Hacker News Reader

codekaon Facebook disabling messaging in its mobile web app to push people to Messenger

> But I hope you can imagine why a chat team does care if a technology doesn't allow them to send timely and reliable notifications.

Sure, that's why they have the app. But it's not a reason to completely turn off messaging from the website. Heck, they could even turn off chrome notifications completely and the website would still be completely functional.

codekaon Facebook disabling messaging in its mobile web app to push people to Messenger

Chrome has perfectly acceptable push notification support.

I am an occasional user of Facebook Messenger, and using the mobile website was perfect: I don't care if notifications are delayed or even lost (I'll see the messages eventually anyway). But there's no way I'm going to install a separate app for something I use maybe once a week, tops.

If it stops working from the mobile website, then I just wait until I'm back at my computer to read fb messenges.

codekaon Facebook Messenger Platform

https://youtu.be/ryIQYYogQ8A

I've literally never owned a plunger in my whole life, and I don't know anybody who does. It baffles me everything I'm in the US and every toilet has a plunger!

codekaon Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

> People hate ads (pretty much everyone)

Except of course, the people actually paying for ads don't hate them... otherwise they wouldn't be paying for them.

codekaon Why use www?

Not really, if I were doing this, I'd buy ads for the search term so I can guarantee (within reason) I'm at the top.

codekaon Mast Brothers obscure the fact that they originally used remelted chocolate

I always thought those websites were jokes, right?

Right...?

codekaon Google, Microsoft, Comcast Say Verizon’s New Cellular Tech Could Wreck Wi-Fi

Depends. If Google et al are right and they have studies which show it degrades performance under certain conditions, then all it would take is one class action to get off the ground.

People will pile on, and the evidence that Verizon knows their technology can cause problems is already mounting. That they're pushing their products through without reviews or certifications could be seen as evidence of negligence or maliciousness.

codekaon Apple CEO Tim Cook: 'Privacy Is a Fundamental Human Right'

> If you don't know what you're doing and install apps from the app store without examining them closely

That's completely orthogonal though, because Play Store is Google's walled garden. What Google allow you to do, in addition to downloading things from their walled garden, is also side-load apps completely separately from the walled garden.

There's no evidence that the ability to side-load causes an increase in malware/crapware.

codekaon [dead]

A better title would surely be "Robot ethicist calls..."

I mean, I'm not really sure what a "robot ethicist" actually does, but it at least seems more relevant.

codekaon Google stock spikes after reporting better than expected Q2 earnings

It's important to note that most engineers at Google don't actually work on Ads or anything to do with monetization directly. Most will be working on things like Search, Gmail, Android, Maps, Docs/Drive, YouTube, Chrome, etc etc.

I'm pretty sure Google doesn't really have a plan to monetize any of those things (other than ads), but I think it's also pretty cool that a small minority of the company makes enough money to let the rest do pretty much whatever.

codekaon JPS+ pathfinding – faster than A* [video]

I work on Google Maps and can confirm that it definitely takes the time required to turn left vs. right into account. If you send me an example of a bad route (you can use the web interface, which uses the same backend as Google Maps on your phone) I can take a look as to why it's routing you the way it is. My email address is in my profile.

codekaon Let's Encrypt Root and Intermediate Certificates

Apparently it's in iOS 8: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204132

There doesn't seem to be an authoritative list for Android, but I did find this: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/libcore2/+/master/... -- not sure whether it means it's in the latest versions of Android, or whether that means it's going to be all versions of Android (e.g. with manufacturer/carrier modifications, etc) or what...

codekaon An Overview of Phong Shading in GLSL

This is something I really miss from a few years ago when I was using Cg to do my shaders. It had (what I would consider) fairly basic features like #include and the ability to specify texture states and so on within the shader file. Now I have to do all of that manually, or write my own preprocessor or something...

codekaon I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

It depends on your role, PMs and managers would obviously have a lot more. I'm just a lowly engineer and looking at my calendar this week, I've have 2.5 hours of regular meetings, 3 hours of interviews (though that's an outlier, I normally do 1 interview a week, which is 1 hour long), and 2 hours of "tech talks" (which is not really a meeting, it's basically people from other teams talking about what they've been working on).

codekaon New South Wales Attacks Researchers Who Found Internet Voting Vulnerabilities

Coercion is a problem even with paper ballots, though. I could force you to take a picture with a cell phone of who you voted for on threat of violence.

codekaon New South Wales Attacks Researchers Who Found Internet Voting Vulnerabilities

That would be a problem if internet voting was the only option, but surely if the "normal" way of voting was still to come in to the polling place on the day and cast a paper vote, then online voting as an option for people who are unable to make it to the polling place on the day is not a bad idea?

codekaon [dead]

If the Android watches are anything to go by, absolutely not. The heart rate monitor on my Moto360 is often out by 50% or more.

codekaon Proposal for generics over primitives needs a rethink

> The cost of the C# approach is that existing classes could not be gradually migrated to be generic; existing collections had to be effectively deprecated and replaced, or a "flag day" had to be declared where all the code (library and client) changes simultaneously. These are not options for us. At the risk of being obnoxious, C# was able to get away with it because at the time, they had a very small base of existing users and code and were not yet successful enough to have to worry about compatibility.

