Hacker News Reader

barumrhoon Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

  If the mechanical model also does this, it it conscious too?

So, how would you answer your question?

barumrhoon Removing Bad Actors on Facebook

Even if Facebook decided not to police, they cannot be neutral. They have to decide what to show to users. Now, they use algorithms to do this, but that doesn't relieve them of their responsibility.

barumrhoon Designing Websites for iPhone X

Keep in mind that this is mostly a problem in landscape mode and roughly 90% of usage is in portrait mode.

barumrhoon Video is Coming to Reddit

Video playback experience sucks right now for their mobile apps. I think they can aim for a much better viewing and uploading experience.

barumrhoon AirPods are now available

I had the same problem with their earphones, but some reviewers mentioned that AirPods fit much better.

barumrhoon Safari Technology Preview supports 100% of the ES2015/16/17 features

(Not sure how to format this)

  - Battery life
  - Bookmark syncing and continuity (opening tabs from any of your other devices)
  - Content blocker API (so that ad blocker extension doesn't see all of the content)
  - Not having browsing history sent to Google

I use Chrome for Flash content and Facebook.

barumrhoon NextEV's NIO EP9 is a four-wheel-drive electric hypercar

The website doesn't really give a context, but I found this article to be helpful: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/nextev-hypercar-nio-ep9

barumrhoon Microsoft to Tie Executive Bonuses to Company Diversity Goals

There is currently a bias of preferring men over women. I think a policy like this can help you be more conscious about the candidates' actual qualification.

Over-representation of a minority race isn't an issue. The goal isn't to have a workforce that matches racial distribution of the whole country; it is to have more diversity.

barumrhoon Why we are suing Apple for better HTML5 support in iOS

Looking through the list of features that iOS Safari doesn't support, I am happy that Apple doesn't blindly implement these features. I think a lot of these present tricky user experience issues (fullscreen support, notifications, background, file system api) and can be abused by websites. (I am also noticing a lot of these are still proposals and experimental features.)

barumrhoon Why we are suing Apple for better HTML5 support in iOS

WKWebView is supposed to fix this issue.

https://developer.apple.com/reference/webkit/wkwebview

barumrhoon Master Plan, Part Deux

If you assume that trucks can be fully autonomous, then cost efficiency may be achieved by more trucks carrying less weight since driver wage is no longer a part of the equation.

barumrhoon Spotify raises $1B in debt with devilish terms to fight Apple Music

Sounds like that doesn't seem likely. They are just going to wait for IPO to happen so that the debt converts, effectively deferring valuation to the market.

barumrhoon Flexible Feature Control at Instagram

Ah, I was hoping it was about their iOS or Android app.

barumrhoon Crashlytics now serves over 1M apps

There are probably many unpublished (prototype, development version) apps.

barumrhoon The new MacBook

I'm curious if this machine will be able to drive a 5k monitor when Apple makes one. The tech spec says the USB-C port will support DisplayPort 1.2 (not 1.3), so it doesn't seem promising :(

barumrhoon Ask HN: Is Swift ready for production yet?

Yes, it's production ready, but the quirks in tools are significant hindrance to productivity. I would estimate 1.2 ~ 1.5x longer to get it written in Swift.

barumrhoon How HoursTracker earns five figures a month on the App Store

The revenue from my apps have grown to be significant. Not enough for me to work on it full-time though.

Off the top of my head, I think 95% of my revenue is from ads. I have plans to work on improving IAP conversion since I don't like the fact that I show ads. This article got me thinking about what I can offer more than just "remove ads".

barumrhoon How HoursTracker earns five figures a month on the App Store

I just wanted to share my experience that this isn't always the case. I launched a transit app in Toronto* about 3 years ago. (There were already plenty of them back then.) Over the years, daily downloads steadily grew without me doing any marketing. These days I get a few hundred downloads per day which, to me, is mind-boggling. I realize this is a bit of a special case since people now look for transit apps when they get a new phone.

* https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/ttc-watch-for-toronto/id5052...

barumrhoon Type hinting for Python

I'm curious how this is valid Python:

  def fib(n: int) -> Iterator[int]:


  - Colon inside argument list
  - Arrow and type

What are they used for normally?

barumrhoon Show HN: Artful for Mac

I wanted something like this. It would be great if it could work as a screen saver too. I rarely see my desktop.

barumrhoon Facebook Rooms

It's possibly only available in the US. It's not available in Canadian App Store :(

barumrhoon iMac with Retina 5K display

They have to update their notebooks with Thunderbolt 3 before they can release 5K Thunderbolt Display. Thunderbolt 2 doesn't have enough bandwidth to push the pixels.

barumrhoon The Curious Case of iPhone 6+ 1080p Display

This is only true with regards to screen resolutions. From my experience, there are more issues caused by different hardware (making camera work with all devices require a lot of testing), and custom keyboards also cause problems. (Custom keyboards will affect iOS 8 as well, but we will see if it will cause problems. This depends a lot on API design.)

barumrhoon Show HN: Realm (YC S11), a mobile database

The main benefit of using CoreData is seamless faulting behavior. It's not obvious from the example or the site that Realm supports something comparable. How does Realm deal with a lot of objects?

barumrhoon Android's Overblown Fragmentation Problem Revisited

Nearly everything but the kernel is auto-updated to the latest version on all Android devices, even if they're several OS versions behind.

This benefits users, but not developers. Developers still need to code and test against old API levels.

barumrhoon Apparently It’s OK For iOS Apps To Ask For Your Apple ID And Password

OAuth only makes sense if they provide an API for iCloud calendar, which isn't the case as far as I know.

barumrhoon ObjClean

I remember trying out AppCode and trying to get the syntax configuration to be exactly how I like, but it wasn't possible. (It wasn't something major, but it was still annoying.) I do agree that AppCode (and IntelliJ) is a nice IDE, but I still stick with Xcode for iOS.

barumrhoon Robinhood: $0 commission stock brokerage

Would this be restricted to American investors only?

barumrhoon Why I’m not paying the Troll Toll

I am currently in the same situation. (I posted here on HN a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5272575)

The author was lucky enough to find a lawyer that will defend him pro bono, but in my case (and I assume many other cases that we don't hear about), the cost of defending is more expensive than settling. The problem is that it is really cheap for patent trolls to file a lawsuit, since they basically copy and paste the claim, which is most likely to be too poorly written to stand a chance in court. I wish the court had a strict approval process.

barumrhoon Repository Next

I agree. I was talking about 'management interface' that shardling suggested. So, this would only kick in if you are a contributor of that project.