Hacker News Reader

aspidistraon Comcast turns 50,000 paying customer homes into public hotspots

As well as those listed by other commenters, there are other FON collaborations listed here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTFON#Collaborations

Belgium, Germany, Greece, Jersey...

aspidistraon Ask HN: How exactly does Hacker News 'points' work?

People think it is a magical black box because the code in the parent comment, and in the thread you linked, is three and a half years old, and HN does not run these days on exactly the same code that was open-sourced in news.arc.

aspidistraon A Platform and Blogging Tool, Medium Charms Writers

It's one thing to charm writers. But what about charming readers, too?

As a reader I am not charmed.

I find it all too similar and slick. It is "designed" to within an inch of its life. The text and pictures don't seemed anchored to anything and just seem to float there on the page. This deprives them of any weight. It makes everything feel pompous or grandiose.

I agree with a lot of what is said here:

http://www.theguardian.com/news/oliver-burkeman-s-blog/2014/...

I also find the "Reading time" a little infantilising.

aspidistraon Circle Emerges From Stealth To Bring Bitcoin To The Masses

I'm not exactly sure what you are asking.

But almost all of the things on that page -- standing orders, direct debits, day to day banking, maintenance, transactions -- are free of charge at most UK personal current accounts.

The only thing I noticed that would have a charge is sending money outside the UK, even to EU countries.

aspidistraon Circle Emerges From Stealth To Bring Bitcoin To The Masses

You might get a massive increase in personal freedom and privacy from using bitcoin. But there is a difference between Pure Bitcoin, so-to-speak -- everyone is their own bank -- and a bitcoin-based service.

On Circle's website, it states: "Keeping your money safe is our top priority." That suggests Circle, too, is in actual control of your money -- like the retail bank service they aim to improve.

So how do you know the things you write -- recording transactions, storing your data, restricting access, hacker susceptibility -- won't apply here?

My point is that faced between two choices where a consumer gives someone else control of their money, the traditional system in many places is so far ahead in terms of reach, convenience and regulation compliance that a startup has a lot of work to do.

aspidistraon Circle Emerges From Stealth To Bring Bitcoin To The Masses

Every time I read an headline about "bringing bitcoin to the masses" I'm reminded of the saying that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

> "We don’t think consumers should be charged for using their own money."

Where I live (UK), I can't think of anything bitcoin services like Circle offer that is definitively better than my existing bank setup.

I'm not charged for using my own money. I don't pay a monthly fee for my bank account. I don't pay anything to send money to other people in the UK, which covers 98% of all the people I send money to. If I do send money to people in the UK, it's usually virtually instant, because of Faster Payments. I can withdraw money from nearly all ATMs in the UK free of charge -- the only exception are rare independent ones in places like nightclubs and out-of-the-way convenience stores, and I honestly can't ever remember using one. I can check my bank balance on my phone -- by app or by SMS. In lots of outlets I can pay for small value transactions, anything up to £20, just by waving my bank card.

I understand the banking system in the USA is ... different. (Some would say behind the times.) But in the UK at least, promoting a bitcoin-based service based around the concept of better retail banking is a hard sell.

aspidistraon Introducing Moto E and Moto G with 4G LTE: Smart phones priced for all

The Motorola site has Phones4U in the Retailers drop down.

Phones4U have it listed at £89.95 SIM-free.

http://www.phones4u.co.uk/Black/p/MOTEBLCK?packageType=FTC&t...

(scroll down to "Other ways to buy")

aspidistraon London black taxis plan congestion chaos to block Uber

Two other Black Cab app startups:

Get Taxi http://gettaxi.co.uk/

Hailo https://www.hailocab.com/london

I believe these have faced some resistance in some cities even with a strategy of working with licensed taxi operators.

aspidistraon London black taxis plan congestion chaos to block Uber

Neither the Channel Islands nor the Isle of Man are in the UK.

aspidistraon The Return of Upcoming.org by Andy Baio

You didn't mention that you thought the app was simple. You said you thought running crowdfunding for it was dishonest and immoral.

