Hacker News Reader

Thanks for finding this!

Growing up I read Dilbert in the paper every morning. At some point I got one of the compilation books and for some reason in an epilogue Adams included his alternate theory of gravity which was essentially that gravity as force didn't exist and things pressed down on each other because everything was expanding at the same rate. He said he had yet to find anyone who could refute this.

Even at 12 I could tell this guy was an annoying idiot. Loved the comic though.

appon Omnimax

"These people wanna see a lobstah!"

appon Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

Based on your replies I doubt there’s anything that would actually convince you, but as it happens the data is pretty public and there are plenty of charts charts:

https://bsky.app/profile/jaz.bsky.social/post/3lamm7liwrc2w https://bsky.app/profile/jglypt.net/post/3lahqd45qqw2y https://bsky.app/profile/alice.mosphere.at/post/3lac4bbxhty2...

appon Social media platform now bans users for what they say off-platform

Oy. How does a site like this even make it to the front page? America's Frontline Doctors is a right-wing cutout full of the usual conspiracy theorists and ghouls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America%27s_Frontline_Doctors

This domain is as fake news as they come.

appon Inflation rises to 6.8% year over year

Untrue, I just looked at my phone and I have an NYT alert from 3 hours ago: "Inflation hit the highest rate in a generation last month. Consumer prices rose by nearly 7%..."

It's also right on the front page of NYT.com

appon Boeing says certain 787 parts improperly manufactured

Came here to say this. Very informative, if somewhat laudatory, videos.

appon FTC and several states sue Frontier Communications regarding internet speeds

I got Frontier after moving into a house with no internet in upstate New York ("Upstate" being 100 Mi north of NYC). I ordered the 20Mbit plan and after missing and having to call to reschedule 3 installs (w/ 12 hour windows), the first words out of the installers mouth was "you got scammed". Indeed our signal was so weak we were only able to sustain about 0.5kbps. They wanted $75/mo for this and made it as hard as possible to cancel.

The basic history of Frontier in my area is that they bought up all of Verizon's old copper lines and have done exactly nothing to improve the capability. They don't even know what the capabilities ARE. Areas are either oversubscribed or so far from nodes that the signal is worthless. They're trying to squeeze every last cent out of rural houses with no other options and letting the underlying infrastructure slowly fail.

I ended up using a pretty performant (~50Mbit) LTE connection, hacked AT&T hotspot and yagi antenna for 2 years. Finally, as part of a rural broadband grant program New York State got Altice to come in-- probably in exchange for a monopoly in a more attractive part of the state. Now I have 300Mbit cable for $100/mo. Altice (aka Optimum) is also a terrible company, but Frontier still sends me postcards claiming to be "the best internet in <my town>".

These guys are selling a product that doesn't work. They deserve to be sued and I'm disappointed that New York State isn't involved.

appon Longest known exposure photograph ever captured using a beer can

I visited this town! SCAD has done a great job and the students were lovely. What a magical place to study abroad.

appon F-35's radar invisibility cloak in question

I think you are thinking of these recent photos of an F-22: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29218/these-images-of-...

However you're no doubt correct that radar absorbant materials is high maintenance on any aircraft.

appon Apple introduces 8-core MacBook Pro

Just replaced the battery and threw new thermal paste on my Mid-2014 15" for $300. Discrete graphics, no TouchBar and a keyboard with travel. I hope this thing runs for another 5 years.

appon Big Win for User-Generated Content Hosts in Vimeo Case

Between this and net-neutrality, it's a big week for the internet.

appon The Wreck of Amtrak 188

I was on a Northeast Corridor trip once when the train was struck from the side by a rock. It sounded like a gunshot went off inside the car-- everyone jumped and there were more than a few shouts. I can imagine being hit head-on by a rock at night would be enough to distract an engineer for a few critical minutes. What a shame.

appon Vimeo's Net Neutrality Letter to the FCC [pdf]

There's an associated blog post too: https://vimeo.com/blog/post:640

appon Turboencabulator

There's several more here: http://turboencabulator.tumblr.com/

appon Ask HN: Who Is Hiring? (May 2012)

