HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

netnichols

321 karma · joined June 16, 2010

submissionscomments
netnichols··on Ask HN: Which non-technology book has influenced you the most and why?
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque.

It might not actually be my first choice, but this one of the few on my short list that no one else has mentioned.

I read it in my mid teens (not too long after we stopped playing Rambo in the back yard) and it profoundly affected the way I view war, violence, and suffering. I've only read it the once (almost 25 years ago), and I hardly remember the story at all, but I vividly remember the feeling that it gave me.

netnichols··on Scientists must fight for the facts
Hehe, exactly. "We had yuge crowds! The biggest crowds! At least when compared to Bush..."
netnichols··on The fishy ingredient in beer that bothers vegetarians
My thoughts exactly. I laughed out loud a couple of times at the hysteria permeating this article.
netnichols··on A new look for repositories
It took me ages to get used to the old new design (that dropped the tabs on top). Glad they're switching back... definitely a more intuitive structure for me.
netnichols··on The iPad Pro
Did you read it? A large section of the review was complaining about bugs and software shortcomings. That's not being a very good "fanboy".
netnichols··on “On Accident” or “By Accident”?
Funny, before I read the article I thought that "on accident" must be some British English bastardization since it sounds so weird to my American ears. But I was born in the late 70's and haven't lived in the US since 2000, so maybe that explains it.
netnichols··on How Googlebot crawls JavaScript
They probably don't care about that content.

My first guess would be that they snapshot the DOM in the JS tick immediately after window.onload completes. Maybe they have a short pause to let any fast timeouts or callbacks complete, but there's got to be a cutoff at some point (e.g. to stop an infinite wait for pages that continuously update a relative date). Of course, with their own JS engine, I bet they can get really fancy with the heuristics to determine when to take that snapshot.

netnichols··on The 2014 Panic Report
Panic is actually more well known as a company that makes Mac apps. Many would call them the preeminent developers for the Mac platform (along with Omni). So think of it like this...

A hugely popular (for its market), established, independent, and profitable software company gives clear and transparent insight into how the past year has gone for them and their products.

netnichols··on Falcon is a high-performance Python Web framework
My first thoughts as well when scanning the homepage.
netnichols··on Falcon is a high-performance Python Web framework
That is a nice competitive advantage over Flask, but Bottle has no dependencies whatsoever. And besides a slight performance advantage over Bottle, I don't see any significant reason for me to switch to Falcon.
netnichols··on Velocity.js
Funnily enough I was just today checking out Transit[1] for a project I'm working on. Has anyone gone through the process of picking Velocity vs. Transit? What made you pick one or the other?

[1]: http://ricostacruz.com/jquery.transit/

netnichols··on Langton's ant
Thanks! It was hard to get the point of how cool this is from the animation/description in the Wikipedia article.
netnichols··on Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill
My German apartment has drafty, unsealed wooden window frames, and the window in the kitchen is a single large sheet of glass. We have to hang a rug over that window in the winter, as it feels like you've left a freezer door open if you get within 3 feet of it.

But the walls are indeed very thick!

netnichols··on “Learning to Read” excerpt from The Autobiography of Malcolm X
That's a great point. It's fascinating to think where he would have ended up after 20 or 40 more years of study and contemplation.
netnichols··on A flat icon set for OS X
Nice job! Just missing a Facebook icon for my Facebook SSB.
netnichols··on Tech Blogger Tries To Cancel Comcast Service, Hilarity Ensues
When I'm in a place where these folks will follow you around, I turn as robotic as possible and answer once (or maybe twice to make things perfectly clear) with a simple "no". I try to leave no room for interpreting playfulness or agressiveness.
netnichols··on Tech Blogger Tries To Cancel Comcast Service, Hilarity Ensues
It wasn't quite that bad... I could cancel for any reason, but only up to something like a month before the next billing cycle.

I of course realized this around 2 weeks before the next billing cycle, so I would have been forced to pay for the whole year if I didn't show that I was leaving the city.

So I certainly have some blame to my name for not having read the contract more carefully... it just all seemed a bit crazy at the time for a gym membership.

netnichols··on Tech Blogger Tries To Cancel Comcast Service, Hilarity Ensues
Nice idea, so long as you're in the US where you don't really have an 'official' location...

I tried to do this once in Berlin to cancel a gym membership outside of the contractual limits. They required showing an official 'de-registration' from the city of Berlin. I was moving within the city at the time, so instead of telling the city I was moving, I instead told the city I was leaving and then a few weeks later reregistered with my new address.

Unfortunately I wasn't aware that this would reset the amount of uninterrupted time spent in Germany which is needed for getting a permanent residency. D'oh!

netnichols··on Show HN: Depot
This has nothing to do with the actual product, which may be great, but... I am so ready for the trend of hyper-animated websites to start dying down.

I scrolled through the whole website, and while it looked great, by the time I got to the end I still had no idea what the product actually offered because my eyes were too busy watching all the little animations to pay attention to the content.

netnichols··on iMessage purgatory
Ugh, I hear you. I had to disable iMessage on my girlfriend's iPad because it kept 'stealing' every SMS I tried to send her.
netnichols··on The Distance: A new online magazine about long-lasting businesses
More likely a Rocky reference. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_distance_(boxing)

;-)

netnichols··on Vegetative patient says 'I'm not in pain'
That was another patient, not the main focus of the article:

> Another Canadian patient, Steven Graham, was able to demonstrate that he had laid down new memories since his brain injury.

netnichols··on Show HN: Jollyshot – ephemeral image hosting
I really like the simplicity and the 'guaranteed to self destruct' feature.

But... converting PNGs to JPGs makes it unusable for many many use cases.

netnichols··on Vis.js: A Visual Interaction System
Yeah, on my rMBP the timeline examples look fine, but the graph examples are distractingly blurry.

I look forward to a day when all of these high PPI growing pains are behind us.

netnichols··on Vis.js: A Visual Interaction System
Agreed. Or at least a description of what technologies are used (e.g. Canvas, SVG, VML, etc).
netnichols··on Roundcube Webmail 1.0.0 released
Congrats to them. I remember the days of running IlohaMail on a VPS for my family's mail and was very impressed when Roundcube came out.

I eventually decided that hosting my own email wasn't for me, but would certainly encourage any company or organization with a bit of sysadmin resources to take a close look.

netnichols··on Gracefully Dropping Support for Dinosaur Browsers in Trello
Ugh... yeah, I'd give my pinky finger to only have to worry about IE9 and up.
netnichols··on Poll: Asking for a friend – what do you understand by "6x4"
As others have mentioned, a grid of 6 columns by 4 rows, like the resolution of a display.
netnichols··on The Full-Fat Paradox: Whole Milk May Keep Us Lean
Exactly. I kept waiting for that to come up in the story and it never did. Would love for someone less lazy than myself to look at the actual paper and find out if this is addressed.
netnichols··on Microsoft, Past and Future
> I don't see how Gruber can come to this conclusion unless he has suddenly changed position and thinks the open web will eventually win out over native apps.

How does his statement have anything to do with 'open web' vs. native apps? How many native apps do you use that have no 'cloud' component whatsoever?

Gruber isn't talking about Microsoft making a bunch of web applications, he's talking about them becoming a key player in the data services arena, i.e. offering a platform for providing data to both web applications and native applications alike.

Page 1 of 3Next →