Hacker News Reader

jeff18on How to make McDonalds french fries

That article talks about boiling a plastic bag, whereas sous vide is usually no hotter than 140° F.

jeff18on How HTML 5 link prefetching can make your site load faster with one line of code

It shouldn't affect Google Analytics and other JavaScript based analytics, but from the article,

* If this becomes popular it has the potential to skew logs and stats. Consider what happens when a bunch of prefetch requests are made to one of your pages, but the user never actually visits the page. The server (or stats package) doesn’t know the difference.

To clear this up, Firefox sends along an HTTP header, X-moz: prefetch, but you need some logic on the server side to detect it.

jeff18on Perfect email regex finally found

I would estimate about 0.25% of people will make a typo like "@homail.com" or "@gmial.com"

Multiply that by say, 130,000 people, and you are dealing with 325 people who don't receive their download, etc. and are not happy!

I think what would be really awesome is a regex that catches these common typos and warns the user immediately.

jeff18on Google, please add NumPy to App Engine

I think what's crazy is that Google has ignored the Google Code spam issue. People really should have an opt-in checkbox that says "Should this message be forwarded to 852 starred recipients?" or [insert armchair solution here]. It really is truly annoying tracking bugs with Google Code.

jeff18on American Express fails miserably at basic security

Just out of curiosity, what is the actual penalty to American Express for saying their page is secure while transmitting credit card numbers in plaintext?

jeff18on Wolfire open sourcing Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, and Penumbra Overture

We have already gotten several offers to purchase the bundle's source code and I hear from other developers that they are getting requests for another promotion.

jeff18on 23andme for only $99 today only

It's not possible to do it anonymously?

jeff18on Why I don't want Flash to die (and you shouldn't either)

It's not about "wanting Flash to die". It's about improving web browsers so Flash is not necessary.

jeff18on Bump

This is a pretty loaded example. You're using the absolute worst case scenario as the use case for bumping (requiring two bumps and that their server is down). 99 times out of 100, you only need a single bump, and their uptime has been great so far!

jeff18on Bump

You're seriously scared about destroying your phone by lightly tapping fists?

jeff18on Deceiving Users with the Facebook Like Button

I see this story come up a lot, but according to reCAPTCHA, it's an urban legend. There is not really any evidence that spammers actually do this at all, let alone do it on a meaningful scale.

jeff18on 4.2.2.2: The story behind a DNS legend

http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq.html#privacy

If you are correct, there is a massive conspiracy at Google, where a single whistleblower would be able to cost the company billions of dollars.

jeff18on SproutCore: Introducing GreenHouse

Why not ship a self-contained demo where all you have to do is double click it to try it out, like Atlas?

I have to admit I am having some trouble installing this and setting up a sample project.

jeff18on Don't be a douchebag: Best practices for game mechanics in your web app

HackerNews has leaderboards though. http://news.ycombinator.com/lists

jeff18on HTML5 presentation

The WebKit nightly builds are by default.

Chrome can be with a runtime flag.

FireFox has an about:config flag.

jeff18on More Web Inspector Updates

I see this complaint leveraged at the web inspector a lot, but I don't really understand it. It seems like the differences are very subtle.

http://i.imgur.com/amWMy.png vs. http://i.imgur.com/ysH0a.png

(As an aside, note that FireBug doesn't know that the font color has been overridden by the font tag.)

I'm curious what changes specifically you would make to improve it?

jeff18on More Web Inspector Updates

Could you be more specific? Is it just a font thing?

jeff18on Adobe makes CS5 preorder form Flash only. Alt title: Worst use of Flash ever.

I'm not seeing the Flash form in Chrome on Mac OS X.

jeff18on Google App Engine turns 2

I think you have many valid concerns about App Engine which are definitely worth discussing, but your over-the-top rhetoric and exaggerated numbers make it hard to do that!

