Hacker News Reader

d_ron Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances

This looks like a fixed cost per region, rather than a cost per instance. If so, it might actually end up being quite cost-efficient.

"we add a $10/hour charge whenever you have at least one Dedicated Instance running in a Region. When figured as a per-instance cost, this charge will asymptotically approach $0 (per instance) for customers that run hundreds or thousands of instances"

d_ron Ask HN: the current state of the empty # in 'a href'

I usually tack on "return false;" to the onclick action to prevent the browser from actually navigating to '#'. Not sure if this is the recommended/best way, but it works.

E.g.

   <a href="#" onclick="doSomething(); return false;">test</a>

d_ron I'm Regretting Going WP7

Sorry to the OP. Many people I know swear by their iPhones. And with those for whom iOS doesn't fit (for whatever reason: Apple's idiosyncrasies, carrier/phone choice, app/OS choice, etc.), Android is an excellent alternative where Angry Birds runs just as well.

WM7, on the other hand, still sounds like a black sheep, so I'm always curious to hear how someone decides to opt for this choice. I think the most common I hear is "I was waiting for a long time, and I was hoping this time Microsoft got it right."

Signed, a former loyal Microsoft customer/fan who one day stopped waiting.

d_ron At least now we know why Color really got that funding

Not to bring pop culture to HN, but this "photo data mining" reminds me of the ultrasound/sonic contraption in "The Dark Knight" that collected visuals on everyone in the city.

What I find fascinating about Color, though, is that I can open the app in downtown Palo Alto and actually see photos of startups nearby, peoples' lunches, offices, whiteboards, window views, and so on. Mobile/GPS-based photography is an idea that has been tried in the past, but seemed to have never taken off due to lack of traction. Surely too early to tell, but perhaps the high publicity attracted here will actually make it possible for this one?

d_ron Flux: Better Lighting for Your Mac

I've been using it for sometime (on Mac and Windows). Since I usually code at night when bright light is jarring, it makes coding that much more pleasant.

d_ron Android openness withering as Google withholds Honeycomb

Unfortunately it appears that in the common case, "open" for Android has to do more with how much carriers can "customize" the OS, and is not about an end-user's experience.

I think this is in part because the primary customers of Android as a business are carriers (this is where Google makes money).

d_ron Color

According to one of the comments at TC, the domain cost $350K. It's cool to see newer (and well-funded) startups going for non-"web 2.0" names, e.g. Path, and now Color.

d_ron Internal status email: Twitter at 3 months old. 160 Users & 100 Tweets per day

"Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success." -Biz Stone (co-founder of Twitter)

http://www.bizstone.com/2010/09/timing-lessons.html

d_ron A New Approach to Amazon EC2 Networking

Seconded.

I first tried Rackspace Cloud, who would send me frequent marketing-style e-mails with stock photos of intelligent-looking office employees, ask me to participate in raffles, and other nonsense that I would quickly filter.

I much prefer seeing new feature announcements from AWS in my inbox! (And on HN.)

d_ron Ask HN: HTTPS Where can I get a cheap certificate?

As much as I dislike GoDaddy, I've used them in the past and it was fine and affordable. FYI, if you do use GoDaddy (and some other providers), you need to specify an "intermediate" certificate since their own certificate is not directly trusted by root CAs. This is transparent to the end user as long as you set it up correctly on your box. More here: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=d_r

NameCheap, my current registrar of choice, gives out free SSL certs with domain registrations (and I think transfers.) Haven't tried using their certs yet, though.

d_ron If I haven't succeeded in my mid 20s, could I be successful?

Here's a decent collection I recently came across. (Sorry, kinda ad-filled site link.) http://www.11points.com/Personal/11_Famous_People_Who_Were_i...

Who knew that at 30, Julia Child was a spy and Martha Stewart was a stockbroker?

d_ron How do you deal with multiple Gmail accounts?

Why not just use the Forwarding option (also under "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" tab?)

d_ron Show HN: MapCrunch Street View gallery

Your site rocks. This is the first time I actually used the Facebook "Like" button to share something I saw.

Here are some ideas to improve engagement on the gallery:

- Comments section under each photo

- Page numbers on top of the page, not just on the bottom

- "See more:" text next to the navigation on the bottom

Good luck!

d_ron Is the Boston technology scene living in the past?

I'd be curious to hear how many boostrappers are taking advantage of MA's healthcare system (everyone's in a group.)

d_ron Apple’s early days and the origins of "real artists ship"

This Steve quote is great:

"No way, there's no way we're slipping!" ... "You guys have been working on this stuff for months now, another couple weeks isn't going to make that much of a difference. You may as well get it over with. Just make it as good as you can.

Especially after I started working on apps in my spare time, I realized how hard it is to actually finish and how easy it is for days to drag on while I add just one more little tweak. Here's to shipping quicker.

d_ron Show HN: Calendar for the Mac App Store

Hope you can fix it soon. Here are some ideas:

Did you verify receipts in your app? If so, could this be the problem?

http://forums.realsoftware.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=37309

"I had mistakenly used the app name instead of the app bundle id in the verifytools receipt check code. "

Also, does anything show up in the system Console?

Did you do anything special to compile/package the app beyond regular Xcode + "Build and archive"?

d_ron Pixel Perfect map of china

This is neat. For example:

Shanghai skyscrapers: http://j.map.baidu.com/-FNB Beijing Olympic stadium: http://j.map.baidu.com/TjNB

Edit: for some reason, the links don't work in Chrome. Firefox works though.

d_ron Selling Kiko: How Justin Kan sold his first YC startup on eBay

From the post: We posted the auction on Reddit and, with the help of a few friends, got to the front page. ... Pretty quickly the story was picked up by Techcrunch ...

