Hacker News Reader

JoeCortopassion "Gun" "Control"

This needs to be re-stated: What are you calling an "Assault Weapon"? The federal Assault Weapon ban pertained to cosmetic features only, not the rate of fire. If the firearm could only fire one round, with each pull of the trigger, but possessed a cosmetic feature (pistol grip adjustable stock, etc) then it was illegal as an "Assault Weapon". This ban had nothing to do with automatic weapons. Both the CDC and the United States DOJ published reports after the Assault Weapons ban stating that it had little to no effect on violent crime.

The problem is, the media sensationalizes guns, and what you think of when someone says "Assault Weapon", is actually a military grade "Assault Rifle", which is very different. An Assault Rifle is a firearm that can fire multiple rounds with one pull of the trigger. Semi-automatic firearms can not do this, and they can not be changed to do this without expensive modification, by a highly skilled machinist that is licensed to do so. Just to be clear, Assault Rifle's are very regulated by the ATF, are very expensive, and have a long (months) process required in order to get one.

Not to stir the pot too much, but all of these shootings are happening at schools, which are Federally mandated "Gun Free Safety Zones". These nut jobs know that no one there can defend themselves. I'm not saying everyone should have a gun. I am saying that when the bad guys can't tell who has one and who doesn't, they are going to be a lot less likely to do regrettable things

JoeCortopassion Ask HN: How much do you charge as iOS Contractor?

$50/hour. Not because I am incompetent, but because I choose to work from home(more productive, more time with family vs commuting). Most people want you to come to their office for butt-in-seat hours, so I have to lower my rate to still be desirable. Unfortunate, but there's not a ton of full-time remote iOS demand these days

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For reference:

Cheap overseas outsourcing = $20-30/hour

Junior/entry-level contract rate = $50-75/hour

Competent developer (i.e. able to work well without need for help or guidance) = $75-125

Highly skilled professional (flies in to help, recognized industry professional, directs projects architecture) = $150-300

JoeCortopassion Mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut

Listen, there are two parts to this: 1. The horrible tragedy, and 2. The hopes to prevent this from happening again. If we are going to talk about this, we need to all fall under the assumption that we agree that this is both a very tragic act perpetrated by someone who is obviously disturbed/mentally ill, and that it is all of our desires to do what we can to make sure senseless acts of violence like this never happen again.

So where do we go from here? How do we prevent this from happening again? It seems that there are two schools of thought (generalizing obviously): 1. Disarm everyone, and 2. Allow everyone to carry weapons. Regardless of which side you fall in, neither work perfectly unless they are complete (i.e. all weapons are gone thus criminals don't even have access, or everyone is armed and no one has the upper hand). The problem with both absolutes, is a deranged person will always find a means to carry out their ill will, whether that's a gun/knife/driving a car into a crowd.

The safest computer is encased in concrete, and buried 6 feet underground. Much in the same way, the safest society would have each of us locked in a room, with no interaction. What we have to figure out is this: How much liberty do we all give up, to limit the devastation of the senseless acts of a few?

JoeCortopassion Netflix says Google Fiber is "most consistently fast ISP in America"

Is anybody really surprised by this? I mean, Google has some of the best and brightest engineers working for them, a substantial budget, a purpose other than profitable retail of their service, and a tiny town outside of major populations to work with. I would be hard pressed to find a reason why they wouldn't be faster than anyone else out there. Shoot, I bet you could find similarly sized cities were Verizon/Comcast/Charter handily beat Google Fiber. Don't get me wrong, I love that they are doing this, but everything breaks at scale

EDIT: Misread the part about it being Kansas City vs. a city in Kansas. I feel my point about scale still stands, as Kansas City in total (Missouri and Kansas) is in the 6-700,000 person range, and is still a fraction of total user base of the other ISPs mentioned

JoeCortopassion WhatsApp Hack

Am I missing something? "Give me your number and password, and I'll show you that WhatsApp is insecure". Really?

There is definitely a place to out a company that fails to secure things consistently, but asking for credentials in this way absolutely wrecks your credibility to anyone but the most trusting of people that already knows you. No one should input anything into this form, even if it's credible. To do so, is assuming that it is not being stored in any way (unprovable), and that it is following security best practices (on a site that's not even operating on a secure connection). I'm sure you are a standup guy, but I hope we never get complacent with blindly accepting "hack checkers" like the ones that popped up around other notable hacks recently

JoeCortopassion Tim Cook's Freshman Year

Anyone else bugged by the fact that the top two comment threads, for this article, are about pedantic details of the article format rather than it's actual content? You have to go halfway down the page before you get a comment that's even on-topic

JoeCortopassion Google Car Search

Pretty terrible search.

