Hacker News Reader

akmilleron I Got Myself Arrested So I Could Look Inside the Justice System

"except serious financial crimes"

Unless it's a serious serious financial crime in which case they get to remain the CEO of large financial institutions with bailouts and increased bonuses!

akmilleron Man buys clay iPad, gets put in jail for wanting refund

It didn't get registered in his name. Read the full story next time.

akmilleron Flamingo for Mac: A Modern Messaging App

"Also, does all software require a free trial or something? I never got that memo."

Obviously no, but it's hard to convince people to move from software that works (such as Adium) to your software if you can't at least provide a great overview of how it works via video demonstration or better yet allowing the user to try it out.

akmilleron Off

I thought I was clear, but re-reading it I agree I wasn't.

What I meant was that I found little use for a tablet until I got the Surface. It still doesn't play a major role in my day to day activities but I'm using it daily and Windows 8.1 on the Surface is a wonderful experience.

If any other company was behind it I honestly think it would be more successful, but because it's Microsoft there is this natural hate. Just reading your comment, "Surface is a joke compared to the iPad" seems to indicate a lot of disdain for a product that I doubt you've even held in your hand. Am I wrong?

akmilleron Off

"We know Microsoft’s tablets suck"

This irritates the hell out of me. Who is this "we"? Fine if Marco wants to suggest that they suck, but I'll take a shot in the dark and say he hasn't even tried to give one a fair shake...would love to hear from him if he actually has.

I have never found a use for a tablet, but I have several around my house including iPad Mini, iPad 3, Nexus 7 (1st gen), and now a Surface. The Surface is the best of those devices and the only one I can see myself continuing to use going forward.

I would challenge anyone to just open their minds if they haven't tried one and jump in completely for a week or so then make up your mind. Definitely not saying the device is perfect, there are some things (both hardware and software) I'd like to see added but it's a damn nice device!

akmilleron Microsoft’s Hardware, Round 2: Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2

Because it supports external displays up to 3840x2160.

Edit: Sorry, misunderstood your question!

akmilleron Michael Dell buys back PC company he founded in $24.8bn deal

I've been a developer and building websites for a long time. Yes, "easy" is probably overstating, but the parts that are problems I'd think could be corrected or fixed without a major undertaking. Fixing the broken links and finding a way to speed the pages up a bit should not require overhauling the entire site.

Dell, I would guess, does much of their business online so it would seem a no-brainer to make the online experience as good as possible. Broken links and consistent timeouts are inexcusable for a site like Dell.

akmilleron Michael Dell buys back PC company he founded in $24.8bn deal

I've had it take longer with Apple too but that's usually been on popular releases when they've gotten back-ordered. My wife's laptop was customized with 8gb of ram and 512gb ssd and its ship date was 1-2 days and it did ship 2 days later.

My main complaint was that after ordering a computer for 1800.00 it's very frustrating to be told that it will take 10-20 days just to "build" it, much less how long it will take to actually get to me.

akmilleron Michael Dell buys back PC company he founded in $24.8bn deal

Some of Dell's hardware seems to be getting better again. I just purchased the Dell XPS 12" and I'm mostly satisfied with the computer (although it's a bit expensive).

However, there are two things that still drive me crazy about Dell. The first one should be easy to fix which is that the website is absolutely awful. It's slow, many links 404 and overall just a very frustrating experience. It took me awhile to get my computer ordered because of how slow the site is and I almost gave up.

The other issue is the fact that I have to wait about 2 weeks for my computer to be built and shipped to me. Most of their computers they don't even allow many configurations so why can't they have pre-built machines ready to ship. The very day I ordered my Dell, I ordered a Macbook Air for my wife which shipped in 2 days.

Dell has been pretty consistent force on the server side, but I'd like to see them regain some strength in the consumer laptop market again.

akmilleron Elon Musk took the futuristic gesture interface from Iron Man and made it real

Everything we all do in life builds heavily on what others have done before us. The article explicitly states the components he used. The interesting part of the article is that he's attempting to take these extremely new and young components and use them together for something that helps them engineer components of their rockets. That's the way forward for many of these technologies is to find real viable use cases and refine them until using it for that given purpose is successful.

akmilleron Lenovo’s new Yoga 2 Pro has the same flexible hinge, 3200×1800 display

Have you used one? I ask because I thought the similar thing but recently purchased the Dell XPS 12" and one of my coworkers bought the Yoga. While I agree, I don't often times flip my screen around unless I'm reading a long article of some type I do touch the screen a lot and the screens don't move like you'd think. In fact I'm so used to using the touchscreen (and I've only had the dell for about a month) that I find myself trying to touch my screen on my macbook now as well.

akmilleron School is a prison and damaging our kids

Don't forget that math and physics have to be completely disregarded to be a creationist as well.

akmilleron School is a prison and damaging our kids

So who decides what the "real education" is? I believe, as a parent, that "real education" for my kids is determined by me. If there are parents that want to teach their kids mythology painted as facts then so be it. In this day and age those kids will reach an age of reason like everyone else and they will have direct access to an amazing amount of knowledge via the internet. I'm less and less worried about dogma going forward. What you are suggesting is to remove any innovation and entrepreneurship from the educational system.

akmilleron School is a prison and damaging our kids

Are you saying these people just don't understand and haven't taken the time to learn the details about evolution? Or, do these people understand the science behind evolution and still actively deny that it took place? If the latter, then yes these people aren't "all there". Perhaps calling them stupid is over the line, and counter-productive, but I would be skeptical of any other opinions they hold due to the fact that they are creationists. It shows a severe lack of critical thinking if nothing else.

akmilleron Android is for startups

This is anecdotal (but frankly so is yours)...

