Hacker News Reader

xomon Apple is making a show based on Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ books

You might like the anime film Time of Eve. It's been described as the best Three Laws work that isn't Asimov or an adaptation.

xomon Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

And yet the company still can't afford walls.

xomon Show HN: Cardery – Generate card images from CSV using HTML/CSS/JS

Cardery is my weekend project.

It's a script that uses dom-to-image to render PNG images from card data in CSV and card template in HTML/CSS/JS. Work in your favorite text editor or spreadsheet editor, while refreshing your browser for instant WYSIWYG feedback.

Cardery's main advantage over http://www.nand.it/nandeck/ is that you write templates in HTML/JS/CSS instead of some obscure language.

Cardery's main disadvantage is that, because it relies on your browser and OS to do the heavy lifting, what you write may not be portable between computers. For example, in writing the demo I was in the peculiar situation of needing it to look good everywhere, but not necessarily look the same everywhere. The demo specifies "font-family: sans-serif" and lets the browser choose the exact font. I did try specifying "font-family: Verdana", which is my default font in Chrome, but in Firefox the kerning became hideous when Cardery applied CSS scale(). (Thankfully the issue is font-specific, and it looks fine with my default font Open Sans.) I will try Cardery in a Linux VM and see if the rendering looks reasonable. If so, then that becomes one answer to the portability issue.

xomon As Obesity Rises, Remote Pacific Islands Plan to Abandon Junk Food

The [WTO] said in a statement that it would allow a 300 percent import duty on turkey tail imports and a domestic prohibition on sales during the transition period to allow the country to “develop and implement a nationwide program promoting healthier diet and lifestyle choices.”

Reminds me of the planet Norstrilia in Cordwainer Smith's fiction, which exports an astronomically precious immortality drug, yet maintains its archaic culture (resembling Australian ranchers with a British cultural inheritance) with import taxes of over 20000000%.

xomon Just how smart is an octopus?

Pigs use mud to avoid sunburn.

« Some people have gone so far, especially with show pigs, as to slather sun screen onto their pigs when they know that they will be out in the sun for a considerable time and they don't want them to get dirty with mud. » -- http://petcaretips.net/pigs-sunburn.html

You could also just keep your pet pig indoors all the time.

xomon Time to Dump Time Zones

While we're at it, how about defining the offsets the other way around, so we can write 15:30+5 == 15:30 EST == 20:30 UTC?

xomon The traits of a proficient programmer

A WarCraft III commentator told the story of how he once saw a pro, during the opening, send his Demon Hunter to the healing fountain on a certain map, and he started doing the same with the same timing on that map. One day he met the pro in person and asked why he'd done it, and the pro said, To see if the opponent's Blademaster was there.

xomon “Wikipedia Is Not Therapy”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Surgeon_of_Crowthorne "tells the story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and one of its most prolific early contributors, Dr. W. C. Minor, a retired United States Army surgeon. Minor was, at the time, imprisoned in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum"

xomon Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians

quoting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10954918 :

> Go players activate the brain region of vision, and literally think by seeing the board state. A lot of Go study is seeing patterns and shapes... 4-point bend is life, or Ko in the corner, Crane Nest, Tiger Mouth, the Ladder... etc. etc.

> Go has probably been so hard for computers to "solve" not because Go is "harder" than Chess (it is... but I don't think that's the primary reason), but instead because humans brains are innately wired to be better at Go than at Chess. The vision-area of the human's brain is very large, and "hacking" the vision center of the brain to make it think about Go is very effective.

xomon Learning Chess at 40

I learned Go several years ago at the age of 20, and tracked how much time I spent on it. Comparing my progress with that of a certain strong amateur who started at age 14 and estimated how many games he played throughout his progression, I think I reached my current strength of 1-kyuu after roughly the same amount of practice that he had when he was 1-kyuu. This anecdatum of mine agrees with children's extra synaptic density leveling out around age 12. I would guess that it doesn't matter whether the writer was 40, 20, or 14; hypothetically, it might matter if the writer were 4 (or 7).

