Hacker News Reader

vstmon Mark Cuban's Opinion on the Governor Romney Tax Plan

The fun thing is that every person can solve any problem with enough time, control and resources (given that the person has at least average intelligence and no mental disorder).

vstmon Using the HTML5 Fullscreen API for Phishing Attacks

I've just tested it in IE 9, apparently it has its own "safety mechanism" - I get the following message:

    Your browser does not support the Fullscreen API.

vstmon Language learning makes the brain grow, Swedish study suggests

German (Swiss German native), English and French. I'm actually learning French again, since I have forgotten nearly everything because I haven't used it in a long time (I have learned French before English). The funny thing is now I get some words practically "for free" thanks to my English vocabulary: strange->étrange, jealous->jaloux - the grammar still kills me, though.

vstmon Apple accused of ripping off famous Swiss clock design

By selling luxury watches to Chinese millionaires.

vstmon Sock of the month: Get a pair of socks delivered to you, once a month

I had the same thought. I think they could even adapt the video for socks: "Are the socks any good? No... our socks are fxxing great".

vstmon Stripe And A/B Testing Made Me A Small Fortune

No, I think there is no way to detect if the HTTP-request to the server which makes the API call is made via HTTPS or not. Except if their libraries detect that on your side and block the API call there, but of course that can be easily circumvented. They can only enforce that HTTPS requests are made to their API.

vstmon How many squares can you find?

There are four lights.

vstmon More on Sparrow and talent acquisitions

Very true. The main points are:

- Some businesses fail to ask for a "fair" price (to be profitable)

- Some markets are doomed and have not enough paying clients (in Sparrows case: the market for e-mail clients)

Businesses either just fail or, if they are lucky, get bought (if the product is good, that is).

vstmon The True Problem With PHP

I guess people are the real problem of PHP. But then again: people are the real problem of everything.

vstmon Not a bug: phpversion('extension_name') returns false

Well I think it's not that easy. "phpinfo" does not gather the version information from the extension it just tells the extension to return some tabular data which is not "interpreted" by PHP. In contrast the "phpversion" function reads the version-field from the modules "zend_module_entry" struct.

Now if you look at, for example, the bz2 extension: https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/master/ext/bz2/bz2.c You see that NO_VERSION_YET (NULL) is set in the version field of the struct (line 122).

You can grep for "NO_VERSION_YET" in the "ext"-directory and you'll see some extensions without version information.

So the problem is in the extensions, and since the extensions deliberately have no version information the behaviour is no bug.

vstmon Why my company doesn't send automated email from a 'noreply' address

Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't bounces sent back to the "FROM" of the envelope? The mail server does not care much about the "From:"-email-header and much less about "Reply-To".

vstmon What Happens When We Die? (Bullshit?)

I think we shouldn't interpret things into this article which simply aren't there. His main point is obviously "death is not a moment" that means the chemical processes in your body don't stop the moment the doctor says "He's dead Jim". I haven't thought about this so this is an interesting point. So the question is what processes are still up&running in our brain during that time? I had hoped for a little bit more enlightenment from the article in that matter.

vstmon [dead]

There's already a discussion about that, see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2873795