Hacker News Reader

I'm really excited about the Event changes. Will definitely be updating our app as soon as possible. Thanks!

illaminton Cray T94 Supercomputer on Ebay

And how well-built it is! Look at the construction: all-machined bolts and panels and stuff. Looks like something you'd find in the avionics bay of a spaceship. I love how the panels have milled labels, too: "Common Memory", etc. Looks like it'd sing "Daisy, Daisy" as you opened it up. If I had the means I'd pick this thing up and put it in my living room in a heartbeat. Alas.

illaminton Inside a Nuclear Control Room

Growing up I really wished that I could work on things like that: I love switches, knobs, dials, klaxons, etc. but the best I have is vim and a command line. Obviously usability can be improved but I'll still lament the decline of big clunky switches and blinkenlights.

illaminton WebKit sorts JS arrays using Selection Sort

I think they're both using Nitro (depending on who you ask: http://ariya.ofilabs.com/2012/06/nitro-javascriptcore-and-ji...), but UIWebViews don't have JIT compilation turned on (no executable memory pages allowed in iOS apps), so they're slower.

illaminton Keyless BMW cars prove to be very easy to steal

It's not keyless entry, it's the electronic keys used for push-to-start (which is also an unavoidable option, but it's one I like).

illaminton Vulnerabilities in Heroku's Build System

Perhaps a fantastic example of why keeping detailed configuration in environment variables is probably a bad idea. Your private SSH key isn't part of the environment. It's configuration. Treat it as such.

illaminton The New MacBook Pro: Unfixable, Unhackable, Untenable

I've always been in the camp that rarely replaces the battery in my Mac laptops, especially with the new LiPo batteries. It's not like they're NiCads that need replacing every month (I remember having a stack of batteries for my Powerbook Duo). Additionally, in the past, the only other components I've replaced have been drives (adding an SSD) and memory (upgrading to the max amount supported by the board). In this case, you've already got those. If you go the 16GB route and pick an SSD appropriate to your needs (I'd never want to trust 768GB of data to one drive in a portable machine, anyways), what's left to upgrade?

Seriously, most people talk about adding SSDs and replacing drives: it already has an SSD that is near-as-makes-no-difference fast enough to saturate the SATA bus. People expecting to get the one-time boost they got from going to a 5400RPM drive to a blazing-fast SSD won't ever experience that again until we push past SATA interfaces. The 16GB of RAM you can option it out with is also pretty close to not only the limits of practicality but also the limits of the chipset. So, those points are moot. Max out the RAM and pick any SSD and you'll never need to touch them during the lifetime of the computer, and if you could, it wouldn't have any real effect. The SSD is even socketed so--should it die--you can replace it.

And, sure, the screen is hard to replace, but it's not like Apple's ever been the pinnacle of upgradability anyways. What were you expecting, a socketed processor and some thumbscrews so you could drop in a new chip? Whether you know it or not, this serves the needs of well over 99% of Apple's market for the MacBook Pro, and if it doesn't serve yours--if you really insist that you must be able to replace and/or repair every single component in your computer, then a Mac wasn't for you in the first place. Two Thunderbolt ports and two USB 3.0 ports further drive the point home. I do, like many of you, lament the loss of the "hacker" ethos that enables us to modify our computers and drop in new parts, but we're kidding ourselves. This isn't a new state of affairs and we're making a mountain out of a molehill.

illaminton Encrypted Chat Developer Detained, Interrogated at US Border

Link is blocked via Websense at work. Is there an alternate source?

illaminton Show HN: My first personal app - HackerNews for iPhone/iPad

Yes. Please. I'll buy it the moment you do.

illaminton GNU Emacs Reference mugs now available

No, I was legitimately curious. Thanks!

illaminton GNU Emacs Reference mugs now available

Where's the vim equivalent?

illaminton JQuery knobs

I wanted to work on some of the usability issues raised in this thread, but I'm not the biggest fan of the style of the original JavaScript, so I ported (most of) the code to CoffeeScript:

https://github.com/wyattanderson/jQuery-Knob

I left out some of the configurability by choice, and there's no Cakefile yet, but I added the ability to color the knob through CSS via the addition of a hidden style target element. Maybe not a great practice, but I like it better than embedding style information in the code and HTML. Additionally, it'll draw resolution-doubled on Retina displays.

Feel free to hack on it.

illaminton Try right clicking GitHub's logo

I think this is a fantastic way to handle it. I feel like it should probably be a user-configurable setting, too. There are a surprising number of comments in this thread from people whose process has been interrupted, and I think it's a cop-out to just tell them to ctrl-click to open a new tab. Don't get in the user's way.

illaminton After 2 Years of Testing, Venmo Opens Payment Service to Public

I've managed to convince most of my circle of friends to sign up for and use Venmo, and I'm glad that I did. Makes splitting lunch bills, paying people for beer, collecting utilities from a roommate, splitting a cab, etc. so much easier. Cash feels terrifyingly archaic, credit cards only slightly less so. PayPal? Hah. What is this, 2004? Cashing out is quick and the iPhone app is great. Its simplicity is its strength.

illaminton Show HN: Pitchdeck Inspired Resume

I think resumes like this are nice to show off your front-end design capabilities, but it takes a long time to get relevant information out of them, as opposed to glancing at a black-and-white single-sided 8x11 sheet of paper. You still need something that people can look at and instantly make a decision as to whether or not they want to dig deeper into you.

illaminton The Only Way to Stop SOPA

I think it's naive and dangerously idealistic for the tech community to sit idly by, decrying the state of legislative affairs and refusing to play the game for the sake of honor or some arbitrary sense of intellectual superiority. I'm not saying that the situation isn't shitty or that we shouldn't work to fix what is clearly a broken system, but the IP lobby is playing for keeps here and we're throwing around open letters and hashtags.

illaminton Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works

You'd think that tech companies involved would have a stronger lobbying arm. Every one of those extremely wealthy individuals that signed onto that "open letter" to congress should be funding lobbyists in combination with Google, ISPs, etc. and every provider out there who stands to lose from the passage of SOPA.

