Hacker News Reader

gerggergon Continental Selling Options on Tickets

It's not an option, it's fare price insurance. Essentially airlines have taken the 'insure everything' game that retailers found out was massively profitable years ago. Also they've taken to selling cheap trinkets, charging fees for everything, and recently playing commercials on the plane's loudspeaker forcing every one in the cabin to listen. (Which if they really cared about airline safety/security they wouldn't play as the commercials train me to ignore everything that comes over the loudspeaker)

None of this is good for consumers, the only way the airlines make money off insuring things is if we loose more of it in the long run, and none of these expenses are large enough to justify the payment. Just like the service plans at best buy.

gerggergon Worlds Most Expensive Burger: 1/4 million euros

The real benefit of artificial non-descript meat sausage will be ending overfishing? I'm assuming you mean when they come out with artificial fish meat, but I can't find any mention of that in the article.

gerggergon Worlds Most Expensive Burger: 1/4 million euros

There already are artificial flavors, even artificial meat flavors. McDonalds french fries are sprayed with it. The reason he wants to make this a burger isn't because they've made artificial cow, it's because the artificial meat has the consistency of ground beef at best.

gerggergon Worlds Most Expensive Burger: 1/4 million euros

It most certainly is. Vegetarian bacon, while good, does not taste like bacon. And bacon with all the fat removed does not taste like bacon. It may be good, but it's not bacon.

gerggergon Worlds Most Expensive Burger: 1/4 million euros

Don't worry, when costs go down there will be plenty of marketers giving it plenty of 'appetizing' names. Let the scientists stick to the science.

gerggergon FBI Turns Off Thousands of GPS Devices After Supreme Court Ruling

If they hadn't made this judgment, would there be anything stopping you or I from legally attaching GPS devices to government official's cars and recording their movements?

They should overturn the ruling and make it fair game for anyone to track anyone else. Then we can make google maps mashups for tracking each other and government officials.

--edit-- </sarcasm>

gerggergon What Happens to the Coke in Coca-Cola?

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but if not, why then would they regard their formula as such a secret that the only two people allowed to know it may not fly together in case the plane should go down? As a diversion form their business practices?

gerggergon What Happens to the Coke in Coca-Cola?

There is a huge difference between a permit and an agreement with the DEA.

gerggergon What Happens to the Coke in Coca-Cola?

"In fact, the United States (and most other nations) expressly prohibits the sale and trade of coca leaves. In order for Coca-Cola to continue to exist in its current form, the company has a special arrangement with the Drug Enforcement Administration"

The article makes it seem as though Coca-Cola has an exclusive arrangement that involves funneling leaves through a chemicals company. It doesn't mention anything about Stepan being the only chemical company that can process the leaves for other reasons.

gerggergon What Happens to the Coke in Coca-Cola?

So coca-cola has a legal monopoly on the use of an ingredient. Seems like pretty unfair business practices to me.

gerggergon The Sun is Setting on Rails-style MVC Frameworks

Sure, I guess if you fundamentally misunderstand MVC but not in the real world.

You don't have render your view on the server, using a js framework is perfectly fine in MVC. There are plenty of rails plugins to make this even easier and I whole-heartedly disagree with, "Rails-style MVC frameworks have a horrible routing solution for RESTFul JSON APIs". Rails has simple routing that works great for restful resources and auto renders json that can be easily overridden.

Having a unified/standardized REST interface for web services would no doubt be nice, but it's existence has little to nothing to do with MVC.

gerggergon Those opposing ACTA are missing something fundamental…

Cheesy opinion piece by a dude who doesn't seem to have even read the legislation. Plus, why is it written in the 3rd person?

gerggergon SimpLESS compiless .less into beautiful .css

http://lesscss.org/

don't think it touches vendor prefixes.

gerggergon Webkit is the new ie6 (the trap of vendor prefixes)

it's pointless to blame anyone else but ourselves, the web development community

I disagree. To me this is a complete failure of the W3C do do 3 things:

- Come up with a solid plan for the deprecation of vendor specific tags.

- Convince browser vendors to follow it.

- Move fast enough with the CSS spec.

gerggergon The Open Web Needs You Now

I think the doom and gloom is a bit over-hyped, and the other browser authors probably have no choice but to implement the webkit prefixes. They just don't have the install numbers to do otherwise. I don't like the situation but I see it as inevitable and not that big of a deal.

