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Suanon Show HN: sachet – handcraft your Vim environment online

Sent a pull request for "set clipboard=unnamedplus": https://github.com/aam1r/sachet/pull/10

Suanon John Carmack: Latency Mitigation Strategies

Misread as "Legacy Mitigation Strategies" - that would have been a good read as well.

Suanon We Should Expect To Pay For Small Open Source Projects

This plus moxie's comment (currently top) really sum it up nicely. Unless I get on the order of $500 or more for it a month, I won't stop seeing something as a side project or hobby. I certainly don't want the support responsibilities that come along with paid products.

Knowing that you've solved an unsolved problem in some niche, putting it out there, and seeing others voluntarily use it is far more gratifying than whatever small sum of income such a scheme might net you. This applies even more when those others start helping contributing back.

Suanon The Promise of Firefox OS

This thought has been in my head ever since I read this HN comment last night: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5199006

To everyone saying that this has been tried and failed with Java Applets / Silverlight / Flash: what those technologies did was try to shoehorn app-like environments into the browser, which of course annoyed users because it broke all kinds of expectations when compared to visiting regular HTML pages.

What I (and I think, the OP) have in mind is an actual 2nd "browser". A different standalone app. I envision something where "webapp" authors can post manifests at URL endpoints which define the UI and behavior (not unlike styling in Android), and this 2nd browser will "render" the webapp using native widgets and controls. This brings with it a number of things:

  - OMG! The basic keyboard shortcuts all my other native apps have are now available, instead of some poorly hacked-together javascript-detected version
  - Rich user interaction with the app and the controls is now a first-class citizen - no more weird highlighting of the entire page, or unexpected popping-up and disappearing of elements on misclicks
  - Right click can actually be used, without hacks!
  - Opening a new "window" with a new app actually creates an OS-level window with the icon and name being the webapp's favicon - furthering the notion that you're actually using an app and not visiting a website.
  - It still retains the main advantages of the web - it's cross-platform and ubiquitous (and users don't have to go through the hassle of explicitly installing and updating native apps)
  - I'm sure developing highly interactive webapps for this platform would be a lot simpler, more fundamentally sound, and more enjoyable than the huge hack that is HTML5/AJAX now
  - etc etc

It would really surprise me if nobody has thought through this idea in more detail than me, or if there isn't someone out there working on something like this already...

(EDIT: formatting)

Suanon Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows

I've been trying to think what is the root cause of this sad state of affairs on Windows. Attacking the scammers is not going to work since obviously their scams are profitable (and legal enough to get away with...)

Is it (the lack of) education among users? I find it curious that when compared to financial products, where improving financial education is often brought up as a solution, there's a lot less mention of education when it comes to cases like these. Sadly this kind of "don't fall for these scams" computing education is not very transferrable to more productive uses of computing.

In a free market, if users stop falling for this crap (admittedly a tall order on Windows) then the scammers will naturally go out of business.

Suanon Show HN: my useless weekend project, add speech bubbles to images

Really nice domain name too! So many sites have .it, .io, etc domain names where the TLD doesn't mean anything at all and it's glaringly obvious it's just cause they couldn't get the .com. In this case it works very nicely.

Suanon Apple kills a Kickstarter project

A big thing for me are the Macbook trackpads (and the standalone magic trackpads). They're just so awesome to use and no other manufacturer's comes close to Apple's.

Suanon Letters: A tiny debugging library for Ruby

The problem this is trying to solve is an annoying one - so much so that I just wrote something similar a couple of weeks ago: https://github.com/suan/quick-debug

Letters seems like a better way to do it though.

Suanon Mousetrap: Keyboard shortcuts in Javascript

If anyone is looking for a way to let users enter keycombos which you could then use with Mousetrap, I wrote this: http://suan.github.com/jquery-keycombinator/

Suanon Python Packaging: Hate, hate, hate everywhere

One reason is that many distros are very slow to update the versions of these packages. It's much easier to get up-to-date packages from language-specific package managers.

Suanon JQuery plugin which lets your users easily define keyboard shortcuts

Plugin author here. There seems to be many solutions out there which let a developer specify keyboard shortcuts code-side, but nothing which lets their users easily enter/change keyboard shortcuts in a text box, with good usability. Here's my attempt at the problem.

Hopefully if this is easier, productivity sites like github will start to allow users to define their own keyboard shortcuts rather than forcing down a predefined set on you.

Suanon Writing Browser Extensions - Comparing Firefox, Chrome and Opera

On my Android 2.3 phone with stock browser, when I tap an image, the image _below_ it gets highlighted, even though the correct image is opened - horribly confusing.

Also when an image is being viewed, you can't swipe to go to the previous/next image. I believe this works on the iPhone.

Suanon Inside Aaron’s Apartment: A Most Amazing Bedroom

At first I thought the cube-like stairs were the part which dropped down into the floor when the knob is turned, like something out of a futuristic movie.

