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mhansenon [dead]

Planet Money did a podcast the other day on exactly how the ratings are created. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/26/138721364/the-tues...

TLDL: There's no algorithm. There's no one ratio you can look at. Analysts travel to the country, assess how likely it is to pay its debt, and report back. A few people listen to the evidence then take a vote on the new rating.

mhansenon How I Made 50 Friends In One Month

G+ circles does allow overlap - both in people that are in circles, and when you share things you can choose to share it with multiple circles.

mhansenon Google Plus: Tagging automatically shares private photos

They do make it clear you're sharing with a wider audience. When you click the share button, G+ tells you:

  This post was originally shared with a limited audience –
  remember to be thoughtful about who you share it with.

This is a social problem, not a technical problem. You can't stop bits being copied, but you can make people think twice before copying.

mhansenon Octopress - A blogging framework for hackers

The idea is that you can write your blog posts in your favorite coding editor instead of some web form. Some people find that easier - I certainly feel more at home in my editor.

mhansenon Facebook Bans Advertiser Pushing Google+ Follows

Trivially false: See the approved ad for Facebook Ads on a Google search for 'advertising':

http://www.google.co.nz/search?q=advertising

mhansenon Last.fm web site primary and failover down

You might be interested in a side project of mine, that lets you visualise your last.fm listening history. I'm looking for feedback (and the touch of a designer) before I launch it.

http://markhansen.co.nz/scatter.fm

mhansenon Is tmux the GNU Screen killer?

No, Byobu is. https://launchpad.net/byobu

mhansenon Kinect for Windows SDK (Silverlight Required)

Smudges just aren't a big deal if the screen has a backlight.

mhansenon All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

They wouldn't be paid if they weren't worth the money they were getting; the customers would rather keep their money.

Lawyers: Do I really need to explain that they perform an important, valuable role?

Drug dealers: Can't say much here. Drugs are tricky, economists call them inelastic, and they can make people irrational.

Bankers: I sure like being able to invest my money and use it everywhere via EFTPOS

Accountants: It's a hell of a drag doing taxes. It's very valuable to have someone do this work for you (if it wasn't, everyone would do their own accounting).

Bottom line: determining value is a tricky economic/algorithmic question.

Luckily, we have a price system, where people can set prices. If the customers pay that price, that's a strong indicator that the service is worth that much. It's not perfect (see bubbles), but it works pretty well on average.

mhansenon Keynesian beauty contest

Where's the evidence?

mhansenon All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

Any job that someone's willing to pay to have done - by paying for the job, they indicate that it's worth that much money, and hence at least as useful as that money was.

mhansenon U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors

The US Government isn't some big monolithic entity with one goal, it's made up of many factions, each pulling in a different direction.

mhansenon LulzSec hacks NHS.

This isn't Anonymous.

mhansenon Google +1 Button Performance Review

It's premature optimization. The extra time taken for a scope lookup is completely insignificant compared to the network costs in loading the script.

Perhaps if this was inside a tight inner loop, I could understand, but here it's completely unneccessary.

mhansenon Demoted

All those things you mention are exportable, and yahoo/msn/apple could write an importer against these APIs to make it easy.

mhansenon Remind HN: Your systems need to be ready for World IPv6 Day June 8th

You don't need to implement IPv6, but you do need to be prepared for any problems that may arise in your network when google, youtube and facebook start advertising AAAA records. Some companies running older software and older operating systems might encounter problems.

mhansenon JSONSelect

Please someone make this into a commandline utility that lets you pipe and query JSON around. My toolkit is missing a JSON slicer and splicer.

mhansenon The Next-Generation Browser: No URL Bar

Where?

mhansenon Working with git? These aliases will save you hours

Yes, these aliases really help. Version control schemes like git reward frequent commits. Anything that lowers the barrier to a commit is good.

Especially when you're under hard time pressure, commits can often fall by the wayside, unless they're super easy (read: need very few keystrokes).

mhansenon JSON: The JavaScript subset that isn't

That still won't work unless you escape the line endings. And you'll also need to escape single quotes.

mhansenon JSON: The JavaScript subset that isn't

jQuery JSON parser will delegate to JSON.parse where available, which doesn't have this problem.

Using JSONP with jQuery, you have to directly eval() the response from the server, and you don't control what the server sends - it could send invalid javascript with these code points in it. You can't fix that from the client-side, jQuery can't fix that.

The servers have to be patched.

mhansenon JSON: The JavaScript subset that isn't

No. Using JSONP, you are forced to directly eval() code from another domain - you can't just use a javascript library to change that code.

mhansenon Ask HN: Apart from Hacker News, what else you read?

Not read, but I listen to NPR's Planet Money podcast

mhansenon Google App Engine for Go

Why is the thread [dead]?

mhansenon Does Google apply places on people?

http://maps.google.co.nz/maps/place?cid=4194875824776890974&...

No, Google Places is just for businesses. This is a business that the owner has publicly listed in the German Yellow Pages, under "Event Management" (you can see this in the "more about this page" link). This business just happens to have the name of a person.

mhansenon SMS from Chrome, fully sync'd with your Android phone

Invite only?

mhansenon Why no company that values their data should ever "Go Google"

This person was a paying customer, and did get human support. From the article:

    We got back several emails explaining that they are very sorry,
    but while they are working on retrieving the file, they can’t 
    promise any dates or times.

It's easy to miss that, as most of the article was a copy-paste of a useless email. Looks like after that, he did get the human support you're talking about.

mhansenon WakeMate Shipping Internationally

I just asked on their website:

WakeMate: its 8 inches by 6 inches by 1 inch WakeMate: and weighs .2 lbs

mhansenon Great Unsolved Problem In Computer Science

Hasn't Google Calendar solved this?

mhansenon The Programmer Salary Taboo

Make a sockpuppet account.