P.S. have you considered AppScale to migrate off of Google's infrastructure? Google has been funding a project that is a complete clone of the App Engine API, but can run on arbitrary hardware using MongoDB or a plethora of other middleware.

I think we've hit the max comment depth, and I think it's time to turn on the noprocast settings again. ;)

jeff18on Google App Engine turns 2

According to the independently verifiable health dashboard, the current memcache latency average for today is about 7ms[1]. The average datastore get() time is around 50ms[2]. The average datastore put() time is around 100ms[3].

Are you accusing Google of falsifying this trivially reproducible and abundant data? That would be quite an interesting story. ;)

[1] http://code.google.com/status/appengine/detail/memcache/2010...

[2] http://code.google.com/status/appengine/detail/datastore/201...

[3] http://code.google.com/status/appengine/detail/datastore/201...

jeff18on Google App Engine turns 2

You claim that about 90% of applications require sub-100ms latencies on datastore writes. Can you back this up? On the contrary, it seems to me that very few applications need to be blocked by writing to the datastore, let alone cases where 100 milliseconds make them unusable.

Secondly, 3 millisecond memcached access is several orders of magnitude too slow? 3 nanosecond memcache access would be quite a physical achievement. ;)

jeff18on Google App Engine turns 2

This was largely solved in 1.3.1. I quote:

Reduced error rate with Automatic Datastore Retries - We've heard a lot of feedback that you don't want to deal with the Datastore's sporadic errors. In response, App Engine now automatically retries all datastore calls (with the exception of transaction commits) when your applications encounters a datastore error caused by being unable to reach Bigtable. Datastore retries automatically builds in what many of you have been doing in your code already, and our tests have shown it drastically reduces the number of errors your application experiences (by up to 3-4x error reduction for puts, 10-30x for gets).

jeff18on Google App Engine turns 2

How do you reconcile that statement with the fact that tons of developers do actually use it? Myself included. ;)

jeff18on Cappuccino 0.8 released

Awesome, I am a proud supporter of the Atlas beta so I might use this as an excuse to dive in. :)

jeff18on Tell HN: you can pick up a WiFi iPad today and trade it in for a 3G later

Right... Is it a common practice to get customer service reps from a reputable company to sign a contract when they tell you something that does not seem extraordinary?

Update: You guys scared me, so I just called Apple directly. They said that the official policy is that you have 14 days to exchange an opened Apple product, but in the case of the iPad it is common for Apple Store employees to extend this to 30 days (I now see the 30 day extension note on my receipt).

I did not get the phone call in writing though, but as I mentioned, you can verify it for yourself. ;)

jeff18on Tell HN: you can pick up a WiFi iPad today and trade it in for a 3G later

This is totally different. What I am describing is more akin to buying a 16 GB iPod touch and then exchanging it for store credit which you use to buy the currently out-of-stock 32 GB model a couple of weeks later.

I don't have the specific documentation that says this is the case, but I personally canceled my 3G iPad preorder and bought a WiFi model yesterday at the advice of an Apple Store employee.

Just call your local Apple Store and they will verify it for you.

jeff18on Tell HN: you can pick up a WiFi iPad today and trade it in for a 3G later

I did this myself at the suggestion of an Apple rep at the main Apple store in San Francisco.

Go ahead and call your local Apple store if you don't believe me. :)

jeff18on Cappuccino 0.8 released

I'm really, really intrigued by the base-64 assets with an MHTML fallback technique for reducing HTTP requests. What is the best way to do this without using Cappuccino?

jeff18on Price Anchoring, Or Why a $499 iPad Seems Inexpensive

I don't know if you'd want to make it extremely clear that the employer is your first choice and you would like to negotiate your salary to a lower point. It seems like you'd want the exact opposite of that.

jeff18on Faster Firefox landing page increases download conversion by 15%

I'm not totally sure what you mean by tool. Whatever framework you're using surely can include an external file, and if not, even Apache itself can handle this via SSI. It really depends what your web app looks like.