We have mainly been doing iOS apps but we are hearing demand from customers about having an option in Android so one of our developers (who is definitely much more of an Apple fan) has been experimenting with the Android SDK and he has been very impressed with the Android SDK. He has found many things to be far easier in the Android SDK than with iOS. His main complaint is with the emulator which is extremely frustrating to use but since it's dead easy to use your device that's not as big of a deal.

akmilleron Android KitKat

I would guess they came up with the idea of kitkat and contacted Nestle for permission to use the name and likely Nestle saw a good opportunity to use it as marketing.

Obviously just speculation on my part, but seems more likely (to me) than Google actively trying to get sponsorship on a code name.

akmilleron Javascript Frameworks Are Amazing and Nobody Is Happy

Why is it important that it's "in the box". You can have a html page started with a link to foundation and be doing a progressive grid layout in less than a minute. If you don't like their grid implementation use one of a dozen others. I'm guessing you used pre 3.0 twitter bootstrap. The latest bootstrap (I don't know how good it is, I have mainly used Zurb Foundation) is supposed to be much better at supporting progressive grids.

akmilleron Javascript Frameworks Are Amazing and Nobody Is Happy

Your examples don't strike me as limitations of the tools for designing a UI in the web...the limitations you mention are just due to the nature of it being on the web.

Frankly, a list of tens of thousands of messages sounds completely worthless to me. The first email application I've ever really liked and use all the time is Gmail. I think Google helped to redefine what the email interface should be, so much so that other desktop apps sought to imitate many of their features.

I believe that some of the limitations on performance actually force developers to build better interfaces than what you'd get if a desktop application was built in its place. I have to focus on what is most important and determine the best way to deliver that functionality to you. I suppose that's why I find myself anymore using web applications far more than desktop apps. The only native desktop apps I use anymore are things that I have to have the performance for (IDE's, Photoshop, etc...)

akmilleron Javascript Frameworks Are Amazing and Nobody Is Happy

I wouldn't characterize web layout as "awesome."

I would. I've been doing web development for a long time, along with many other types of development, and although there are quirks (as there are with anything), you can do nearly anything via web layouts. The flexibility of the system, and things people have accomplished with it, is really amazing when you stand back and look at it as a whole.

akmilleron XKeyscore: NSA program collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet'

Honest, maybe naive question, but what types of programmers actively help build and maintain systems like this? I turned down a job for a company that is less than a mile from my house because I viewed their business as immoral.

Hard for me to fathom anyone taking a job, helping to build systems like this. I get that many of the components of a system like this could be seen as harmless. However, a system of this complexity must have some talented engineers bringing it all together and making it work. How can they feel good about what they are doing?

akmilleron Ubuntu 13.10 to ship with Mir instead of X

But the same comparison could be made about Chrome and Chromium, no?

akmilleron The Revel Web Framework for Go

Well, how hard is it to just use their session store to store a guid of some type and use that key to store session data in redis or some other storage?

akmilleron In the Bible Belt, Offering Atheists a Spiritual Home

I've never really experienced any type of heckling, however, where I live (Missouri) most people just assume you are a Christian of some form. I do feel like if my employer knew I was an atheist I'd see some discrimination at work. Not to mention that, for the most part, you won't get elected to public office if you are a atheist. In fact in Texas an atheist can't run for public office.

akmilleron iOS 7 As Defense

I honestly don't see that at all on my nexus 4. Maybe it's just the limited apps that I use. I do see more performance related issues on my Nexus 7 though.

akmilleron iOS 7 As Defense

Android still hasn't matched iOS in the responsiveness front

Guessing you don't use Android or at least haven't in awhile? I've been Android user now since the release of 4.0 and it seems much more responsive now than my wife's iPhone 5 in almost every category from web browsing to gaming. I was very aware of the lag pre-4.0 and that was the main reason I never switched (was an iPhone user before that). Now it's as smooth as can be.

akmilleron U.S. urges states not to allow general use of self-driving cars

They also say, "as self-driving cars improve, they will reconsider." Seems fair.

It would seem fair if they pointed to any actual data regarding the safety of such vehicles versus the safety of cars driven by humans but I see no such information provided. Or, it might seem fair if there was any company trying to actively sell self-driving cars to the general public right now.

I think this is a problem that would likely work itself out without legislation surrounding it. Companies, for the most part, would probably like to provide products that don't endanger the lives of their customers. Along with that, insurance companies I'm sure would love to reduce the risk of driving while maintaining the current cost of insurance. Therefore, I'm guessing they will be heavily involved in testing self-driving cars. If the findings aren't good I'm sure insurance costs would be extreme or not available at all.

akmilleron 1Password 50% off today

I'd say the biggest difference is simply usability. My coworker uses KeePass and I use 1Password and most things take him 1 or more steps to do than it takes me. For instance, the browser plugins with 1Password are pretty seamless, no copying and pasting just a simple click to login.

However, I tend to think that AgileBits over-charges for 1Password and I still haven't upgraded to the new version since they moved to the app store and tried to make me purchase the same version I had already bought(just to move to app store distribution model).

I bought the family license which gives me 5 users I believe, but I still have to buy the app for all iOS devices which in my house includes a total of 5 devices (at 9.00 a piece right now...that's on top of the 70.00 I spent for the family license). They don't, however, charge for the Android version which I find a bit odd since they charge for iOS.

akmilleron Lying Microsoft Advertising

I think what they say is shady, but as the parent of this thread states, it is technically accurate to say that their screen is larger by industry standard measurements (i.e. corner to corner).

akmilleron Phantompy - Headless WebKit engine for Python, like phantomjs

They are not (although they definitely should be). Google will read and index javascript, they do not execute it.