Hacker News Reader

stephthon How automatic transmission almost made sperm whales extinct

Add to the list the story where a large sperm whale managed to sink a whaleship that was attacking multiple of its kin [1] (story which later inspired Moby-Dick).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_(whaleship)#Whale_attack

stephthon Stop SOPA, save the Internet

It was #1 (and ~ one hour old) when I commented, and stayed #1 for a couple hours, in a highly popular thread (3 hours old and almost 400 votes at the time I believe). My comment stuck as the top child with just a couple votes, hence all children had a low voting count. So I assumed the parent was #1 amongst dozens of other comments thanks to its individual number of votes.

I kept an eye on this because its popularity is unsettling to me. I don't usually miss the vote counters but in situations like this one I really do.

stephthon Massive networks of stripes appear in Chinese Desert--visible from space

For political/military strategists to take an morning stroll on? See if any bright ideas pop up?

It's eerie.

stephthon Stop SOPA, save the Internet

What's wrong with asking for suggestions on how to act?

stephthon Stop SOPA, save the Internet

Be careful what you wish for. This is not Tron or the Matrix where hacking against the system takes you to magical adventures. Censorship sucks no matter how you look at it.

And I don't get your drug analogy. Buying drugs legally means you know what you're buying, you can easily track the quality and strength like you would for your favorite brand of coffee. You can know where it comes from, who worked on it, if it is sustainable. You can use drugs legitimately, you don't need to hide. You can be open about it with people, and share how it has a place in your life. Illegal drugs on the other hand have none of this. The only thing you can do is build a relationship with a good dealer and cross fingers that the quality will stay the same most of the time. And there's obviously no way it hell you will trace the product back to its production. You can even go to jail for using it. And the unreliability of the product makes the experience unsafe, unpredictable, unhealthy, and dangerous. How is that "freedom"?

Edit: Seeing how popular the parent comment is, I urge readers to think twice about it. The parent comment's "looking at the bright side" stance is a coward and lazy attitude. Sorry for being harsh but it's true. It's much easier to invent yourself a wicked reason why it would work for your own individual best, put your mind at ease and just sit back instead of going through the mental effort of worrying about this and putting the energy to stand up for everybody's rights.

stephthon Machine Vision made Easy - SimpleCV

Ingenuitas got me curious too. It looks like an interesting team and company, and all your existing products are open source and free of charge, you don't seem to be selling anything. How do you make money?

stephthon I'm a serial over committer

I like the visualization of goals feature, it seems like a useful self-analysis and reward system. I might give it a go. Thank you.

stephthon The (logarithmic) calendar I want

This is quite amazing. I have a hard time visualizing time, Im often arriving late, or surprised that the month was over so soon, and have a hard time visualizing the progress of a project over time. To cope with this, I spend quite some energy programming/drawing visualizations of my past/future, and these have often given me critical insights. It's amazing to me that some people have an ability to naturally visualize time as a space they move within.

Talking about what it's like to be in our brains and not assume that we should all function the same way can lead us to so much insight about ourselves, about our limitations, about how we can improve our lives. Thanks for sharing your experience and the article.

stephthon Vimeo bans game videos

In case you missed it, the original report is largely better informed and prosed than the bite size, watered-down, borderline misleading, linked article:

http://kotaku.com/5853665/vimeo-vs-indie-game-developers

stephthon Exposing Social Gaming's Hidden Lever

Nice catch.

"Random Reward Schedule" and "variable interval reinforcement schedule" look like different names for the same concept, but looking closer the former seems to cover both time and reward, and the latter focuses on the time component. Am I reading this correctly?

stephthon Codify: native coding environment for iPad

This could effectively be a programming sketchbook - which is not a new idea (see the Processing IDE), but this integrates within a device that's basically the digital equivalent of a notebook. This is such an amazing and beautiful concept.

Say hello to the future. We don't have hoverboards, but we have codebooks - where sketches come to interactive life within its pages!

stephthon In defence of Objective-C

  #define KV(KEY,VALUE)   VALUE, KEY

  myDict = MD(KV(key,val), KV(key2,val2));

Ugly but a case can be made that this end justifies the means.

Another option is implementing your own dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys where you flip the varargs and feed them back into the subclass dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys.

stephthon In defence of Objective-C

That ## vals syntax is new to me. What's the difference with the following?

  #define MD(...) [NSMutableDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:__VA_ARGS__, nil]

stephthon In defence of Objective-C

you don't need to use XCode. I keep it open to manage, build, etc, but use textmate to do the editing.

stephthon Dear John Carmack.