New York, NY / San Francisco, CA (mobile devs only)

VIMEO -- vimeo.com/jobs

Looking for:

PHP App Engineers

Backend Engineers (http://bit.ly/JLMR3C)

Designers (http://bit.ly/InBF0T)

QA Engineers (http://bit.ly/KsY3BA)

Mobile Engineers (to be posted soon)

Mobile Designers (to be posted soon)

Stuff we use: PHP, Python, MySQL, Mongo, Redis, AWS, Solr, Hadoop, nginx, node. And pretty much any mobile platform.

appon The Fixie Bike Index

Single-speed are also lighter if you have a walk up apartment.

appon Ted Dziuba's take on Hubot

If you're looking for a less functional Hubot that's been around for years, why not use Last.fm's irccat? http://www.metabrew.com/article/how-we-use-irc-at-lastfm

It already does the whole "kick of a script with these params from irc" thing and can easily be piped to from any langage that can open a port.

appon Steve Jobs’s Worst Design Decisions?

1) G4 Cube.

2) Using a MO drive on the first NeXT box.

appon PHP Short Syntax for Arrays: developers say no.

I think "search engines" might be a little misleading, it's not readily grepable locally either.

appon Show HN: Watchlater it's Instapaper for Videos

Strange that you feature a Vimeo video in your description, which has it's own "Watch Later" feature.

appon AWS Downtime Counter

Lumping S3 into EC2 isn't misleading?

appon AWS Downtime Counter

Hold on a second, only EBS-backed instances and RDS are having trouble, yes? Not EC2 in general and not other services. To say "amazon aws services" is misleading.

appon Socialcam 2.0 lands on the iPhone

I don't think there is a 2.0 release, the update today in the app store was to 1.1.

appon Apple's Safari Browser Gives Search Marketers Headaches

This caused a bunch of headaches at Vimeo while working on our iframe embed code a couple months back. If I remember correctly Safari (and now I believe Chrome 10) will not send cookies in iframe POSTs unless a user specifically navigates in that iframe. So for example clicking the "like" button in a Vimeo video wouldn't work right away. There is a workaround: you programmatically fake a POST right away, and the second POST works because the user has interacted with it.

This might be a nice "headache" for marketers, but there are legit uses. As a developer I'd prefer if browsers were consistent in their default handling of cookies.

appon Should Tumblr care? David Karp tells users who complain to "go away"

http://www.davidslog.com/2941069729/200m-page-views-per-week

Looks like the downtime isn't slowing them down much.

appon GET vs POST in terms of security

There are two additional security features POST has that GET does not:

1- POSTs cannot be forwarded

2- some browsers (webkit only I believe) require a client to interact with a domain before they can POST to it-- this means iframes cannot POST.

When it comes to XSRF, they are equally (in)secure.

appon Google, H.264 and Video on the Web

Great article. I drew that very chart this morning trying to sort out the implications of this change.

> "As a side note, it would be great if MPEG LA would simply open up the licensing terms for H.264 and make it royalty-free forever for 1: browsers to implement it, and 2: people on the Internet to produce & sell video with it."

How hard would this be to do? Is that all that prevents FF/Opera/Chrome from supporting h.264?

appon Simple Questions for Google Regarding Chrome’s Dropping of H.264

Are there any you can buy today? I honestly don't know of any.

EDIT: Thanks, I guess the answer is no...

appon Simple Questions for Google Regarding Chrome’s Dropping of H.264

1. On2 never went to market with VP8 before the sale to Google. To say that they weren't sued for something they didn't release doesn't prove anything, especially since VP8 was marketed as a evolution of VP6.

2. See #1, they licensed VP6 not VP8/WebM.

3. No doubt!

4. Google does not indemnify users of WebM (http://www.webmproject.org/license/software/). If someone were to sue you for WebM, it's not an attack on Google and they have no reason to pick up your legal bill. Sure, it's not unreasonable to assume that if many large companies adopt a technology it's safe to use, but it doesn't protect you from being attacked individually.

Armchair legal hand waving goes both ways.