Hacker News Reader

confuzatronon Why Does Apple Offer Free Engraving?

Surely any engraving might detract from the Apple logo, thus reducing the phenominality, fabulosity, etc

By the way, I crave downvotes from humourless Apple devotees.

confuzatronon Apple bans Android magazine app

Mobile platforms are an extremely active battleground right now, though.

The mind boggles that we're in a situation where arguments like this are put forward. No offence to you specifically Groxx, but... I feel like Apple has exiled us all to crazy land.

confuzatronon Apple bans Android magazine app

Well, think about it this way: would you want your children reading a publication about Android?

Because hey - if you're cool with that, go ahead and get them an Android phone.

confuzatronon 7M Downloads: Why Angry Birds Is Free on Android

PayPal? Are you kidding me? Using PayPal is like pulling teeth.

confuzatronon Websockets are awesome (you can see everyone's cursor)! Please donate yours

For me, tangling cursors with strangers seemed somehow icky.

Mind you, I also avoided chat roulette...

confuzatronon The New MobileMe Login Page Has Some Badass JS

I'm getting no animations in 7.0.517.44.

confuzatronon Nude.js | Nudity detection with JavaScript and HTMLCanvas

I'm hoping someone will implement tiresomelyRightOn.js.

confuzatronon Google Bowls a Googly - Possible invalidation of Oracle's patents

Interesting but unconvincing theory. I have never seen public API documentation that lists private fields before. This certainly makes no mention of private fields: http://www.docjar.com/docs/api/sun/security/provider/certpat...

confuzatronon Google Bowls a Googly - Possible invalidation of Oracle's patents

Some aspects of it look copied to me - the class's 10 fields are in identical order. Some parameters to the function look lifted straight from code generated by disassembling bytecode (flag flag1 set set1). However, these may be explainable by some other means.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=permutations+of+10+item...

confuzatronon It Will Be Awesome if They Don't Screw it Up: 3D Printing...

a 3D printer is a machine that can turn a blueprint into a physical object. Feed it a design for a wrench, and it produces a physical, working wrench.

That breaks when you try and use it because it's made from chocolate.

confuzatronon [dead]

My point was that "The consistency is impressive" is questionable, given that the list is polluted with random rants that don't even describe an occurrence. It's a poorly curated list that I find untrustworthy as a result.

...and amazingly enough, I noticed that your chosen 'highlights' include such rants! Deary me, pay attention.

confuzatronon [dead]

Here's one from that page:

"And you still have to take off your shoes... correct? Eight years to built the A-bomb. Nine years to put a man on the moon. Yet... after 9 years, we are still walking barefoot through airports. Something that would not be permitted in a health care setting... or a restaurant."

Yup. Good 'account'. Very... consistent.

confuzatronon Your eyes suck at blue

Sorry, no. You've really missed the point I'm afraid.

A little bit of knowledge, as they say...

confuzatronon [dead]

True enough. It's quite hard to find them but I found one that apparently came from a site called InfoWars - isn't that some whacko conspiracy theory website? That's an unusual selection in general - there's comments that don't even describe something that occurred - just someone complaining in general about the TSA policy.

confuzatronon [dead]

First they came for the area Wiccans...

confuzatronon A zombie keyboard, an app-store rejection, a call from Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs appeared one stormy night on my father's farm and helped deliver a breach lamb. He was gone as quickly as he arrived.

Of course there's no email trail...

confuzatronon Your eyes suck at blue

So, my screen doesn't display blue in a way that pixellation is visible to the human eye, and this is somehow not an issue with the human eye how?

confuzatronon Your eyes suck at blue

I'm sorry, but this is all irrelevant waffle.

The issue is that the human eye is less able to distinguish detail in the blue spectrum, as the article (and a quick test) shows.

(Blimey, I just noticed your first comment got 22 votes! Apparently irrelevant waffle gets upvoted on HN, if it sounds confident)

confuzatronon Your eyes suck at blue

Lots of text there, and you certainly sound confident, but I tried an experiment, and it confirmed the claims of the article. I used Paint.NET, loaded in an image, copied it to three layers. Adusted each layer to be a single colour channel, then changed each of the layers to 'Additive' mode.

Pixellating the blue layer - I could perceive at most some 'colour blotching', but no real loss of 'sharpness'

Pixellating the green layer - pixellation was easily visible.

Pixellating the red layer - the effect was somewhere in between.

You should give it a try. Here's my test Paint.NET image file with the layers all set up for you:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/714931/bluejay.pdn

confuzatronon Gmail: Trap my contacts now (warning when exporting contacts to Facebook)

...not to mention, a concrete reminder of the hypocrisy of Facebook's argument.

"Facebook - we protect your contacts, so unscrupulous websites can't spam them like we do."

confuzatronon TextCAPTCHA: 180 million simple logic questions

Your point is that this captcha system may prevent smart-alec pedants from commenting? Man, that's a feature not a bug.

confuzatronon Soviet Image Editing Tool from 1987

What's that piece of music at 2:30? I've heard it before in some cheesy techno dance track I think.

confuzatronon IE9 Outperforms Other Browsers for HTML5 Compliance

If people keep writing test cases, eventually we might know what HTML5 is!

confuzatronon The Day US Customs Found A Bullet In My Pocket

Well, it's possible that you were undergoing weapons training and stupidly forgot you'd left a bullet in your pocket before packing up. And it's also possible that a child gave it to you as a gift. This guy wasn't arrested or jailed - he was treated with not entirely unreasonable suspicion.

confuzatronon The Day US Customs Found A Bullet In My Pocket

Al-Qaeda might be fundamentalist arseholes, but they're not stupid.

You're over-generalising; I reckon there are plenty of idiots in Al-Quaeda.

confuzatronon The Day US Customs Found A Bullet In My Pocket

Coming home from Pakistan with a bullet in your pocket does point to the possibility that while in Pakistan you were dealing with weaponry. The guy doesn't give enough context to understand how the journal entry actually looked.

From your last sentence, I can see you are no stranger to making snap judgements without all the details. ;)

confuzatronon The Day US Customs Found A Bullet In My Pocket

I'm pretty sure it's their job to ask people questions and put them off balance while doing so. Even to the extent of saying unreasonable things and raising their voices. It is irritating to be on the receiving end and I say that having only got the low-level treatment that I think everybody gets. But there you go.

confuzatronon That mysterious J in emails

...do their names start with 'J'?

confuzatronon Microsoft picks HTML5 over Silverlight for Internet apps

So mobile Safari 3.0 (looks like the best candidate for 'three years ago') supported all of HTML5? Really? Googling shows that safari 3.0 for Windows certainly didn't support HTML5. Did mobile safari 3 support '2010 HTML5', given that it's still in draft at the moment. Has 'HTML5' remained the same for 3 years?

confuzatronon Programming languages have to break free from the tyranny of ASCII

Why do we still have to name variables OmegaZero when our computers now know how to render 0x03a9+0x2080 properly?

Ω is a valid variable name in C#. (But Ω₀ isn't).