joshaidan

The museum of science and technology in Ottawa had a working demo of a stepper switch. When you hear one in action you quickly realize how a rotary telephone works and why it makes the noise it does.

I've heard people say it's quick the sound to hear a CO full of them in action.

Everything is Broken always felt like a theme song for my job in telecommunications at a service provider. Especially the parts about broken lines and broken switches. That's just how universal Dylan's literature really is:

Broken lines, broken strings

Broken threads, broken springs

Broken idols, broken heads

People sleeping in broken beds

Ain’t no use jiving

Ain’t no use joking

Everything is broken

Broken bottles, broken plates

Broken switches, broken gates

Broken dishes, broken parts

Streets are filled with broken hearts

Broken words never meant to be spoken

Everything is broken

Seem like every time you stop and turn around

Something else just hit the ground

...

YouTube version of the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngVMh3vJsVU

What I find soothing about it is when there are long pauses. It makes me wonder... what's making people take long breaks?

What I find cool about this is that I ran it on my profile pic, and when Facebook shrinks it down to the micro size image, you can't tell the difference between the primitive version and the original.

Yeah I totally agree. Personally I want to find a way to do both. Build a great product that's well marketed. If anything, when you build something great, don't totally ignore the marketing side of things like I often do.

I think one way to do both of these is market your product well, yet at the same time develop it in a sustainable way so that this piece of crap is becoming something that eventually looks great on the engineering side of things.

> It's just a wordpress website. You don't need nothing fancy to be successful.

I've observed similar products myself, often ones that are more successful versions of my own creations. I've seen stuff built with spaghetti PHP code, yet it was marketed well and more people were paying money to use it than my own. Yet when I looked at it, the first thing I saw was an SQL injection vulnerability that would allow me to drop the entire database.

It makes me wonder though, if instead of looking at entrepreneurship from the software development side of things, maybe instead I should be trying to build a marketing and advertising agency that builds software. These types of companies seem to make more money than I do.

Yet at the same time, in the marketing companies that come to my mind, the weaknesses in their products tend to be sustainability. I think overtime customers are going to become frustrated with their lack of good support and ability to maintain code and add new features.

Just my thoughts when reflecting on all of this. :)

When I was a kid I learned programming by going to the library and borrowing books on programming. This was, of course, before the days of the Internet where you can use google to find those resources. My biggest challenge was trying to find the tools I needed, i.e. a C/C++ compiler, PASCAL interpreter, assembler for my Commodore 64, because it wasn't like I could go on the internet and download them, and there were fewer free open source tools that I could get my hands on. So I would have to had the money to buy them, as well as find a store were I could purchase them because it wasn't like I could go online and order them.

Anyway, the point I want to make is that I was a pretty self motivated learner, I didn't need someone telling me what to do, but it would have been nice to have the resources I needed, and an "expert" I could go to who could help me when I had questions or didn't understand something.

>> The keystroke-based interface was trashed by critics.

It's kind of ironic how nowadays I prefer using Vim for coding and other tasks. And I also find myself preferring Markdown more and more whenever I can for a variety of tasks, from planning meetings to preparing presentations.

I read on the website that one of the future project goals is to improve stability on OSX. Reading the artist interviews it sounds like it performs very well in Linux.

Informative site. Is it possible to add some Open Graph tags to it to make it easier to share on social media?

I wish this article reached out to the students and tried to tell their side of the story. Good journalism usually tries to hear from both sides of the story--or at the very least give an explanation as to why they couldn't get comment from the students.

Looks good. One positive benefit I can see from churches using this is that they won't have to force their members to join Facebook to stay connected.

The story behind the CVV is something like this:

CVV is also known as card not present number. Historically it was printed on the back of the card, or on the front using unraised type. This way, if an impression of a credit card was taken (using one of those old fashion swipe back and forth machines), the CVV number would not be included in the impression. This provided some protection for card owners, as it prevented a merchant from using the credit card number obtained from an impression to say place an order using the CC over the phone. This is why you're required (or it's recommended) that you ask for the CVV number for any transaction where the card is not present.

One thing that bothers me about "write your book" courses and howtos is that they rarely specify what type of book the course is geared towards. In particular, is this course for fiction or non-fiction writers?

Now, I wonder what Bill received. Bill should make a similar post about his gift, would be cool.

Regarding the whole dog thing. I guess if you're ordering something by drone, it will arrive within 30 minutes. So why not just keep the dog inside or in the kennel for 30 minutes?

Looks like I found my weekend project:

"Show HN: Game where you write Python robots to fight crime"

While there are perhaps many issues regarding whether or not merchants will accept this product for payments, one thought occurred to me.

What happens when merchants/banks start offering the ability to make purchases using your smartphone? Doesn't that render this product obsolete? (if I'm not mistaken, you need a smartphone to set it up)

I wonder if it would be possible to make some kind of API, or way to make it possible for apps to launch worldwide instead of just locally. I know there are challenges for launching for a large area when starting up, but I wonder if there's a way to make it easier for startups.

I like the variable naming in the code. It's good that they didn't use one/two letter variables that span more than five lines of code. Short, meaningless variables names--used for things other than index values is one of my big pet peeves. I had to use somebody else's code as the base for a project and it was full of two letter variables that didn't mean anything. Gave me a big headache working on it.

I wish they would have shown the eagle landing, that would have been interesting to see.

That's very interesting.

I've seen lots of toll fraud at my work. Often a VoIP device like an Asterisk server or a VoIP phone will be compromised and used to send calls to a premium rate number, usually at a very high call rate. This is their downside, they're exploited by people who want to make a quick buck. And carriers are forced to pay them because they have contracts with their toll trunk providers that all calls sent through those trunks are legitimate calls.

jdee, have you ever had any success prosecuting anyone committing fraud? Wonder if that's even possible.

I find it interesting the amount of attention Hacker News is getting from this in mainstream media.

It makes me wonder, when people unfamiliar to Hacker News read about it in stories like this, do they get the wrong impression and think Hacker News is about the criminal kind of "hacking"?

I have a lot to say in response to this article, but for now I'll just share a quote from one of my computer science professors that I'll never forget:

"Just because you're a computer science professor doesn't mean you know how to use a computer."

>> Should you buy this mediocre Mary Cassatt lithograph for “Price: $185,000.00 + $4.49 shipping”? (Jeff, is WaPo charging you $250 million plus $4.49 shipping? I don’t think so. )

If you have an Amazon Prime subscription, I bet you don't have to pay the $4.49 shipping.

I'm curious, what qualifications are required to become a listener? Do you have to be a mental health professional? Do you have to live in the United States?

I was sad when they lost the water bottle.

My theory is that the reason for Google implementing the Promotion tab is so that they can put ads into the INBOXs of people who use desktop and mobile clients. Doing it this way won't be too intrusive to people who use the web client, which already has a place for ads to be viewed.

There is a university in Thunder Bay: http://lakeheadu.ca

The advantage with Thunder Bay is that people are trying to develop it into a hotbed for start-ups, and will do a lot to see your startup succeed.

Quick examples of Thunder Bay startups: http://cinevate.com, http://qwantech.com (big in the mining industry, also doing work in autism support systems), http://flightop.com

I've always used this method:

http://railscasts.com/episodes/190-screen-scraping-with-noko...

As well as Mechanize when working with sites that require session cookies and all that.

I'm wondering too what the advantages of Upton are?