Hacker News Reader

tdoggetteon Committing Location Based Service Suicide

Are phone conversations less real for being remote and digital?

tdoggetteon ET equation estimates number of potential girlfriends

What's far-fetched about it? It seems self-evidently true-- it's not as though the equation even makes claims about the probabilities involved.

tdoggetteon Is HN changing ? Part 2

It's not that the necessary information isn't communicated-- it is. The problem is that there's a complicated graph that's the main content of the page, and it lacks a title and axis labels.

tdoggetteon First Person Tetris

Firstpersontetris.com

What you need, when you need it

tdoggetteon Is HN changing ? Part 2

In case it wasn't clear yet, the 'units' for the axis are simply the rank number of the postings, 1000 postings vertically, blocks of 1000 postings horizontally. That makes the time-axis non-linear.

No, it wasn't. Why aren't these graphs labeled? They make no sense without knowing what they are already.

tdoggetteon Record police with phone camera in Boston, get arrested

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

tdoggetteon Ask HN: Spam fighting with bogus lead gen nowdays?

That's nonsense. Spam deliberately attempts to defraud (at worst) and irritates (at best) millions of people. Fighting back is attempting to prevent this, by wasting the time of people that spam. That's the difference, and the two acts aren't ethically similar.

tdoggetteon XSS war: a powerful Java HTML sanitizer

Try middle-clicking a link on that page in Chrome. Tt opens in the same tab (for me at least), but I get normal behavior in IE7.

tdoggetteon Google Street View Meets Video - Amazing

Autoplaying video. Worse, buffering autoplaying video that I can't reliably track down by tab.

tdoggetteon Recommendations engine DirectedEdge opens up to developers

I have an idea that I've been planning. It's got a lot of little pieces, and one by one, I've discovered that someone else is already making them. It's pretty great living in the future.

tdoggetteon Nexus One Phone - Web meets phone

This is an incredibly neat site. Click "Feel".

tdoggetteon Hearst Shows Off Its Snazzy E-Reader, The Skiff Reader

I'm waiting on a fully-featured, well-designed [non-Sony] reader that's small enough to pocket: say, the size of a very thin mass-market paperback. These huge things aren't something I can see myself carrying around.

tdoggetteon [dead]

I was waiting for the punchline, but it never came. Okay, where is that money?

tdoggetteon How to Achieve Painless Registration

I really wish that he blogged every week.

tdoggetteon Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

Pan-Mass Challenge? PubMeb Central?

tdoggetteon Tell HN: Best wishes for a happy and productive next decade.

A decade is a period of 10 years. The period of ten years whose numbers begin with 200X is ending, and since that's how we refer to decades (as in 'the 90s'), we say the decade is ending.

tdoggetteon Announcing the Firefox 4 Design Challenge – The Home Tab

It's not that part of the comment that's getting it downvoted, it's the first bit.

tdoggetteon Announcing the Firefox 4 Design Challenge – The Home Tab

Part of "doesn't get in the way" is a consistent and pleasant user interface.

tdoggetteon Ask HN: Please critique (harshly if necessary) Movie Tracker

It looks sharp, but my main concern would be that anyone who's the type to watch and track movie watching already has Netflix and won't want to invest time in something else.

How are you swinging ticket discounts, by the way?

tdoggetteon Happy Birthday, Linus

This seems like a legitimate opinion. Why the -4?

EDIT: No, if you agree, upvote the other guy.

tdoggetteon Ask HN: Would you work for a company just out of Chapter 11?

If they want to pay you good money to do work you want to do, take it: we're in a recession. If it tanks, it's a resume line item, if not, so much the better.

Of course, if you have an offer from a company you're sure won't go under, then that might be a better move.

tdoggetteon Do crowdsourced Q&A sites deliver any value?

No mention of StackOverflow, which is far and away the best of the niche sites he talks about at the end.

tdoggetteon iPhone app Gunman lets you have a shootout w/ friends via augmented reality

I suspect that this is going to be the Pong of the augmented reality game: the simplest thing that'll be fun forever in endless variations, and something upon which amazing things can be built.

tdoggetteon Music Browser, Not "Music Service Client"

I have a hard time understanding why someone would make or use this. Music distribution is by no means a solved problem, but what would a music browser accomplish? Why would people publish their music on this instead of the web?

tdoggetteon OLPC v3 concept: $75 flexible tablet

I lump those along with the concepts: until someone (engadget is a good bet) has held it and taken photos, it's a fiction.

tdoggetteon Ask HN: Review my app - Wallet Garden

It won't load.

tdoggetteon Core Values Drive A Startup’s Success

That's a tautology: the way you know what startups had good ideas and execution is by seeing which ones succeeded.

tdoggetteon Ask HN: Review my Twitter App - Tweakio

You might benefit from buying tweak.io in addition.

tdoggetteon Google In Discussions To Acquire Yelp For A Half Billion Dollars Or More

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/10/yelp_reviewers_paid/

This seems like they paid people to write reviews, but I see no suggestion that they instructed paid reviewers to be biased. More content is better for everyone, as far as I can tell.

Another Register article (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/19/yelp_pitch_revisited...) seems to be at most an accusation of unethical ad sales tactics, and it includes the CEO flat-out denying that they'd ever manipulated reviews for money.

tdoggetteon Journalists are hurt by "balance" requirements, by Robin Hanson

That's something that has turned me off of using mainstream media for anything other than fact-gathering: There's no consideration for what's actually true. Editorials and political blogs give a clearer view of what's going on.