Hacker News Reader

inneson Anonymous & Lulz Security Statement to the FBI

No, the problem of misdirected anger is unsurprising.

And it's especially predictable with groups such as Anonymous who in their writings come off as pompous, childish, self-centred, and self-aggrandizing. Not the kind of traits that correlate with empathising with people on the other side of the planet.

Their strategy (setting aside the more base stuff that is just bullying and focussing on their attempts to appear principled and 'crusading') seems to be to latch on to easy populist targets in order to win others approval. Their politics are those of angry teenagers who've read enough Chomsky or Klein to get all riled up.

inneson Even a URL tells a story

Hmmm. I don't believe people use the term 'iPod' to refer to any old MP3 player.

inneson When it comes to presentation, Mark Zuckerberg is no Steve Jobs

Does anyone have a link to the video of the presentation by Zuckerberg?

inneson "//" should indicate a URL

Sorry for the meta-comment, but you seem to be the only person here who actually got what the article was saying.

inneson Speed up your eclipse as a super fast IDE

Good programmers don't need this, like good sprinters don't need bicycles.

inneson Jeff Bezos commissioning a giant clock to last 10,000 years.

Look upon my big clock, ye mighty, and despair.

Edit: apologies for light-hearted comment.

Edit2: amazing how quickly you get slow-banned on News.YC. Thanks downvoters.

inneson 5 Months of Customer Service Hell with HTC

before someone makes the argument that Apple sells extremely high-margin items and thus can afford good customer service... HTC sells the same type of product at the same price points.

HTC sells similarly capable products at lower price points and with a less deluxe finish. I know because I saved hundreds of pounds by going for an HTC desire instead of an iphone. But don't take my word for it, It's a well known fact that apple's profit margins dwarf those of other manufacturers.

inneson Joe Hewitt’s First Post-Facebook Web Gift: Inertial Scrolling For All

The article is by MG Siegler.

inneson Myths About Introverts

Speak for yourself - I like to think I'm above that.

inneson Exposed: Facebook’s Secret iPhone Photo Sharing App (Which Looks Amazing)

I'll need to look into that - haven't seen this option surfaced anywhere in the mobile or desktop sites.

Edit: I can see it in desktop upload - I must not have used that for a while. I uploaded a big image as 'high resolution' (actually, you can't select high resolution because the photo is already being uploaded by the time this radio button becomes available for clicking) and facebook shrunk it down to a paltry 720x480. The UI blows it up to larger than this, so it looks more blurry.

The basic uploader has no 'high resolution' option, but didnt shrink the uploaded photo down as much.

inneson Exposed: Facebook’s Secret iPhone Photo Sharing App (Which Looks Amazing)

Is it just me or do photos not look awful on facebook? They're compressed to death.

inneson If The World Were Only 100 People

A version of this where everyone not pale pink wasnt mapped to #000 might be interesting. Asia alone must account for more than 30% of the world's population.

inneson Apple acknowledges Mac Defender malware, promises update

To answer this question, we'd need to know whether various things will change in the future:

Will criminals stop wanting to scam people?

Will non-technical users somehow get more savvy?

Will the Apple userbase get smaller and thus less lucrative?

inneson Misuse of 3-D digital lens leaves 2-D movies in the dark

a movie theater is a completely different environment than your living room

This is true - my living room doesn't have somebody eating out of a loudly crackling popcorn bag, people talking to each other a few seats away, a dude behind me who accidentally dunts the seat every now and then when he crosses and uncrosses his legs, a dim slightly out-of-focus picture with the top chopped off because the projector hasn't been set up properly, or a woman updating facebook on her smartphone in my eyeshot every few minutes+.

Truly magical.

+okay, admittedly that's a distillation of annoying Cinema crap.

inneson Apple to support reps: 'Don't confirm Mac infections'

> The MS approach has always been to make money on working around defects.

Internet Explorer and Windows Defender are both free.

Also, the defect in this instance is allowing users to install software on their PCs and not helping them avoid installing malware. As this story shows, this is a defect that is shared and arguably worse on OSX.

inneson Apple to support reps: 'Don't confirm Mac infections'

No, but they can help solve the problem of gullible people downloading and running installers for known malware.

