Hacker News Reader

alxpon Techies don't understand what business Apple is in

Don't underestimate the influence of developers and the tech elite jumping on a usable desktop Unix in the early 2000s. The first places I ever saw more than one or two Mac laptops in one room were developer meetups. And you know each of those influence purchasing decisions of their families and friends as a trusted source. If OS X didn't have Unix underneath I would need three hands to count the number of people I would not have told to buy a Mac because I wasn't using one and loving it at the time.

alxpon A brief glimpse of Nokia's popularity outside the Western world

Betting against high-selling low-margin products would be like betting against Wal-Mart. You can co-exist with them but you can't beat them at their own game, and their game is around to stay.

alxpon Rands in Repose: Managing Nerds

I normally find articles with titles like that painfully condescending, but this was quite well-done and worth a read.

alxpon Why developers should care about system packages

> I'm not sure why it's the author's responsibility to go setup a dozen different VMs. That really is the package maintainer's job.

If you're in the enviable position of having lots of people willing to put in the time to maintain your package, and a distro that thinks your software is sufficiently noteworthy to include in their distro. But if your software is relatively new and you want to encourage wide adoption, one way to help is to make the install process friendly and familiar for sysadmins as well as fellow developers. And if you speak their language that goes a long way towards building that trust.

alxpon Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period

HTML's smooshing two spaces together was offensive to me in the 90s when I was learning it after being a touch typist since I was 7 years old. I still double space, but no one knows unless they view source.

alxpon "this gem is awesome".to_spanish # = "esta joya es impresionante"

Drupal's localization infrastructure is quite nice. Instead of 'echo' you use the function t() which lets users use a GUI to translate all tokens in a Drupal site.

alxpon Is tomorrow Armageddon for Mac developers?

A lot of Apple products don't have any activation at all and rely on the honour system. The times I've pirated desktop software was because I was annoyed that I had to tie the installation to a single machine. The Mac app store lets you install on multiple machines, so that will be enough to make me happy to pay for more apps.

alxpon Is tomorrow Armageddon for Mac developers?

Omni Group are the best example of a great Mac developer that isn't huge like Adobe or MS. They sell best-of-their-kind software for the iPad for quite high prices, and are doing very well. I don't see this changing in the Mac app store.

alxpon Is tomorrow Armageddon for Mac developers?

There's also lots of $2 games on Steam and it hasn't killed the premier developers' ability to charge $30 or $40 or more for their AAA titles.

alxpon Windows Phone 7 development from the perspective of an iOS developer

I think games will be where WP7 will shine, Microsoft has the best game and media development APIs out there for any platform, and there are many many developers who've been building high quality games for Xbox and PC who could move to the platform a lot more comfortably than to iOS which requres OpenGL or to Android which sounds like a mess to have to deal with divergent hardware.

alxpon Why the Kids Don't Blog and Grandma's on Facebook

I think we've ended the historical period where younger people will always be more tech-savvy than their slightly older counterparts. I wonder if having internet and ubiquitous connectedness just be a part of the background for younger people will actually make them less likely to be early adopters of something unknown or up-and-coming.

alxpon Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies

You could say the same thing about driving a car.

alxpon [dead]

I haven't looked at the page code but it seems like there's a deliberate delay after the page loads and you start reading before the banner pops in right in your field of vision. It drives me crazy every time.

alxpon John Carmack talks about Rage SD and HD, iOS, and what's next for iOS gaming

IIRC id's first game on iOS was Wolfenstein 3D which originally cost $9.99 when I bought it. They are probably aiming for the left-hand side of the price / demand curve for Rage to gain new fans, where Wolf3D was targetted at people who already were fans.

alxpon Where Are the Android Killer Apps?

They "convinced" developers to get on board in large part because they let devs use the same tools they've been using to create the original games on Windows with. If I had an existing PC game it's a no brainer to target WP7. Android is a much tougher sell.

alxpon Icing PayPal: How We Did It

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/mozilla/stomps.html

D'oh.

alxpon Sears adds a little zombie style to its site

to _its_ site.

alxpon Developers blog post: No, I won’t do it. It would not be professional.

Yep, doctors have been complicit in creating the United States' for-profit healthcare system. If they live by a code of ethics that says "first, do no harm" then an objective outside observer would say they've not only failed miserably, they've actively worked to harm people who need medical care.

alxpon RIM introduces PlayBook -- the BlackBerry tablet

Think sports metaphor.

alxpon RIM introduces PlayBook -- the BlackBerry tablet

They need time to get developers working on products for the thing so they don't get caught out in the cold with nothing good at launch.

alxpon Never Mind The Bullets: a comic strip with HTML5/CSS

From an accessibility perspective, having the text available to a screen reader is a very good thing. Hope this becomes commonplace for web comics.

alxpon How Loneliness is Contagious

I love that this has gotten so well-known. Tanya is from my hometown and it's fantastic to see a member of our arts community make an imprint on the world like she has.

alxpon The Dark Side of Android Hacking

Here's the important sentence, and why the author has a point:

"if I was running a jailbroken iPhone, I'd just restore it with iTunes, and it would be factory-fresh with known software."

Apple tells you not to jailbreak, but they'll happily let you back in the house if you've gotten yourself into a mess. Google are telling power users that their OS is the hacker-friendly one, but leaves minefields for anyone who takes them at their word and tries to do what the author did.

alxpon Myths about prostitution

> Yes, this is the nasty little secret at the heart of feminism.

The straw man version of feminism you hold in your head is not the one that exists in real life. Google "patriarchy hurts men, too".

alxpon What parents worry about vs what they should worry about

This rock keeps tigers away. I'll sell it to you for $20.

alxpon Fedora: Trademark defense -- you can help

The creators of the Fedora repository software are playing the world's tiniest violin for these guys, I'm sure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora_(software)#Trademark_dis...

alxpon Three Rules to Actionable Metrics

> "actionable"

Metrics you can get sued over?

alxpon Is There Anything Good About Men?

This speech was posted to MetaFilter a few years ago and generated a much deeper discussoin than it seems to here. http://www.metafilter.com/64034/The-Waw-effect Definitely worth reading some less glowing discussion about the talk.

alxpon The dirty little secret about Google Android

Recent history says that's unlikey

alxpon The dirty little secret about Google Android

Rooting most Android phones and jailbreaking an iPhone are about the same level of technical difficulty as far as a consumer is concerned.