The only way for this to change, is to build into the spec that once a feature is no longer experimental its vendor specific tag name gets deprecated and then removed and the deprecation warning needs to show up in the web inspector / firebug. Otherwise devs will literally think if it ain't broke don't fix it.

This is a job for the W3C. They have the task now of convincing browser manufacturers to implement this and to really start picking up the pace standardizing the web. There is never going to be enough public outcry to get people to stop using the webkit only prefixes unless other browser install numbers pick up.

gerggergon Kickstarter Fundraising Record About To Be Broken

What was the previous record? Diaspora?

gerggergon Obama Seeks 'On-Ramp' for More Startups to Go Public

Yay, loosening regulations on wall street. Lets let startups without enough financial knowledge and market power to create a real IPO jump into being publicly traded.

I see this going really well.

gerggergon Lessons from Moneyball

The only real lesson in Moneyball is do what you love and don't let others tell you not to.

What I find most interesting about the story is the different effect it has on people. Business types see it as "Take a great risk and it'll pay off (literally)." Science types see it as "Math works".

The reality is, you just have to do what you want to do and not care if other people tell you you're crazy. Was a situation like Moneyball an exception to the rule? Hell yes. But with out those 1 in 1000 exceptions to the rule we'd have very little to show for 50 thousand years on the planet.

gerggergon Women to Facebook: Stop banning our breast-feeding pics

Mmm, I think this really highlights the issue that facebook is not a public space. It's private. You can campaign all you want but this isn't womens lib. This is a private business that has their own rules. You want real freedom of expression? Facebook doesn't care. They just want their earnings to be as high as possible.

I'm by no means saying that facebook is doing anything close to the right thing. Exactly opposite. But I think theres a gross misconception among the general public that people somehow have any rights whatsoever on facebook.

gerggergon [dead]

The title of the post is "A Solution to CPU-intensive Tasks in IO Loops"

There's no reason to make up a more inflammatory one. It only serves to guarantee a less productive discussion.

gerggergon 30 to 40 Percent of VHS Films Will Never See Another Format

For me, a huge justification for piracy: archives.

Not just you, but also the US supreme court. If you already own a copy of that movie on any format it's legal to have 1 digital backup and you can acquire that backup by downloading it. Where most people get in trouble is by re-uploading it. If you do that, you're distributing something you have no right to distribute. And the most successful aspect of bittorrent is how efficiently it turns you into a distributer.

gerggergon Yale Discovers a Fungus That Eats Plastic

I'm hoping it's gold. That way we can all get rich.

gerggergon Node.js isn't a silver bullet, but it's still a bullet.

Sure, that all sounds great. I'm not trying to say you made a bad decision. You're original comment, though, came off as overly forceful, and a mild-bit condescending to the erlang community for no apparent reason and I decided to put my 2 cents in about it. There's no reason why your exact service couldn't be written in another language other than pure personal preference. And thats fine but you need to loosen up a bit about it.

gerggergon Node.js isn't a silver bullet, but it's still a bullet.

Plus all the hype just makes programming better. More eyes, more research, more usage, more knowledge, more code-as-art projects. I don't use node, but I'm envious of the people who have all that time to play around with it. Is it the best solution for any problem? That's up to no one but your own expert opinion. It really doesn't matter. What matters is people are programming and they're having fun doing it.

You try to use Node as a production solution and it(or you) fell short somewhere? Great, you just learned something and are a better programmer because of it.

gerggergon Node.js isn't a silver bullet, but it's still a bullet.

It's been going on since at least news papers. Go to the grocery-store and take a look at the magazines in the checkout isle. Humans love to watch unfold what they think is a controversy. It's entertainment.

gerggergon Node.js isn't a silver bullet, but it's still a bullet.

For no reason other than it would be a fine alternative. I'm sure your Node solution is performant and simple, and you should stick with that but no doubt a simple server written in ruby or haskell or python or anything really would get the same job done.

gerggergon Node.js isn't a silver bullet, but it's still a bullet.

Sinatra?

gerggergon Yale Discovers a Fungus That Eats Plastic

Any one know what the by-products of the fungus' metabolism are?

gerggergon Sugar Should Be Regulated As Toxin, Researchers Say

Alcohol should be regulated for the same reasons other harder drugs should be regulated.

- Proper regulation(not prohibition) takes money away from organized crime.

- Government based health regulations are still of great social impact.

- The money generated helps pay for the societal impacts of its use.

gerggergon Sugar Should Be Regulated As Toxin, Researchers Say

It's really just the simple economics of demand + cost cutting.