Hacker News Reader

fbnton Kickstarter hides failure

I'm not sure how he got this figure, but a 56% failure rate doesn't seem too bad to me.

fbnton Ask HN: By foot to Y Combinator

I thought interview invites were to be given out on october the 31st. Am I wrong?

fbnton Ask HN: Any great books on Sales and Marketing?

Influence, the psychology of persuasion by Robert Cialdini. An oldie, but a goodie.

fbnton Italian Wikipedia shut down

My bad, I didn't know that. Thanks.

fbnton Italian Wikipedia shut down

I was thinking more about Norway, the Netherlands or some scandinavian countries.. I understand your concern with Germany, we're quite some different countries now btw :)

fbnton Italian Wikipedia shut down

I wasn't talking about the actual Joe the plumber, I was simply referring to the 'average person', the 'average joe' if you wanna keep the naming reference. Italians just have no idea of who/what Joe the plumber is.

fbnton Italian Wikipedia shut down

The situation here is getting more and more anachronistic each day, they are this close to make me seriously angry. The country is run by a mass of greedy, corrupt, paranoid, elderly individuals with chronic sexual disorders who completely lost touch with reality. And the italian equivalent of 'joe the plumber' isn't that much of a good person either. I can trust no one anymore.

I don't really know how to deal with all this. Maybe we should outsource our parliament. We should really hire people from other countries to do the job. Don't worry, the pay is really good, the weather is fine, and you'll always have good food for lunch. Sit in our parliament, you make the laws that helps us grow as a decent developed country while making sure that the justice system works well, and we'll follow them.

fbnton UARS satellite: New images of tumbling spacecraft

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/uars/index.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hRsgdyFQjM

6.5 tons of equipment burning into the atmosphere should be visible at the naked eye even in daylight.

fbnton The Google Wallet, a lifetime log of your purchases

I misread, my bad.

fbnton The Google Wallet, a lifetime log of your purchases

Iubenda

fbnton HTML5 Map of the the World Migrations using SVG, Raphael.js and offline storage

You could over impose three dotted lines with a different color/dot-spacing to each connecting line, then set a timeout and alternate their visibility accordingly, so you can get a "dots flowing inside the line" effect. Not sure if this can work with canvas though.

fbnton HTML5 Map of the the World Migrations using SVG, Raphael.js and offline storage

Nice and interesting, well done! I also like the offline caching feature.

The only tiny imperfection I see it's in the lines connecting two countries, I'd like to see an arrow so I know if I'm looking at arrivals or departures.

Is there a way to filter the GMO database to see only the current migration flow (say, last 5 years)?

fbnton Should you launch at a conference?

Imho, when you're launching a product, if your final goal is to get VC funding, then go for a tech conference. If your final goal instead is to sell a product, then you probably want to look at other venues, and spend your energies in marketing efforts to reach out to your potential clients.

fbnton The process behind our startup's logo design - draftswork shown

Unfortunately, I have to agree with the negative comments. Even if the whole process denotes great consistency and attention to details, it really sounds like a huge amount of energy spent on something that I may consider relevant, but not to that extent.

Also, having seen the logo multiple times, I actually never got it was a shell. Anyway, thanks for sharing.

fbnton Ask HN: My side project. Is it useful?

Nice tool, good design, UX could be improved, but I like the idea.

   There's not a flight search engine that I know of that
   would group those airports together.

Not really, I always use the map feature on SkyScanner, you can see and choose a nearby airport, and you can also check if a direct flight is available. If there's one thing where your tool is different, is that you can type the name of a random place, but I find hard to believe that people would be so clueless about the place they're going to.

   And two of those airlines (Easyjet, Ryanair) do not show
   up on flight search websites

Again, SkyScanner does that, and so does a number of other flight search engines or travel sites such as Expedia, eDreams, lastminute etc. This is simply untrue.

Overall, good job, I don't see why people wouldn't want to use this.

p.s: Should you land in Verona Villafranca, come say hi! I live near there :)

fbnton Kendo UI - a framework for modern HTML UI

Hey, don't shoot the messenger! I am no related whatsoever with Kendo UI, I read about it on twitter and thought to submit it here to see what you guys think of it. I'm pretty sure there's no voting rings involved.

-the OP.

fbnton Ask HN: Too many costumers, no time

I'd say only few lucky surgeons in private practice make that kind of money. I have no reason to doubt your good faith, but my BS-detector is getting some signals.

