Hacker News Reader

magnet_ballon Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

It's possible that the vimium extension for chrome will give you what you want. The 'f' shortcut gives something similar to what you want.

magnet_ballon Using Git Wrong

But why won't they just work on a separate branch still sitting against the main git repo? So long as the internet is up it offers the same thing basically.

magnet_ballon Education of a Programmer

Functional languages describe the data instead of what you do to the data. This is game changing in perception.

Go read Learn Yourself a Haskell.

magnet_ballon “I have toyota corola”

I have something of a young name which is also uncommon, not many people over 30 with it, when I was young I googled my full name and got only one result, today when I google myself I find a ton of people who are usually my age or younger.

There aren't a lot of people who are using my email, one is an older folk who uses it, and I always mean to contact him, and one was a DJ which accidentally used my email address instead of his.

magnet_ballon Sway: A new presentation application from Microsoft

People always say that good typography beats everything but I have yet to see anyone explain typography more than the "use serifs for this and use sans serifs for that".

magnet_ballon The Jolla phone – first impressions

That's 330 ppi by my calculation. The iphone has the same pixel density and it is very much good. I don't see the reason to push 1080 pixels on my tiny 4.5 or even 5 inch phone.

magnet_ballon Microsoft and Xamarin partner

I've seen a lot of talk about how far Mono has gone in recent times but not much in writing. Do you have anything about the progress that was made? Blog posts, announcements, anecdotal evedence? I'm looking for stuff to show to the team so we could consider expanding our C# development to linux too.

magnet_ballon Microsoft and Xamarin partner

The BCL is such a great tool that I am sometimes baffled by other languages heavy reliance on package managers like npm or gems to get basic functionality.

It is consistent, well behaved and while not complete, it is very solid. The only complaint I have are that it has some dark corners (System.Diagnostics come to mind) and the fact that non of the classes are easily used for testing and that I have to wrap a lot of basic functionality like file system access or the TcpClient to be avle to test my classes.

magnet_ballon Four years of Go

I don't understand why people dismiss XML like that, I use it a lot at my line of work and it makes sense.

We need the structure that JSON can't give us and other data markup languages are too obscure to teach them to everyone we work with.

magnet_ballon The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal (1995)

There is one penis.

And some medical looking photos of men, all easily explainable so long as your workplace permits you to browse HN.

magnet_ballon The Onion quits print

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-project-to-preserve-hum...

This was meant for a different scale of time but could be useful in an NBC's Revolution type of scenario.

magnet_ballon Nexus 5

It annoys me that people can't keep their phones in working order, you have paid hundreds of dollars on this piece of equipment and you treat it like a piece of shit and in 6 months you complain that it doesn't work?? Maybe if you had treated it like the delicate piece of machinery that it is it wouldn't have broken.

It's a blatant disregard for money and it annoys me deeply when I see someone throwing their 5 inches of glass on the table without a thought.

magnet_ballon Nexus 5

It's not the amount as much as the lifetime.

I live in that ancient belief that you should be able to keep your phone functioning happily for 3 years, which is exactly what happened with my iPhone 4, by iOS 6 it became slow and kind of crashy but usable and it did everything I wanted it to (even if it didn't get all the new features like the new navigation or Siri).

But the main point is that it kept going for more than 3 years, and the Galaxy Nexus, a phone that was really expensive at the time does not get the new update just a year and a half after release. That's half of the lifetime I expect of a phone.

magnet_ballon Google Correlate - Draw

Very neat to find local trends. Try drawing a boom (immediate spike) at some point in time to find something that trended highly back then.

magnet_ballon Funding your startup with a "one week on, three weeks off" consulting setup

To me that seems a very good idea. Doing security at a place where you don't have to be on guard at all times (something like a receptionist job) means you can work on your product and get paid to do it with some distractions.

magnet_ballon Wikipedia is now drawing facts from the Wikidata repository

To map all human knowledge.

magnet_ballon Why learning Haskell makes you a better programmer

I think he fails to mention the very strong static typing in addition to method signatures. There are no nulls, everything is expected ahead of time, you know what you are going to get.

magnet_ballon The Hobbit, the Uncanny Valley, and what it means for 3D

The bits that were weird for me was when telling the story of Ardor, you see the dwarves fighting and they seem to be moving too fast. But me too, as someone who like getting 60FPS from his games adjusted to the fast rate and enjoyed the rest of the movie.

magnet_ballon Why OpenPhoto will defeat Picasa and Flickr

This article has an asterisk at the beginning which leads to a footnote "Note: I’m currently a member of the OpenPhoto Team". This should be at the beginning, it sets the articles tone. I'd take it seriously if it was an outside source but being written by a developer on the project, for me it's a cute introduction to the software and it doesn't tell me whether this software is actually good.

What I do learn from this is that it would probably be a good solution for hack-it-yourself enthusiasts from the Linux community who always look for the open source solution.