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dmbass

398 karma · joined June 22, 2011

maxkostow.com
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dmbass··on Recap on our Anti-SOPA Campaign: 15,000 Faxes Sent to Congress
Do the faxes get sent straight to a computer or printed out? If the former, I wouldn't expect anyone to care, but the latter, en masse, could surely cause some disruption. No?
dmbass··on Ubuntu rips up drop-down menus
I always wished the kind of mouse+command line interface found in AutoCAD existed for more applications. This seems like an nice step in that direction.
dmbass··on Show HN: Skimling - A Platform to Help Kids Improve Their Writing
Doing well on essays is part of doing well in school, and doing well in school leads to a better life!

That line is particularly appalling and represents one of the many things that is wrong with our education system. That logical progression is what encourages people to cheat (plagiarism and paying for essays count).

Maybe try something more like "Getting feedback and incorporating it into your thought and work process will help you get it right the next time for your whole life."

dmbass··on Apple Isn’t The Only Disruptor: How Amazon Is Killing Publishers
I too own a Kindle and one of the major downsides I see is that you cannot share it. You cannot give or lend a book to someone when you are done. You cannot put a Kindle on your coffee table and have anybody who picks it up be able to flip through and actually read without losing your place in the book. It's a device designed around a single user which is often enough not the use case for a physical book.
dmbass··on I'll tell you why movie revenue is dropping...
You might like this: http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/

They even provide an RSS feed of new trailers.

dmbass··on A startup’s plan to sell solar like cell phones
Doesn't this model work for cell phones because they are really cheap and the provider doesn't care if they get lost/stop paying? Afaik solar panels are expensive to make so how does this make any sense?
dmbass··on Louis C.K. experiment results: over $500,000 in 4 days
There are lots of examples of artists blowing up without labels (though some subsequently start their own or get signed) in the past few years by distributing their music on the internet for free. See: Pretty Lights, Girl Talk, Odd Future, The Weeknd, Justin Bieber, etc. It won't be viable for every artist/band but neither is the music industry of old. You must bring something special because otherwise nobody will care.
dmbass··on Twitter Redesigns Around Four Concepts: Home Timeline, Connect, Discover, Me
1. Home Timeline

2. Connect

3. Discover

4. Me

dmbass··on “Greater Choice”
Doesn't the phone have to be local to the AP in order to get the MAC to send to Google for the location?
dmbass··on Ask HN: Please review my site "Smoke Signal"
Well, you would probably want the person to know you are out of office/on vacation/not checking email, not that you have a full inbox.
dmbass··on Why Audio Matters: Hacking Gamers' Memories
I agree that audio is a very important aspect of games (and other forms of media like video), but do people really play mobile games with the sound on? When I do, it's either to my own soundtrack or none at all.

Has anybody actually polled the device volume level and ambient noise level when people are playing their game?

dmbass··on Google buys Zagat
A reference to http://abovethecrowd.com/2011/03/24/freight-train-that-is-an...
dmbass··on Google buys Zagat
Google already links to Zagat in their places reviews. This is Google buying a large and influential slice of pie to make it harder for others to compete.
dmbass··on Google buys Zagat
Keep digging that moat, Google. As has been the case throughout history, the guy with the biggest moat wins, right? Oh wait, nope, that's not it. It's the guy who figures out how to bypass the moat who wins.

Google, please go back to innovating. People like you because you do new and exciting things, not because you have your hand in every business sector. Giant acquisitions like this and MoMo help nobody.

Edit: I'm not trying to say Google shouldn't protect their business, but I, at least, would prefer them to do it through innovation rather than buying giant companies.

dmbass··on Chrome's Most Important Feature
Do you choose what version of a web site you use? Generally no. You trust that whoever is running it cares enough to not break it for you, just like Chrome users trust Google to not break their web browser.
dmbass··on WSJ: A Very Gloomy Picture Of Larry Page's Short Tenure As Google CEO
http://www.google.com/search?&q=For+Google+CEO+Larry+Pag...