Seriously, look at it. The IP lobby is spending millions to buy out Congress and we've got the billionaires and corporations that are significantly larger, richer and more powerful than the IP lobby writing fucking letters?

illaminton A Case Against Using CoffeeScript

I've been working on a large project in CoffeeScript for about 9 months now and have never noticed or felt burdened by the translation between JavaScript source line to CoffeeScript source line in debugging. Maybe it's different for others, but the code is so structurally similar that there shouldn't be a major difference. It's not like looking at the assembler output of a C++ program and having to demangle names and deal with compiler-generated labels and jumps etc.; the structure of the program is still the same, it's just the syntax that's really only mildly different.

Of course, though, it comes down to personal preference. Don't want to use CS? Fine! Great! Go hog wild! No one's forcing you to. Me, though? I'll never go back.

illaminton The ¬NED pin goes low on detection of a nuclear detonation [pdf]

Well, this is certainly cooler than anything I work on, nuclear destruction or not.

illaminton LED, CFL and Incandescent bulbs side by side

$40, though, really?

illaminton Why doesn't every company buy developers the best hardware?

Echoing this. Most workloads don't need dual Xeons, or even more than 4GB of RAM, but an SSD and two big monitors can make even a low-end machine feel like an absolute Ferrari when you're not waiting for Outlook to launch or wasting time otherwise. SSDs are the best productivity upgrade you can buy: $100, maybe $200 per developer and suddenly no one's sitting around just waiting for their IDE to launch.

illaminton Ada holding up F-22 Raptor upgrades

We had a project in our "Programming Languages" class that consisted of solving a problem in a number of different languages, including Ada, which proved to be the most difficult simply because of the lack of decent resources or guides online. I'm not saying I couldn't get accustomed to it, but with just about any other language you can go online and find a few guides that'll get you acquainted with the paradigm of a language, and I couldn't find anything like that for Ada. Programming in Prolog was easier because at least then I could go to our library and dust off a book from the late '80s about how to write programs in Prolog.

illaminton Stanford CS enrollment increase "downright scary"

Seriously? Just because there are waves of people enrolling in an introductory CS course at an extremely high-level CS school like Stamford doesn't mean that any reasonable percentage of those students will actually end up getting degrees. I'd estimate that less than 10% of the people enrolled in the intro CS course at my university ended up getting a CS degree.

Sure, there's bound to be an uptick; demand for developers is huge and all, but it's still a rigorous course of study and I think you need to be pretty driven to "get" it all. I'm not even remotely worried, because even if there were an overabundance of "computer scientists", there would still be a dearth of good computer scientists.

illaminton Fogus: Node.js should become its own language

Seriously, CoffeeScript is amazing. I've been working on a large client-side project in CoffeeScript for the past few weeks and every time I look at the resulting JS output I can't imagine having written it by hand; it's been a massive boon to my productivity. I wrote JavaScript for years before this and hated it at times, and now I can't ever imagine going back if given the choice.

illaminton Cracking the code

You can opt out and see what info RapLeaf has on you here: https://www.rapleaf.com/people

I'm amazed, but not necessarily surprised, that they could pin down my income level, location, age, etc. from just my email address.

illaminton Poor People Should Probably Gamble More

And for God's sake, man, pay your tickets before they're overdue, a few hundred bucks is nothing compared to the pain of trying to get just about anything done at the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles!

It's true: I just moved to CT and had to deal with transferring a car title, registration and license from out of state and it was a nightmare. Definitely would've rather spent the 8 hours and ~$350 at a casino, of course.

illaminton Poll: Are you using SSDs?

I started with an Intel G2 SSD in my MacBook Pro, then I added an OCZ RevoDrive PCI-E SSD to my desktop PC. My work laptop has an Intel SSD, and I'm considering picking a few more up for my servers at home and my media center PC as prices plummet. I can definitely say that they make a noticeable difference in perceived computing speed, and I'd never go back to regular hard drives if given the choice.

illaminton Ask HN: Is USA that bad when it comes to health insurance, etc?

I transitioned recently from my parents' insurance which they pay for themselves as small business owners to the insurance my employer provides, which is probably the best insurance situation I could possibly be in. I pay about $16 a month on my paycheck for no deductible, very high lifetime limit, essentially unrestricted healthcare coverage, and pretty decent dental and vision as well. I'm lucky I love my job, basically, because being in my parents' situation where they paid thousands of thousands of dollars a year for practically no preventative coverage would be pretty awful if anything actually happened.

Basically, if you work for a large company and are in a large insurance pool, life's probably pretty good. If you're a small business owner, fresh out of college, unemployed, or have a preexisting condition that can't get covered for whatever reason, you're potentially quite screwed.