Hacker News Reader

pennigon Ting Gigabit Fiber Internet

CenturyLink installed FTTH here a few days ago. When I called Comcast to cancel, it sounded like they intended to put up a fight until I mentioned the word "gigabit." Immediately took the wind out of the poor rep's sails.

pennigon Trampolino: Arduino powered liquid pouring system

Great Scott!

pennigon Localtunnel.me

Yeah, that's what I thought this was at first. Naming it the same as an existing project with the same purpose is negligent at best.

pennigon NSA Rejecting FOIA Requests by US Citizens

Child's play, really.

pennigon US Healthcare is an Embarrassment

I don't have any personal hardships with the existing system, but whenever I see my statement of benefits where a doctor bills $X and insurance pays them $X/4, I always scratch my head and think, "This is normal? There has GOT to be a better way!"

pennigon Why you should take your 20's seriously

Well, shit.

pennigon iPhone 5

Oh. You were serious. I feel bad for laughing now.

pennigon CSS text-transform is language-dependant: the Dutch case explained

The code path for that case must be delightful.

pennigon Apple Submits Updated Campus 2 Plans to Cupertino

Ahh, you're right. I took a look at the PDFs and the blue circle indicates emergency access routes.

pennigon Apple Submits Updated Campus 2 Plans to Cupertino

A road? Were you looking at the floor plan for one of the underground parking levels?

pennigon Winamp for Mac

Well I'll be monkey's uncle.

pennigon Winamp for Mac

It's like how TCBY used to be "The Country's Best Yogurt" but is now "This Can't Be Yogurt."

Win now stands for the-opposite-of-lose, instead of Windows.

pennigon Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator, Only One Month Late

Behold, the power of OpenDoc!

pennigon Cool New Google Maps Feature Lets You 'Helicopter' Preview Routes

I'm not seeing this, in latest Safari or Chrome. Anybody else?

pennigon Doodle or Die - our "bizarrely addictive" Node Knockout game

when I tried to draw "procrastination" it killed the server, apparently.

pennigon The technology inside Apple's $50 Thunderbolt cable

Having active cables also leaves the door open to optical Thunderbolt cabling in the future, without the need for new hardware.

pennigon Apple Reports Third Quarter Results

So many billions.

pennigon Why Comcast Should Be Sued

Kind of a tangent, but it frustrates me to see when a company makes its decisions based on the desires of its shareholders (by legal obligations or otherwise). The way I see it, this behavior only serves to weaken a company. Sure, the shareholders get their 5¢ dividends, but it's usually at the cost of a superior product offering.

Capitalism, man…

pennigon BankSimple: A Bank That Doesn't Suck

I'd hate to see your list of questions posed to a potential mate.

pennigon Arduino.js

Interesting demo, but I feel a bit duped since it's not a pure JS implementation. I expected something written to work with NodeJS, but instead I found a browser-based JS library that talks to an instance of Flash on the page.

Still, kudos to the author for coming up with this experiment.

pennigon How Google Controls Android: Digging into the Skyhook Filings

I see it as two separate concerns. The first time around, folks criticized the result of the "open" nature of the platform (i.e. fragmentation). Now, these folks are criticizing the so-called hypocrisy in the "open" mantra itself.

pennigon Google to build its own office space

The race is on now between Apple and Google! Who will be the first to break ground on their respective paragons of green corporate campuses? I am giddy with anticipation!

pennigon JavaScript performance and a Webkit hotspot

Looks like WebKit has problems appending to a very long string. The less we can do that the better, so I came up with this solution:

  var dest = 'apple';
  while (dest.length < 100000) {
    var out = '';
    for (var i=dest.length-5, end=i+10; i<end; ++i)
      out += dest[i];
    dest += out;
  }

That brought the time from about 4 seconds to a more respectable 90 msec.

pennigon Bertrand Serlet to leave Apple

What kind of button would you want to press?

pennigon IPhone Needs a New Home

That's quite the theory you've cooked up there.

pennigon Ode to the App Review team

That's some top shelf snark right there.

pennigon Skip The Water

An interesting thought, but the square was just a masking tape outline that couldn't be messed with.

pennigon Skip The Water

I remember back to the days of my youth. My friends and I were participating in Odyssey of the Mind one year, and we had a problem to solve during the state finals.

The goal was to build a bridge that could transport marbles from one side of a 12-inch square to another without anything touching the surface within the square. With a meager set of supplies (postcard, paperclip, rubber band, etc), we scratched our heads for a bit. But in a flash of inspiration, we built a bridge spanning two adjacent sides.

We thought it might've been too clever, so we asked the judges to reiterate the rules. They didn't mention the opposite side. Just another side.

We took home 1st prize.

pennigon Video And Screenshots Of Android 3.0′s Surprise Appearance

I enjoyed that feature, but the gesture feels backwards. Seems that a swipe up rather than down would be better for rotating to an oblique angle. Imagine a rotating whiteboard (e.g. http://j.mp/g2KHGc). Standing in front of it, you'd want to push on the top half ("swipe up") to rotate the face upwards.

pennigon BankSimple Launches Preview Site

What people really need is fundamental help with managing their spending and finances.

Check the "Know what you can safely spend" blurb under The Product section. It seems like it's in the ballpark of your grand vision. You can allocate spending/saving buckets, and it will tell you — based on your income/spending streams — how much discretionary money you have at any given point. Seems really handy.