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drvortex

104 karma · joined October 15, 2013

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drvortex··on Atom 1.0
I am loathe to install something like Atom with a 4MB limit on file size and 80 MB install size when Sublime Text does the same or better in a 8 MB install package with no limits.
drvortex··on Placebo Button
It's not the placebo effect working despite the user not having faith in it.

By providing the information you do on the web page, you are suggesting (and perhaps convincing) the user that the placebo will work despite being a placebo. Therefore, it might work by a placebo effect on the effectiveness of the placebo.

You are placebo-ing the placebo. Inception all over again, eh.

drvortex··on Show HN: Convoy's Game of Life in Browser
Conway
drvortex··on Show HN: Mata – Chrome extension that makes reading friendly for your eyes
Erm. Hard to tell what I think of a piece of software when I haven't used it. There's plenty of reader extensions, greasemonkey scrips and bookmarklets to improve readability. What makes them better or worse is the implementation and styles.

As they say, the proof is in the pudding.

drvortex··on Multiprocess Firefox
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=748291

Here is one of several you get when you search for 'Forward' button

drvortex··on Multiprocess Firefox
Thanks for the offer. But I believe that the decision to remove the Forward button when there is no 'Forward' history was a design decision. Unfortunately, it has the unpleasant effect of resizing the address bar as well. So as you click through tabs, or click links, the address bar keeps resiing depending on the state of the history in that tab.

These 'design' decisions are quite silly IMHO. But I will find the original bug report and CC you on it.

drvortex··on An Introduction to Matlab Metaprogramming
In this universe, that is called symbolic computation or functional programming.
drvortex··on Multiprocess Firefox
Now if I can only fix the wobbly address bar that changes size depending on Back/Forward availability.
drvortex··on Show HN: Mata – Chrome extension that makes reading friendly for your eyes
Where is the link to the extension ? All I see is a demo.
drvortex··on Show HN: Review my startup – a blogging platform
Self-hosted package? It is important that you make the backend available for self-hosting if you want paying customers. It is the reason why Wordpress, Ghost and company are doing well - they are open source and can be examined for security flaws and modified if necessary. Very few casual/amateur bloggers will pay for a blog when Blogger, Tumblr etc. exist.

You want to be a blog hosting company. Make the engine available.

drvortex··on Myntra, India's largest fashion and apparel e-commerce portal to go mobile only
They don't make these decisions lightly. They have done the market research and must have deemed it an acceptable loss to lose these desktop people.
drvortex··on Myntra, India's largest fashion and apparel e-commerce portal to go mobile only
Huh? Why India? The link talks about Africa. The Indian mobile market has been completely taken over by Android. About 50% of molbile phones sold in India are cheap Chinese phones. But even those these days come with 1Ghz processors and 4 inch screens (albeit of poor quality).

These run Android fine. Firefox OS is at the moment clearly heading for the no-mobile-phones-yet market and offering a low-end phone. India is somewhere in the mostly-mid-range-mobile-phones zone now.

drvortex··on PHP: md5('240610708') == md5('QNKCDZO')
So this is a PHP fail. But all the same, MD5 has been shown to fail collision resistance several times now.
drvortex··on Show HN: Shirt URL – redirect your T-shirt to new content every day
You need to printing QR codes for that, not just the plain text URL.
drvortex··on Google’s ARC Now Runs Android Apps on Chrome OS, Windows, Mac, and Linux
I have to admit that this is a brilliant move by Google. In one sweep, they have put the might of the formidable Android ecosystem behind ChromeOS. Well done. Chrome OS is instantly comparable to Linux and Windows if it can run native apps.
drvortex··on ReText – Markdown Editor with Live Preview
It depends on the complexity of your document. For example, writing a scientific manuscript is a horror in any kind of Markdown. No proper support or integration for references, equations etc. Everything is hacked together. Even LateX is better at it. I understand that Markdown is intended for simple documents. But then, I don't see why I should write Markdown instead of just directly typing it out in Libreoffice Writer.
drvortex··on Show HN: A GTK+ 1Password App for Linux
What are the advantages over Keepass?
drvortex··on Show HN: Squall – A microblogging platform that replaces tweetstorms
http://imgur.com/EpY3Ioz