xomon AlphaGo Beats Lee Sedol in Final Game

quoting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10954918 :

xomon EnChroma: Color for the Color Blind

Explanatory note: Most humans have three types of color receptive cones; a few have four. Mantis shrimp have sixteen.

xomon Teaching Youth to Think ‘Slow’ May Help Reduce Crime

  When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
  The line too labors, and the words move slow;

xomon Marilyn vos Savant and the Monty Hall Problem

If the host can choose between doing nothing and revealing a goat, and the host wants the contestant to lose, then the contestant's best strategy is to never switch, in order to avoid being exploited by a host who only reveals a goat when switching would lose. Any reader who wrote in to say the probabilities were 50-50 after a goat was revealed was probably not thinking the host wanted the contestant to lose (or to win).

xomon Piano playing transformed into Playstation controllers that play StreetFighter

They tried, but I'm not convinced that they succeeded. Their video resembles Street Fighter in the way that https://youtu.be/-2gJamguN04 resembles Football. It's possible that their mapping works, in that there's some non-unpleasant piano sequence that maps to at least superficially convincing gameplay, but their video didn't show it.

The connection of analog (piano) to digital is impressive. The additional claim of having mapped music to fighting is not yet substantiated.

xomon When Grandmasters Blunder: Even the best make mistakes

« Assuming Anand and Carlsen’s blunders were independent events, what we saw was a 1 in 10,000 occurrence. »

Are they independent events though? In a game between mediocre players, if there is only one move to take advantage of a blunder, the computer analysis will repeatedly cry "blunder!" each turn until either that move is played or the initial blunderer defuses the opportunity. As for grandmaster play, I have no clue.

xomon Apple Stops Online Sales in Russia Over Ruble Fluctuations

I don't know what it was like then, but perhaps the idea is that if the Ruble were to recover, then the Russian hosts would lose out?

xomon Show HN: Interactive sorting tool, using FJ algorithm for minimal comparisons

I wasn't sure whether to submit the tool or the explanation, though they link to each other.

The tool is here: http://xomnom.com/preference.html

xomon 90 Percent of People Don't Know How to Use CTRL+F (or CMD + F)

To be fair, I do both of those as well: the former when I have only one hand free, and the latter to sanity-check my formulas.

xomon How To Become A Better Programmer By Not Programming

On the usefulness of N-back (scroll to heading "Notes from the author"):

http://gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ

xomon Please confirm your email address

"valid through August 19"

xomon Hey, Bethesda Let’s settle this

The economic factors are totally different here, but still it reminded me of:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2690799

quote:

"See the following paper for an economic analysis of trial by battle:

http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/Intellectual_Life/LEO....

I particularly liked this quote: "[I]t's reasonable to expect to find a large number of retained legal representatives under a legal system in which people feel that their property rights are constantly threatened by rent-seeking litigiousness or in which rampant rent-seeking opportunity gives them an incentive to behave litigiously themselves. The rarity of retained champions in medieval England therefore suggests that rent seeking under trial by battle wasn't rampant.'"

xomon NYU Prof Vows Never to Probe Cheating Again—and Faces a Backlash

As stated, the professor is preventing cheating by modifying the nature of the assignments.

xomon Why I will never pursue cheating again

really studying style

I want to do this. How did you go about it?

xomon Salary negotiations for techies

Faking it is making it, most of the time it seems.

xomon MasterCard under DDOS, can't process SecureCode online payments

Correlation != Causation

xomon Son, as soon as someone puts their hands on you...

Not only is Zhuge a surname, but also, my (Chinese) parents once told me that it's taboo to name a child after someone; not sure if that's true in all parts though.

xomon My dalliance with smart drugs - and the lesson I learned

Come to speak of it, interfering with birth control does happen to be a possible side effect of modafinil.

xomon Common Programmer Health Problems

What's a door jam?

xomon Why Parents Hate Parenting

Also try switching sides when you're ahead.