Hacker News Reader

samwormon Play Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe Against an AI

Did you miss the bit where the author stated he was a high school student and had written the applet as an exercise to learn java? The clue was in the 3rd to 12th words on the page, where it states they did it in "grade 7".

Elsewhere they say they're now in "grade 11" and their github account has a heap of interesting projects.

I think you were a little heavy with the snark.

samwormon Memcached turns 10 years old today

Memcached actually turns 10 tomorrow - Wed 22nd.

I consider memcached to be one of the most important programs of recent time, it has been a core component for almost every large scale website you can think of. Ubiquity isn't always synonymous with quality, but in this case it clearly is.

Its incredibly powerful and very easy to deploy. A great piece of work, one that has saved my sanity many times, and congratulations to all involved.

samwormon $100 Invested in 100 $1 Lottery Tickets

Well for him it was an investment, because he was writing this article and it formed the basis thereof. So for him the expected reward of (monetary return + pleasure of playing) was bolstered by (increase in value of the resultant article by having a physical illustration).

samwormon Barnes & Noble Puts Google’s Play Store and Apps on the Nook

Nook are clearly trying to revitalise their product offerings, perhaps clearing out old inventory? They're currently selling the nook simple touch for £29 here in the UK... which is an absurd price for an 800 MHz TI OMAP 3621 with e-ink display, RAM / Storage, WIFI, Battery etc.

It may be based on an ancient Android 2.1/Linux 2.6.29 but £29 is an insane bargain. Get root and a shell on it and you've got a great piece for general use kit for next to no money.

samwormon Poll: How many Bitcoins do you have?

I currently hold 0.02429599. Does that answer your question?

samwormon Kickstarter sucks at pre-orders (or: Why we pivoted)

Did you read the "what is Kickstarter?" page before making this? Because Kickstarter isn't about pre-orders, its about backing projects. The "Kickstarter Is Not a Store" post on their blog is pretty clear about it all.

I'm not saying that an alternative browser for Kickstarter projects doesn't have merit. Or that a meta-directory sat on top of Kickstarter (and others) isn't a useful service. I'm just saying that your framing of it (pre-orders) is actually opposed to the ethos of the underlying service.

samwormon Income disparity in Silcone Valley

Silicone != Silicon

samwormon Why don't MacBooks come with cellular networking?

Do you have a different broadband conenction for your xbox and your pc? No, you have one for the house and then share it. Likewise you only need one portable network connection (your cell phone) and all your other devices share it. If you own and cell phone and have data enabled devices (tablet, laptop etc) you're doing it wrong.

samwormon My Plea to Oracle: Axe Java Applets

"I can attest that nobody uses applets anymore"

http://danielrapp.github.com/mcstats-analysis/

Minecraft disagrees - you know, one of the best selling games of the last year or two... 9.4m copies sold. And according to this analysis 33% of people play it in an applet. To me this sounds absolutely insane. But we should never underestimate the insanity of the general populous.

samwormon BBC demands DRM for HTML5

My argument, and I sent this too them when they were doing a consultation a while ago, is that they shouldn't be buying content that they can't use for public service purposes. We have many good sources of movies in the UK, and many of them are "free" at the point of use (ie advert funded). Let them show Madagascar, and while they do that the BBC can run some other program. They should remove themselves from the content purchasing market if the terms are too restrictive to allow them to meet their public remit. We don't /need/ these films on the BBC. They could run some of the content they're currently relegating the digital ghettos of BBC3 and BBC4 instead.