News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

Nekojoe

Re:Getting shot by a handgun on Tuesday December 21, 2010 @09:14AM (#2027758)
On a similar note George Orwell got shot once in the Spanish Civil war. This article documents his thoughts on it - http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/soldiers/george-orwell-shot.h...
Re:Times and Sunday Times reveal online reader figures on Tuesday November 02, 2010 @07:10AM (#1859922)
I agree. The BBC have more analysis here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2010...

The figure also includes Apple iTunes Store App purchases and Kindle subscriptions. But they're not broken down. For all we know 3 people could have bought direct access to the website and the other 99,997 people could have bought the App to read something on their iPhone while taking the train to work.

It's interesting to see that the Guardian are now earning around £40 million from on-line ad revenues. While the back of a napkin calculation by the BBC blogger puts The Times paywall at £7 million.

Re:Times and Sunday Times reveal online reader figures on Tuesday November 02, 2010 @06:49AM (#1859865)
The difference is that the Times and Sunday Times are aimed at the public. There's plenty of competition and free on-line quality alternatives in the UK from the BBC News Website and the Guardian. What I'm interested to see is how other sites traffic went up as people left the Times site as the pay wall was put up.

I'll bet the type of news you're willing to pay for isn't aimed at the general public. I reckon sites that will do well behind a paywall are either specialist sites or industry specific sites or even sites that offer time sensitive information first. The kind of sites that either offer quality information or hold a monopoly on this information. They also won't price this for the general public they'll price it for the corporations.

From what I've heard it's because the buttons and the case are made by different companies and they can't get the colours to match. http://www.reghardware.com/2010/10/15/white_iphone_spied/
Re:Being Steve Jobs's Boss on Friday October 22, 2010 @03:21AM (#1818876)
I love this quote - "We talked a lot about how perception leads reality and how if you are going to create a reality, you have to be able to create the perception."

It sounds like the concept of the reality distortion field.

Re:Programming is for Stupid People on Tuesday October 19, 2010 @05:48AM (#1806635)
This way of memorising things is called Chunking - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_%28psychology%29

Chess champions use this technique too. I remember seeing a TV documentary where they got a chess champion to look at a board layout for a few seconds and reproduce it in front of them. They could do this easily for a valid board layout. But when they got people with no knowledge of chess to design the board layout in an invalid manner the chess champion could not reconstruct the board as accurately or as quickly.

I guess a common programming equivalent would be a design pattern.

If this was in the EU it would be a case for Protected Geographical Status - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_Geographical_Status
Re: Review my hackathon MVP - Amazon instant search on Wednesday September 29, 2010 @11:08AM (#1739656)
I like it. It would be nice if the buy button was more prominent. I found a book I was interested in buying, or at least finding more about. I tried clicking on the book cover and nothing happened. I did notice the Buy button in the top right at the end, but it's not prominent as it's the same colour as the shelf.
Re:Author Simon Singh Puts Up a Fight in the War on Science on Friday September 03, 2010 @11:25AM (#1659867)
Don't forget to mention Ben Goldacre's own website too which has more of the same stuff - http://www.badscience.net/
Re:Twitter for iPad is here on Thursday September 02, 2010 @09:08AM (#1656021)
TweetDeck on iPhone is the same. The multi account feature was what won me over in the first place. I liked it as I could use it for managing both my personal and websites twitter account. Unfortunately that's broken right now. The issue is mentioned on their support forums, but no one at TweetDeck seem to have picked up.

The only other issue I have is a minor UI gripe. When you click on the run in background button, the progress bar and cancel button for the background tweet covers the back button on the main part of the app. It’s odd that they did that.

I remember seeing a documentary about these foxes last year. IIRC they were part of a science experiment to see if it was nature or nurture that was the key factor in the domestication of dogs.

Basically with each litter of foxes they selected the most friendly, and allowed them to breed, creating more friendly / domesticated foxes. They also selected the most vicious and bred them separately as a control. Later when the behaviours became more pronounced they artificially inseminated the vicious foxes with the domesticated foxes embryos to find out if they would be aggressive or domestic. They turned out to be domestic.

Interestingly because foxes are solitary animals they behave more like cats than dogs.

Re:WePay (YC S09): Innovating Where Banks Won’t on Friday July 09, 2010 @06:00AM (#1500233)
Borrow money on the internet?

Isn't that what start-ups like http://www.zopa.com/ are all about? Disclaimer - I'm not affiliated with them in anyway.

Re:Why Arduino is a hit with hardware hackers on Thursday July 08, 2010 @04:09AM (#1496801)
Baker Tweet uses the Arduino - http://www.bakertweet.com/

The official Arduino blog always has lots of interesting examples too - http://arduino.cc/blog/

According to this [1] it costs £2.15 a hit. Which isn't that bad spending wise if you consider the worst website in the UK government cost £11.78 per visit.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/25/gov_websites/

Re:Two Weeks Vacation is only a Recommendation, not a Rule on Wednesday June 30, 2010 @11:16AM (#1475076)
It all depends on where you are. One guy tried to get 4 weeks off at a place I used to work. He needed sign off from a high up manager to do this. The manager retorted if we can get by without this guy for 4 weeks, why do we really need him at all? Suffice to say, he didn't take his 4 weeks holiday.
Re:Homeopathy for politicians on Tuesday June 29, 2010 @05:08AM (#1470886)
If you're interested in this blog post I suggest reading Ben Goldacre's book Bad Science - http://www.badscience.net/

It covers the problems with homoeopathy in great depth and includes other similar alternative medicines, along with flaws in scientific studies promoting them and quackery in general. I highly recommend reading it. Not just to learn about the problems with these kind of treatments, but also the difficulties in creating unbiased scientific tests.

El Reg has a better write up including safety fears - http://www.reghardware.com/2010/06/16/arctic_laser/
Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names on Thursday June 17, 2010 @09:08AM (#1438742)
Re:ZX80 & the Dawn of 'Surreal' UK Game Industry on Wednesday June 09, 2010 @09:48AM (#1416948)
Everytime someone mentions the a Sinclair and accounts, I always think of Hey Hey 16k - http://www2.b3ta.com/heyhey16k/

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