Hacker News Reader

noelchurchillon Hammocks Make Sleep Easier, Deeper

This reaffirms my wanting to buy a house boat and live on it.

noelchurchillon Why China's Ghost Towns Matter for Our Economy

Seven months ago, analysts were predicting 2011 would be the Year of America.

That would be news to me. Which analysts were predicting that?

noelchurchillon Mark Suster: Raise Money Now So When The Party’s Over You’re Sitting Pretty

Well I suspect this bubble (if it is indeed a bubble) is somehow related to the recent stimulus efforts, so I suppose it depends what the Fed does after ending QE2 at the end of this month, if they eventually begin a new round of QE (in one form or another), and how long they maintain exceptionally low interest rates.

noelchurchillon US Senators ignore unintended consequences of criminalizing embedding videos

I imagine ex-bureaucrats are useful to hire because of all the connections they made while in office. If there are term limits and the churn rate is high, that doesn't leave much time to build those connections while in office, or to keep them after they've left.

noelchurchillon Hands Off Our Houses (follow up on the $300 house idea)

Often times customers use your product in a way you didn't intend. A $300 house may have value, just maybe not the way the builders envision it.

noelchurchillon [dead]

For the sake of thinking it through, how exactly would a government get rid of bitcoin?

I imagine they'd make it illegal to accept bitcoins as payment, which would remove all legitimate users from the market, but illegal drug buyers and sellers may still use it as payment, along with underground bitcoin/cash currency exchanges.

The anonymity of bitcoins may prove to create great enough demand, and help decentralize the illegal drug trade.

noelchurchillon Can We Kill This Myth That The Internet Is A Wild West That Needs To Be Tamed?

I thought the HN crowd would have an appreciation for the number 1337.

noelchurchillon Can We Kill This Myth That The Internet Is A Wild West That Needs To Be Tamed?

BTW I upvoted you to make your karma 1337 :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet

noelchurchillon Can We Kill This Myth That The Internet Is A Wild West That Needs To Be Tamed?

Looks like the freedombox isn't available yet? I like the mission though!

noelchurchillon Ads Implant False Memories

Or better, the good ol' "copy of a copy" analogy.

Or you might compare it to re-compressing a jpeg over and over.

noelchurchillon Lawsuit: AT&T overcharging iPhone users by up to 300%

In response, AT&T issued a statement stating that the allegations were “without merit.”

I think it would come off a lot better if they just said "We're looking into the issue and will make it right if we've wronged anyone."

noelchurchillon Why student loans are not like subprime mortgages

I don't think anyone believes there is actually a bubble in diplomas. Obviously there aren't any DBS's (diploma backed securities), or diploma flipping schemes.

However you might be able to make the case that there is a bubble related to university costs, or the market for university grads. Tuition costs continue to rise while wages remain stagnant and jobless rates remain high. If this trend continues long enough, the demand for diplomas is bound to go down and universities will be forced to lower their costs.

noelchurchillon Apple support forums confirm malware explosion

I think part of the problem is that people have been sold on the idea that Macs are safe and "there aren't any viruses for the Mac." There is this ill conceived notion that naive users hold that they aren't at risk so they'll more more inclined to install malware without thinking about or understanding the consequences.

noelchurchillon Apple support forums confirm malware explosion

Yesterday I spent several hours going through discussions.apple.com and collecting requests for help from Mac users who have been affected by this issue. I found more than 200 separate discussion threads, many of them from people who have been tricked into installing this software and are desperately trying to remove it. It started with four posts on April 30; this past weekend there were 42 unique, new discussion threads on this subject.

I am not unfamiliar with Apple’s forums. I’ve done similar searches in the past, especially after reading some of those same posts that Gruber called out from 2008. I have never found more than one or two in-the-wild reports. This time, the volume is truly exceptional.

This appears to be the first widespread malware attack.

noelchurchillon Apple support forums confirm malware explosion

Did you the article? Serious malware on the mac.

noelchurchillon Apple support forums confirm malware explosion

Ugh it's finally happened.

noelchurchillon Why don't app marketplaces allow vendor responses to the reviews?

Sometimes I know there is something wrong with my app because someone writes a bad review, but I can't do anything about it because I can't contact them to figure out how they got that problem.

So I made the "contact us" functionality front and center in the app and started getting a lot more direct feedback.

noelchurchillon Why Bing Could Beat Google in Social Search

The Facebook integration is a big win-win for Bing and Facebook.

noelchurchillon Muting annoying users on Twitter without unfollowing them

I have an old friend I follow on twitter who tweets way to much garbage and I want to unfollow her, but I know for a fact she uses an unfollow tracker, and I KNOW it'll spite her. I wish there was a way to mute people right in Twitter.

noelchurchillon Teaching Method More Important Then Teacher

They weren't taught with the correct method.

noelchurchillon A collection of maps of the Middle East

Bookmarked! I love maps and globes, and I love demographic data.

noelchurchillon Apple could adopt ARM for laptops, but why would it?

No. Think about it. For example, even if you could make an iOS app on an iPad you wouldn't want to. There are legitimate reasons for wanting a keyboard and trackpad. iOS is the future of Apple and they want all those iOS apps to be available on all mac computers too, so they're going to continue to move that iOS to all their machines, including ones with keyboards and trackpads.

noelchurchillon Apple could adopt ARM for laptops, but why would it?

OSX and iOS are merging. Think touch screen macbook air.

noelchurchillon Chief: Data on stolen police laptop safe because laptop needs power cord

The only power cord you might need is for your electric screwdriver to open op the laptop, remove the hard drive, and plug it in to another computer.

noelchurchillon Web browser market share: upgrade analysis

Where is the Safari version adoption chart?

noelchurchillon Why we need an Open Wireless movement

This seems like a non-issue to me, especially in the age of smartphones with personal wifi hotspot abilities.

noelchurchillon There are two kinds of people in the world

Two kinds of people in this world: You, and everyone else.

People will box you into a definition that suite their needs.

noelchurchillon The iOS weather-app market

I use Fahrenheit for iOS and like it.

noelchurchillon Petrodollar Warfare -- AKA the "Oil Currency Wars"

The most renegade of the lot could be Libya and Iraq, the two that have actually been attacked. Kenneth Schortgen Jr, writing on Examiner.com, noted that "[s]ix months before the US moved into Iraq to take down Saddam Hussein, the oil nation had made the move to accept euros instead of dollars for oil, and this became a threat to the global dominance of the dollar as the reserve currency, and its dominion as the petrodollar."

From: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MD14Ak02.html

noelchurchillon Google's Groupon Competitor Goes Live

Google is going to partly win the war against SEO gamers by integrating "social bullshit."