Hacker News Reader

feadogon Go proposal: Leave “if err != nil” alone?

You mean a CarlyRaeJepsen monad? A "Call Me Maybe?"

feadogon CEO Says Launching Satellites Without FCC Permission Was a ‘Mistake’

HN user 'feadog' wonders if your username is a trad reference or an early music reference.

feadogon ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

sidenote, sometimes this does happen, and it almost always is full of the most comically hateful people: see voat

I'd feel much better if reddit and twitter were even handed with their condemnation of comically hateful people. As someone on the Left, what I've seen is that Left-leaning media bias tends to give indirect license to the most extreme authoritarian and even toxic fringes of the Left. It also fuels a reaction from the far Right.

For as long as Fox News exists and promotes itself as an actual news agency (HAH!)

The mechanism I cite above has been in operation at Fox, just in the other direction.

feadogon The Hotel Industry’s Plan to Combat Airbnb

great accommodations all over this heavily-touristed island for €35-55/night.

Used to be about half that pre-Euro!

feadogon The Hotel Industry’s Plan to Combat Airbnb

Staying in AirBnB I don't feel safe at all and 80% of the AirBnB's I stayed had one problem or the other.

This is almost the direct opposite of my own experience.

feadogon Show HN: TorrentPeek – Distributed search engines using BitTorrent and SQLite

web-scraping and the like always seemed like a problem that could be done fairly elegantly with distributed systems.

Elaborate?

feadogon Base-122 – A space efficient alternative to base-64

base 85 also has the interesting property that 4 original bytes fit in 5 encoded bytes.

Still useful for Javascript, as the bit shift operators work on 32 bit "registers".

feadogon Base-122 – A space efficient alternative to base-64

I wrote a base 92 encoder for the Javascript game I'm working on:

http://www.emergencevector.com/

It's pretty easy to write the decode for the 0-91 integer in Javascript.

    if (ch == "!") {
        return 57;
    } else {
        return ch.charCodeAt(0) - 35;
    }

It doesn't give you that much usable compactness over base 64, though you can easily encode a 360 degree angle with two bits of precision lost. Also, 5 base 92 characters can fully encode 32 bits of binary data. (Of course, since base 85 can do it in 5 characters.)

I'm probably going to go to typed arrays of 32 bit values. Currently, I can encode an entire ship's data in 18 bytes, of which 4 characters is a hash id.

feadogon Tesla Shock Means Global Gasoline Demand Has All but Peaked

I beg to differ. It's a very fun to drive retro stylish car! (I'm an owner.)

feadogon Tesla Shock Means Global Gasoline Demand Has All but Peaked

Hydrogen powered cargo ships have already been made as well. However, I'm not sure if hydrogen generation on board ships has been explored yet. Who knows... it may be possible for ships to run without ever needing to refuel if generation is done on board.

Sorry. Go back and study thermodynamics again. If you have the energy to generate hydrogen, you might as well use that energy to move the ship. You're always going to spend more energy generating the hydrogen than you will get back burning it or combining it in a fuel cell. The one exception is if you start from just the right feedstock to generate the hydrogen from, like some hydrocarbon. The leading candidate now is natural gas. However, in that case, the byproduct is CO2 -- so what's the point?

Or, maybe you were thinking of hydrogen as energy storage? Batteries are far better than hydrogen as far as that goes.

feadogon Tesla Shock Means Global Gasoline Demand Has All but Peaked

You can already buy a portable box that lets you combine the power from two different circuits that are out of phase with each other, to get twice the power. I saw a post by a Tesla owner who uses it to get effective Level-2 charging from friend's country homes.

feadogon Tesla Shock Means Global Gasoline Demand Has All but Peaked

Practically everyone can plug in their car at night, and with nothing more sophisticated than a $10 outlet timer, fuel up the fleet no problem.

Even that expense should disappear. My Fiat 500e lets me set a timer to start its charge.

feadogon Microsoft gears up to mass produce large-screen touch displays

Something that's a standing desk/tilted drafting desk form factor combined with good palm/elbow/forearm recognition would immediately address the "gorilla arm" problem with such interfaces. Combine that with Reactable-style tool objects, and input from cameras and/or a Kinect, primarily in order to make the system "smarter" about how to interpret touch, and I could see some really revolutionary interfaces for applications that are amenable to a data-flow style model.

(Applications where you have boxes connected by pipes/arrows to other boxes.)

feadogon Founder Depression

Anyone in the East Bay?

feadogon Native GUI library for Go

Some folks at Microsoft were trying to circumvent this with Singularity OS being based on something like CLR. Then everything could dynamically interoperate with everything on a programming language level.

http://xkcd.com/927/

feadogon Go/JavaScript MMO with Conway's Life as an Area Attack

I've been looking for something like the game that is described in the post for awhile. The kind of complexity that comes out of having N different damage types and M arbitrary, incompatible equipment slots is fun, but it's not nearly as intellectually rewarding as the complexity that comes out of simple rulesets like Newtonian Physics, programming, or genetic algorithms. Some use of GAs was attempted by Lord British with Ultima MMO games.

Generally, it runs into problems like these:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/l8/conjuring_an_evolution_to_serve_y...

feadogon Introducing Swift

So they could implement SpaceWar on the PDP-11.

feadogon In California, a Champion for Police Cameras

I think there are cynical claims of police overreach and actual police overreach in Oakland, CA. I think cameras would help with both of these.