Hacker News Reader

yobbobandanaon “grep -R doesn't automatically search amazon”

Until everyone stops using Ubuntu because for some mysterious reason they suddenly hate it.

yobbobandanaon What hackers don’t know about business

Under a section labelled "Not understanding the differences", too.

yobbobandanaon Valve Source Engine Running Faster on Linux than Windows

And a worse link.

yobbobandanaon Valve Source Engine Running Faster on Linux than Windows

Here's the submission that linked to the actual blog post, not to the whole damn blog:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4326619

yobbobandanaon Pacific Fibre cable project sunk by US fears about Chinese espionage

Economic incentives? China is a major trading partner for NZ at least.

    China overtook the United States at the end of 2008
    to become New Zealand's second largest trading partner,
    with bilateral trade amounting to $9.4 billion in the
    year ended December 2009.

source: http://www.nzdmo.govt.nz/publications/nzefo/2010/17.htm

yobbobandanaon Introducing Ubuntu Web Apps: setting the web free of the browser

Gmail and Google+ came up under the communications menu, and last.fm was integrated with the sound menu. App menus and features seem to be available from the HUD. Seems pretty well integrated to me.

yobbobandanaon Keeping the Trans Pacific Partnership from changing our copyright laws

A range of difficulties have emerged for TPP seeking to strengthen IP standards beyond those agreed to in TRIPS. Analysis of the costs and benefits of IP protection shows that there is a tendency towards overprotection of IP in all our societies, particularly in the areas of copyright and patents. The analysis also shows that the optimal rate of protection differs between countries and that it can differ across time as countries move through different stages of economic development.

The second linked document - New Zealand's submission - was quite readable and seems fairly rational.

The essays by NZ organisations opposing TPP were also pretty much all interesting reads.

yobbobandanaon GitHub Android App Released

Free time at home is much more valuable than free time on the bus.

yobbobandanaon Internet Access Is a Human Right, Says United Nations

Is there any written statement by the UN about this?

yobbobandanaon Boot2Gecko demo & quick hack

One thing I hope this promotes is a good interface for accessing device hardware via HTML. In particular i had a hard time trying to access a webcam feed to embed in a webpage when i tried it a while ago. The ability to simply capture images/audio/video for use in a web app, from your phone or your webcam, would be tremendously fun.

As far as i'm aware the current solution for this is still to use Flash, or a native application. I'd be happy to be wrong. In any case making a phone entirely controllable via web standards will ensure that such capabilities are avilable and proven.

If anyone has more info on webcam integration with HTML5 video, this stackoverflow post could use some love: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1318834/whats-the-status-...

yobbobandanaon Boot2Gecko demo & quick hack

Telefonica press release for those who missed it:

http://saladeprensa.telefonica.com/jsp/base.jsp?contenido=/j...

yobbobandanaon How Microsoft Pays Big Money To Smear Google In European Parliament

I imagine this article was intended as PR for the Pirate Party.

"This is the kind of stuff we do not like, vote for us if you also do not like it."

I think it targets their core demographic quite well. Whether it is mock outrage or not is a moot point.

yobbobandanaon Piracy and the Four Currencies

The author does address the subjectivity of the integrity dollar value:

""The $I cost is the most subjective of the four and depends on how much stock a player puts in "doing the right thing," (so to speak) or whether they even see any moral integrity in the choice at all.""

I agree on the value-added point though, there are often services game makers can provide which make the official copy more attractive to players.

yobbobandanaon YC and 500 Startups company Curebit caught stealing from 37 Signals

Please do not conflate stealing with copying.

When something is stolen, the original owner no longer has posession of the stolen object. If the story were about money or physical property, "stealing" would be appropriate. It is not.

The word "copying" is quite adequate. In this case, direct copying is obviously poor behaviour. It betrays a lack of capability on the part of the copyer. This story would have had the same emotional impact, had it used the correct term.

Using the word "stealing" mires the story in the intricacies of digital copyright debate, which is not what this is about. It is about a startup not doing its own work, and thus demonstrating inability.

yobbobandanaon Accidental Scientist Hawks ‘Online Marketplace for Brains’

Aren't the prizes on offer extraordinarily low for the accomplishments desired?

For example to "Develop new models to accurately predict the market response to large trades." is valued at $10,000.

yobbobandanaon Book Shopping in Stores, Then Buying Online

Could a bookstore not offer an Amazon purchasing option? If customers want to browse books in the store and purchase off Amazon, why not explicitly enable this? The tradeoff is obvious to the consumer: either get the book now for a heightened price, or get it later more cheaply. The bookstore could make a commission off the Amazon referral.

A quick web search turns up: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/

yobbobandanaon “Reforming the Mathematical Language of Physics” (pdf)

As a former student of physics, this does appear quite interesting. The article feels concise and well-structured, and the math seems very elegant.

For physics and math students I recommend starting at page 9. The 8 pages of rationale seem a little unnecessary, with the math mostly speaking for itself.

I'm looking forward to giving this a more detailed read later.

yobbobandanaon How to read Haskell like Python

I've tried to learn Haskell a couple times, and I keep running into the basic problem of not being able to search for info on terms like ">>=". If you don't know what it means, how do you find out? I certainly never knew until reading in this article that they were called "fish" operators. I previously tried to work through 3 or 4 different Haskell tutorials, and still didn't know this.

This article seems very helpful for simply enabling someone with Python experience to learn Haskell.

yobbobandanaon Barnes & Noble Urges U.S. to Probe Microsoft on Patents

In a [1991] memo to his senior executives, Bill Gates wrote, “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.” Mr. Gates worried that “some large company will patent some obvious thing” and use the patent to “take as much of our profits as they want.”

source: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/09/opinion/09lee.html

yobbobandanaon A Brief Explanation of Microsoft's Anti-Google Patent FUD

Microsoft has previously been accused of "misusing patents to further an anticompetitive scheme against Android". Here's a link to the relevant article on groklaw:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110427052238659

Disregarding your comments on patriotism and the USPTO (which I don't fully disagree with), the disturbing part about Google being unable to buy these patents, is that they appear to have been actively collaborated against in the auctions. Not being able to build a substantial patent portfolio denies them the ability to countersue in response to frivolous patent threats against Android, which I assume is a large part of why Google was willing to bid so highly for them.

Personally the part of the recent auction I found most disturbing was that the patents weren't sold to the highest bidder, they were sold to a conglomeration of bidders, some of which had already tapped out. To make a parallel with an art auction, it would be like half of the bidding floor banding together simply to ensure that another promiment bidder didn't get the piece. Possibly a valid action, but possibly anticompetitive, depending on the situation.

yobbobandanaon What’s Wrong with Learning Haskell

My biggest stumbling block when trying to learn Haskell, was that I could not find out what operators did, and every example program i tried to learn from had its own obscure set.

Even simple things like trying to find out what "$" does, are effectively impossible to search for. Constructs such as "||>" are a nightmare.

I finally progressed a little after finding a Haskell "cheat sheet" and reading it thoroughly.

The "cheat sheet" was 14 pages long, with three columns per page. And to top it off, it still didn't explain what many of the operators did, rendering whole sections illegible.

Still, like I say, it's the best learning resource I found.

http://cheatsheet.codeslower.com/ for the curious.

yobbobandanaon The Pi Manifesto

personally, i'd answer "half tau".

half tau r^2 is a fine equation for an area.