Hacker News Reader

lton Introducing Pebble Time

They should be able to do that themselves (I've seen a lot of projects adding tiers in the middle of campaigns, you can't remove/change existing tiers).

Kickstarter shouldn't be able to add new tiers by themselves, as they have no say what the price/rewards should be. The current tiers are likely (hopefully) carefully planned based on their manufacturing plans and how many watches they can fulfill in the schedule given.

lton Introducing Pebble Time

Nope.. Adding up all the tiers up totals a maximum of $9,550,000, for a total of 56k watches.

Interesting that they didn't design this to break their 10.2M record of the first campaign. I'd bet they are going to increase the slots or or announce addons for the pledges to go for it. At this rate they are going to be sold out in a couple hours, if that.

lton Politician's fingerprint 'cloned from photos' by hacker

This is well available today. For example, there's an app for that:

https://keysduplicated.com/

lton Amazon’s Monopsony Is Not O.K.

Anecdotally: Guilty as charged, on both accounts.

I also have a physical stack of unread books, which I'll probably never get around to read now that I have a Kindle, created mostly due to impulse buying on bookstores. Some I also bought again digitally.

I'm now growing my virtual kindle queue, faster than I can read, but with a different approach: I added all my wishlist authors (including cstross, incidentally) to ereaderiq, which notifies me of price drops, and buy 1.99 daily deals or similar range. So far I got very good deals on good titles of Arthur Clarke, Kurt Vonnegut, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson and so on.

So, again, anecdotally, I might buy things that I'll never read, but the amount of titles that I haven't read is bigger than my daily reading time, and after a certain quality threshold, titles seem mostly interchangeable.

I'd guess the best price point is the one just on 'impulse buy'.

lton Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq01.html#patients

lton How to walk through walls using the 4th dimension [video]

That's pretty much the idea of Braid, an awesome indie game. It uses time manipulation in different ways to create mechanics in that vein. Recommended.

It's a different concept than true 4D though.

lton Print this file, your printer will jam (2008)

Or the "Car allergic to vanilla ice cream" tale.

http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~smann/IceCream/humor.html

lton The day I left my son in the car

Wonder how they would react if they saw swedish babies napping outside in sub-zero temperatures:

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21537988

lton You can now create a Bitcoin clone by filling out a simple webform

http://fstoppers.com/photoshop-wont-let-you-work-with-images...

lton Steam Removes Game 'Order Of War: Challenge' From User Libraries

Another disaster about to happen is Games for Windows Live, a online DRM scheme, used by many games, but in particular GTA IV, which doesn't have much on online features except for the DRM check. It has been announted that GFWL is going to shutdown July 1st. Many developers/publishers have indicated that they are going to remove/replace it, but Rockstar not only hasn't mentioned anything in that sense, it has recently updated the fine print on the steam store for GTA IV adding new clauses:

    Access to special features may require internet connection, may not be available to all users, and may, upon 30 days’ notice, be terminated, modified, or offered under different terms.
    Unauthorized copying, reverse engineering, transmission, public performance, rental, pay for play, or circumvention of copy protection is strictly prohibited
    Partner Requirements: Please check the terms of service of this site before purchasing this software. rockstargames.com/eula

So while Rockstar is washing their hands if their offline, single player, triple-A game stops working in six months, and also prohibiting circumvention of this 'protection', GTA IV is happily being sold by Steam, even today being promoted in their store front page as a daily deal of their winter sale.

lton Faster Than the Speed of Light?

What bugs me about this explanation is the following: aren't we moving quite a bit all the time? We go along the earth as it's rotating around itself, then revolving around the sun, then the solar system revolving around the milky way, then the milky way probably moving somehow and so on.

If we could somehow "get off" earth, "stand still" and let it "float away", would time would appear to move faster?

lton Travelling Salesman – Official Movie Site

The concept reminds me of Charles Stross "Antibodies", first story of the Toast collection, available free here:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/toast/to...

