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VLC for Android No.This is an alpha version that crashes all the time... Not the final version. If you try it, you'll see why ;)
VLC for Android Incidentally, I chanced upon another source of VLC builds http://vlc-builder.neo-ns.net/vlc-android/
VLC for Android didn't work so well for me but, but still looking forward to watching the progress. I use V-player advanced. Best player I have come across.
VLC for Android Works well on my transformer.
ISP Bandwidth Caps are Really Rate Hikes As a Canadian who went through the debate here, I can say that caps and rate hikes aren't the same thing. The psychological impact on the average internet user is very different, and so online behaviour will be impacted in a different way.Paying 40$ a month instead of 30$ for an unlimited or very high amount of data means you'll grumble a bit, but you'll still do whatever you did before.Going from a very high cap or unlimited to a very low cap + expensive additional data means you'll very probably try to restrict your data transfers and do whatever you can not to exceed your cap.You don't have a sunken cost like with a normal rate hike..
ISP Bandwidth Caps are Really Rate Hikes While I don't argue with the title of the article - bandwidth caps really are just a way to deal with infrastructure costs by passing it on to some consumers - the use of IP transit as a reference for an ISPs cost of service is inaccurate.IP transit costs are what a carrier or ISP would pay to get traffic from their main datacenter/CO in a given metro area to the Internet. This is an operating expense and is a drop in the bucket compared to CapEx they spend on the last mile.The cable operators and mobile carriers are freaking out because they are constantly pouring money into nodes splits and QAM carriers(cable) or radios, backhaul, and spectrum(mobile). These are the real money pits of their businesses and their motivation to enforce data transfer caps, throttling, etc.
ISP Bandwidth Caps are Really Rate Hikes I don't understand why ISPs aren't offering some benefit to their users when they introduce these transfer caps. Why not add caps to the lower plans and lower the price as well? If it's true that the vast majority of users don't get anywhere near the caps, then this would be beneficial to most users.For heavier users, offer a plan with no cap (or, say, a cap 10x larger) and higher speed, and charge more for it. I think power users would be much more accepting of a price increase along with higher speeds than a simple addition of caps to all plans with no price change.
ISP Bandwidth Caps are Really Rate Hikes The default 2Gb wireless internet cap from Verizon is pathetic.It is even more pathetic with their 4G network advertisement. All it takes is 1(maybe 2) HD movies from Netflix to hit a monthly cap.
Why does UI of Microsoft's website so unattractive?Do they lack of designers? "Microsoft Website" is a term kind of like "Europe." It covers a lot of culturally diverse ground.In general, Microsoft's approach to the web has always been, get stuff out there and accessible. Unlike Apple or Google, there isn't top down control over all their web presence.I have theorized that this aspect of Microsoft culture comes in part from having had so many millionaire employees at the dawn of the commercial web.What I find curious is that hacks created by Microsoft's MVP approach to web properties finds so little resonance with HN'ers.
Why does UI of Microsoft's website so unattractive?Do they lack of designers? Corporate sites are almost always garbage because there are so many department claiming that their content is the most important. Especially so for MS where they have lots of needs to meet: e.g. downloads, upsells, product information, enterprise support, news, etc. I think usually the design department starts with a beautiful layout and the various departments hack it to shit.It is pretty amazing that there are 5+ navigation schemes on one page.
Why does UI of Microsoft's website so unattractive?Do they lack of designers? You know, that's a question I think about quite frequently. Companies like MS and Google have all the money in the world, and yet it seems they are not able to hire teams of designers that can really nail a usable interface. I play with my Android phone and at times wonder who came up with the interaction flows, OS patterns and conventions. It really boggles my mind. I am inclined to say that they feel the market doesn't demand of them good design.
Why does UI of Microsoft's website so unattractive?Do they lack of designers? What's interesting is how different their Mac product division's site is:http://www.microsoft.com/mac/outlookIf only that group could share more of its expertise with the rest of the company. :)
I lost 60 pounds this year. How can I best share what I've learned? First off- congratulations, that’s an awesome accomplishment.On fitness “advice”, solicited and otherwise. I am a long time fitness enthusiast, I look like a bodybuilder. This makes one a bit of a pariah in the startup/tech community. Geeks are not muscular, if you are into body modification from a transhumanist perspective you’d best do it in some socially acceptable way like piercing or tattoos. This means people are perfectly comfortable telling you, positive or negative precisely what they think of how you look in a manner that they would never consider doing with an overweight person.Part of this is posing fitness “questions” under the impression that in a business environment, dressed in professional attire, what I really want to talk about how I happen to look. 90% of these are not really questions, they are round about ways of making it clear to me they are not responsible for how they look- as if I care or am judging them somehow.The other 10% of questions there is nothing really you can do for them even if you were inclined- “tightening their core”, “get cut and put on some muscle”, “Best exercise for a six-pack” are no more answerable than “My Internet is slow, what is the best computer to buy to make it go faster?”. All you can do is shake the Magic 8 ball and give them a spectacularly oversimplified answer that won’t do any harm, but unless it’s the answer they already have in mind they will just ignore you. The real answer for "where do I start" is not something they want or will do so I never bother giving it anymore.It may feel like you had a great epiphany, but it’s highly unlikely that you discovered some groundbreaking new method for body recomposition. Outside of the realm of very, very elite athletes none of this data is proprietary or secret. All of the information that most people need to achieve a reasonable fitness goal is freely available- they just have other priorities and there is nothing wrong with that. These people are not unfit because they have not heard your secrets to losing 60lbs in a year, they are unfit because that goal is not a priority in the same way it was for you. Trumpeting, or in my experience even relaying your own methods does not achieve much unless you are a professional in the business of charging for that information.That being said, if it it personally satisfying it’s certainly something you should do.
I lost 60 pounds this year. How can I best share what I've learned? Random idea... what about a browser plugin that presents a random tip on opening a new tab or starting up? I can't imagine you'll rise above the noise with books, videos, or blogs.
