Hacker News Reader

buddydvdon Facebook considering $3-4Bn buyout of Skype

Perhaps what Facebook want is all of Skype's customers' credit card numbers. Linking them with Facebook accounts may help boost all of their future 30-percent-comission endeavors.

buddydvdon JSONx is an IBM standard format to represent JSON as XML

This point seems relevant:

"Bridges to Web 2.0 technologies with JSON filtering and validation, support for REST verbs, and converting/bridging of REST and Web services."

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/integration/datapower/xs40/

buddydvdon JSONx is an IBM standard format to represent JSON as XML

"In an XML Firewall service, JSONx can be used like other XML input."

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wsdatap/v3r8m1/inde...

"An XML firewall is a specialized device used to protect applications exposed through XML based interfaces like WSDL and REST and scan XML traffic coming in and out of an organization. [snipped] XML Firewall is often used to validate XML traffic, control access to XML based resources, filter XML content and rate limit requests to back-end applications exposed through XML based interfaces."

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

buddydvdon Has anyone noticed this before? HN: Best Of

http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100

More info: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1998376

buddydvdon Has anyone noticed this before? HN: Best Of

More links here: http://news.ycombinator.com/lists

buddydvdon Apple May Have Snapped Up iCloud.com

Link to the trademark registration: http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4009:7n...

buddydvdon Working with the Chaos Monkey

I'm not trying to give grief here. I respect Jeff highly and found this article to be insightful. If people dislike my comment for its tone, I accept it. It was probably a bit overly antagonistic.

buddydvdon Working with the Chaos Monkey

This is where the distinction is made: "Who in their right mind would willingly choose to work with a Chaos Monkey? Sometimes you don't get a choice; the Chaos Monkey chooses you." But, the final takeaway point of the post blurs that distinction: "the best way to avoid failure is to fail constantly." Stack Exchange didn't "choose" the "best way to avoid failure" -- the problem chose them. Netflix, on the other hand, did make that choice. The article is written as if Stack Exchange followed Netflix's path and chose to fail constantly when it didn't.

buddydvdon Working with the Chaos Monkey

Right, I agree that is the main point of the post. However, generalizing Netflix's naming of their fault-inducing system into unexpected failures dilutes the meaning of such name. Jeff's introduction to Netflix's system is what made this post interesting (if you disagree, take the mental exercise and rewrite this post in your mind without mentioning Netflix's system). There's a disconnect between the main point of the post and the most interesting point of the post.

buddydvdon Working with the Chaos Monkey

The blog post seems to imply Stack Exchange is working with the Chaos Monkey when it really isn't. They didn't really build a system that randomly shuts down servers or services. The difference is subtle but important.

buddydvdon Joel Spolsky: Can your programming language do this?

Can Xcode 4 compile code using Objective-c blocks into iOS 3.x compatible binaries? This article made me realize how much I miss anonymous functions/lambda expressions from C# and javascript.

buddydvdon Microsoft breaks own world record for IE nonsense

From the original MSDN blog post: "Browsers that compromise (by spreading across too many OSes and OS versions) face challenges. For example, building a new browser for the ten-year old version of Windows that came with IE6 didn’t make sense to us because of the limitations of its graphics and security architectures."

Seems like they rewrote IE's engine using newer, lower-level, hardware-accelerated APIs to achieve better performance compared to earlier versions of IE. This is at the expense of dropping compatibility support for older versions of Windows. I think they are also saying, by avoiding the use of cross-platform compatibility layers, they were able to build a faster browser compared to their competitors'.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/04/12/native-html5-f...

buddydvdon How I spent $1799 at LivingSocial.com and didn't even know it

Eliminating the payment confirmation page to optimize the funnel seems shortsighted. If they want to do one-click purchase, they should clearly label the buy button to indicate this, otherwise, show a payment confirmation page. I was also surprised by this the last time I bought something from LivingSocial.com.

buddydvdon Where can I get large datasets open to the public?

Open datasets are hard to come by. It's potentially easier to find problems to solve by looking at the available datasets than seeking datasets for the problems you wish to solve.

buddydvdon SelectOut: Opt out of being tracked online

Here's the link to Network Advertising Initiative's opt out page:

http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp

When you opt out of a network, the participating network will assign you an opt out cookie. When you visit a website that indirectly loads these tracking pages, it will check to see if you have their opt out cookie. If you do, they will avoid assigning you their tracking cookie.

These tools basically help you manage and persist the opt-out cookies so that when you clear your browser's cookies, the browser doesn't remove these opt out cookies.

All the participating networks provide an URL that tell you whether or not you have their opt out cookie. If you do, they will redirect that request to: http://www.networkadvertising.org/verify/cookie_optout.gif

Otherwise, they will redirect you to image that says you have their tracking cookie. You can subsequently use javascript to inspect the dimension of the image to determine whether or not you have opt out of that network.

buddydvdon [dead]

Facebook does not allow this.

http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?pid=19404...

However, FB did remove that specific example from their TOS.

buddydvdon What is Stack Overflow's business model?

They also seem to be making money from inserting amazon affiliate tags to links pointing to amazon.

