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alsothingson InstaNerd

First thought: Why are there no references anywhere? Second thought: Must be because it's so difficult to put links in a webpage.

alsothingson InstaNerd

this was my first thought and it's driving me nuts. It's just a bunch of floating assertions.

alsothingson The humble USB cable is part of an electrical revolution

USB was defacto standard for data transfer, especially on PCs, but the /connector/ on the phone side was not at all standards compliant or uniform across makes and models, and up until the passage of that law, it wasn't uncommon for the power port to be separate. Now that is basically unheard of. I'm not saying the law is the only reason for this change, but it is clearly a big factor, yet it is omitted from this article.

alsothingson The humble USB cable is part of an electrical revolution

CANBUS +1. Would love to nudge the ardunio-ish end of the IoT community in that direction.

alsothingson The humble USB cable is part of an electrical revolution

I find it notable that this article entirely ignores the EU's Common Electrical Power Supply law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_External_Power_Supply), which effectively mandated that all smart phones sold in the EU use micro USB for power. This had a swift and noticeable effect in the diversity of connectors in phones (basically Apple is the only maker that doesn't use micro USB and this change happened at the exact time of the law). The emergence of USB as The Way Phones are Charged didn't happen as a magic emergent property, but via considered government regulation. Government: it can actually work.

alsothingson The cold emails which got me meetings at Twitter, LinkedIn and GitHub

possible, I'm much less sure about my use of passed versus past here then the use of which instead of that in the title. That said, I had thought 'get' did not indicate motion across the sentence here 'passed' did, so passed is correct. But I could totally believe I'm doing it wrong.

alsothingson The cold emails which got me meetings at Twitter, LinkedIn and GitHub

I thought you were right for a second, but I'm fairly certain that 'passed' is what I meant. It's the past tense of pass, and thus the correct word. see http://www.grammar-monster.com/easily_confused/past_passed.h... for a good set of examples.

I appreciate that the which/that distinction is tricky, but one is a restrictive clause and the other is not, changing the meaning of the sentence.

alsothingson The cold emails which got me meetings at Twitter, LinkedIn and GitHub

I cannot get passed the title. Unless the only cold emails the author sent were the ones that got the meetings, s/which/that.

(Actually I did read the article, and in it she says "cold emails produced 7 meetings at Twitter, Klout, LinkedIn", so either she sent 7 cold emails or the title should use 'that' not 'which')

alsothingson Minecraft adds Ordnance Survey Great Britain terrain data

“The raw height data is stored in metres and must be scaled down to fit within the 256 block height limit in Minecraft. A maximum height of 2 500 metres was chosen, which means Ben Nevis, appears just over 128 blocks high.

“Although this exaggerates the real-world height, it preserves low-lying coastal features such as Bournemouth's cliffs, adding interest to the landscape.”

- http://www.pcgamesn.com/minecraft/ordnance-survey-recreate-g...

So they are keeping to the 256 block height, but being slightly creative with the vertical scale...

alsothingson An Apology From TechCrunch

I mean, this http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/09/the-re... was not comedy and it happend all of a few days ago.

alsothingson The Thing I Didn't Build

tl;dr - nothing on the web is private.

alsothingson Is there any such thing as 'road tax'? (UK: Cars vs Cyclists)

It's perhaps worth mentioning that there's a pro-cyclist campaign around this issue that's been going for a few years (full disclosure, I have one of their jerseys) http://ipayroadtax.com/

alsothingson Is there any such thing as 'road tax'? (UK: Cars vs Cyclists)

I believe this headline is a very clear example of Betteridge's law of headlines[1], since the answer is 'No'.

I'll also just add that road surface wear and tear is to a significant extent and function of vehicle weight. If car driver want to yell at people for using more than their fair share of the road, yell at HGVs.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headline...

alsothingson City of London Bans 'Smart' Trash Cans

A bit of context, these bins tracked wifi enabled devices as they passed by for various targeted marketing things. http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/londons-smart-bins-track-4m-...

alsothingson [dead]

duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5933422

alsothingson Ask HN: Help create a new word: Solusify

Is it meant to be an amalgam of 'solution' and '-ify'?

Can you differentiate between other similar already in use terms like 'yak shaving' http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving or 'bikeshedding' http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding ?

alsothingson Never Lie About Who You Really Are

sure, but I've never know someone, when introducing their spouse, to say 'this is my common-law [husband|wife]'. Among other problems, it's quite awkward.

alsothingson Never Lie About Who You Really Are

This describes me (I live in the UK). I'm 31 I've been in a lovely heteronormative relationship for eight years. We aren't married, and we've called each other 'partner' for years. In my head it lives in the linguistic space between '[boy|girl]friend' and the state-sponsored '[husband|wife]'. I also enjoy its gender neutrality.

alsothingson Make the Metric system the standard in the United States

This is because in both the US and the UK, imperial measures are legally defined in metric units. A pint is 568ml, by definition (well, in the UK, the US believes a pint is 454ml, but that's another argument).

alsothingson Make the Metric system the standard in the United States

yes! As a US expat in europe, this never ceases to cause me trouble. Plus the A size ratios are just lovely.

alsothingson Draw.io Doomsday sale - 100% off for 24 hours

+1 I'd love that.

alsothingson How would you design a chicken?

self-buttering chicken makes me drool at my desk. Would that make it a cow-chicken hybrid though (assuming it's butter from cow's milk anyway)

alsothingson How would you design a chicken?

Is very low fat necessarily optimal? I think excessively fatty birds are a problem, but depending on use, I suspect a non-zero percentage of fat is desirable. Though I have no idea what the optimal amount would be. But in plenty of food applications, grease is good.

alsothingson How would you design a chicken?

Obviously they should be cube shaped, to facilitate more efficient shipping.

alsothingson Outlawed by Amazon DRM

I'm a fan of foyles[1] and their selection and prices are quite good.

[1]http://www.foyles.co.uk/

alsothingson Lessons in website security anti-patterns by Tesco

The post advocates simply staying reasonably up to date, then says that IIS 6 is unreasonably old. relevant bit:

This is not necessarily a high-intensity exercise, once every few years you simply make sure you haven’t fallen too far behind the eight ball. Certainly you don’t let key software components get 9 years old and nearly 5 versions out of date.

This is quite a bit less intensive then you describe and I think it's reasonable to expect that a website taking payments not be more the a couple years out of date.

alsothingson Lessons in website security anti-patterns by Tesco

Unless/until Tesco have their databases hacked or stolen there is no risk at all.

This is not the case. The most glaring reason why was pointed out in the posted article. It very clearly showed that Tesco failed to communicate logged-in state information (stored in a cookie) between the client and server over an encrypted line. This means your account is vulnerable to attack without the entire db being leaked.

alsothingson Face.com closes its API after Facebook purchase

The interesting point here to me is, is there any obligation for service continuity across an acquisition? Any at all?

alsothingson ACTA IS BACK: Leaked docs show EU Commission trying to sneak ACTA via Canada

source article: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6580/135/

alsothingson United States Pirate Party

I believe the relevant idiom here is "the solution to 'bad' speech is not limits, but more speech".

If someone is a nut, don't censor them, mock them. It's much more effective.