pak

Ah yes, not even the Steve himself can resist the ole pie chart chin trick.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2008/jan/21/liesda...

Maybe he'd blame that on the default styling of pie charts in Keynote (tsk!), but it'd take some extraordinary reality distortion to believe the Apple slice landed at the bottom by accident.

One reddit user suspects that they are looking for TTL's on packets that do not match what iOS uses. I would love for somebody more knowledgeable about TCP/IP on HN to evaluate the likelihood of this...

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/g62wv/i_woke_up_...

If this is the case, user agent spoofing will not work, and it would be quite a bit of hackery to trick iOS' IP stack into spoofing TTL's for packets from tethered devices.

Your chemistry class example is nonsensical. In class, if there is an opportunity to explore a few things and a mess is made, maybe you would not be blamed. That's usually not how labs are run--you follow a procedure and mixing chemicals with no forethought is a huge safety hazard to everybody in the lab. Neither the "real world" nor the Internet is a place with a mutual agreement between all participants to experiment with each other's property.

Maybe a better example would be going into your neighbor's backyard and testing how readily his shrubbery lights on fire. Oops, it's burning! Tell him to "fix the bug" and move on.

Also, peacefully protesting about ongoing violations of the 4th Amendment in an airport will apparently get you arrested. A student describes how he was intimidated and threatened by the TSA in this filing, starting from page 9: http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/03/tobey....

He had done nothing more than write the amendment on his chest and expose the text after being selected for body scanning. The story was submitted earlier: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326382

While I agree that URL shortening stinks for all sorts of philosophical and practical reasons, it grinds at me that HN's crippled markdown doesn't let you specify text for links. It makes it hard to integrate multiple links into text, because I am forced to line-break after each to achieve a minimum of readability.

You can see that the HN formatter is sympathetic to this type of textual disaster and "shortened" your links, just by omitting the last 20 or so characters of each.

Some mobile web app "stores", like http://openappmkt.com/ , provide all the JS and HTML to force users to install the app to the homescreen first, in the interest of preserving their user experience.

Try installing an app that is based on OpenAppMkt like http://khanapp.com and notice that it asks you nicely to add it first to the home screen before running.

As an iOS web developer you can use the navigator.standalone JS var to detect if the app is running straight from the home screen, and ask the user nicely to install it if they haven't done so.

Why would you prefer users to do this? Because it removes the location bar chrome, which can result in a near-seamless fullscreen interface that more closely resembles a native app.

I will call your UPS logo and raise you a Xerox:

the timeless http://bit.ly/h7p2hX

vs. the new http://bit.ly/4YBIew

While we're at it, let's toss in MySpace:

the meh http://bit.ly/dWqJFi

vs. the WTF-worthy http://bit.ly/eRmxK1

It's only "wasted" time if you didn't learn anything while hacking it together, didn't have any fun, and gained nothing in redesigning it your way. But, to each his own...

Re: the loupe, yeah not sure exactly what you meant, but you can also change the magnification in DCM prefs.

#3 is allowed by DCM. Besides #2 and #6, all of those other features could probably be layered onto DCM with FastScripts (free for up to 10 global hotkeys, http://www.red-sweater.com/fastscripts/) and some trivial little AppleScripts, certainly nothing that couldn't be done in half an hour by anybody reading this site.

I think $5.50 is overkill for a system utility with some trivial extra shortcuts and visual enhancements.

EDIT: re #3, you can change the magnification of the loupe, not its literal size on the screen.

I wish more attention would return to Kohana (kohanaframework.org), which is basically CodeIgniter done better by a community of coders, except the documentation for 3.x is sparse and IMO certain things in 2.x were better.

This idea for CI is nice, but the video reminded me of one of the more annoying parts of CI: $this->load->whatever()ing everything, which should be rightfully obsoleted for everybody running PHP5 as it is in Kohana, because PHP can autoload classes with your own custom __autoload() function. It's wasted effort to manually load everything and the collisions created in the local namespace are intolerable.

There are much more interesting ways to relate numbers to pitches; see the Pythagorean ratios and tuning before equal temperament.

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

I agree, there is a lot here that is not well researched, right down to not correctly capitalizing LaTeX and TeX. However, to your point, it's an unfortunate thing that neither kerning nor hyphenation are on by default in the versions of Office that can do it: Word alone has tons of poor defaults (and most people don't know how to change them, even I shudder at the thought of messing with Normal.dot). It's the usual reluctance of MS to break with the past.

Also, while we're at it, why is paragraph spacing NOT prominently accessible from a toolbar or the ribbon? In Mac Office 2011, I can only find it in the Format Paragraph dialog box, straight from 1995, as there is no more formatting palette. It's like they are begging everybody to continue hitting Enter twice between paragraphs (you know who you are, stop it already!).

OK, but websites have used alert() since the dawn of time to trap you on the site with an endless stream of annoying modal dialogs. If this ever catches on, browsers will do exactly what most have done with alert(): if the webpage calls it more than X times a second, the browser asks you, "Do you want to allow Site X to continue to screw with your location bar?" and you can say No.

Handy Chrome extension that blocks Like buttons and their ilk:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ejpepffjfmamnamb...

I've been using it for months... no regrets. And the web is generally faster because Facebook JS takes ages to load.

This is nice but what's the difference from ViewText (http://www.viewtext.org)? ViewText has a JSONP API, which made it perfect for building into a recent little project I did (it was a web app). Plus, it's been around for a lot longer.

Right, although we have been trained otherwise by rainbow diagrams from birth, colors do not map 1:1 to wavelengths, and most of the light we observe is a mixture of wavelengths; we can only sample an intensity from each of three fuzzy bands of the spectra, and the rest is in our heads.

