Hacker News Reader

treefaceon Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues

I actually legitimately hated Spore for its gameplay. So much promise and hype...such poor execution.

treefaceon Show HN: Tiled Text – a Different Approach to Editing Text

When I first started using ST, I thought the map would be really helpful. In the end, I typically use it the way you do...as a sort of placeholder and scrollbar. However, the ctrl-R feature has become my go-to tool for finding a subsection quickly. Really useful, I've found.

treefaceon Mars Rover Spots Metallic "Arm"

Huffington Post? Come on now..

treefaceon Collection of 6,850 video games and 330 consoles up for sale on Ebay for $550K

How do you know this ruined his life?

treefaceon Php-o: metaprogramming PHP to give it a saner API

I think the point he's making is that you don't need to find a jQuery-like library for PHP because you can just use another language.

I personally say nuts to that. With all of the latest projects, PHP development is actually getting to be pretty non-shitty.

treefaceon Amazon Profits Fall 45 Percent, Still the Most Amazing Company in the World

Which tells you how meaningful the P/E ratio is when analyzed independently.

treefaceon The Amazing iOS 6 Maps

Google has had 3D buildings for years. That video is only the latest in a long series of improvements on this feature. The level of detail in that video far exceeds what others are doing, but it's still rolling out throughout this year.

treefaceon Google Fiber Plans & Pricing

>Someone mentioned that it's a $700 cost

It was some guy higher up who provided no sources. We don't know how much it actually costs Google. There are so many factors involved that I highly doubt $700 is what it costs.

treefaceon Google Fiber Plans & Pricing

>Then again, I first learned about it in an economics book in the 90s ... and I think that book was from the 70s.

Well that explains why you have such an average grasp of the concept.

treefaceon WikiLeaks says it has obtained 2.4 million emails from Syria

Thank you for clarifying that.

treefaceon Dragon has successfully achieved splashdown

I personally wouldn't use any single event to mark the "start" of private space exploration. It's a gradual process, not something that happens all of a sudden.

treefaceon 20 lines of code that beat A/B testing every time

Thanks for explaining that!

treefaceon CryEngine 3 soft-body physics simulator

Simple. Make two game modes: Indestructible Cabin mode and Hardcore mode. In hardcore mode, if you get into an accident and the cab happens to crush your legs, you have to finish the rest of the game in a wheelchair.

treefaceon CryEngine 3 soft-body physics simulator

It depends on the game. I think we're right at the point right now where some developers are making a huge push toward absolute realism (see: LA Noire's facial models and Battlefield 3's destructible environments), but it's still in the early stages.

I think a huge part of the problem isn't a sudden move to laptops, I think it's that the current generation of consoles is seven years old, and major developers (i.e. those with the resources to innovate) tend to design with the console in mind these days.

treefaceon 20 lines of code that beat A/B testing every time

Could you expound on this a bit? What attributes would you have to add? How would you calculate scores?

treefaceon SpaceX ISS launch webcast starts at 4:15 am EDT

This flight on its own isn't "disruptive", but the process that it's a part of might be. The purpose of this flight is just to prove that the technology works. The process might be disruptive if it continues its cost cutting and space flight becomes cheaper and more accessible.

treefaceon Scientists Claim Brain Memory Code Cracked - 6 bit bytes

As is often the case, a Reddit comment is more illuminating than the article:

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/qqg5y/scientists_cl...

treefaceon Show HN: ANSI art renderer in JavaScript/Canvas

Not sure if you're aware, but the big "fork me on github" link at the top right isn't pointing at github.com/atdt, it's pointing at github.com/you.

treefaceon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (February 2012)

SEEKING WORK - Orange County, California (we normally do remote work)

See our portfolio here:

http://frozennode.com

We can code anything on the web, all the way up to high performance sites with a complex data architecture that can serve hundreds of thousands of uniques per day. The co-founders' GitHub accounts are:

https://github.com/janhartigan

https://github.com/sketchynix

We're used to taking innovative ideas and making them work with the constraints of the technology. We also have successfully built several enterprise systems, including one that let an ad purchasing company manage nationwide marketing campaigns for all radio, tv, and cable stations in the US. Drop us a line...there's a good chance we'll be able to help!

treefaceon New leukemia treatment "exceeded our wildest expectations"

You appear to be confused. They're not talking about the cancer-destroying t-cells, they're talking about the DRACOs drug suite to kill viruses. Two totally different stories.

treefaceon A new kind of interchange eliminates left turns.