This part has got to be important. Getting significant visibility for the auction likely helped quite a bit, and eBay is just a medium that made the auction possible.

d_ron Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

I was also confused about that. I may be misunderstanding how the law works, but isn't it true that group coverage can deny pre-existing conditions only for a limited time (6 months)?

In California you need at least 2 employees to qualify for group coverage. So you start an actual company, perform business (presumably turning in some money to cover your costs), and also get coverage for your dependents. There's one caveat that the coverage does not start until your company has been around for 6 months (unrelated to the pre-existing 6 months figure above.)

Or was the author's post related to (presumably) retiring earlier and specifically not wanting to start a company again?

d_ron Show HN: Breakup Notifier

Apparently it was also mentioned in The Facebook Effect

http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-knows-that-your-relation...

"Zuckerberg sometimes amused himself by conducting experiments ... he studied who was looking which profiles, who your friends were friends with, and who was newly single, among other indicators..."

d_ron Geohot seeking donations for legal defense against Sony.

A side question. If we donate, what stops PayPal from randomly "freezing" his account and holding the money hostage, as they have on a number of other occasions for people having a "Donate" link?

d_ron Standalone sandboxed IE6, IE7, IE8 executables (Recovered after a takedown)

I use this product, at times.

I think it's an example of a good intention on Microsoft's part that hasn't been executed or marketed incredibly well.

Any web developer worth salt has to preview their work on IE6-IE9. And everyone has to jump through hoops to make this work (And no, VMs are not an acceptable solution. Why should I bog down my machine with a VM when I just need an extra freaking browser?)

So there comes Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview. How did they even come up with such a name? What it does is it allows you to open several frames side-by-side, each with a version of IE. It's a great idea, it's JUST what I needed. But what it doesn't let you do is actually interact with the pages. You can only see, not click. Want to test a JavaScript behavior? Sorry.

The gimmicky name and the lack of marketing evidently obscure it further. No surprise you've never heard of it. I completely accidentally stumbled across it last year.

Edit: Link with screenshots: http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/dd565874.aspx

d_ron Ask HN: Best Registrar (To which should I consolidate?)

I have quite a few domains with Namecheap and so far so good. What I like is that their UI is not dumbed-down ("GoDaddy-style") and you can find that darned DNS setting without fishing through 5 layers of navigation.

It also helps that they've been giving away private registration for free.

(I am not affiliated with them, just a customer, YMMV)

d_ron How Not to do Online Utility Billing

Not to put down people's hard work, but I am yet to encounter a utility company website that has any sort of sensible usability. Multi-digit pin number login names, split into little textboxes, that are frustrating to enter? Check. Only 4-digit passwords? Check. Emails me a PDF attachment that just asks me to go to their website? Check.

Each time I move (and get a new utility co), new surprises await. My latest utility company apparently uses a slew of Gmail accounts to massmail the statements. Sigh.

Screenshot: http://dennis.posterous.com/why-are-utility-company-websites...

d_ron Learning from our Mistakes: The Failure of OpenID, AtomPub and XML on the Web

The other day I wanted to log in to my StackOverflow account. I was presented with this screen: http://i.imgur.com/SwuVJ.png

Shoot, did I previously log in to SO with my Google account? With my Facebook account? How can I remember? Or maybe, I created a "myOpenID" account? After trying various combinations, I became frustrated by the error "No OpenID endpoint found."

Finally, I ended up spending twenty minutes digging through my old e-mail to figure out that I did, in fact, create a dedicated OpenID account at myopenid.com.

It turned out, for some ungodly reason, that I have to enter my OpenID as "http://<my username>.myopenid.com/" -- I would not have ever guessed this.

As a developer, I can appreciate the motivation behind OpenID. But the execution is simply frustrating.

d_ron Ask HN: Why hasn't Ticketmaster been killed yet?

“A large-scale concert on sale is, in essence, a denial-of-service attack.” And unfortunately, on July 24, service was denied.

Fascinating. It seems like quite a few of the would-be-competitors, even given the chance to compete, end up failing on the technical side of things (can't deal with thousands of concurrent requests).

d_ron How The Social Network Soundtrack Glitch Artwork Was Made

...this time I actually destroyed images by opening them up in a text editor and adding/removing text to their raw code.

Fuzzing used to create art!

(Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzz_testing)

d_ron Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

On the topic of sending e-mail, I discovered the following note on my utility company's bill payment page. I'm guessing they have never heard of SendGrid or the like.

http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dennis/GGBF...

(They did not reply to my friendly e-mail about it. Or perhaps their box was over quota...)

d_ron Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

It amazes me how quickly AWS iterates and adds new features. Also, this is just what I needed for a site I am building (I was trying to figure out which third-party mail provider to use.)

d_ron Fun with HTTP headers

E-mail headers can be fun too. For example, Facebook e-mails up to this day contain:

X-Mailer: ZuckMail [version 1.00]

The X-Mailer header traditionally indicates the mail client that was used to send the e-mail.

Want to check if your friend who has "Sent from my iPhone" was really using an iPhone? Just look for "X-Mailer: iPhone Mail" (Of course, these headers can be arbitrarily set by a client, so this is not meant to be a definitive check.)