Hacker News Reader

Prisenon The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid

>> Music is so cheap. All of the original demands 10 years ago have been met. Guess what? piracy is worse than ever. It reminds me why you never negotiate with terrorists.

All the news I've read regarding streaming services (they have existed a lot less than 10 years, mind you) is that they are decreasing piracy. Do you have any other data points?

Prisenon The "overlearning the game" problem

The problem with this is that all issues regarding taxation/government spending are non-orthogonal, and can't be uncoupled easily (or at all).

Prisenon 90 Percent of People Don't Know How to Use CTRL+F (or CMD + F)

"/" is also not a single key on all keyboard configurations. On a swedish keyboard it's shift+7, hardly any easier than ctrl+f.

Prisenon The Arduino Solution to Selectively Mute Over-Exposed Celebrities

Why would you use firsthand experiences when the actual statistics are freely available?

Prisenon When Children Attack...

The birth rates in the western world are already low enough that populations are decreasing excluding immigration. If your suggestion was implemented, they would literally go extinct in not that long a time span. Not sure I'd call that outcome a bingo!

Prisenon Accuracy takes power: one man's 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator

PS3s are only vulnerable with old firmware, and hacked ones can't play new games nor play online.

Prisenon The future of old: If you’re 30 now, what can you expect at 80?

Sounds more like you treated the symptoms of atypical cystic fibrosis than the symptoms of aging.

Prisenon Kurzweil: 3 Supplements To Let You Live Until The Singularity

So, according to the article, there is: 1) No scientific consensus whether these supplements will make you live longer or not. 2) A web page where Kurzweil sells these supplements.

Can someone explain why I shouldn't think of this the same way that I think about homeopathy etc.?

Prisenon How do you use 1Gbps Internet links? Chattanooga residents find out

Symmetrical downlink and uplink is the really exciting part to me. Imagine being able to transmit GB-sized files point to point in a matter of minutes. There are so many opportunities for stuff you can do with that :)

Prisenon How to build toddler app UIs.

It's pretty obvious that iPhone games designed to be controlled by tilt work well with tilt, it's not at all obvious that other genres of games work well with pure tilt controls.

It's also a bit premature to draw conclusions from kids at an age where their fine motor skills are still developing. They could be getting frustrated because pushing buttons is hard for them.

Prisenon How to build toddler app UIs.

Motion controls and button controls are not mutually exclusive. And buttons are essential for games that require more precise controls, in the same way that a physical keyboard is essential for writing long texts.

Prisenon Why Experts Get It Wrong

Ravi Mehta is not vaguely surprised that most high-profile basketball "experts" screwed up their Final Four predictions. Overall, of 5.9 million brackets submitted to ESPN.com's Tournament Challenge by those following the games, only 192 had Butler meeting Virginia Commonwealth in Saturday's semi-finals.

This is like asking people to predict the result of a slightly skewed coin flip, without giving any odds, and afterwards proclaiming them wrong if the less likely side happened. In other words, this does not show that the predictions were "wrong" in any meaningful way.

Prisenon How We Got Owned by a Few Teenagers (and Why It Will Never Happen Again)

If the landlord leaves the master keys unprotected, he most definitely shares some of the blame when the apartments of his building are broken into.

Prisenon Epic Games shows jaw-dropping graphics for next-generation consoles

Did you know that Mirror's Edge is built using the current version of Unreal Engine? Tech demos are built to showcase as many features as possible, in a very limited time. In order to show shadows/lighting they are often dark.

Prisenon Nearly All US Universities Lose Money on Sports

I see no numbers for individual sports. Athletic departments losing money does not mean that the football team is losing money.

Prisenon Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code

They probably have to specify exactly what percentage of income is given out in winnings. Not to protect the lottery company, but to protect lottery buyers.

Prisenon In Norway, Start-ups Say Ja to Socialism

Tragedy of the commons. It's one of the most fundamental reasons that we have states.

Prisenon Obama Nominates RIAA Lawyer for Solicitor General

Would we really be saying that for a lawyer who defended the Catholic church in the sex abuse scandal? No, b/c anyone with _any_ integrity would likely walk away from that...or anyone with any political smarts.

Very poor example... The right for everyone to have a proper defense in criminal trials is a cornerstone of the legal system, and I'm really surprised anyone would argue against it.

Prisenon Facebook is a Ponzi Scheme

One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth. So they invested in new Internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in.

Facebook doesn't have this feedback loop.

Prisenon Harder to read = easier to recall

It's probably less effective when your audience isn't forced to read your text.

Prisenon Call Of Duty Invades The Mac App Store at $50

The game is also massive in size, at over 6 gigabytes, so it’s going to take a while to download even on a fast connection.

That's pretty small these days.

Prisenon PS3 Root Key Hacker Sued

If we're only concerned about strict legality, EULAs are on very shaky legal ground. For example, EULAs that you don't sign _before_ buying the product have no legal standing at all in the EU. Sony has already tried suing PSJailbreak in Spain, they lost and had to pay damages.

Prisenon Chrome about:flags now has instant and side tabs

Instant has been moved into Options in the Beta version. I know I was pretty confused when I couldn't find it.

Prisenon AT&T Pins 4G Label to Existing Network

The fastest implementations of HSPA-plus are actually coming close to the theoretical limits of how much data can be transferred on a given frequency band, but they have some big drawbacks compared to LTE.

The one that will be most noticeable at first is latency, which is at most half that of HSPA (the requirement is 20ms for LTE). The second is that LTE will be able to use bigger frequency bands than HSPA, eventually reaching a 100 MHz band.

Even ignoring that, AT&T's current HSPA-plus network is nowhere near as fast as HSPA-plus can be. They would need to upgrade it to get close to the raw speed of LTE.

Prisenon Reversal on Carbs: Scientists now blame carbohydrates for America's ills

The correct (average) recommendation might not be static. If people didn't sit still as much 40 years ago, maybe they could eat more carbs without getting fat.

Prisenon Reasons to expect the next 10 years to be more exciting than the last

By the end of the decade, expect voice and video quality as good as you might expect from HDTV.

Bandwidth wise, this is (at least technically) possible today.

Prisenon Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies

Special forces operating in extreme conditions have no qualms about leaving someone, if necessary.

Prisenon Is expecting expertise unreasonable?

A Cobol programmer using twenty year old knowledge can still make good money and be useful. A physician using twenty year old medicine knowledge - not so much.

Prisenon Does It Matter Where You Go to College?

If they just took an average, it could be that those choosing not to attend had other, much more lucrative, alternatives.