Hacker News Reader

lephton SSLMate – Buy SSL certs from the command line

Can you link to this? I wasn't able to find info about this fixed yearly fee plan on their site.

lephton Replacing Photoshop with NSString

It'd be interesting to combine this with monodraw:

http://monodraw.helftone.com/

lephton Burma's capital: a super-sized slice of post-apocalypse suburbia

TFA claims it's 6 times the size of NYC but cost only $4 billion dollars to build. How is that possible?

lephton Why Spotify Pays So Little

There's a support article here:

https://support.spotify.com/us/problems/#!/article/Why-have-...

They claim that the behavior matches your desired behavior of having a "pointer" that re-updates if availability changes and the explicit version is made available again

lephton Bank harrasses user because he tweeted screenshot of their SSL certificate

If you read the article, the National Bank of Greece is not the one that harassed the author/their employer, the unnamed "second bank" did.

lephton Bank harrasses user because he tweeted screenshot of their SSL certificate

That's incorrect:

> The first bank contacted almost immediately with me and I respect National Bank of Greece for that.

lephton Apple App Store STATUS_CODE_ERROR causes service problems

In this case, at least, honeypots. From the linked page:

> Every second, Norse collects and analyzes live threat intelligence from darknets in hundreds of locations in over 40 countries. The attacks shown are based on a small subset of live flows against the Norse honeypot infrastructure, representing actual worldwide cyber attacks by bad actors.

lephton The Rise and Fall of RedBook

Thanks for a more optimistic view

lephton With a Few Bits of Data, Researchers Identify ‘Anonymous’ People

I believe this is the EFF project you're referencing, for the curious: https://panopticlick.eff.org/

lephton Mosh – a robust, responsive replacement for SSH

That's not entirely true:

https://github.com/keithw/mosh/issues/198#issuecomment-74179...

Panic has explicitly stated in the past that they won't add mosh support to Prompt due to license issues, for instance.

lephton Mosh – a robust, responsive replacement for SSH

You can get native tmux scrolling on a mac with iTerm or Terminal.app: https://filippo.io/native-scrolling-and-iterm2/

lephton Mosh – a robust, responsive replacement for SSH

Unfortunately the one iOS app that supports mosh (iSSH) was removed from the app store late last year. I've heard that the mosh license isn't compatible with the App Store(?)

lephton Keurig 2.0 DRM Bypass

I worked at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (the owners of Keurig) around the time they were first gaining traction, and remember them briefly being called "Keurig cups" internally before the "K-cup" shorthand caught on.

lephton Jawbone UP3 Activity Tracker

I own the Nike FuelBand, Fitbit Flex, and Jawbone UP24, and actually choose to use the Jawbone because of the software. I prefer the UI for food tracking, and find that the "smart insights" stuff is great on the Jawbone, showing correlations between mood/activity/sleep/food, etc.

lephton Jawbone UP3 Activity Tracker

I own the UP24, which uses bluetooth and still manages a full two week battery life (with the latest firmware.)

I had the exact same experience with the 24 and the rubber enclosure warping. It's very disappointing that Jawbone has such hardware quality issues, as I vastly prefer its software to that of my FuelBand and Fitbit.

lephton The Sad Saga of Silicon Graphics (1997)

> Another name for this is "vocational irony", which is a form of situational irony.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCobblersChildr...

lephton My Isometric Voxel Engine: One Year Later

This looks quite good in the video, good work!

You mention a few games as inspiring traits of Voxel Quest -- most of which are quite obvious -- including Hearthstone. In what ways was Hearthstone an influence? Art style, or something beyond that?

Edit: Just finished watching the entire video, it really does look fantastic. I will say, the one off-putting part of your game design philosophy for me was the whole "no long-term progression" thing. I find the way Rogue Legacy handles this a beautifully rewarding mashup of the roguelike quick permadeath and the feeling of making overall progress in the game world.

lephton Google Now vs. Siri vs. Cortana – The Great Knowledge Box Showdown

Are you referring to the effect of the 'Voice Feedback' always/handsfree setting? I believe you can get the "more verbose" mode by just setting it to 'always' http://drop.petec.io/151n0

lephton Intelligent chat that makes your team communication twice as fast

Speaking of copy that's off-putting, the "makes your communication twice as fast" makes me immediately dubious and seems sort of amateur/icky. Twice as fast as what? Via what metric?

lephton Lift Labs joins Google X

That was my initial thought/worry as well, but it looks like Lift.app is safe from Google acquistruction for now: 'Lift Labs'[0] is the creator of a spoon that helps parkinson's victims eat, and the bottom of the Lift.app website[1] gives the company name 'Lift Worldwide',

[0]: http://www.liftlabsdesign.com/ [1]: https://www.lift.do/

lephton Introducing free voice calls from Hangouts

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell you still need to dedicated GV app. It was however just updated today:

- Updated user interface to match iOS7 guidelines - Bug fixes and performance enhancements - Support for Google Voice integration in Hangouts

lephton Introducing free voice calls from Hangouts

Surprisingly enough, GV for iOS was just updated:

- Updated user interface to match iOS7 guidelines - Bug fixes and performance enhancements - Support for Google Voice integration in Hangouts

lephton The End of Big Twitter

App.net's 256 characters is a very nice 'sweet spot' for me.

lephton How Norway has avoided the 'curse of oil'

Fascinating contrast to this Backstory Podcast episode about America's relationship with oil: http://backstoryradio.org/shows/black-gold-2/

lephton Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

Cobook sort of seemed to be going in this direction, but they got acquired by FullContact:

https://cobook.co/pete

lephton What I Saw in Ferguson

OT: How can you (I) tell when something is being flagged off the front page?

lephton Ars editor learns feds have his old IP addresses, full credit card numbers

Check the last three pages of the linked PDF... pretty chilling stuff

lephton GoTenna – Send and receive messages even when you don’t have service

Can anyone provide some insight into why this would be? What's the intention of these restrictions?

lephton FAA bans the use of drones to deliver packages

I'm not convinced myself that it wasn't just pure PR, but wanted to point out:

> why doesn't Amazon use them inside their warehouse? It is a controlled environment

The fact that it's a controlled environment is precisely why they're unnecessary in their warehouses -- the flying robot delivery method would theoretically allow them to bypass the uncontrolled variables in the real world: road traffic, pedestrians, etc.