GoDaddy is the largest ICANN-accredited registrar in the world, so their target audience of "everybody with a functioning libido" seems to have worked out well for them. I think it was the Super Bowl ads starting in 2005 that basically got their brand stuck in the head of anybody considering starting a website. There's a lesson in there somewhere.

Inc magazine did a segment on Bob Parsons: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/the-way-i-work-bob-pars...

Yeah, it's all about form factor. If you see a laptop plugged in and leaning behind a desk, you think somebody lost their laptop and you pick it up. If you see one of these sitting in a socket, you don't look at it twice because it looks like one of millions of power adapters that are hooked into all the walls everywhere.

Personally, I want one that screws into a lightbulb socket and lights up :-)

This is a great companion to another paranoia-inducing post on HN recently (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2267205) because it suggests a way to create your own plug-in-and-leave-it proxies to do whatever on the Internet without leaving any tracks. As you know, most hackers attempt to do this by tunneling through one or more compromised systems, but here is a way that might actually be somewhat legal:

Go to any place where two public wireless networks overlap, and leave one of these devices in the overlap zone and connected to both networks. Arrange the networking so that you can tunnel out of one wireless network and back into the other. Do this in a few such places and you have a series of hops that can make it quite challenging to trace traffic back to you. Have your device retain no logs and include a remote power shutoff, so if somebody is chasing you from the destination network, by the time the physical plug is discovered (if it is at all, these things are easy to conceal) the router logs for the source network and ISP have long cycled.

If you are doing something really nefarious, do all of this on a battery-operated Gumstix and leave it in a trashcan between a Starbucks and a public library. The battery would probably last you all day, and then the garbage truck will dispose of all evidence by next morning without any intervention.

If you want to do this right now, check out Screens for iPad.

Jailbreaking comes with all sorts of downsides. You may have gotten lucky, but also observe that every jailbreaking tutorial on the web has hundreds of comments from people who didn't get everything to work right and pleading for advice from others that will never come.

From my experience, it turns older iPhones into a stuttering laggy mess and breaks visual voicemail, and makes you paranoid about every iTunes update.

This is exactly the sentiment that led to us at QuickFuse (quickfuseapps.com) to skip creating yet another XML DSL for building voice apps. The voice dev ecosystem is overflowing with them, some new and some old (VoiceXML, TwiML, etc.), so we decided to move straight to a graphical representation that does the task.

For some things, a visual DSL like a callflow for voice apps or musical notation for music probably has the highest information density, and therefore becomes the most pleasing interface for being creative.

No, I think you're underestimating this potential change. It really seems that Google wants people to not realize they are using a web browser when they are browsing the web, and the URL bar is one of the last notable things separating typical browser UI with that of desktop applications.

Defaults are important because so few people change them or even notice them. Hiding the URL bar by default will make some new Chrome users not even realize it is there, and yet more will eventually neglect to use it properly. The web then becomes like a HyperCard stack, with Google as the top card (by default). I'm sure this is exactly how Google wants the web to be, but it's not going to help create knowledgable web users.

I'm sure you've heard of users that google "www.nytimes.com" to go to the New York Times, because they already don't know how to use the URL bar or what a URL is and equate Google with getting anywhere on the web. Think about how this change is going to influence people of that technical caliber.

Your comment makes me think of how short-sighted laziness is endemic or maybe engrained on a cultural level. Or even worse, it's a natural part of our decision-making processes, but I really think culture can overcome it.

Solving the problem of people never learning "one thing" to save hundreds of wasted hours over the years is akin to solving the obesity problem in America. Everybody that is obese knows already that obesity is a health problem, but it takes that little bit of effort to start making it pay off, and nobody has the time/desire to put in that little bit of effort. Meanwhile massive societal forces conspire to both make people overeat and stay inactive, just as they keep them from taking the time to learn new things about their software and work processes.

The reason I think culture and education can overcome these forces is because of another comparable societal problem: the campaign to end smoking actually has gotten a large percentage of Americans, especially youth, to get over that hump or even better never start at all. It took massive investment in public education and time for it to propagate through a generation. So, these are cultural problems: we have a failure to motivate people to explore new computer skills.

I didn't say he believed in a personal god. He believed in a more abstract sort of god, one that reflected the mysteries that humans will never penetrate; he also said this concept defined his sense of being religious.

"A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man."

"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."

"Why was the universe created?"

Do you think science will ever answer this question? The universe as a whole is on some level inexplicable, unless we somehow manage to transcend our existence in it...

Saying that a scientist's belief in God causes confirmation bias in his research results is more ad hominem and less productive criticism. Einstein believed in God, and in fact wrote extensively about the relationship he felt between God and his theories of the universe. Likewise many scientists lead productive careers without an iota of their religion (or family, or culture, or whatever have you) impacting the rigor of their work.

One feature Uploadify still retains over this plugin: The Flash upload dialog allows you to restrict what file types (by extension) are selectable, which can prevent some people from uploading the .JPG when you only accept audio files, etc. I don't think anything in the HTML5 DnD API has accounted for this.

That sort of "control" wouldn't necessarily be conclusive; Bing could be using click data weighed by a prior calculation of how trustworthy the clicked-on site is (e.g. an analogue of PageRank score), whereupon clicks on Google would rank much higher than clicks on some newly-created fake search engine.

I guess my point is, unless you have deep knowledge into the secret workings of a search engine with hundreds of inputs, simple "tests" to figure out the nature of just one of those inputs are bound to end in multiple plausible explanations for your results, unless you rig a huge fraction of the WWW. And Google has better things to do with their time.

My first thought was that it was click data, and not outright copying. If a bunch of Google employees with Bing toolbar start clicking on links to some made-up term, that should spike the data enough to change results within a few weeks. How can Google positively rule that out without internal knowledge of how Bing works?

Ah, now that's a welcoming intro paragraph for the README.