How do you explain games that have basically no mechanics at all? I'm talking about simple point and click games like Myst.

what exactly are you talking about? myst has significant game mechanics. all games have game mechanics.

stephthon Dear John Carmack.

Some of the most critically acclaimed games, as well as highest selling games, have stories.

He's not saying games don't have stories, of course they do, he's saying that some game designers get distracted from making good mechanics, which I agree, is a huge mistake. Mechanics is the core of the medium, and shouldn't be put second on the list.

Valve gets that. Their attention and talent put into storytelling and art direction is top-notch, yet that has never distracted them from making sure their mechanics are excellent.

stephthon Video: Hacker creates Super Mario game in a cardboard box

Source code:

http://teagueduino.org/index.php?p=/discussion/22

stephthon Show HN: KernType, a typography game made with Raphaël

Nice! Beautiful well thought design, nicely balanced game, and such an intuitive way to understand kerning: let your visual intuition guide you.

One suggestion: a way to move multiple letters at the same time.

stephthon Diveintohtml5 lives

Yeah, it's important to keep sight of that, and frankly in that case it makes me wonder why I should continue to come back here?

Same here. That's why I'm so interested in what happened backstage with these stories. I've contacted the mail link on the Guidelines section for some light but haven't received a reply yet.

stephthon Diveintohtml5 lives

letting all those articles on the HN frontpage would do the exact opposite to provide him more attention that he is avoiding.

So you're saying those stories were removed because Mark Pilgrim wished they were? Is that how things actually work in HN?

stephthon Diveintohtml5 lives

Mark didn't want them there, obviously, and neither did anyone except rubbernecking thrill-chasers.

Or people interested on the subject of mark pirlgrim's work going 401, or the subject of info suicide. There seems to be some kind of censorship goin on, and whether or not there's a legitimate reason for it, HN readers deserve an explanation.

stephthon Diveintohtml5 lives

Both stories have more than 200 votes and are only a few hours old. Mark Pilgrim doing an info suicide is newsworthy and obviously a lot of people care about it, so can someone explain how and why those stories have been kicked out of the first HN pages?

stephthon Diveintohtml5 lives

So ... why exactly were the HN stories buried?

stephthon Diveintohtml5 lives

Different from what? What do you mean?

I'm super confused. A couple hours ago the two top stories were about mark pilgrim having done what looked like an info suicide. I came back here to check on that and the stories are nowhere to be seen on the first two pages of HN. What happened?

stephthon I Think Your App Should Be Free

I don't see where I said that I endorsed this state of affairs.

I don't care so much if you in specific endorse it. i do care about how it's a line of thought that we hear more and more often.

Also, I think you are the one spouting pure arrogant bullshit when you completely dismiss amateur production.

I dismissed amateur production? are you sure you hit reply in the right comment?

In fact there are tons of hugely talented musicians out there who aren't making a living off their music.

no kidding! you just blew my mind. now think of what they could do if they made/played their music as a full time job.

stephthon I Think Your App Should Be Free

And people will keep finding ways of financing their love (playing music). In fact, I don't know many of my favorite musicians today who make a living from their music. They all work day jobs.

I think this new cultural line of thought of "in this day and age with the tools we have why would you need a full day job support for ..." (replace ... with making music, running a blog, developing games, etc) is pure arrogant bullshit. Yes, you can have hobbies, and side projects, and some might excel at doing them for a while. But doing your craft as an actual full time job is the only way to reach, and maintain, your full potential.

stephthon Algorithmic symphonies from one line of code

made a 2-line remix of miiro's 1-line symphony [1]:

Side A: http://tinyurl.com/3uejhum

Side B: http://tinyurl.com/3mfaogd

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlrs2Vorw2Y&feature=playe...

stephthon Bored? Try Doodling To Keep The Brain On Task

My philosophy teacher was nice enough to allow me to doodle in her classes. She believed it was a positive thing. But - and I never told her - the doodling actually distracted me from the class. I was always lost when I emerged and tried to listen to her, leaving me to put the pieces of the puzzle back together during homework. (I still kept doodling, listening to monologues has always been a problem with me, and I was not much of a responsible person back then).

Maybe we could say I was not doodling, but actually drawing? Or maybe the problem was that the drawings subjects were not related to the class? Now it occurs to me that if I had set a challenge to myself where I had to illustrate what she was saying, it could have solved my boredom and at the same time helped me focusing on her teaching.

stephthon Bored? Try Doodling To Keep The Brain On Task

Does it come down to the same conclusions?

stephthon Be Careful when Speaking to Federal Agents - 18 U.S.C. Section 1001

The only way was to sneak it under a story about federal law. :)

self-solving problems like split ends

Could you explain that? I though split ends forced to cut one's long hair regularly.