Hacker News Reader

felixmaron DropZap is free for a limited time. Supports iPad, iOS4,and Retina Display.

Thanks. Bonus points for creating a universal app for iPhone and iPad. I am starting to become annoyed by developers that just scale their iPhone app, put "HD" at the end of the title and then ask the same or higher price again for the iPad. Imho Apple should refuse those apps or at least create very strict guidelines.

felixmaron Why A Brush With Death Triggers The Slow-Mo Effect

The slow-motion effect may be the result of the mind mapping the experience to a single timeline afterwards.

I was at the Enschede fireworks disaster (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enschede_fireworks_disaster) ten years ago and experienced what the article calls turbo perception. It is not like overclocking a single processor by pressing a turbo switch. A better metaphor may be temporarily having access to more processors than normal that operate in parallel. In a short time frame you make a lot more observations and decisions than normal to improve your situation, apparently some simultaneously. Because it is difficult for the mind to deal with parallel timelines of observations it maps the observations to a single timeline which results in the slow-motion effect that people recall afterwards.

felixmaron Microsoft and Ballmer not getting the iPad

One thing that surprised me after using an iPad for a while is that the web is starting to feel old. I now see bloated web pages everywhere. Unnecessary widgets, links, icons, useless side columns, actual content making up a quarter of the screen. Information overload. I am now regularly imagining how a site i visit would be better as an iPad app. Applications like Flipboard have created new expectations how content could be consumed.

felixmaron Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’

Nobody in the 90s but the wildest visionaries saw Wikipedia coming

Tim Berners-Lee mentioned "General reference data - encyclopaedia, etc." as the first area for intended uses of hypertext, see http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Uses.html He also mentioned collaborative authoring. The innovation of Wikipedia is public editing which made sense when the general population came online.

felixmaron Dropbox API is available

Why is the developer page behind a log-in wall?

felixmaron Do independent web apps have a future in world divided into walled gardens?

VC Mark Suster has written a must-read post about this topic: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/02/17/app-is-crap-wh...

felixmaron Large-scale design in Haskell?

You can summon dons anywhere on the Internet by using the magic word "Haskell". I don't know how he does it but it is amazing.

felixmaron How to listen to vuvuzela without all the annoying football

Is that what those gentlemen in shorts are doing at the Vuvuzela concerts?

(stolen from esoterik@reddit)

felixmaron Ask HN: Apple is always right.

It's about control. Like most companies Apple prefers not to be dependent on unilateral decisions made by other companies. Even though WebM is free it is controlled by Google. WebM has only one implementation and Google sets the direction of the project. H.264 is the result of cooperation of many companies and has multiple independent implementations. For a huge company like Apple the license fees of H.264 are not important.

felixmaron Ballmer just opened the Second Envelope

I do not get the impression that Hacker News readers are anti-Microsoft. It's more that Microsoft is mostly irrelevant for a community interested in startups and web applications.

felixmaron I am a junior angel in Silicon Valley. AMA

At what point did you decide to sell Delicious to Yahoo? Did you sell because of the money offered, because the initial idea was more or less finished or something else?

felixmaron Hulu: HTML5 Isn’t Ready for Prime Time

Apple has one or more pending patents for it's (rather trivial) live streaming protocol and so far only agrees to RAND terms, see https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/1142/ I have not seen a confirmation from Apple that it will offer royalty-free licenses if the protocol becomes a IETF standard. That should imho be a requirement for HTML5 adoption.

Also it may be better to adopt another streaming protocol for HTML5 because the Apple's protocol is not suitable for low latency streaming.

felixmaron Better performance in App Engine with new Lisp language Clojure

Not Python specific but languages that regularly interface with C code are often troublesome on Windows because the library writer assumes Posix functionality is available or the library depends on Unix libraries that are at best badly ported to Windows.

Haskell is one language where i encountered that too often, whereas Clojure's Windows support does not feel second rate. The portability of the JVM and Java's libraries combined with a joyful functional language like Clojure is very attractive.

felixmaron Why Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the MPEG-LA

It seems that Google's purchase of On2 already has effect because MPEG is seeking to develop a royalty free video codec.

