Hacker News Reader

dmpatiernoon Designing command-line interfaces

The important point here is to at least require that <Enter> key, rather than just using getchar() or whatever else and continuing on unexpectedly.

dmpatiernoon Emacs follow-mode

In vim, with scrollbind:

  nmap <silent> <Leader>ef	:vsplit<bar>wincmd l<bar>exe "norm! Ljz<c-v><cr>"<cr>:set scb<cr>:wincmd h<cr>:set scb<cr>

Source: http://markmail.org/message/kbnyhxffy6zs7pic

dmpatiernoon Ask HN: What has been your most profitable side/weekend project to date?

iScrob - http://iscrob.com - a Last.fm scrobbler for iOS. It's free with ads, or $5 with no ads. I released it almost exactly 1 year ago, and it's averaged about $20/day in revenue since then.

It's unique because there's some trickery involved getting around the strict iOS backgrounding requirements, and most of my competitors haven't done a great job with it.

dmpatiernoon 135TB for $7,384 - Backblaze Pod 2.0

For anyone wondering, I just did this on OS X to adjust the throttle overnight:

  > crontab -l
  0  1 * * * sed -E -i .bak 's/net_throttle="[0-9]+"/net_throttle="100"/' /Library/Backblaze/bzdata/bzinfo.xml
  0 10 * * * sed -E -i .bak 's/net_throttle="[0-9]+"/net_throttle="40"/'  /Library/Backblaze/bzdata/bzinfo.xml

dmpatiernoon Ask HN: What's your most-used function that you wrote yourself?

Typically this is what file_get_contents() is for (with fopen_wrappers enabled) if you just want a simple GET.

dmpatiernoon Splitterbug (YC S11) shutting down

I have it installed on my phone and can assure you it's very real and works well.

dmpatiernoon Splitterbug (YC S11) private beta: track expenses with friends from your phone

I'd be happy to help beta test for iOS. Email in profile.

dmpatiernoon Ask HN: Rate my mac+web app, Screendocs – Upgrade that wall of text.

It looks nice. I can easily see how useful it is. Seeing the sample page was much more informative to me than your landing page though. I would try to integrate the two and show off more of your product on the front page.

Why do you require the Mac app? You should offer both read+write access on the web, with the client app just being an optional bonus. Eliminating that requirement would solve a huge chunk of your marketing problems and open the tool up to many more users.

Nice name change, by the way. :P

dmpatiernoon Zynga buys iPhone game engine development team (Cocos2D/Zapus Media)

It's important to note Zynga will not be acquiring cocos2d itself, just two of its developers. I'm also glad to see Zynga will continue paying them to work on the platform, though I do wonder what sort of in-house tools they'll build for competitive advantage.

dmpatiernoon I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count

This is exactly how I feel. It's no longer an efficient use of my time.

dmpatiernoon Why is it so hard to be a good domain registrar?

I've used SRSPlus for years and my only complaints are with their DNS hosting. It sometimes fails for a few minutes at a time, returning no results for a simple dig. I've personally noticed it 2-3 times in the last year so I can only imagine how much it actually happens. There's also no support for TXT records or anything else aside from A, CNAME, and MX.

I've been considering a switch to Hover, but haven't done a trial run yet.

dmpatiernoon Run iPhone Apps Directly From Your Browser With Pieceable Viewer

This is very cool. I'd love to read more about how it works. I think they're running a dedicated iOS simulator for each app and streaming the user input/video output via Flash. Even their $60/mo plan has a limit of 10 simultaneous viewers, so I imagine it's pretty taxing on their hardware.

