Hacker News Reader

shimonamiton Declassified US Spy Satellites Reveal Rare Look at Secret Cold War Space Program

Here's how they "downloaded" back then...

According to documents released by the NRO, each HEXAGON satellite mission lasted about 124 days, with the satellite launching four film return capsules that could send its photos back to Earth. An aircraft would catch the return capsule in mid-air by snagging its parachute following the canister's re-entry.

shimonamiton WinRT demystified

Don't forget that Apple invented the new 'mobile' as we now know it - hardware, UX, app store etc. Everybody else is following.

shimonamiton Are You Building The Right Product?

Elegantly put. I like the term "meta-features".

shimonamiton Giving away my Rails 3.0 book. Code examples also available on Github.

Off topic: what is the font you used in the PDF book?

UPDATE: ...and thank you much for the materials!

shimonamiton Akamai thrives in the spirit of its lost founder

From the article:

"The terrorists breached the cockpit somehow, and the one trained to fly a jet, Mohamed Atta, moved to take control of the plane. And it may be at that point that Lewin tried to stop the hijacking, according to the government commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks.

He had the training for it, but he never had a chance. One of the terrorists was seated behind Lewin and stabbed him, possibly in the throat. Lewin was one of the first of many to die on Sept. 11."

shimonamiton Some People Understand REST and HTTP

Yes, but that is yet another good reason not to version.

shimonamiton Some People Understand REST and HTTP

Another interesting post by Steve. What are your thoughts on twilio's date prefix in the URI versus using "v1" for example? Does discovery appease the purists qualms about versioning? But if using HATEOS enables discovery (which twilio is doing), why put a date there in the first place? I am thinking they're future-proofing their top-level resource discovery, but maybe I'm missing something.

shimonamiton NYT Skimmer

Up/down arrow keys to scroll sections (vertical), left/right to scroll section pages (horizontal). I think it is brilliant.

shimonamiton Persona - A concept email client

Ah, thanks. So most if not all the smarts were in the camera, not in the post-shooting graphic polish?

shimonamiton Persona - A concept email client

Aside question: Can anyone elaborate a little bit on the camera, lenses, and graphical effects used to produce the blur/focus effect in this video?

shimonamiton Thoughtback - Program Your Mind

What a great name for your application!

shimonamiton Coffeekup

I just noticed the example is editable! Thumbs up for a great demonstration.

shimonamiton AXR: A better(?) alternative to HTML+CSS

I had to scroll 12 slides until I reached the first snippet.

shimonamiton AXR: A better(?) alternative to HTML+CSS

Show me the CODE! Where is it???

If you are trying to revolutionize and disrupt existing languages/syntaxes, show how yours is better! Side-by-side on the front page is best. Look at CoffeeScript's site.

shimonamiton Telescopictext

For a minute there I thought I'd be able to paste in some text and automagically get a TL;DR. Pretty neat nonetheless.

shimonamiton In Fifty Days, Payments Innovation Will Stop In Silicon Valley

I'm not sure about that. From their website:

However, BankSimple is not a "bank." We partner with chartered banks who provide FDIC-insured products, leaving us free to concentrate on designing the complete consumer banking experience, via the web and your smartphone.

What implications this has on their regulatory requirements, whether banking or money transfering, would be interesting to discover.

shimonamiton Guy unknowingly live tweets the Osama raid in Abbottabad

Live coverage is only valuable if it is live. For most, this only came in the clear in the aftermath.

Twitter is more akin to a real time, universal log + interactions, but it doesn't come with a central studio that sifts through the materials and gives you the good stuff. If you don't know where to look, for most it will always be a hindsight experience.

shimonamiton Osama bin Laden Is Dead

Abbottabad literally looks like a resort nested in the Swiss Alps.

shimonamiton Fire ants lock legs and jaws to form rafts, avoid drowning

Here's a BBC video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A042J0IDQK4

shimonamiton Help Identify These Mysterious Scientific Objects

Side point but I can't help it: I can't bare static image navigation like this anymore, especially from a tech site like wired. I work on a widescreen laptop and I have to scroll down every time a new page loads with the next image.

shimonamiton Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting

I liked the ending:

Maybe if we called it 'cloud commuting', CIOs would buy in.

shimonamiton Google Invests $168MM in World's Largest Solar Power Tower Plant

The first experimental solar power towers were built in the 1980s. The first commercial plant was constructed in Seville, Spain and became operational in 2007.

shimonamiton Apple AirTunes private key extracted

Interesting. So why didn't they use a TMP? Cost savings? International distribution constraints? (I see TPMs are illegal in China -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module.) It is somewhat peculiar given Apple's known DRM policies.

shimonamiton Apple AirTunes private key extracted

So, are there no alternatives to embedding a single private key across multiple hardware devices?

shimonamiton How do I create a topmost window that is never covered by other topmost windows?

In DirectX you will lose exclusive control of the screen and all rendering surfaces if your app loses focus. Retaining focus is not possible, unless by way of trickery. Game forums are riddled with developers trying to overcome this problem.

shimonamiton How do I create a topmost window that is never covered by other topmost windows?

In such a case an IT admin remote controlling a PC, or an employee goofing off with Windows Player will prevent my app from gaining exclusivity. That does not solve the problem.

Also, exclusive access to the screen does not guarantee your program will go uninterrupted. Retaining exclusivity is impossible, because you just might get an ALT+TAB, CTRL+ALT+DEL or a WM_KILLFOCUS from who knows where. There are custom techniques for getting around each of those, but they're all along the lines of what's described in the article. Attaining and retaining exclusive access to the screen is next to impossible.

shimonamiton How do I create a topmost window that is never covered by other topmost windows?

Unfortunately that is not the case. Things like NetMeeting and other remote desktop control apps do the same.

shimonamiton Google: Hide sites to find more of what you want

Now, if they could only provide a way to disable previews...

shimonamiton I took "abusing the HTML5 History" to the next level.

Woz, you around?

That gave me a good laugh! If it is of any interest, in the following video which was posted a while back on HN, Steve Wozniak tells how he co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs, and amongst other things, how he hackishly brought color computing to the Apple 2:

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/400/

(You'll have to forgive me since I don't have time to search exactly where in the video he talks about adding color.)