Example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/90924/what-is-the-best-ph...

buddydvdon Re-using Backbone.js Models on the server with Node.js and Socket.io

Quora seems to be taking this approach. Except, after the initial request, mutations make the server send rendered HTML fragments instead of raw JSON back to the client. I believe this is due to the fact that their view templates are coded in Python so they can't be easily reused on the client side.

buddydvdon PhantomJS is a minimalistic, headless, WebKit-based, JavaScript-driven tool

Automated Testing: http://code.google.com/p/phantomjs/wiki/ServiceIntegration#J...

Screen Scraping: http://code.google.com/p/phantomjs/wiki/QuickStart#Rendering

buddydvdon Quora's Notification Settings

My guess is that they didn't think of it and no one has requested this feature. Here's a link to a list of feature suggestions submitted by active Quora users:

http://www.quora.com/Quora-User-Feedback/What-features-would...

Of all the suggestions, Khalid's suggestion seems most relevant to yours:

"I just signed up, and was a bit horrified to see 40 odd possible e-mail notifications I could receive. But I was disappointed not to see a link to an RSS feed of those notifications." (http://www.quora.com/Quora-User-Feedback/What-features-would...)

Note that his main suggestion is to have Quora provide RSS feeds in place of email notification as opposed to adding a button that lets users disable all email notifications.

Like I said earlier, their sensible default settings make this feature somewhat unnecessary.

buddydvdon Quora's Notification Settings

At the bottom of each email, Quora provides a link that lets you stop receiving all notifications from them. It's a two-click process.

buddydvdon Quora's Notification Settings

As long as they have sensible default settings (which I think they do), having detailed control of the types of notifications you want to receive is perfectly fine. If they decide to change default settings to something less desirable, then I think this would be more of a problem.

buddydvdon Google Head Designer Admires Q&A Startup Quora

Almost all contents are publicly viewable. For example: http://www.quora.com/Startups

Things that aren't publicly viewable are question comments and revision logs.

buddydvdon Is Quora the biggest blogging innovation in 10 years?

Quora's Webnode2 and LiveNode[1] systems are very innovative and simplify the creation of real-time web applications. In fact, I believe Quora's choice of tackling the Q&A space is merely to demonstrate the power of these two systems.

One recurring problem in creating real-time web applications is how to sync the display between browser windows/tabs amongst different users (and of the same user).

You can render the page, stream compact JSON data to the browser, and use the data to update the page with javascript. However, doing so likely require you to duplicate your server-side templates on the client-side. You can, of course, avoid duplicating your template code by only implementing them on the client-side. However, doing so will hurt your site's SEO because your webserver would now generate JSON data instead of rendered HTML that search engines understand.

Duplicating template code increases complexity while removing duplicate code using client-side-only templates hurts SEO. This is the problem that Quora solved. Instead of streaming compact JSON data, Quora streams rendered HTML that updates any part of the page (not just a section of the page).

From an answer Charlie wrote: "If I were making a new website from scratch without LiveNode, the first thing I would do would be to rebuild LiveNode. Pretty much everything about web development is easier and faster and more correct using it." [2]

One of Abert's (Quora Engineer) tweets: "Going back to Django after having used Livenode is just painful." [3]

More info:

[1] http://www.quora.com/Quora-Infrastructure/What-is-webnode2

[2] http://www.quora.com/What-limitations-has-Quora-encountered-...

[3] http://twitter.com/146/status/15005261304

buddydvdon How Allies Used Math Against German Tanks

http://www.quora.com/How-do-you-symmetrically-encrypt-32-bit...

buddydvdon Want An iPod Nano Watch? So Does Everyone. New Kickstarter King

Right, I understand. My point is that iPod Nano just doesn't seem to work well as a watch. If Apple were to design a watch, I don't think it would require people to push a button to view the time.

buddydvdon Want An iPod Nano Watch? So Does Everyone. New Kickstarter King

Unlike regular watches, it seems like you need to press a button on the side to wake it up to see the time. If so, that's quite inconvenient.

http://vimeo.com/16647049 (jump to 2:23)

In any case, it's still a neat idea.

buddydvdon Using Amazon EC2 as a web proxy

I believe non-jailbroken iPhones don't support SSH. So, one way to get around this is to turn on PPTP VPN on a DD-WRT'd router and connect to it while you're away from home.

buddydvdon WoodGas Cars: 1000 kg of wood = 365L of gasoline, no refining required

In the show, The Colony (Discovery), the colonists built a wood gasifier using spare parts found within an abandoned warehouse.

Here's a video clip showing a wood gasifier (they eventually got it to work but that part isn't shown in this clip): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkH6mFlfH3o

buddydvdon Chromeless: Build your own browser

It doesn't seem like you'll be able to embed XUL elements with this form of customization. Does it mean you'll have to implement your own tree control, toolbar control, etc [1]?

Also, will this work with existing browser plugins? If users are unable to use their plugins, would they actually switch to use a customized browser with no plugin support?

Is this project intended to let developers create installable web apps (like Google Chrome's installable web apps with the manifest's "container" field set to "panel" [2])? If so, probably it'll better to just market it like so. I think people are far more interested in building monetizable web applications than customized browser layouts.

[1] XUL elements: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/XUL_Reference

[2] Chrome Web App's "panel" option: http://chromestory.com/2010/07/panel-tab-and-window-styles-c...