Hacker News Reader

wedesofton Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors

Also Chernobyl uses graphite as a moderator instead of water. I.e. the chain reaction continued even after the water boiled away.

wedesofton Forty-five times faster at programming

Interesting. I have heard many good programmers say that to them reading code has become more important than writing code.

wedesofton Andrew Warner is out of the hospital

Take it easy and enjoy life.

wedesofton Facebook Turns Friend Activity Into New Ad Format

Using the example from the article. This could go very wrong. I imagine something along those lines:

"Puking after drinking bad coffee - at Starbucks with my friend.

STARBUCKS!"

wedesofton Google's H.264 decision: It's all about YouTube costs

It's not about the Youtube servers. I think, it's about the Youtube clients. Licensing costs may be small for Google but they are not small for manufacturers of mobile phones.

wedesofton VLC for iOS Pulled from the App Store

What stops you from installing the software on your iPhone? It's not as if the binaries are not available any more.

wedesofton Ugly Software (like Blackboard) Gives Education a Bad Name

Universities should stop using Blackboard. They tried to use a software patent to prevent competitors from implementing "roles" (otherwise known as user groups).

Eben Moglen even gave a keynote on this: https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF06/Keynote+-...

The keynote was followed by an open discussion with Blackboard's lawyer: https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF06/Lunchtime...

As Eben Moglen put it: "Preventing people from learning how things work is the opposite of education."

wedesofton Some Google employees defect, then rebel

Just install EasyPrivacy [1] and Fanboy Annoyances [2] for Adblock Plus.

[1] http://easylist.adblockplus.org/

[2] http://www.fanboy.co.nz/

wedesofton What is full-text search (and why you need it now)

In the past I used HtDig (http://www.htdig.org/) on my Linux desktop. HtDig's latest release is from 2004 and it doesn't support PDF (only Postscript). Also it is not so easy to set up. More recently I tried Strigi but it seems to be very slow. However it has adapters for many file formats including PDF. I don't use MacOS, so I don't know how about the performance of Spotlight.

I think a fast full-text search for the desktop can be very useful. Collecting all those publications doesn't really help when you can't find them when you need them.

wedesofton A Dramatic Demonstration of the Power of Mental Frames by Simon Singh [video]

Amazing how the mind locks on to the given pattern. Maybe that's related to the psychological fact that people tend to overestimate the control they have over the physical world. You could also call it optimism.

wedesofton Who Fatally Wounded Microsoft? It Was Bill Gates.

10 years ago mobile phones where just microcontrollers with LCDs and Symbian OS on it. Users couldn't even install J2ME software on it. In terms of openness Google Android and Nokia Maemo are now the best mobile operating systems (albeit still not fully open yet). Talking about fataly wounded: iPhone is maybe the last phone which cannot run Java software in our days.

wedesofton Is Microsoft Afraid to Say the L-word?

Read the Port25 article. I especially like the fact that only Microsoft Windows runs the top 10 downloads on Sourceforge: Well, GNU+Linux obviously sucks because it doesn't run popular applications such as "7-Zip" and "Gimp Installer for Windows". And that open source applications such as Firefox run under Windows as well clearly reflects Microsoft's increased engagement with Open Source Software.

wedesofton Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love

The music and movie industry are having a hard time, too! Soon it will be the newspapers and book publishers. People realise that they don't need publishing companies and soon people will realise that they don't need advertising. But I think that people will always need musicians, actors, and writers.

wedesofton Could Anything Make You Use IE9?

I wouldn't want to miss all those Firefox extensions. Especially AdblockPlus and EasyPrivacy. As far as I know Chrome only blocks displaying of ads but not the download. I.e. it cannot support EasyPrivacy at the moment.

wedesofton Finish The Projects You’ve Started

Test of time: Once I read an article on a game developers website. The article suggested to let an idea for a bigger project rest for some time (e.g. two months). If you are still enthusiastic about it, then it's more likely that you have the motivation to pull it off.

wedesofton Clojure won't win the battle but may win the war

That's why I prefer Ruby over Python. It unifies loops and iterators using closures. At the same time the syntax "pretends" to be simple so that you can start using Ruby straight away without having to understand continuations and closures. But I think a language which manages to hide the complexity of monads without removing them will blow Clojure out of the water.

wedesofton ‘Google’ Hackers Had Ability to Alter Source Code

It's high time for a more pervasive use of e-mail encryption and signatures.

wedesofton Whatever happened to programming?

