jakobe

Unfortunately this doesn't work in mobile Safari...

You are right, that is a rather weak claim in an otherwise very well written article. I especially don't see how higher pain-and-suffering damages would have helped stopping this criminal sooner.

But unfortunately it takes lots and lots of money to apply Red Bulls branding strategy.

Watching TV shows in English (with English subtitles) is a great idea, but I'm not so sure about The Simpsons. I speak English fairly well and I still have some trouble understanding the Simpsons (Homer especially). There are other shows that are much easier to understand and better suited for beginners.

For example, I would consider Breaking Bad much more suitable for beginners in English (most characters speak very clear), but it might not be an appropriate show for kids.

I wish HN had a "star" button or so to keep track of insightful comments.

Concerning the click tracking thing, there's a browser extension for Safari that replaces the tracking links with the real links. This extension has made Google search a more reliable for me. Maybe there's a similar extension available for Firefox?

Not really. Google's autocorrect regularly 'corrects' my search term to something else. Or Google suggests a similar search, where by "similar" they mean "the same search but with the most important term missing".

Sometimes Google instant stops working and I can't search anymore. I have to reload the page before I can enter new search terms.

Google used to be so simple, predictable, and it always worked. Now it is a complex, intransparent mess.

Google Search is becoming more and more like Altavista and Yahoo were like when Google started.

Why is it not okay to use tables for styling purposes? Why is it okay to use multiple nested divs, but not the table/tr/td tags? Are there any practical reasons, besides the goal of making the markup more 'semantic'? Are there any screen readers that can't handle table tags? Or do some crawlers choke on tables?

I keep hearing this dogma, don't use tables for layout, but nobody has ever explained to me why it is a problem in practice.

Interesting fact: How evidence was obtained is only important in the US. For example, in Austria where I live, it doesn't matter how the evidence was obtained.

In Austria, if someone illegally spies on you, the information they collect can be freely used in court. It is not important where the evidence comes from, it is only important if the evidence is credible or not.

This doesn't mean that the police can do whatever they want; if they torture someone, a potential confession would be worthless because it wouldn't be credible. And if the police used illegal means, that would bring about a separate trial (in theory).

But courts in Austria never have to pretend that some evidence doesn't exist.

You are right, I don't know much about Torvalds. He might be a very patient person most of his life. Like any public figure, he is probably badly misrepresented on the web.

But what makes me sad is that when he does snap, there's a large number of people who come and justify his behaviour. People don't say "You are misrepresenting him!". People say "He gave so much to us. He has the right to behave this way."

I did not mean to call Torvalds names. Apparently I wasn't careful enough in my wording.

I meant to express my frustration how the community often accepts socially inacceptable behaviour from accomplished people.

When "normal" people fall into a rage, we tell them to learn coping with their anger. If they keep yelling angrily at people, we might even suggest they see a psychiatrist. Not as an insult, but because we sincerely believe that they could maybe learn some coping strategies to get along better with other people.

But for some people the rules are different. When someone complains that Steve Jobs verbally abused his employees, or when someone complains that Linus Torvalds uses unnecessary profanity, a lot of people start to justify this behaviour. They claim it is necessary for their success, etc.

I find verbal abuse in private just as inacceptable as in public.

Torvalds seems to be a real bully. And it hurts me to see all these responses justifying his behaviour, as if this is the way it must be.

Just look at this message: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1TUvG3J...

There is no justification for this kind of behaviour. If anybody else behaved this way, they would be sent to a psychiatrist. But apparently since it's Linus Torvalds, he's just being a little "harsh" and that's necessary to get his point across.

We are talking about early stage startups here. I don't think it's a good idea to hire dedicated tech support people at an early stage startup.

Hiring tech support staff is for later, when the product is solid, and the developers can't handle the flood of support requests any more.

"As strong as styrofoam" doesn't really mean anything. Are you talking about tensile strength? Or about resistance to shear forces? Compressibility? I haven't found much data on the mechanical properties of aerographite, but the Young modulus given on Wikipedia seems way too low to withstand atmospheric pressure.

The author doesn't understand the concept of a blimp. The only reason for filling it with helium (or hydrogen) is to counter the atmospheric pressure. Since aerographite doesn't do that (it would just collapse under the pressure) there is absolutely no point in filling a blimp with aerographite.

If you found a way to create a hull that withstand the pressure, and prevents the aerographite from being compressed, why fill it with that stuff in the first place? Just use a vacuum inside your superstrong hull!

First thing I did was disable all email notifications. Not a trivial task: I had to turn off like 30 different types of notifications one by one. However, these sly bastards just kept coming up with new notifications, that were turned on by default. So I kept getting emails from facebook, even though I thought I had disabled all of them.