Was just a little disappointed when I saw that that wasn't the case :)

Suanon Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas

Supposedly these seemingly dull ideas are beachheads.

Are they really, though? It seems to me that many successful startups are simply bought over by another big company and their "beachhead" is eventually lost in the acquiring behemoth.

Suanon Show HN: WYSIWYG-editing Markdown with Hallo Editor

Here's a WYSIWYG (md-to-html only though) plugin for Vim, if that's your preferred workflow: https://github.com/suan/vim-instant-markdown It uses Github README styling too

(Disclaimer: I wrote it)

Suanon HN: Name a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve

A controllable, smartphone-based car entertainment system.

Any smartphone could be plugged in via a USB-like cable which transfers I/O, audio and power. The car's up/down/left/right "radio" buttons would then control like/dislike/next/previous for Pandora-like apps running on the phone. Throw in another 2 buttons or so for other functions. There would be an open "key-mapping" standard which would be implemented in the OSes which music apps could tap into. There would be a standard set of programmable-per-app buttons (not unlike video game controllers)

Voice is unusable when music is playing and touchscreens are too dangerous. Mobile and digital entertainment technologies move so fast, yet I only change my car twice in 3 decades or so - I don't want to be constrained by what technology was available when I bought it.

Suanon Need name approval from community

I personally can't stand names that end with "ly" for no good reason (assistly, embedly, ugh. If its an actual word, like "carefully", then fine) So that leaves Flekko, which is neither good nor bad IMO.

Suanon Goldman's new money machine: warehouses

Unfortunately I feel not much is going to change until something even more drastic happens (think brink of revolution), and that makes me sad.

Suanon Famous Logos Designed Entirely in CSS

I think it shows that people will work on what people like working on, especially during their precious free time.

If you rake your memory you could probably find points in time when you were working on something you really enjoyed, even though you had other good ideas that would better benefit the community. I know I certainly have been in that situation.

Suanon Famous Logos Designed Entirely in CSS

Its confusing as well. Before clicking the link I thought they would be icons (newer ones, naturally) which were designed from scratch using CSS.

Suanon Bank of America to charge monthly fee to debit card users

Reminds me of something I tweeted a while ago:

"Something's wrong when its easier to earn credit card cash back than interest on savings..."

http://twitter.com/#!/suanyeo/status/106413797811568640

Suanon GitHub Hits 1,000,000 users

http://projectlocker.com/ provides free private git repositories. Sure, their GUI is nowhere close to Github's, but you get what you pay for.

Suanon Why there aren't many innovators in China

I'm a Chinese Malaysian and pretty familiar with Chinese culture and their ways. For those of you who might be skeptical, I think this article quite accurate.

I've tried hard to think of recent Chinese tech inventions that are truly new, and not a ripoff of a popular existing product, and could never come up with any, until just recently. I bought one of these "Air Fly Mouse" http://www.airflymouse.com/ and it works as advertised! Here's to more innovation coming from China.

Suanon Why Instapaper Free is taking an extended vacation

Amen. My $0.99 app (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2407744) for Android which has been out for more than a month and costs $0.99 has seen only 6 downloads (4 of which are my friends!) I'm really curious as to how it will "sell" if I change it to free, and if there was an iOS version.

Suanon Show HN: Call Me Not: solving the "when to call?" problem.

Thanks for your thoughts dasht! I created this app mainly for my own uses to not call my girlfriend when she's in class, and initially when I went searching for such an app, the queries I used were similar to "reverse call blocker", and "outgoing call blocker", hence the title. That said I might change it to something else...

The "Call Me Not" app name I agree is confusing, but it sounded really catchy and a whole lot better than "Call You Not", so we stuck with it.

We did consider other groupware/google calendar approaches as well, but there was the question of implementation and the receivers' incentives to download the app and/or publish "don't call" times on their calendars. We ultimately decided on this approach for a first pass since it fit _my_ needs perfectly, at least. Completely changing the mechanics in later versions is not out of the question though, and will be based on valuable feedback we get from users like you =)

UPDATE: Title changed as per suggestion!

Suanon ThingSpeak: an open source "Internet of Things" API

Also see: http://www.violet.net/_mirror-give-powers-to-your-objects.ht... (Violet also frequently uses "The Internet of Things" when marketing their products). I wrote a hacker-friendly app for the mir:ror at http://mirlite.heroku.com

Suanon Ask HN: HOW did YOU learn to program?

Its debatable whether it counts as actual "programming", but one of my first related learning experiences was designing starcraft and warcraft 3 maps. While I almost didn't write any _code_, I nevertheless had to construct conditionals, triggers, events, loops etc through the GUI which probably helped a lot when I started actual coding during my Java class.

Plus it was so fun too - I could make something quite tangible and "braggable" (a custom game map I could play with friends) without too much difficulty and syntax overhead. Sometimes I wonder if such game map editors should be utilized more in teaching programming to students; they certainly got _me_ interested in programming.