Hacker News Reader

gr366on First Look: How Penguin Will Reinvent Books With iPad:UK

Don't look now, but what's going to be the must-have educational toy for next holiday season?

gr366on A New Way of Working: A Two-Month Recap

It's fascinating to watch 37signals adapt as it becomes a slightly larger company. I think the number of features accomplished is pretty impressive for it being their first attempt at this new way of working. Across multiple products, no less.

My first reaction to a lot of their learnings was "Duh", but of course I've only learned a number of those lessons after several years working with agile dev teams. Credit to them for sharing all of this.

gr366on Breathing

Would it feel more relevant if you were familiar with the author's credentials? James Duncan Davidson, among other things, wrote Tomcat and the Java build tool Ant (and got both donated from Sun to the Apache Software Foundation). He wrote or cowrote a number of O'Reilly books on Cocoa and OS X, and contributed a chapter on deployment to the well known Agile Web Development with Rails. All that prior to his budding career as a photographer.

Having that information might make it feel more appropriate in this forum, but I would hope a topic like this, which will affect everyone at some point in their life, would be fair game on HN.

gr366on Breathing

How do you comment on something so heartfelt and meaningful other than to say I'm very sorry for his loss but deeply grateful that he shared this.

gr366on Bill Gates on the iPad - and his envy of the iPhone

Plus, the iPad has a stylus that ships with every user. Multiple, in fact.

gr366on Ask HN: Google Reader Alternative?

I use Feverº by Shaun Inman. It requires that you have a hosting account somewhere, but has an interesting twist to it:

You set up your subscriptions as either "Kindling" or "Sparks". Kindling are your essential feeds and Sparks are your supplementary feeds. So Sparks just kind of sit in the background (though you can read them too), but when enough of them start pointing at an interesting story, that story becomes "Hot" and is prioritized by "temperature", kind of like Techmeme does, but for your personal feeds. It has completely wiped out my "Unread Items" issue, because that number isn't really surfaced in the UI. And with the Hot items, you're unlikely to miss something important.

http://feedafever.com/

gr366on Scott Adams: The Problem With the Economy

Well that's a shame, had you been able to get past that and finish reading, you'd have seen that his point was people are spending too much time marketing crap products and not enough time building superior ones, which suggests lots of opportunities for the entrepreneurial sort that read Hacker News.

gr366on The NBA's Locker-Room Nerds

"A spokesman for the Portland Trail Blazers says the handful of players on the team who cozy up with novels didn't feel comfortable revealing themselves."

I'm imagining getting together some teenagers to do public service announcements aimed at NBA stars, to let them know that they needn't be ashamed of who they are.

It's interesting to see the divide between foreign born players and American players, in terms of how they spend their free time. Also nice to see that Pau Gasol is in fact reading 2666, which Phil Jackson hand-picked for him (in the original Spanish, I imagine?)

gr366on Django Advent - Messages for the rest of us (Feb 10, 2010)

Point of clarification: I believe Django Advent is the site that is hosting articles about the forthcoming Django 1.2 features (like messaging in this particular post), and is not the name of a feature within Django. (Even though the title of the post and its context on HN might make it look as though it is).

gr366on Is Adrian Peterson a Liability? A running back's fumble rate distribution

So the conclusion was that based on the analysis he's not a liability...for the Vikings. But as a pretty serious fantasy football owner, I wonder if — given the fact that Peterson was the consensus #1 overall pick last season — he was a liability to his fantasy owners. You pretty much have to play your number 1 pick (and a homerun hitter like Peterson) every week, but were there less glamorous, middle-tier running back choices that ended up giving their owners a better chance of winning each week (assuming negative points for fumbles lost in the scoring system)?

Yes, I do want to be the Billy Beane of fantasy football.

gr366on Shutup.css — Hide Comments on Many Popular Websites

Okay, not so much the use of the CSS @import rule as much as the mechanism used to deploy the rules. I haven't seen a lot of user installable stylesheets that "phone home." Seems like an under-utilized technique.

UPDATED: Yes, I understand @import is used frequently on the web. My point being A) You don't see a lot of browser-installed stylesheets and B) the few that I've seen haven't made use of @import.

gr366on Shutup.css — Hide Comments on Many Popular Websites

And to go full circle, has anyone checked to see if it works on Daring Fireball With Comments?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1097490

gr366on Shutup.css — Hide Comments on Many Popular Websites

What's really clever about this is that the stylesheet you download and use in your browser merely imports another stylesheet on stevenf's own site, so that additional CSS rules to hide comments can be added for the immediate benefit of everyone without them having to download updates.

gr366on Why Google is bad for the newspaper business

Whether Google News is good or bad for a newspaper's online business is also partly a function of how big the newspaper is. Google News seems to frequently promote the biggest sources (NY Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, LA Times) with the main headline for a story and lump in the smaller players among the "2,000 plus sources". If you're a big player, it's probably fine to be part of Google News.

If you're a smaller player, maybe you needn't be covering stories that the big players are covering. Your readers are probably already only coming to you for local news anyway (part of the reason AP and Reuters content so often supplements a site). Reporting on more local stories could make you more likely to become the de facto source for your Local News section within Google News.

