Hacker News Reader

rtpon Block disposable emails

One problem with a service like this is: how do I know if I can trust it with people's email addresses? How do I know that this site doesn't store the emails tested and sell them to spammers?

rtpon So you think you own your Twitter name?

Just because it is within the rights of Twitter to be a dick doesn't mean that it _should_ be a dick, and from where I am standing, Twitter is currently acting like a dick.

rtpon 70% of the Public Finds Piracy Socially Acceptable

Do you have a source on that? I live in Sweden, have an average wage, and we have pretty high taxes, yet I could potentially buy a lot of movies and CDs if I wanted to, and I gather Denmark doesn't have that much higher taxes than Sweden, so that is why I'm asking.

rtpon How to detect a toxic customer

If you are a people-pleaser (and this doesn't necessarily carry a negative connotation), then it's a good tactic for any employer to play the victim card by talking crap about previous "walkers" in order to instill loyalty. You don't want to be a "walker", do you? ;)

Actually, I think you should pay extra precaution when dealing with "trashtalking victims", because I think the risk of dealing with a toxic customer is greater than losing a bit of revenue from someone who was genuinely burned.

rtpon Court affirms jail time for Pirate Bay founders

Sounds like a great "plan to skip jail and fine".

Well, I didn't say it was a good plan. ;) I was merely pointing out that I thought they were anticipating that this was how things would turn out.

I would like to add: The statute of limitations here in Sweden for a jail time of <1 year is max 10 years or so (according to Swedish Wikipedia it's 2 years, but I'm not sure if the fines complicate the matter).

rtpon Court affirms jail time for Pirate Bay founders

AFAIK, every one of them lives in Thailand/Cambodia except for Carl Lundström.

I think they were all aware (except Carl Lundström) that luck would run out sooner or later, and from what I've seen, they had the plans all laid out on how to skip jail and fine.

I would be surprised if any one of them except Lundström would serve any of their prison times, or pay any sum of money to pay for their fines.

rtpon Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense

Nope.

I'm saying that the models should fit the past data. I think I misunderstood lzw. :)

rtpon Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense

Are you saying that the projections for the future should fit the past? I'm sorry.

rtpon Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense

You don't understand it correctly. Models are supposed to fit the evidence, otherwise they're incorrect. That's how science works. Say you've gathered evidence of the big bang. You create a model for it. Then, suddenly, for some reason observations and measurements of background radiation doesn't fit your model. If that is so, you'll have to either adjust your model as to fit the data, or throw it away and build a new model that fits the data.

rtpon Ymacs -- An Emacs-like editor for the Web

This should be implemented as a bookmarklet, or more preferably a userscript.

rtpon Ask HN: Who Is Hiring? (November 2010 Edition)

To those downvoting, please specify why. Personally, I can see that parent post shouldn't be here, but a suggestion on where to post it would be helpful so that others don't repeat the same mistake.

rtpon Ask HN: Are you embarrassed by your failed projects?

I see it like this:

Success is relative, yet you can measure success. The more projects you've done, the more successful they ought to become (although some variance on that graph is perfectly normal, I presume). If you don't improve in pulling off your projects, you are doing something wrong, and then you should revise on what to improve upon in order to progress.

Having failed before is actually an indication that you're more likely to succeed (relatively).

rtpon Ask HN: What browsers do you support?

IE6+, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera.

Suggestion to avoid falling into the trap of wasting a huge swath of time on fixing stuff for IE: test often. Really often. Test your approach as soon as you can, so that if you find that your approach isn't working, you'll catch it early and can avoid using the same approach in the future and have to fix it everywhere once noticed.

rtpon Show HN: Couldn't sleep; added 960gs support to jMockups

Nice! One thing I like about this service is that I can pretty rapidly wrap up a prototype of the layout of a site I'm about make a design for, and then try out different colors, fonts, paddings and margins etc. Excellent tool to get a rough idea on how to further expand a design.

rtpon Ewww, You Use PHP?

> I’d assume the goal in web development is the end product or service and not the means to it.

I don't think I agree. The end product's possibility to be exist at all depends on the mental health of your employees, how efficient they are, and what tools they use. Someone who is unmotivated due to using a language or a tool that is horrible will work only on work morale as a resource for motivation, and it's only a matter of time before that resource runs out, and they'll start feeling miserable and perform sub-optimally.

I don't have an opinion on PHP, although I've made a few cool things with it and enjoyed coding in it, so I don't think it's necessarily that bad.

rtpon Underscore.js: Annotated Source Code

You mean like putting the methods into the native classes' prototypes? That's a bad idea. The reason why it is a bad idea is that you cannot extend a prototype only within a scope, i.e if you change the prototype, it'll be changed regardless of whether it'll break another library, or that another library replaces your methods and thus render your library broken. This opens up the risk that you'll end up with bugs that are hard to trace to their source.

rtpon Autism Diagnosed with a Fifteen Minute Brain Scan

Ah, this one. Say you have a sample group with the size of 10000 people (all randomly picked). The prevalence of autism is calculated to be around 1% of an typical population. This would mean that the group consists of about 100 people who are autistic. The accuracy of this test is 90%, and thus this would yield a positive result of about 90 people who really have autism, and about 1000 people who don't.

rtpon DuckDuckGo's new privacy policy tried to explain why you should care

http://dukgo.com

rtpon DuckDuckGo featured on Lifehacker

There's http://www.dukgo.com, which is a tad bit less work to type ;-)

rtpon Google the way it's supposed to be

Also, if company A doesn't innovate, company B might come up with something better and steal A's customers.

rtpon CSI Effect: How Forensic Science on TV Impacts Our Real Justice System

This might be of interest:

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

rtpon Big Blog Theory

The blog posts are written by David Saltzberg, PhD in physics and astronomy.

I think this is his homepage: http://www.physics.ucla.edu/~saltzbrg/bio.html

Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Saltzberg

rtpon Things I Learned from World of Warcraft

Not practicing what you preach doesn't say much about the truth of what you're preaching.

rtpon Being a Man in the 21st Century (Part 2)

Not that I disbelieve you or find your post implausible, but do you have a source on that?

rtpon Evolution details revealed through 21-year E. coli experiment

Dialog between creationists at Conservapedia and professor Lenski:

http://conservapedia.com/Conservapedia:Lenski_dialog

rtpon For Hackers Who Don't Sleep

Circular reasoning. If people didn't need sleep, there'd be just as many people on the street as during the day and it wouldn't be any riskier.

No, what he is saying is that when you're sleeping in your bed, you are in a situation that are far less risky than being out on the street, driving your car, etc. How many people, statistically, die in their sleep, compared to "out on the streets" (especially when it is dark)?