HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

ronnoch

389 karma · joined May 29, 2010

I release all copyright on my comments on Hacker News, under a CC0 no copyright declaration [1]. Feel free to do what you want with them.

[1] http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

submissionscomments
ronnoch··on Change your Last.fm password
I was worried for a minute, but I can't actually think of anything a hacker could do with my last.fm account that I care about.
ronnoch··on If You Have A Smartphone, Anyone Can Now Track Your Every Move
How would one go about setting this up in their own house? Privacy concerns aside, I can think a some cool uses for this (more finely-grained location based reminders for instance).
ronnoch··on AIDE - Java IDE for Android
You can use a Bluetooth keyboard with an Android tablet.
ronnoch··on Scroogle, Privacy-First Search Engine, Shuts Down for Good
I believe Ixquick blends results from several search engines, like an aggregator. Startpage is by the same people but only includes Google results. It also has some Google-specific features like date search. The difference is pretty small though.
ronnoch··on Scroogle, Privacy-First Search Engine, Shuts Down for Good
Why? I doubt it has any negative impact on Google if a tiny fraction of their users go through a proxy, and I'm having trouble thinking of another reason to oppose doing so.
ronnoch··on Scroogle, Privacy-First Search Engine, Shuts Down for Good
The two best alternatives I've found:

https://ixquick.com/eng/

https://startpage.com/eng/

ronnoch··on Scroogle, Privacy-First Search Engine, Shuts Down for Good
What if you object to being tracked, but also realize that no other search engine comes close to matching Google's results?
ronnoch··on Amazon, please don’t hijack the web on Kindle Fire
XDA forums are hard at work: http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=1309

Basically, they have CyanogenMod 7 running on it, but there are still some kinks that need to be worked out (a few features aren't working yet, video isn't perfect, etc.)

ronnoch··on Vim: revisited
Spaced repetition fans should be aware that there's a great Anki deck available for learning vim commands:

http://alfmikula.blogspot.com/2010/11/using-spaced-repetitio...

ronnoch··on Siri Is Stuffed With Hilarious Easter Eggs
I can't help but think it's more likely that these images are faked than that Apple actually designed Siri to recommend escort services.
ronnoch··on Hey Google, I want my cache links back
There's also this addon for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-pag...
ronnoch··on Amazon to Unveil the "Kindle Fire"
Maybe people who want e-ink just buy a Kindle.
ronnoch··on College Students Can Now Rent Textbooks Electronically From Amazon
I've been known to use the scanner instead. Then it's free.
ronnoch··on Google Makes Web Pages Load Instantly
In order to be instant, it would have to download all images, scripts and stylesheets too - wouldn't that screw up everyone's web stats?
ronnoch··on SonyPictures.com hacked, personal information and passwords compromised
Well, that's certainly the last thing Bitcoin needed right now.
ronnoch··on BankSimple: We have cards
In some ways the more awesome you are the more humility you have to signal, to avoid seeming arrogant.
ronnoch··on Mozilla to crack down on add-ons that slow down Firefox
The memory problem is pretty serious. I've been using the Memory Restart addon (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/memory-restar...), which shows memory use in the bottom corner and lets you click to restart when it goes over a certain amount.
ronnoch··on Receivd - beautiful, fast filesharing for everyone
Will there be Windows support?
ronnoch··on Is This The Girl That Hacked HBGary?
Couldn't they just attempt to fill the "outside" partition up? I mean, let's say you have a 1TB partition with a 100GB hidden volume inside. What happens if somebody tries to write more than 900GB into the outside partition?
ronnoch··on Show HN: Readability-like API Using Machine Learning
The tagging feature is very impressive.
ronnoch··on No-SQL injection in Mongo PHP
> Honestly, I'm trying to figure out how someone could sanitize their input and still be affected by this.

I don't think you could, unless you tried to write your own sanitizing functions from scratch and somehow screwed it up. In PHP, htmlspecialchars(), mysql_real_escape_string() and addslashes() all do fine sanitizing array input -- either throwing an exception or returning the string "Array".

ronnoch··on No-SQL injection in Mongo PHP
Somehow I managed to use PHP for 8 years and never notice this... Time to double check all my input sanitizing code, I guess.
ronnoch··on Send to Kindle: any web page text, with one click, using Chrome browser.
On the contrary, I've even started using my 3G as my primary internet device, just for basic web surfing and stuff. My eyes feel more relaxed than they have in years.
ronnoch··on Send to Kindle: any web page text, with one click, using Chrome browser.
I only started taking notes once I got a Kindle. The idea of defacing a physical book just bothers me, and most the books I read are from libraries, anyway. Now that I have my Kindle I've been taking notes all the time, but there are a lot of missing features. Not being able to link to other sections in a book is a killer.
ronnoch··on Impossible for the HN crowd: Do nothing for 2 minutes
Aha! I knew there was something wrong with that horizon. I spent 2 minutes trying to figure out what it was.
ronnoch··on Paranoia and deletion: the wipe man page
Currently your comment, which adds nothing to the discussion except a simple spelling correction, has more upvotes than the parent. Sign of the times for HN?

Not to say spelling corrections are never useful, I think they often are, but I don't understand the mindset that upvotes them over comments that actually participate in the discussion.

ronnoch··on Steve Pavlina releases 1000+ personal development articles into public domain
He actually posted on his forum that Google makes up a minority of his traffic now, so it's not a huge worry for him.
ronnoch··on CES2011: The end of the PC era
Agreed. I'm predicting more along the lines of really good on-screen keyboards, or ThinkGeek's laser keyboard (http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/keyboards-mice/8193/), or something entirely new but still in that vein. In other words, keeping what works but evolving past the big physical slab of plastic.

> Call me old-fashioned, but I don't see it being supplanted by voice-transcription or gestures or whatever for a very long time.

Well, we can type way faster than we can talk, so even if voice transcription were perfected, it would still be impractical.

ronnoch··on US Government Strategy To Prevent Leaks Is Leaked
Does the government throttle document downloads? It seems like if there was a download limit and a mandatory wait between downloads, the whole cable fiasco could never have happened. I mean, you could still leak a few documents here and there if you wanted to, but nothing like the massive leaks that have been happening.
ronnoch··on CES2011: The end of the PC era
We'll probably still be using some sort of device that involves tapping keys with our fingers. But I'd be very surprised if that device is anything like current keyboards.

(And then there's the small chance that brain-computer interfaces will allow us to type with our minds, but I'm not betting on that.)

Page 1 of 3Next →