Hacker News Reader

legooolason HTML5 video chat implemented in Webkit GTK

I hope the irony of including a flash video on the page, to show a video example, is not lost :)

legooolason Why the US keeps minting coins people hate and won't use

Pound notes are also still printed and in use in the channel islands, although they aren't legal tender for the UK from there, but then the coins aren't either (despite being virtually identical).

legooolason The iPad Is For Everyone But Us

How many songs have they sold at a 30% cut from the music store again? I can't find anything right now to back this up, but my gut feeling is that they make a _lot_ of money from the software side, and they're going to keep pushing that because there's a lot more profit and (again, I suspect) lower costs.

If I find some numbers to back this up then I'll post them...

Edit: http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Apple-Q3-2009-by-t... (Q3 2009) shows $958m from Music and $528m from software, services. This isn't as much as from hardware totalled, but those numbers and the iPhone numbers are the only ones with growth. They're going to keep growing as they put more hardware out which can buy music, videos, apps etc from their stores.

legooolason Tim Berners-Lee unveils government data project

> However, "ensure you do not ... modify ... the information" seems to defeat the whole purpose of the project.

If you could modify the data then you could essentially make stuff up and claim that it's based on data from data.gov.uk. Wouldn't _that_ rather defeat the purpose of the project?

legooolason A site for Picolisp, a very true Lisp

Nothing stopping you doing these kinds of optimizations on Lisp code again at runtime when you have the extra info. Just automatically recompile if you know it will save you enough time to be worth it (which is a more difficult problem, of course...)

legooolason My thoughts on Google Go

Perhaps the "competent developer" is not what they are aiming at, but the masses. In fact, this would explain a lot of languages using C-like syntax if it were true (not to say that those which do are any worse/better than those which do not, he said back-pedalling :).

legooolason My thoughts on Google Go

We need to encourage people to get over their fear of syntax which is not C-like. I find much more pain in C-like syntax being jammed onto new languages than new languages daring to be different (and possibly coming up trumps, or being a disaster, but it's more interesting if they're different and perhaps better in some ways, IMHO).

legooolason Why kids don't program

Are there decent tools to debug and check JS for you, so that you don't have to rely on the browser built-in support (which is incredibly forgiving but also doesn't tell you what is going on)?

A massive advantage of BASIC was that it would tell you it was wrong as soon as you typed something with a syntax error in it, and it put a big flashing "?" (or similar) right there until you fixed it. Can JS be made to do that?

legooolason ITunes update screws text. Official solution: remove all your third-party fonts

Depends how old your Apple device is. I've got 4 ipods of various vintages (mostly given to me after their owner upgraded or some part of them broke), and they all work fine to sync to Linux boxes using gtkpod.

(Newest one is a 3rd Gen 30Gb, so I don't know about newer ones, but I suspect it's not too terrible)

legooolason Google's Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years

There are already phones coming out and planned with 800x480 and higher res screens, 1Ghz processors and upwards of 256Mb.

Moving up to 720p HD, 1Gb of memory and even quicker/more-cores chips doesn't seem more than a couple of years off. Whether they'll manage to make them any more usable is a different question :)

legooolason Coding Horror: Treating User Myopia

Perhaps someone should also teach them about the correct use of capital letters and how they make sentences easier to read.

legooolason Street View: We can trike wherever you like

I expect this is part of the reason they only have pictures from bright and sunny days in most places.

legooolason ISP in file-sharing wi-fi hack

Will we start to see attempts to ban "old" and insecure wireless routers? If your router only does WEP then you're open to this kind of attack, and no amount of configuring it will fix it...

legooolason What problems does Google Wave solve?

It is open, but most[1] people are going to use the Google-provided servers. Businesses who want to keep their data safe can have an internal wave server, but these aren't the kind of places which would allow employees to use Gmail for their business communications...

[1] Wild assumption, but I expect that the numbers will bear this out.

legooolason Google's Javascript PDF Viewer is Embeddable

It's becoming more common to use a separate domain for static content like this to be cached more effectively (and to have no cookies etc sent), so it may not always be the same server as the page you're looking at.

legooolason Stackoverflow Eating Away at Experts-Exchange

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/9462

Greasemonkey (or Opera user javascript as I believe that's mostly compatible) script to remove experts-exchange results from any google query. Saves you from having to use a different search or use -site: stuff.

Should be easily extendable to hide/dim/highlight/whatever any sites you want to see less/more of.