Interface failure all over the place.

drvortex··on Show HN: Ripple – a new way to share
So you made Plague for iOS?
drvortex··on Sublime Text 3 builds picking up steam again
Oh yeah, well not on Windows.
drvortex··on Sublime Text 3 builds picking up steam again
Atom is also huge - 77 MB installer on Windows, while Sublime Text 3 is 8 MB. It hardly fits the bill for a lean-mean-editor.

Atom doesn't have a 64-bit version either. I tried it as a replacement for Sublime Text 3 but it just doesn't cut it. I am wondering why ST3 development had slowed down in the first place.

drvortex··on Show HN: JumpChat – Skype without accounts
Screenshare doesn't work on Chrome.

This is a nice tool and there have been some like it already (https://appear.in/) but Skype's killer feature is that it has a list of people I know that I have added, saving me the trouble of emailing URLs or scanning QR codes. The problem with this is that it requires me to already have established contact with the person I want to video chat with, in order to share the link. With Skype, establishing contact, initiating a call and video chatting, all can be done through the same software.

This is why Skype-killers don't take off. Hangouts has made some inroads because it also has a list of people already present. If only it was as reliable as Skype in low bandwidth environments and not bundled into an intrusive Chrome app (it actually blocks a little part of your screen if you want to stay online, the extension has no offline feature, etc.)

drvortex··on Paperwork: An open source Evernote alternative
I moved TO Evernote from Zim. I was using the same kind of setup you mention, a Zim directory saved in Google Drive, and synced via the official Google Drive client.

It worked ok, until my needs started going beyond simple text and images. There is a horrible issue that caused due to file locking after you make changes because the Google Drive client and Zim aren't really talking to each other at all. Every once in a while GDrive will attempt to sync exacly when you are editing the file and fail.

Evernote's clipping/reading functions of the browser extension finally won me over. Evernote also has much better UX+UI compared to Zim.

drvortex··on Paperwork: An open source Evernote alternative
It is the path of least resistance to get to a 'Desktop' experience. And please, what are the alternatives?

Firefox ? I'm sorry, but Firefox lost relevance a couple of years ago now. Firefox is ethically the best , but it sucks in implementation. Firefox is now the broccoli of the web, stale broccoli at that.

drvortex··on Paperwork: An open source Evernote alternative
It is actually a shame that it is based on PHP. If it was based on pure JS, there was hope to make a desktop version easily using node-webkit or something.
drvortex··on Paperwork: An open source Evernote alternative
As other's have mentioned, the WebUI is a major no-no.

Evernote's strength lies in its Desktop application and very useful clipping service.

The fact that Evernote uses its own cloud storage instead of say an encrypted folder in Google Drive/Dropbox etc is a negative of the service. Sync is required but implemented in the most undesirable way in Evernote currently.

Paperwork is promising, but seems to have replicated the negative of Evernote, while foregoing the reason why people use Evernote in the first place.

So, if you want to Paperwork to take off:

1. Implement it as an offline Chrome App with Dropbox+Google Drive sync. 2. Implement a web clipping+screenshot extension.

drvortex··on Show HN: Using SVG to Shrink Your PNGs
Cool trick, but PNGs can be lossified using a simple lossy averaging filter, using reduced and optimized color palettes etc.

https://tinypng.com/ https://github.com/foobaz/lossypng

drvortex··on Node-os
If node-js is based on Chrome's Javascript engine. Did you just make a alternative Chrome-OS?
drvortex··on A Mathematician’s Lament (2002) [pdf]
If the musician woke up in the first sentence, how is he still dreaming in the next one?
drvortex··on Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs
There is a μ on the German QWERTZ keyboards.
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