Hacker News Reader

drxon Disassembly of Pokémon Red

Yeah, I know the guy who runs the wiki, he's a really cool guy and has been doing this for a while too. The whole wiki is fascinating if you're into that sort of thing and have some spare time.

drxon Disassembly of Pokémon Red

I fondly remember spending 2 weeks completely disassembling Sonic the Hedgehog once, I was always curious how games worked. Disassembling them turned into a little hobby of mine -- you always find leftover graphics, dead code and sometimes even whole unused levels when you poke around, it's lots of fun.

If you're interested, up-to-date versions of Sonic the Hedgehog disassemblies can be found here: http://info.sonicretro.org/Disassemblies

People have also disassembled other games like Super Mario Bros., etc.

drxon Programming prodigy passes away at 16

> limb out of the hole you dug for yourself

How delightfully patronizing.

drxon Programming prodigy passes away at 16

> You people need to learn when to bite your tongues.

While I appreciate your proselytizing suggestion that we change our entire moral and ethical framework based on what some random person on the internet wrote in anger and eschew logic and reason, I will bite my tongue whenever I please, thank you very much.

drxon A simple framework for developing Linux kernel heap exploit

Anyone know of something like this for other platforms than linux?

drxon Good Creative People are Never Bored

This is trivially refuted by the fact that "good creative people" with concentration/motivation defects, depression etc. exist.

The whole article is a non-sequitur.

drxon EFF's 2011 Holiday Wish List

Must be cool for Colin to have Tarsnap featured there (as secure backup provider Tarsnap puts it, "[b]ackups are supposed to be a tool for mitigating damage — not a potential vulnerability to worry about!")

drxon A Programming Idiom You've Never Heard Of

You could dispense with the 'you've never heard of'.

drxon WebGL Liquid Surface

I got an alert saying "Could not initialize WebGL". Alerts are annoying.

drxon The Xinjiang Procedure

If anyone is as curious as I am: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sch...

drxon Go Daddy No Longer Supports SOPA

> In changing its position, Go Daddy remains steadfast in its promise to support security and stability of the Internet. In an effort to eliminate any confusion about its reversal on SOPA though, Jones has removed blog postings that had outlined areas of the bill Go Daddy did support.

> "Go Daddy has always fought to preserve the intellectual property rights of third parties, and will continue to do so in the future," Jones said.

Translation: we got caught this time, but will not hesitate to do it again.

drxon New Greplin iPhone app

Ah, my mistake.

This was in the email I got from Greplin: "It's been our biggest request for months and it's finally here: The Greplin iPhone app."

drxon Why European startup had to move to USA to fulfill its vision

"10.02 - Business taxes" at the Official Statistics Office of Norway: http://www.ssb.no/metadata/conceptvariable/vardok/1441/en

"Taxable wealth is the value of the company's assets reduced by debt, as of 1 January in the assessment year."

This doesn't necessarily mean that the same definition applies at the tax office and/or that it applies to startups, though.

drxon Why European startup had to move to USA to fulfill its vision

Out of curiosity I researched this a little. Sweden abandoned the wealth tax in 2007.

However, the neighboring Norway has a 1.1% combined wealth tax on income above about $350k. And according to [1] "from the income year 2008 the full market value of shares reg- istered on the stock exchange are in the shareholder’s wealth, whereas unlisted shares are valued based on the company’s taxable wealth".

Other countries that have the wealth tax are France, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Netherlands and India. Some of them have limits on the wealth tax in place, e.g. in France the amount cannot exceed 50% of annual revenues.

[1] http://www.kpmg.no/arch/_img/9585751.pdf

drxon The Day I Saw Van Gogh’s Genius in a New Light

He mentions this color vision deficiency simulator app: http://asada.tukusi.ne.jp/cvsimulator/e/index.html

It's interesting to look at real life through color deficient eyes.

drxon Poll: How much did you earn from your stock options during exit?

