Hacker News Reader

ctideon PSN Users Reporting Hundreds of Dollars Stolen From Them

Considering I got a call from Capitalone this morning saying my credit card that I had on PSN was being used to buy gas in Connecticut, I think this is probably a fairly legit article.

Certainly possible that it's purely coincidental, but seems unlikely.

ctideon Sony Shuts Down PlayStation Network Indefinitely

Why force a click to see the result? Seems like a good way to ensure you get bogus data.

ctideon The music industry finds another way to shoot itself in the foot

You're pulling things out of context. The full quote, which answer most of your questions:

" A nameless person has decided that he, not us, is best placed to release the new Amon Tobin album, and to do so for free, online via a watermarked promotional copy. We know these things happen, and we know that not everyone realises how much is invested in ambitious, groundbreaking tours, collaborations with brilliant artists and lovingly designed packaging... It still hurts."

The point they're making is that it costs them a lot of money to produce an album, and someone deciding to leak it early sucks. An obvious point, but one that's probably written more out of frustration than out of a desire to communicate something people don't already know.

The translation that I took from it, is that they want to offer a full package on a given date. That package includes the option to digitally purchase the music, or buy a physical disc that includes things that they feel are important to some people. By having it leaked a month+ early, most people are just going to acquire it they only way they currently can -- by downloading it for free. Offering a digital download a month early is obviously not the ideal scenario for them (it means people who would have otherwise purchased a physical copy will now just purchase a digital version) but it's better than just losing all the sales that will otherwise result from people being 'finished' with the album before it's even released.

ctideon The music industry finds another way to shoot itself in the foot

I was impressed with this, which I saw (ironically) about 15 minutes after I posted my earlier comment:

http://ninjatune.net/article/2011/apr/19/amon-tobin-isam-ava...

This is the best response I've seen from a label to a leak yet.

ctideon The music industry finds another way to shoot itself in the foot

This doesn't even touch on the fact that albums now seem to leak months in advance of their release date. I don't doubt that this means that people in the UK can be listening to albums 2-3 months in advance of when they can legally purchase them. I can't help but imagine this is one of the leading causes of music piracy these days.

Why wait 3 months to listen to an album if you can get it today?

ctideon [dead]

Well, according to TMZ, she never rejected it as her manager didn't ever send her the song:

http://www.tmz.com/2011/04/20/weird-al-yankovic-lady-gaga-re...

ctideon Ask HN: How do you do graphic design?

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_PekcT72-PGE/SK3PTKwW_eI/AAAAAAAAAG...

Amusing, felt obligated to share the link to save people googling like I did!

ctideon Why are you not using a SSD yet?

I can't speak for Windows users, but on my Mac, I didn't have to do any of that.

ctideon Why are you not using a SSD yet?

Every application I launch, launches in a fraction of the time. I don't like to leave every application I use (some of which are horrendous memory hogs, such as Illustrator and Photoshop) running perpetually, so having next to no load time is an amazing benefit.

Textmate is another excellent example. Search in project is completely usable with an SSD. I had temporarily switched to AckMate because of how unbearably this feature was, now it's instant again.

Booting faster is the least of my cares as my laptop is only rebooted when updates force me to.

ctideon Why are you not using a SSD yet?

I installed one in my Macbook Pro a few weeks ago for ~$300, but bought the 120 GB SSD vs. 80 GB. Considering I'm only using 60GB of it, I certainly could have bought the 80 GB and had everything shipped for right around $200.

It's easily the most noticeable upgrade I've ever done.

ctideon Why are you not using a SSD yet?

Since when is $200 an outrageous amount of money for a seriously significant performance increase?

ctideon Anatomy of a Failed Pitch at Startup Weekend

I'm pretty sure all the recent posts showing the RIAA how to determine what files exist on dropbox are going to do a much better job of that than his pitch will.

ctideon What Makes Companies Great

Do you feel this is more obnoxious than a fixed header bar?

Lots of people do the fixed header bar (https://banksimple.com/ comes to mind immediately) and I don't ever see complaints about those.

ctideon [dead]

Are you running Rails 3? We were looking at various gems the other day for ab testing for a side project, and they all (including seven_minute_abs) seem woefully outdated and abandoned.

ctideon Sony Ericsson promotes Android bootloader unlocking

Why? That's an analogy that doesn't make any sense. It's not like Sony was publicly telling people how to modify their hardware.

ctideon 50% of Innovation will be Gamified by 2015

Or you could just read the press release from Gartner here : https://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1629214

The blog 'author' literally added nothing to it, which is probably why he botched all the links.

