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cyril_st_john

37 karma · joined July 27, 2011

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cyril_st_john··on Winamp Skin Museum
One of the great things about Winamp 2 skins in particular is how simple the format is - basically just a bunch of BMPs in a zip file. Pretty much anyone could make one. You didn't need any special software or code knowledge to inspect an existing skin and see how the pieces fit together. You could make one in MSPaint if that's all you had, as I did for my first couple skins.

(There were also a few INI-style config files, mainly to define colors of dynamic things like text. For most skins you would just need to copy the defaults and maybe change a few color hex codes.)

cyril_st_john··on Reviving Papers with Code
Any interest in expanding it beyond just AI papers? "Papers with Code" sounds like it could be much more broad than it currently is. I was excited to browse the "All Domains" section until I realized only AI topics are covered - just because so many of the papers that are relevant to my work would not fall under any of these categories.
cyril_st_john··on Smart thermostats inadvertently strain electric power grids
The article suggests the difference is that smart thermostats have the timer feature enabled and configured the same by default, and most users do not change the defaults.

Even if most other thermostats have a timer feature, I guess they are not all turned on and set to the same time by default.

cyril_st_john··on System Font Stack
Please don't use this. -apple-system & BlinkMacSystemFont are OK but after that it's just a scattershot list of guesses that will often be wrong. I have most of the fonts in this stack installed on my Linux desktop for various reasons and none of them are the system font. Just fall back to sans-serif for now and adopt future -apple-system equivalents as they become available.
cyril_st_john··on Robinhood’s big gamble
As others in this thread have noted, what you described would be illegal. But suppose for the sake of argument that Robinhood's order flow is actually really bad and users are getting a measurably worse price through RH vs other brokers. RH targets small-time investors who are trading in small amounts - perhaps investing a bit of their paycheck every week. It seems unlikely that the order flow would be so bad that RH users are losing anywhere close to $5 per trade because of it.

So even if "it's not really free" it's still a significant discount compared to the pricing that was standard before RH came along. Opening up investing to more people by making smaller & more frequent trades feasible seems generally good to me.

I will admit that other aspects of Robinhood's business such as the degree of gamification are still concerning, though.

cyril_st_john··on Discord's new UX design is harmful to the visually impaired and colorblind
Interesting concern for HN commenters to have given the number of "X Considered Harmful" articles that make it to the front page here.
cyril_st_john··on Progressive Internet Explorer
> But as we all know, due to Internet Explorer's lack of support for any of these features, we must be patient and refrain from using them, and make do with the same old tedious techniques for the foreseeable future.

Couldn't disagree with this more. Let your site have square corners, no shadows, and no animations in IE. The users won't know or care.