Hacker News Reader

arantiuson A Dramatic Demonstration of the Power of Mental Frames by Simon Singh [video]

He specifically talked about the fact that when the brain has a "strong enough" bias, that's when it ends up telling you that its false error correction data is indeed fact.

arantiuson Why it's so hard for Toyota to find out what's wrong

> That's about 80 years of combined, daily, multi-hour a day driving.

Not to belittle your point, but you're making a common mistake. Just because "80 years" feels like a big number doesn't make it significant.

You've presented the data point of two (2) drivers. On the other hand, there are hundreds of millions of drivers, just in the USA. Even a vanishingly small percentage of failure cases would still cause hundreds of failures, across so many billions of hours of driving. And easily not appear in any sample of two drivers' experience, no matter how much driving they've done.

arantiuson Adblocking is Missing the Point

Single anonymous blogger claims that advertising is fundamentally broken, and, thus, that all the parties collectively investing billions of dollars into it each year are fools, who do no ROI calculations on their dollars spent.

Yeah right.

arantiuson Ask HN: Still using thesixtyone?

I used to go semi-frequently. I have specific musical tastes. Now, I can't help but get it to shuffle to something like 9/10 songs that I would never want to hear.

Limiting to a genre, in the old version, it used to be 1 or 2/10 that I didn't care for. I've tried a few times, but effectively have stopped using it. I can't find the same feature. The "moods" thing is not nearly as effective. It feels like it's become a radio station, and I don't listen to it for the same reason: I have no control over what it plays, and it seems to play "pop" (don't read that literally, just "things lots of people listen to") music all the time, and never what I want to hear.

I also, generally, find the new interface very difficult to use. Lots of mystery meat navigation and hard work to find what I'm looking for.

arantiuson Steve Jobs personally rejects FreedomTime iPhone app (2008)

> When the app store chooses not to carry a software product, you can always go to ??????

... one of the other mobile platforms. The OP listed four alternatives.

arantiuson Poll: What was your reaction to this item?

I use "pv" (pipe viewer) for this. So the example would be:

pv tarball.tar | tar xf -

And the output is great.

arantiuson Javascript: A Language in Search of a Standard Library and Module System

I find the fact that so many people decided to create their own "standard libraries", even after so many others were available a strong statement for the fact that one standard would be bad. Obviously, all these people had reasons strong enough not to use the existing tools, wanted something so different, that building it themselves, with all the effort involved, was a better solution.

arantiuson How Google Docs Leaks Your Identity

> Collaboration automatically opens up security problems.

I think you mean: "Collaboration automatically opens up _privacy_ problems."

arantiuson Why I’ve Fallen in Love with the Nexus One

It depends on which "an Android phone" you want to consider. Manufacturers can lock down the phone as much as they like.

The N1 however requires one simple command (which can and probably does void your warranty, depending on how nice HTC/Google feels like being) and then you can flash whatever you like.

For other phones, there's usually a nonsupported hack that will let you do the same.

arantiuson How a Hacker Asks His Date To Formal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_formal

Social event.

arantiuson A rant about PHP compilers in general and HipHop in particular.

Actually, in that same situation, I believe it was limited by memory (MB per apache+php process), and number of processes available driven by latency. Given the number of processes running on a machine, and the memory that each consumed, we "couldn't use up" the processor capacity, the memory ran out first.

Maybe we could have switched to something lighter, but the cost of all that development and testing would outweigh a handful of extra machines.

arantiuson Google's Super Bowl ad shows the need for search privacy

> Microsoft's Bing is anonymizing this information after six months by deleting the entire Internet Protocol ("IP") address associated with your search queries. Google can and should anonymize search queries in the same way after six months or less.

FUD. 20 seconds of Googling shows me:

----------------------

http://www.google.com/privacy_faq.html#toc-anonymize Why are search engine logs kept before being anonymized?

We strike a reasonable balance between the competing pressures we face, such as the privacy of our users, the security of our systems and the need for innovation. We believe anonymizing IP addresses after 9 months and cookies in our search engine logs after 18 months strikes the right balance.

----------------------

http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/search/archive/2010/01/1... Specifically, we are reducing the amount of time we store IP addresses from searchers to 6 months. Currently we keep that information for 18 months before we delete it. .. Then, after 18 months we take the additional step of deleting the IP address and any other cross session IDs associated with the query.

----------------------

"Cross session IDs"? What is that? Cookies? All cookies? In my mind, these policies are very equivalent. Google already does the same thing after six months. Probably the same thing at 18. Plus, Bing just announced this change a week or two ago.

arantiuson A rant about PHP compilers in general and HipHop in particular.

> I’ve heard the argument "you don’t need a compiler, since PHP is rarely the bottleneck" for many years. I think its complete bollox. ...

> Unless your PHP server is sitting there idling (which is probably the case for many PHP servers out there) ...

Don't these two statements (abbreviated in my quote above, but directly one after the other as quoted) directly contradict each other? My personal experience is also that the CPU is never the bottleneck in (well written) PHP apps. You're usually always waiting for the DB or the network/io latency of something else like memcache.

In fact, I know at my last job (handling ~100s of millions of dynamic PHP requests/day) that PHP's gzip compression was turned on specifically because we had gobs of spare CPU, so using it to save bandwidth was a win both for speed and for the bill.

arantiuson [dead]

> a single "Menu" entry that popped up the other menu items as an overlay menu would be great for me and would allow me to ditch the menubar

Among others: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1455

arantiuson Don’t Hash Secrets

True, but I believe the point is still valid. Given knowledge of cryptographic hashes, and ignorance of HMAC, it is a perfectly reasonable assumption to use a hash in this way. I think that's a rather common situation, and outcome.

