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cfinkeon A 140-Acre Forest Is About to Materialize in the Middle of Detroit

Although the entire section isn't going to be woodlands:

Hantz Woodlands' goal is to have at least 15,000 trees planted and 50 blighted structures torn down in two years on parcels of land that weave in and out of existing neighborhoods.

So it wouldn't be appropriate for Google to accept that edit.

cfinkeon Medium Opens Signups To All

"The license has no restriction as to [...] type of systems or products that may be used in conjunction with your User Content."

vs.

"solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your blog."

That's the difference.

cfinkeon Show HN: Web site I built last night that takes screenshots of web sites

Before SearchMe was shut down and had its assets liquidated, I built the tool that took all of the screenshots for the search results. (SeRPs were presented as a series of screenshots rather than a list of links; see http://techcrunch.com/2008/03/11/searchme-launches-new-searc... for some examples.) The toughest thing to get right was consistent screenshots of Java and Flash content.

I can't get your app to load, but does it handle at least those two plugins? If so, how? And if not, do you plan to change that?

cfinkeon The way government does tech is outdated and risky

You mean Not Invented Here.

cfinkeon 37signals Works Remotely [video]

We take pretty much everybody: http://automattic.com/map/

(There are 14 Canadian Automatticians as of this writing.)

cfinkeon 37signals Works Remotely [video]

Confirmed; the Canadian contingent of Automattic is a good-looking bunch.

cfinkeon 37signals Works Remotely [video]

Join us at Automattic: http://automattic.com/work-with-us/ We all work remotely -- all 200+ of us.

You may have heard of a few of our products: WordPress.com, Akismet, Gravatar, and likely the most relevant to you, the WordPress iOS app.

cfinkeon Dopplr is shutting down

If you're not familiar with Dopplr, this short infomercial has all you need to know:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXNgBs5DPLg

cfinkeon The Story of My Desk

Haha, it probably hasn't been that clean since the picture was taken three years ago.

cfinkeon The Story of My Desk

As long as we're sharing pictures of our homemade desks, here's mine:

http://i.imgur.com/vFAThh.jpg

Oak, oak, oak, and more oak. I love oak.

And here's a full build album, including pictures of my wife's desk on the other side of the room:

http://imgur.com/a/HTxXk

Everything was done by hand except for the cabinet boxes above the corner desk and the cabinet doors, which I had made by a local cabinetry shop, since I don't have the proper tools and router bits.

This was one of my first major woodworking projects, and I can confirm what jlongster is now learning: you don't know how much you don't know about something until you try and do it yourself.

cfinkeon What is the worst thing about working at Microsoft?

How about "People who answer legitimate questions with two non-answers"?

cfinkeon Chrome has updated - How to fix the changed New Tab page

the '3 lines' button that no one has a good name for.

It's called a hamburger button: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/03/18/whats-a-hamburger-but...

cfinkeon The Internet Alphabet

Here's mine, from six years ago:

http://www.chrisfinke.com/2007/01/20/the-a-to-z-of-me/

cfinkeon Groupon sales rep threatens restaurant with negative Yelp reviews

A screenshot proves nothing: http://i.imgur.com/puRHX20.jpg

cfinkeon A list of 8,363 unused domains owned by Google

Aardvark was a search-by-IM engine that was acquired by Google in 2010.

cfinkeon Google Reader is dead

I tried it when you posted it, but I gave up on it when it took 15 seconds to load any content after logging in :-(

cfinkeon iOS7 – Why Is Everyone Suddenly A Design Critic?

More importantly, no one outside of this conference has even used the iOS7, so really, truthfully, everyone needs to shut the fuck up.

False. I'm thousands of miles away, and I've been using it since a couple hours after it was announced, which was about 20 hours before this post was published.

cfinkeon iOS7 – Why Is Everyone Suddenly A Design Critic?

I may not know anything about design, but I know what I like.

cfinkeon Outbox – A beautiful inbox for postal mail

Our mail system is already a travesty.

Elaborate?

cfinkeon Dora, Diego, SpongeBob and Other Viacom Shows Leave Netflix

My two-year-old son is mourning the loss of The Backyardigans. Time to buy the episodes on iTunes and fire up Requiem+pyTivo.

cfinkeon Yahoo acquires GoPollGo

The announcement at http://gopollgo.com/ hits all the acquisition bingo spots:

* "We are excited"

* "It has been so rewarding

* "We're so excited"

* "we couldn’t be happier"

* "thanks to all our users,"

* "As of today, we'll no longer be supporting [GoPollGo]"

cfinkeon I Wish Nest Did More Than Thermostats

If you're changing your sprinkler configuration, you're doing it wrong.

Or your lawn is dying because there hasn't been enough rain. Or your lawn is dying because there's been too much rain. Or you're resodding a part of your lawn. Or you're removing part of your lawn to put in a garden. Or you've started using rainbarrels to naturally irrigate your backyard. Or your city has changed which days you can water your lawn on.

you can be pretty sure that the reason the internal clock is wrong is because the author tried to tweak things.

It could also be because the power went out or because of Daylight Saving Time.

cfinkeon Things to Make with a 3D Printer

Is my experience growing up really that uncommon? Or is having a 3D printer just an expensive substitute for having friends that are in to making and fixing stuff?

In the same way that C++ is just a verbose substitute for having friends that are in to writing assembly.

cfinkeon Things to Make with a 3D Printer

I can't remember the last time I needed a replacement part for something and it was just a monoblock plastic piece.

As the father of two young boys, I could make a full-time job of printing replacement plastic pieces for broken toys.

cfinkeon Checkboxes that kill your product

But then please for the love of god make about:config something that can be used without trawling mozilla.org discussion threads or random about.com 'articles'.

I think one of the reasons that about:config is not easy to use is because it shouldn't be easy to use.

If it was a nice window with checkboxes and dropdowns and tabs for groups of related options, then it would become a de facto settings dialog a thousand times more problematic than the legitimate settings dialog.

cfinkeon Worst Bug Ever

Agreed; I expected it to be the story of Therac-25 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25)

It was involved in at least six accidents between 1985 and 1987, in which patients were given massive overdoses of radiation, approximately 100 times the intended dose. These accidents highlighted the dangers of software control of safety-critical systems, and they have become a standard case study in health informatics and software engineering.

cfinkeon Five reasons why the PHP silence operator @ should be avoided

One reason to use it: to silence functions that generate warnings when the falsy return value would suffice.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.parse-url.php

5.3.3 Removed the E_WARNING that was emitted when URL parsing failed.

cfinkeon No, you are not 'running late'; you are rude and selfish

How about "You're late and we started without you."?

cfinkeon The Best of Kickstarter 2012

I found it irritating and hard to follow. Had to close it after the fourth click. To each his own.

cfinkeon Ask HN: what are your best (relatively) passive, non-stock-market investments?

I fell into it when my wife and I had the opportunity to buy a parcel of her grandmother's farm that was already being rented, so I don't have much more information than that.