In any case... Parsing 35TB of HTML, JavaScript and images, and then releasing that as structured data, on top of rebuilding a sustainable web service? I don't think it is simple at all. It's not exactly a hackathon project.

aspidistraon The Return of Upcoming.org by Andy Baio

There's a section on the page called "Why Kickstarter?"

I don't think there's anything dishonest and immoral about the reasons given there.

aspidistraon Chicago’s Last Tannery

The HN guidelines specifically ask submitters to take the title out:

If the original title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link anyway.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

aspidistraon Chinese Number Websites

> -b /- root(b^2-4ac to the tune of Pop Goes the Weasel

Woah. In the UK the most we got was SOHCAHTOA: "Smiles of happiness come after having tankards of ale", or "Some old hag cracked all her teeth on apples".

aspidistraon Knol – Let's Rethink the Way We Handle Knowledge Bases

IANAL, but I was also able to find Knol from Google on the UK IPO search:

http://www.ipo.gov.uk/tmcase/Results/4/EU006911796

and the OHIM website, which as I understand it covers Europe-wide trademarks:

https://oami.europa.eu/eSearch/#details/trademarks/006911796

But like I said, I am not a lawyer, do your own research, consult an expert etc etc...

aspidistraon Knol – Let's Rethink the Way We Handle Knowledge Bases

"We are in no way affiliated to the discontinued Google Knol."

Google trademarked Knol back in the day (2007). A USPTO search shows it is still live:

http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4809:9wz...

Electronic publishing services, namely, publication of text and graphic works of others in the field of general encyclopedic knowledge; providing education, entertainment and information services, namely, providing information via the Internet in the field of general encyclopedic knowledge.

aspidistraon The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved (1970)

Just checking department: do you have permission from the copyright holder(s) to publish this?

aspidistraon 37 percent of adults cannot swim the length of a 25-yard pool

With the austerity measures in place in the UK in recent years there have been a few cases of despair at councils closing their swimming pools and leisure centres to try to cut costs. This is often despite fewer and fewer people attending them over the years.

Public swimming pools are a rich seam for nostalgia in Britain. Many public swimming pools were originally built in Victorian times and so fall into the "Always There" backdrop of a city, things you never really enthuse about but would miss if they were gone.

http://www.victoriansociety.org.uk/news/category/swimming-po...

Lidos, public outdoor pools, make up the other half of Swimming Pool Nostalgia. Most were built in the 1930s. They had already fallen out of fashion, really, when I was a kid -- since holidays abroad had become cheap -- but there was one quite near us, about 30 mins drive away, and going there was a bit of a treat.

There have been a few campaigns in recent years -- some successful -- to restore lidos or at least preserve them.

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

aspidistraon 37 percent of adults cannot swim the length of a 25-yard pool

The class was usually split up in to groups of about 10, depending on age / proficiency. There'd be a teacher leading each group.

There would also be the lifeguards from the pool. If I remember rightly, this was at least two, if not more -- there always seemed to be one sitting up in the high chair, and there always seemed to be one patrolling the pool edge.

It was a 25m pool, and while the school was there it was closed to the wider public.

aspidistraon 37 percent of adults cannot swim the length of a 25-yard pool

>> Why?

I suppose there's the argument that most of the earth's surface is covered in water; it would be useful to not be afraid of it, to know how to move in it, and to be confident doing so.

But then, I grew up on an island where you're never more than 75 miles from the sea; undoubtedly that's affected my worldview.

aspidistraon 37 percent of adults cannot swim the length of a 25-yard pool

> In the UK, learning to swim is part of the national curriculum, unlike the US.

More details on exactly what kids in the UK are taught:

Swimming and water safety: All schools must provide swimming instruction either in key stage 1 or key stage 2.

In particular, pupils should be taught to:

- swim competently, confidently and proficiently over a distance of at least 25 metres - use a range of strokes effectively [for example, front crawl, backstroke and breaststroke] - perform safe self-rescue in different water-based situations

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curricul...