And, blindingly obvious in hindsight (I have definitely heard of HMAC before, at least) but new to me too.

arantiuson Buying a Google Nexus One Unlocked is a Terrible Experience

The Google Voice app on any android phone will do this.

The original post is about one really specific feature, completely under T-Mobile's control (and restriction in this case), and has nothing to do with Google or the Nexus or Google Voice, or anything else mentioned.

arantiuson DoGood: Browser Plug-In for Responsible Advertising

Agreed. It doesn't matter why you're doing it. Hijacking existing ads is a dirty tactic.

arantiuson Nexus One display and subpixel pattern

It never has, even back when all the Android devices had LCD screens. I'd mostly chalk it up to not having the UI bits that normally were blue in (i.e.) gmail, so the blue just didn't show up. Text is black on white, buttons are black on grey, and there's not a lot of space left.

arantiuson Nexus One display and subpixel pattern

I have, to date, had zero trouble using my N1 phone anywhere yet. Two key points:

1) It's winter in New York City. Even outside there's not a lot of really bright sunlight.

2) The N1 has a feature (which I like) whereby, with a light sensor, it adjusts the brightness of the screen to compensate for ambient light automatically. Or: readable in light, not blinding at night.

arantiuson How to unlock and root a Nexus One

You've always been able to. The nexus one was never _carrier_ locked. (But as mentioned, the different frequency that ATT uses for 3G is unsupported -- so just voice and EDGE data.)

This "unlock" is, as described, attaining root level permissions on the phone, thus the ability to do things in software that the stock firmware disallows.

arantiuson Dear EarthLink Customer Support

The article doesn't provide any details; I'm quite curious _how_ this happened. And how did it stop?

arantiuson Google Defends Nexus One Termination Fee

> That means anyone who buys the phone online with a T-Mobile contract and wants to get out within 3 months are ...

... fools who aren't responsible enough to sign a contract in the first place, and just getting what comes to them.

Either way, it's cheaper to buy the unlocked phone.

https://www.google.com/phone/choose?locale=en_US&s7e=

Subsidized phone: $179 Subsidized service: $80 * 24 months (click "more") Total: $2099

https://www.google.com/phone/choose?locale=en_US&s7e=

Unlocked phone: $529

http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/plans/cell-phone-plans-detail.a...

No-contract plan: $50 * 24 Total: $1729

If you're stupid enough to sign up for a contract that costs more than the no-obligation version, and then you want to welsh on that contract: you've got to pay the penalties.

arantiuson Paypal is evil

> I'm tempted to ask everyone who has been affected by PayPal's "security measures" (a frozen account) to write a post and submit it to a blog.

I'm tempted to ask everyone who has _not_ been affected to do the same. Except that there are millions upon millions of them. I've used PayPal for years. I remember using eBay before PayPal. A morass of checks waiting to clear the bank and other nasty confusion was horrible.

To the original article: if you're running a business, just like with your computers, never have _any_ single point of failure. Including payment processors.

arantiuson How revolving doors are more cost-effective than traditional doors

I think "Swing doors waste ..." is more accurate. And perhaps easier to grasp. Doors don't _use_ energy, unless they're motorized.

arantiuson Thunderbird 3 released

> 1) There is no option to say "reply using the same 'from' address that the mail was sent to." ..

Used and loved this extension to solve that for some time: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/594

> 2) ... the status icon/indicator will get permanently stuck in "new mail" mode and you have to restart the app to get it to disappear.

Rarely seen similar behavior in TB2 (no upgrade yet). Goes away when I hit 'get mail'. (Forcing it to check the server, and notice the mail is read. I do IMAP exclusively.)

arantiuson Happy holidays from Gmail: Free snailmail gift cards

But the OP is specifically talking about information specifically besides that "supplied here". Like, measuring how much it really costs, the hidden challenges, etc, in setting up a large automated mailing system.

arantiuson Tell HN: Subdomains and Google Analytics don't mix

> .. appended to the beginning ..

Or, of course, prepended.

arantiuson Check the Redesigned Google (With Always-Visible Sidebar) Yourself

> The old Google linked from the SERP through a proxy link which redirected to the actual result. The new Google links directly from the SERP to the result.

It is my understanding that this is always on, but for a random subset of users. If you go drastically changing your cookies (like the instructions here tell you to) you are very likely to change the state of this flag, too.

arantiuson Do you think the whole email me at XXXXXX[at]XXXXXX[dot]com fools the spammers?

> Then you can set the catch all address, and for every website you need an email address for, you use <website>@<yourdomain>.com (eg amazon@example.com and msdn@example.com.

I do exactly that, BUT with one critical difference:

I once had a catch-all address set up for everything@example.com, but I got lots of spam to random made-up addresses. I now use everything@sub.example.com, and I don't see any spammers making up addresses within my subdomain.

Where this unfortunately breaks down seriously is those sites that require you to log in with an email address, and require you to share that login with other people. Especially paypal -- I get spam to my paypal address, because anyone I've ever bought anything from on ebay knows that address. And there is no way to both use that service and keep my email private. There's a variety of similar sites out there.

arantiuson Ask HN: How is Kosmix hacking up Google Ads?

https://www.google.com/adsense/static/en_US/Afs.html