Hacker News Reader

bobfon Chrome is Ready for Business

He's probably impressed because while that should be "a given for a non-trivial and widely-used desktop application", in reality it rarely is.

bobfon Chrome is Ready for Business

From a personal and business perspective, the thing I find most appealing about Chrome is that it feels so much faster than other browsers. In practice, this means you can extend the life of old hardware which is primarily used for browsing the web, and save money from having to upgrade.

bobfon Show HN: Profile Collage for Facebook

It would be great if you implemented a crop/preview feature, so the user could line things up properly instead of having to manually loop through editing/submiting until a decent result is achieved.

bobfon Locksmith gets less tips and more price complaints for being faster

Definitely. That story (or rather, the concept - as there are seemingly many variations on the story) was the first thing that came to mind when I read the article. Google "knowing where to tap" for (some) variations.

bobfon The 4-Hour Body: (Quickly) Hacking The Human Body

Also, after ~two semesters of college, I realized I typically focused a lot on homework, etc. during the first three weeks of the semester and started to burn out. However, it is the last three weeks of the semester that usually impact your grades the most. I changed my focus to the last three weeks, and got better grades with less effort/burn out/stress.

bobfon The 4-Hour Body: (Quickly) Hacking The Human Body

I found that to be true with school. 5% effort usually gets you a B, while the closer you wanted to get to "perfection" (100%/A+), exponentially more effort is required.

bobfon Luke Skywalker and the Story Behind the New Design of 1000Memories

The first thing I thought when reading the headline was.. "wow, that's some serious linkbaiting"

bobfon Ask HN: How to develop logical skills?

Look at LSAT prep materials.

bobfon Whose house is of glasse, must not throw stones at another

Indeed. It would be nice if dd-wrt or a variant supported a wonder-shaper sort of fix..

bobfon Today you, tomorrow me

I agree, since there is no implication in the Spanish phrase of "what can you offer in return?". The Golden Rule seems to mesh better with the original ideal expressed. I always find it interesting when literal translation, or convenience in closeness of expressions, are preferred over intended meaning.

bobfon Ask HN: How to fire sell a web startup?

Hundreds/month of revenue, with what sort of expenses? Is it mostly just the issue of the amount of time you're putting into it with relatively little return?

bobfon Today you, tomorrow me

The original Spanish expression is "Hoy por ti, mañana por mi", and I find the Golden Rule to be the closest direct application of the concept in a single expression. Interestingly, the three suggested translations of the expression I found were: "You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours", "What goes around, comes around", and "Tit for tat" (http://www.proz.com/kudoz/spanish_to_english/idioms_maxims_s...). However, none of those seem to accurately convey the sentiment/ideal expressed in the original phrase.

bobfon Ask HN: Favorite payment processor?

Amazon payments?

bobfon Mixpanel (YC S09) - Merry Christmas, Internet

Great service as always from the Mixpanel guys. Thanks!

bobfon The Anatomy of a Perfect Landing Page

Aside from the topic of landing pages - BuckyBalls seems like an extremely slimey company. Look up Buckyballs vs. Zen Magnets, or see http://boingboing.net/2010/09/24/buckyballs-magnet-ma.html

bobfon Ask HN: Would you pay for this?

Odesk does this to allow "bosses" to monitor freelancers.

bobfon Big Just Got Bigger - 5 Terabyte Object Support in Amazon S3

Indeed. While I would love to migrate to AWS, it is still vastly more expensive than our current power/bandwidth/cage space costs.

bobfon Amazon S3 - Object Size Limit Now 5 TB

Although I wouldn't argue there is an immediate need for 5TB objects, raising the previous 5GB limit is undoubtedly useful.

bobfon The Day I Bought $15,000 From the US Mint

I'm fairly certain FatWallet (Finance) figured it out before it was discussed FlyerTalk. Lots of great finance/deals there, if you aren't in the know already.

bobfon How to Fly 35,000 Miles, Visit 4 Continents, 9 Countries, and 15 Cities for $418

No.

bobfon Evernote makes $800,000 per Month

Groupon is far and away the exception, not the standard to measure against.

bobfon How to Fly 35,000 Miles, Visit 4 Continents, 9 Countries, and 15 Cities for $418

American Express Blue Cash is great if you spend more than about $9000/year on it. The first $6500 in a year provides cashback at 0.5% on everything, 1% on "everyday purchases" (gas, groceries, drugstore, etc). After that, cashback jumps to 1.5%/5%. On average, people spend 15-18% on "everyday purchases", so that makes average cashback 2.025% after the first $6500 -- slightly better than a straight 2% cashback card, which are rare these days. To do the math:

- Regular 1% card: $9000 at 1% = $90

- Amex Blue Cash: $5525 at 0.5%, $975 at 1.25% (for the first $6500), then $2125 at 1.5%, $375 at 5% = $90.44 (the splits assume the average spending habits of 15% on "everyday purchases")

bobfon Ask HN: Recommend a Managed Hosting or Colocation Provider?

I had a dozen servers or so colocated with ThePlanet, during their outage due to electrical explosion.. I was not impressed with their disaster management, communication, etc.

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/06/01/explo...

bobfon This is experimental. However, it could start a revolution in information access

What a month indeed! The first two are really only interesting to the masses in hindsight though. I wonder how many interesting technological advances happen every month that we don't realize until years later.

bobfon Sad as Hell

Of course. It is important and useful to be a part of society, be conversant with the issues of the day, etc. The author's point seemed to simply be that constantly being conversant with popular culture is capable of becoming a timesink.

bobfon Sad as Hell

And how many times would you care to have seen pictures of him, or heard anything about him? Probably zero. So it isn't exactly entirely voluntary, right?

bobfon Ask HN: cloud supercomputing for the masses

Interestingly, Google announced something similar recently -- 'BigQuery' -> https://code.google.com/apis/bigquery/

bobfon Do posts appear on HN or Reddit first?

Reddit "breaks news first" for the vast majority of stories, simply by having a much larger userbase. I see HN as being far better filtered though, with higher quality comments and signal/noise ratio.

bobfon Sad as Hell

Days seem over before they even begin, and I have nothing to show for myself other than the anxious feeling that I now know just enough to engage in conversations I don’t care about.

To me, this was the most striking sentence in the article. It seems to be something that has increased from the time pop culture began to the present. Each of us probably hears more about Justin Bieber than we would ever truly care to, for example.

bobfon Ask HN: gifts for geeks?

A solid state drive (SSD), if they don't have one already. Prices have become more reasonable and performance gains over traditional drives have become more worthwhile. For example, I recently bought one of the better performing 120GB drives for $220, though they've been available for less with rebates.