Looked for Toyota Tundra, found none. Typed it in again, and chose a few of the auto-completes suggested to me. No results. Looked for a F-150, no results. It's one thing to not have some of the most popular automobiles available, but quite another to not have results for something that you suggested I search for. Besides that, what is this supposed to do? If I click on one of the cars that it happens to have I get a blank page. Is this supposed to help me buy a car? See what's out there? Know fair value? I just think that someone jumped the gun on this, and it could be executed on quite a bit better

JoeCortopassion Lego Finds Discontinued Set For Boy Who Saved Up For 2 Years

Had this exact same experience, and you are the first person I know of that saw it as well. I distinctly remember (SPOILER) when they were on the roof, about to disable the device, going "I can't believe that Marvel allowed Lego to do this before their big movie blockbuster". For that matter, who was the marketing genius who thought that surmising the entire story arc would make for a good commercial at any time?

JoeCortopassion Notch trying jsFiddle

Such a great example of what can be done in javascript/canvas. As it is, I was completely blown away by how little code it actually took to do that. My only gripe would be, why couldn't he have used descriptive variable names, so I can better go through and understand it? :-)

JoeCortopassion Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (December 2012)

SEEKING WORK - Remote, based in Southern California

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Joe Cortopassi

joe[at]joecortopassi[dot]com

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iOS developer (proficient with RESTful service integration)

Full stack web developer (PHP/mySQL/javascript/html/css/Linux)

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Specialties:

Objective-C

iPhone/iOS

PHP

MySQL

Javascript

Dojo

jQuery

HTML

CSS

Bootstrap

Kohana

Blueprint

Business Analytics

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http://joecortopassi.com

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/joe-cortopassi/24/76b/5b9

http://joecortopassi.com/www.facebook.com/CortopassiConsulti...

https://github.com/JoeCortopassi

https://twitter.com/JoeCortopassi

------------------

About Me:

I started off in web development, doing mid-large size lead generation web sites. As a big part of dealing with lead generation, I became proficient in RESTful API integration and development, along with complex javascript web applications used for analytics. I then began working on iPhone and iPad applications over the years, working on apps for CieStudios.com and their perspective clients. My ability to understand complex api's, also helped me build connection management and caching systems for iOS apps that assured the user that their information would always be posted to the server, regardless of their data connection.

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JoeCortopassion Poll: I have a startup idea. How should I pursue it?

http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

JoeCortopassion Ask PG: Fix the broken flagging system? Surface article just got flagged off FP

Another example of a Microsoft article getting hit today:

http://hnrankings.info/4849090/

Microsoft mocks Internet Explorer haters in new ad

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4849090

JoeCortopassion Ask PG: Fix the broken flagging system? Surface article just got flagged off FP

iOS developer here, see the same thing with any article writing positively about an Apple product

JoeCortopassion Microsoft mocks Internet Explorer haters in new ad [video]

This ad isn't about the merits of IE as a browser, this ad is about building a preformed thought in the common users mind whenever they hear someone bash IE. IE hasn't been the victim of bad PR, it has earned it's reputation through years of blood/sweat/tears by the hands of developers. Microsoft recognizes that they won't be able to change this attitude in the developer community, but that they can lessen the weight a developer's opinion has amongst non-technically minded people, which is a much larger share of users.

Like it or not, a lot of people will think of this ad first (and what it tells them), the next time one of us tries to warn them about IE

JoeCortopassion Alertify.js

So Facebook and Twitter should also save drafts of posts you were going to make? What if latency is non-trivial, or connection is lost? Do I also want to send ajax posts for drafts every second to ensure that as little as possible is lost? A lot of this is mitigated by a very simple

  confirm("Are you sure you want to leave?");

JoeCortopassion Alertify.js

Just out of curiosity, if you had a web app like Gmail, and your user accidentally went to close their browser window with an unsaved email half done, how would you plan on warning them without blocking events?

JoeCortopassion Alertify.js

Confirm and prompt are typically used to indicate a decision by the user. Natively, these functions stop javascript execution to wait for the users input, so that it knows what to do, but do not allow for customization. Non-native libraries do not have this ability to prompt the user for input, then wait for their response, before continuing the execution of that script. Callbacks are one way to circumvent this issue, but introduce new issues with scope and readability.

