Hacker News Reader

brntnon Thanks FedEx, this is why we keep getting phished

In this case the consequence is that the Australian government agency collecting the import tax doesn't get paid. Which means that they don't release the package to FedEx, and that you don't get your package.

FedEx needs to do a better job with these notifications. At the very least they need to hire a copywriter.

brntnon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://brntn.me

I'm a web developer, so I end up mostly writing about Python / Django related topics in that space, but really it's anything tech related.

brntnon Simple text editor has over 15k monthly users

I build a little scratchpad for personal use: https://sesh.github.io/scratchpad/

I guess for the most part these sort of things start off solving a personal problem. Getting 15k monthly users is very impressive!

brntnon Mailit: A Tiny Drop-In REST API to Send Emails

It's not _worse_, it's just designed for a use case that expects it to only be available to services that are allowed to send email.

brntnon Show HN: Cinc – GitHub for recipes

Nice work!

Are you using mptt or treebeard under the hood to manage the forking?

brntnon Git-recall - Simple and handy tool to easily recall what you've done

This seems very similar to the (quite popular?) git-standup script.

https://github.com/kamranahmedse/git-standup

As someone that often works across multiple projects, I find the ability to do a recursive search through a directory of git repositories very valuable.

brntnon CSS Tube Map

Yes.

brntnon Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers

Strange feature request: I'd love to be able to specify dietary requirements on a per-meal basic. My partner is vegan, so I'll normally cook vegan dinners, but like to get meat into lunch/the occasional breakfast.

brntnon Branch

Are you sure people weren't referring to Medium being similar to your Throwww?

http://medium.com

brntnon SimpleCart(js) - Javascript Shopping Cart

Also asking for trouble with PayPal. Which we all know can cause small stores a world of hurt.

brntnon Best Open Python Books

The Django Book, though great, is ridiculously out of date - the print version is written for Django 0.96, the incomplete web version is for Django 1.0, and Django 1.4 was just released.

It's a great resource, and was very useful to myself when learning Django back in the day, but the regular Django docs have far surpassed it on my made up usefulness scale.

brntnon How Eduardo Saverin Sold Facebook Ads in 2004

This used to annoy me (especially when people created events in place of ads) but it's mostly solved now with the ability to promote your posts. That's going to work way better than an ad that your friends are used to ignoring.

brntnon Pwdr - an open source powder 3d printer

It's very superficial of me, but I wish more open source hardware projects went to this much effort to "sell" their product.

Beautiful page design, well written copy, nice photography and a great looking device.

brntnon Pwdr - an open source powder 3d printer

Isn't that the whole point of the reprap projects?

You're going to be waiting a while if you're hoping for a 3D printer that you can buil at home and can churn out steel rods, bolts and belts.

brntnon Chrome for iOS

Until you click a link in an email or app.

brntnon Brackets: The Open Source Code Editor for the Web

Judging by the git repo, brackets has been in development significantly longer than your project. It also seems much more complete already.

And your project doesn't seem to be designed as an IDE, but rather a blogging engine with a strange focus on code editing. How exactly are the projects similar?

brntnon Show HN: EdgeKick, real-time analytics for public Facebook pages

That's a fair call, though it's pretty easy to check if "facebook" is in the submitted string and then check if it's a page slug if it's not.

brntnon Show HN: EdgeKick, real-time analytics for public Facebook pages

Quick bugfix: It only seems to work if you include the "www." in the URL of the page. Why not just ask for the page-slug instead of the full URL?

EDIT: I can see this being really useful in a "opposition research" sort of way. It would be great to be able to view/compare multiple pages at the same time, and then try to highlight where one is going better than the other.

For pages that you manage, it's really not that useful when compared to the powerful analytics Facebook already provides through the insights tool.

brntnon The disadvantage of smarts

With all the discussion about reddit blocking certain domains early last week, I find it interesting that this hour old post has 27 points and is surrounded by other posts that have between 1 and 5 on the new page.

brntnon Yahoo Axis

Unlike the Axis page, you don't need to watch anything to find out what the product does.

People watch the Apple ads because they think they're "cool" or "interesting", not because they're trying to find out more about the product.

brntnon SEOmoz raises 18 million from Ignition and Foundry

I'm curious, how did you find Hacker News?

brntnon Why I'm Sticking With Dropbox (Over Google Drive)

I saw people discussing this earlier on Twitter and I agree that the Dropbox TOS sounds better than the Google one.

My problem is that Dropbox does everything that is highlighted in this post as a reason not to use Google Drive. If anything, the Dropbox TOS reduces clarity by "hiding" that they do these things.

> use, host, store, reproduce

Well yeah, that's what the service is designed to do. Dropbox does all of those things.

> modify, create derivative works

Something as simple as creating a thumbnail of a JPEG is modifying/deriving your files. Dropbox most certainly does that.

> communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute

Again, this allows them to show you your data in multiple ways that exist now or may exist in the future. Again, Dropbox does all of these things too.

I honestly think that Google should have added "We will never sell, give away or allow partners to access your files without permission" to the top of their new TOS. It would clear all of this nonsense up.

brntnon YouTube Identifies Birdsong As Copyrighted Music

Rumblefish hasn't sent a DMCA takedown request, they've used Google's provided tool to say that they own the rights.

brntnon How Far Can You Get From McDonald's?

Yeah, somewhere between Swan Hill, Mildura and Horsham. Big Desert, or into eastern SA would get you a fair way from a McDonalds.

brntnon How Far Can You Get From McDonald's?

I find this hard to believe (grew up in Swan Hill).

Where are you heading to from Melbourne? I doubt you could stay in Victoria and be more than 250km from a McDonalds.

brntnon Reddit: a necessary change in policy

It does, but most states/countries have some exception. For example, here in Australia a psychiatrist has to report someone they think is going to cause harm to themselves or others.