Hacker News Reader

janconaon App Store: Sentence first — verdict afterwards

Another reminder that IPhone developers are all sharecroppers: http://goo.gl/HPAp

janconaon Clarifying SourceForge.net’s denial of site access for certain persons

A project I work on, Android on Freerunner, ran into this issue with Google Code a while back. We had a user in iran who was unable to access our project because Google was blocking access from their country. It seems that the only alternative is to host your project on a site located outside the US.

janconaon We Stole Your Pictures, Now We’re Going To Sue You

It's not AP, it's AFP (Agence France-Presse) that's accused of stealing the photos.

janconaon Google Street View Logs Wi-Fi Networks, Mac Addresses

The "when done by individuals" doesn't really apply where the web's involved because it's extremely cheap to harness the efforts of many individuals. I don't know how many access points Google has in their database, but Wigle has over 20 million in theirs, collected by thousands of people on every continent. I don't know how Wigle is funded, but my impression is that they're a pretty low-overhead operation.

My point is that if you're concerned about the privacy implications of an access point database, you should be concerned no matter who's putting it together.

janconaon Google Street View Logs Wi-Fi Networks, Mac Addresses

This has been going on for years. See wardriving: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardriving and Wigle: http://wigle.net/ Or is it only a problem when Google does it?

janconaon Why More U.S. Expatriates Are Turning In Their Passports

It's more nuanced yhan that. You have to renounce your citizenshop, but after Britain doesn't recognize that you'll be a dual national. See: http://www.richw.org/dualcit/faq.html

janconaon Writer Peter Watts Guilty Verdict in Border Incident

Since knowledge of jury nullification is far from widespread, and any mention of it during a trial would likely lead to an immediate mistrial, I think he is correct not to begrudge the jury their verdict.

janconaon Autism Clusters Tied to College-Educated Parents

This clustering is not really news--it's been noticed for years. One possible explanation is "assortative mating".

The theory is that geeks marrying other geeks raises the likelihood of having hyper-geeks as offspring, and today it's much easier/more likely for geeks to meet and breed with one another than it was in the past.

janconaon Java is pass-by-value, Dammit (and so are Ruby and Python, Dammit)

I think I first saw this debated in comp.lang.java in 1996: http://bit.ly/5XOSey I don't think the arguments have changed much.

janconaon Pigeon beats broadband in data transfer race

Obligatory RFC 1149 reference: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149

We may have to update the old "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes..." chestnut.

janconaon Ask HN: How old were you when you got your first computer?

KIM-1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1) in 1979. I was 23.

janconaon Wanted: A New Home for My Country

Sea levels in the Maldives appear to be stable or falling: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/19/despite-popular-opinio...