Hacker News Reader

JackWebbHelleron Google App Engine Silently Stopped Sending Email 5 Weeks Ago

Chris, you say Gmail tightened up their spam filters... Did this take place in the last ~6 weeks or so?

I've noticed the spam filter on Gmail for Google Apps has gotten significantly less accurate recently, resulting in far more false-positives than usual. Any ideas if this is a known issue? I can only presume it's more accurate overall, but it was definitely a noticeable change for our organisation.

JackWebbHelleron I made a cell phone [video]

Which conference is this?

I tried Googling "!!Con" and obviously the exclamation marks don't count as part of the search term. Apparently Google doesn't know what I mean by "exclamation mark exclamation mark con" either. There's also no link in their YouTube channel...

JackWebbHelleron Firefox makes click-to-activate Flash the default

The update process is horrendous. Redirect to Adobe's website, follow a 3-step 'wizard' - where Step 2 is a placebo 10-second loading bar saying it is "initialising" - and Step 3 is an advertisement for installing other crap from Adobe.

After all that you have to download a DMG, close all your applications and reinstall from scratch. Why not just build in an auto-update in the background and be done with it...

JackWebbHelleron SpaceX – Launch Vehicle Failure

So what's going to happen to the astronauts aboard the ISS - this was a resupply mission. How much longer can they stay up there with their current supplies?

JackWebbHelleron Press Me: The buttons that lie to you

Although they may seem redundant, buttons on pedestrian crossings are vital for disabled people to know when it is safe to cross.

Most UK crossings beep when it's safe to cross (for the blind), and have small jagged cones[1] on the bottom that can be felt spinning around in your hand (for the deaf and blind).

[1] http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/660/media/images/67872000/jpg/_...

JackWebbHelleron WikiLeaks publishes 30,000 leaked Sony documents

https://wikileaks.org/sony/emails/emailid/139607

So it would seem Scott Forstall (of Apple) is now an advisor to Snapchat, and owns 0.11% of the stock... I'd been wondering what he'd been up to after Apple.

JackWebbHelleron Introducing UberTAXI

Actually it follows the same fare rate as the taxis themselves, plus 5% extra to Uber for the convenience of the service.

Fare info: http://www.tfl.gov.uk/modes/taxis-and-minicabs/taxi-fares?ci...

JackWebbHelleron Introducing UberTAXI

> "We recognise the unique heritage and value of traditional black cabs when it comes to getting around. UberTAXI is another way of using technology to offer more choice, making life simpler and keeping London moving"

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

JackWebbHelleron HomeKit

Is Z-Wave the same thing as a Zigbee mesh network? I know that's what Philips Hue uses.

JackWebbHelleron Sheerwind

Why is the funnel intake octagonal? Making it circular would be more aesthetically pleasing, or is there a technical reason why having 8 'separate' entrances is required?

Secondly, paint the funnel intake and top section green, and the 'trunk' brown, stick these on top of a hill, and from a distance it could pass for a tree. Much more visually pleasing than a traditional wind turbine.

JackWebbHelleron iGoogle switched off

... Internet Pod? For an offline music player?

JackWebbHelleron Regex for matching words in the English dictionary

This was generated with frak - https://github.com/noprompt/frak

"frak transforms collections of strings into regular expressions for matching those strings. The primary goal of this library is to generate regular expressions from a known set of inputs which avoid backtracking as much as possible"

JackWebbHelleron Prism: Create and explore personalized infographics of your SMS history

Imagine if this was actually created by the NSA (I mean, naming it Prism seems too obvious to be true), and we're all just falling into it's aesthetically-pleasing honeytrap.

JackWebbHelleron UK Porn Filter Will Censor Other Content Too, ISPs Reveal

I'm not sure if it affects all carriers or not. But you can opt-out, you just have to go through an age-verification process - usually providing a credit card number to confirm you are over 18.

JackWebbHelleron Partial Tesla Model S recall

(Assuming this was meant as a reply to my comment) - I do understand that, I pretty much just bought a single share to say I had one, and see how it would perform, more as an experiment and out of curiosity than an actual business interest.

JackWebbHelleron Partial Tesla Model S recall

I bought my first ever share - a single share in Tesla - two weeks ago. I saw the headline and my heart sank.

But if you have to deliver bad news, that is how you do it - proactively and efficiently. It answers every question a Model S owner will have whilst providing solutions to every problem. Brilliant.

JackWebbHelleron Peter Molyneux may have just monetized trolling

> "Its a strange situation where it is legal to do something to a human that is illegal to do to a computer"

What is illegal to do to a computer, in this case...?

JackWebbHelleron Show HN: Tweetspiration – let Twitter brainstorm ideas for you

"Someone should make an app that tells me how much pizza i am"

Well, I know what I'm doing for my weekend project!

JackWebbHelleron Space Monkey: Taking the cloud out of the datacenter

Whoops, I understand now! Thanks.

JackWebbHelleron Space Monkey: Taking the cloud out of the datacenter

Also, there's really no reason for this to be a special device. It easily be a blob on your computer's hard drive

Uh... If it was on your computer's hard drive and your hard drive failed, it wouldn't be much use as a backup system, would it?

JackWebbHelleron Space Monkey: Taking the cloud out of the datacenter

Dropbox does this too. I think I read somewhere that they md5 your file and see if matches one already on the network, if so, they just replicate a 'link' to that file in your account.

That's why sometimes if you upload a movie you downloaded, it uploads in a matter of seconds.

JackWebbHelleron Show HN: What colour is your IP address?

People are bashing this for being 'pointless', but hey, so is the next great to-do list app you made in 48 hours. This is a fun little experiment.

I can see an actual use for this. Look for example at Identicons, Wavatars, and MonsterIDs[1]. They all use browser variables to generate random avatars for use around the web, e.g. on blog comments. I imagine this could do something similar, and a nice colour palette is a little more classy than a monster.

[1] http://blog.gravatar.com/2008/04/22/identicons-monsterids-an...

JackWebbHelleron Annual income of richest 100 people enough to end global poverty four times over

We all know it's just not that simple...

JackWebbHelleron How to Tackle Three of the Toughest Interview Questions

"Tell me about one of your weaknesses..."

At this point, hand the interviewer a card you had pre-prepared, which reads "My over-preparation sometimes comes across as arrogance".

JackWebbHelleron Wikipedia (English) starting to migrate to MariaDB

Which database system Wikipedia is currently using?

JackWebbHelleron 23andMe raises $50M, cuts price to $99, sets goal of 1M genotyped customers

Only on Hacker News would the top reply to a comment about a person discovering their father was not their biological father be about privacy and opt-ins...

JackWebbHelleron Portal’s physics engine rebuilt in 25KB—on a graphing calculator

I think that's the joke...

JackWebbHelleron Microsoft mocks Internet Explorer haters in new ad [video]

Usually a video with 301 views means it's suddenly exploded virally. YouTube 'stops counting' temporarily at 300 views whilst it verifies that a video is being legitimately viewed by many people in a short space of time, rather than people artificially inflating their viewcount by whatever methods they can.

In a matter of minutes or hours that number will suddenly increase significantly.

So it's an anti-spam measure. There's a short explainer here: http://www.seroundtable.com/youtube-301-views-15347.html

JackWebbHelleron I almost feel obligated to pirate Office for Mac

>> So? Set up with a VPN that has stateside IPs, or build your own on AWS.

Is that a serious suggestion...?!