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torpor

Re:Ghost of WWII: 1940's meticulously overlaid on modern day on Tuesday August 03, 2010 @07:25AM (#1570772)
This is really a great idea. I'd love to be involved in such a startup .. iPhone/Android/PlaszmaOS/Angstrom developer here, ready to be recruited!! :)
>To be honest, what more do you want to see in it?

An App Store for OSX would be nice. Or even just a repository mechanism - I am so sick of updating the apps on my Mac systems when my multiple Linux boxes are always up-to-date with the latest stable releases.

Its 2010, can we please have an OSX repo mechanism, Apple?

Re:Ghost of WWII: 1940's meticulously overlaid on modern day on Tuesday August 03, 2010 @06:21AM (#1570695)
This set of data is just screaming to be turned into an iPhone app .. imagine, you're somewhere in Europe. The GPS figures out where, and gives you a picture (modern-day) to wipe your fingers over .. revealing the WW2-era pic underneath.

For some European cities, this would be killer .. I know a lot of people who are interested in the history of Europe from the perspective of WW2, and this could be quite an intriguing application to develop ..

Re:Ghost of WWII: 1940's meticulously overlaid on modern day on Tuesday August 03, 2010 @05:53AM (#1570660)
The pictures of the Heldenplatz (here in Vienna) are particularly sobering, considering that its a very bright and vibrant place these days .. oh, except for the one week a year when the Austrian military put on their big displays there, of course .. that is a bit freaky.
Re:Ghost of WWII: 1940's meticulously overlaid on modern day on Tuesday August 03, 2010 @05:52AM (#1570656)
I live in Vienna, and am constantly on the lookout for signs of the old wars. Its a very sobering experience to walk down some street and then realize later that was the site of intense street fighting and massacre.
Re:Damn Cool Algorithms: Levenshtein Automata on Tuesday August 03, 2010 @05:47AM (#1570650)
I first encountered the Levenshtein distance at work (where I am part of a team developing SIL-4 level operating systems for use in the transportation industry), as part of our coding rules which describe the differences in variable names allowed (e.g. "char fic; char foc; // ") .. After I looked up the algorithm on my own intuition, I realized it had applicability to MIDI sequences in unique ways, and thats how it came about.
Re:If Calvin Took Ritalin (A Tragedy In Four Panels) on Friday July 30, 2010 @08:39AM (#1560897)
>Too bad people will stick with their stereotypical nonsense regardless.

Doubleplusgood, brother. Non-pharma though-proc, rectified!

Re:If Calvin Took Ritalin (A Tragedy In Four Panels) on Friday July 30, 2010 @08:38AM (#1560890)
In light of the WEIRD study, medicating children for anything deemed by this society to be 'un-normal' is a tragedy.
Re:Damn Cool Algorithms: Levenshtein Automata on Thursday July 29, 2010 @08:03AM (#1557287)
Great article, and as it happens right now I'm using this algorithm in a hardware MIDI sequencer I'm working on .. it works very well for phrase-based recognition of patterns in a MIDI context, also ..
Re:Oolong Engine is an iPad / iPhone / iPod touch Engine on Monday July 26, 2010 @10:27AM (#1548091)
The reason for this all-encompassing effort, I believe, is that it gives the Developer everything they need to get started and get rolling .. while at the same time giving the Artist everything they need to get started as well. It doesn't matter what engine you use, if you've got Art assets that don't jive with what your engine expects, then you've got a massive, extraordinary headache, as a Developer.

Also, the point of having yet another accelerometer/input suite is platform compatability .. these engines aren't very useful if they restrict you to a single platform, so they go for as many platforms as possible .. well all of these platforms have to have a common input method, and thats why the engines have to account for it - so that a developer can target the Engine, not the Platform, and benefit from having all these other target architectures available to them ..

Disclaimer: I've built my own 3D engine for use on Android/iPhone/Plaszma/Linux-AngstromOE environments ..

Re:Deploy your own satellite for $8000 on Tuesday July 20, 2010 @10:11AM (#1532097)
So buy two packages, put an Ion drive in one, payload in the other, have them mate in orbit.
Re:Zed Shaw on C++ on Friday July 16, 2010 @05:00AM (#1520697)
Because you're too busy waiting for all that C++ code to compile before you can be too busy debugging it ..

FtFT! :)

Meh. Wake me up when you can use the device itself to write software for the device. Until then, the barrier to entry is still too high.
Re:WikiLeaks will Not be abandoned. on Monday July 12, 2010 @05:23AM (#1507298)
>threat to national security

The real threat to national security is the predominance of special-interest groups who are currently in control of the US Military machine, having it fight un-just, disgusting wars, in the name of the United States of America.

The true threat to national security is the Pentagon itself, which simply wouldn't be necessary if it weren't creating its own reasons for war around the world.

You want real national security? Stand down your soldiers, America. That is the only true way to be secure in your beds, Americans.

Re:Dear Apple, what the dock? on Tuesday July 06, 2010 @07:22AM (#1490625)
Audio too?
Re:Did Americans in 1776 have British accents? on Monday July 05, 2010 @06:10AM (#1487857)
Australian here .. I've always had a bloody atrocious time in my travels, with my accent .. so I just standardized on "American-sounding" and I get along just fine with people understanding me, mostly, about 100% of the time .. except when I reveal I'm from Australia, and the whole thing unravels into a nationalism-filled diatribe about how I'm not a "true Aussie" since I don't speak A'Strine properly ..

I am a true Australian, since I don't actually live there, and consider anyone else living there, not an Aborigine, to be just a bunch of bloody tourist wankers, heh heh ..

