Hacker News Reader

bhseoon Lessons of life from an uneducated man

I enjoyed this article. The part about helping other people reminded me of Randy Pausch's Last Lecture and what he said about enabling the dreams of others: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

bhseoon MagicJack's Next Act: Disappearing Cell Phone Fees

Does it make a call to every cellphone in range?

That would be a cool way to spam.

bhseoon The Physical Impossibility of The Future by Someone Trapped In Chicago

First of all, what does "physical impossibility of the future" mean? I find this an absurd title, not that I expect anything better from TC.

My favourite quote (about wifi):

  Sure, it’s destroyed lunch conversation and pub trivia but, 
  in common with anyone who hit their 20s or 30s in the 2000s,
  I’d happily swap either of those for the ability to book a 
  flight from the back of a cab, or to consult Wikipedia from 
  the toilet.

I'm gonna go back to ignoring links to TC, however an option to filter certain sites from HN would be most welcome.

bhseoon 4.3.2.1 -- Another google DNS ip

Way too many geeks use that for 4 digit codes.

bhseoon Poll: Do you have an OpenID?

You last point is exactly why I avoid OpenID authentication.

bhseoon Ask HN: Is it worth buying misspellings around your domain name?

Buying typo domains is good if:

1. You have a lot of money.

2. You might be a phishing target.

3. There's an affiliate program on the non-typo domain.

It's a good idea to try to buy the most popular typos, you can get an idea if you check the search query frequency for each typo (try the Adwords Keywords tool) or you can "kite" a bunch of typo domains and delete non-performing ones before you have to pay for them.

bhseoon Ask HN: Is it worth buying misspellings around your domain name?

Smart guys make typos too.

bhseoon How (and why) Sillicon Alley Insider uses MongoDB

"But overall, MongoDB is probably well-suited for a lot of web applications -- maybe as many as 50%."

Found this at the end of the article, made me chuckle.

bhseoon The Foamy Rules for Rabid Tools

My favourite part of the article:

"Dreamweaver was attempting to be helpful, but the moment it reformatted my code, I threw a fit. YOU TOUCHED MY CODE."

bhseoon Ask HN: How can we make better, more readable privacy policies?

You mean http://lexpubli.ca/

bhseoon Ask HN: How can we make better, more readable privacy policies?

One thing that bugs me in privacy policies is the "we may change this policy at any time and without warning" clause.

RSS could be one way to make sure users can receive warnings and notification of changes. However, subscribing to RSS feeds for each site would be too tedious.

A browser plugin (or rather built-in feature) that popups a warning in an overlay bar at the top of the window (like the password remember feature in Firefox), would be better. It could receive data from a centralized service, privacy policy RSS feeds, or just by screen-scraping the policy at a specified interval and checking for changes.

bhseoon Ask HN: How can we make better, more readable privacy policies?

At their current state, privacy policies are indeed not useful.

But maybe we can change that.

bhseoon Ask HN: How can we make better, more readable privacy policies?

A related link from Aza's post's comments:

http://www.privacychoice.org/

Clickable links from my comment:

http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/making-privacy-policies-not-...

http://aza.etherpad.com/privacy

Related projects:

http://www.w3.org/P3P/

http://commondataproject.org/

http://www.dmaresponsibility.org/PPG/

http://www.oecd.org/document/39/0,2340,en_2649_34255_2886327...

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/easy-privacy-policy/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/terms-of-use-2/

http://www.professionalprivacypolicy.com/ (free trial)

http://www.freeprivacypolicy.com/privacy-standard.php (free trial)

bhseoon Dustin Curtis's new web app

bhseoon Ask HN: Are single-letter domain names valuable?

ICANN fortunately does not control all of the top-level domains.

bhseoon Living in an RV as an Internet Nomad- 3G, solar, cost savings, and flexibility.

His list of other technomads is also noteworthy:

http://microship.com/technomads/index.html

bhseoon Lithium - another (new) PHP framework

No thanks.

bhseoon Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?

A related point: whoever first owns the data from all link aggregators (digg, reddit, mixx, etc) and all URL shorteners (bit.ly, tinyurl, ad nauseum), and weighs those results more heavily is going to have an awesome search engine... albeit better for entertainment than productivity.

Except I'd never find the obscure stuff that Google helps me find every day. I don't think a lot of links to manuals,mailing lists, etc show up on any of the sources you mention.

bhseoon Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?

Agreed.

Until they implement it, you can use the CustomizeGoogle add-on for Firefox that lets you filter results out on your side.

bhseoon Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?

SEO: When you cut through all the BS, the entire goal here is to make a less good match come first.

That is not the entire purpose of SEO. There's good sites out there that don't provide their content in a way that can be indexed by spiders. SEO often solves that. There certainly are plenty of people making bad websites and trying to make them rank, it's Google's job to weed out the useless information.

People still collect links (shameless self promotion: http://internetmindmap.com ), they still have huge blogrolls, there are human powered search engines, a vast amount of directories for every imaginable niche...

Google doesn't need the perfect page of 100 links and I doubt it ever did.

Your mashed potatos example does not make sense. Google gave you generic info for your generic search query. How is that bad?

Now the fact that certain sites dominate a very wide range of search queries, is an interesting point. Personally, I would just add a sidebar or something similar, to be occupied by the "staple" sites, such as wikipedia, about.com etc.

bhseoon Dedicated to software that sucks less

I think we should stop measuring in lines of code. You can have less lines with more code. You can have a lot of lines with less code.

The amount of code matters.

Less code is usually better.

bhseoon Paper: The Grand Unified Theory of Superman's Powers [pdf]

Any amusing situations you'd like to share?

bhseoon Table Oriented Programming

Try the Scrapbook add-on for Firefox. It's quite handy.

bhseoon Academic Kakistocracy

On a sidenote,"kakistos" means "the worst". hence kakistocracy.

bhseoon Academic Kakistocracy

Reminded me of this saying:

"Someone that pretends he is an idiot, is not actually an idiot."

bhseoon Why there aren't more software startups in India

Useful information for those wishing to form a start-up in India:

http://madaan.com/investing.htm

bhseoon Sam's String Matching Algorithms Collection

Great collection, I'm gonna port a bunch of those to PHP, in case anyone cares.

bhseoon The Next Big Thing in CAPTCHAs

The next big thing in turning visitors away.

bhseoon Ask HN: Tell me why a room-and-board-and-bandwidth incubator is a stupid idea

"Hacker village" has kind of a nice ring to it.

bhseoon Ask HN: Tell me why a room-and-board-and-bandwidth incubator is a stupid idea

If anyone is interested in experimenting with something like this in Europe, please drop me a line.

I would like to setup something between a co-op, coworking space, hacker space and incubator, preferably in a small city.

Some things that would be provided:

- Good location, somewhere not too urban

- Separated work and living quarters, a little overlap is ok

- Projection room, conference room

- Broadband + backup 3G connections, local VPN, file-server/NAS

- A couple dedicated servers for web development

- Groceries/food/etc, some provided for free, optional combined shopping list for those that want to save money and time

- Communal cooking/lunches/dinner, maybe a dedicated cook

- Cleaning service on-demand

There's lots of exciting possibilities, once you find a few good people to do this with. If any of the above sounds good to you, I'd be glad to discuss further.