Hacker News Reader

larsuon Why Hipmunk Is The World's Best Travel Site

The winners from here on out will the ones who make the Web functional and simple.

On a site with lots of ads (including a popup ad), social media "sharing links", a sidebar with unrelated content, and persistent top- and bottom bars.

larsuon Vim clutch

I doubt that foot / finger coordination is good enough to get the timing right without losing some keystrokes.

larsuon Follow up to the CSS Google Doodle - Accurate this time

What do you mean? I think it would probably be shorter in most languages given the right toolkit.

larsuon Don't waste your time by cd-ing in the terminal

To only display information about a specific command, you can also use

    help <command>

larsuon Clever social engineering. A malicious web page that tells you it's malicious.

You're right. But something like this would be harder to fake: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/img/tignish/features/security-i...

larsuon Low Level Bit Hacks You Must Know

Bit Hack #6. Turn off the rightmost 1-bit.

Now it finally gets more interesting!!! Bit hacks #1 - #5 were kind of boring to be honest.

Does anybody know a practical use case for that? I have personally never encountered a situation were I needed to manipulate the right most 1-bit.

Otherwise it's a nice introduction to bit hacking.

larsuon Clever social engineering. A malicious web page that tells you it's malicious.

Firefox's html warnings in the browser's content window seem to make this particularly easy, though.

larsuon Apple changes words in order to change the debate

They certainly would have leverage if they built a phone people really want. This is exactly how Apple gained that leverage.

Alternatively, they could team up with the other manufacturers and boycott carriers which refuse to sell their phones as-is. But they simply don't seem to care about their end-users as much as the carriers (and neither does Google apparently).

edit: spelling.

larsuon Apple changes words in order to change the debate

Of course it is. Proof in the pudding: iOS has none of it.

You missed my point, which was that the crippling is not Android's fault but that of the carriers and phone manufacturers. Its also not due to some inherent property of iOS that it doesn't have any crapware, but thanks to Apple caring about their customers more than about the carriers.

To Apple, carriers are not customers. They're generally hindrances and they might be partners, but Apple's customers are end-user.

Not so for HTC or moto.

Exactly. But again, this has nothing to do with Android or its openness.

larsuon Apple changes words in order to change the debate

The amount of crippling done by the carriers is not Android's fault nor is it in any way advantaged by Android being open. The same crapware has been on Symbian and other (closed) mobile operating systems for a long time.

Apple is the only manufacturer that was able to convince carriers to sell their phones without any of that garbage. I don't know what is stopping HTC/Motorala/Samsung from trying to enforce similar conditions for its Android-based devices. I guess the carriers simply have too much control over what gets into the market and refuse to sell anything that they aren't allowed to tamper with.

However, I agree with you that the Android brand will suffer very badly from this.

larsuon Android Chief Andy Rubin Sends His First Tweet — And It’s Aimed At Steve Jobs

It's not about theoretical openness, but whether the manufacturer you bought your phone from passes Android's openness on to you, their customer. Most (all?) of the successful ones (HTC, Samsung, Motorola) don't.

Since Android is Apache-licensed, the openness isn't enforced to all users of the software.

larsuon Typedefs & Linus

Please don't. I once dealt with code like this and it becomes unreadable very quickly, especially if many different types are involved.

However, if printk would be declared with __attribute__((format(printf, 1, 2)) (I don't know if it is), gcc would warn if the format string contains specifiers which do not match the given types, regardless of any typedefs.