Hacker News Reader

JustinSeriouslyon Google changes Palestinian location from 'Territories' to 'Palestine'

Why Google made this change, from the article, "In this case, we are following the lead of the UN, Icann [the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers], ISO [International Organisation for Standardisation] and other international organisations."

When it comes to Israel/Palestine, every mapmaker in the world is taking a stance.

JustinSeriouslyon How to fail at marketing

Another example: long form sales pages. They've been discussed here on Hacker News before, and many people here hate them, but they do (apparently) convert very well.

JustinSeriouslyon Huffshell: You probably type too much.

For a bare-bones approach, this shell command would also do the trick.

cut -d\ -f1 ~/.bash_history | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head

(Note: There should be two spaces after the -d\ .)

JustinSeriouslyon Should Wikipedia run ads that ask for money, or ads that make money?

You're right, but money already is involved in these articles. Authors and actors (and agents, I've suspected in a few cases) are keeping a biased eye on their articles.

I think it would be difficult for Wikipedia to be corrupted by money. There's too much transparency, and there's too large of a community. The admins have already discovered with dealt with large-scale attempts to game the system.

What's actually at stake here is the appearance of objectivity. Affiliate links, which are nearly universal across the web, should be minimally objectionable.

JustinSeriouslyon Should Wikipedia run ads that ask for money, or ads that make money?

I've always wondered why Wikipedia doesn't include affiliate links to Amazon on all their book and movie articles.

I think their current logic is that affiliate links force them to choose which online store they want to support, which is something they appear loath to do.

Look at the page they send you too when you do try to buy a book in an article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0802130984 . It's so large and completist that it has two tables of contents, and it's so obsessively non-preferential that it does a good job of hiding the one amazon.com link that most people are probably looking for.

Personally, I've bought 100s of books and DVDs after reading their Wikipedia articles, and I'd be happy to let the WikiMedia Foundation get my affiliate dollars.

JustinSeriouslyon Life Below 600px

(from Jakob Nielsen)

"Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their attention below the fold."

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/scrolling-attention.html

The article includes the results of an eyetracking study, and a few examples of viewing patterns where people did spend a lot of time below the fold.

JustinSeriouslyon Bonfire of the Vanities

As someone with technical knowledge and no purchasing power, I dislike talking to salespeople and technical people. I just want the name of a product that I can recommend to my boss. I want that datasheet.

I recently tried to recommend a great product to my boss. I had used it in a past job, and I knew what company made it, but I had no idea what the actual product was called. I didn't want to waste my boss's time, so I tried to do the research on my own and figure out what specific product I was looking for.

Their website wasn't very helpful, it was filled with generic product names and an amalgamation of SEO-friendly keywords and the word "solution". I emailed them to find out which product I was looking for, and next thing I knew I was on a sales call. Then I was on a sales conference call. Then they popped in for a sales meeting, even though I never told them my company's address.

I came away with a vague idea that their products were both nameless and probably very good. I explained it all to my boss; he took a pass.

I could've saved everyone a lot of time if I just had that comprehensive datasheet.

JustinSeriouslyon Half of the top 50 Wikipedia contributors are bots

Some bots auto-revert changes that are likely to be vandalism or spam, like if an anonymous user adds a link to a blog on a free blog hosting site. (Specifically, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:XLinkBot .)

JustinSeriouslyon Firefox 4 is here

Sometimes you can work around this.

Find the install.rdf file for the plugin, and change the maxVersion variable to "4.*".

It doesn't always work, but I've had good luck with it.

JustinSeriouslyon Amount of profanity in git commit messages per programming language

I ran it for Javascript, Ruby, and Perl, and I got this:

{"JavaScript"=>48, "Ruby"=>46, "Perl"=>28}

JustinSeriouslyon Google's AROUND Operator for Proximity Search

I was about the say the same thing, but about Infoseek.

JustinSeriouslyon Economist books of the year (science and technology picks)

Politics and current affairs

Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime. By John Heilemann and Mark Halperin

The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama. By David Remnick

The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers. By Richard McGregor

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory. By Peter Hessler

Molotovâs Magic Lantern: A Journey in Russian History. By Rachel Polonsky

Curfewed Night: One Kashmiri Journalistâs Frontline Account of Life, Love and War in his Homeland. By Basharat Peer

The Fear: The Last Days of Robert Mugabe. By Peter Godwin

The Watchers: The Rise of Americaâs Surveillance State. By Shane Harris

The Rule of Law. By Tom Bingham

The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Childrenâs Futureâand Why They Should Give it Back By David Willetts

Biography and memoir

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance. By Edmund de Waal

Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Familyâs Feuds. By Lyndall Gordon

Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) With Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes. By Stephen Sondheim

The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece.By Eric Siblin

History

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. By Timothy Snyder

Why the West RulesâFor Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future. By Ian Morris

Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962. By Frank Dikotter

Red Plenty: Industry! Progress! Abundance! Inside the Fifties' Soviet Dream. By Francis Spufford

A World on Fire: An Epic History of Two Nations Divided. By Amanda Foreman

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of Americaâs Great Migration. By Isabel Wilkerson

Pearl Buck in China: Journey to the Good Earth. By Hilary Spurling

A History of the World in 100 Objects. By Neil MacGregor

Economics and business

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. By Michael Lewis

More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of the New Elite. By Sebastian Mallaby

High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg. By Niall Ferguson

Science and technology

A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. By Paul Edwards

Biology is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and New Business of Engineering Life. By Rob Carlson