They must be capturing the output at some deeper layer though since OpenGL doesn't render (but it does run).

dmpatiernoon Writing Clear, Concise, Sentences

This is not a case of Serial commas. The title "Writing Clear, Concise, Sentences" has two adjectives and one noun. It's not a list of three.

dmpatiernoon Groupon’s Secret Weapon – the local advertising GDS

I don't think it's its relationship with vendors so much as its relationship with consumers. People are flocking to Groupon looking for places to spend their money.

dmpatiernoon Code Standards & Front-end Development Best Practices

A very detailed and well-written document. My favorite line:

   Use CSS sprites generously. They make hover states easy, 
   improve page load time, and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Funny and true.

dmpatiernoon From idea to app in less than three weeks

That's an interesting idea. Could be useful for people traveling with iPod touches.

Yes, I use and love TestFlight. They really have a great product.

dmpatiernoon How to get 4 to 5 stars on the App Store

Appirater defaults to asking only once, and not until two weeks of steady usage. This helps get better reviews since people who use the app a lot tend to like it. In addition, developers have full control over when to display the prompt to avoid interrupting certain tasks.

dmpatiernoon Pic A Fight: Instagram meets FaceMash

Looks great. I've been working on something similar for iOS, but with themed challenges. There's a lot of potential here.

http://photochallengeapp.com

dmpatiernoon Hybrid Incremental MySQL Backups

The real surprise here is that Facebook was still using mysqldump to perform regular backups. Yikes that's slow.

dmpatiernoon Apple’s Three Laws of Developers

It made me think of Tron.

dmpatiernoon Egypt has shut off the Internet (update: not everywhere)

   Update: It's not everywhere. A foreign journalist at the Semiramis 
   Intercontinental hotel says he has internet access.

dmpatiernoon ITerm 2

Awesome. I use iTerm instead of Terminal primarily for its "Send Input to All Tabs" feature, and it's nice to see the project continue with these performance improvements.

dmpatiernoon Ex-Programmer at Goldman Found Guilty of Stealing Trading Code

Perhaps it's just a difference in business culture, but I would feel like a major asshole negotiating such benefits as a software developer.

dmpatiernoon Ex-Programmer at Goldman Found Guilty of Stealing Trading Code

Mr. Aleynikov wanted to be able to work from New Jersey, where he lived, and eventually agreed to work out of New York City if Teza paid an additional $200 a month for his parking, Mr. Malyshev said.

Pretty ridiculous arguing over a 0.2% salary increase.

dmpatiernoon JavaScript on deviantART: DWait and Dependencies

Not if you set a proper far-future Expires header.

dmpatiernoon JavaScript on deviantART: DWait and Dependencies

You're right about them not being minified, but wrong about the need for 4 external stylesheets.

Look at their home page, for example. It uses just one stylesheet (v6core.css). That same file is also used on their blog, so my browser already has it cached. Perfect!

None of those stylesheets are less than 45K, so the savings they get from not needing to download them on every page outweighs the HTTP request hit they take by including them separately on more complex pages.

dmpatiernoon JavaScript on deviantART: DWait and Dependencies

They're certainly doing the right thing here. JavaScript optimization is a constant battle between (1) reducing HTTP requests by grouping code together in a single file, and (2) reducing file sizes by splitting code into separate files.

You don't want to group too much because you risk downloading code you don't need, but you don't want to split too much because you need to keep HTTP requests low. Proper optimization requires intelligent grouping of related code to create a balance between these two ideals, allowing the browser to cache commonly used resources so subsequent page loads are fast.

Their blog page has 6 external JavaScript files and 4 external stylesheets. Those numbers are pretty reasonable given the scope of their site.

dmpatiernoon Show HN: Manage your time, automatically, with Location Pie (my side project)

For me it provides incentive just to get out of the damn house. :P

And it's really great knowing how long I've been at work without needing to keep track in my head.

dmpatiernoon Show HN: Manage your time, automatically, with Location Pie (my side project)

The labels do have to be created manually, although it only requires two taps to do so, and it can be applied retroactively.

dmpatiernoon Facetime for the Mac

My favorite feature of FaceTime for the Mac: it stays full screen even when you tab away to do work on another monitor.

FaceTime is now my preferred video conferencing software.