Hacker News Reader

lspearson Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support

I am siding with Google on this one. Stadia is amazing. I play games with zero lag on both my TV and MBP when normally I would have to buy two copies. Reddit has been freaking out at every step to get more features for a platform they supposedly hate. Products over promise on timelines all the time. Chill.

lspearson Immortal Game

Link to game? I'd like to watch that.

lspearson Memory recall dependent on gene influencing hippocampus-based circadian clock

Mentions Zeitgeber which I had to look up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeber

lspearson Building a new Windows 3.1 app in 2019: A Slack Client

Bravo

lspearson Zugzwang

Poker has the concept of positional advantage. Acting later is an advantage because you gain more information from your opponent. Although chess is a total information game and doesn't have this phenomenon, the player at turn can still be at a disadvantage due to circumstance.

lspearson Convert a physical chessboard into a digital one

I did something similar, but with an end-to-end ML approach: https://towardsdatascience.com/transcribe-live-chess-with-ma...

lspearson Snake game made in Go

Plug: https://github.com/notnil/chess

lspearson Tree stumps that should be dead can be kept alive by nearby trees

Learned this in "The Hidden Life of Trees". Great book.

https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Life-Trees-Communicate_Discove...

lspearson Carthago delenda est

If you haven't checked out the hardcore history podcasts I recommend doing so. The punic war episodes are particularly good.

lspearson “The China Study” and Longevity

I think this analysis is incomplete. It's important to separate out longevity from cause of death. "The China Study"'s central premiss is that a vegan diet reduces the likelihood of dying of the "Western" diseases such as heart disease and cancer. A simple correlation between a vegan diet and longevity doesn't address this and also wouldn't take into account the high correlation between not being able to afford animal products and a lack of access to medical care. If you actually read the book the author goes into all this detail.

lspearson France seizes france.com from man who's had it since 1994

Domains on the blockchain?

lspearson A Small Fintech Stock Surged 2,400% After Announcing It’s a Crypto Company

Bubble?

lspearson Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching

Just use Udacity or Coursera

lspearson Understand Go pointers

"Understand Go pointers in less than 800 words or your money back"

There are multiple pictures each of which is worth 1000 words. Where is my money?

lspearson Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

https://www.locationsmart.com provides a service to locate devices at the cell tower level. You can use it to verify location updates from the device are in the ballpark of where they say they are. I haven't used it personally but a friend did.

lspearson Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system

"the experience is shockingly good for a device that costs less than a bar tab"

Glad to see someone else lives it up at the bar

lspearson A step-by-step guide to building a simple chess AI

Love this article. I went through a lot of these same steps when I was tinkering with my own chess bot. Bitboard representation with bitshifting operations can dramatically speed everything up (see here https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Bitboards). Another easy step is to integrate an opening book. The "Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings" provide a great set. Here is link to CSV of the openings for easy parsing: https://github.com/notnil/opening/blob/master/csv/openings_a...

Plug: Any gophers out there looking to build their own bot can use my chess engine https://github.com/notnil/chess

Edit: wording

lspearson Carlsen–Karjakin World Championship

Agreed

lspearson Carlsen–Karjakin World Championship

Spoiler alert!

lspearson Microsoft aren't forcing Lenovo to block free operating systems

isn't

lspears on Excel: Error when CSV file starts with “I” and “D”

Same

lspears on Convert curl commands to Go code

A couple of these tools have sprung up:
JSON: https://mholt.github.io/json-to-go/
CURL: https://mholt.github.io/curl-to-go/
SQL: https://github.com/knq/xo
The JSON tool especially has saved me a lot of time.

lspears on 100M games played

same

lspears on Git Large File Storage 1.0

That video is hilarious! I wish we had more awesome videos like this for new technologies!

lspears on The Way Humans Get Electricity Is About to Change

True but with a lack of certainty in demand few companies will invest to extract those reserves.

lspears on The Way Humans Get Electricity Is About to Change

I work at ShaleApps http://shaleapps.com/ a Oil and Gas focused start up in West Virginia. Investment in the industry is plummeting because of low oil prices. The price of oil is around $60 a barrel right now, but the oil sands in North Dakota and Canada are only profitable at >$100. Coal is getting killed in the US for regulator reasons, but I don't see why other countries would make the massive investment to switch to natural gas. I think coal will like be seen as the "bridge fuel" by later generations.

lspears on West Virginia Officials Warn Not to Use Water Following Chemical Leak [video]

Drinking water isn't the only consideration. People can't take showers, cook with water, or even wash their hands. It wouldn't be a problem if it was one day, but if it goes on it will make living in the area terrible. The real issue is they don't know how long the region will be effected.

lspears on West Virginia Officials Warn Not to Use Water Following Chemical Leak [video]

I'm from Charleston WV and live a couple miles from where the spill took place. People stormed stores for bottled water and some even resorted to stealing to avoid getting the rationed amount. About 1/6 of the state's population doesn't have access to drinking water and many don't have the money to "take a vacation" and leave the region. Businesses can't operatorate and the economic repercussions will devistate the region. The question everyone has is how long will it last? The chemical is dispersed in the water pipes spanning 8 counties and there is no easy way to get it out. We have been angered about the lack of national attention this has received and it makes us feel like no one cares about our state.