This was maybe the main reason why I switched to Ruby. The largest part of my time was spent on integrating other people's work. Don't get me wrong. It would take me more time to write the code from scratch and it would have introduced redundancy. But it just didn't feel right spending so much time on getting other people's stuff play together. I think the problem is that C/C++ and Java don't scale semantically.

wedesofton The Nook: The Real Man's Electronic Reader - Hilarious

For lack of something hilarious I went on to watch this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cd7Bsp3dDo

wedesofton A rant about Ruby 1.9 String encoding

The performance is better if you use an encoding with a fixed byte-length character-set.

wedesofton Firefox fades in popularity

Does the statistic include Google Chrome Frame for Internet Explorer?

wedesofton Keeping the Pirates at Bay

Looks like the computer game of the future will be played by both gamers and developers: DRM.

wedesofton Al Gore: We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change

The article is worth studying as a masterpiece of political rhetorics. A salesman truly shows his skills when selling a bad product.

He explains that some side issues in the debate (IPCC claims about disappearing Himalaya glaciers,FOIA violations) are mistakes and he conveniently ignores the big elephant in the room: tampering with temperature records, corruption of the peer review process, lack of evidence for AGW.

And this is all coming from the same Al Gore who used to make false claims about melting polar ice caps, increases in sea level rise, ... in his movie "An Inconvenient Truth".

To cite [1]: "You can bet he’d be making the same claim if we had a below normal snowfall records too."

[1] http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/23/the-goracle-forecast-a...

wedesofton Imagine There's No YouTube

Decentralising social networks, hosting, and search is desirable.

But I can't see anything positive in the decision of the Italian court. Remember this is Italy. It's Berlusconi's country. And the guy is hellbent on eradicating independent media. He won't stop at shutting down Youtube.

Being able to anonymously publish stuff is a very important aspect of the freedom of speech!

wedesofton Leaving the iPhone

I won’t be able to get to 0% sugar ..., but I’m trying to stop eating sugar, ...

I guess we have to be worried if we don't hear from him any more.

wedesofton DreamPie: The Python shell you've always dreamed about

Apart from 'irb/completion' I use 'wirble' [1] for colour highlighting of the output in Ruby/IRB [1]. I had to modify it to get it to work with Ruby 1.9 though [2]. I don't think anybody has done syntax highlighting for input.

[1] http://pablotron.org/?cid=28

[2] http://www.wedesoft.demon.co.uk/downloads/wirble.rb

wedesofton “You’re one simple step from…” Don’t sweat it Silverlight, I was just leaving

Because of you mentioning the snowboarding video I installed Moonlight only to be confronted with this: "Due to Olympic broadcasting regulations, NBC is only allowed to show Olympic competition video on the internet to users in the United States and U.S. Territories (including Puerto Rico). Users outside of those locations will still have access to an extensive set of non-event video content on NBCOlympics.com including the video listed below."

Now back to uninstalling Moonlight...

wedesofton Open letter to Google: free VP8, and use it on YouTube

I noticed too, that H.264 has some special threatment to improve encoding of uniform regions which frequently occur in artificial images.

Regardless of what video codec you use, the rate-distortion greatly depends on the encoder software and how you use it. When you use MEncoder's x264-compression for example you can tell it to do multi-pass encoding, more accurate motion estimation, use less keyframes, more frames for pixel prediction, ... . Many people don't even use multipass encoding when they convert their videos.

Update: Here's an interesting website about work on the theora encoder http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo8.html

wedesofton Anti-IRS Rant of Software Engineer who Today Flew Plane into IRS Building

As far as I know they fined him for pollution or something. He said that he had some clothes and a toothbrush with him because he expected to go to jail for this. But the police set him free on the same day. It would have been different if he had lit the fire on the road though.

wedesofton Anti-IRS Rant of Software Engineer who Today Flew Plane into IRS Building

In 2008 somebody in Germany got fed up with the high taxes on fuel. He couldn't afford to run his business (which required a car) any more. So he parked the car on a lawn in the city centre of Frankfurt, wrote "Fuel Profiteering http://www.acidware.de/ in big letters on it, and put it on fire.

I just want to say that there are other routes to explore before taking it this far.

http://www.spiegel.de/auto/aktuell/0,1518,562570,00.html