Actual Google search link that will work when clicking through to WSJ.

dmbass··on Show HN: Like Button for Hacker News
I imagined something like http://dl.dropbox.com/u/408087/hn/button.png
dmbass··on An idea (to fix public transport schedules).
There are a lot of stations (numbered lines only, I think) that have "time to next subway" signs which I've found to be pretty accurate. I'm not sure if there is an API for subway info, but they run so regularly (~5 mins or less during the day and 30 mins at late night) that it's generally not that important to get that info. I'm not going to take a taxi because the subway is 15 mins away.
dmbass··on Closures – A Simple Explanation (Using Ruby)
This explanation did not add anything to help me better understand closures and anonymous functions. I already understand that closures allow you to pass an anonymous function around and it maintains the variables that were in its scope when it was created (whether by copy or reference).

The problem, at least for me, is finding a non-trivial example of using an anonymous function. Does anybody have other examples like malkia's[1] that demonstrate why anonymous functions and closures are useful? Or maybe just a good explanation of functional programming?

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2919149

dmbass··on Code Kata: Becoming a better developer
About your pet peeve, "art" has more than one definition, so you may want to rethink being annoyed by calling a style of fighting a "martial art." See: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/art?show=1
dmbass··on Google docs: Try out a new look and keyboard shortcuts for your documents list
Woah seriously? Google needs to cool it on the padding and add a little bit more definition/differentiation to the different app areas. This is getting a little bit out of hand; brains need at least a little bit of direction to know where to look.
dmbass··on Organizing Large C Programs
I agree. I was looking forward to some useful information, but this is really the first thing you learn after "hello world" in C. I'm somewhat baffled as to why this was even submitted to HN much less how it made it to the front page.

In my experience, managing C projects becomes frustrating pretty fast but maybe that's a problem with all languages (most of my limited experience is in C).

dmbass··on How our SaaS startup got 1000+ signups in just 7 days, without getting Crunched.
Design is the most important part of your product if you are not creating a new market because that's the only way you can differentiate your product. Everybody is going to have the same features and what you are really selling is your design.

When you launch a new product into a new market, the features (i.e. what it actually does) end up being slightly more important than the design. The design is obviously still important, but probably not the most important part of your product.

P.s. I really like the retro-beach lifeguard metaphor for customer service.

dmbass··on Apple captured two thirds of available mobile phone profits in Q2
On point 2, they also release at least 4 new phones every month to "stay competitive (with each other)". That can't be cheap.
dmbass··on Unsolicited Redesigns (Khoi Vinh responds to NYTimes redesign)
"Completely" is unfair. See: http://andyrutledge.com/images09/newsSite/nyt-redux-article....

But just come out and say "we had to cover the site in ads and couldn't do a better design" if that's the case.

dmbass··on Unsolicited Redesigns (Khoi Vinh responds to NYTimes redesign)
The only really egregious criticism was that "the front page of a news paper is not editorialized". Someone DOES choose what the most important stories are at the time of publication and puts those on the front page. That is editorializing. If all the stories were in reverse chronological order or alphabetical order or something, then it wouldn't be editorialized.

All the "terrible/unusable design" criticisms are quite valid today, I think. Maybe they weren't 5 years ago when the site was designed, but there is simply too much information to process now.

dmbass··on Unsolicited Redesigns (Khoi Vinh responds to NYTimes redesign)
...the argument that the redesign’s author makes is not quite so persuasive, mostly because it makes some rash assumptions, misses some critical realities and, perhaps worse of all, takes a somewhat inflammatory approach in criticizing the many people who work on the original site.

This guy sounds like the redesigner really hurt his feelings.

Why not share the design constraints that the redesigner failed to consider? Wouldn't that be more productive than complaining about link baiting and criticism?

dmbass··on ISP Bandwidth Caps are Really Rate Hikes
The point is that today we don't hit the caps, but metaphorical-tomorrow, we will hit them and it will be too late to change the precedents set today.
dmbass··on Dropbox Leases Giant New SF Office, Plans To Grow To 400+ Employees
In my estimation, if their system was decently designed, instead of granting anyone access to everything, nobody should have been granted access to anything if there is an authentication problem. Can you possibly imagine a worse system than they currently use (that still attempts to provide security)?
dmbass··on LulzSec's 'Topiary' arrested
So the A-Team dox were a bunch of rubbish? (or perhaps that was already confirmed and I missed it).

http://pastebin.com/iVujX4TR

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