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

Total value. Rental price per acre per year in my area of Minnesota is about 7% of the sale price per acre.

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

If you purchase farmland, at least in the upper Midwest, you'll earn a 5-8% yearly dividend by renting it out, and there is little to no maintenance that you need to do yourself (depending on your rental contract).

cfinkeon Facebook: Your Year in Review

Did you expect Facebook to stalk you over the year and make a list of the 20 biggest moments in your real life?

cfinkeon Gangnam Style Becomes World’s Most Watched Video With 1 Billion Views in Sight

It is that hard to believe. I've watched Gangnam Style twice, maybe three times, and I know lots of people who have never seen it at all. I've seen the moon landing footage dozens of times, and I don't know anyone over the age of 10 who hasn't seen it at least once.

cfinkeon Gangnam Style Becomes World’s Most Watched Video With 1 Billion Views in Sight

The "World's Most Watched Video" may be an exaggeration -- am I to believe that Gangnam Style has been watched more times than the Zapruder film or the moon landing footage?

cfinkeon Don't re-elect SOPA supporters on Tuesday

There are three other candidates for Senate in Minnesota besides Bills and Klobuchar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_election_i...

cfinkeon Apple has lost their legal claim to the iPhone name in Mexico

The lawyers for Apple were holding the gun, pointing it in the general direction of both iFone and Apple.

cfinkeon Apple says no Java for you, removes plugin from browsers on OS X 10.7 and up

I can barely remember the last time I encountered a Java applet

The very-popular SmartSource coupon website uses Java to enable users to print coupons. That's the only thing my household has needed Java for in the last year, but it's high priority for my wife.

cfinkeon Reddit's Moral Low Ground

a phone call is private

Tell that to the government.

cfinkeon Using the HTML5 Fullscreen API for Phishing Attacks

which Chrome and Safari have done

Firefox does it too, and in a much more obvious way than either Chrome or Safari. Here are all the latest browsers on Mac compared: http://imgur.com/a/jdcI7 (Sorry Opera; I haven't re-installed you yet.)

I actually didn't get any permissions dialog or warning label in Safari 6; maybe I ok'd it for another site at some point in the past, but I definitely didn't whitelist this domain.

cfinkeon Patent US6368227 - Method of swinging on a swing

I did this all the time as a kid. If my family had owned a video camera, I'd definitely have prior art on tape.

cfinkeon Show HN: We got tired of getting gifts we don't like/need, so we made this

The older I get, the more I turn into my father, who despises wishlists and won't tell people what gifts he'd like. Only receiving gifts that were on a list removes the mystery and wonder from the process.

I've begun telling people who ask that a good gift is anything interesting that I wouldn't buy for myself, and I've been pleased with the results.

(This isn't a commentary on GiftSocial as a product, but on wishlists as a social construct.)

cfinkeon iOS6 Safari Caching $.ajax Results

Must be in Apple's haste to make iOS 6 zip along impressively they got too happy with the cache settings.

As a developer, this is one of the most irritating things to see in a bug report: a smirky uninformed assumption about why the bug exists.

cfinkeon How hackers will jailbreak the iPhone 5

Relatively easy.

cfinkeon With iPhone 5, Apple Has Chiseled The Smartphone To Near Perfection

I very much appreciate the actual vertical screen real estate within apps such as Mail and Calendar, which now can display much more info.

"Much more info"? The new screen is only 0.5 inches taller. That's equivalent to half of a Mail message or one extra Calendar entry.

cfinkeon Boosted Boards (YC S12) Unveils Its Magical Electric Skateboard

If you added doors, a roof, and a few more seats to a moped, that would be my perfect vehicle.

cfinkeon Boosted Boards (YC S12) Unveils Its Magical Electric Skateboard

Add a handle, a steering device, a seat, and make it wider, and I would definitely buy one.

cfinkeon Chute releases jQuery lib to collect photos from users with 1 LOC

Have you successfully implemented this intent anywhere?

