Hacker News Reader

epeon The Dropbox iPhone App is Out

Awesome! Huge improvement over using the web client. One feature request, and I don't know if this is in line with your vision for the app, but it would be awesome if you could edit plain text files from within the app itself.

epeon Engineering a Better Alarm Clock

I used to have the exact same problem and used something along these lines for years and liked it: http://www.meijer.com/catalog/product.jsp?productId=131845&#...

epeon Sublime Text

Please do, I'm curious to take a look at it.

epeon Young Workers in Free Fall: 1/3 Under 35 Live with Parents

"...34 percent of workers under 35 live with their parents for financial reasons"

I'd like to see "workers under 35" defined a bit more precisely. Is it literally "anyone under the age of 35 who holds a job", which would include teenagers working at McDonald's and (quite unsurprisingly) living with their parents?

epeon Subcases and Hierarchy

Am I missing something about the database section? It seems like if I add, e.g. a right child to node B in the diagram, I will have to update the "right" values on nodes A & B, as well as both the "left" and "right" values on C & E. Imagine doing this with a much larger subtree where C is, and you're looking at a ton of UPDATEs to store one new node, aren't you?

epeon JCryption - JavaScript data encryption

Voted up in hopes that tptacek sees this so I can watch him rip it apart. ;)

epeon Convert HTML to PDF, an OpenSource Alternative Based on Webkit

Agreed for arbitrary HTML, but there a lot of webapps (including one I've written) where it's useful to be able to produce PDF output. When you control the HTML and can test that it converts to PDF the way you want, this can be much faster than trying to generate PDFs from raw Postscript or whatever.

epeon The One in Which I Say Open Source Software Sucks

I know that one example does not a complete refutation make, but:

http://adium.im/

epeon Ask HN: your favorite obscure Firefox extensions?

If you do any web development that involves web metrics (Google Analyitics, Omniture, etc.), Omnibug is quite useful:

http://www.rosssimpson.com/dev/omnibug.html

epeon Amusing ourselves to death - Huxley vs Orwell

While there are valid reasons to fear both the "Orwell dystopia" and the "Huxley dystopia", the former tends to send more of a chill down my spine. I think this is because it seems much more possible, on a personal level, to resist or opt out of the Huxley dystopia than the Orwell one. Postman may have a compelling point that much of it has happened already, but it has happened through individual choices that I don't have to share -- the books are still there to be read, the tools & techniques are there to filter the information overload & focus on the good stuff. Admittedly this is not easy, but in the Orwell dystopia it's not even a possibility.

disclaimer: I haven't read the book and am responding to the (likely oversimplified) line of argument presented in the comic.

epeon "If you move your mouse pointer continuously... the query may not fail."

"Inverted commas"? Really?

epeon What's Holding Back Google Apps?

Exactly. GE may have the resources to safeguard data on its own servers better than Google could, but the average small/medium business almost certainly does not.

epeon Ask PG: Leader board ranked my comment karma

I would guess that the supply of high-quality submissions is fairly inelastic compared to the supply of high-quality comments; i.e., there are enough people submitting articles that the good ones will likely get submitted either way, while the same may not be true for comments.

epeon We don't need more doctors

But we need to move away from the "guild" mentality that has kept boundaries narrow and created regulatory, licensing and reimbursement obstacles to new models of health care delivery.

Fair enough, and some of his ideas seem good, but the "guild mentality" is precisely what's keeping the supply of doctors down. There are regulatory burdens on both sides of the equation, and I don't think it's entirely clear which way things would move if they were relaxed.

epeon Apple snags Ex-OLPC security chief

What a fantastic summary of OLPC's failure. Thank you for the link.

epeon How David Beats Goliath

Even though I sometimes enjoy his articles, I can never read Malcolm Gladwell without thinking of this: http://candid.livejournal.com/770034.html

epeon Visualizing Bayes' theorem

An explanation similar to this was what made Bayes' theorem really click for me when I took probability. Thanks Prof. Terpstra!

http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/ndsu/normann/statistics/faculty/te...

epeon Redcar is cool, but I still can’t use Linux

It's quite simple to rebind home/end to work like you expect in all Cocoa text controls (i.e., almost anywhere you edit text -- Firefox is the one frustrating exception I'm aware of). If you haven't taken a look at the Cocoa keybinding system, I suggest you do so. It's really quite flexible.

http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/Cocoa%20Text%20System....

epeon Ask HN: Would you pay for a shared office/startup space? What would it need?

There's one in Denver that I've heard good things about:

http://hivecoop.pbwiki.com/

Despite having an 8-5 job already, at $100/mo. I would be tempted to sign up just for a place to work on side projects.

epeon The Rules Apply To Everyone

Those essays sound interesting -- any chance you have a link handy?

epeon The Best E-Mail Program Ever: How Gmail destroyed Outlook.

Thanks!

epeon The Best E-Mail Program Ever: How Gmail destroyed Outlook.

Until I can label messages without touching the mouse (Greasmonkey and the like don't count), gmail has certainly not "reached perfection".

epeon The Extraordinary Happenings At BitTorrent

> Cohen, who has recently had highly publicized financial troubles, may have simply been bought off.

[citation needed]

epeon Can Dropbox Be Trusted?

It looks to me like "Personal Information" refers to just that, your personal information (name, address, phone number, etc.), not the files you store in your Dropbox. (IANAL)

epeon DNS Drama Exposed (Dramatically)

As a fellow DNS non-expert, I found http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/iguide-kaminsky-dns-vuln.htm... to be pretty clear.

epeon Poll: Turn off News.YC a few hours a day?

Fixing your brain is feature creep, but keeping a high signal-to-noise ratio is well within the design goal of HN. If intermittently turning off the site can help accomplish that (not saying it will, just that it might), it seems worth trying.

epeon Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret

Hehe, good one, but I think he means the email that the can't-typers send him will be "really short".

epeon Write a Sudoku Solver in Python

A cool OCaml version:

http://www.ffconsultancy.com/ocaml/sudoku/index.html

epeon Ask HN: Software for diagramming a system?

Another alternative is Dia: http://live.gnome.org/Dia

It is (or was last I looked) less polished than OmniGraffle, but open source and cross-platform.

epeon Build Enterprise Applications for the Employees, Not Managers

If you design it for the employees, I'm not sure it qualifies as "Enterprise" software any more. Not that that's a bad thing.