I lost 60 pounds this year. How can I best share what I've learned? I don't really know how to "answer" here. Do what you want in the manner you want to do it. At some point, you have to question the "Why am I interested in doing this?" question. Is it ego? Is it to be helpful? Is it to show off? Do you ultimately want to become the next Jared [1]? What's the end goal here?I'm not judging - I'm pointing out a valid discussion you need to have internally. This post makes it seem more ego-driven - and there's nothing wrong with that. But having that internal discussion will help you solve a lot of this.[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Fogle
I lost 60 pounds this year. How can I best share what I've learned? You could start a MLM life-coaching business. I met a lady in an entrepreneurship class I was taking was was working in one of those. She had a similar weight story to you.I don't necessarily advocate this by the way. The point I want to make is that the best way to scale 1-1 conversations is to have other people participate in the conversation as well. For some things, weight loss being of them I think, 1-1 conversations with a person telling their story is more powerful than other methods of communication. Even books(which are my favorite, you can always write a book).
Why you should take everything Mike Arrington says with a grain of salt. I can understand someone posting an article then other people commenting on why they disagree, but to start a thread just to say "here's another reason I disagree"? I don't get it. Not only that, but saying one sentence (minor at that, in my opinion) discredits "quite a few other things" but not listing them? I don't know... there's a lot of useless stuff being posted on HN lately, but I don't waste my time (or other people's time) saying "this doesn't belong on HN" over and over and over. This just seems to cross a line though, so I felt the need to reply.On top of that, what's with all the Arrington bashing lately? Some of his stuff is good and some is questionable. If you disagree with him, great, just put some meat into the argument. This just seems like you're going out of your way to post something negative. If you want to lay out your arguments for the "quite a few things", that could lead to an interesting thread, but I just don't get what you were expecting to achieve by posting this.
Why you should take everything Mike Arrington says with a grain of salt. This isn't a good example of Arrington being off-target. His point that you can get a much better product for less money is well-supported in his article. How hard is it to use a point and shoot camera exclusively for video, if that's what someone wants to do? A crayon and paper are simple too.
Why you should take everything Mike Arrington says with a grain of salt. This is typical Arrington:So I haven’t actually tried out the new Flip Mino. But I’ve spoken with people who have, and I used the Flip Ultra, which launched late last year, for a while before abandoning it. And I just can’t figure out why people like this thing.So you're reviewing something you've never used? That's credible.I assume the people he's "spoken with" here are the same people he's spoken with about twitter being slow because of Rails. I'm starting to think that Arrington has a lot of "imaginary friends."
Why you should take everything Mike Arrington says with a grain of salt. I can handle him saying this...He is a features guy, he likes a lot of features.I will begin to lose respect for him when a company he invest his money in goes on stage at TechCrunch 50.I will definitely lose all respect for him if one of the start ups he invests in wins TechCrunch50. At some Point he needs to decide if he is his own PR firm or a third party commentator.
Website Screenshot Of Every Two-letter Domain Surprise, surprise. No one is doing anything useful with the majority of them, just like many other potentially useful domain names online.I remember how pissed I was in 1998 when I tried to register my first website and found most names were squatted already. Truth be told, I'm still bitter at domain squatters.
Website Screenshot Of Every Two-letter Domain I used to be a product/design guy at CNET in their games division. My team was working on one of the biggest initiatives for the company, launching a new site with a pretty small team of engineers (think it was 6, we had no editorial team, just some recent hires for data entry). In any case, we'd been working on it for 5 months or so, really grueling work, but we were young and excited about building something with so much potential. One month before the actual launch someone came up to me and said, "hey, we need you to move the launch date up two weeks". The reason was pretty boring, the usual executive needs it for X, and as you'd imagine nobody was very excited about it. So all the engineers are stuck in a cramp little meeting room bitching about how many extra hours we'd have to put in to get it done.Eventually I laughed and said "Well, no one in this room will ever work on a two-letter domain again. That's probably reason enough. At least we get to say we launched one."8 years later I still think about that day. I've had a pretty wild career, but yep, I doubt I'll ever get to build another TV.com.Anyways, that's my tiny anecdote about a two letter domain! Worked with a lot of good people on it and still work with some of them. It's a pretty different site now, but right out of the gate it was huge and had tons and tons of community contributions to its episode guides, storing everything in a nice structured data style. These days all I think is... man, we could have done so much more with it (we should have put an API out for the data at least). From what I understand, Google's sidebar related data search results have slowly been biting at into the traffic of large wiki repositories like TV.com and IMDB over the past couple years.
Website Screenshot Of Every Two-letter Domain Huh, apparently c4.com resolves to 127.0.0.1. Also they're running the screenshotting stuff on the same server that serves their site.
Website Screenshot Of Every Two-letter Domain If the Admin is here, The very bottom ones (00.com, for example) should display upwards on hover, not downwards below the footer where it can't be seen.
Why Doesn't Our Government Actually Do Anything? The fundamental problem here is demosclerosis - any low-hanging fruit have long since been plucked. Essentially every plank in the Socialist Party Platform of 1928 has already been enacted into law. Nowadays many of the issues government tries to address were caused by the previous round of government efforts to solve problems.But the longer you apply patches on top of patches, the more rickety the whole structure becomes. Eventually you reach a point where you'd be better starting over with a complete rewrite from scratch. It happens for software languages and OSes; it happens for governments too.As for what to do about it, I always liked Heinlein's suggestion (in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress) that there should two houses of congress: one whose job is to pass new laws, another whose job is to repeal old ones. Without that second house, the legal code invariably becomes a cancer or an impenetrable thicket.Another idea is Seasteading. Basically there needs to be some way that brand new from-scratch ideas of how to govern can be tried out and demonstrated. The same way stodgy old companies can learn by stealing ideas (and people) from tiny new startup companies, the stodgy old governments need a way to learn by stealing ideas from tiny new startup governments. Any change that helps big old countries break up into smaller new ones or allows brand new smaller ones to come into existence would be a big help. Seasteading (forming new societies in international waters) is one such option; another is the "charter cities" movement, where existing governments are convinced to voluntarily allow other legal systems to flourish in small areas that would otherwise be in their domain.