Not pick, but I added view, subscribe, and share to the latest version of the WordPress.com Web app in Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/khjnjifipfkgglficm...

cfinkeon Chute releases jQuery lib to collect photos from users with 1 LOC

Sounds like a re-implementation of Web Intents: http://webintents.org/pick

Does Chute register as a 'pick' intent handler? If not, do you plan to?

cfinkeon Facebook now worth less than what Microsoft offered for Yahoo in 2008

Why is that significant? Is there going to be a story every time the stock price changes about which historical company Facebook is now worth more or less than?

cfinkeon Medium from Obvious Corp

The name made me think of me.dium.com from a few years back (later renamed OneRiot, and then bought by Wal-Mart), which now just shows a phpinfo() page: http://me.dium.com/

cfinkeon Mozilla Will Nearly Double SF Office, Add 125 People In Early 2013

when flash crashes in Chrome, only 1 tab is affected

At least in Chrome for Mac, when Flash crashes, it crashes in every tab.

cfinkeon For More Pianos, Last Note Is Thud in the Dump

It sounds to me like cfinke made a poor choice when acquiring a used instrument then extrapolated that to 'all old instruments are bad/can't properly hold pitch'.

This information came to me via my father (a church musician, organist, and pianist for 40 years) and a number of piano tuners in the area that I talked to about getting the piano back in playing condition. I'm familiar with musical instruments and wouldn't claim that all old instruments are bad.

cfinke should've just gotten someone who knows about pianos to help him/her choose a good one

When we did eventually purchase a piano, we talked to the right people and made an informed decision. In the story I shared, the price (free) was more important than the condition.

cfinkeon For More Pianos, Last Note Is Thud in the Dump

A neglected engine does not spell the end for a vehicle - but it seems to be that that is in fact the case for a neglected piano.

Well, you could always disassemble the piano, replace the strings, tuning pegs, and possibly the soundboard, and put it back together, but what you really have is a new piano in an old case, much like if you completely rebuilt the mechanical parts of a car but kept the original body.

cfinkeon For More Pianos, Last Note Is Thud in the Dump

A piano that has not been regularly tuned will lose its ability to stay tuned, turning it into a very large and heavy place to display sheet music, just like a car that never gets an oil change will eventually become an immobile scrap metal sculpture.

Shortly after we got married, my wife and I took possession of a 1918 upright piano that had not been tuned in a long time. We didn't know enough about pianos to know better, so we spent considerable time and effort to transport it 40 miles and up a short flight of stairs into our new home... only to dismantle it by hand less than a year later and slowly throw it away. It couldn't be tuned, and it took up too much room to keep if it wasn't going to be played. I think we sold the cast iron soundboard as scrap for a few dollars, and I did save some of the larger pieces of wood, which I used to build a bed for my two-year old son a few years later.

As a side note, if you've never taken apart a piano, I highly recommend it. You get a specific understanding of its inner workings, even if you think you already know how it functions.

Pictures of the piano disassembly:

With the keyboard removed: http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2193/2299985304_d0b38313f6_b.j...

The keys that I saved for a long time but never found a use for: http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2091/2299984652_a024f4a05e_b.j... (They're like teeth that have been knocked out: much much longer than you'd expect.)

The soundboard exposed, and the huge screwdriver I had to buy (see the top of the photo) to remove the screws attaching it to the wooden back: http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3105/2300002756_92e8503676_b.j...

The soundboard removed: http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2217/2300002188_68c614d900_b.j...

Just a portion of the screws and other hardware holding it together: http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2095/2299206761_ae640697d9_b.j...

cfinkeon Meanwhile RSS is some powerful shit

Last night Twitter unveiled their Olympics site.

And if you haven't already seen it, you have no idea what Dave is writing about, since he doesn't link to it anywhere.

cfinkeon Why won't anyone think of the deaf?

I implore you Web Developers and Designers to simply have a checkbox: Don’t ring me, I’m deaf.

Alternatively, "Don't ring me, I greatly dislike speaking on the phone when e-mail will suffice."

cfinkeon Paypal Redesigned

But any time PayPal redesigns the internal pages, every single tutorial on how to actually accomplish something in PayPal becomes useless.

cfinkeon [dead]

Filling out my e-mail address and clicking "I Want In" shows me a new form on list-manage.com with no information pre-filled and an error message saying "Blank email address."

cfinkeon Ask HN: Domain names you bought for a start-up that never happened

pieinterest.com:

Pinterest for pies. (Just kidding. I don't remember why I bought it, but I did.)