That was my experience a year or two ago. At some point I deleted my facebook account, because the value I got out of it wasn't sufficient to tolerate all those annoyances: changing email notifications, constantly changing privacy settings and policies, annoying ads, annoying messages from people I barely know...

All my other tools don't track everything I do with them, don't sell the information to advertisers, and don't spam me with dozens of emails.

I don't get why it's necessary to justify not using such a "tool".

The problem is that there are no signs on the fence explaining why it is there, and the people who raised it are nowhere to be found, and the most likely reason for its existence is unreasonable paranoia.

One technique for reducing customer support email is to write extensive documentation. Whenever I get a specific question more than once, I'll add the answer to the docs. It turns out that most customers read the docs before emailing, and in my experience it is extremely rare to get questions that are answered in the docs -- and if, I can just send them a link.

I always feel that the most difficult part of any project is its design, the implementation is rarely difficult. By design I mean both the conceptual design (data model, user flow), and user interface design. It takes a lot of time to come up with ideas how to tackle a problem. Then you implement them, realise it doesn't work, and start over with a different approach.

All this design work isn't necessary when you copy something. Someone else has already done the design work for you. You can lean back and say: "The solution is obvious." Then you only need to implement it. In my experience, the implementation always seems trivial in comparison to the design process.

But you are right, people who copy stuff often make poor copies. I think the problem is that they probably don't fully understand your design. They see how you solved something, but they don't understand why you solved it that way.

Finally, I don't think a rebuild is the same as a copy, because you generally only rebuild when something doesn't work. And then you actually need to put a lot of design work into the rebuild process -- that's why it's hard.

> How dare you assume that your competitors have the time and skill to copy you.

Unfortunately your competitors don't need your skills to copy you; once you make your thing public, everybody will see how to do it and copying your product becomes trivial. But the good part is that only successful projects are copied, so you really shouldn't worry about it -- when people start copying you, it means you are on the right track.

I don't get how a cardiac stress test can cost 2000USD. You put someone on a home trainer, let them pedal for 20 minutes, and look at their EKG. It's usually performed by a nurse, and the doctor spends 30 seconds looking at the EKG (the analysis of the EKG is even partially automated).

If there was actual competition on the market, I'm sure a health service provider would find a way to perform the test for 75USD.

The most important thing about a codebase is how it is designed at a large scale, its architecture. Using a framework often dictates a specific architecture, and this might lead to more manageable code bases.

But you can come up with a clear architecture without using a framework. For example, most projects I work on are well suited for a modular design. I can build them from many small, independent parts. So I write lots of PHP scripts consisting of some SQL queries on top and some presentation logic below. Introducing an ORM and separating Model/View/Controller would just add unnecessary complexity!

In my case, modularity ensures maintainability; there's no need for anyone to read all of the code before they can start working on something. Reading all of the code is only necessary if you write spaghetti code; but inexperienced developers will have no problem writing unmaintainable spaghetti code using any choice of framework!

That's why I still use vanilla PHP & Postgres for web projects. I don't use any hot new technologies, I don't use frameworks, I don't do unit testing. I try to use as little client side JS as possible. Whenever possible, I use static HTML.

The advantage is that I can create a working prototype in days. I can show something to the client very early, and I don't spend months to fulfill specifications the client didn't really understand in the first place.

When I leave the project, any PHP developer will be able to pick up and implement changes within hours. My code isn't elegant in any way, but it's simple.

I have to disagree, wine is bullshit. If you are going to use Windows apps, just use Windows!

Why is it not a fair comparison? Someone claimed travellers in the EU were subject to similar surveillance as in the US. As far as I understand, you need to show an ID even for domestic flights in the US.

I'm not sure I like the approach of serving files from your repository. I'm not sure about how git works in detail, but are repository updates even atomic?

When I deploy my website, I use a different approach: My webroot is just a symlink. My deployment script exports the repository to a directory with a unique name for every commit. When the export succeeds, the symlink is updated to point to the new directory.

The advantage: Changing to the new version is instantaneous. If something should go wrong, I can immediately revert by changing the symlink back to the old dir.

I just landed in Madrid, coming from Vienna. It was an international flight, but since it was within the EU, I didn't have to show my ID once. I bought my ticket online, I checked in online. At the security checkpoint, I showed my boarding pass on the phone. When boarding the plane, they scanned the boarding pass on my phone.

I could have just given my phone to someone else to travel.

There's a lot less surveillance of travellers in the EU compared to the US.

Maybe freedom to communicate without being subject to government surveillance?