Why Doesn't Our Government Actually Do Anything? >>- Eliminated all gold, and replaced it with unredeemable “greenbacks”They confiscated the gold. The war on terror is a new phenomenon and it should meet the criteria for a significant undertaking.
Why Doesn't Our Government Actually Do Anything? The reason is that government has valid things to do, but these have been frozen in place since the mid 70's.Right now, the big debate appears to be a 5% taxation difference on the top 10% of wage earners.The only other things that change are fear-based, such as the creation of "Homeland Security".
Why Doesn't Our Government Actually Do Anything? Well, I'll try to keep my point simple. Our constant need to complain is corrosive. Visionary thinkers shaped our society for the next generation.I didn't enjoy reading this since it was a large complain fest, and that is the corrosive thing that has made our government do nothing. If you imagine a future in which you have a government that is effective, that "does" things, somehow you are able to accomplish that goal. You need visionary thinkers, not complainers. And you have to offer up some idea of where you see the future of government, instead of complaining about how it does not do anything. The people who shaped our societies future knew the kind of society they wanted to live in. We rarely talk about what we want our society to look like, what we value as a society. Start talking about these things.
Leading Anti-Marijuana Academics Are Paid by Painkiller Drug Companies Drug companies are not trying to stop the legalization of marijuana. Painkiller manufacturers has gotten into a lot of shit for the abuse of their products (some execs almost went to prison and paid $34M in fines personally; see Purdue Pharma [1]. How do they remedy that? By funding anti-drug groups. Unfortunately there are no "bud is ok, but Oxycotin is bad" groups, so they fund the ones that are anti-all-drugs. The main goal of funding these groups is to stop abuse of their own drugs, while looking good doing it.I work in the drug industry. Trust me, none of them consider marijuana a threat. There may be one or two exceptions, but they certainly aren't the companies making narcotic painkillers.[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/21/business/21pharma.html?_r=...
Leading Anti-Marijuana Academics Are Paid by Painkiller Drug Companies This kind of indirect monetary "investment" to maintain the moats to your market reminds me a lot of how ridiculously cost effective lobbying can be to companies like Intuit. $10mm/year in lobbying can virtually guarantee that legislation remains in their favor, which blows any kind of product R&D in terms of ROI out of the water.It's frustrating and disheartening to read things like this, and yet the evil business side of me can't help but think, "damn that's evil but so smart of them..." :(
Leading Anti-Marijuana Academics Are Paid by Painkiller Drug Companies So, the big news here is that pharmaceutical researchers (researching small molecule drugs like THC) are largely funded by companies who earn their money from a large number of small molecule drugs. Vice doesn't actually compare pro-legalizing and anti-legalizing scientists.I'll also get on the record that I would not recommend using THC containing products for pain relief without medical supervision or advice.Don't get me wrong: funding bias is a problem, but it gets overstated. The scientific process has to deal with much worse problems, like personal egos, evil publishing, malstructured career mechanics and outright fraud. Still, "paying for the right results" is a lot harder than it is often taken to be.
Leading Anti-Marijuana Academics Are Paid by Painkiller Drug Companies Sounds like they knew what would happen:States with Medical Marijuana Have Fewer Painkiller Deaths https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8245373
Winer decides to turn off blog comments I'm frankly not surprised-- Winer has complained in the past about comments. From the perspective of someone who often disagrees with him, I've never really understood why he had them in the first place, as he simply does not tolerate alternative views well.
Winer decides to turn off blog comments Comments are often worthless, and the reason comments are worthless is because there's no identity invested in them. When sites like HN and Reddit work (which isn't all the time), it's because there's a community of identities which are invested in the comments. When a site like HN or Reddit grows too much, though, most of those identities disappear.Publishing your own blog post as a rebuttal, or emailing the author, are generally worth more, not only because of the identity involved but because there's a barrier of entry you won't bother crossing unless you're sure you have something to say.
Winer decides to turn off blog comments I was thinking about doing the same thing, but then I've decided to keep them open, but just for 15 days after the publication date of the post. That way it is easier to moderate, and I can still have some valuable comments from the real followers of my blog. Just my two cents.
Winer decides to turn off blog comments Scripting News has gone the way of Daring Fireball. It was bound to happen.
Is F# Ready for Production? > 5.Hiring developers is already very hard. Do we want to limit the pool of available candidates significantly (and take the increased salaries that come with the harder-to-find skills)?To that one, if I were in your shoes, I'd answer "yes" in a heartbeat. Using F# can help you differentiate yourselves on the job market. Everybody's looking for great developers, but you guys have a big plus when recruiting developers who prefer functional programming.As an anecdote, Dutch startup Silk writes their entire backend in Haskell. Their founder Salar told me that while finding people is harder, the people they find are, nearly without exception, really good and passionate. They want to work for Silk because they want to code Haskell for their day jobs. They don't cost more than "other" developers at all, because they're so happy they can finally use what they feel is a decent programming language at work.I guess F# has a bit less of a hardcore following than Haskell, but I bet that if you're one of the few functional programming shops in the region, Haskellers (and MLers and maybe even Lispers) will definitely prefer that over C# or Python.
