Hacker News Reader

ansyon Accuracy takes power: one man's 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator

This is very interesting. As the article states, most SNES emulators are inaccurate by quite a bit. Despite that the incompatibilities are mostly imperceptible. Perfect emulation of the brain and human intelligence may be a long way away. But perhaps something very closely resembling it is not nearly as far off as we think.

ansyon OS X: Dowload "iTunes festival"-streams using your terminal

Wouldn't a better archival method be archive.org if that is legal or bittorrent if it's not? These instructions are cool and all, but the former are a bit more practical for the purposes of saving the music for posterity.

ansyon Google's New Patents

Nothing exists in a vacuum. You will presumably infringe on other patents in the pool for dumb stuff everyone needs like search boxes, buttons, and scroll bars. Put one in the wrong place or put the wrong label on it and you're suddenly infringing on a "one click" patent or something equally asinine.

ansyon Poll: What should be done about the endless repetition of stories?

I think articles that are not the original source should be merged as comments under the original source since they are often just another news organization or blogger commenting on the source without additional source data.

This will also bring Hacker News more in line with paragraph 5 of the Hacker News Guidelines[1].

I believe even if an article "adds to the conversation" it still isn't worthy of a top level submission. It should be a comment like all the others.

EDIT: To implement this maybe power users above a certain karma threshold can be granted the ability to mark an article as derivative and point to the original source submission. If some magic number of power users do this, the article and the comments are moved and any links to the derivative article are redirected as well.

This will also discourage karma whores and blog-spammers from submitting derivative articles because there is a good chance it will get rolled into someone else's submission that actually submitted the source article.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ansyon Harvard study predicts electric car penetration when gas hits $4.5-$5.5/gall

Note that 100 miles is the ideal range under ideal conditions. Consumer Reports did some preliminary driving tests [1] of the Nissan Leaf and found in extreme cold they barely got 8 miles of range on a full charge in 10 degree (F) weather. Typically they were seeing an average of 65 miles in 20-30 degree (F) weather. This is probably why the 2012 model will come with a built-in battery heater that keeps it warm while charging.

So I would definitely not recommend the Leaf unless you live in Hawaii or California. I believe range is also compromised in extreme heat as well. Basically, you've got to live in paradise to expect a 100 mile range year-round from the Leaf.

[1] http://news.consumerreports.org/cars/2011/01/second-drive-20...

ansyon Apple's officially over the optical drive, for better or worse

PCs have been without an optical drive for years before Apple did it. I had a laptop with no optical drive nine years ago and I'm sure it wasn't original then. Granted, the experience was so poor I vowed never to live withot a built-in optical drive again.

But the time has come. In fact it might be a year or two overdue to be controversial. Now that booting from a USB flash drive is broadly supported my personal need for removable media is satisfied with just a USB port and a thumb drive. Burning a DVD to share files or boot to a rescue disk seems old fashioned and unncecessary. I don't even know where my box of recordable disks is anymore.

ansyon Sun CEO explicitly endorsed Java's use in Android

I am not a lawyer, but I completely disagree when estoppel is taken into consideration[1]. Sun publicly endorsed Google's implementation of Java and there is probably plenty of evidence it endorsed it privately as well.

There is a reason a CEO doesn't just spout off whatever he wants without consulting a lawyer. Especially on company letterhead which is what the Sun Blog amounts to these days. If it was a mistake it should have been retracted. But it wasn't, so maybe it wasn't a mistake in the eyes of the law.

And yes, if a film's rights holder gives explicit or even implicit endorsement of people watching the film through piracy, as did Michael Moore [2], that does protect you from him suing you for pirating it. You don't need a license contract to tell you it's OK.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7uvRCyVfa0

ansyon Bing Becomes a Distraction for Microsoft

This is clearly a controversial article. But I think it's fair to say Microsoft is not focused. Who can say what Microsoft's focus is these days? Without vision, the company and its followers will get lost. Microsoft may be able to stumble upon success by flailing about, but without vision Microsoft won't be able to tell the difference between success and distraction when it's staring them in the face.

To make an extreme example, is a great real estate deal a success to Microsoft? Microsoft might need to buy real estate from time to time and benefit from doing it well. And yes, some companies make lots of money in real estate. Should Microsoft be opening up a real estate investment arm? Probably not. But given Microsoft's focus these days, who knows.

The question isn't just what is a distraction to Microsoft, but what is Microsoft's focus? Samsung's focus is manufacturing. Apple's focus is product design. Google's focus is data. These are all big, successful companies with laser focus even if it appears from the outside they are working on the same things. Who are you Microsoft and where are you going?

ansyon Leo Tolstoy and static code analysis

Tolstoy is perhaps not the best example because he had little to do with the spelling, grammar, and sentence structure of his English language works. This was all done by the respective translator after the fact.