>Despite your jabs at my theoretical personality flaws, we clearly agree.

Just wondering if you've considered the delivery, not the message, is what may be getting in your way here .. I've seen it go both ways, also. If the person has genuine statistics on record of having had a startup success, then no problems: but if the claims are being made without any real basis to back them up, well then .. that can get mighty cold, mighty fast. The hacker elite respect none whose words are mightier than their deeds ..

"Culture through Osmosis" isn't really a popular model around these parts .. you're going to have to burn, baby, burn ..
Paul is no longer in Austria - he moved to the States, following that grand hacker dream of success in Silicon Valley .. but as far as I know, he was Mr. Startup, indeed..
Re:Will the real programmers please stand up? on Wednesday June 30, 2010 @07:06AM (#1474462)
Doing something theoretically difficult in code during an interview is one thing - but having a compiler in front of you to help you get through that difficulty is another thing entirely.

The point is to determine whether you are a programmer because you think like one, or if you are a programmer because your compiler thinks like one, for you. Surely, if you rely on your edit-compile-test-hack-edit.. loop to get you through the problem, thats okay: most programmers work like this.

But the really good programmers, ones that are valuable to all sorts of conditions of development, can work out a problem pretty rapidly without needing the workflow-loop to get to the conclusion. These sorts of tests, outside the 'normal environment' in which programmers usually operate, don't really point out the programming-efficiency of the person, but do point out how much they depend on tools to be the programmer they are ..

Myself, I also thought of 3 different ways to reverse the list before I sat down to write any code. And even now, with my compiler in front of me, I'm not entirely sure there isn't some brilliant one-liner to solve the problem. I am, however, sure that once I've compiled a solution, and run it, and seen that it does indeed work, I can walk away from the problem satisfied that I at least got something working, even if it wasn't the best solution. The degree of effectiveness of my approach and my process is what is being measured, here, I would imagine, by the interviewer ..

Re:Ask HN: What were your naivetés in your twenties? on Wednesday June 30, 2010 @04:14AM (#1474214)
A couple things from this forty-year old:

1. If you want to have kids, do it sooner rather than later. The sooner you have them, the better: they grow up so fast, you'll still have time in your 40's to enjoy life with them as teenagers, if you're lucky. If you leave it too late, you'll be pretty disconnected from their teen lives, and hell .. what 40-year old doesn't enjoy the odd jaunt with their teenage kids, eh? I know I wish I'd had my kids a decade sooner .. and don't let anyone tell you its hard, either. Its not hard, if you love them enough, to keep your lives together and do well as a family. Family units are the strongest groups you will ever find or belong to, if they are indeed a unit ..

2. The wisdom of the Mob. It doesn't exist in nearly as palatable a form as most people might desire, and there is also the ugly truth that the Mob can be downright stupid. Collective truth is often full of lies. You would be wise to exercise your ability to disassociate yourself from collective thought as often, and as early, as possible. This means, always question "what everyone else knows to be true" four, five, six times, before you use it as a basis for life decisions .. The Mob wishes to Eat you, Individual, and Never Forget That!

3. Save. Save, save, save. 10% of your money saved on a regular basis now is a huge relief in the future. I wish I'd enforced this on myself a bit better in the 20's .. you simply cannot avoid the fact that if you save during your most productive years, your least productive years will be better off for it ..

In fact Paul may be one of the reasons why "startups", as a subject, is such a tender one in the Metalab scene. You can talk about "startups" for years without actually starting one.

It seems that there is a particular brand of arrogance required of anyone trying to get something new done in the world of The Mob Mind, and that Mob Mind may well already be on its way to agitation in the Metalab scene, with regards to startups .. However, that arrogance persists in the Metalab scene, in the form of others, in the wings, preparing their new ideas for delivery.

No, you're wrong about Metalab - there are plenty of people in the Metalab scene who would respond to your ideas if you were to make the effort to present them .. metalab is a hotbed of new-startup activity and some of the hackers there are really trying to make money, rather than just get it from their parents, as so many "smart kids in Vienna" do these days ..

What you might be interpreting as disinterest in the subject of startups is more like to be a disinterest in the means by which you are preaching to the converted .. sure you're not just getting a negative personal response and broadly generalizing it to avoid discomfort?

Well, you're wrong. There are tons of people in the Metalab scene who are into making money, and who want to get their startups rolling .. otherwise why else would there be so many startup meetings there in the first place?

>I don't think my talk would be welcome, or I would be given the cold shoulder, so I don't put myself through it.

Weird. Preach to the converted, much?

Re:New service cleans up whiteboard pics with an email on Tuesday June 29, 2010 @07:22AM (#1471034)
Alternative: Learn to use Inkscape.
Instead of 'doing coffee' with all these guys, why don't you come to Metalab on Friday night and hold a few lightning talks?

http://metalab.at/

>I think a bit part of Austrians having inhibitions about starting their own businesses is as you say, the mindset.

I think its the rampant Marxism, frankly. So many brainwashed people in this society think that success = criminal behaviour, and that to be a successful capitalist means you have to be an utter thief. To be fair, the Austrian society has its statistics in this department, which go back to before the Austro-Hungarian empire, and I doubt some dubious American-style hype festival is going to change much about that.

>Ah, I thought everybody wanted to be successful? ;)

In Vienna? HAH AHA HAHAHA HAHA AHHA HAHA HAHA HA HAAA!!!

ROFL

You haven't lived here long.

Getting down on the ground and playing with your kids > dating/video games/movies.

If not, you're doing it wrong.

You're right, sys/queue.h is wonderful ..

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