Is F# Ready for Production? This article is ridiculous. F# is used in production in lots of places from startups like Tachyus and SnappyGrid, to mid-sized firms like Trayport all the way to huge corporations like Aviva, Credit Suisse, EDF and Barclays Capital.IDE Support: Sure, the IDE support might not be quite as developed as C#. But frankly most refactorings are just pressing tab a few times with F#. Refactorings for C#/VB.NET are mostly workarounds for languages that require huge amounts of excess syntax. The IDE support for F# is still way ahead of most of the competition (particularly dynamic languages). The intellisense and error highlighting work fantastically well.Options/nulls: Yes I suppose you still occasionally have to do a null check if you interface with legacy libraries. but I think having thousands upon thousands of .NET libraries means this is a worthwhile tradeoff. Plus you can use the TryGetX methods in F# far more nicely than in C#. http://luketopia.net/2014/02/05/fsharp-and-output-parameters...F# missed by Roslyn: F# has had an open source compiler written in F# for years. C# is a ridiculous language to choose to write a compiler in. See http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/roslyn-vs-fsharp-comp...What's coming next: F# is so far ahead of C#/VB.NET that this argument is ludicrous. Even if F# remained stagnant it would still always be better than C#. It has sensible defaults: immutability over mutability, functional over OOP, parametric polymorphism over inheritance, lack of nulls over null checks everywhere.C# has poor defaults that are now irreparable due to the need to keep backwards compatibility.F# is open to contributions now so I would expect some great things. Joinads, for example... http://tryjoinads.org/Hiring developers is hard: This is a nonsense statement. Sure, if you want to hire 100 F# developers you might struggle, but you're going to struggle to find 100 good C# developers. Yaron Minsky from Jane Street reports hiring OCaml developers was "the easiest hiring he's ever done". If you tweet that you are looking for F# developers I know from experience that you'll get a lot of responses from very talented developers. Most places I've worked have a terrible time finding decent C# devs - interview:hiring ratio is around 50:1.
Is F# Ready for Production? I can confidently answer "yes" to this question, because Tachyus, the first Silicon Valley start-up in the oil and gas industry, http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/04/10/tachyus-a-data-start-... , chose F# as the core software language. How did this work out? We went from absolutely no software written to deployed as the core operational software of a regional oil production company in 12 weeks. Our management and our customer's management are so happy with the results we are "all in" and not looking back.
Is F# Ready for Production? For those who expect that Betteridge's law of headlines ("Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.") applies here, the article is actually quite positive about F# :-)But even then, it is just worth pointing out that there is a massive list of testimonials from those who are already happily using F# in production in a wide range of areas, including finance, science, line-of-business, startups and many more: http://fsharp.org/testimonials/
Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone (Prelude edit: A few people seem to be missing the point I'm making here. I know quite a lot about the predator, and a bit about the Global Hawk. I do not know much about the Sentinel. The jab about building a drone with parts on my kitchen table is a joke, meant to illustrate that this is either an absurd level of incompetence on the part of Lockheed Martin [not likely] or the article is incorrect, the latter being most likely. The Global Hawk, for instance, uses inertial navigation as well as GPS. Spoofing GPS against that platform would be annoying to the people controlling it, it would not get you a free Global Hawk. It is a near-certainty that the Sentinel has a similar navigation system.).Some clarification on these drones:Some of them require a human being with Line Of Sight to land them. "Predators" (what a lovely name), for instance. This thing is basically a gigantic R/C plane, and a pretty nice one at that.You taxi it to the runway, take it off, and fly it via remote control. There is a human watching it the entire time (although the human may not be in close proximity to the plane. The militarized versions, for instance, have pilots living in Nevada, and planes living in Afghanistan).Another plane, called a "Global Hawk", is much larger, and requires almost no human intervention at all. You open the hanger door, press the go button, and then leave it alone.It taxis itself to the runway, powers up, takes off, flies its mission, comes home, lands, taxis back to the hanger, and powers down.If this article is accurate, it would mean that this drone model requires no human intervention, which makes sense if it's primarily a passive, camera-platform.What becomes really really scary about this is the idea that they're relying solely on GPS to fly.How do I get into defense contracting, again? I have the parts for a "drone" sitting on my kitchen table right now that, from the sound of things, is about navigationally equivalent to this thing.(By that I mean a $30 'duino, $50 worth of gyros and accelerometers, and $60 worth of a GPS. Hey government, here's a cost cutting measure: hire me to build you some drones.)
Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone Lets flip the tables here and imagine Iran is flying surveillance drones over mainland USA, gathering photos and who knows what else. Would it be unreasonable to think the USA would try with everything they've got to shoot them down and/or capture them? Who would be the bad guy in that scenario?I find it amusing nobody has thought to question what right the US have to fly a surveillance drone over Iran to spy on the country/people. Furthermore, I think it's pretty clear if you choose to cross a well established border and put something in my country without my permission, for the express purpose of spying on me, you better know I'm going to try hard to capture it as my own.Is it even "legal" for the US to be doing this?Who judges who can spy on who, and who is the "bad" guy when one side captures gear from the other side?
Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone So, they spoofed GPS and jammed the rest of the communications to make it land automatically. Given that there are test transmitters for GPS devices used when consumer devices are being created it's not a surprise that they managed to do this. Not very long ago there was a GPS jamming exercise in the UK done on a military range.I realize that as a Westerner I shouldn't be rooting for the Iranians but if they did spoof GPS, jam the rest of the communications and get this thing to land thinking it was at its home base then it's at least a neat hack.Also, in the article there's a quote from someone dissing the Iranians' technical ability. This seems like a mistake. Iran is not a 'stone age' country like Afghanistan.
Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone One American analyst ridiculed Iran’s capability, telling Defense News that the loss was “like dropping a Ferrari into an ox-cart technology culture.”An ox-cart technology culture that is allied with China and Russia. I hope this kind of hubris is counterbalanced by more realistic attitudes in the defense world.
