Hacker News Reader

andoson Coke Engineers Its Orange Juice—With an Algorithm

    > Americans drink a ton of it. It is one 
    > of the very few foods in the US which 
    > Europe simply cannot approach.

Just like coffee, I presume.

andoson Preventing users from pouring water into coffee machine beans compartment

Portuguese, "puxe": http://translate.google.com/#pt/en/puxe

X sounds like SH.

andoson The Magazine

That’s accurate. Articles are peppered with first person pronouns. Minimalist on presentation AND content, sadly.

andoson Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal

Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses [1][2] is long-overdue. “There is a current, established format for international addresses” is probably one of them.

[1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

[2] http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programm...

andoson A bold but simple login system

Tada!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_token

Guess what? Even worse usability.

andoson A 12pt Font Should Be The Same Size Everywhere

A millimeter (which I rather often call “milímetro” or “millimètre”) is also too late. By the way, the SI uses powers of ten.

andoson A 12pt Font Should Be The Same Size Everywhere

An inch is too big. A centimeter is too late.

andoson Med Student Rescues Body Part From Airport Security

I was reading this like any other ordinary story. Then I got to this part:

    Amazingly, he doesn't do transplants anymore. 
    Tracheas, he has decided, can be regenerated 
    from scratch, using stem cells.

It brought tears to my eyes. No amount of bad news can weaken the beauty contained in that little paragraph. This made my day, really.

andoson Android: Emerging UI Pattern - Side Navigation

Pro: tab bars are modeless. Con: less content, more chrome.

andoson Google will start warning Chinese users about problematic search terms

The same blog post in Chinese is provided as a 10 MB PDF [1]. My PDF reader simply gives up while loading it and prints insane amounts of error messages. I'm guessing they converted all the text to curves to avoid being censored?

[1] http://services.google.com/fh/files/blogs/google_chinasearch...

andoson Plagiarism

Certainly. In my opinion an explicit quote of part of the original article would have been better than paraphrasing. Quoting reinforces the value of the source (“we couldn't write it any better”), paraphrasing does the opposite.

andoson Plagiarism

Hence the "drama".

andoson Plagiarism

Real life needs some serious mutexing.

andoson Plagiarism

A case of poor timing, I think. TNW posts a non-attributed version of the article [1]. Author complains on twitter. Meanwhile, TNW notices the error and ninja-edits the post with proper attribution [2]. You check the updated post. Drama ensues on twitter.

Edit. Oi, I'm not saying TNW is in the right, people. Just pointing out something that their CEO seems to have missed.

[1]. http://cl.ly/0q1C3n1j323R3C131X0d/o [2]. http://cl.ly/1a0c2y2p291H1u2T2s3S/o

andoson Easel.ly - A nice HTML 5 infographics editor

I really need something like this. However, I watched the video and came back unconvinced. You don't show me how to manipulate data. How do I get it into the canvas? Can I get it from APIs? from Google Docs? Can I bind data to attributes of the objects I drag and drop into the canvas? Can I filter and aggregate my data or must I preprocess it offline? We really need a web app that brings infovis to the masses — like a Garageband-ified Tableau. There's nothing like that yet. But if you are just a themed clipart canvas, you'll find a formidable competitor in PowerPoint.

andoson Stop Calling People Morons.

The comparison to a football coach is very accurate, but I think it's unfair to put Linus Torvalds and Ulrich Drepper in the same bucket.

While Drepper is pure asshole, Linus just uses insults in the same situations the rest of us would use bold text. I wouldn't like to be on the receiving end of one such email, of course, but most of his tirades are actually very constructive.

andoson Linus Torvalds won't do github pull requests

So, you are saying that if you were the maintainer of a project which required a feature such that the Github implementation was inadequate but the official git implementation was OK, you'd use the Github implementation anyway?

andoson Richard Stallman Collapses At Barcelona Conference

My Spanish is rusty, but the article says that:

- Stallman felt ill halfway through a lecture he was offering in Barcelona, probably due to a blood pressure spike;