A better author to use would be someone like Nabokov or Hemingway who originally wrote in English.

ansyon Apple to Buy Hulu?

Nobody can take Hulu international unless they acquire the respective licensing rights for that country.

To explain, content creators figured out a long time ago they got more money by selling rights to content as specifically as possible. This is by region and format. So United States is separate from Canada. And the DVD distribution rights are separate from theatrical distribution rights which are separate from the online streaming rights.

This is how Netflix was able to offer online streaming so cheaply. It could secure the online streaming rights to shows for pennies on the dollar because nobody else was even trying to buy them. Everyone was bidding up TV rights, DVD rights, and theatrical rights.

So going international has nothing to do with what advertisers want. It has everything to do with paying content holders separate license fees for every single country on earth for every show in Hulu's catalog.

That's a monumental effort without even mentioning each country's broadcast laws which can be byzantine to say the least.

ansyon The Node Beginner Book, an introduction to Node.js, is now complete

I read this book and the Hands-on Node.js book by Pedro Teixeira of NodeTuts. I have to say, while The Node Beginner Books is a tremendous effort that deserves congratulations, I did learn more from buying Hands-on Node.js for those interested.

Granted, Hands-on Node.js costs $6 versus Beginner's free. But in my opinion it's worth it. And a sizable portion of Hands-on Node.js is free in a sample download which I what I started with before deciding to buy it.

http://nodetuts.com/handson-nodejs-book.html

ansyon Warren Buffett: I could end the deficit in 5 minutes.

Tax breaks are just another form of entitlement. Tax breaks are almost worse than other government benefits. It's basically taking out interest only loans on the tax payer's behalf. Here's $500 ... Oh and by the way, that comes with $500 worth of debt with a 4% interest rate that you are going to pay forever.

ansyon Google, at scale: A brief review of "In the Plex" (the story of Google)

I highly recommend In the Plex to anyone on Hacker News interested in tech folklore. I'm sure even Googlers would find stories they hadn't heard before. The story of Google is an epic story fit for Homeric interpretation.

Steven Levy also wrote the excellent Crypto which covers the emergence of strong public cryptography. It is not a story of accidental discovery, but about active sabotage by the NSA and perseverance by a number of visionaries like Whit Diffie and Martin Hellman working under the radar and outside the mainstream.

http://www.amazon.com/Crypto-Rebels-Government-Privacy-Digit...

ansyon Nokia N9

Engadget added hands on videos if you want to see a real device in action.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/21/nokia-n9-first-hands-on/

The UI appears to be extremely smooth. There's also a demo of transitioning audio from phone to external speaker using NFC.

ansyon Google Already had a Like Button (and other redundancy)

I think the Like button is against Google's DNA which is why all these initiatives seem half assed. Google doesn't want to rely on users to say what they like. Instead Google looks at actual user behavior by examining logs. It's the same reason Google resists limiting or anonymizing logs. It's also the reason Google did the "unthinkable" by combining its cookie with Double Click's - Google derives enormous value by analyzing actual user behavior across both on Google's own sites and across every other site with Google's ads. Asking the user to self report by clicking a button every time seems primitive in comparison and not worth pursuing.

ansyon VC per capita, Europe: $7, U.S.: $72, Israel: $144.

I wonder how much of Israel's VC money is domestic and how much pours in from the US.

ansyon The most dangerous car in America is...

Is it the car that's deadly, or does the car attract deadly drivers?

For example, are there other, stronger predictors of deadly accidents such as age, geography, or occupation? And are those people more likely to buy certain cars? I notice Buick has fewer deaths per million, but could that be because Buick attracts more cautious or less frequent drivers?

I assume the IIHS has competent statisticians. But I'd still be interested to see how strongly the differences between drivers factor into this.

ansyon Computer compromise leads to theft of bitcoins valued at $500,000 USD

I'm a BitCoin skeptic with the best of them. But this is breathtaking.

That's one thing about bitcoins. There's no FDIC or SIPC watching your back. It's the wild west with train robberies and stage coach heists in all.

ansyon Amazon Tells States: 'Drop Dead' Over Sales Tax

State sales tax is just one revenue stream a state can employ. There are several criteria for a good tax. One being it is not regressive. Another being it collects more than the burden it places on society to collect it.

Sales tax is arguably regressive, so it already has one hit against it. And in the internet age, when it is not enough to do business in your home state, sales tax is becoming a bigger burden to collect.

That said, Amazon is large enough it could collect sales tax no problem. I am just thinking in general, it may be time to look at another form of tax to fill the void for sinking sales tax revenue.

ansyon 50% of iPhones Brought to Genius Bar Have Never Been Synced

Original: http://onefps.net/post/6496478249/50-percent-of-iphone-owner...

That.. doesn't make total sense unless these people aren't using their phones either. According to one analytics company iOS 3 has been virtually eliminated.

http://insights.chitika.com/2011/just-in-time-for-ios-5-ios-...