Ask HN: When to learn AJAX? AJAX, how it's commonly referred to now, is simply the process of loading content from an external page into a Javascript variable. Most of the time it's not even AJAX anymore, but rather AJAJ (Asynchronous Javascript and JSON). In terms of getting started there really isn't much to learn, especially if you have some experience with jQuery.The big thing you need to remember is the A: Asynchronous. Especially if you're new to programming, this won't make any sense to you. As you use it you'll just get frustrated about why it works the way it does. It takes a bit of experience to learn to use it well, so give it some time. Remember these two key tips: 1. The code following your AJAX call should not be dependent on the content you are loading. Javascript will continue running line by line after the AJAX request is sent, NOT after the content has been loaded. If any code is dependent on the loaded content, it belongs in the return function. 2. The return function for an AJAX call only has the data from the page it loaded, it cannot* see the variables you defined before you made the request.Other than that, just realize that the true power of AJAX comes from the data you're loading in. You can use it to create an <iframe> of sorts that simply loads pre-built HTML files into a div, but that's not all that exciting. If you use something like PHP to process and load data, you can start to make some very cool applications. If you're looking for a good learning project, I would recommend creating a simple "shoutbox" that works completely with AJAX, including periodic refreshes to check for new comments.If you don't know what a shoutbox is: http://www.shoutmix.com/main/ Some jQuery functions to check out: .load(), .post(), .get(), .ajax()*: A lot of times, your return function WILL be able to see variables you defined before the AJAX request because they ended up in the global scope. I'd recommend that you don't rely on this unless your making the variable global on purpose. Otherwise, there's a lot of potential for a debugging nightmare.
Ask HN: When to learn AJAX? Ajax isn't complicated at all. It's basically HTTP requests via javascript. The request returns an XHR object (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest).Now along with this feature comes some differences from regular HTTP, but you can read those up in an article. Just remember the concept.
Ask HN: When to learn AJAX? "Knowing" Ajax isn't a skill, like riding a bike or knowing what the $() operator does - it's understanding a concept.In short, it's a term that describes a design pattern where some Javascript makes an asynchronous HTTP request in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page, receives the response, and then does something with that information.Now that you've got what it means, the question becomes "How do I implement that?", which is much easier to deal with. For this, just keep digging through the jQuery examples and tutorials (if that's the Javascript route you're taking). Find a trivial example, get it running on your host, and then start experimenting with it. Once that's down, repeat with a more complex example. Read some more articles from different authors. Make your own examples. Repeat.As for the broader question of when you should learn it (or anything else), the answer for things like this is always the same: when you feel in the mood for learning something new.
Ask HN: When to learn AJAX? I've been working on a hobby project to do an ajax site from scratch, and after a month of flailing I've decided to make a conventional site first and then ajaxify it. If you get bogged down after a couple of weeks you might want to make the switch back to nonajax sooner than I did.If anybody has tips on debugging ajax I'd love to hear them ...
How a colonial past shaped Star Trek’s utopian futures This entire piece throws out conjecture as fact and appears to back none of it up with substance.> By making the Ferengis a race of intergalactic traders with oversized appendages and an addiction to “gold-plated latinum,” Star Trek merely updates Jewish stereotypes.If you read the TNG novels you will find that the Ferengi tourists to earth all head for Wall Street regarding it with something like religious reverence, I suspect though don't claim the Ferengi where meant to embody the end result of a "perfect competition" style of capitalism and the capitalist personalities that you end up with and not a shot at the Jews.In fact I'd ponder whether his apparently evidence less assumption that the corrupt money grubbing characters where meant to be the Jews shows his own prejudices rather well.
How a colonial past shaped Star Trek’s utopian futures While this is a thoughtful piece, it's ultimately misguided. Star Trek is a decades-old, generational franchise, built and maintained by hundreds of writers, actors, producers and directors. There is not single person or "voice" that speaks for Star Trek. With such an expansive cannon, it is trivial to pick and choose story lines and themes to support any conjecture or criticism. Like any other cultural artifact, Star Trek has taken on the flavor and zeitgeist of a given era. Including the at times sexist, racist and xenophobic attitudes of the day.Where the article gets things particularly wrong is exploration in Star Trek. The European exploration of the Americas was premised on exploitation - to find new worlds an peoples to conquer and dominate. It didn't see foreign peoples as human, but as resources to be mined, extracted and refined.Contrast with Star Trek: aliens are almost always extended the hand of friendship at first contact. They are considered self-determined individuals who can become partners in science or trade, if they are capable. The Federation regulates it's interactions with aliens via the Prime Directive. A Directive that is designed to protect the "other" and maximize their independence and well-being. To declare this an analog with European conquest is laughable.
How a colonial past shaped Star Trek’s utopian futures Once the article equates Voyager with the original 1960's series, just about any absurdity is possible because by the time people are returning from where no one has returned before after staying where no one stayed before [Deep Space 9] we're comparing the results of mining the last dollar from a franchise in the age of 1000 cable channels to a show that was on that was on the chopping block each season when there were only three channels and TV was in Black and White.Uhuru was a bridge officer. Spock was mixed race. Sulu and Chekov showed that the animosity of the 1940's and that of the Cold War were transient. It was McCoy and Kirk and Scotty who were always teetering into the irrational and poor judgement. They were the ones acknowledged as most likely to create a 'Planet of the Nazis'.It's Picard for whom that doesn't really seem possible. As a character, he lacks that level of flaw. He's been sanitized. We're in the realm where including a blind person requires cool sunglasses. There's no Captain Pike of The Menagerie to make us uncomfortable.Indeed, the robot as object of romantic interest and as the subject of enquiry into the nature of personhood is...well, just another white guy. And in classic middle-brow morality play idiom, the price a female character must pay for falling in love with the wrong sort of person is death.There may still be 100 more economically viable episodes to come, but when the iconic leather jacket is combined with water-skis, the writers are just going through the motions.
How a colonial past shaped Star Trek’s utopian futures Societies shown in Star Trek are very homogenous. It appears that each species has only one culture each. But if you look at us, we do not have one culture. We have many cultures, and subculture that nests within them.That is not the case at all with Star Trek race. Even humans appeared to be made up only one culture, with no subcultures or variation at all.
