Hacker News Reader

zainon Firefox achieves 100% market share in over 14% of continents

Summary: Firefox has 100% marketshare in one continent, Antarctica, out of what is most likely a very tiny sample size. Please stop with the linkbait titles.

zainon Skittles.com: Interweb the rainbow

#startups on freenode.

zainon Apple's Safari hits 10% browser market share

I think the "corporate effect" is mostly on IE6. I've seen that people who have a choice to switch from IE6 usually do, but they switch to IE7, not Firefox.

For example, my company gets a ton of hits from IE; about 50% IE7, 25% IE6, and 10% Firefox (our software is for Windows, so we see almost no mac users). The only one of those that drops considerably over the weekend is IE6 (by about 10%) and IE7 spikes nearly as much (8%).

zainon Netflix customers up in arms over the new Netflix Silverlight player

Isn't that how streaming to PCs works if you don't opt in to Silverlight?

If not, substitute "flash" with whatever the current option is.

zainon Connexions: An Open Source Initiative to Kill Textbooks

On the other hand, I constantly find myself wishing I could CTRL+F while looking for something in a textbook.

zainon Netflix customers up in arms over the new Netflix Silverlight player

Does anyone know why they decided to make it so people couldn't switch back to Flash? It seems to me that if they lifted this ridiculous restriction, all these people pissed at Netflix would be happy.

zainon Ask HN: Best encryption solution for personal stuff (images, videos etc)?

http://www.truecrypt.org/

zainon [dead]

Is it really necessary to post a thread every single time a large site goes down?

zainon Quickest way to $30,000 profit after taxes?

Wow, that's genius! Let me make sure I have you straight (I've never heard of this before)...

You check the TicketStumbler blog for hot pre-sale tickets. You buy them for face value when they go on sale (10AM?) hoping they'll get sold out. Then, you flip them on StubHub/Craigslist after they're sold out? What if the show doesn't get sold out?

Also, did I understand you correctly in that TicketMaster gives the best tickets to the first people who buy them, and you might get bad seats buying at 10AM? How can you tell if the seats are good enough?

Thanks for the info :)

zainon An Open Letter to my Two Mortgage Companies

I'm not sure where you're getting your 3x income numbers from, but they're simply ludicrous. With a mortgage of 3x your income, your mortgage will be less than 20% of your salary. For example, with an $85000/yr income, you earn about $5300 post-tax per month, and your mortgage payment is only $1350. If you consider home owning to be important to you, surely you can afford paying more than that for your mortgage.

Furthermore, it is impossible to find a home in the bay area for under $600,000. I'm certain that those starter homes are not being occupied by high net-worth individuals with $200,000/yr salaries.

I have been told that your monthly payments should not be more than 45% of your monthly household post-tax income. That comes out to a mortgage that can be about 5x your income. With those numbers, the lady in the article should've had a household (her + her husband) income of about $150,000/yr.

I'm a recent buyer of a $625,000 home with a $85,000/yr salary and I have no problems keeping up with my payments and establishing an emergency fund.

zainon Ask HN: Is it too much to expect a usable browser on OS X?

The one and only reason why I use Safari is because of the smooth scrolling. I've found that Safari is the only browser that smoothly and responsively scrolls with the 2-finger trackpad scroll. Not even Firefox with smooth scrolling turned on can match it.

So yes, I'd like to put in another vote for a perfect OSX browser.

zainon Ask HN: Is HN slow for you lately? Or even not responding?

http://searchyc.com/

zainon Crackulous developer wants people to stop pirating his App Store piracy app

http://cydia.hackulo.us is not a site, it is a repository for the iPhone's package management system (Cydia). The site it links (http://hackulo.us/) has a redirect to http://hackulo.us/forums/.

zainon Crackulous developer wants people to stop pirating his App Store piracy app

That's not the real Crackulous developer. Crackulous is free and open source. This message is from their forums:

The quick and dirty: Crackulous was developed right here on our forum, on our SVN server. Anyone selling Crackulous or claiming to be the developer is trying to scam you. The official Cydia repository to get Crackulous is http://cydia.hackulo.us. Crackulous is and will always be FREE SOFTWARE. It has had NO OTHER developers but SaladFork and Angel, with contributions from Uncon

http://hackulo.us/forums/index.php?showtopic=12570

zainon Tables vs CSS: CSS Trolls begone

Really? You use Photobucket and Rapidshare as examples of sites whose design examples you want to follow?

