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ryanwatkins

777 karma · joined May 14, 2010

http://www.ryanwatkins.net/
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ryanwatkins··on Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials
> It was incontrovertibly approved as it is only installable via MDM.

Only if this his standard govt issued phone. It's also been shown they are also using their own personal phones. The could easily be using unapproved phones some random DOGE'er bought gave them with an MDM setup, without any real oversight.

ryanwatkins··on How each pillar of the First Amendment is under attack
> I don't really want to damage strangers' property. I don't own any car as I just take public transportation, so I can't really say I'm "boycotting" Tesla any more than any other brand.

Divest of Tesla. In a 401k move from index funds to other funds without or less TSLA. Or invest in inverse EFTs that essentially short Tesla - TSLS, TSLQ, and TSLZ. Not buying a Tesla or torching a Cybertruck are not the only options.

ryanwatkins··on Mozilla Reaction to U.S. vs. Google
Microsoft netted about $550 million from that $150 million investment in Apple.
ryanwatkins··on Japan facing credit card number shortage
The liability is usually with the card issuer (bank), unless the merchant fails to meet liability shift requirements - like processes a card via the manually entered numbers or magstripe, rather than the chip in the card if the terminal supports it.

This the way card networks have encouraged migration to systems that support tokens and cryptograms to limit fraud.

See https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/understanding-e...

ryanwatkins··on Publishing thousands of police discipline records that New York kept secret
Its nearly 75% depending on how you count. See May 2020 report: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/ccrb/downloads/pdf/policy_pdf/mo...

Of the requests made, about 26% are resolved in 30 days or less. 46% requests still outstanding after 90 days.

So yes, its pretty clear NYPD delays or doesnt respond to requests for body camera footage.

ryanwatkins··on Publishing thousands of police discipline records that New York kept secret
You can pontificate that its one rogue complainant or you can check the data because its right there and shows race, age and gender of the complainant. The very first page of data shows one sergeant with 25 complaints composed of atleast 11 complainants over 5 years.
ryanwatkins··on Forget Google, time to end the Visa-MasterCard duopoly
There are plenty of other payment methods than cash that have guards against being lost/stolen or the other problems with handling cash, but also dont have the high cost of interchange that funds credit card rewards.

Merchants take credit cards to avoid losing a purchase. Cards have such a high volume that consumers expect it and some small portion will skip a purchase if its not an option. But merchants would much prefer you pay with a store card, debit card or one of many other payment methods that dont have the same (2-3%) cost that credit cards do.

ryanwatkins··on Forget Google, time to end the Visa-MasterCard duopoly
The vast majority of that fee that merchants pay goes to the bank, not Visa or Mastercard. And a vast majority of what the bank gets in that fee goes back out to the card owner in the form of rewards. You see merchant fees of 1-2% because that is pretty close to typical rewards paid out on credit cards.
ryanwatkins··on Forget Google, time to end the Visa-MasterCard duopoly
Their leaders may not be well known, but they spend an absolutely massive amount of money promoting their brands. They are extremely recognizable.

Mastercard so much so that the recently removed their name from their logo as its nolonger needed.

ryanwatkins··on Forget Google, time to end the Visa-MasterCard duopoly
Merchants certainly "notice" and take any opportunity to use an alternative to the card networks. They only accept it because they must to avoid losing a purchase. They would rather customers pay in almost any other form due to interchange costs.

When talking to big merchants about any new payment product, the first question you will hear is often "so, how does this lower my interchange cost?"

ryanwatkins··on Transcribed police scanners in real-time
Yes, it is legal in the US. Federal law allows it - P.R. 91-36 (FCC 93-410), though New York law attempts to make it illegal to do in your car: https://codes.findlaw.com/ny/vehicle-and-traffic-law/vat-sec...
ryanwatkins··on Visa, Plaid, networks, and jobs
That hidden cost is subsidized by the other customers charged the same price but that pay cash, or via debit card rather than credit card, or even with a credit card with lower rewards than yours.
ryanwatkins··on ECMA TC39: “SmooshGate” was officially resolved by renaming flatten to flat
Version in the type attribute used to be there with Mozilla. They removed it. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/sc... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1428745
ryanwatkins··on Build a digital clock in Conway's Life
Google Easter has a nice little easter egg when you search for for "conway’s game of life".
ryanwatkins··on 1980s computer controls Grand Rapids Public School heat and AC
The $2 million doesn't have to sit around for 20 years in a non-interest bearing checking account. Put $1.5million in a 5 year CD and get another ~$50k/year. Give them other maintenance work to do while they are at the school turning on and off the heat, and it becomes more viable.
ryanwatkins··on Using the USB-C port and adapters on your MacBook (Retina, 12-inch, Early 2015)
The Galaxy S6 and a bunch of others, including some HTC Droids, 8X and others, LG G3, many Lumia devices, Blackberry Z30 and Classic. But yes, not the iPhone.
ryanwatkins··on Rob Eisenberg leaving Angular 2.0
He did appear on the Polymer dev mailing list last week to pick a bit of a fight about how web components are/are-not compatible with other frameworks: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/polymer-dev/Ev7sO_BB...
ryanwatkins··on Material Design for Bootstrap
They've released preview documentation of a design centered around an unreleased OS and you are upset they don't have Google implementations in all the other non-google UI frameworks already?