All I'm trying to say is that allowing custom defined objects to have the ability to block execution can be very handy in certain instances. I by no means was criticizing the alertify.js library

JoeCortopassion Alertify.js

Very cool library! The one thing all of these type of things lack (e.g. this, dojo.dialog()) is that they are non-blocking to the execution thread, unlike alert()/confirm()/prompt(). I know it's not their fault, javascript doesn't allow this natively, but i feel like that would be immensely useful for general user input, form validation and the like. Yes, I am aware that it can be done currently through workarounds, I'm just saying that allowing certain native objects to be blocking upon further user input, would be immensely useful and save code readability

EDIT: Care to explain why I'm getting downvoted? Said nothing offensive, and I'm clearly on-topic.

JoeCortopassion How to set up a safe and secure Web server

For anyone that wants more resources like this, I've found articles in Linode's library to be very helpful: http://library.linode.com/lamp-guides

JoeCortopassion Ask HN: Know any great freelance developers?

I am available, with a solid background in Lamp and iOS development. Feel free to contact me (info in profile), or check me out at JoeCortopassi.com

JoeCortopassion Elon Musk: Apple Likely to Lose to Google in Smartphone Market

Tim Cook: Elon Musk likely to lose to Toyota in Automobile market.

This title/article serves no other purpose but to take half of the top ten keywords in HN and pack them into one post. Elon Musk is a smart man, but his experience is far outside the smartphone realm, and his reasoning is as insightful as an MSN/Yahoo article circa Steve Jobs passing.

JoeCortopassion Ask HN: How have you made "quick" money before?

How does one actually sell Wordpress plugins? I've heard this a few times before as "Pro" or "Premium" plugins, but never seen where the market is

JoeCortopassion Why won't anyone talk to me? What recruiters look for in a resume

I've actually had a similar struggle with the incessant but spammy recruitment emails, that I was able to fix almost perfectly. In the "Summary" section of my LinkedIn[1], I have a sentence that says this:

  "If you wish to contact me, please put the word 'Waffles' 
  in your message. It sounds silly, but it lets me know that 
  you have taken a little time to asses my profile, rather than 
  mass messaging people based on a keyword search."

"Waffles" will never be added by coincidence, so if I ever see that in the subject line of an email, I know that the recruiter has actually read my profile, and took the time to write a custom email to me. If it doesn't have the word "Waffles", I just ignore/delete it. It has dramatically improved the quality of emails I get from this vector

[1] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/joe-cortopassi/24/76b/5b9/

JoeCortopassion Man Arrested At Airport for Unusual Watch

Absolutely agree with what probably happened. Everything I've read about this mentions wires and fuses. As bad as the TSA is, it seems entirely more probable that an artist wanted to make a point, by using items that draw attention, without actually being illegal. If this is just some guy with an eccentric watch, I hope they backtrack and let him go. But if it's someone trying to incite a reaction, then you can't really complain about being arrested.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes

JoeCortopassion How to get your IP unbanned on HN

Very generous offer, but I would argue that HN's slow performance is a feature, not a bug. The average drive-by person, that is attracted to sensationalist articles and titles, simply doesn't have the patience for the slow load times of every page. The user that is seeking intelligent conversation, however, is more than willing to have 5+ second wait times if they know that they will be getting valuable content. Couple that with page load times having consistent slow load times, rather than surges of performance, and I wouldn't put past PG to build a delay into page loads to act as a sort of filter. Even if it's unintentional, I would still argue that is still useful in driving out some riff-raff

JoeCortopassion Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

Skip to the relevant part of the video [53 second], and the guy clearly touches the bottom of the McCain section with his finger, then rolls his finger down. My point still stands though: The user sees the wrong selection immediately, and can notify someone or try again. The only scandal here is that this is even a story

http://youtu.be/0MHwNZkNFlI?t=54s

JoeCortopassion Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

But there is no real evidence. He shows a video of a garden variety bug/error with resistive touch screens, then makes some sensationalist claims in his comments that are completely unsubstantiated.

JoeCortopassion Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

As opposed to some random Reddit user?

JoeCortopassion Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

He says a lot of things, but amazingly only shows us the one thing that can be easily debunked as a glitch/error.

JoeCortopassion Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

I know that this will remain at the bottom of this thread, because it doesn't have enough conspiracy theory in it, but does anyone really think that this is actual vote tampering?

I mean, why on earth would you tamper with a voting machine so that it stuffs the ballot, but have it update the UI so that the user can see and report the error? This should fall to the way side of failing basic logic, but it doesn't because people want a sensationalist article to argue over. Changing votes would be much easier to do on the back end, and would have the additional benefit of never being detected by the user