For what it's worth, I hope Gartner's wrong. Applications are already so saturated with gamification that I've found it to be more a turn off at this stage.

Make your product compelling, not compulsive.

ctideon RWW Hacker Poll: Is OSX Still Developer Friendly?

Your definition of developer is radically different from mine.

ctideon How I was rejected at Microsoft

In my experience, Microsoft interviews tend to build off of each other. You start off with a fairly simple interview, and the things you mess up (or that the interviewer didn't feel you were especially strong on) are the things they probe deeper on further into the interview. I'm not at all surprised that you felt it was pretty easy if you only met with 3 interviewers, considering a full loop is ~6 real interviews with a fluff interview at the end if you've 'passed'.

ctideon The iPhone Tab Bar

I'm surprised he doesn't mention anything about text inputs barely above the tab bar. The Google Voice app does this, and it's painful to consistently accidentally switch to one of the other tabs when trying to respond to a text message.

ctideon VMware launches Node.js, Rails and Spring PaaS

The stack is open source: http://cloudfoundry.org/

ctideon GitHub launches Issues 2.0

Hopefully this means search results that link to issues will stop being completely worthless and incredibly frustrating.

ctideon Poll: Should TechCrunch articles be banned from HN?

No, I'd hate to have to read Techcrunch itself. Reading it through the HN filter makes it much more useful.

ctideon Why Gumroad is the next billion dollar startup – The developer interview

The big deal is that multiple articles on that site are focused on products created by the same guy. If he's not the one actually writing the posts, whomever is clearly has a boner for him.

ctideon Ask HN: Textmate and RoR?

Install the following:

https://github.com/protocool/AckMate - Searching within your project sucks by default. This makes it not suck.

Testing -

https://github.com/aslakhellesoy/cucumber-tmbundle - Bundle for cucumber highlighting. https://github.com/rspec/rspec-tmbundle - Lets you run specs individually from within textmate.

Frontend -

https://github.com/kuroir/SCSS.tmbundle & https://github.com/peterlih/handcrafted-haml-textmate-bundle & https://github.com/seaofclouds/sass-textmate-bundle - Sass/Haml/Scss bundles. HAML and Sass will make you life significantly easier, embrace them.

Next up, download and install : http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html

For themes, I prefer 'Blackboard' with the font changed to Inconsolata, but play around with the various color schemes and choose whichever you prefer. You'll probably spend a lot of time looking at it.

Now, bookmark: http://api.rubyonrails.org/ and pretty much keep it open somewhere all the time. It's invaluable for rooting through why things aren't working.

Lastly, rails is full of magic. Magic that sometimes is quite far removed from the actual errors you run into. Your first few months will probably have more than a few very frustrating moments where things just don't work and you can't figure out why. Stackoverflow is your friend, and no question is stupid. If you can't google an answer, just ask.

ctideon Rails 3 + Devise + Uploadify = No Flash Session Hacks

Adding (and exposing) reusable auth tokens to get around a configuration issue seems like awfully bad advice.

ctideon How did the New York Times manage to spend $40 million on its pay wall?

Maybe Color raised 41m so they could build a paywall.

ctideon Show HN: Review my app, WAYWN (What are you wearing now?)

Not yet, but we have been thinking about ways to expose filtering. Certainly, at the very least, we'd want people to be able to filter easily by tags they care about, gender, location, etc. Just tough to get the level of control in there without an abortion of a UI. We'll keep thinking about it though!

ctideon Show HN: Review my app, WAYWN (What are you wearing now?)

Yeah, definitely angling to have people post before they go out rather than after. We've been discussing ways to expose 2 outfits and have people choose between them, but for now we want to just get discussions going around outfits in isolation.

Thanks for the feedback!

ctideon Show HN: Review my app, WAYWN (What are you wearing now?)

No direct mobile support yet, we're tied to the Instagram API and will autoupload any photos tagged with #waywn from a user who has connected their Instagram account to our service.

From the web, we support drag and drop photo uploading (one thing we haven't figured out is an easy way to expose that to the user) as well as via webcam.

Certainly, a mobile app would be a high priority if we push forward with it.

Thanks for the feedback!

ctideon Show HN: Review my app, WAYWN (What are you wearing now?)

Clickable link: http://www.waywn.com/