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. By Matt Ridley

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. By Steven Johnson

What Technology Wants. By Kevin Kelly

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. By Siddhartha Mukherjee

Culture, society and travel

Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. By Guy Deutscher

Sweetness and Blood: How Surfing Spread from Hawaii and California to the Rest of the World, With Some Unexpected Results. By Michael Scott Moore

Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theatre. By Larry Stempel

McGilchristâs Greek Islands. By Nigel McGilchrist

Fiction

Freedom. By Jonathan Franzen

To the End of the Land. By David Grossman

Parrot and Olivier in America. By Peter Carey

The Unnamed. By Joshua Ferris

Mr Peanut. By Adam Ross

The Imperfectionists. By Tom Rachman

Selected Stories. By William Trevor

Poetry

Human chain. By Seamus Heaney

White Egrets: Poems. By Derek Walcott

(lets hear it for perl one-liners.)

JustinSeriouslyon Ask HN: Please upvote good questions in comments

I disgree.

If someone replied to a post with, "You're wrong and an idiot," but the original poster replies with a reasoned defense, then I would certainly vote down the first reply and vote up the second.

If someone is trolling with a dumb comment like, "Capitalism never works," but then receives well-thought out replies as to why capitalism does in fact work in this situation, then I would leave the original comment alone and vote up the replies.

JustinSeriouslyon Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work)

Which is often "just like game X, but more complicated."

I think that's the route of most startup pipe-dreams: Take a successful site or product, and make it more complicated.

JustinSeriouslyon 140 Google Interview Questions

Did they actually say "appreciate"?

JustinSeriouslyon German vandals target Street View opt-out homes

"some youths high on googlemania - a local thing"

Is this really a thing in Germany? That's the weirdest part of this whole story, that kids would care that much about an international corporation like Google. It'd be like getting in a fight with someone because they didn't drink Coke.

JustinSeriouslyon Wrong scientific beliefs that were held for long periods

I've been trying to work this one through. One possible solution, (using a hefty dose of mathematical illiteracy, that looks like one of those word problems that occasionally appears in Marilyn vos Savant's column):

  base salary: $100
  $100 * 1.2 = $120
  $120 * (1.2 * .8) = $115.2

("It's a 20% pay cut from our pay raise, that's why you have to multiply our pay raise with our pay cut.")

JustinSeriouslyon Ask HN: Seriously, what's wrong with HTML tables?

Maintainability.

Same reason that, when you code, you want to include comments, have good variable names, use reasonably-sized functions, etc. It makes maintainability and future extension much easier.

Forget about semantic purity. CSS has survived all these years because it's been very useful in a very practical sense.

JustinSeriouslyon The Python IAQ: Infrequently Answered Questions

It was a weird title. I did an an quick poll of two non-programmer, LOL-speak experts, and I got these answers:

- If you can read this, you can get a job in financial program (if there were any)

- If you can read this, you can get a job in functional programs/programming (if there were any)

I don't know what this proves.

JustinSeriouslyon Teens Find Innovative Ways to Control Their Facebook Presence

Some people (myself included) like use Facebook as a mirror to their own social circles. Defriending someone from Facebook for an inappropriate post would be like defriending them in real life for an inappropriate joke. It's easier to just ask them not to do it again.

JustinSeriouslyon Netflix wins a longbet from 8 years ago.

Even most of the original commentators, back in 02002, thought it was easily doable.

JustinSeriouslyon Unbundle our archaic cable TV system

This issue has gone all the way to congress a couple times, but no real fix has ever come of it.

Fortunately the market has already solved it for us. With Itunes and Hulu and DVD season box sets, we've gone all the past a la carte per channel and straight to a la carte per show and per episode.

JustinSeriouslyon Placebo buttons: 'door-close' buttons, others, don't do anything

A key word missing from the HN title is "most." Most door-close buttons don't work, most pedestrian walkways buttons don't work, but some do, and it's very easy to test which ones do.

They aren't all placebos.

JustinSeriouslyon No wonder CompSci grads are unemployed

I think this says more about your college/university than CS education in general. I have a BS in comp sci, and I had to write functioning code in almost every computer class I took. (The only exception being one A.I. course that was cross-listed with philosophy, and even there I used automata in my final paper.)

JustinSeriouslyon The reverse job applicant

Generalists should go for smaller companies, like small web development shops. Those jobs are always, "Programming, plus some simple web design, which means a grasp of SEO, probably Photoshop, occasionally sysadmin work, knowledge of Apache, and you'll have to set up your own version control."

JustinSeriouslyon Love Makes You Increasingly Ignorant of Your Partner

Proof that love makes you blind.

JustinSeriouslyon Why Python chose Mercurial

I think the logic is this: Github is popular. Ruby is the most popular language on Github. Therefore Ruby and Git are connected.

JustinSeriouslyon Zuckerberg's Residence at Issue in Facebook Suit

Mr. Zuckerberg "is a 26-year-old man who has spent almost a quarter of his life building this company,"

Six. They could have just said six.

JustinSeriouslyon Local Storage And How To Use It On Websites

Good point.

For Firefox users, browse to "about:config", then search for "dom.storage.enabled".

JustinSeriouslyon So I made something that's pretty stupid but had fun doing it

I'm not getting no results for "Debug port", which should be no more than 3 (since it links to Xbox, which is 2).

Same for "Index of Estonia-related articles".