Hacker News Reader

mestudenton Zed Shaw: The wonderful Rob Sobers did a great job translating LPTHW to Ruby

This is probably another unapproved translation as zed said his book was meant for teaching python and we need substantial changes for ruby.

The other book basically translated the code from python to ruby while keeping much of the text the same I don't know if this is the case with this one.

mestudenton Linus Torvalds dumps Gnome3 for XFCE (G+ discussion)

I guess I am not the target audience either, but gnome2 remains my favorite desktop environment and once that is dropped from distros I will go another route, perhaps xfce but it does indeed have many shortcomings.

mestudenton Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

For something as obvious as for gaming (where in the video other games have people running around while these guys are hovering around a static environment), I expect something that at least looks like a game, hell id go for simple animation such as the top comments blade of grass.

mestudenton I don't know how to IE6

I try to make my websites work in ie6 but with minimal work, I'll let IE6 users use it but it will be a degraded experience and most of my website for normal people actually haven't seen such high IE6 usage as 6.5%.

mestudenton Hosted product page?

Maybe give a bit more of a description because I remember something similar but can't quite put it together with your description.

mestudenton Chromebooks on sale at Amazon for $349

To be honest I expect a chromebook to be priced similar or at the very least $200 for me to be competitive with a more powerful/portable netbook.

His expectations aren't off, the manufacturing limitations just don't meet them.

mestudenton Google Tried To Buy Color For $200 Million. Color Said No.

And that trailing slash is exactly how it didn't get caught by the dupe filter.

mestudenton 33GB of public domain JSTOR articles, and a manifesto

Is this[1] the "manifesto"?

If not can someone post it so I don't have to get around the block.

[1]: http://cdmirror.textfiles.com/JSTOR_01_PhilTrans/1st_READ.tx...

mestudenton "Yes, but what are your credentials, Mr Stross?"

To be honest the emails he got could have easily annoyed him and seem to have come from someone who believes he is not interrupting into someones time (especially after the first response which is reasonable for someone without "citable" credentials).

I'd like to think he gets a large amount of emails a day and the fact that this person wanted credentials but decided to email rather than research further could have hit a nerve.

Just look so far as the final response shown:

> I think that you shouldn't write articles under the mindset that you know what you're talking about...

mestudenton Ask HN: SEO / Web site advice

This isn't really anything to do with seo but make your front page static and move the rest (all the wedding pictures) to another page with a limit (maybe 5 or 10 a page).

I thought your site was broken but it was just loading so much.

That page load absolutely killed my connection and google could be punishing it. (Though I don't know if they punish download size)

The option should be available in your wordpress install.

mestudenton Samsung Galaxy S II – Over 3 million units sold in 55 days

That is my problem right now, I won't buy an android until cyanogen runs on it and it is easily rooted, so when my droid first gen finally broke I actually ended up buying an iphone as all the comparative weren't listed as meeting my requirements.

I hope when my iphone breaks the ecosystem is better (so far I only really miss native gmail and having an actual filesystem to use with the apps.)

mestudenton AWS drops bandwidth pricing

Because incoming still takes up bandwidth so it makes sense to count it is such. I however do remember it being free at some point in time.

mestudenton SearchYC is shutting down

That is the way I use it, much better than the new one that requires javascript to do everything.

mestudenton Scripting News: Where I'm at with Firefox

Are you using linux, linux seems like a secondhand citizen with regards to firefox and that is where I see all my problems.

I don't know if crashing is the right word but it does become completely unresponsive often enough that it is noticeable and annoying. (Unresponsive as in it has to be killed to regain functionality.)

mestudenton Scripting News: Where I'm at with Firefox

I try every new firefox release for at least a week, and to be honest I haven't seen an advantage of using it since chrome came out.

It is just way too slow[1], it may have better extensions better adblocking and a regular ui but it just can't compete.

[1] Slow in both snappiness and perceived rendering compared to chrome, firefox also still likes to crash or freeze on me which rarely happens with chrome even though I run the dev channel.

mestudenton AT&T's Rube Golbergian Web Form

I've activated without installing anything with every broadband provider I have had as well and most of the time it is quite easy.

Cable seems to be activated just by using their modem the last few times and qwest dsl can be activated by a simple login on a browser and waiting for them to verify.

mestudenton Arch Linux Packages Visualization

I haven't had any trouble with AUR any time I've used it, most of the time a simple makepkg -s does the trick, but maybe it is just similar enough to slackbuilds for me not to mind.

To be honest though Arch moves too fast for me and there are quite a few advantages for not, I use ubuntu though because it is easy.

mestudenton Team Fortress 2 now free forever

You can't really pirate cs anymore than you can pirate tf2, css also runs on the same engine as tf2 so any of the kids that can get their hands on source can get their hands on tf2 computerwise.

mestudenton Team Fortress 2 now free forever

You would be surprised by the amount of cheaters with multiple accounts in source games even though they weren't free.

mestudenton Team Fortress 2 now free forever

It depends on the game, play competitive counterstrike and everyone is a dick (source or 1.6)

mestudenton Dropbox Cofounder & CTO Arash Ferdowsi responds to yesterday's bug

If you weren't around for the last discussion and haven't figured it out by the web client: dropbox encrypts and decrypts your data on their servers which inherently provides anyone with access to them and their encryption decryption methods access to your files.

The problem as discussed many times is that of security and usability, dropbox takes the usability route and for some users this is great for others not so much.

mestudenton Uber drops fares for SF Taxi strike

Customer acquisition and advertisement.

mestudenton Why I've built an alternative to Github

I do this (also on prgmr) and manage backups with tarsnap+cron which with all my small repos costs nearly nothing even if I don't clean up old tarsnap archives.

mestudenton 500k Bitcoins traded in 1h, Mt.Gox market hacked + crash

So much for "There are no chargebacks on BitCoin"

Well this is trading through an intermediary, you can't really expect it to work that way otherwise something like this would have a lot more incentive for wrongdoers.

If you really want to have no chargebacks you have to go the harder route of one on one trading, with everything that comes along with that.

mestudenton Vim + eink

I don't think it is eink but take a look at Pixel Qi screens http://www.pixelqi.com/

mestudenton Chrome at 20% market share, IE9 less than IE7

My non-tech site (small, ~10,000 uniques per month):

    IE            45%
       IE8            72%
       IE7            19%
       IE9             7%
       IE6             2%
    FF            23%
    Safari        19%
    Chrome        10%

mestudenton Linode turns 8; Disk space +25%

I'm pretty sure that fee is only for managed servers (meaning you are paying $100 for full support) and isn't charged just for your instance usage.

mestudenton Linode turns 8; Disk space +25%

It depends on what your using the vps for, I have a vps with prgmr and it really isn't that much of a hassle, even starting fresh with debian is a 5 minute or less process with the centos recovery.

mestudenton Linode turns 8; Disk space +25%

You would think so but linode is pretty much still the exception with quality vps hosting.

The first year I used linode 2007 there was an insane amount of upgrades, maybe someday soon they will pass more of this on to us but I'm glad they are still doing it.

http://blog.linode.com/category/upgrades/

mestudenton (debunked) PayPal vulnerability allows access to any account within 30 seconds

It doesn't say how they are sending it to an unauthorized email, maybe their is some hidden value in the form that they are sending to allow it or something altogether different to get the reset email.

Just because you can't do it doesn't mean it is fixed.