Hacker News Reader

magicbuzzon Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

https://www.flickr.com/photos/randomwire/5062013491/ says it all really.

magicbuzzon What Life Looks Like When Night Lasts for Days

I haven't spent any time in the Arctic Circle but it's been an itch I want to scratch. The last 10 years I've been based at about 19° S but I went and spent half a year in 46° S. Arriving in summer, my brain kept thinking it was 4PM all the way to 9PM :-) Short winter days would race by. I found myself thinking 'day over already?!' a lot. The advantage was you were always discussing the dawn beauty with neighbours as everyone saw it.

magicbuzzon MacBook Pro? No

Although well-written, I wonder why people buy laptops when they seem inherently poorly suited for their requirements. Most of the complaints seem to be things that are obvious. I've been using MBPs since 2000. But 6 months ago bought a ThinkPad Carbon X1 and lovin' it. Always seems to have battery all the time.

magicbuzzon Australia's first electric aircraft has begun test flights

Self-loading freight.

magicbuzzon Australia's first electric aircraft has begun test flights

Article gives you the idea that it would be taking pax to Rottnest Island (a popular tourist destination) but it's only registered as a 'recreational' so the only ppl going to Rottnest would be pilots themselves or a non-paying pax.

Payload is 200kg so that is basically two people and one suitcase.

30 minutes reserve might be enough for short hops but I've just finished reading various articles written over the years by Richard Collins (who writes a lot about safety) and he states that he always had a hard rule of a one hour reserve.

Still, the operating costs are crazy cheap. If they made a plane that had 3 hours range (2 hrs flying, 1 hr reserve) at 100+ knots with more payload, I'd be interested.

magicbuzzon How I went from programming to consulting (2012)

Writing software that is half the quality is a recipe for disaster. I’m managing a team of remote offshore developers who assured me they had lots of ‘corporate development’ experience. In the early days we rejected about 80% of the code they wrote. One guy added 100 lines to a React reducer that we ended up doing in two lines of code.

magicbuzzon The time I was turned away from China

Exactly. As a visitor you don’t have to “register at the local police station”. Just if you’re a resident.

magicbuzzon Irish vet fails oral English test needed to stay in Australia

Chicken Farmers are in short supply apparently.

magicbuzzon The Colditz Glider

Schloss Colditz apparently now has a museum. Be neat to see that.

magicbuzzon Visiting Chinese Megacities

That is a great link. Very interesting to a possible future visitor. But to be honest, the more I hear the less inclined to go I am.

magicbuzzon How to make a friend fast

LOL

magicbuzzon Getting Julian Assange: The Untold Story

Nothing in this comment to justify it being downvoted.

magicbuzzon HTTP/2 is not the future, it’s the present

To be clear, Server Push as described in the article is not actually provided by nginx yet and thus by the server config in the article. I have no doubt that the awesome nginx folks will implement in due time though.

magicbuzzon Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?

+1 I have a 2 yr old MacBook Pro. In OS X, window manager performs seamlessly using the Intel inbuilt graphics. On Ubuntu 16.10, the window manager is slow to the point of taking half a second to update window borders whatever the app. Makes doing responsive web design frustrating to the point of wanting to switch to another OS. I am really hoping that 17.04/Mir improves on this.

magicbuzzon Lua VM running in a WASM environment

If I can get cqueues running, then I can run lapis on that and get a webserver happening.. in my browser!

magicbuzzon Lua VM running in a WASM environment

Never say never but Lua is pretty unique because of the vm size and language design.

magicbuzzon Lua VM running in a WASM environment

Works on Chrome 58 out of the box. Very cool!

magicbuzzon How to Steal a River

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-02-25/all-timber-apartments-...

Saw this recently on this subject.

magicbuzzon How Peter Thiel Got New Zealand Citizenship

Didn't even bother to fly to New Zealand to get his citizenship.

magicbuzzon Leonardo Da Vinci Lost Drawing Discovered

They can look at a drawing and tell whether the artist is left or right-handed? Seriously?

magicbuzzon Koya Bound – Eight Days on the Kumano Kodo

I've been to Koya-san twice. It's an amazing place/atmosphere, including the trip up.

Third time around I will have to walk there.

magicbuzzon Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

Sigh. US-only. That kills it for me.

magicbuzzon Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

He must be doing a firmware update to his ECU :-)

magicbuzzon Lua as a Python’s secret weapon

Yes. It uses lapis. Running on top of nginx so huge configurability for all sorts of things.

magicbuzzon Lua as a Python’s secret weapon

Lua is amazing. I've used it to reimplement an API served by Python and it was consistently twice as fast i.e. half the time to serve a request compared to the Python framework in basically the same code.

magicbuzzon New MacBook Pro outsold every competing laptop in just five days

One port is "a bit on the low side".....

magicbuzzon Deep in New Zealand

I walked 400km of the Te Araroa trail earlier this year. Compared to Australia, there is a marked absence of fauna. A number of other walkers commented about the same thing. The only encounters with animals I heard of that were possibly dangerous were a surprised goat and a falcon acting defensively about it's territory.

You're more likely to die from cold exposure (I got very chilled one time) or crossing a river. Sandflies and spear grass will annoy you at times but they won't kill you.

magicbuzzon Linux Market Share on Desktop

I've done transformations of complex pricing spreadsheets to code for providing dynamic quoting on websites. It was amazing how complex the logic gets sometimes with even what seems like a simple spreadsheet.

magicbuzzon Sanic – Python 3.5+ web server that's written to go fast

I honestly don't understand why you would do this when nginx with Luajit is so fast. I think Python is great but nginx is so robust, widely used and Luajit is so impressively quick.

magicbuzzon Stripe in Japan

I like the Mt Fuji graphic.