mgurlitz

I'm surprised he included the app's resources (icon, etc.) under the BSD license -- rewriting the data store to use iCloud instead of his service (where Cheddar makes money, but also the source of many complaints in reviews) while keeping the UI would make a quick (though somewhat seedy) buck on the App Store.

Captchas are hard because there's only so much an algorithm can extract from spatial information. Computers are excellent with temporal data, given essentially unlimited memory for past video frames. Computers benefit more from increased information than humans do.

I think one of the most groundbreaking ideas they have is "flipping the classroom" [1], where students watch Sal's videos at home before class for homework, then in class they work on problems with the teacher and other students. That's where the ability for teachers to track and target deficiencies really becomes powerful.

[1]: http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/story/2012-05-30/sal-kha...

What are the advantages of IronSpread over traditional Python COM access? The API appears only marginally better than Excel's VBA interface, and it looks like IronSpread can't interact with multiple workbooks.

The benefit of having the shell launched from within Excel, with no setup needed, disappear when you want to run more complex functions like continual updates. And on top of that IronSpread doesn't support Office 2003.

> The big logo-y thing at the top of your blog page? Yes, the one that currently links to your blog? Right, that one. It shouldn't link to your damned blog! Link it to your product's home page instead.

Every time I have to manually cut the /blog/ out of the location bar I wonder how many users were lost by requiring that little bit of extra effort.

That link goes to Currently still. Here's More Interestingness: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ngddmdmkjnnefgggjn...

> George said the laptop won’t be able to dual boot Windows. But Dell made available an Ubuntu install image customized for the XPS13, so you could buy the Windows version and install Ubuntu yourself if you require dual booting.

They probably don't mean the laptop "can't dual-boot Windows," but that it requires extra steps in deleting Linux, installing Windows, then installing Linux.

Of course it does: http://www.chromium.org/tab-to-search

The site is back up. Google has a cache now in case it goes down again: https://encrypted.google.com/#q=cache:http://ryandetzel.com/...

> I'm not sure I buy the premise here. UIWebView is a class to help developers show web content in an app. That's all it was ever about.

I'm pretty sure it's still the case that when you add a HTML5 app to your home screen (so your users see the icon instead of a bookmark in Safari) all of a sudden it doesn't get run on the Nitro JS engine anymore.

It says right on the suckless.org home page, "software that sucks less," so probably the first.

The hckrnews.com browser extension does this with an orange bar on the left of new comments, and on the hckrnews.com homepage it will list how many new comments have been added to the story alongside the total count.

The author conflates quite a few unrelated concepts. Monads with "interfaces and object models," and templates with type inference. Perhaps in the programmer's head these all serve similar functions (often erroneously. See, e.g. http://blog.tmorris.net/type-classes-are-nothing-like-interf...), but language designers need to make clearer distinctions.

Tabletop made a huge mistake making their bottom line dependent on YouTube's upvoting system. What if YouTube decides to get rid of the "Thumbs up" system? Or if Google wants a share of your revenue from this service? See edw519's comments here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2255615

The author (rginda, http://www.hacksrus.com/~ginda/) is a Google Chrome developer. You're probably already trusting his code by running Chrome.

The way I catch up with HN posts after a few days away is hckr news (http://hckrnews.com/). It's stress free, and I can shorten the list to 10 or 20 top items per day. Then if I have time I'll expand to the top 50% list and scan for anything interesting.

And if you fail to protect your wi-fi they could claim negligence. "I have heard other lawyers compare leaving your wifi open to leaving a loaded gun lying around." (http://torrentfreak.com/are-you-guilty-if-pirates-use-your-i...). I think it would ironic if WEP became popular again because it could protect negligence and is trivially hacked.

Earlier this year there was a "Socialbot" project where bots controlled Twitter accounts and were awarded points for follows and replies from humans. The team that won (http://aerofade.rk.net.nz/?p=152) programmed the bot to ask questions and use some Twitter culture (Follow Friday). There are also quite a few funny conversations in the post.

And if you read the rest of the presentation, don't forget to read along with his notes http://perl.plover.com/yak/presentation/samples/notes.html#s...

Why is using more than 250GB of data a commercial use case? The author thinks his personal interests in photography and music are what topped the cap. I doubt Google Docs and his other work services would even show up on his bandwidth compared to Netflix and XBox Live.

Consumers shouldn't have to upgrade to a business plan, paying for business-class support, a static IP, and other features they don't need. Comcast would probably end up making more money and saving a lot of face if they had a plan with sane limits for people who live on digital media.

The Chatroulette connection is particularly interesting since Verbling could achieve what Chatroullete tried and failed at. Chatroulette's founder, who learned English from online video chats, supposedly got his idea from interactions with foreigners and other cultures in a tourist shop in Russia: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/17/100517fa_fact_...

It looks like Ruby is only needed for the file server. You could easily substitute a Python file server (cd .js; python -m SimpleHTTPServer 3131). You could use a remote Apache server for synchronizing your scripts. I agree that Ruby is a little overkill, but it is simple enough to run easily on a Mac, and it is extensible for hackers.

My impression is that these hackers would have much of the scamming process automated. Maybe it was a real person filling out the recovery form, but I doubt the initial scheme (set up redirecting, send spam mail) was performed by a human. Perhaps the hackers had saved every email in the account and were able to extract the necessary information to do the recovery. But the author admits the Gmail account isn't valuable - the marginal gain from recovering the hacked account seems negligible for the hacker to intervene himself.

It seems more plausible that the recovery form has been gamed. The initial hack was programmed to extract the information in advance and possibly even perform the account recovery if necessary. They know exactly what and how much information is needed for Gmail to accept the recovery, whereas the author had to call his s.o. to fill out all the fields.

Either way, it sounds like the Gmail recovery form should be revised. The author argues recovery is already difficult for the true owner to perform. Google could, while keeping the automated process, make it harder for an algorithm to recover the account than the real owner.

There's another Inconsolata derivative named "Inconsolata-g" with straight quotes, dotted zeros, and other small fixes to make it a "programmer's font." http://leonardo-m.livejournal.com/77079.html

Eric Schmidt said he chose a 70/20/10 model to organize 70% of its resources to "core search and ads," 20% to related interesting businesses, and 10% to new ideas. Since 2005, though, some other businesses may have entered the "core" 70% (http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Search-Engines/Google-Reveals-Its-P...).