Given that there is a desire for using royalty free video coding technologies for some applications such as video distribution over the Internet, MPEG wishes to enquire of National Bodies about their willingness to commit to active participation (as defined by Section 6.2.1.4 of the JTC1 directives) in developing a Type-1 video coding standard. (Source: http://www.robglidden.com/2010/04/mpeg-resolution-on-royalty... )

Notice that they mention distribution over the Internet. MPEG has less potential competition in the broadcast sector.

felixmaron Designing for iPad: Reality Check

We found that the iPad applications we designed, made it relatively easy to be translated back into websites. The iPad could prove to be a wonderful blue print to design web sites and applications. If it works on the iPad, with a few tweaks, it will work on a laptop.

In that case you might as well skip the iPad application and focus on the cross-platform web application. Many of the current iPad applications don't really need to be native apps.

felixmaron Why I'm investing in Windows Phone and skipping Android

Only HTTP is supported unlike Silverlight which also supports TCP sockets and even multicast UDP with Silverlight 4.

felixmaron Why I'm investing in Windows Phone and skipping Android

My mistake, i meant to write "No native code execution support like Android has".

felixmaron Why I'm investing in Windows Phone and skipping Android

The downside of Windows Phone 7 is that it is the most limiting and sandboxed development platform of all mobile operating systems. No native code execution like Android, no multitasking, no direct access to the camera, no sockets support and more. Even Silverlight has less restrictions.

felixmaron Flash, Google, VP8, and the future of Internet video

Adobe’s H.264 encoder in Flash Media Encoder is so utterly awful that it is far worse than ffmpeg’s H.263 or Theora; they’re practically assuming users will go use x264 instead.

Why is x264 GPL licensed instead of LGPL like FFmpeg? It would make x264 the de facto H.264 encoder.

felixmaron 5 million Dropboxes

That's pretty bad. Bandwidth caps and charges create a different mindset that hurts many providers like Dropbox. If i transfer a large file i only think about how long it will take, not how much it would cost. Unfortunately bandwidth caps are often due to a lack of competition between ISPs.

felixmaron 5 million Dropboxes

Xs4all is actually the most expensive consumer ISP in the Netherlands. The cheapest ISPs offer 20 Mb DSL for 20 euros per month. DSL is slowly becoming legacy technology due to high speed fiber and cable connections.

felixmaron Jamie Oliver's TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food

Besides, the problem isn't educating the kids but the parents.

In one episode of Jamie's School Dinners some parents were giving junk food through the schoolyard gate to their children when Jamie had convinced the school to start serving healthy and delicious meals. His Don Quixote like crusade to improve the food culture of the English is worthy of praise and makes him much more remarkable than most TV chefs.

felixmaron What countries are ‘pulling their weight’ for Haiti?

The chart has base e, not base 10. My point is not about how much the Dutch have donated or not, but to show that the inclusion of private donations of all countries would significantly change the chart.

felixmaron What countries are ‘pulling their weight’ for Haiti?

The absence of private contributions makes the chart rather meaningless. Take for example The Netherlands: a pledge of 4.3 million dollars according to the data. This was an initial pledge by the government shortly after the disaster. In the mean time over 42 million euros in private contributions have been donated to relief organizations and the Dutch government will double that amount.

felixmaron The future of UI will be boring

Not exactly the same but take a look at the Lenovo U1 hybrid http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/05/lenovo-ideapad-u1-hybrid-...

felixmaron Nokia tries to reinvent itself: Bears at the door

I was one of the few who voted it up. It's a well written article with good comments.

felixmaron Linux on the desktop 2010, your honest thoughts?

I remember buying a boxed version of SUSE Linux a long time ago. Other distributions have tried that business model as well. It doesn't work. Most Linux users expect software to be free of charge.

felixmaron Merry Christmas everyone

Happy Midwinter Celebrations to all of you!

felixmaron HN Meet-up Netherlands update

Are there YC funded startups that are based outside the US? I know a Dutch startup that received an invitation for an interview, but don't know if they got in.

felixmaron Amazon CloudFront Now Supports Streaming Media Content

It is possible to write a Silverlight client that understands Adobe's RTMP protocol if you really need it, but for non-live streaming to a Silverlight player i recommend IIS with smooth streaming on the origin server(s). The media chunks are delivered through HTTP so any CDN will do.