Ask HN: Which scheme implementation do you recommend? If you are learning Scheme by reading SICP, you might want to install MIT/GNU Scheme. Otherwise, let me join the bandwagon in endorsing PLT. The PLT camp has its own favored textbook, qv http://www.htdp.org/ .The just-released game QuantZ (http://www.gamerizon.com/gamerizon-news-and-media.html) was written almost entirely in Gambit Scheme (per https://webmail.iro.umontreal.ca/pipermail/gambit-list/2009-...). Your Scheme factoid for the day.
Ask HN: Which scheme implementation do you recommend? As pg mentioned, PLT is a good place to start. It's widely used and has an active community. Dr. Scheme is a nice IDE for learning as well.If you need to compile to C, Chicken and Gambit-C are both pretty well regarded (it has been a little while since I've looked into this specifically so take it with a grain of salt).
Ask HN: Which scheme implementation do you recommend? We like PLT Scheme. (You used it to post this question.)
Ask HN: Which scheme implementation do you recommend? I'm going to say that it doesn't really matter but, PLT is probably a great place to start.If you want to learn Scheme then make sure to use the R5RS setting on PLT. When I write for portability, that's the setting I use.Most of my writing however, is in PocketScheme for my iPaq.I've messed a bit with Kawa however that just led me to ordering a copy of 'Programming Clojure' so I can see what the hype is all about.
Stephen Fry on binary choices I often find myself in agreement with Fry's seemingly incompatible interests. Like his appreciation for the Free Software movement[1] as well as Apple's achievements[2].[1]: http://www.gnu.org/fry/[2]: http://www.stephenfry.com/2010/01/28/ipad-about/
Stephen Fry on binary choices C.S.Lewis has had some clever things to say on the topic. There's this brilliant paragraph in Mere Christianity that goes:"… so many people cannot be brought to realise that when B is better than C, A may be even better than B. They like thinking in terms of good and bad, not of good, better, and best, or bad, worse and worst. They want to know whether you think patriotism a good thing: if you reply that it is, of course, far better than individual selfishness, but that it is inferior to universal charity and should always give way to universal charity when the two conflict, they think you are being evasive."Think this applies here, too.
Stephen Fry on binary choices Wow, do I know his feeling. I call it 'Coke/Pepsi' binary thinking. The notion that the World is essentially binary, instead of a multi-dimensional varied landscape of gradients.
Stephen Fry on binary choices I'm reminded of this, written in May, 2007:http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/TwoAndAHalfMen.html?HN
A beautiful self hosted alternative to Basecamp Earlier discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5698741
A beautiful self hosted alternative to Basecamp Wow really nice work. I have a strong feeling you need to raise the price.
A beautiful self hosted alternative to Basecamp Why use this over freedcamp.com/ ?
A beautiful self hosted alternative to Basecamp What are the requirements?
UN: Disconnecting File-Sharers Breaches Human Rights At least use due process of law, instead of (as HADOPI did) disconnecting users after they had been merely accused of infringement 3 times. That effectively makes copyright owners into judge and jury, and forces the ISP to act as executioner.
UN: Disconnecting File-Sharers Breaches Human Rights Maybe I missed something, but how do you disconnect a person from the internet? One person may have several ways to access the internet, each of them with their own IP address and even ISP, while someone else shares a single computer with other family members or is using NAT.I see no way to enforce such a law unless you jail the person. What were they thinking?
UN: Disconnecting File-Sharers Breaches Human Rights Yeah, but when was the last time any country cared what the UN considered a breach of human rights?
UN: Disconnecting File-Sharers Breaches Human Rights I suppose they also consider it a breach of human rights to disconnect users for harassing other users, spamming, DoSing, breaking into the ISP's own network, wire fraud, and so on. All is as much "free speech" and as equally illegal as warezing.
R.J. Lipton - A proof that P is not equal to NP Reading Lipton's description of this paper I think I understand how normal people feel when they listen to geeks talk about technology.
R.J. Lipton - A proof that P is not equal to NP The paper is rather complicated, you can see it here http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Vinay_Deolalikar/#s.p. on the author's site.it would be nice to believe this is solved, but my gut instinct is that it will not be vetted.
R.J. Lipton - A proof that P is not equal to NP This was also good the last three times today it appeared on HN. :)
R.J. Lipton - A proof that P is not equal to NP Scot Aaronson bets 200k$ that this proof isnt truehttp://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=456
Bruce Sterling: Poor folk love their cellphones Damn and blast, where is the podcast of the Bruce Sterling SXSW talk? It doesn't appear to be up here yet:http://sxsw.com/taxonomy/term/44I'm tired of all these bits-and-pieces leaks. Sterling's one-liners are much more fun -- and often make rather more sense -- in context.I suppose, if I had been willing to spend more money, I could have just gone to SXSW and heard Sterling in person. But, instead, I have to wait like a mendicant for them to get around to dribbling it out to me. Maybe this is what Sterling was talking about.
Bruce Sterling: Poor folk love their cellphones This reads more like a comparison of "old money" and "new money" to me, than of rich and poor. I have more than one rich friend who would hate to be disconnected.
Bruce Sterling: Poor folk love their cellphones Of course poor people love their cell phones! But rich people too (even more sometimes)... And what's the point? How you use Twitter is a pretty different story. I find the article has a pretty strange structure anyway, I'm sort of searching the point the writer wants to make. Some more tweeting could help the author to get more concise maybe :)
Bruce Sterling: Poor folk love their cellphones The article was thought-provoking for me, as I hadn't heard the Sterling talk, but she lost me here:I myself mostly post links to this column, hoping that the self-promotion is transparent enough that people can easily ignore a link or click it if they’re curious ....I can’t help wondering if I’ve turned into some banged-up street kid, stuck in a cruel and crowded neighborhood, trying to convince everyone that regular beatings give you character. Maybe the truth is that I wish I could get out of this place and live as I imagine some nondigital or predigital writers do: among family and friends, in big, beautiful houses, with precious, irreplaceable objects.And what is stopping her from doing that? Her Twitter usage seems to be very much self-promotional and one way, so it's not as if she's leaving a community she has a stake in. What's she whining about?
