Hacker News Reader

luigion Introducing Instapaper 4.1 for iPhone, iPad

I was remarking on the Stockholm Syndrome effect that Apple has inflicted on its most popular third party developers. It's a sad situation.

luigion Introducing Instapaper 4.1 for iPhone, iPad

Sad that he feels the need to be so publicly thankful of the App Review team.

A sane policy would recognize that he's a popular iOS developer in good-standing, and would not submit him to any review process.

luigion Best HTML5/CSS3 Presentation Frameworks

I did a similar round up last year:

http://luigimontanez.com/2011/web-based-slide-decks-done-rig...

luigion 500 Words before 8am

My productivity rules:

    1) Produce, don't consume.
    2) Achieve small goals.
    3) Say no.

I used to work at a place that had a 10 am stand up meeting (once headed by the author of the Information Diet, incidentally). My trick was that I'd try to get in a code commit before that stand up. If I was able to accomplish that I'd be more likely to have a productive day.

luigion Evernote blog: WhySQL?

It's amazing how when you use recent technology that has been designed and engineered from the ground up for the demands of modern web apps, you can devote a lot of other resources to the actual product and usability.

luigion Cogs bad

For most startups, embracing a cloud architecture just makes sense. You're building an MVP and want to get it out in front of users. Deploying on something like Heroku and using the add-ons is one of the best ways to focus on your product and not on your server. Then when you have a success, step back and evaluate your tech stack.

To me, the primary advantage of all this new-fangled web server technology is the improved developer experience, not the performance implications.

luigion Reuters totally clueless about the meaning of "hacking"

Here's the announcement about how The Wrap is the "main entertainment news provider" for Reuters:

http://www.thewrap.com/media/column-post/thewrap-replaces-th...

luigion Instapaper Founder Marco Arment On The App Business

Would Marco make more money giving away his app for free and charging $1.99/month for the service? It's always seemed odd to me that you pay for the web service upfront with a one-time fee, though that seems to be working well for Pinboard.

It may be the case that a one-time upfront cost is the best way to attract paying customers.

luigion Google at GitHub

Google should acquire GitHub and let the GitHubbers run Google.

luigion Server-Sent Events

The last section is really important. If you don't need the full duplex communication of WebSockets, Server-Sent Events are a much better choice. If you can get away with using AJAX to update the server from the client, do it.

luigion Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood.

It's the studio and record label system that needs killing. The creative, skilled people who make entertainment and art need to be able to thrive.

luigion Remain Diligent: SOPA and PIPA Must Be Squashed, Not Changed

The author never bothers to explain why SOPA and PIPA are still bad without the DNS provision. Instead, he takes an unyielding position and uses propagandist language to make his point.

It's good to see the EFF explain why the bills are still bad here (last paragraph):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/signs-progress-interne...

luigion How rel=nofollow Works

It's true that there's a difference between crawling, indexing, and ranking, but Google is pretty clear on the ultimate effect.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

How does Google handle nofollowed links?

In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap.

luigion How rel=nofollow Works

That's a new sidebar feature that goes where ads have traditionally gone. Google has decided to literally promote G+ over ads, which is a story in itself, but a totally different one.

It doesn't change the search results in the main column.

luigion Your templating engine sucks and everything you've ever written is spaghetti

I was inspired by this project for Node:

https://github.com/hij1nx/weld

And I tried the concept using Nokogiri in Ruby. I found that in practice it gets really tedious. I had to make sure that every single element I wanted to manipulate had a unique id. Then I had to account for updating the content of an element versus an arbitrary attribute for that element. Or adding an attribute, like some data-* attribute. I realized why string interpolation is just so much easier.

There's also the problem where the DOM parser changes the original HTML in some way. How will it deal with conditional comments for IE? Or slightly malformed HTML that you want to keep that way?

I ended up going back to Handlebars.

luigion Two Congressional Staffers Who Helped Write SOPA Become Entertainment Lobbyists

If anyone's interested in reading more about Tauzin, there's a long read from the Sunlight Foundation here:

http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2010/02/12/the-legacy-of-...

Also available as a $0.99 Kindle Single that acts as a small donation to Sunlight:

http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Billy-Tauzin-House-PhRMA-ebook/...

Disclosure: I work for the Sunlight Foundation.

luigion The Unintended Effects of Driverless Cars

I brought this up in Matt Maroon's post about the topic back in January, and he brought up a good point: People like to own their car because it's a moving storage locker.

http://mattmaroon.com/2011/01/03/google-will-become-an-ai-co...

luigion Whatever works for you

There's a difference between trying to help a guy solve a specific problem and trying to evangelize him to switch to your preferred platform.

There are tons of resources on the Web devoted to syncing Outlook with the iPhone. Maybe someone more tech savvy (like Marco) could have helped. Instead he said he "couldn't help him". He really meant "I don't want to try to help you".

luigion [dead]

We have the opportunity to replace the entire House of Representatives every 2 years (and the Senate every 6 years).

2006, 2008, and 2010 were all wave elections. The electorate has been speaking its mind quite forcefully. Elections aren't the problem.

luigion Smooth CoffeeScript

I'll add that on my Kindle Fire, the code snippets were quite readable when turning into landscape mode.

Not sure if the e-ink Kindles switch to landscape mode as easily.

luigion Microsoft, Apple and 27 other tech companies backing SOPA indirectly

Here's the Influence Explorer profile of the BSA:

http://influenceexplorer.com/organization/business-software-...

luigion Open letter to the Mac/iOS dev community regarding conduct

As the number of developer conferences increases for a given technology, the probability of a sexually inappropriate talk approaches 1.

luigion Facebook Acquires HTML5 App Delivery Network Strobe, SproutCore Lives On

Sounds like SproutCore will still be worked on outside of Facebook:

https://twitter.com/#!/wycats/status/133955395013181440

https://twitter.com/#!/wycats/status/133651471983050753

luigion Apple's iTV: Apps Are the New Channels

We may start seeing shows as apps, not channels as apps. So I can get The Walking Dead app, or the Battlestar Galactica app.

Television networks are like book publishers. They're not really needed anymore when content creators can sell their stuff directly to a willing audience.

luigion Richard Stallman’s rider

Verbose means excessively wordy. I think you mean succinct.

luigion Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup

Then come Chris, Jason and Joe (who has a Dropbox tattoo on his arm because he feels “Drew is changing the world”), more MIT brothers aiming to live a California dream they all imagined back in Cambridge as “billionaires, bottles and babes.”

Eww, that's offputting.

luigion Introducing Instapaper 4.0 for iPad and iPhone

I've switched to Spool:

https://getspool.com/

Both text and video. First-class Android and iPhone support. Alas, no iPad support, but I don't use that much anymore.

luigion Samsung and Google pull Nexus Prime, Ice Cream Sandwich launch

AllThingsD has official word:

In an updated statement, the companies confirmed they were making the move out of respect for Jobs.

“We believe this is not the right time to announce a new product as the world expresses tribute to Steve Jobs’s passing,” the companies said.

http://allthingsd.com/20111007/samsung-google-cancel-launch-...

luigion Amazon Silk web browser adds new twist to old idea

Two major points: (1) It uses a single SPDY connection to the Amazon cloud. (2) It compiles JS down to ARM machine code.

luigion Amazon Silk Web Browser

When Opera Mobile introduced similar concepts in their 9.7 release, they caught tons of flack for both privacy concerns (what if I'm at my bank website, or looking at personal pictures?) and for technical considerations (they're breaking the Web!).

Either way, this browser will likely be used by millions. It'll be interesting to see what we developers will have to deal with.