Hacker News Reader

wedesofton PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

My autoresponder just sends "I'll read your e-mail when I return". In general when reading e-mails takes too much time, I just read and respond to the rest on another day (except e-mails from friends). If you respond to your 200 e-mails immediately, you can be sure to have 100 follow-up e-mails the next day.

wedesofton Internet voting: Exactly what the 99% needs

With the Internet it is possible to involve the public much more than just with online elections. The FSF for example uses a website where people can comment on each draft of a license [1].

[1] http://gplv3.fsf.org/comment/agplv3-draft-2.html

wedesofton Be nice. It's a fscking gift

There's a nice collection of the kind of demands customers come up with: http://clientsfromhell.net/

wedesofton Ruby is beautiful (but I'm moving to Python)

I don't know whether that qualifies as number crunching, but I am using Ruby for computer vision.

http://www.wedesoft.demon.co.uk/hornetseye-api/

wedesofton Perl is no more accurate than randomly-generated language

In other words: When a beginner writes code, the programming language does not matter.

wedesofton John McCarthy's proposal for the language of the future

My favourite quote from his talk about 'Elephant 2000': "In 'Elephant' the programmer would write nothing about an array or database for storing reservations. Arrays of course would be necessary but the compiler would invent them."

wedesofton Time Zone Data Returns

This is related to the news from 8 days ago (time-zone database used by Unix shut down due to IP litigation): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3081281

wedesofton Facebook is scaring me

To block tracking I subscribed to EasyPrivacy ().

() http://easylist.adblockplus.org/

wedesofton Facebook is scaring me

I can recommend Fanboy's "Annoyance Block List". It will block requests to Twitter, Facebook, ... unless you are opening one of their sites directly.

(*) http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/

wedesofton Windows 8 OEM specs may block Linux booting

It certainly won't get easier to install a Linux dual-boot. It is already difficult enough as it is:

* Windows PCs without installation medium

* Windows installation with a full partitition table (four primary partitions)

* (intentionally?) corrupted partition tables

I.e. installing GNU/Linux requires you to resize partitions with a potentially corrupted NTFS file system and/or delete backup partitions. Alternatively the user uses a Windows image file as Linux file system (Wubi) which is slower and a more fragile solution.

wedesofton Touch Vision Interface employs AR to control screens from afar

Also see Visual Panel by Zhengyou Zhang. The problem basically is to find correspondences and then fit a planar homography between the input and the output surface. [1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/zhang/VisualPa...

wedesofton Saylor offers millions of dollars in bounties for open textbooks

I can recommend the Samizdat website [1]. They have a very good linear algebra book as well.

[1] http://samizdat.mines.edu/

wedesofton Ruby Arduino Development

As far as I understand it, it compiles a subset of Ruby to C. It is a real subset of Ruby because it does not support meta-programming.

wedesofton Destination asteroid: NASA probe arrives at ancient ‘mini moon’

Here is NASA's press release. http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/feature_stories/spacecraft_to_enter...

wedesofton How Running A Business Changes The Way You Think

If you happen to use Firefox, I can recommend the iReader extension. http://www.samabox.com/extensions/iReader/

wedesofton Among the costs of war: $20 Billion in Air Conditioning

Maybe they should build windcatchers. That's what the locals use. There's one in the Dubai Museum [1] and its amazing how well it works.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wind_Tower_Dubai.jpg

wedesofton I Spent A Coin (And I Liked It) — How I Bought Lunch in Manhattan with Bitcoins

The cost of electricity per Bitcoin in turn depends on the computing power invested in the network. The strength of the next block is adjusted so that it takes approximately 10 minutes for the network to solve it. Also there are optional transaction fees.

wedesofton Write your first MapReduce program in 20 minutes

Interesting. I didn't know that you could pass a block to merge.

wedesofton Write your first MapReduce program in 20 minutes

And here's the equivalent Ruby program. In Ruby it is usually 'collect' and 'inject' instead of 'map' and 'reduce'.

    result = Dir.glob('test?.txt').collect do |file_name|
      File.new(file_name, 'r').read.split(' ').collect do |word|
        word.downcase.tr '.,\'', ''
      end.inject Hash.new(0) do |hash,word|
        hash[word] += 1
        hash
      end
    end.inject do |all,hash|
      (all.keys + hash.keys).uniq.inject Hash.new(0) do |acc,word|
        acc[word] = all[word] + hash[word]
        acc
      end
    end
    p result

Edit: The Python example in the article is better because it merges hashes in the reduce step which facilitates parallelisation.

wedesofton Computer vision (online book)

Just use a download tool which can continue interrupted downloads. For example wget with "-c" option:

    wget -c http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/s.prince/book.pdf

wedesofton What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails?

The Ruby program takes more time because it is not optimised and it also checks for numeric overflow. The following Ruby program

    puts (1 .. 21).inject :*

will output "51090942171709440000". And

    puts (1 .. 21).inject(:*).class

will output "Bignum" because Ruby switches to big numbers when its integer representation is exceeded.

wedesofton Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

It's not exactly news. Reduced solar activity has been observed for some time and satellite measurements of the troposphere show a slow cooling of the average global temperature over the last ten years.

Here is a presentation by Fred Singer if anybody is interested (in the past he has headed the US weather satellite program for many years). http://videolectures.net/kolokviji_singer_nnha/

wedesofton Leaked NPD(German right wing party) donors-list meets Google maps

Considering the number of NPD deputies who have lost their mandate because of fraud, embezzlement, theft, ... I would say that security is not exactly their primary concern.

wedesofton Apple WWDC 2011 Keynote Video

It's now on Apple's Youtube channel.

http://www.youtube.com/user/apple

wedesofton Senators seek crackdown on "Bitcoin" currency

Shutting down Bitcoin because of illegal drug trade is like banning cryptography because of terrorism: It is not solving the problem and it is not a valid reason for stopping innovation.

wedesofton Apple WWDC 2011 Keynote Video

Maybe playing this link will work?

http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/jun/11piubpwiqubf06/11piu...

wedesofton Astronomy Picture of the Day (timelapse with Earth rotating)

Nice idea. But they only used 2D translation and rotation. Ideally they would have used a homography (projective transformation). Unless other effects are ruling the image (radial distortion, atmospheric diffraction) this should lead to a better result.

wedesofton Why Microsoft bought Skype

Interesting comment. IMO using a virtual machine to abstract away the hardware is what an operating system is all about. Microsoft has done a lot of work to prevent any competing middleware (Java, Internet browser, Flash, OpenGL, ...) from challenging their position.

http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepape...

wedesofton Ios, Android, WP7 - who cares?

Who cares? Developers do! For example Nokia's decision to ditch Qt4 means that we have to wait for "write once, run anywhere" even longer. And I am not so sure whether the browser will solve it all again. I think Microsoft and Apple are going to make sure that this won't happen again. In fact they already did so by removing the customers' freedom to install and run software of their choice.