Deaths per TWh for all energy sources: Rooftop solar power relatively dangerous Okay, that's DIY rooftop installations and though I'm usually against atomic fear-mongering I have to say that it's difficult to accurately gauge the effects of the Chernobyl incident. And to be fair, we also need to count birth defects and other permanent injuries. So I don't know if this is a valid comparison. By the way, without having the facts to support it, I'd wager that fossil fuels cost the most lives of all energy sources, but again, that's also impossible to ever measure accurately and in islolation.
Deaths per TWh for all energy sources: Rooftop solar power relatively dangerous "The World Health Organization study in 2005 indicated that 50 people died to that point as a direct result of Chernobyl. 4000 people may eventually die earlier as a result of Chernobyl, but those deaths would be more than 20 years after the fact and the cause and effect becomes more tenuous."In other words, this article only counts the deaths of reactor staff and emergency crew, and goes on to outrightly dismiss cancer deaths.The article's stated purpose is to show a comparison of death tolls. The dramatic loss of quality of life due to radiation poisoning for thousands of people exposed to the highest levels of radiation surrounding the Chernobyl disaster, and the displacement of hundreds of thousands, is also worth considering when weighing the negative impact.That said, with Chernobyl, we're talking about the absolute worst-case scenario for a nuclear reactor improperly contained (actually, not contained at all) and neglected long after warning signs were shown. We shouldn't practice historical revisionism or insult its victims by downplaying its impact, but we should also remember that its particular history will not be repeated with the containment barriers and safety measures in place at today's plants.
Deaths per TWh for all energy sources: Rooftop solar power relatively dangerous Woah, so that basically means that for coal in the US of the 3 or 4 cents per khw (wholesale price, not yet transmitted to your house) there is a hidden cost that is between 35 and 50% more, assuming $1mm / life (a standard non-conservative assumption by engineers). So basically coal isn't worth it at all? It's not just nuclear, natural gas could be made cheaper (and greener) than coal after you take in the human life costs. I also question why the oil cost in human life is so high. Do they take into account oil related conflicts like the Gulf War?
Deaths per TWh for all energy sources: Rooftop solar power relatively dangerous Seems like at some point you also have to factor opportunity cost into this as well--so the numbers probably become even more compelling. So if a form of energy is especially expensive, that's dollars you could have spent on say healthcare, food, etc.To me this is the real indictment against things like solar, not the risk of people falling off roofs.
Web Inventor Tim Berners-Lee weighs in: There’s Danger in the Filter Bubble I'm not getting this "filter bubble" meme that's floating about of late. My site is dedicated to helping people filter information (www.filterjoe.com), though not in the narrow sense discussed by the "filter bubble" proponents. Many regular people I know are totally overloaded and overwhelmed by the web, and most especially the social web (email, facebook, twitter, etc.).Which is the best browser to use? How do I manage 200 passwords? What's the best kind of AA battery to buy? How do I read web pages without getting distracted?It can be pretty hard for a normal person to get good answers to questions like these. Googling won't necessarily get you good answers and many people won't even know to ask (many people don't know that their password practices are extremely risky, or that the little "e" they click on to access the internet is a browser).What's needed are better filters. This backlash against filtering takes one very small subset of possible reasons to filter - avoiding contradictory information to controversial topics - and makes a grand leap to the conclusion that all filtering is bad.By this argument, if I do a keyword search on "passwords," it would be best if I were served the random top 10 results that happen to have the word "password" somewhere in the title or one of the subheadings. That way I won't be subjected to harmful biases . . .EDIT: typo
Web Inventor Tim Berners-Lee weighs in: There’s Danger in the Filter Bubble I think that the premise here, that by giving relevant results search engines will filter the diverse range of opinions which exist in the world, is intriguing. In the short term, I think it's unlikely that online personalization will be accurate enough to create the type of bubble Tim Berners-Lee is suggesting. In the long term, however, I do see this as significant and dangerous. Unlike the way current tribes work, in which a person needs to actively seek and follow their 'tribe', this is a passive action - over time web services get to know you and seemingly shield you from diversity. The passive vs active nature required to keep up with one's tribe is the part of his prediction which worries me.
Web Inventor Tim Berners-Lee weighs in: There’s Danger in the Filter Bubble I don't know about you, but a filter-bubble is for me a very difficult-to-visualise mixed metaphor.
Web Inventor Tim Berners-Lee weighs in: There’s Danger in the Filter Bubble If I've ever seen an efficient filter that "as a result you end up being dedicated to your tribe", Hacker News is one.
Working memory at 5 is a better predictor of academic outcome than IQ [abstract] Thanks to the citation shown in the abstract submitted here, I was able to gain online access to the full text of the article through my alma mater university. The key issue here is that designers of IQ tests have known for a while that their empirically designed tests didn't tap all of the human abilities that might properly be called human "intelligence." The submitted paper test children with the WISC-R IQ at time 1, and the WISC-III IQ test at time 2. But now the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) has gone into its fourth version, the WISC-IV, and the current Wechsler IQ test includes tests of working memory.http://psychcorp.pearsonassessments.com/HAIWEB/Cultures/en-u...Intelligence researchers get this. The older versions of IQ tests didn't have a broad enough variety of item content to tap important cognitive abilities such as working memory. Working memory is very important, and is a hot area in intelligence research in the last several years (as this paper reflects). The latest versions of the currently used tests are already taking this into account, and include working memory items in the item content of the tests, and subscale scoring to identify which test-takers have the most problems with working memory.Another comment in this thread asked,Does anybody know of a good introductory text about these various theories of memory? I'd love to learn more about them, but following references is a bit time consuming.Seehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...for a guide to background reading on these issues. The Alan Kaufman popular book IQ Testing 101 is a very good book, easy to read and quite up-to-date, on these issues.
