Hacker News Reader

rodion_89on Ghost Font: A font that humans can read but AI cannot

I threw it at Fable with the prompt "What does the message say?" and it also figured out without issue. Thought process is interesting https://imgur.com/a/GToXs6W

rodion_89on Shouldibuytwitter.com – A tiny takeover arbitrage model for TWTR

Elon is a unique-enough identifier whereas Jeff and Bill aren’t

rodion_89on It Turns Out You Can Bullshit a Bullshitter After All

Page 17 of the appendix: https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/downloadSu...

rodion_89on WhatsApp delays privacy changes following backlash

> No amount of turd polishing with unlimited money and PR talent was able to make people to like him

I don't rule it out. Gates managed to pull it off when I didn't think it was possible

rodion_89on Google made plans to target the EU official in charge of digital policy updates

> I can choose to drop Google any second

> failed to produce any viable alternative to Google

These two statements seem to be in conflict

rodion_89on Senate leadership pushing a surveillance bill as Americans focused on Covid-19

They instead extended it for 77 days due to COVID-19. Basically punting for now

rodion_89on Avoid News: Towards a Healthy News Diet (2010) [pdf]

It's an avenue for social coordination. The benefit of having a hive mind is that you get to have a hive.

rodion_89on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2019)

Substack (W18) | Full stack engineer | San Francisco | Onsite | https://substack.com

Substack lets writers start their own subscription publication - think paid blog/newsletter - where writers' and readers' incentives are aligned.

Over 50k people pay to subscribe to publications, and top writers are making six figures.

We use Node, Express, and Postgres on top of Heroku. React for frontend. Simple & effective so we can focus on solving problems for users.

We are 4 people. We raised a series A from a16z this summer and are thoughtfully building our early team. Two of our three founders are technical (the other is a writer) and we're looking for folks to work along side us, shipping things that touch thousands of writers and millions of readers.

Come join us! https://careers.substack.com

rodion_89on AMA with Substack and Matt Taibbi about a new business model for journalism

His wiki[1] says "Women portrayed in the book have gone on record to defend Taibbi, stating that none of the sexual harassment portrayed in the book ever happened."[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Taibbi

[2] https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/12/the-destructi...

rodion_89on The Kik Bot Platform

http://kik.me/leftpad.bot

rodion_89on That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people

Reflects more on him than Apple

rodion_89on Google’s growing problem: 50% of people do zero searches per day on mobile

Are his quoted 1.4bn Android devices all outside of China? If not then the numbers for mobile and desktop come out pretty similar:

    1.3bn non-China Android users = 1.4bn Android users - 0.386bn China Android users [1]
    1.28 searches/user/day = 50bn searches / (1.3bn users * 30 days)

That 1.28 for mobile is pretty close to the 1.23 quoted for desktop

[1] https://www.techinasia.com/china-386-million-active-android-...

rodion_89on Ad Blocking, Ad Networks, and Your IP Address

> "don't watch my video unless you pay $5"

This is an explicit agreement between the customer and content provider. YouTube, Google search, etc don't have any explicit agreement with users in this regard -- the ads just show up.

The TOS says it, your understanding of their business model conveys it, but at the end of the day they just shove the ads in there without directly claiming to their customers, "you must see ads and be tracked to get free content".

I think usage would change dramatically if they actually claimed this when a user first uses their service.

rodion_89on Apple TV – A World Without Webviews – BPXL Craft

For anyone who has ever navigated websites on a "smart TV", thanks goodness. If Apple can deliver on apps bringing all the functionality and content I want, I'd much prefer the native apps interfacing effectively with the device's remote

rodion_89on Google Hangouts

Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hangouts/nckgahada...

rodion_89on MacDown: Open-source Markdown editor for OS X

Kinda surprised by the rise in markdown editors whose selling point is the live preview mode. I always felt that the best feature of markdown was that the raw text made it somewhat obvious how it should be rendered. If a preview mode is need I almost want to jump straight to a WYSIWYG editor

rodion_89on App.js: Mobile webapps made easy

Like the others said, this is written by Kik Interactive (http://kik.com/) which is well-funded.

The idea is that Kik's browser has the PhoneGap-like utilities that you described built-in, while this is a library for building the UI of an application. http://dev.kik.com/

rodion_89on App.js: Mobile webapps made easy

It'll continue I work in webview with panning (bounce) turned off. In fact that's usually the most optimal experience

rodion_89on App.js: Mobile webapps made easy

Thanks for the feedback!

* Fixed the scrolling issue. Ios safari doesn't let you disable the bounce so there is a workaround now.

* Ios back gesture works fine... Except in mobile safari, again because there is no way to disable apples back gesture. This would work best in phonegap or Kik where you can control these kinds of things

* Will fix subject bug in demo soon..

rodion_89on App.js: Mobile webapps made easy

It's actually just using the browsers scrolling mechanism. Android 4+, iOS 5+ ship with touch-scrolling that you can enable on an element so it's as close to native scrolling as you can get.

Just add this CSS:

    overflow: scroll;
    -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;

rodion_89on Some of the Best HTML5 Games from 2013

Looks like the Zynga app is using Kik for distribution: http://cards.kik.com/

rodion_89on New Google logo

For reference, the current logo being served is hosted here: https://www.google.com/images/srpr/logo4w.png

rodion_89on Former Google Exec Turns Whistleblower On Company’s Tax Avoidance In The UK

Microsoft and Apple are engaging in similar behaviours.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement#Compa...

rodion_89on Stop developing for the 90% use case

According to Yahoo 99% of visitors have JavaScript enabled.

http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/many-users-javascript-d...

rodion_89on Digg banned from Google?

You are totally right. Disregard everything I said.

rodion_89on Digg banned from Google?

Their robots.txt file clearly asks to not be crawled at all.

  User-agent: *
  Disallow:

http://digg.com/robots.txt

rodion_89on 300 million users strong, Opera moves to WebKit

You still have "to pray the developers left" you a method to get the data in either case as native apps are simply the client-side of an application (just like a web apps).

The "openness" of the web is mostly referring to the technology stack (open source rendering engines), the standards, and the freedom of distribution. All of those points are not fully "open" and that's what I think they're referring to when they say that "the web may not be fully open".

rodion_89on The CSS Trashman

Totally killed all of my media queries..

http://jairaj.org http://www.csstrashman.com/styles/495

rodion_89on Google "working to remove" the redirect from Google Maps on Windows Phone

From what I can tell there is nothing stopping anyone from making a decent YouTube app with their public API.

https://developers.google.com/youtube/2.0/developers_guide_p...

What exactly is missing that they want?

rodion_89on Junior - A Native-Looking and Feeling Mobile HTML5 Front-End Framework

We made a similar tool for making apps like this to make our mobile Reddit app. It works really well on iOS and Android, blending into their UI design.

http://reddit.kik.com

Framework: https://github.com/kikinteractive/app