peter Renshaw

""... American coffee chains (particularly Starbucks but also some of the donut variety) have tried to break in and mostly failed. Starbucks closed most of its stores last year after multi-million dollar losses. They couldn’t cope with the Australian competition... I would love to be corrected – but I think the reason has to do with our wage structure. American low-end wages are very low indeed whereas Australia has minimum wages at quite high levels. ..." Could a simpler reason be that these chains make crap coffee Failure has less to do with cost than understanding what the customer wants. Importing a supermarket/chain concept and then expecting the locals - I'm from Melbourne ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos...... - exposed to multitudes of small well run cafe's with a heritage of coffee since the 1950's means the local population are quite sophisticated in their understanding and taste. Generic coffee chains with their cookie cutter approach can't easily..." - Peter Renshaw

""... US government, for example, spends on “Defense” (including “preemptive” warfare) and Homeland Security, 8 times what it spends on educating the next generation... You know, whenever I heard numbers like those, it always seemed like it was missing some very subtle point, but I never could quite put my finger on it. I think I just figured it out: ..." About 6months ago I checked defense spending compared to education spending in the US. Here's what I found ~ http://www.backtype.com/url...... "... if you add up the money we spend on public education in this country, at the local, state, and federal levels (most of it is at the local level), it's about what we spend on defense. It may even be more ..." Defence at 4% (2005) [0] and education at 7% of GDP (2007-006). [1] But there is no mention of costs associated in the intelligence community. You can read more about the breakdown of spending for education in the reference. [0]4.06%CIA Factbook, North..." - Peter Renshaw

""... I would argue reposting of old gems from HN time to time. It helps everyone here! ..." Not a bad idea." - Peter Renshaw

""... Thanks I'll kill it. ..." Hmm can't kill it. Must have passed over a certain threshold. Any moderators around? Kill the story." - Peter Renshaw

""... but this is a dupe from just 53 days ago ..." Thanks I'll kill it. There must be a bug somewhere or the url's have changed because they both resolve to ~ http://www.sachinagarwal.com/setting...... Pretty sure if you re-post something already on HN the post is redirected to the original." - Peter Renshaw

""... I'm trying to figure out why this article is posted, as a UK anti-discrimination bill doesn't seem to matter much to mostly-US programmers. ..." Because it's worth thinking about "why there are so few women in Startups?" Is it really how good a person is as a hacker or entrepreneur that stops someone succeeding? Is the Startup playground as open and equal as you think?" - Peter Renshaw

""... Sticking exclusively with Twitter for now ..." Great strategy. I noticed @joshu and http://a.tinythread.com use this idea making authentication simple without the login hurdle." - Peter Renshaw

"^(([^:/?#]+):)?(//([^/?#]*))?([^?#]*)(\?([^#]*))?(#(.*))?I found the w3 specs (rfc3987) suitable for my needs ~ http://www.ietf.org/rfc... a nice Regex to parse Url formats. This Regex allows you to extract scheme ($2), authority ($4), path ($5), query ($7) and fragment ($9) ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos... There are problems I've seen with using Regex strings and expecting them to work in all cases on all Regex engines which is why I tend to stick with PCRE ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...... a point in favour of the Gruber example. "... The pattern is also liberal about Unicode glyphs within the URL ..." PCRE supports Unicode but it's not switched on by default ~ http://www.pcre.org/pcre.txt" - Peter Renshaw

""... Do you like/agree with my answer ? ..." Over analysis?" - Peter Renshaw

""Newest Members" Is there anything stopping the location having a hyperlink linking to a page with people by location? I like the authorisation using oauth - the simplest way for existing twitter users to sign-up. Do you think it's worth adding your own authorise system or are you sticking with using Twitter authorisation?" - Peter Renshaw

""... Note, this is from 2006. ..." Hey this is classic "Wil Shipley". It's worth the read just for the writing style and humour. But it's insightful gems like this: "... There's an interesting side-effect to this last kind of fight, the fight for good. When you're not doing it for your own ego, you can win just by convincing others to join your side. If you get enough people to fight for you, you can even win without anyone actually knowing it was you. ..." that make reading the article worthwhile." - Peter Renshaw

""... I made a Twitter-bot a while ago for HN ..." Thanks for making this Rik. I use this as my primary feed. Works well." - Peter Renshaw

""... gniog ot yrt siht tuo txen keew ..." Yes." - Peter Renshaw

""... He probably just did a str.reverse instead of str.split(' ').map {|w| w.reverse}.join ' ' ..." Nothing so elaborate, just in my head." - Peter Renshaw

""... rechtub klat ..." Letters reversed, words reversed here?" - Peter Renshaw

""... That's unfortunate. I'm with Charlie on this one. I think we should be able to determine what we want to use to represent ourselves professionally within reason ..." And if you do at least be able to pay for it. I thought that would have been an obvious choice. LinkedIn smacks of insiders, closed doors and exclusion. This might be all right for those who work for/with "the man" but not those who don't. Does LinkedIn have some competition? Would there be any benefit of a more *open* alternative (aside from twitter)? ps: Fred what is the origin of your avatar?" - Peter Renshaw

""... Mapmakers will often use “copyright traps,” bits of information in their maps that are purposefully wrong ..." Very true. I once had to re-do a map for this exact reason though I'm not sure the "purposeful" fit was to get the major intersection on the page or to catch people out." - Peter Renshaw

""... I am currently looking for and seeking a technical co-founder for a new music start-up I am working on. ..." Age isn't the problem here, understanding the problem domain is. "... This year makes me 18 years old...An ideal co-founder for me would have to be no more than 2-3 years older than me, because most older people may not be very comfortable working with side-to-side with someone of my age. ..." I think the idea of a co-founder and age being incompatible has less to do with age than perceived and actual competence and power. Competence because it's difficult to work with idiots. Power, because an in-balance of power regardless of age turns working with anyone into a master/serf relationship." - Peter Renshaw

""... Agreed on all counts. Never heard of him until the news he was fired from MS, read his goodbye blog post that was pretty Microsoft-friendly, and threw up in my mouth a little when I saw this new one. ..." Which means you probably didn't look very hard. "... The companies were much higher quality than I expected. The founders were nearly all coders and hackers but did a surprisingly good job at presenting their idea, target market, and business model ..." ~ Don Dodge Don was around YC around 2 years ago and while initially thinking the YC model was a joke, he changed his mind by observing. That's what you want isn't it? People think one thing, but change their minds after observing ~ http://searchyc.com/don+dod..." - Peter Renshaw

""... Thanks for the references bootload, bookmarking for later reading! ..." Sure Mark. Learned a bit about Kerouac myself - much I didn't and still don't know." - Peter Renshaw

""... Most of the stuff on youtube is utter crap, but there's still more interesting stuff than I have time to watch. ..." Watching stuff on youtube for me is really like taping radio as a youngster. Now it's going back for old music video clips and tv shows. One persons crap is someone else's scarce resource." - Peter Renshaw

nobody cuts the key & dunks quite like the Dr., nobody ~ http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Peter Renshaw