Hacker News Reader

user2459on Humans hot, sweaty, natural-born runners

"We’re the tortoises of the animal kingdom"

... That might be the deepest thing I've ever read.

Also, here's Attenborough narrating this article http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_o

user2459on Encrypt Everything

Here are some tips from the EFF on encryption: https://ssd.eff.org/tech/encryption

user2459on Adobe to charge Flash coders to use 'premium' features

Perhaps Unity and Epic declined the offer.

user2459on Adobe to charge Flash coders to use 'premium' features

"It's not clear to me how requiring programmers to pay to use something that was previously free will spark innovation."

Steve doesn't understand his own article. The whole point is that they're changing for completely new functionality. These aren't improvements of the existing flash player, they're completely new additions. And beyond that the vast majority of devs will never even have to think about it. You have to make over $50k with your flash product and you have to use the premium features.

Weather you like flash or not, these new features are great for online and ios game developers and cost Adobe a lot of time and money. Also weather you think about it or not, many of the mobile games you play are written in actionscript and running in Adobe air and air apps are specifically exempt from the fees.

So all in all, this is interesting news, but it's in no way as dramatic or devastating as some people would like to believe.

user2459on A Pinterest spammer tells all

The spammers make their money because they can "fake out" the system to think they're the honest money-making folks.

None of this is any different than basic capitalism. Now this isn't an anti-capitalism rant, it's just an observation. Rite-Aide and Walmart can buy entire city blocks and run their businesses at a loss for years to fake out and overcome honest citizens' businesses and we celebrate their success.

I suspect if people could invest in spammers there'd be a different public perception of them.

user2459on Mozilla's BrowserQuest - Massively Multiplayer HTML5 Experiment

Awesome! And again great work. The game was really enjoyable and the code inspiring.

user2459on Mozilla's BrowserQuest - Massively Multiplayer HTML5 Experiment

Really organized, easy reading source too: https://github.com/mozilla/BrowserQuest

Outstanding work that I'm sure is going to inspire a lot of people. Though I don't see a license file anywhere.

user2459on Mexican Drug Gangs Kidnap Computer Hackers and Programmers

Events like this are the main reason why The War on Drugs™ is so dangerous for everybody. It's not the drugs or gangs killing gangs. It's the gangsters that live through it sitting on piles of money who now have the resources to expand into crimes that take more than a gun, friends with guns, and some luck. Because of the prohibition they can now hire hackers to commit crimes for them in any place in the world. It's going to get harder to implicate them in crimes, and yet easier for them to make money off them.

Possibly the worst part is that this happened to us(and is still affecting us) in almost exact detail during the prohibition of the 20s and yet we continue to shrug our shoulders and keep giving them more money.

user2459on PHP-Snow - A concise, dry and beautiful language that compiles to PHP

Here's something constructive for all the haters. Snow is open source, seems with such a consensus it should be easy to get some people together and hack on a fork of snow that is more appealing to the masses. Or does the current PHP syntax leave nothing to be desired?

user2459on PHP-Snow - A concise, dry and beautiful language that compiles to PHP

With a passion? Kind of over the top don't you think? Snow is just a tool like php is just a tool. We're all programmers just trying to make development easier for ourselves and hopefully others. I don't know how anyone can hate any aspect of programming with a passion. It's our modus to find things we dislike and we write tools to prevent us from ever having to do them again.

user2459on PHP-Snow - A concise, dry and beautiful language that compiles to PHP

"I am greatly annoyed when I have my code break because there's some space instead of tab or tab instead of space or extra space somewhere where it is not obvious."

A good editor will show you that too.

user2459on Ability to learn is affected by the timing of sleep

I always figured it was because I had less other things to think about between me and the next morning. I could learn something and think about it a little while I was lying in bed trying to get to sleep VS trying to learn something and then shift to some other cognitive activities afterward.

user2459on Notepad++ 6.0 Released

gedit: http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/binaries/mac/gedit/3.2/

text wrangler: http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/download.html

redcar: http://redcareditor.com/

but you're really not gonna get any better than textmate or sublime text 2

user2459on Notepad++ 6.0 Released

Definitely not free, but non-self-crippling.

"Sublime Text 2 may be downloaded and evaluated for free, however a license must be purchased for continued use. There is currently no enforced time limit for the evaluation."

user2459on [dead]

There is no certifying agency or legal standing. But the definition of Open Source from the Open Source Initiative may help you: http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd

user2459on Don't use bcrypt

Long story short, if a bcrypt exploit is found, you'll be sorry. So use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBKDF2 or http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt.html instead. They're apparently better tested.

I'm no expert opinion, but seems a bit unnecessary and that bcrypt is still a perfectly good choice for most password stores.

user2459on Megaupload Seizure Order “Null and Void” Says High Court

"The blunder, which occurred because the police applied for the wrong type of court order..."

Blunder my ass, sounds like abuse of power that, against the police hopes, ended up being checked.

user2459on One IDE to Rule them All?

This question lacks a lot of details, what tech is being used, how experienced the team is, what the build and deploy environments are like, what level of syntax consistency is needed for various reasons etc..

While many programmers are religious about their tool chain there are very legitimate reasons for wanting a standardized dev environment especially with an IDE that does things like syntax homogenization for you. Without more details it's impossible to tell weather this specific individual case would really benefit from the mandate in spite of upsetting the comfort of their devs.

user2459on Methods & Properties with Javascript OOP

It's all about scope. What you should do is read about scope in javascript and get to know it well. Then stuff like this will come naturally or you'll at least understand why people program like this and that it's not just some language peculiarity.

MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Functi...

short stack overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/500431/javascript-variabl...

user2459on The Unwelcome Mat - How Not to Attract Tourists

It's not an unwelcome mat, it's a go away mat. As an American who travels a lot the biggest hassle I've ever had to deal with when entering another country was putting my bag through an x-ray machine and filling out a form about fruits and vegetables. Whenever I get back to the states I see hours long lines of non citizens waiting to get through customs with way too few customs officers stamping passports. That alone would be an unwelcome mat, but put on everything else we make people go through and we're pretty much just saying "Go Away".

Along with the fee and abusive questionnaire at this site https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/esta/ we've also got this lovely informational site http://travel.state.gov/visa/temp/types/types_1262.html and tons of other fees http://travel.state.gov/visa/temp/types/types_1263.html . Then of course after you've paid all your fees and told the US government all about your diseases, mental illness, and intention to spy on them, you still have to give them your fingerprints, photo, submit to a search, wait in line for 2 hours, and answer many more questions about the same stuff.

It's not xenophobia. It's full on we think we're better than you and you pathetic humans get to deal with us 'cos we said so. The whole system wreaks of 'cos we said so. Every citizen and border patrol agent knows it's excessive and ineffective, but we keep on truckin' cos hey, they're all just doing their, trained to be overly aggressive, jobs.

user2459on NASA has mapped the universe

The sky is not the universe. NASA mapped(took pictures of) the infrared sky. Sensational title aside, it's a pretty awesome and humbling accomplishment. Plus, being NASA it's all in the public domain.

user2459on JQuery Scroll Path - Scroll a page along a custom path

Also doesn't degrade gracefully in case of no javascript.

user2459on Where’s _why?

Personally I think _why's largest contribution to programming(or even culture) wasn't inspiring people to program. It was inspiring people to teach. We read his book and saw that teaching itself could be fun, wacky, and rewarding and it stoked a fire in lots of us to turn ourselves into educational magicians.

user2459on FBI, stumped by pimp's Android pattern lock, serves warrant on Google

The FBI Forensics Lab mis-entered the pattern lock too many times? The FBI uses the same tactic as my little brother to get into peoples phones? At a forensics lab? And the stuff they want from google kind of blows my mind. "The times and duration of every webpage visited"... As far is I can see that's completely undeliverable by anyone but possibly the carrier. Who do they have working down there?

This is also super interesting: "His parole conditions prevented him from doing anything to hide or lock digital files."

So if convicted of a crime they can require you to not use basic personal and identity safety measures.

user2459on I'm not a "curator"

This might just be the largest rich people problem I've ever heard of. Re-appropriating copyright doesn't need a justification, just continue to do it and stop pretending like you really care about the original artist more than they can bring you visitors.

user2459on I'm a Citizen of the Internet, Where's My Passport?

Yes because the internet will defend you, protect your natural resources, provide you with health care, provide you with unemployment insurance, negotiate treaties to your benefit, inspect your food, regulate your drugs, educate your children and pave your roads.

The reason it's so hard to move between countries is standard exploitation. People would exploit the resources(be them natural or otherwise) and move on to the next place if there was nothing stopping them. Maybe you wouldn't. Or maybe you wouldn't notice yourself doing it. But people would. Tourism is really only good for local economies if you leave after a few weeks. Otherwise you're putting to large a burden on the place you're visiting and the payoff of having you come and leave money is no longer there.

People should be able to move to other countries if they want but it should be a serious and large decision. And realistically, you should care about your local government. It's not like democracy doesn't need you just because you have cute ideas about global citizenship.

user2459on A "real" user proves Windows 8 fails on the desktop

The 'you figure it out' test doesn't work across the board. It works for common tasks but when you're introducing a new paradigm obviously it needs to be taught. All the new paradigms on windows 8 can be taught in less than a 10 word sentence. This kind of citizen's journalism is unscientific, a waste of time and of no value to microsoft.

user2459on I’m calling it: Ubuntu is finally ready for the world.

I see your frustration, but let's try to work it into optimism. Ubuntu itself can't control those things and without out support from vendors it can never have them. What Ubuntu can do is provide a rock solid OS with a simple user experience that will hopefully attract enough users to garner the attention of more vendors. This is mostly the critical mass problem and is a function of economics for vendors. If we give them a large enough economic incentive to support ubuntu, they will come rushing to do it. So for early adopters not everything you're expecting will be there, but if you can pain through or dual boot you'd be helping to ensure it is there for future users.

user2459on I’m calling it: Ubuntu is finally ready for the world.

This is kind of a cheezy, non analytical and barely informational article, but I agree with the standpoint.

Ubuntu is easy. It's actually strikingly easy. From install through normal everyday usage the experience is painless(actually enjoyable) and fluid. For the vast majority of machines it will be self configuring and for the rest installing drivers ranges from just as easy as other systems to of course much harder but thats a vendor problem not an Ubuntu problem that really can only be addressed with Ubuntu gaining users.

Don't get distracted by comparing the other OS's feature by feature to Ubuntu. You're just going to waste your time and get unnecessarily hot headed. Ubuntu's greatest strength is still, and arguable always will be, that its FOSS. But it is also a dead simple, batteries included, no noise operating system that normal everyday users would find lovely to use.

What Ubuntu really needs now is community optimism and a bit of lighthearted activism. It needs installs. The more users and attention, the more interest and support. Ubuntu is definitely ready for prime time, we just have to put it in that timeslot.

user2459on How India Became America

I think what paraschopra is commenting on is that India has certainly not become the USA. It has a passing resemblance in some places if you limit your vision to 5 degrees in front of you, and small sections of the richest parts of India are getting slowly westernized. But India as a whole, the 2nd most populous country in the world, has certainly not become the USA.

But the NYT isn't going to make money with a headline like India still getting slowly westernized in rich areas