Hacker News Reader

mediocregopheron Spider That Builds Its Own Spider Decoys Discovered

For even more mind-blowing, a mussel that looks like a fish:

http://unionid.missouristate.edu/gallery/L_reeveiana/Reevian...

EDIT: looks like jre beat me to it

mediocregopheron Spider That Builds Its Own Spider Decoys Discovered

I think the benefit might be less of scaring away predators, but just acting as an alternative, bigger target for them. Anyone looking at spider webs for a meal will immediately go for the large obvious spider-looking thing in the web, and while that predator is dealing with the confusion of getting a mouthful of debris and gunk the real spider can make a get-away.

mediocregopheron Linux 3.7 released

Ah, you are correct. My mistake.

mediocregopheron Last.fm Radio to be killed off in most countries next month

Grooveshark is available in most European countries

mediocregopheron Linux 3.7 released

CentOS 6 actually does support the initrwnd 10 modification. I forget what exactly is involved but we have it working on our servers where I work.

mediocregopheron Forget Extinct: The Brontosaurus Never Even Existed

Relevant: http://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_shape_shifting_dinosaur...

mediocregopheron Shimming your way to Linux on Windows 8 PCs

IIRC the Arch isos are set up such that you can literally dd them onto a usb drive and they're automatically bootable. Not sure if any other distros do this, but they ought to.

mediocregopheron Dell releases powerful, well-supported Linux Ultrabook

I tried that, but the scripts already weren't doing anything. Turns out systemd handles those things now, edited my logind.conf file and everything is fine now :)

mediocregopheron Dell releases powerful, well-supported Linux Ultrabook

It's a bit funny.... the biggest problem I have with my current laptop and linux is that I can't get it to NOT sleep when I close the lid. No matter what I do it just wants to sleep. Seems to be the opposite of the problem everyone else has....

mediocregopheron Hunter Moore’s Revenge Porn Site Will Map Submitted Photos to People’s Addresses

You do realize that anonymous and their 4chan originators have been doing this kind of thing for years, right?

Off the top of my head: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNO6G4ApJQY http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/jessi-slaughter

I wouldn't expect much backlash from anonymous on this one.

mediocregopheron Codersumo - Challenge your inner sumo coder.

Clojure would be great! It's an awesome language with a great community behind it, it would be awesome to see it get more traction and start making it into more challenge sites like this one.

mediocregopheron No Studying After 5pm: Using Parkinson’s Law to Kick Procrastination’s Ass

YMMV. I'm also working part-time along with full-time school, and my average school day doesn't end till around 3. This ends up with me not home till 8 usually. I would never be able to hold to any kind of schedule like this, since my days vary so wildly, both in amount of school work and work work.

Personally, what keeps me from procrastinating is that at this point of my school career the work I have to do at home is mostly project based, so I actually find most of it somewhat interesting, unlike the busy-work laden gen-ed courses I was in the first two years (when I did have a big problem with procrastination).

mediocregopheron Google Nexus 4: Nearly flawless

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&feature=yout...

mediocregopheron Why you should take your 20's seriously

I apologize, I was being dismissive. I wasn't trying to say that weightlifting/bodybuilding/etc lacked meaning or were inferior, just that the motivations are different, and for me personally the intrinsic motivation of them (this muscle needs to be worked out, then this one, etc...) doesn't work as well for me as the extrinsic motivation (I'm going to finish this problem today) of climbing.

mediocregopheron Why you should take your 20's seriously

Where I am (not SF) there's definitely a large showing of programmer/climbers at the local gym. I think a large part of it does have to with the problem solving aspect (hell, we call them problems even), but for me it has more to do with it fitting in with my life a lot more cleanly then any other sport does. I don't have to change into a uniform or put on a whole mess of gear or anything of that sort (when I'm going to the gym anyway). I just walk in, put on my shoes, and go. There's no inertia to climbing. There's not many sports that give this; "pumping iron" can but personally I enjoy climbing and solving problems to counting to thirty while sitting in a chair.

mediocregopheron Why I Program in Erlang

I have used erlang in a number of large projects over the last couple years and for the most part I'm in agreement with the author about both the benefits and drawbacks of erlang (when people ask me about erlang I always say "erlang is great for anything that requires a lot of moving pieces and doesn't require the code to actually look nice or be readable"). I have a couple of other drawbacks I think should probably get mentioned:

Logging is..... strange. The recommendation is to use SASL, which writes your logs in a binary format that only another erlang library can properly read. SASL has some nice features, like auto-rotation and such, but I'd much rather have my logs get spit out in plaintext and just logrotate like I do with everything else. One of these days I'm going to write a proper erlang logger.

Rebar is strange. It's erlang's deployment tool thing, kind of like leinengen but much less intuitive. I tried getting used to it but found it just made testing more difficult and made setup a chore. I opted instead to just steal the makefiles from the mochiweb project and call it a day.