The reason C# was able to do it is not because they had so few users that a "flag day" was acceptable, it was because they went with the first option and rewrote all their collections. C# did genetics right the first time, and didn't end up in this bizarre type-erasing, half-ass world that Java find itself in today.

codekaon What Is Google Chrome Helper, and Why Is It Hogging My CPU Cycles?

Wait, isn't "Memory Clean" just one of those apps that allocates a huge chunk of memory, forcing the OS to page everything else to disk? Those things are snake oil, they don't improve anything and in fact are often worse than doing nothing at all...

codekaon Nexus 6

... and width is the only dimension where the iPhone 6 is actually bigger than the Nexus 5.

codekaon HTTP/2: The Long-Awaited Sequel

Also, Chrome has experimental support for HTTP/2 in Canary[1] as well as Firefox since version 34 (if I'm reading [2] correctly).

It seems unusual for Microsoft to disable SPDY support entirely, at least until support for HTTP/2 is more widely deployed...

[1]: http://www.chromium.org/spdy/http2

[2]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Networking/http2

codekaon Tim Cook on iMessage Security: It’s Encrypted, and We Don’t Have a Key

But they could just inject a "fake" recipient device with their own public/private key and decrypt messages as they transit the system. They might not be able to decrypt messages you've sent in the past, but I can see no reason why they couldn't read messages as you send them if they wanted to (or were required by a wiretapping agency, for example).

I also recall a while ago a researcher who showed that if you forgot your iCloud password, there was a way to get Apple to reset the password and give you access to all your previously-stored data. If they had no way to decrypt your data remotely, that should be impossible.

codekaon Common App Rejections

I think he meant the clone of it that they put up before the original developer had a chance.

codekaon Friendship Paradox

I don't think it's as bad as that. It's the mean number of friends, not the median.

The example of twitter makes this a bit more clear: your followers have more followers, on average, than you. But that's because you likely follow someone with a million followers. That one person greatly affects the mean follower count.

So if you follow 10 people, one of whom has 1000 followers, and the rest just have one, the paradox still holds.

codekaon LG's Smartwatch Shows Android Wear Operating System Has a Long Way to Go

> Android Wear seems still in the experimental stage, but this app is not labeled a beta.

This is the impression I get, after using one for about a week. Not only does it seem rather unfinished, it's also quite buggy (some notifications never disappear, the navigation integration is basically unusable, and there was a point where I was getting no notifications and had to clear data for the Google Play Services app to get them back).

However, when it does work, it works brilliantly and I'm kind of lucky that it doesn't look monstrously big on my wrist, so I think I'm going to stick with it for now.

codekaon Supreme Court’s new rules on abstract patents hit Apple v. Samsung

(1) “to detect contact with the touch-sensitive display at a first predefined location corresponding to an unlock image”; (2) “to continuously move the unlock image on the touch-sensitive display in accordance with movement of the detected contact”; (3) “to unlock the hand held electronic device if the unlock image is moved from the first predefined location on the touch screen to a predefined unlock region on the touch-sensitive display”; and (4) “visual cues to communicate a direction of movement of the unlock image required to unlock the device.”

It really sounds like Apple's lawyers are struggling to make "drag the image to unlock" sound more complicated than it really is.

codekaon Apple Featured My Game, Here's Why I Changed It

Usability testing is a bit of a luxury for a two-man team...

codekaon The App I Used to Break Into My Neighbor’s Home

Except, how would the valet know where you live?

codekaon Google Voice Search Attack on Android [pdf]

There was another one where a guy with the name "XBox Shut Off" would run around griefing players in Call of Duty and when they yell at him to stop, accidentally initiate the "off" command.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGZeU4s28kk

codekaon How every smartphone platform gets the alarm clock wrong

There are several third-party apps that have a "shake to snooze" feature. I find that gives me enough time to wake up properly and turn the alarm off (or if I go back to sleep, the fact that it's only snoozed means I get woken right back up again).