I have friends who love startups but would never start one. It's not for everyone.

drxon Ask HN: Hacker wannabe demotivated & depressed in need of help

I'm a bit late to the topic, so quite possibly you've moved on, but

> I keep failing and getting frustrated as soon as I hit a wall, I didn't used to be like this but now everything seems too hard

> depressed and demotivated

Just one of many possibilities, but you could have a neurological disorder ("I didn't used to be like this" and depression, no motivation). Go to a decent doctor and get checked for a bunch of things. Could be something treatable like vitamin deficiency.

In any case, feel free to ping me, emails in my profile.

drxon Python Facts

Try https://github.com/jcrocholl/pep8

You could show the output of this to the submitter (somewhat bad -- barrier to submission) or flag them yourself so you can correct them occasionally.

Examples:

  $ pep8 optparse.py
  optparse.py:69:11: E401 multiple imports on one line
  optparse.py:77:1: E302 expected 2 blank lines, found 1
  optparse.py:88:5: E301 expected 1 blank line, found 0


  $ pep8 --show-source --show-pep8 testsuite/E111.py
  testsuite/E111.py:2:3: E111 indentation is not a multiple of four
    print x
    ^
      Use 4 spaces per indentation level.

      For really old code that you don't want to mess up, you can
      continue to use 8-space tabs.

drxon Quora: What would be a good use of Apple's $86.85+ billion in cash?

I would pay money to read this kind of insight on a regular basis.

drxon PageRank is bad math: discussion

> You, and many others, seem to imply that being "bad math" (mathematically not sound) is the same as being "bad" (in the broad sense). The author never said that the method was useless, nor anything similar. PageRank was an obviously great advance at the time, but this does not mean that it can not be improved.

I did not say the author said PageRank was bad. I merely said that it being "bad math" was irrelevant to the real world.

> Oh, and "physical constants" are not even remotely similar to using a made-up constant. Physical constants are measured experimentally, meaning that they "exist" in the object that the mathematical model tries to explain. Now tell me how do you measure ".85" being an "existing" constant in the "ranking of website importance" object that pagerank tries to model...

I was just showing how flawed his π analogy (he was comparing π to PageRank constants), and his reasoning how π is a time-bomb are.

drxon PageRank is bad math: discussion

Regardless of whether PageRank is "bad math" (the author being the arbiter of what's bad), it was never about being formally anal, it was about solving a problem -- making search much, much better than the then-competition.

PageRank solves the problem with flying colors. There is nothing wrong about having hidden constants that you tweak until you get the results you want. The alternative would be to, instead of coding what has become Google, attempt to find a more general solution. Maybe you'll find it. Maybe. And if you do, by the time you have, someone else will have come and made Google instead of you. And for what? Mathematical purity? Phobia of constants?

I suppose the author also feels much of physics is also bad, since it's riddled with constants upon constants, all of which are "ticking time bombs": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_constant

drxon HN Apps List

http://archfinch.com/tags/hn -- HN filtered by tags (all posts with at least 10 points, updated hourly).

drxon The Importance of Follow-up

I have found this to be very true. For one venture, I have a wiki (not unlike your spreadsheet) with everyone I've emailed and plan to email, with their data, position, when to email/call them next, their status, etc.

drxon Two New Elements Join the Periodic Table

http://google.com/?q=ununquadium

If I was a domain squatter, I would crawl the internet looking for words/ngrams and register .com domains with them. Which is probably what someone did.

drxon Suspension, Ban or Hellban?

The biggest problem I have with this is the wasted energy by the hellbanned.

drxon Google to offer for-pay Translate API

This made me consider the problem relying on shitstorms for feedback. The problem might be unrelated (for example, this might have been engineered in advance as a way of minimizing the negative reception of the decision).

That is, in sufficiently large consumer bases, is it safe to rely on shitstorms for negative feedback on business decisions?

Some groups have outspoken representatives that can get the word out there so that it can snowball into something that can be noticed.

However, what if the average emotional response to the decision had been the same, but no shitstorm was raised? Does it happen often? In what conditions?

drxon Safari extension to hide Bitcoin stories on HN

Try this:

Follow HN (http://archfinch.com/tag/hn), block startups, (http://archfinch.com/tag/startups), windows8 (http://archfinch.com/tag/windows8), then subscribe to your personal RSS feed.

Perhaps I could make it into an extension.