Hacker News Reader

undergroundheroon Always bet on text

I used the Chrome extension for a few months and the OCR was never very accurate. Even giant, clear block letters were often not recognized.

undergroundheroon Firefox OS Shows Continued Global Growth

The phone performs poorly, and the excuse is to blame the "impatience" of Americans?

This comment reads like a sarcastic "It's not a bug, it's a feature." If the phone is terrible compared to the competition, people aren't going to be patient and adaptable--they're going to buy the competition.

undergroundheroon Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

You were, he's looking for an argument.

undergroundheroon I'm Leaving Mojang

> Then why no try to promote tinkering ? A game company dedicated to game development in a way he deems fit ?

But why? If he doesn't want to run Mojang, he probably doesn't want to start another game company at the moment.

Can he enjoy tinkering around himself without having to go on some divine mission to spread his ideas and passions around the world?

undergroundheroon My dad unexpectedly uses my Linux laptop to get real work done

If you're doing any work at all with .NET, Visual Studio is the greatest IDE in the world. Believe it or not, people can be productive without a command line--especially if you can use VS to automatically generate thousands of lines of code.

undergroundheroon T-Mobile to offer free unlimited international data, texts

If you don't mind me asking, where are you located? I get good T-Mobile reception inside all types of buildings in and around the Kansas City metro. The only place I've ever lost coverage is in the basement floors of my doctor's office away from windows.

Their rural coverage is pretty awful though.

undergroundheroon The Worst Programming Environment in the World?

Here is the website for his OS: http://www.templeos.org/ (redirected from losethos.com)

It's common knowledge that losethos is a schizophrenic.

undergroundheroon Using SimCity to diagnose my home town's traffic problem

I don't know the details about which parts of the simulation are run locally and server-side, but the fact that your cities are "always on" (i.e. other players' cities can trade and visit your city even if you're not playing) tells me that a good portion of the resources/traffic simulation is run on Maxis servers.

It may be not be a valid reason for you, but Sim City ran significantly faster than Civilization V on my machine. To me, they both perform a massive number of simultaneous simulations, and Sim City's performance is near instantaneous.

That said, there's one huge factor none of the beta players can take into account when judging Sim City's performance: no one has been able to build massive, multiple-city metropolises, as play time was limited to hour-long sessions.

undergroundheroon Using SimCity to diagnose my home town's traffic problem

I was worried about DRM, but the beta convinced me it was worth it. Server-side simulation processing makes the game run lightning fast.

undergroundheroon Using SimCity to diagnose my home town's traffic problem

I agree, its simulation has depth that rivals Civilization V. And even better, the game's simulation is run on the Maxis servers so it doesn't lose speed with larger cities. Sim City 4 and Civ 5 both have problems with processing large maps. Totally worth the DRM for me.

undergroundheroon Petition: Stop bundling crapware with Java

I definitely agree about VS. Microsoft got a bunch of heat for VS2012, but it's been their best release yet. Their IntelliSense support for C# is unmatched by any other language-IDE pairing I've used.

That said, I've used MonoDevelop in Windows and OS X and it works pretty damn well. The Mono project has done a great job mirroring the .NET API and runtime.

undergroundheroon Ouya Android console up for pre-order on Amazon

For those curious about the games and software confirmed to release on the Ouya, they have a list on their site:

http://www.ouyaconsole.com/ouya-software/

This Amazon discussion has a mirror of the list in case Ouya's site goes down (it's loading slowly for me):

http://www.amazon.com/Games-availables-from-day-one/forum/Fx...

undergroundheroon Why did men stop wearing high heels?

My girlfriend has the exact same shoe size (5 in the US). She buys all of her shoes from Chinese companies on Ebay, as they always seem to have her size in stock. I have no idea if there are regional foot size differences, but shopping online may be a solution.

undergroundheroon Steve Ballmer's Nightmare is Coming True

Gabe Newell is a vocal critic of Microsoft and Win8, and Valve is sitting on piles of money. This is the least likely of these scenarios.

undergroundheroon Nudifier: Turn Any Photo Into a Hilarious Censored Nude

I assure you my comment is not part of a "voting ring". Just stated my desire to try the app out.

undergroundheroon Nudifier: Turn Any Photo Into a Hilarious Censored Nude

Very entertaining, wish there was an Android/online version.