Quick and worthy a read.

lton Why I Let My Students Cheat On Their Exam

Instead, they were changing their goal in the Education Game from “Get a higher grade than my classmates” to “Get to the best answer.”

The goal shouldn't be “Get a higher grade than my classmates”, it should be “Get the highest grade possible”. And the goal for the teacher should be “Translate each student knowledge data into a numeric value”, which is somewhat orthogonal to the experiment.

lton Very Short Reply Expected

Sounds like the VSRP would be more like:

"Can't. Next month?"

lton Shodan: The scariest search engine on the Internet

Sounds like they also attempt to authenticate using default user/pass combos.

lton Mozilla and Epic Announce Unreal Engine for the Web

Does this mean that the source will be available for anyone playing the game, even if obfuscated?

It should open interesting possibilities.

lton Show HN: Increase your productivity with ambient noise

I ran into a similar thing today, focus@will:

https://www.focusatwill.com/about/

More than specific patterns they offer, I found interesting that they they claim unfamiliar music is better for productivity:

"And the single most important factor to consider when choosing a genre is what kind of music you usually listen to for fun and entertainment when you are not trying to be productive. And then, counter-intuitively, it's best to select the very opposite kind of music when using focus@will. Why? Because your brain gets pleasure, releasing dopamine when it hears music you like and listen to a lot, and music that is associated with good times or strong memories of any kind will reduce the focus enhancing effects when used as a productivity tool."

Unfortunately, I can't try them out because I'm not in the US.

lton The claim that Instagram lost a quarter of its users isn’t supported by the data

It's funny because cause and effect is one of the reasons he uses to call the claim "bogus".

lton No one-click unsubscribe? It's spam.

It's in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act

    You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request.

http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-complia...

lton Bringing Google+ to work

What about Hangouts on Air private to your company? That would be really useful.

lton The Mystery of the Encrypted Gauss Payload

Yes, these are GUIDs in the following format:

{931373E2-3DA4-4631-930C-F59510630DA3}

It seems to me that's a good theory of what it might be looking for, as GUIDs should make good triggers. I wonder if this reduces the search space enough to make brute force feasible now.

lton Curiosity rover: Martian solar day 2

Wow. This was nice on a computer, but it's really, really impressive on an iPad. I suggest everyone to try it.

lton Watch High-Speed Trading Bots Go Berserk

Looks to me like the time of the day.

lton Some things I've learnt about programming

Yes, they're usually called "Omniscient Debuggers". Intellitrace on Visual Studio provides this kind of funcionality.

lton Microsoft Research make breakthrough in audio speech recognition

Yes. Not only easier, but more reliable. The examples you gave are perfectly static sound bits - they don't change. It doesn't make sense to transcribe them to text, just match the audio. Soundhound/Shazam/etc do this easily. I'm pretty sure YouTube has some kind of similar mechanism already in place.

This technology gets a lot more interesting if you want to search for people talking about you or your products.

lton Microsoft Research make breakthrough in audio speech recognition

Those don't really require textual matching, just regular audio fingerprinting. In fact, doing that would match Starcraft or movies podcasts, where people are quoting the source.

lton Use Jenkins "Build Per Branch" for Git Feature Branch Development

Count me in as another one interested on this.

lton I analyzed the chords to 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found.

This has been crowdsourced once.

Scott Adams, from Dilbert, once postulated that most hit lyrics are nonsense, and asked his readers to post random phrases to create a song:

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2008/01/writ...

A German band picked it up and selected the best random phrases and recorded it:

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2008/01/the-...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=TiH9db...

It's not bad actually.

lton Live Blog: Google's 'next dimension' of Maps event

I keep hoping for some smoother navigation on street view, first-person-shooter like.

I realize the issues interpolating the pictures, but navigating down a street is quite clunky today.

lton 6.5 Million LinkedIn Password Hashes Leaked

Another data point:

I changed my linkedin password about three weeks ago. The old one is in the list (already 00000-ed), the new one isn't.