To upgrade you need to plug in your device and sync. Not to mention you generally need to sync to put music on the device.

Something is fishy about this rumor. Are the only people going to the Genius Bar recent purchasers?

ansyon $10K for solving a math equation

The only tedious part is typing it out into a linear solver like this one:

http://wims.unice.fr/wims/en_tool~linear~linsolver.en.html

Solution: http://wims.unice.fr/wims/wims.cgi?session=QW1E82D03B.1&...

Getting the numbers appears to be the easy part in figuring out the new company name.

ansyon The Zipcar Prize proposal: enabling one-way car sharing trips

The point of the Netflix prize was to improve something Netflix already understood well and was getting diminishing returns for its research dollar. The Netflix Prize was able to attract serious interest from legitimate academics and engineers because the problem was refined to the point where it was legitimately very hard.

ZipCar doesn't even offer one-way car trips. I'm sure it could do them with adjustments to inventory, management, and pricing. Traditional car rentals are evidence there is a model that works. But ZipCar needs start one-way car trips, much less get to the point where it has reached diminishing returns on its research investment, before it can expect worthwhile contributions from crowd sourcing.

ansyon Google ChromeBook Review: ChromeBomb?

> Chromebook was touted as something that doesn't need updates

Say what? Everything so far has said it would have automatic updates. That is not the same as saying it requires no updates. In fact it is the opposite.

ansyon HP TouchPad: Shipping July 1

A company the size of HP can afford to give away piles of TouchPads and Pres to developers that might be mildly interested. HP should have somebody hunting down the twitter accounts of prolific app developers and mailing out starter packs of hardware. Google has been handing out hardware left and right and doesn't seem to be slowing down one bit.

ansyon Apple Reverses Course On In-App Subscriptions

Although Apple wasn't explicit, I believe only the $30 upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion is exclusive to the App Store.

The App Store doesn't exist in Leopard and Tiger, so Apple will probably release a full price DVD set for $180 that includes Lion, iWork, and iLife.

Not exactly great, but it is an alternative if you don't want to download from the Mac Store. Keep in mind, prior to Snow Leopard the OS X upgrades were $130 anyway.

ansyon Samsung Preparing a Bid for Nokia?

http://www.idc.com/about/viewpressrelease.jsp?containerId=pr...

Nokia shipped 100 million 'smart' phones in 2010. Samsung shipped 23 million. That's a big difference. If Samsung bought Nokia it would own over a third of the global smart phone market. Notice also that even though Nokia isn't growing as quickly as its competitors, it is still growing.

And, looking at the entire mobile phone market. Nokia sold 453 million phones while Samsung sold 280 million phones. Combined that would be over half the entire mobile phone market.

http://www.idc.com/about/viewpressrelease.jsp?containerId=pr...

But you are right in one respect. Samsung has been extremely cautious about mergers after several failed mergers in the 1990's. So it would really need to have a good reason go down that path again.

ansyon Samsung Preparing a Bid for Nokia?

I don't think Samsung would stop making Win7 Nokia phones. That would be throwing away money. But depending on the exclusivity clauses in the Microsoft deal Samsung might start making Android flavored Nokia phones as well. Samsung is strongly aligned with Google and just hedging its bets with Microsoft.

ansyon Samsung Preparing a Bid for Nokia?

Samsung could be a good buyer for Nokia. It could switch over the supply of Nokia's internal components to Samsung thereby creating synergy. Samsung could swap out Symbian with Bada on lower end phones and (depending on the Microsoft contract) Android on the high end.

In exchange Samsung gets Nokia's patents, Nokia's mapping assets, and access to an enormous global supply chain.

ansyon "My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing."

I actually subscribe to the theory put forth in Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson and Sussman

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-9.html#...

Essentially, "computer science" is a myopic name for what is really "process studies." It just so happens that defining processes to run on computers is forwarding the field more than any other. But in the distant future we will all understand the field to be about abstractly defining processes i.e. a series of repeatable steps to accomplish a task. Which would be independent of the mechanism used to execute the process.

Therefore programming is the act of defining a process. And programming languages are what we use to define them.

It is covered fairly intuitively in the first few minutes of the SICP video lectures as well:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5546836985338782440

ansyon Nintendo's WiiU: Touchscreen, coming 2012

It's an extension of the Nintendo DS formula. Except the top screen is the TV and the bottom screen is embedded in the controller. The controller's cost will be a huge factor. It could be as much as $100 ... or more.

Nintendo just needs to make a phone. A Nintendo DS with a cellular antenna that's free after carrier rebates. How could that not work? Every kid would get it. A lot of adults, too. If you really wanted an iPhone or Android, you could just buy a normal Nintendo DS. There's so much opportunity there, it's baffling. Even if all it did was play Mario and have the same features as a flip phone it would sell.