Hacker News Reader

dermatthiason On Ocracoke Island, the only American dialect that is not identified as American

I think I am not the only one who is missing some sound samples. Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7MvtQp2-UA

dermatthiason [dead]

That's a fan made trailer.

dermatthiason Any Android app can read your WhatsApp database

One important point here: In the article the author says that the location of the database is /sdcard/WhatsApp/Databases. That's not entirely correct.

It only gets copied there when you use the build in backup feature (Settings -> Chat Settings). Else, it sits "safely" under /data/data/com.whatsapp/databases like every other Android sqlite database.

But nonetheless, WhatsApp was and is not really known for its safety...

dermatthiason Digital Ocean down

Same for my Amsterdam droplet, all ok.

dermatthiason How Apple hides new functionality in iOS: isYoMamaWearsCombatBootsActive

Not to forget the gravity constants of the Death Star and The Island, defined by the SensorMananger.

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/hardware/Sens...

dermatthiason Hetzner.de compromised (german email)

Quick overview: They had a Nagios backdoor, which led to a leak of the customer database of their dedicated server administration console (Hetzner Robot).

They are not sure how it happened right know. External security experts are involved.

The customer passwords are SHA256 hashed (thank god!).

---

This one is really serious. With access to this admin console, you can wipe all dedicated servers with one single click. We advised Hetzer before to add more security (two-way authentication, etc.) to the console, but I think not much happened here...

dermatthiason Apache releases Lucene Core 4.0 and Solr 4.0

Last time I checked, Solr and Nutch (the web crawler) had a really bad documentation. Only some wiki pages slapped together, mostly outdated.

Any improvements on this front?

dermatthiason Road-map wristwatch from 1920

Pilots now have iPads strapped to their legs. Or, that's what a friend of mine does. It really useful (with a dedicated pilot app, not Google Maps), but they always have a "real" GPS onboard for backup.

dermatthiason They are Opening that 100 year old package right now - watch live video

Many documents and a scarf from the king.

dermatthiason GNU Emacs Reference mugs now available

German bookstore Lehmanns, known for academic books, is selling Vi, Emacs, Linux, BSD and Latex reference mugs. They even got one with the number Pi and e on it.

For example, the Vi mug: http://www.lehmanns.de/shop/mathematik-informatik/5635112-97...

Latex: http://www.lehmanns.de/shop/mathematik-informatik/7361330-97...

dermatthiason Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

30 days, and you can pin certain versions.

dermatthiason Demonstrating responsive design to clients.

Yes. But clients will understand this one better, with different known devices right in front of their eyes. Some of our clients can't map a resized browser window to a smartphone <-> tablet switch.

dermatthiason Create 2D games in Lua and LÖVE.

A real time killer and really great game concept developed in Löve is mari0, a Mario and Portal clone.

http://stabyourself.net/mari0/

dermatthiason Introducing Chrome for Android

Definitely CynanogenMod. Probably (I haven't checked them all) the most complete and best testet Rom out there. Available for nearly every major Android hardware.

dermatthiason HN now comes with HTTPS?

I was refering to my own feeling when loading HN, a (in comparison) very simple website.

I am sorry if it sounded like I was talking about any website in general. That is not the case.

dermatthiason HN now comes with HTTPS?

On the server side, it is ycombinator's decision if they can handle the additional cpu cycles. i believe they can, or else they wouldn't have enabled it.

on the client side, I don't think you can really feel the latency. is measurable, of course, but i don't think you can feel it.

dermatthiason WikiMedia's Geo IP Lookup JSONP call

Oh, that is correct. Sorry, I need to read the headline more carefully. Missed the 'P'.

dermatthiason WikiMedia's Geo IP Lookup JSONP call

been there, done that: http://ip.beached.org ;)

dermatthiason Ask HN: How do you manage passwords?

At work, we use a shared Keepass file (Keepass is a password manager). We are only a small team, so this works out quite well. And this leads us to very secure (and different!) passwords for all our client servers and accounts, because getting and setting passwords is just a click away.

Private, I use a simple system where I have a 'master' password, which I augment with letters and numbers based on the domain name of the service. For example (not my system): A domain has 5 letters and a .com TLD, so I add the number 5 to the end and 'moc.' to the beginning of the master password. You can easily expand this system for your needs. Works really well for me.

dermatthiason Apple’s iCloud Icon Uses The Golden Ratio

Nice find, but for me that's just basic design principles applied to an icon design. The golden ratio isn't really something that's new or anything...

dermatthiason Google.com has 35 W3C erros while MSN.com has 0?

Because they value speed and cross-browser compatibility more than conforming with the standard. As long as the errors are minor and don't affect the page display (and I am sure Google is well aware of that), you do not really need to care about valid html code.

dermatthiason How I almost got a Criminal Record

Same thing happend to a german professor in 2008, where they also accidentialy swapped IP numbers. The accusation was child pornography, the news got hold of it and, of course, his reputation was deeply damaged.

Original german article: http://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Unschuldig-unter-Verdacht-291...

and translation: http://translate.google.de/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl...

dermatthiason Google: Les Pauls 96th birthday

Best PR ever. Today, in every office around the world, there will be at least one person saying "have you seen the google logo today?". And everybody will have a good time. Totally worth the development cost (and such a thing will be enjoyed by everyone who develops it).

dermatthiason Dropbox Encryption with TrueCrypt

I use encFS for the sensitive files inside my Dropbox and it works really well. Because it is a per file based encryption and most of my sensitive files are rather small (<1MB), there are no (noticeable) speed problems.

In combination with some (really simple) bash scripts for mount- and unmounting, this is imho a good way to encrypyt files inside your Dropbox.

dermatthiason Twitter moves from Rails to Java

"Could this mean that Java is a better platform than Rails for high scalability needs?"

Isn't this very much common knowledge for systems the size of Twitter?

dermatthiason GNOME 3 Released

gnome3.org seems to be unaccessible right now. Any news on a official (as in official from the GNOME people, not Canonical) repo / .deb for Ubuntu 10.10?

I'm using Awesome WM since a about a year and I'm really happy with it, but it looks kinda good and I want to give it a shot.

dermatthiason TweetDeck launches web client alternative to Twitter.com

I guess the same can be said for Seesmic Web.

dermatthiason Brian Aker explains Memcached

Pretty basic overview and not very techy, but the last paragraph is worth the read:

"A question I'll often hear is, "How do I dump the data back out of Memcached?" If you're asking that question it usually means you're not thinking about Memcached correctly."

dermatthiason Nintendo to ‘Hobbyist’ Developers: No Thanks

Irrelevance?

They really did something new with the Wii controls, landed a huge hit and Sony/Microsoft are only recently getting back with similar controls (Kinect, Move). I think they deserve a point here.

The Wii is still the best selling console and the DS the best selling handheld(by far!). Perhaps it's irrelevant from a HN pov, but certainly not from a familiy/kids/recreational gaming pov.

And the major games from Nintendo itself (Mario Galaxy, Zelda....) are rock solid, high quality games.

dermatthiason The Joy of The Joy of Clojure Closure

This morning I was thinking about writing a tweet why the book is still not available in a dead-wood fashion, because I don't really like reading ebooks/PDFs (I preordered the book as pdf and print version through MEAP). But then it came to me that such a tweet will not speed up the process in any way. So I skipped it...

Nice to see this post now :)