Though the title is misleading - nothing is censored. It seems like a variant of bubbling: making fully clothed people look nude in a SFW way.

undergroundheroon When Facebook was Fun

>their personalized results are stuck in the uncanny valley

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

I'm not entirely sure what you meant to say in that last sentence, but I know you didn't mean to say "uncanny valley". Stuck in limbo, perhaps? (whatever that would mean)

undergroundheroon Notch trying jsFiddle

Thanks for the livecoding link. I assume there's some overhead in constantly checking for and applying code changes - that's probably the reason for the lower frame rate.

undergroundheroon Microsoft releases tool for creating Windows 8 apps in the browser

I enjoy the aesthetic of Windows 8 and was really excited to start messing around with app development as a new hobby project. The WinRT API, though... it's very bare.

Perhaps I was naive thinking the WinRT API would be similar to .NET, but Microsoft could have made it much, much simpler for current .NET developers to start working with WinRT.

My biggest gripe is that WinRT seems to be 100% focused on mobile/tablet platforms. My laptop has Windows 8 and I spend all of my time in the desktop, away from apps. Why? Because there's a lack of "real" applications in the Windows 8 Store. Writing system utilities for a more technical audience is almost impossible. They replaced the excellent System.IO namespace with the Windows.Storage namespace, which doesn't give you access to much of the computer's actual storage [1].

Hopefully I'm wrong and someone posts a reply with an easy way to search through the computer's files and folders, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/windows...

undergroundheroon The Useless Web

Wow, I got lost in there.

undergroundheroon McAfee’s Third World Travel Guide

It's a purely informative post written to explain police corruption to an outsider. He mentions his disdain for sex slavery.

What about that quote qualifies him as a "piece of shit"?

undergroundheroon Steven Sinofsky to Leave Microsoft

I hope so as well, the WinRT API is stripped bare. I was shocked to see how much of .NET's functionality they didn't port over to WinRT.

undergroundheroon The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible

I've had a soft spot for Microsoft ever since C# became my primary programming language. The .NET documentation is incredible, and Visual Studio works flawlessly with their languages. I'm loving their Kool-aid.

undergroundheroon Show HN: I spent two years working on an HTML5 game. I finally released it

I'm working full time on a game development project in Unity. I have nothing but good things to say about it. The community is great, and our development would take twice the time without community-created tools like NGUI and PlayMaker. Unity 4 will address some major irks of mine (esp. animation handling), and a new UI engine is down the road.

Its Javascript support is probably what's drawing you to the engine though (I use C#).

undergroundheroon Walt Mossberg's Windows 8 Review

That was exactly how I felt reading it. Very little detail and no criticism. It was a page-long description of Windows 8 that offered no unique perspective of how it feels to use the new OS.

undergroundheroon Andreessen Horowitz Invests $15M In Text Annotation Startup Rap Genius

b) They're going to get a bajillion inbound links because their content is interesting to link to (as opposed to standard lyrics sites). Which will rank them higher than their competitors for the same queries.

This is true today, and RapGenius has a great linking feature that lets you link to a single line explanation in the lyrics (helpful so the recipient doesn't have to scroll through and find the line of interest).

undergroundheroon Software on Steam

On Windows 7 I can use CCleaner or the control panel to uninstall games installed with Steam.

undergroundheroon Show HN: Professional PowerPoint & Keynote Design as a Service Platform

Wow... What a convenient change.

undergroundheroon GoDaddy outage caused by corrupted router tables

Thanks for the great information, appreciate it.

undergroundheroon Pay Too Much for everything

No, he's not.

This doesn’t always work. Sometimes a cheaper product is actually better. But consider removing price as the default decision criteria.

He's advising you to stop buying the cheapest available, not to buy the most expensive available.