Honestly, listening to some Mac user responses to this problem, it's like entering a timewarp back to when all the measures implemented on Windows/IE to deal with this stuff hadn't even been thought up.

Possibly a quick fix, until it's addressed, is for folk on OSX to do their web surfing in a Windows VM, using a security-focussed browser designed for non-technical people, such as IE9. ;-)

inneson Apple to support reps: 'Don't confirm Mac infections'

Ed 'Glen Beck' Bott is apparently more influential amongst non-technical Mac users than anyone might have expected!

inneson Apple to support reps: 'Don't confirm Mac infections'

As the OS gets more popular, Apple will need to add the kind of protective features present in Windows to deal with this sort of problem. Dismissing it isn't gonna work - this kind of malware is the problem these days rather than viruses. As a savvy user, I've never found the need to run antivirus software on Windows, but it would be the height of arrogance for me to scoff at the problems others do have and blame it on their stupidity.

As is the way with these things, Apple will stonewall, but I expect eventually handle the issue. In the mean time some of the congregation will snort in derision and deny there's a problem.

inneson British hackers: stop voting for lizards; start voting for people today

Well, OK. It's two 'X' ballots compared to one 1..n ballot. You could argue each way which is more complicated. And I agree that neither is sufficiently complicated to disqualify it.

What I would say is that the mechanics of AV are more (pseudo?)non-deterministic than the Scottish Parliament system of PR. With PR - seats mirror votes more or less. With AV, nobody really seems to know how things will turn out, and even less representative massive majorities can occur. So in a way AV is more complicated in that sense.

I'm still wondering why I voted for it to be honest.

inneson British hackers: stop voting for lizards; start voting for people today

I have to disagree. It's a list of options, albeit taller than a sheet of A4. Instructions: put a cross next to your choice.

If that ballot paper is confusing then you shouldn't be allowed to vote.

inneson "Take a Photo; It’ll Last Longer"

...and the ability to select a shadow depth of field is probably a bigger factor in achieving the "pro look" than raw sharpness etc.

inneson Anatomy of a Fake Quotation

I think it's a property of the sentiment itself, rather than the quote. But that's just me - I like it when evil people meet their comeuppance; I thought it was good that OBL was executed, although I'm not the air-punching, brewski chugging type. If I were to find and post a quote indicating my sentiments, no doubt there'd be people thinking I was a dick; it's not going to keep me awake at night.

inneson Stack Overflow Makes Slow Pages 100x Faster By Simple SQL Tuning

Imagine how great StackOverflow would be if all the experts critiquing it here had built it.

inneson Workers Leaving the Googleplex

You can claim 'sociological issues' all you like, but when people see you're a fantasist with a laughable view of how the world works, and you're dealing in sly insinuation and race baiting... 'sociological issues' aint gonna cut it.

Well, I say that, but with the naivety on show in this thread perhaps this guy is onto a winner with 'sociological issues'.

inneson SMS from Chrome, fully sync'd with your Android phone

That's pretty cool - although it's having trouble matching up some of my messages to contacts, and threading them.

inneson This is a web page - Mozilla WebGL demo "No Comply"

IE9 is looking pretty dated at this point. 2D acceleration when the competition is doing this?

On the positive side, it shouldn't be too hard for them to add this functionality to IE10. They just have to choose between showing a blank page (FF4) or popping up an error message (Chrome).

inneson Android overtakes iOS in desired smartphone surveys

I find the rationalizations made in these iPhone/Android threads fascinating. Not sure doing so is healthy though.

inneson A “perfect” voting system

"Suppose ... there is a fascist party ... and that they have a constituency that amounts to 1% of the electorate"

Given a legislature of 600 representatives, a party with 1% support would have a vanishingly small chance of winning a majority.

inneson Internet Explorer, WebGL and a Return to the Bad Old Days

Sealed classes, oh the humanity. You should maybe have a lie down.

By the way, WebGL doesn't work in my Chrome install (10.0.648.205, ubuntu). Is it something that I need to switch on?

inneson IE10 platform preview available - with native HTML 5

I am liking the pugnacious tone. I suspect that with IE9 shipped, they feel they've earned the right to make a forceful argument on how browser development should happen.

"Hey kid. Releasing a new version every few weeks ain't professional."