- he asked the staff for medical assistance;

- meanwhile, he continued the lecture with some difficulty, but in a good mood;

- the lecture was suspended when the ambulance arrived, and was eventually cancelled;

- after being attended by the medical staff, he was well enough to walk out of the building;

- no further details on his health.

andoson "Adobe has released Adobe Photoshop CS6, which addresses these vulnerabilities"

The OP are not comparing cars to software. They are comparing the natures of the commercial relationship between the owner and the car manufacturer and between the user and Adobe. Expecting free "recalls" from Adobe is not unreasonable.

andoson Show HN: my Mac app just got fireballed

Just bought it! Skipped the trial because the video demo was enough. You should really be proud. Works like a charm, somehow feels like a UNIX tool. Hope you get rich in exponentially faster increments of five bucks.

andoson Brazil's copyright societies indicted for fraud

This is not about copyright, but author rights.

andoson LightTable detailed critique: Concept vs Reality

I would translate it exactly like that, though it's actually not ad hominem but ad humanitatem, really. We are all biased creatures, as others have pointed out. I think the critique is biased, I think it is biased because the author put a lot of effort in his (otherwise awesome) Java product, and therefore I quoted Upton Sinclair.

For instance, he argues that it would take a lot of working around to provide instant feedback for code with side-effects, but isn't that obvious? The LightTable video doesn't claim it magically mocks every external component or does some other fancy stuff. That doesn't make the feature less useful, especially in a language like Clojure, which was used for the demo. For me, that part reads much like "since it ws so hard to create Chronon, one cannot pretend the LightTable features are so easy to implement. Let me prove that by putting LightTable in the context of my product."

There was — deliberately, yes — a bit of snide and a lot of cynicism in my post, but I hope to have made it clear that it was not without a reason (for the cynicism, at least).

andoson LightTable detailed critique: Concept vs Reality

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

That's the blog of a company that makes a tool that integrates with Eclipse.

andoson Concurrency is not Parallelism (it's better) - A talk by Rob Pike

Software that predates the iPad, it seems.

andoson Google told to halt auto-complete

You missed the last space after her name.

andoson Google told to halt auto-complete

Do you know what kind of auto-completing Google should really halt? Spoilers. Do not type Game of Thrones character names on Google.

EDIT. I'm really, really sorry. I didn't mean to spoil by implying that there are spoilers. I removed the character name.

andoson Codename: Obtvse

How is Obtvse, in any way, an improvement upon or alteration of Svbtle?

As far as I can tell, it's a 1:1 clone, but "open".

andoson Step by Step UI Design

3. That's actually not a close icon, but an "expand" icon. You can just click anywhere to close the lightbox

That's also a usability issue with the lightbox UI. I couldn't figure why the "close" button was not working, either.

andoson Mozilla is looking for help for its browser-agnostic Web documentation

Indeed. Here's some statistically ignorant experiment I just did. Loading the Function [1] document (not the whole page, just the document) takes around 1.6 s here:

  Connecting:  0.837 s
         SSL:  0.258 s
     Sending:  0     s
     Waiting:  0.767 s
   Receiving:  0.001 s

   Xfer Size: 14.26  KB (gzip)
      onload:  3.37  s  (primed cache)
              12.78  s  (empty cache)

The SSL overhead is really a big deal, but waiting 0.8 s for what is basically static content just makes no sense. Meanwhile, in w3schools world, it takes around 0.2 s to get the “same” content [2]:

   Blocking:  0     s
    Sending:  0     s
    Waiting:  0.204 s
  Receiving:  0.037 s

  Xfer Size: 23.94  KB (plain)
     onload:  1.09  s  (primed cache)
              1.82  s  (empty cache)

I don't know if I can compare the networking numbers here, but I definitely can compare the onload result — MDC is annoyingly slow. Their content is excellent, they just need to improve the website performance to become the top Google result.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global...

[2] http://www.w3schools.com/js/js_functions.asp

andoson Introducing Instapaper 4.1 for iPhone, iPad

Same on the iPad 2.