Hacker News Reader

tewkson MacBook Pro gets Retina Display; MacBook Air updated with Ivy Bridge

I'm at WWDC now on my MacBook Air and wish that I remembered my ethernet adaptor...

tewkson "Tap the spacebar with your phone." - Bump unveils new photo uploader

It's actually not a lie! Both features were legal: they shared App Store or iTunes links to the relevant app or song. This disappointed those users wanting to share the actual app or song and thus weren't used very frequently :)

tewkson "Tap the spacebar with your phone." - Bump unveils new photo uploader

We are a cloud based solution that takes privacy very seriously. We do not share your personal information with people or services you don't want. Our privacy policy is available both in the app and online: http://bu.mp/privacy

tewkson "Tap the spacebar with your phone." - Bump unveils new photo uploader

Want to build magic like this into your own iOS or Android app? Try out our brand new, super fast APIs:

https://github.com/bumptech/bump-api-ios

https://github.com/bumptech/bump-api-android

Email me if you have any questions: tg@bu.mp

tewkson Apple quietly adds "Catalogs" to iTunes App Store

Shopping

tewkson New version of Bump launches today

I'm head of API at Bump. We've been hard at work on version 3 of our API for both iOS and Android, complete with quite a lot of dogfooding. Both betas are significantly easier to integrate, and offer excellent performance in addition to more features. We are constantly looking for feedback from developers and integrating this quickly into our development cycle.

Working out of the box is something that we demand and is the typical experience for an API user, both in the old versions and in the new ones. If it doesn't, then we are available on email and our Google Groups and respond quickly.

A concrete example of how we are always pushing the limit: greater than 90% of all matches are now displayed on the handset in less than one second from time the of bump.

https://github.com/bumptech/bump-api-ios

https://github.com/bumptech/bump-api-android

http://groups.google.com/group/bump-api

http://groups.google.com/group/bump-api-android

We love feedback. Please email us: api@bu.mp.

tewkson Dear business people, an iOS app actually takes a lot of work

Time to prototype has definitely gotten cheaper.

C is still necessary for a lot of people at scale.

tewkson Show HN: Hellepoll is a blazingly-fast async HTTP server written in C++

I'm curious as to why the author hasn't referenced nginx, which is written also event based (epoll/kqueue) and written in C.

tewkson Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator

shorten plus.google.com/x to plus.google.com rather than google.com, as is the status quo

tewkson Who said Android apps can’t look good?

Thanks for your feedback. That screenshot is pretty old; iTunes Preview has newer ones which reflect our newer, more attractive refresh. As always, we are hard at work at awesome new stuff.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bump/id305479724

tewkson Helicopter view of your driving directions on Google Maps

This page breaks the back button.

tewkson Daring Fireball: Amazon's New Kindles

Actually, people do in fact choose tablets and laptops based on size. I'm not suggesting that either size is superior. They are clearly different.

Anecdotally, I find that the iPad size is great for a table/lap, but less great for holding, while I love the size/shape/weight of the Kindle2 for reading. I don't think any particular size will win out.

tewkson Daring Fireball: Amazon's New Kindles

He's not crazy and that conclusion is not unique to gruber. The screen area of the iPad is nearly 2x that of the fire. Resolution is 1.3x but pixel density will increase on iPad3.

They are about as competitive as a 15" laptop is to a netbook: not very as they are physically quite different. The price difference reflects this.

tewkson Do you really need a tablet?

Agreed. I personally vary between delight and dislike of the soft keyboard. They can do nothing but improve and your note about young people adapting is absolutely true.

tewkson Do you really need a tablet?

Most users can read or draw on paper for more than ten minutes. The user can still place a tablet on his/her lap or desk.

tewkson Do you really need a tablet?

The biggest problems with these devices today are ergonomic, but these will be fixed with time and the laptop with keyboard will gradually be made obscure: tablets won't be the third device.

As the thickness and weight of the iPad decrease, it will become less cumbersome and more natural. iPad2 is already a big step forward in the latter two categories: it is significantly less awkward to hold an iPad1 but still has quite a while to go.

Typing today on an iPad is slightly awkward. Good voice recognition could eliminate this in private settings.

When these physical dimensions diminish, input improves, and screen resolutions increase, the experience will converge towards that of a truly interactive notepad or piece of paper, thereby becoming much more natural.

tewkson Public market newcomers getting crushed in sell-off

The point is that these stocks are underperforming with respect to large cap companies and thus the market at large. The s&p is down under 5% today.

msft -3.5% aapl -3.38% hpq -4.4% ibm -2.2%

tewkson Public market newcomers getting crushed in sell-off

This is untrue on a percentage basis.

lnkd: -14% djia: -3.75%

tewkson Spotify launches in the US

Queen is also there.

tewkson Open letter to BlackBerry bosses: Senior RIM exec tells all as company crumbles

There's been discussion of the uptime claim and its relevance to users; however, I know the it to be completely untrue. Users having to restart their blackberry in order to restore messaging, for example, is not at all uncommon.

tewkson It's All Software

This argument is nullified by the fact that computing power continues to fall in cost, size and power usage.

The user does not and should not care about where his or her application logic is being run so long as this device is affordable.

The vision you present adds questionable cost savings and substantial latency: (NY->SF->NY)/c will always take 32ms, best case. Taking this trip asynchronously instead will make sense for a very long time.

Apple understands that shuffling data between devices is a real burden to users, so they've attacked that problem instead of chasing an esoteric one.

tewkson Real-time blog comments in Go, backbone.js, socket.io and redis

It seems as though the author's neglectfulness in not including Clojure in this project renders it unusable.

tewkson Bill Gates says he advocated Skype takeover

Which, to the questioner's point, ships maybe in quantity m's whereas the iPad ships in quantity mm's

tewkson BusinessWeek's Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs of 2011

Interesting, but pg's set of measures is also necessary to evaluate impact upon society and the world at large.

tewkson End-to-End Encryption for Credit Card Payments

The top answer there outlines exactly what's being done in this post.

tewkson IPhones and 3G iPads log your location in an unencrypted file on the device

Great analysis which is the first I've seen to come up with a reasonable explanation for the existence of this file. Caching this data is a logical method by which to speed up location lookups.

However, there's no reason why this data should not be stored by default under the OS's "Data Protection" encryption as email is by default on devices where a passcode is set:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4175

tewkson Why TechCrunch is over

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/09/compete-on-compete/

http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/07/hey-what-happened-to-scribd...

http://techcrunch.com/2007/08/16/usatoday-relaunch-as-social...

et cetera

tewkson Hey Apple, Please Be Nice and Share MacRuby

webkit2 is also a private framework in Lion, a la iOS...

tewkson Microsoft just bought Nokia for $0

This is a great article, but the conclusion is flawed in that high point for Nokia was not the Nokia 2110!

It was instead Series60 third edition, which included a WebKit browser and SIP support in 2006.

Afterwards, nothing happened... it was as if the company threw its hands up in resignation post-iPhone.

tewkson Mac App Store UI is so hideous that it makes me want to kick a swan

However, the store feels very snappy, which is a welcome change from the iTunes Store being very slow even on a Core i7 machine.