Hacker News Reader

ZeljkoSon Apple and Google Face Growing Revolt Over App Store ‘Tax’

In my modest opinion, progressive app store fee would make much more sense: https://svedic.org/philosophy/why-app-stores-need-progressiv...

ZeljkoSon Thanks Economist, You Really Know What Has Gone Wrong with the Internet

The things you see as a problem are not the things that annoyed me:

A) The Economist says that article limit is 5 per month. But they waive that limit for Google Crawler. So they mislead search engine into thinking that article is accessible, when actually it is not. They intentionally misrepresent as a free service to attract free SEO traffic.

B) The person who shared link to that article was not aware people like me will not able to read it. They were also mislead into thinking is an accessible resource, to get free shares.

C) Even if you don't have a problem with A and B, their UX is ridiculous. One message to subscribe is covering another message to subscribe. As the same time there is a newsletter popup which promises you a PDF.

I hope that now you better understands what annoys people. It's is not that business are trying to make money; it is how they approach it.

ZeljkoSon GitHub – Deep Visualization Toolbox

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgkfIQ4IGaM

ZeljkoSon Computers Have Had Emotions for Quite Some Time

I think you are talking about empathy, not basic emotions. Mirror neurons are observed only in primates[1]. Birds may have some mirroring system, and lower-order animals do not. So, if you require mirror neurons for emotions, you are basically stating only primates can have emotions, maybe birds and other animals (like honeybees and crayfish) can not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron

ZeljkoSon Undiscovered Bach? No, a Computer Wrote It (1997)

Emmy Bach style chorale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PczDLl92vlc

ZeljkoSon Eager to Burst His Own Bubble, a Techie Made Apps to Randomize His Life

Max's randomized living apps: https://maxhawkins.me/work/randomized_living.html

ZeljkoSon NIST to redefine the kilogram based on a fundamental universal constant

Interesting fact: this is important for US too, because pound is defined as exactly 0.45359237 kg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_(mass)#Current_use)

ZeljkoSon How People Use Bike-Share Spaces vs. Parking Spots

Yes, private cars spend 95% of its time idle on parking. One solution is car sharing, which need 4-8 times less parking space: http://svedic.org/philosophy/car-sharing-and-the-death-of-pa...

ZeljkoSon Reaction Engines begins construction of UK rocket engine test facility

Sorry to disappoint you guys, but Reaction Engines was founded in 1989 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_Engines_Limited) and every year they issue press releases stating they are on a brink of revolutionary engine. In this 18 years they didn't produce anything that actually works. Skylon is a "design" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft)] and SABRE is a "concept under development" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABRE_(rocket_engine)].

ZeljkoSon Cambridge scientist debunks flying myth

Veritasium video explains it better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFO4PBolwFg

ZeljkoSon How not to create traffic jams: Don’t let people park for free

One alternative to a personal car is a shared car (one way car sharing), which eliminates B, C, D and partially A (depending on car share density in your area).

Article I wrote for Vice on that topic: http://svedic.org/philosophy/car-sharing-and-the-death-of-pa...

ZeljkoSon Acme Klein Bottle

Checkout is golden, it asks you for number of dimensions in your universe: http://svedic.org/TEMP/KleinBottleCheckout.png

ZeljkoSon Acme Klein Bottle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU

ZeljkoSon A Clear Case of Trading with the Enemy (2015)

As a side note, I have never heard of steel tires, but apparently in WW1 they were a big thing:

- Truck spring wheel: http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/smw/images/thumb/a/...

- Bicycle spring wheel: http://www.oldbike.eu/museum/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/WW1-...

ZeljkoSon Super minimalistic, super to the point: website of the Bardo Coffee

From reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/5wg1x7/i_hope_t...

ZeljkoSon 10GHz at under 1V by 2005 - The future of Intel’s manufacturing processes [2000]

Yes, more about the end of Dennard scaling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling#Breakdown_of_D...

ZeljkoSon Facebook will lose 80% of users by 2017, say Princeton researchers (2014)

Facebook actually did a hilarious debunking: https://www.facebook.com/notes/mike-develin/debunking-prince...

ZeljkoSon Echo – Assembly program that prints the first positional argument to stdout

I agree, nothing special. For comparison, "colpinsky" draws color changing Sierpinski Triangle in only 16 bytes, less than this echo :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw5WLk9IeX0

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=62079

ZeljkoSon LessPass: sync-less open source password manager

I completely agree. In addition to that, I use my password manager (LastPass) to:

A) Safely store confidential data like credit card information and pins.

B) Share some data with coworkers, on a folder-by-folder basis.

C) In a case something happens to me, my friend has Emergency Access after 7 days: https://helpdesk.lastpass.com/emergency-access/

ZeljkoSon Web Bloat Score Calculator

From my developer: "We measure every request that was received by SlimerJS, also for any request that sends a resource as GZIP, but does not specify its size, we will GZIP that content ourselves in order to get its size."

ZeljkoSon Web Bloat Score Calculator

> Whether an image is bloat or valuable content requires sophisticated judgment and understanding of what the purpose of the page is.

I completely agree with that. Quick check is to replace all images on a page with placeholder images—if that doesn't reduce functionality of the page then maybe you don't need that images at all.

ZeljkoSon Web Bloat Score Calculator

Yes, prefetch is deliberate as that is the default behavior of SlimmerJS and most of the browsers.

ZeljkoSon Web Bloat Score Calculator

There is some truth to that, but I wanted screenshots to be visible for comparison and to have the same visual functionality. Artifacts around text make it hard to read, thus less functional.

ZeljkoSon Web Bloat Score Calculator

Thanks Maciej, your obesity article was a one of the sources of inspiration :)

ZeljkoSon Web Bloat Score Calculator

Hi, author here.

I wanted to measure visual information content of a page, and yes, PNG is maybe not the best to do that. JPEGs are smaller, but it introduces another problem of visible artifacts around text.

If anybody knows a better way to measure visual information content, please suggest.

ZeljkoSon Parking Lots Are a Waste of Space

True, but for that we need a traffic engineer with experience in traffic flow simulation software :) https://www.researchgate.net/post/Whats_the_best_software_fo...

ZeljkoSon Parking Lots Are a Waste of Space

> Are they including deadheading in their 'utilization' metric? Half the time (or more) the car is going to be self-driving to its next pickup point.

Author here. You are completely right, I didn't include self-driving time in the second table. To correct my omission, let's add a column for 3X utilization where self-driving cars spend half of the time driving alone.

Shared self-driving car (3x)

-----------------------------

Used: 3 x 5% x 2 = 30%

Parked: 70%

Number of cars in the city: N/3

Parking places needed: (N/3) x 70% = N x 23.3%

Parking reduction: (N x 95%) / (N x 23.3%) = 4.07x

-----------------------------

So, in that theoretical case, we would need 4x less parking. However, this is just a rough calculation, for better precision you would use some traffic simulation application.

Thanks for feedback!

ZeljkoSon Original bulletin board thread in which ‘:-)’ was proposed

Interesting thing to note is that before Fahlman suggested ":-)" symbol, Leonard Hamey suggested "{#}" (see 17-Sep-82 17:42 post). After that, someone suggested "\__/" (see 20-Sep-82 17:56 post). But only ":-)" gained popularity.

It is funny to imagine how emoticons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons) would look today if one of alternative symbols was accepted?

ZeljkoSon Scythe, the most-hyped board game of 2016, delivers

I just did.

ZeljkoSon VODER (1939) – Early Speech Synthesizer

More information:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voder

http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=738