Key Stage 1 = Years 1 and 2, so aged 5 to 7 years. Key Stage 2 = Years 3 to 6, so ages 7 to 11.

From my own experience 25 years ago that last bit, about safe self-rescue, involved:

* how to enter water safely if you need to (ie. jumping or lowering yourself in, when not to dive etc) * making floats out of clothing (ie. your old pyjama bottoms) * swimming underwater, including through hoops weighed down on the pool floor with bricks (presumably to mimic navigating tight flooded spaces) * treading water (for AGES) * mushroom floating (not sure if there's a technical term for this?) * how to recover somebody from the water

We went once a week to the council pool on the other side of town and pretty much everyone, all 30 of us, had learned all that by the time we finished and left for high school aged 11.

aspidistraon The Illusion of Life: Disney's principles of animation

For great examples of these principles in videogames, see World of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck (1992)

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

and Disney's Aladdin (1993)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney%27s_Aladdin_(video_game)

aspidistraon Help EFF test Privacy Badger, our new browser extension for privacy

As I understand it, yes, you would still have final control.

When you click on the plugin icon in the browser toolbar, a popup box displays all the trackers Privacy Badger has found. There is a slider next to each tracker, with three states, green, yellow and red. Red means blocked.

As Privacy Badger works, it moves the slider for a tracker when it notices it following you across domains. But you can still manually drag the slider across to Red if you want.

aspidistraon Appsdeck, EU-based PaaS, is now in open beta

Related Github profile lists location as "La Plage Digitale, Strasbourg". Googled that + Appsdeck, discovered La Plage Digitale is a coworking space. Found a couple of articles tagged Appsdeck, which led me to Yann Klis:

https://twitter.com/yannski

It shouldn't be that hard. An imprint / contact details page is a minimum requirement for anyone offering a service such as this for money.

aspidistraon Egyptians may have moved massive pyramid stones on wet sand

Unless Bertolt Brecht is writing it.

aspidistraon Help EFF test Privacy Badger, our new browser extension for privacy

To be fair to EFF, it is explicit about what it considers that strong commitment to be: publishing this DNT policy notice on the domain:

https://www.eff.org/dnt-policy

Quote:

What does the dnt-policy.txt promise mean?

Posting the dnt-policy.txt file makes a promise to the users who interact with their domain. We [EFF] believe it would be a false and misleading trade practice to post the policy without the intent to comply in good faith. However, EFF is not in a position to enforce this promise or monitor compliance.

aspidistraon Help EFF test Privacy Badger, our new browser extension for privacy

> People keep confusing the adserving/retargeting sector with the identity-sector (Google, Facebook).

Can you blame them when the latter keep buying the former? Google bought Doubleclick. Twitter bought MoPub. Facebook bought Atlas. And so on...

aspidistraon Help EFF test Privacy Badger, our new browser extension for privacy

Maybe it's a bug. FTA:

This is an alpha release; we've been using it internally and don't think it's too buggy. But we're looking for intrepid users to try it out and let us know before we encourage millions of people to install it. If you find bugs, you can file them on github against either the Firefox or Chrome repos as appropriate.

https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerfirefox/issues

https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerchrome/issues

aspidistraon Twitter is not dying. It’s on the cusp of getting much bigger

> Don’t be surprised to see Twitter become more YouTube-like, turning its home page into a real-time news platform accessible to anyone, whether they’re logged in or not.

I'm sure the home page (i.e. twitter.com) was like this at one point. There was a search box, a list of top tweets, some featured accounts, and a (scrolling?) list of top and trending hashtags for the region you were viewing the page from.

edit - Wayback Machine capture of what I mean, from Nov 2010:

https://web.archive.org/web/20101102183624/http://twitter.co...

aspidistraon Future Interfaces

See also: Andy Baio's archive of computer interfaces in movies:

http://screen.waxy.org/screenshots/