So, what's the business about? Can you disclose?

fbnton Ask HN: Let's see your weekend projects

Phras.in - http://phras.in

Phras.in helps you decide which words to use when you are not certain on the right term. A writing life saver.

Also on chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gndekfibfmobgcogjd...

fbnton Fouling Out and Moving On (re: Notifo Shutdown)

Same here. He's rightfully going to be treated as an experienced individual, whereas in my country you'd have an "I'm a failure" sign tattooed on your forehead by now, with nobody willing to do business with you again. This is what makes SV great.

fbnton Ask HN: Why don't we use subtitled films/tv to train speech recognition?

http://voxforge.com have been collecting a big speech corpora over the last few years, under GPL license. That should be the way to follow imho.

Training a speech recognition engine is quite a sophisticated process, and usually requires at least a clean (not noisy) set of samples, which you can't find in dubbed movies and surely not in music.

fbnton Keymaster.js: painless keyboard shortcuts for javascript

I recently had the need of using multiple hotkeys for a web application I'm building.

I tried jQuery hotkeys but I had to drop it for a number of reasons: First of all is the unbind problem (well documented on their bug-tracker), if you bind N different keys combination, the callback function for each hotkey is called N times, and that's really annoying and there are no easy workaround. Other than that, not all keys combination are supported, some keys just doesen't work, and it also bind keys per value instead of code: it's basically designed for american keyboards only, the same key value might have different key-codes for different keyboard layouts.

So I came up with a simple homemade solution that words flawlessly for my needs: http://jsfiddle.net/2Saj8/

I'm looking forward to try out keymaster.js though.

fbnton YC NYC, September 26

Yes, you could easily name it YC Europe. I'd definitely fly in for a YC event.

fbnton Google Buys Motorola For $12.5 Billion

Thanks. Clearly, I'm still sleeping.

fbnton Google Buys Motorola For $12.5 Billion

By the look of motorola solutions website, there's nothing that links the newly acquired company, at least directly, to the mobile phone hardware market.

From Wikipedia:

   Motorola Solution Corporate structure

   The company is structured into two divisions:

   Enterprise: Comprises communications offered to government enterprise 
   mobility business.        
   Motorola develops advanced data capture, wireless infrastructure, bar 
   code scanning, two-way radios and business pagers, wireless broadband 
   networks and RFID solutions to customers worldwide.

   Government: Produces public safety and government products. Motorola 
   develops analog and digital two-way radio, voice and data communications 
   products and systems, Wireless LAN Securities and mobile computing, 
   among others.

fbnton Google Scribe graduates from Labs into Blogger (in Draft)

This is more of a relocation rather then a graduation, possibly part of the recent smothering of G.labs as a whole.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind-fewe...

Anyway, I'm happy to see this particular project still alive somehow. It would be interesting to see how many bloggers will use it on a daily basis. My guess is: not many, for a number of reasons.

fbnton I hate computers. But I love what you can do with them.

I personally tend to dislike people who proudly claim their ignorance about computers, usually with the underlying purpose of distinguish themselves from me, the supposedly technical rat.

I mean, I don't know jack about ancient literature or medicine, but it's not something I'm proud of, and I don't go around bragging on my ignorance for sure.

Not sure if this is the case, but it's something I noticed more than once in my daily life.

fbnton Voice search enabled on Google homepage (Chrome)

For those of you who gets redirected to the localized version of google without the new feature, go to http://www.google.com/en

fbnton ICANN Approves generic top-level domains

Market timing. 20 years ago a top level domain wouldn't have been such a valuable asset.

fbnton ICANN Approves generic top-level domains

So yep, I'm not too concerned about this. ICANN aren't a great organisation, and they seem to mainly bring out new TLDs to get more money.

ICANN is a non-profit whom CEO gets ~1M/year. Executives earn a bonus of more than 50% of their base salaries if specific goals are reached, such as adding a new gTLD.

Source: http://www.thedomains.com/2010/02/11/nonprofit-icann-release...

I really hope this top-level domain thing isn't going anywhere.

fbnton PDF Reader in JavaScript

Crocodoc looks great! Just out of curiosity: do you have a set of fonts ready to deliver to the client in order to make the font-face approach work? What do you do if the PDF if using some obscure font type? Are you using Poppler for server side processing?