Records have easily the most annoying syntax of any language construct I've ever used. And god forbid you want nested records, have fun with your full solid line of selection syntax. Bleh.

Which isn't to say it's all bad, here's some other awesome things about erlang that I don't see pointed out often:

Polymorphic anonymous functions

The pattern matching is amazing. When I go back to other languages that claim to support pattern matching it feels like I've lost both your feet and replaced them with suction cups. There's no pattern matching like erlang pattern matching.

Hot-swapping of code. Somewhat unintuitive, and has weird behavior in certain cases, but still definitely better then restarting the server that thousands of clients have long-running connections on

Records. Their syntax is horrible, but their usefulness is infinite. They're basically just syntactic sugar on top of tuples that make them easier to manage and extend.

There's more for both sides, but I'll leave it at that. It's a great language, I highly recommend everyone take a stab at it. Even if you hate the syntax it's good exposure to thinking about how to code concurrently.

mediocregopheron Install Ubuntu on Nexus 7

Extremely misleading title. Maybe the utility to download and flash the device only takes one click to use, but we can't just ignore the fact that you have to actually get the device in recovery mode etc to even reach that step. I like that my nexus could potentially have ubuntu on it, but I think it's important to not purposefully misrepresent the steps it would take to get there.

mediocregopheron Computer Scientist Warns of Social Media Manipulation in U.S. Election

http://www.snopes.com/politics/romney/votingmachines.asp

mediocregopheron Marc Andreessen’s Productivity Trick to Feeling Marvelously Efficient

wutdo: http://sprunge.us/OhOS donewut: http://sprunge.us/OiAL

Two little scripts I just whipped up that'll help you record the things you do throughout the day. I'm definitely going to try to use these as much as possible, it's kind of like a personal micro-blog.

mediocregopheron World of Warcraft hobby sparks US political row

I've had a lot of fun explaining why it's important to reap your zombie children on many occasions.

mediocregopheron The Best Way to Find Aliens: Look for Their Solar Power Plants

Speaking of Larry Niven, my impression after reading Ringworld (in addition to "holy shit that was good") was that Dyson Spheres were kind of a non-workable, and that a species who'd advanced far enough to actually make one could probably just colonize another system anyway.

mediocregopheron Bank of America Giving Access to Random Accounts

That sounds like a horrible to place to work in... I'd feel uncomfortable doing anything other then work, and any coder here can tell you that you need to do SOMETHING other then work every now and then or you burn out very quickly in the day.

mediocregopheron Hotmail: Your password was too long, so we fixed it for you

yahoo is even worse. I went to change my password from a very easily guessable one to a not as guessable one. Once I figured out a password which fit their stupid requirements (if my password is >20 chars I don't think it having an upper or lower case is going to be the kicker) the site told me I had successfully changed my password. When I went to log in however it would not let me log in.

Turns out yahoo had silently truncated my password down to 24 letters. No indication that this had been done, it was really only through trial and error (I had a feeling something was up, and my password isn't too much more then 24) that I figured it out.

mediocregopheron Manchester (England) Airport's body scanners scrapped

>100% of passengers were satisfied with them and prefer them to frisking.

This is a silly comparison. I'm sure if the survey had asked passengers if they preferred frisking to a cavity search they would have found a lot of people being very ok with getting frisked.

mediocregopheron Just Cause 2 Multiplayer: Behind the scenes with gaming's greatest hack

>which is rather poor design for a competitive multiplayer game

Watching that video, I would guess the environment isn't so much competitive (even single player JC2 is very no-particular-goals-in-mind-just-blow-shit-up oriented) as it is mass chaos. It looked like what would happen if /b/ bought an island. So cheating is probably only a minor concern at this point.

mediocregopheron Chrome Killed UserScripts.org

>We suggest Chrome team to follow Opera’s approach, or at least whitelist UserScripts.org globally.

I could be wrong, but I don't think userscripts does any significant culling of their catalog; downloading an arbitrary script from there is just as dangerous as anywhere else. This whole thing is just silly, you have to confirm the installation of a javascript extension. If you accept that it's your responsibility if it turns out to be a keylogger or what have you, not the Chrome team's. They're shooting everyone in the foot because someone might accidentally shoot their eye out.

mediocregopheron NexPhone: One device to rule them all

When you prop up an ipad on it's corrugated cover-case thing and use a bluetooth keyboard with it, what's to stop the same?

(Not hating on ipads, just saying this is not a problem that's been "figured out")

mediocregopheron Bower: A package manager for the web, from Twitter

I didn't even realize this until I saw your comment. Definitely could use a "scroll for more" or an arrow or something.

mediocregopheron Road-map wristwatch from 1920

Still waitin on that pebble

mediocregopheron Steam Linux Beta Build Surfaces In Steam’s Database

That list of initial titles is pretty small, I hope it will soon include all the recent humble bundle games, since most (if not all) had linux ports as well as being steam-ified.

I know it won't do much in the way of making linux any more popular for the hardcore gamer, but it would at least make me happy