Hacker News Reader

extensionon The Amazing Trajectories of Life-Bearing Meteorites From Earth

Is there any plausible way an organism could survive an explosion with the power of a million nukes and a million years floating in space?

extensionon No Free Lunch for Intel MIC (or GPU’s)

We can extract a little bit of parallelism that way, but nothing even close to the scale of what a GPU does.

extensionon No Free Lunch for Intel MIC (or GPU’s)

How would you distribute the work of a virtual machine? It has to execute instructions in sequence, just like a non-virtual machine. Any parallelism needs to be extracted at a much higher level of algorithmic abstraction, i.e. by a programmer.

Imagine trying to make a virtual machine that would rewrite any bubble sort as a quicksort. Parallelizing algorithms is much more difficult than even that.

extensionon Dead Programmers Aren't Much Fun

I find it strangely unsettling that if I die, my Minecraft clan will never know what happened to me. I'll just vanish one day. They will spend some time trying to contact me but probably won't make a connection with anybody who can tell them what happened. And nobody who is sure to know about my death would know to contact them.

extensionon Interactive editor based on the 'Inventing on Principle' talk

Well, since the code is left-to-right, and the editor is presumably as wide as the longest line, the content will tend to be skewed to the left. By putting the editor pane on the right, you reduce the average distance between the code and the output.

extensionon Leonardo Da Vinci Masterpiece May Have Been Found Behind Fresco In Florence

If there's a 3cm air gap, why don't they just go in from the top/bottom/sides?

And did they really drill holes in Vasari's fresco, or just use a neutron thingy, like the NY Times articles says? If there are holes, can't they just shove a small camera inside?

extensionon For tablet computer visionary Roger Fidler, a lot of what-ifs

I'll say it again: Apple was not the first to invent the tablet, they were the last, and that is precisely why they succeeded.

extensionon Boxing with Java

This is what operator overloading is for. If equals() should always be used to compare objects then == should call it.

extensionon Kara Is Self-Aware

If the CG doesn't make you squirm then the subject matter will, so it may not have been the best choice for demonstrating the absence of revulsion.

extensionon One man's quest to purge horrific pictures from his Google results

The search results strongly suggest that they have a reputation as the site of a disaster.

extensionon The Sun is Setting on Rails-style MVC Frameworks

If you want a client coupled to a specific service then you don't want REST, you want a classic client-server architecture, which is more or less the antithesis of REST. But everyone insists on calling it REST when it goes over HTTP, then they complain that the apple tastes nothing like an orange.

extensionon YouTube Identifies Birdsong As Copyrighted Music

This is a massive problem on YouTube right now. Essentially, there are a few large troll operations that abuse Google's "Content ID" system to steal ad revenues from random accounts, while Google shows no interest in fixing the system or shutting down the fraudulent accounts. The targetted videos often contain original music or no music at all. It's so common that it seems to be a fact of life for anyone as soon as they start monetizing their videos, and it's enough to remove any desire I have to do business with Google.

extensionon A Senseless Conversation

The feeling of movement simply isn't reported by nerves

Bzzt...

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

extensionon Judge awards iPhone user $850 in throttling case

To what extent is a third party allowed to assist a claimant in small claims court? If someone were to start a business that made it as easy as possible for people to take AT&T to court...

extensionon The Sun is Setting on Rails-style MVC Frameworks

With the exception of spiders and other AI-like things, no, we are not expecting clients to spontaneously consume RESTful services in meaningful ways. REST clients are generic. They don't know anthing about specific services, thus allowing those services to evolve independently. A client that is coupled to a specific service is not RESTful, nor is any API that can only be consumed by such a client.

extensionon Fermilab Set to Reveal “Interesting” Higgs Boson Results

What's the difference?

extensionon A personal appeal from a former Wikipedia editor

The problem with this is it conflates expertise with wanting to play little karma games. They may (sadly) be equivalent on StackOverflow, but in some fields I imagine the experts have better things to do. The wiki would start to reflect experts at the game rather than experts in the topics covered.

extensionon A personal appeal from a former Wikipedia editor

It makes sense to me. Going with the majority opinion is the only way to have stable content. Trying to resolve controversy on Wikipedia is what would actually destroy it. Democracy can cause horrible injustice, but we've learned from history that it's the only irrefutable way to decide things, unless the evidence is even simpler than counting ballots.

