Hacker News Reader

4rton Apple Reports Second Quarter Results

i guess it makes it more visible. apple products are very expensive and everybody knows that now, not just computery people.

4rton Luxury Music Festival Turns Out to Be Half-Built Scene of Chaos

it reminded me of theranos, but maybe only because it's on HN.

4rton Tesla, Inc. Slashes the Price of Model S

thanks. uMatrix wouldn't even let me visit with my current rule set.

4rton Nintendo Discontinues the NES Classic Edition

i'd not heard that. but the way it was marketed always seemed to me to be another small experiment in nintendo's non-stop attempts to artificially limit supply. they seemed to use it to test word of mouth and their viral marketing abilities ready for the switch.

4rton Brian Eno Plays the Universe

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/n3ct0c2k

i really enjoyed this - "bbc hardtalk brian eno" if it doesn't work in your jurisdiction

4rton Teen hacks Pentagon websites, gets thanked for finding 'bugs'

they should do the same moratorium for hackers as is suggested for weed smokers maybe

4rton How big an issue is the nausea problem for VR products?

i had my only ever car crash the morning after getting my dk2. no excuses, but i'm interested if it might have been related.

4rton How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

LINQ is far from wonky, it's essentially just a bunch of lambdas built to create execution trees which can be optimised then converted to e.g. SQL.

it's powerful and using typed-compile-time-checked LINQ for building DB queries is far superior as a developer experience than some monolithic blocks of SQL text and a test suite.

asp.net5 is getting pretty decent (and close to release) so for current projects I use c# to host my API and bootstrap the app up, but all the frontends are modern js frameworks (using typescript) rather than MS MVC.

4rton Ask HN: Should I be concerned about this job offer?

I'd heed the advice in here. It sounds like a big project to take on as a lone student.

On the other hand, you can go in guns blazing and be professional and fair and say "this is unrealistic I need to hire someone" and you could easily have yourself a software company funded primarily by somebody else's misguided speculation.

4rton Why London Underground stopped people walking up the escalators

i like to go up escalators doing two steps at once because it makes me feel like john cleese taking giant strides up like 10 feet.

4rton Emscripten and WebAssembly

i'm using the emscriptenised version of bullet physics library for a web pool simulation - it does work surprisingly well.

4rton Inside the Creation of the Microsoft Surface Book

the bits about the importance of the "hinge being able to connect two devices going forwards" in the middle of the article really made me remember the MS "courier" prototype.

i really suspect they'll launch a "second touchscreen" peripheral that replaces the keyboard section of the surfacebook.

4rton Ants show that emergency exits can work better when they’re obstructed

no link, but there was a good article or documentary about 10 years ago about how you can improve throughput of an automatic-opening double door by putting a bollard in the centre. iirc it was over 2x increase.

basically people aim for the centre and people cluster up waiting for them to pass instead of having 2 way travel all the time.

4rton Repository of censored and sensitive Chinese keywords

did they really censor the numbers 89 and 6.4?

how do they teach counting?

4rton Intelligence Officer’s Bookshelf

the whole point of this list is paragraph 1

4rton A foodie repents

well, i enjoyed it. he makes valid points throughout.

4rton A green file format: WWF

they announced this a few years ago.

it'd just a PDF with the no-print flag set.

unfortunately it means registering a whole new file type for the promise of a lack of functionality combined with increasing all your document file sizes by appending a huge WWF advert to the end of everything.

really quite a stupid idea.

4rton Apple CEO Tim Cook Outed As Gay

sure, who cares. the answer is in the article.

4rton Share: The Icon No One Agrees On

on a tangent - when the hell did "zoom" and "search" icons become identical.

i find it confusing.

4rton Security researcher Cédric 'Sid' Blancher dead at 37

let me guess: bag, padlock, bath

4rton The Stupidity of Windows 8 in a Nutshell

... ignoring the fact that you can have multiple metro apps on screen just like with any other tiling window manager.

i think there's a good argument that manually micro-managing the sizes and positions of overlapping windows (some of which can additionally be application or system modal) is a waste of time and gives few benefits.

whilst the metro apps are all pretty cut down at the moment - and there's a lot of work to do before it can viably replace the old desktop - i have no real issue with this as the direction of progress.

4rton Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

higher resolutions screens certainly do though

4rton Facebook vulnerability 2013

just pay the guy, it's $4k.

the language barriers are enough to justify any mistakes made in conforming precisely with the t&cs. he didn't abuse the hack. he reported it to you. pay him tbh.

4rton IPhone 5 vs. Canon 5D Mark III

if that guy can't spot the difference, what is he doing with a $4k camera?

4rton Mini-server at home, any good hardware options other than Mac Mini?

i got one of these when there was £100 cashback, meaning the total cost was about £130. I paid another £40 for 4gb of ECC ram so I could use it like a real server.

It's an excellent case design - there's a huge fan at the back pulling air over the 4 drive bays and my TB drives never go over about 25C. It's in a cupboard and unless I open the door it's totally silent.

From what I've seen of other NAS-style devices, it's pretty much unbeatable for value since it does all the same stuff but is ultimately a real, if basic, server.