Hacker News Reader

bobdson PHP 5.3.3 hangs on numeric value 2.2250738585072011e-308

So it's also in the 5.2.* branch? That can't be good.

bobdson Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google

There is already an FF extension that does this. It's called OptimizeGoogle and they need help keeping it up to date. I've offered to help but the code is quite strange (came from an older extension called CustomizeGoogle) and I'm not sure it's worth saving.

A cross-browser effort that implements a few key features from OptimizeGoogle, would be a very good idea. I'd be up for that.

bobdson Shoppers spent more money this holiday season than even before the recession

This will be a most interesting decade.

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

bobdson How not to design a landing page: Tazo Tea

It's pretty impossible to use this on Firefox with NoScript.

bobdson Mozilla takes on web data miners with privacy icon release

A naive algorithm that parses privacy policies for certain keyphrases would be a good starting point, without requiring cooperation from website owners. After all, why would you use an icon that lowers your conversion rate?

bobdson Building Large-Scale jQuery Applications

jQuery plugins are the devil.

bobdson Do a startup or travel around the world?

Why do you have to spend only a couple days at each location?

My rule of thumb is I need to stay about a month at each location, so that I don't feel rushed and it's worth the time to setup a temporary base.

A week-long vacation, trying to cram everything in the shortest amount of time, is not real "traveling" for me.

bobdson Your Smartphone’s Battery Gauge is Lying to You (and it’s not such a bad thing)

I don't think widespread use of "wireless" charging is likely at all. Better batteries are the obvious solution.

bobdson Do a startup or travel around the world?

Why not?

bobdson Gift HN: tund - SSH to your stolen laptop

It's a potential vulnerability against high-tech threats.

It's a security feature against low-tech threats.

bobdson A secure way to store website users "offsite" but still own them.

Why not build it into the browser? Firefox already exposes a window.crypto object.

bobdson Diaspora ported to use buddycloud channels and XMPP

The announcement on the mailing list has some more narrative: http://groups.google.com/group/buddycloud-dev/browse_thread/...

bobdson A secure way to store website users "offsite" but still own them.

I've collected a few links related to JS cryptography, might be useful: http://disattention.com/13/javascript-cryptography/

There is another SRP implementation in JS+PHP: http://www.denksoft.com/wordpress/web-development/secure-aja...

We definitely need more SRP implementations, glad to see more people working on it.

bobdson Jon Rohan · Creating Triangles in CSS

It's quite often that the arrow images and css styles timeout for me. I think we would all appreciate some more caching, especially the server.

bobdson Hey Yahoo, Can you please open source Delicious?

A possibility would be to build this on top of Noserub: http://noserub.com/

bobdson Hey Yahoo, Can you please open source Delicious?

I want Open Source Federated Delicious. Anyone wanna help make it?

bobdson Yahoo is Shutting Down Del.icio.us

I'll second that.

What I really want though is something that will let me continue to use the Delicious extension for Firefox.

bobdson Yahoo is Shutting Down Del.icio.us

The ArchiveTeam would probably be interested in this: http://archiveteam.org/

bobdson Ask HN: Requesting feedback on idea

I like the idea.

The permanent nature of ads built into a map can be a good thing. The advertiser gets lifetime product placement and doesn't have to worry about the developer removing it. However, details are irrelevant if the map is only going to be played by a dozen people.

Advertisers will want metrics.The best place to get data will be directly from the game servers. You could make a small utility that gathers traffic/gameplay/map data and sends it back to you. Then you give server owners a piece of the action in exchange for sending you data and running more maps with ads.

If you go down that road, you might as well find a few hackers to make mods that dynamically place ads in the game. I'm guessing some games might already provide native functionality that could help with this.

By the way, Google is already doing web-based game ads: http://www.google.com/ads/games/index.html

bobdson SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning

It's ok if you want to stop providing service to SimpleCDN, but at least give people some notice, don't just start shutting down their servers.

bobdson Ask HN: Any recommendations for bug tracking software?

MantisBT is an easy to install one. It integrates with SVN, Git, DokuWiki and many more.

http://www.mantisbt.org/

I like that I can hook it up to my Github projects. Here's the how-to: http://leetcode.net/blog/2009/01/integrating-git-svn-with-ma...

bobdson Ask HN: Web-based coding text editors? (for coding on the cr48)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_JavaScript-based_...

I'm always amazed at what can be found on wikipedia.

bobdson How To Get Experience Working With Large Datasets

It's because we need the techniques and tools to handle the ever-increasing amount of information in our lives.

bobdson Ask HN: Co-Ops for Developers?

>Who determines product direction?

Everyone submits ideas, some voting and discussion takes place, then people work on what they want to work on.

Splitting equity and revenue is a much more complicated issue. In my experience it's easy to figure this out for small teams, provided the members are reasonable and can appreciate each other's work.

There was a software startup that was trying to do exactly this but I can't remember what it's called. Quirky is also doing this, albeit for tangible products, and they have an interesting approach.

bobdson How to Fly 35,000 Miles, Visit 4 Continents, 9 Countries, and 15 Cities for $418

They want you to use your card because they get paid on the merchant side as well. So it doesn't matter if you always pay off the card on time.

bobdson Truly decentralized bittorrent

A minor nitpick is that DC++ is the open source client. The protocol/network is called Direct Connect.

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

bobdson What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic

Instead of the same old paper again, how about a comparison of the ways current language implementations handle floating point numbers?

bobdson Assange arrested in London (BBC)

I wonder why the Guardian version didn't make it to the front page.

bobdson Diaspora branch with xmpp federation support

"We don't check that the user is authoritative for an email address, some thought needs to go into how we prove a user has access to an email address in a federated system."

Ideas?

bobdson Assange arrested in London (BBC)

I'm not inclined to believe anything regarding Wikileaks or Assange. I'm sure more than a few people have seen those tweets and some Twitter crawlers/indexers have them stored somewhere. We'll see how it plays out, no need to speculate at this point.