It doesn't mean Wikipedia is a failure, it just means Wikipedia is not the oracle of truth that some people expect it to be. It's a repository of majority views, which is usually pretty valuable, even if it's sometimes wrong. We have other venues for challenging popular fallacies.

extensionon Your address book is mine: Many iPhone apps take your data

Facebook only knows the contacts that match i.e. are already on Facebook. And that's exactly what the user wanted to find out.

It's true that they could store the hashes and build a graph of mystery contacts, but that's still not as bad as taking the actual contact info.

extensionon The Fifty is awake again

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS3LgfdT7E

That is one hot and noisy job.

extensionon Epic's Sweeney on graphics tech: "the limit really is in sight"

Do we even know how to render reality? If we can do it at 1/2000th of real time then somebody should have made a prerendered animation that looks real by now, but I've never seen one. And if we don't know how to do it, how do we know what GPU we will need?

extensionon Game Development Essentials #1 - Don’t use inheritance for your game objects

The conundrum is that you can't define a canonical inheritance relationship between square and rectangle or mammal and cat because the relationship depends entirely on how you are using these concepts in your program. Making them immutable may affect the relationship but does not make it canonical.

extensionon Game Development Essentials #1 - Don’t use inheritance for your game objects

I just mean that first you need to figure out how your engine is going to work -- what actual code you are going to write -- then go about organizing that code into an object model.

A physics engine will have classes for the things it cares about like masses, constraints, collisions, contacts, etc. A renderer could have things like meshes, materials, particle systems, and lights. Each subsystem has a different idea of what a particular vehicle, weapon, or monster is. Two monsters might have the same physics properties but be rendered very differently. A Koopa and a Flying Koopa might look the same but behave differently. You can't start with classes for vehicles, weapons and monsters, and expect these classes to be used across all subsystems.

OOP is really a way to organize your code. OOP doesn't generate solutions.

extensionon Game Development Essentials #1 - Don’t use inheritance for your game objects

Use traits and you get this for free, without implementing all the plumbing yourself.

Inheritance has its place in game dev though. It's just that your hiearchy needs to be designed in the space of what you are actually building: not vehicles, weapons, and monsters but renderers, physics, AI, GUIs, etc. And you want to figure out how that stuff is going to work before you break it up into classes.

extensionon You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You

It could be great propaganda if the Pirate Bay just did everything themselves. Add the button for any torrents where they know for sure how to send money to the copyright holder, and just send them a cheque in the mail. And of course, make all the revenues public.

extensionon Do iOS apps crash more than Android?

So it does.

Though it also has garbage collection, which likely prevents the kind of memory leaks that crash most iOS apps in the first place. And does it let the browser use swap? Because iOS doesn't, so web pages can crash it about as easily as apps can.

extensionon Do iOS apps crash more than Android?

I wouldn't hold my breath. For the most part, if a developer can't be bothered to clean up their memory manually then they probably can't be bothered to use ARC properly. It's not trivial: http://longweekendmobile.com/2011/09/07/objc-automatic-refer...

extensionon Do iOS apps crash more than Android?

It really irks me when crashes are made out to be the result of user actions, or some inescapable act of god. Excepting the very rare hardware fault, crashes are caused by a programmer error. PERIOD. That is all that really matters from the user's perspective. There may be some way to work around the bug by tinkering with things, but nothing the user does can ever cause a crash.

Also, it wouldn't surprise me if iOS apps crash more than Android apps, because iOS doesn't have virtual memory. When an iOS app runs out of physical memory, it gets killed. This was allegedly a design decision.

extensionon Leaked Zynga Memo Justifies Copycat Strategy

It's not easy to crack a safe, but doing so does not entitle you to the contents.

extensionon Leaked Zynga Memo Justifies Copycat Strategy

Obviously they think a great design matters or they wouldn't steal them.