Its early days, they're clearly doing this first with Android L, Web Components (polymer-project.org) and Angular (material.angularjs.org).

And you're upset the implementation for Bootstrap is not done by Google? Boo hoo.

ryanwatkins··on Google Material design framework
Material design is more than just the colors, shadows and spacing, its also the animations and interactions.

This CSS framework fails to replicate things like "ink" that fills an element with a tap color based on where in that element you tapped.

Or the way that a block of color slides across the input when you focus it and the placeholder slides up and scales down to turn into a label.

Material design is not a CSS theme, it requires many other interaction and animation aspects that the Polymer project is building out with their paper-* components.

ryanwatkins··on T-Mobile CEO: “This industry blows,” biggest carriers offer “horseshit”
> The flag to enable the built in mobile hotspot feature of your phone's os is enabled by default when you choose [..] the mobile share plan on AT&T.

Not if that device is a Nexus 7 tablet.

ATT specifically made Google turn off hotspot access from the tablet, while it works with the same SIM in a phone. Or with a TMO SIM in the same device.

See: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2450239 http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/nexus/LwcDQENW...

ryanwatkins··on Show HN: I make my family postcards every year. Here's this year's.
Doesn't work in Chrome on a tablet. Start drawing zoomed to some a flipped view of the backside and there is no space bar to tap without a text field.

Hacks for desktop only is understandable but increasingly a niche area to target first.

ryanwatkins··on Browser logos
http://logos.wikia.com/wiki/Internet_Explorer
ryanwatkins··on fish shell
function fish_user_key_bindings bind \e. 'history-token-search-backward' end

There is a thread about it here

https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/89

ryanwatkins··on fish shell
esc-. is my biggest miss as well. There are discussions on this but still havent been able to fix it on osx in iterm2 myself. Did get option-. to work for now but esc-. has 20+ years of pure reflex action burned into my brain.
ryanwatkins··on Famous Emacs Users (that are not famous for using Emacs)
> Isn't JWZ mainly famous for Netscape (and later the DNA Lounge)?

Depends on when you were born.

ryanwatkins··on The tiny Instagram projector
The company, Mint Digital, also prints Instagram to magnets - StickyGram http://mintdigital.com/portfolio
ryanwatkins··on NeXT Computer
There was ad by NeXT -- "In the 90's we'll probably see only ten real breakthroughs in computers. Here are seven of them." that lists making Unix usable as one of them. I have this poster framed in my office.

A copy and someones review of those seven here: http://wemmick.net/writings/next-predictions/

Optical storage maybe not. But others like Unix, multimedia email and "programmer productivity" faired fairly well.

ryanwatkins··on The Magazine
There was no suggestion above to add Pocket or Readability support to the iOS app, just that by picking iOS, he chose a distribution platform that keeps apps much like his own from scraping the content.

If all publications worked this way, Instapaper couldn't exist.

ryanwatkins··on The Magazine
Doing it as an iOS app like this also prevents you from doing "Share to Pocket / Readability" like you would be able to with a website -- keeps you from scraping the content out of the publishers site.
ryanwatkins··on WebOS legacy lives on as next-generation Enyo framework exits beta
iOS 3 on any device has a tiny marketshare - Instapaper showed it at less than 1.2% of iOS, and that was nearly 9 months ago. (http://www.marco.org/2011/11/30/more-ios-device-and-os-versi...)

The support matrix for Enyo is here - http://enyojs.com/docs/platforms/ Opera Mini and mobile are just not supported.

You need to draw the line somewhere. 'Broad' support is good. 'Everything' support is futile, for the feature set desired in a mobile application framework, with the resources the Enyo team has.

Enyo is good at creating 'apps' - often things delivered in a PhoneGap-like container or something with defined browser support like Chrome Web Store.

Its probably not the general framework for any and all website development needing to support all platforms.

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