Hacker News Reader

pakon Demo: Pure CSS GUI icons, no images (experimental).

Ugh, too clever for my taste. I would hate to edit icons that are a mish-mash of CSS backgrounds, rotated boxes, and border-radius'ed edges, and to boot, based entirely on pseudo-elements. (Current web dev tools like Web Inspector in Chrome/Safari, etc. aren't well built for examining pseudo-elements.) This CSS uses ~3-4 pseudo-elements per icon. It's clever for doing that to preserve the markup and avoiding JS, but it's hard to understand. Maybe it would help to comment the CSS so designers can see that "this is the handle of the trash can, this is the left side of the heart," etc., since :after and :before are hacked far beyond having any semantic meaning.

pakon Reporting a bug on a fragile analysis

Removing code that does nothing. For example: "true;"

pakon Generating code from natural language is closer than you think

Why would you exclude text labels from visual programming? I think this is an artificial distinction. Sometimes they provide the best balance of space consumption vs. clarity. Labels on their own aren't natural language, they are at most terms put into context by the surrounding graphics; would your criteria be that visual programs use icons for every single concept?

Also, you'll find that that where we departed from conventions for flowcharting, we did it to save pixels, or make the UI more accessible. There is a tradeoff in visual programming between ease of editing and clutter--compare with Max MSP, which has a stark UI, at the cost of having you memorize certain textual commands. If you draw a bare flowchart, it's not obvious how to manipulate it until you draw other GUI controls on top of it or make some modifications. However, it is the general paradigm we are tapping into.

pakon 100 Naked Citizens: 100 Leaked Body Scans

This is an older machine, the newer backscatter X-ray type make pictures that look like this:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162-20022861-10391704.htm...

Yep, your "junk" is fully visible.

Paparazzi's wet dream... I mean, if the LAPD can't keep pictures of a battered Rihanna from TMZ[1], wait until Paris Hilton decides to fly commercial through LAX. (Celebrities can't always afford charter, can they?)

[1] http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,498157,00.html

pakon Generating code from natural language is closer than you think

there is no obvious convention for visual commands or visual conditionals

I don't know about that. Within a particular domain, you can certainly come close to representing these things, or presenting the right controls for a user to represent commands and conditionals. For an example, check out QuickFuse http://quickfuseapps.com

Before we built this, we thought about common ways people "drew" voice apps, and commands and conditionals both have certain natural visual representations in the "voice app" space, e.g., blocks with branching arrows and writing text to indicate spoken words.

pakon Ever wanted arc90′s Readability as an API?

You guys are awesome. I literally just embarked on building an RSS reader that fits my personal taste and was wondering to myself how to get page content filtered through Readability. I was envisioning weird hacks, but this is perfect.

pakon Minecraft CPU now available

I think if people could actually see what their computers did on the inside, their head would explode.

This reminds me of the Commodore 64 emulator where you can see pretty much a full slice of active memory, along with all the various graphics buffers, and tweak them as you wish. This takes it to another level: you can literally see and poke every physical component.

Can you fly in Minecraft? It's fun to walk around a CPU, but that looks like a lot of walking.

pakon Blogpress SEO is Malware

Most malware is written with hilariously bad coding style. I found it amusing that he claimed the fun_ prefix can be "used to denote a quantity is a function in some programming styles", despite this being irrelevant in PHP because function identifiers can never also be variables (all variables start with $).

pakon How Facebook Could Beat Google

This is actually a tremendous idea.

One of the main arguments against FB monetizing their ads is because "FB users don't go on FB to click on ads". This is anecdotally true. But when FB Connect and Like buttons have you logged in everywhere, there's nothing stopping them from showing you targeted ads when you are shopping, or searching or doing things where ad CTR would be much higher.

pakon [dead]

I wish there was a website that would aggregate all the flamebait tactics of tech-pundit personalities, and then display them on top of their articles (browser extension/greasemonkey script) so I could stop reading these ridiculous articles upon reaching the author line.

pakon [dead]

One hundred percent correct. When he said,

“If Retweet equals Member of Strategy Group, add to midmorning direct message queue.” “If Silverlight press conference transcript feed contains question from Mary Jo Foley, route to broker queue with Unload flag.” And so on.

...I started cracking up. Expecting general consumers to configure the logic behind their social stream is just a hilarious failure to understand how people socialize.

Email filtering is and will always be a power user feature. The same goes for any feature where you have to configure a set of rules. Most people do not like, care, or want to do such a thing. Press a button and feed me! Accept, Ignore, Like!

pakon Yep, Facebook Takes Control Of Fb.com Ahead Of Mail Launch

I was secretly hopeful this would be an opportunity for somebody with overwhelming mindshare to change that.

pakon Yep, Facebook Takes Control Of Fb.com Ahead Of Mail Launch

Pointed out in the comments: Why not use fb.me, which they already owned? fb.me is shorter and easier to remember ("facebook me" being a colloquialism these days, joe.smith@fb.me doesn't sound bad at all). And it subtly encourages people to go back and use the Facebook website instead of sticking with raw email, which I guarantee will be an underpinning to whatever secret email "project" they are finishing up.

