Hacker News Reader

micampeon Walmart’s $10 Smartphone Has Better Specs Than the Original iPhone

I don't know if it’s on par with Fairphone yet, but Apple have also been helping make some good improvements in their supply chain.

http://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/progress-report...

micampeon How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

This is what Tog and Don Norman have been saying for more than two decades now, so I’m not sure how you can be surprised by what they said. They have always advocated for an extremely “literal” and explicit design of user interfaces.

It’d be interesting to see HN’s reactions to Tog’s articles explaining how the mouse is more efficient than the CLI.

micampeon How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

I think you picked poor examples. All the ones you listed are power user accelerators for actions you can do in other ways that are slower but more straightforward.

Except this one:

> Swipe notifications from the left to perform the default action for that notification.

But this one has a “slide to open” text explainig what to do right below it.

micampeon Unicode: Good, Bad, and Ugly (2011)

All these years I’ve been told that web is better than native because it’s cross platform and future proof.

micampeon Why people keep trying to erase the Hollywood sign from Google Maps (2014)

There is a controversy and lawsuits going on in Half Moon Bay for five years so far http://martinsbeach.blogspot.com/

micampeon Abuse is indefensible

> Sometimes 'smart code' is not necessarily better

I would argue that it's usually not, especially in large and long lived projects. “Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program”.

micampeon A new model, “The Big Splat”, explains the strange asymmetry of the moon

For popular science articles, yes, the narration is useful for the purpose of scientific divulgation and awareness.

If you want pure distilled science this is what you are looking for https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...

micampeon An Asynchronous Shell Prompt

Another example: https://github.com/sindresorhus/pure

This uses zsh-async: https://github.com/mafredri/zsh-async

micampeon Page Weight Matters (2012)

I wish HN prevented new accounts from commenting for one day unless verified by a mod.

micampeon Show HN: Exposé – a static site generator for photos and videos

I suggest you also get the mentioned Lumix 20mm lens with it: it’s simply a beautiful lens, even compared to more expensive ones. Its only downside is a not exactly state of the art focus speed, but it’s manageable, especially if you plan to do this type of travel photography.

micampeon Emulating Swift's “defer” in C, with Clang or GCC+Blocks

I like how Hacker News is all about exploring new things and playing with technology.

micampeon The New Google Logo and Kerning

Kerning and tracking are often adjusted differently at different point sizes, especially if you are designing logos and can easily tweak them manually.

micampeon How does the iPhone 6s camera compare to other iPhone generations?

Very often you just need to adjust levels and white balance to see a significant improvement on many photos. You don’t even need Lightroom for that, even more basic photo editors like OS X Photos work fine.

micampeon How does the iPhone 6s camera compare to other iPhone generations?

I think the largest difference in that portrait is the warmer white balance.

micampeon iOS at Facebook [pdf]

This didn't really tell me why Facebook needs 400 people to work on the iOS app and 75 commits per hour.

micampeon A New Face for Pebble

Well, that’s true, but you went to the other extreme of the spectrum: Piaget’s specialty are ultra thin watches, I don’t think it’s a much better example.

Mechanical watches under 7mm are already considered thin; more usually they are 9-11mm. Quartz are easily thinner.

I think smartwatches currently around look thicker because of case and lugs design. For example, the Sea-Dweller is 18mm, but the side of the case is not flat all the way like the 360, the case back is actually inset, so it’s less noticeable.

micampeon Ad Blocking: The Unnecessary Internet Apocalypse

> ads being indistinguishable from the surrounding content

I think this is an improvement, compared to the current situation of ads getting in the way of the content I want to read.

micampeon Crystal – iOS 9 ad blocker

I'd like Peace in reverse: with a blacklist instead of a whitelist.

micampeon The Apple iOS 9 Review

I disagree. HN should not do this.

micampeon Let's Build dispatch_queue

> created: 2 minutes ago

Please stop. You clearly don’t know who Mike Ash is. If he wanted to work at Apple he wouldn’t need a blog post.

micampeon Google Now’s Staff Exodus Reveals Hurdles for New CEO Pichai

I called it a competition myself. My issue is only with the part where people look for an overall “winner”. It’s an evolutionary process, there is no winner. Your ending question will likely never have a meaningful answer.

micampeon Google Now’s Staff Exodus Reveals Hurdles for New CEO Pichai

Can we stop talking about market competition as a battle where the only outcome is a single winner? That is almost never the result and almost never what you want as a customer/user/consumer.

micampeon Inside Amazon

I think Tim just doesn't realize how privileged he his just by the fact of being Tim Bray.

micampeon Show HN: NaSC – Do maths like a normal person

I usually don’t like to link to competing projects, but this seems to be only for Linux so I think I can link a similar one (as far as I can understand from the screenshots) for OS X and iOS: http://acqualia.com/soulver/

micampeon “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”

It says that people don't understand what Kickstarter is: you are investing in a project, not buying a product. Investments carry risk.

micampeon Thunderstrike 2: Mac firmware worm details

Security researchers have learned that marketing works.

micampeon Crafting Icons

What does “design can be something very divisive” tell you about “why do you need a citation, if you have two eyes” and the original quote that started this thread?

micampeon Google Hangouts 4.0: now simpler, faster, more beautiful

> IMs have had those features for decades

Yes, and 90% of my contacts have been “away” 100% of the time for just as long. Presence information is useless, I’ve been ignoring it for years.

What is the problem you want to avoid? People interrupting you. This is much better solved with a client side option that you control, without relying on the other user’s judgment.

I really like the Do Not Disturb feature in iOS and OS X: it works for the entire system instead of a single program and I fully control it, it doesn’t depend on you interpreting my signal that I’m “busy”.

Send me whatever messages you want any time you want, if I can respond I will, if I don’t want to be interrupted my phone won't make a bleep no matter how hard you push.

Preemptive rebuttal: “the system can turn off notifications when I set myself as away” then why set away in the first place? It has no meaning other than “do not disturb me”.

micampeon Linus Torvalds did not commit this

Signing my commits doesn’t prove that I didn’t do an unsigned one.

micampeon Programming fonts

If you really want to be a stickler you should use PPI, not DPI.