News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

john111

Re:Brandchirps – Simple Brand Monitoring on Saturday January 18, 2020 @11:28PM (#22089480)
You say you monitor the whole web. How is that possible?
Re:Boltzmann Brain on Friday January 17, 2020 @06:26PM (#22080754)
>Your decisions only matter in the case that you're an actual human

Why do you say that decisions matter if you're a human? At least, why would decisions matter more as a human than if you're a Boltzmann brain?

Re:I love coding in C on Thursday December 26, 2019 @01:08PM (#21885553)
What's the point? How is typing foo::bar better than typing foo_bar?

It seems like you want the language to be more complicated for no benefit. Why not use C++ at that point?

Re:Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates on Thursday December 12, 2019 @01:40AM (#21769780)
I really wish we had better definitions for "smart", "cognition", and "intelligence." With our current definitions, all comparisons are purely subjective. Maybe crows are the "smartest" today. Tomorrow it'll be dolphins, parrots, elephants, pigs, or cephalopods. Who knows?
Re:YouTube has apparently reinstated RSS feeds on Monday November 14, 2016 @11:56PM (#12955703)
>To get an RSS feed of a single channel’s uploads, paste the channel URL into your RSS reader.

How does this work? How does the feed-reader know to grab the RSS XML instead of the page HTML, if they have the same URL?

Re:How to accept Bitcoin payments without running a full node on Saturday November 12, 2016 @02:39PM (#12939748)
Glad to see the author here! Just curious, how did you know this was submitted?
Re:Stamp design errors on Thursday November 10, 2016 @06:10PM (#12925497)
Can you link to an example? I know that 4x4x4 is thing, but 3x3x4 does seem impossible.
Re:Voting Paradoxes [video] on Friday November 04, 2016 @01:59PM (#12874525)
I found this video really interesting. I knew that the current US system, first past the post, has a lot of problems from watching CPG Grey's [1] videos on it. I didn't know that the alternative systems, like ranked voting, had all these other weird problems.

It's depressing, really.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

Re:H.264 is Magic on Friday November 04, 2016 @10:03AM (#12872602)
Can someone explain how the frequency domain stuff works? I've never really understood that, and the article just waves it away with saying it's like converting from binary to hex.
Re:Launching Our Crowdfunding Campaign on Tuesday November 01, 2016 @12:17PM (#12847201)
For everyone shocked at the $200k/mo, there is a lot of previous discussion here [1].

Their staff cost about $200k/person, and their total budget for 2017 is 2.9M!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12541383

Re:The Benjamin Franklin Method: How to Be a Better Writer on Monday October 31, 2016 @10:08AM (#12836790)
Benjamin Franklin's entire story is really inspirational. He certainly had work ethic in abundance.

If you need an excuse to practice your writing, you may want to try National Novel Writing Month[1], which coincidentally, starts tomorrow.

[1] http://nanowrimo.org

Off-topic, but what process are people using to make these animated demos? The command-line and browser demo on this page is so clean and crisp. Is it just a screen cap with a ton of post-processing, or is there more to it?
Re:Twitter and Periscope Shadowbans Dilbert creator on Monday October 24, 2016 @01:36PM (#12780957)
Censorship is a really concerning problem, with no obvious solution, when more and more of our communication is published by privately owned third-parties. The other frustrating thing is that this so often happens, and we don't even get a response from the censoring party. I know there is no expectation of free speech on a private platform, but it's still a serious social problem when everyone voluntarily publishes there anyway.