I'm certainly not a CSS purist, but I'm sure you could've found better reasoning than "all the big guys use tables, so I should too."

zainon Ask HN: What do you wish Google Analytics would do?

Visitor paths; i.e. "user A went from this page to this page to this page"

Visitor paths really help you see what pages are confusing your users. For example, using SiteCounter, we found that a lot of people would click the "login" link, and then would click the exact same link again, indicating they weren't sure if they got to the right page. As a result, we modified the page to look more like what someone would expect a login page would look like.

zainon The full text of SICP from MIT Press

Sorry :) I've seen terrible scanned versions of it posted before, but this particular source was never posted. The scanned versions are difficult to read and I figured others would enjoy seeing a clearer version.

zainon The full text of SICP from MIT Press

This is the entire book, hosted by the publishers (MIT Press). I find it much more convenient to read it here than the scribd PDF or even the hard copy itself because when they reference earlier problems and sections in the book, they usually link to it for easy navigation.

zainon New users: Welcome. Please read the site guidelines.

Nobody can downvote stories, but if they're violating the rules, high-karma users can flag them for deletion.

zainon New users: Welcome. Please read the site guidelines.

I'd also prefer to see less "linkbait" on the front page; i.e. stories with titles that are, at best, only tangentially related and are instead overdramatized just to get clicks.

zainon Teensy USB Development Board - 16MHz, $19

In a few years, your comment will seem ironic too ;)

zainon Want Git Preinstalled On The Next OS X?

Git has a very nice and very simple installer on OS X: http://code.google.com/p/git-osx-installer/

You don't need to muck with macports or anything.

zainon Full-disk encryption for all computer drives, coming soon

Big organizations don't trust individuals enough to make them the single point of failure for encryption. Most often, these organizations run key servers that have the actual key, and provide the key based on some form of auth (usually Active Directory). If the user forgets their AD password, its an easy reset; and if they leave the company or something, their data is easily recoverable.

This sort of "encryption in the sky" approach is available to consumers too. There are products by most of the big encryption vendors (like http://voltage.com/vsn/) that make it easy for a user to encrypt their data without putting themselves at risk for data loss.

zainon The Ultimate Dogfooding Story

Here is the video of the creator testing it with his own finger: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3mzhvMgrLE

zainon Ask HN: Review my project, Factolex - the fact lexicon

What's the difference between this and searching for "define: word" on google?

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=define...

zainon Rands: A Disclosure

I'm one of those people on the fence about whether I want to follow a management career or a technical one. Articles like these shove me firmly towards the latter.

zainon Ask HN: Good Hacker Cities

It seems to be fashionable to rag on Muni these days, but after living in two other urban cities, Muni is the best public transportation I've seen. It runs practically everywhere and is quite affordable and prompt.

Muni cars run on clean electric lines, and their busses are now electric hybrids. Each is outfitted with a GPS that updates boards at each stop to let you know in real-time how long before the next bus arrives. They have a phone number and a website that has this real-time info too. Hell, that website even has an iPhone version!

It costs 45 bucks a month to go anywhere you want. It runs 24 hours a day with plenty of frequency and services pretty much every inch of the city. What more can you ask for?

Ever checked out Atlanta's MARTA system? The bus service is random and wait times are often 30 minutes to 2 hours. Without a car, you're basically screwed.

zainon Ask HN: Good Hacker Cities

San Francisco is an excellent place for a hacker.

  1) Plenty of other hackers in close vicinity
  2) Lots of startups all over the city
  3) Excellent public transportation
  4) Awesome bike trails all over the place

Plus, you can walk into pretty much any coffee shop in SF and see at least one or two techies coding away on their macbook :)

zainon Twitter is raising new cash at 250 million valuation

Wow, a $250 valuation with 6 million users? That's $41.66 per user. It is ridiculously high, especially with no business model in sight.

zainon Javascript that auto-fills captchas

we took the approach of not making them 100% human readable.

Sounds like a great way to make sure neither bots nor humans use your service.