Working memory at 5 is a better predictor of academic outcome than IQ [abstract] I read a study some time ago which was examining the cognitive load required by humans to parse various natural languages. I cannot find any references to it at the moment, but the gist of it was that the grammatical structure of some lanuguages required the speaker/listener to keep more information in their working memory before the meaning could be extracted from the sentence (e.g. all the verbs at the end of the sentence). In computer analogies, think of it as being required to push the whole sentence onto a large stack which then needed to be completely popped before meaning was extracted, instead of pushing and popping in pieces as some natural language grammars allow.This article thus had me wondering whether people who are raised speaking such languages natively have an inherent advantage in life because they are exercising their working memory earlier on and thus increasing it's capacity, which appears to convey more general advantages.
Working memory at 5 is a better predictor of academic outcome than IQ [abstract] And what is 'academic outcome' a predictor of?
Working memory at 5 is a better predictor of academic outcome than IQ [abstract] The other day there was an article about the importance of motivation in intelligence and success. From my understanding of what this article is, that's a glaring hole in the theory.
How to stop illegal downloads >Then I asked him to imagine if the product in question represented several months or even years of his life. All that time he was creating, writing, editing, and marketing this thing in order to fund his next project. And then everyone downloaded it, illegally, for free.So he responded to an actual argument with an appeal to emotions? And he seems to be proud of this?Sorry, no. If you have a problem with an argument, you point out the flaw in the argument. You don't try to make the person giving the argument feel bad for the conclusion.> It turns out that we view ourselves categorically as either good or bad, and moving from being 3% legal to being 4% legal is not a very compelling motivation.This is very silly reasoning. People who download illegally don't view themselves as "bad", and most people I know who download illegally (aka "most people I know") also buy stuff in the same category as what they download.
How to stop illegal downloads By preemptively dismissing any and all "rationalizations" as examples of flawed logic, this wise author has effectively created a black hole into which he can throw any counter-argument of his thesis, dismissing it all as "proving my point". Yikes - do we want to pay attention to the kind of rhetoretician who constructs such a system wherein no possible counter-argument is allowable?
How to stop illegal downloads I like Ariely but he's off the mark here, and ironically I think his "conversion" is just as much a rationalization as any he represented in this post.It sucks to work hard on something that you're not renumerated for to the degree you'd like. Suddenly maybe you're a big enough name that this isn't simply due to obscurity, and you resent the fact that people got something out of your effort without paying you for it. But the only thing obligating them to do so in an absolute sense is copyright, and the moral compass of great swaths of the general public seems to have evolved quite decisively beyond it, and as problematic as that is for the current model of creative business I doubt it will change any time soon. I'm no economist but I suspect it has to do with an innate understanding of the value of the bits in and of themselves, which due to the low cost of reproduction, is practically zero. This causes cognitive dissonance in some, who believe it is their moral duty to support the originators of those bits by purchasing them through on online store, but apart from the few who actually take an overtly principled stance on the matter, I suspect most who prefer this mode of distribution actually do so because what they are really buying is the convenience and quality of the transaction.So yeah, artists deserve a fair shake in all this. But perhaps it's more sensible to recognize the market is shifting and that the artists and publishers of the future are going to need to take new approaches toward monetization.
How to stop illegal downloads I think this issue deserves more thought and introspection than Ariely seems to have given it so far.I think grecy's comparison to Catholicism is very striking. One common criticism of Christian religions is centered on the idea of "original sin" -- the idea that people are inherently evil and need to be saved. A similar criticism could (and maybe should) be applied to any law that is broken by a large number of citizens. When this happens, I would take it as a sign that there is something wrong with the law, not with people.But anyway, the key thing is that Ariely seems to have a really exciting research question here, which is how and why do people rationalize illegal downloading, and he seems to be tossing it away in favor of dictating morality at them through a megaphone.
Original IBM PC (Intel 8088) in Javascript with Visicalc For some reason I get a control-L (^L) after every character I type which makes this usable for me but it sure brings back some nostalgia!Ah okay the keyboard was only broken in firefox but it works in chrome.My instinct immediately made me type prompt $p$g from something buried keep in my memory!Basic works and you can make a program within a program within a browser. Ha.
Original IBM PC (Intel 8088) in Javascript with Visicalc Wow, this is awesome! How can I upload original disk images? Can we get an 8086 emulator with VGA? I would love to have all of my old games & software available in the browser. (Scorched Earth, Infocom, Sierra, etc.)
Original IBM PC (Intel 8088) in Javascript with Visicalc PC-DOS disk 2 has debug.com too. With the "A" command you can program fun things in assembler and save to com files :)(color video memory at B800:0000)
Original IBM PC (Intel 8088) in Javascript with Visicalc Run Visicalc by loading it using the menu and "Load Drive", then enter "vc" + return.
Android Hacked via NFC on the Samsung Galaxy S3 It's not limited to NFC (email or website can be used as attack vectors), but the researchers apparently decided to show off the NFC method as it's a relatively new medium for malware (though of course not a very practical one).
Android Hacked via NFC on the Samsung Galaxy S3 The magnetic strip and chip duplication technology in gas stations and convenience stores are already a point of frustration for insurers, financial services and consumers. Exploiting NFC which is intended to be a generally-accepted payment method in the near future does not give me the warm-and-fuzzies
Android Hacked via NFC on the Samsung Galaxy S3 It looks to me like the same vector Charlie Miller showed off a couple of months ago. The NFC Forum responded at the time along the lines of "It's not an NFC thing," and said his demonstration "underscores the importance of providing appropriate security measures at the application layer and enabling users to adjust security settings to suit their own needs and preferences"http://www.nfcworld.com/2012/08/01/317100/forum-responds-to-...
Android Hacked via NFC on the Samsung Galaxy S3 The article mentions that the "flaw had to be triggered 185 times in the exploit code in order to overcome some of the vulnerability’s limitations".How long would that take to trigger through the NFC interface?