I've heard anecdotally that Yahoo's front door (which shows headlines from 3rd party sources) and Drudge are the biggest drivers of traffic to newspaper sites. Note that neither of those referrers tries to point out a dozen other sources for the story.

gr366on Engadget - We're turning comments off for a bit

I wonder about using something like Facebook Connect for commenter accounts, and using the person's full name that Facebook provides. People might be less likely to post useless or trolling comments if their real name (indexable by search engines) and even a link to their Facebook profile were attached to their comment.

gr366on RedesignGoogle: clarity wins, with risque and rebuilt not far behind (NSFW)

While the winning design is nice and quite devoid of visual noise, I did find the mouseovers that display the "Cached" and "Similar" links along with the green URL to be distracting precisely because they would appear during mouseover and catch my eye more than if they were just there to begin with.

Also, there are probably millions or billions of other web pages in greater need of a redesign than Google's results page. This contest feels like trying to come up with a more exotic flavor of vanilla: Tahitian, Indonesian, Madagascar, etc.

gr366on The Lack of Netiquette

First off, this is bad behavior on Ajaxian's part, and they should learn that people will appreciate them just as much (more, actually) if they send the user off-site to the content they're pointing at.

Second, shouldn't it be possible for Roman to prevent another site from embedding his IFRAME? Either catching the window.parent.location in JavaScript or only serving the IFRAME page if his own domain is in the referrer?

gr366on Apple makes $208 on each $499 iPad

Even if this seemingly premature and speculative analysis is correct, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Apple makes a good profit margin on their hardware. In the last decade they've demonstrated the pattern of using media distribution as the loss leader to sell their profitable hardware.

What's impressive this time is that they may make such a healthy margin on a hardware product that came in so far under everyone's expected $800-1000 price point.

gr366on IPad UI Roundup

Nice to have a post that deals with the concrete details of what the iPad is today, not what it may become. I agree that some of the UI elements look shoehorned in from the iPhone interface, and running iPhone apps on the device just wasn't going to have an elegant solution given the resolution-dependent UIs.

But the revolutionary bit is the multitouch/lack of mouse pointer part. The iPhone was a gentle introduction to this new paradigm. It'll be interesting to watch how people catch on and how quickly other companies adopt it — not to mention how Apple handles its patents around this stuff.

gr366on Mark Cuban: Talking the IPad, Kids, Making Money and Video

You're right, I don't think Flash has anything to do with the 3G streaming issues. On the plus side for iPad users, they should be very happy with their contract-free 3G service, because it will never drop a call.

gr366on Former Amazon Exec on iPad: "Amazon doubling down, can't afford to lose"

I'm sure Amazon will be more than happy to sell its e-books for viewing on "Kindle for iPad" (provided Apple doesn't try to shut their app down as "duplicate functionality"). If we consider the Kindle hardware device as a way of priming the pump for digital book adoption, it seems to have worked.

It will be interesting to see what pricing looks like between iBooks and Kindle books (I noticed a number of $14.99 options in the presentation when most Kindle books are $9.99). Even though I'm a Mac/iTunes user, currently Amazon gets the bulk of my digital music money, because they offer better deals than Apple and have made the download to iTunes process pretty painless. My guess is they'll find numerous ways to operate within the new ecosystem the iPad creates.

gr366on NFL Games Have 11 Minutes of Action

That's a great point and I agree with you. However by that logic, shouldn't the amount of time counted for football include when the quarterback comes under center? There's a lot of football going on when Peyton Manning comes to the line of scrimmage. Or when a quarterback is trying to draw the defense offsides.

gr366on Is Apple Evil?

I don't know the answer to this, but have we seen evidence that Apple's commitment to OS X is waning? They seem to have discussed multiple product lines today, one of those being the "computer" market, and the others being part of their new "mobile device" markets, namely iPhone/iPod Touch and the new tablet.

I do know that as far as tech support, I've had to help my girlfriend out a ton with her MacBook (curse you spinning beach ball), but the extent of support I've had to provide for her iPhone has been, "switch it off and switch it on again."

Perhaps Apple is distinguishing between full-fledged computers (for those who have the technical skill and desire to tinker) and consumer devices that are, yes, tightly controlled but less likely to get screwed up by your average person who likes to email, browse the web and watch videos.

gr366on NFL Games Have 11 Minutes of Action

I'd be interested to see a similar breakdown of a baseball game. If you count from the pitcher's release to the end of a play (basically, when the ball is in motion), I bet the total would clock in somewhere around 15 minutes.

Edit: 15 minutes on average. Of course baseball isn't timeboxed like most other sports.

gr366on [dead]

You know, they could have done something with user agent (up-to-date Safari, Chrome or Firefox gets a YES, IE or older versions get a NO, etc), reverse IP lookup (to determine if you're in a "techie" part of the country), etc. That might make it a bit more interesting than randomly picking.

gr366on After Three Months, Only 35 Subscriptions for Newsday's Web Site

Oops, deleted my similar comment I submitted simultaneously. But yes, that $9000 figure is lazy math. It would be $9100 for a full year of 35 subscribers. Considerably less for 3 months (like $2100), and that's assuming all 35 subscribers signed up on day one.

gr366on Poll: Do you ask friends to upvote your submissions?

That's a very valuable distinction. Thanks for pointing that out.

gr366on HN needs to post new stories on the front page to give them a chance

I've created a poll to find out how common it is to ask friends to upvote submissions. If it really is common behavior, then maybe something does need to be done about this.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1075931

gr366on Apple's Proposed Multi-touch User Interface System

A number of the ubiquitous Tablet rumor articles have quoted inside sources as saying the way you interact with it will be what is revolutionary about it. The patent proposals described in this post would seem to bear that out. (And would be pretty awesome)

gr366on The iState of the Union

If only the President had as one-sided an audience as Steve Jobs does.