pakon Multi-tabling poker player plays 120 tables at a time, verified human

Now that's something to put on your resume/t-shirt: "I was verified to be human by PokerStars.net"

pakon Matt Cutts: $1,000 to the 2 best implementations of the recently-hacked Kinect

OK, you're right, that character limit is very annoying. Sorry to sound off about something tangential to your post.

pakon Matt Cutts: $1,000 to the 2 best implementations of the recently-hacked Kinect

Yes, I would call people that work on this hackers in the older more positive sense, but the common, inflammatory meaning of the word "hacked" usually has something to do with a security exploit. As in Headline: "Blahblah.com was recently hacked." As a headline, you would never think that means blahblah was reverse-engineered, but that it was vandalized or people's accounts were stolen.

pakon Matt Cutts: $1,000 to the 2 best implementations of the recently-hacked Kinect

I was referring to the title of the HN submission. The submitter commented and said it was due to the character limit for HN titles, so I suppose I should be "whinging" about that instead.

pakon Matt Cutts: $1,000 to the 2 best implementations of the recently-hacked Kinect

Jesus, it was reverse-engineered, not "hacked". Did Linux engineers "hack" into every single piece of hardware they wrote drivers for? The overuse of this term in headlines drives me nuts. It's not like people can drive by your house and break into your XBox by waving their arms. And that's the colloquial meaning, which has sadly displaced the original, more positive meaning.

pakon Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 - Super fluid, beats everyone on sunspider

There might be an upper limit on the speed of the language itself, but what has a lot more room for improvement is speed of DOM operations and DOM rendering. Since you could involve all kinds of fancy graphics hardware acceleration in that, as IE9 is purported to do, there's a lot more to be done there.

Most JS developers agree now that the slowest operations are DOM operations so they are avoided as much as possible.

pakon Meet The Team

I thought Appcelerator Titanium was supposed to compile to native code? I downloaded it myself, saw all the HTML and JS files in the package and wondered, what the heck is the point in making this a standalone app instead of a web app. It's a ton of UI for a very simple to-do list. If it's just a webpage running in WebKit, and this is all the binary encapsulates, I see no reason to put it online, and then add http://fluidapp.com/ to allow people to use it offline as a desktop app, if they really want. Or, just use HTML5 manifests to make it work offline in any browser.

pakon Show HN: Spreadsheets using Python - Have you seen this?

Yep, thanks.

pakon Show HN: Spreadsheets using Python - Have you seen this?

I swear I have seen the web-spreadsheet-as-website idea on here before. It was not editgrid.com, which amusingly replicates Excel all the way down to the Windows 95 scroll bars. It was actually focused on making the spreadsheets presentable as public pages with live datasources. The site for the tool was made with the tool. Does anybody know what I'm referring to?

pakon Full Hacker News database for download (posts, comments, points, date, username)

Now this is neat. I spent a bit of today reverse engineering the Better HN chrome extension to see how it looked up url's on HN (http://json-automatic.searchyc.com/domains/find?url=%s, for anybody who wondered, I can't find this API documented anywhere). Now, if this API holds up, it seems like there might be a more sustainable way of doing what I was planning.

pakon FireShepherd is the antidote for Firesheep hacking mania

Fighting fire with fire... burn, sheep, burn.

pakon ACID in Theory and Practice

Do any databases allow you to specify that a transaction needs a particular mode, and then that mode is implemented only for that transaction? e.g.,

  START TRANSACTION MODE READ REPEATABLE;

or something like that. It would seem to be a way to only use the extra resources when consistency is paramount. Of course it would take a lot of careful thought to determine which transactions need this mode...

pakon Google points finger at Facebook hypocrisy, blocks Gmail import

Did you friend any of your IRL friends? Because if you did, that would probably be enough for them to cross-reference enough data to figure out who you are. It occurred to me that even when people tag pictures with unlinked text (as they sometimes do to be funny or if the content is sensitive), Facebook could probably use some fuzzy matching and heuristics to map those faces to real identities elsewhere in their database.

...if you think about it, that's probably an easy way to get a lot of photos of people that they don't want to be seen.

pakon Google points finger at Facebook hypocrisy, blocks Gmail import

You have no way of verifying they've completely removed your data from their servers. All you can tell is they no longer let anybody see it through the website. They've publicly stated your data may be retained in "backups" indefinitely.

pakon Opt Out of a Body Scan? Then Brace Yourself

This is the most ridiculous concept in the digital age. If it's being recorded by a computer, it can be copied. Hell, if it can be seen, it can be illicitly recorded. When you can buy tiny cameras from ThinkGeek that fit in the bridge of your glasses and can record VGA video for hours on a single battery charge, you can forget about pictures not being "saved".

And when the job is looking at naked pictures all day, what do you expect? I mean, who do you think seriously is seeking that sort of job in the first place?

pakon Paul Graham : uses this.

  A
  B
  D
  D
  C

assorted curses

  <esc>
  :q!
  $ echo "alias vi=vim" >> ~/.bashrc

pakon Google points finger at Facebook hypocrisy, blocks Gmail import

If you had one, you had one, and it's in their heap somewhere waiting to be mined. All they did was turn off the visibility flags. The only way is to never have an account... lucky me.