Well that's exactly the point...most people don't want to learn, regardless of geographical location. The trick in traffic engineering is to devise solutions that are inherently simple and require little or no training. To use the modern roundabout example again: people are initially confused because it looks complicated from the outside, but when you drive it, it's fairly difficult to mess it up.

treefaceon A new kind of interchange eliminates left turns.

Massachusetts has the worst drivers in the the country - that is a fact - MA has the highest accident rate in the US.

A high accident rate is not proof that Massachusetts "has the worst drivers in the country". I've lived in Massachusetts (and New Jersey, California, and a bunch of other places that like to call themselves the "worst drivers"), but everywhere I go, it seems apparent to me that road conditions and layout account for the huge majority of deviations from place to place.

For example, in New Jersey there are a ton of highways that don't have onramps (or about 15 feet of it). Because of this, there are a lot more (I mean a LOT more) collisions on the "onramp" and people generally are used to swerving in front of 65-mph traffic from a complete stop.

In California you have just as many people (or maybe more) who swerve in and out of lanes at unreasonable speeds, but since there are so many lanes and since they're all so fantastically wide, that sort of behavior doesn't get punished as it might, say, on the Mass Pike or the Garden State Parkway. At the same time, city roads in California (at least in OC) tend to have much higher speed limits. This causes a marked increase in fatal collisions at these types of intersections...not because the people are inherently more aggressive, but because the roads shape their behavior.

treefaceon A new kind of interchange eliminates left turns.

You might think so, but everyone says this everywhere in the world. For example, this is the top argument that people use against the implementation of the generally-safer, higher-throughput modern roundabouts. Without fail, every time a modern roundabout is installed, the exact same thing happens: congestion is eased, the incidence of fatal accidents falls some 90%, and a multitude of people say things like "well, I just couldn't believe that these people where I live were smart enough to handle it, but it worked!"

What people usually attribute to bad driving is usually the fault of poor traffic planning. Humans tend to be the same, circumstances change.

treefaceon Apple deals massive patent blow to HTC, Android in serious trouble

Android, as an operating system created by Android, Inc. and incubated and promoted by Google, is not "charitable" per se, but that's not the point that martythemaniak is making. As a free, open-source piece of software, it effectively acts as a lubricant in the consumer electronics market. By eliminating the manufacturer's cost of building a device's operating system, Google have made it more affordable for both device manufacturers and consumers to effect smart mobile device transactions. So while it may not be strictly financially "charitable" for Google to do this, if we account for the non-financial value of these transactions, I think it's fair to say that an enormous amount of wealth has been created above and beyond what would otherwise have happened in a market that was only dominated by devices running non-free software, especially in countries that have populations that are generally too poor to afford the iPhone.

treefaceon Google Chrome – Why I Hate It And Continue To Use It

In that case, I don't really see any validity in the complaint. The search function is a temporary UI addition with a single purpose that goes away the moment you hit escape. Better yet, if you hit ctrl-f again, it comes back with the same text already entered.

treefaceon Google Chrome – Why I Hate It And Continue To Use It

Continuing assault on the address bar. (First they came for "http", then they came for me.)

Could you please explain why this is an issue to you?

treefaceon Google Chrome – Why I Hate It And Continue To Use It

I see your point about #3, but to be honest, I've been using Chrome since v1 and I have never once had this be an issue. Not a single time. There is simply never a case where what I'm searching for is in the very top right 10 pixels of a page. In your github example, why would you ever be searching for "dashboard", "inbox", "account settings", or "log out"?

Also I don't really understand your complaint about the bookmarks bar. Why do you have it up at all if you don't like the UI? If I want to go to a bookmarked page, I hit ctrl-shift-b to bring up the bar or, much more often, I open a new tab. I think the thing that separates Chrome from other browsers is the huge content real estate, and keeping the bookmarks bar up there takes away from this in a big way.

treefaceon Peititon for Wikpedia to become first digital World Heritage Site

And one of the big weaknesses of Wikipedia, at least in English[0], is that few Wikipedia editors go beyond Google or their own personal experience in sourcing articles.

I guess you can count me as one of the few. I was in my university's library for a week researching and sourcing this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domenico_Selvo

treefaceon The future of old: If you’re 30 now, what can you expect at 80?

Perhaps to the uninitiated, but I think any reasonably-informed person can keep up with at least the latest headline-grabbing advances in medicine. A highly generalized technological vector, one could say, is not too difficult to glean from the day-to-day news, but the distance between now and the realization of any sort of major advance is always difficult to determine.

treefaceon 2011 Logo Trends

This reminds me too much of the colourlovers "trends" that tend to be more representative either of little-changing, long-term trends or whatever sampling bias they might have at any given moment.