Hacker News Reader

The site's down. Does anyone have a mirror?

tdoggetteon $100 Bill: The Fed Has a $110 Billion Problem with New Benjamins

$100 bills with a blank stripe down the middle are going to be valuable in the future.

tdoggetteon Assange arrested in London (BBC)

Traditionally, by starting with "Not guilty, Your Honor," and going from there, but things might be different in Sweden.

tdoggetteon Downtime

They should have a better ongoing communication method than Twitter in the event of downtime. I'd suggest getting a separate hosting account with a reliable third party, and planning on running something that looks like (but isn't) a normal tumblog, but is instead something very reliable, like editing an html file on a web server that everyone on the team has shell access to.

tdoggetteon Show HN - My side project: Thingist

What's it for?

tdoggetteon "Most people don't even know what a rootkit is"

I haven't bought anything with Sony's name on it since then.

tdoggetteon Balloon filled with ground coffee makes ideal robotic gripper

This could be very useful for relatively low-cost prosthetics. All you need from the user is an arm to mount it on and the ability to control vacuum on and off.

tdoggetteon Google Groups Data To Be Destroyed

That's "Don't Be Evil," actually. I think that's a pretty important distinction in tone.

tdoggetteon Try Ubuntu On Web Browser (Online) via Edubuntu Weblive

I went to high school where there was an Edubuntu lab. Each PC had a local OS, but it also booted off of a server in the corner via LTSP, giving everyone a portable Gnome environment.

With this, a class could have access to that environment on any machine without having to boot to NIC. This has potential.

tdoggetteon Predicting the Future

"A story about AI which concludes that they are utterly and forever alien" is Charles Stross' Accelerando. It's a novel made of sequential stories that follow a family through the Singularity and well beyond, and the AI in it becomes something utterly inhuman in terms of thought.

I enjoyed it a lot, and it's a free ebook in addition to something you can get at the library.

Many ebook formats: http://manybooks.net/titles/strosscother05accelerando-txt.ht...

HTML: http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/accelerando.charles_stross/toc.ht...

tdoggetteon Too Dumb to Fail?

If you can guess how a person will react to market fluctuations and make money off of it, is that a crime?

tdoggetteon Google closes Issue 9

Very good advice.

tdoggetteon Hacker News Facebook Group

It's not like HN is restricted. Who would want in other than HNers?

tdoggetteon Facebook Overhauls Groups, A Social Solution To Create “A Pristine Graph”

On the other hand, a Facebook user's list of groups that they've been active in within a month (or look at regularly) is probably very useful data.

tdoggetteon Humor on the web and how to stop it

This is actually a great example of how to discourage stupid humor on a (mostly) serious website.

Heck, I downvoted it.

tdoggetteon "We've read your code"

"We've read your code."

"I'm so sorry."

tdoggetteon Scott Adams: Your Next Gym

"Doing it right" by whose definition?

Why can't something be satisfying on one level and fun as it relates to other things?

tdoggetteon Scott Adams: Your Next Gym

Okay, here goes: You're old-fashioned.

Things are more fun when they're part of a game. Brushing your teeth or doing your homework was not fun at age 6, but if you got a gold star, it was worth it, just because gold stars had some value to you.

But, you say, you don't care about games associated with your everyday life these days. Okay, then. You don't have to play. Don't pretend that your preferences are a model of the way things ought to be. There are a lot of ways that that doing non-fun things can be made more fun with technology and games.

Putting RFID chips in your plates will make lifting more fun if it's tied to a fun, competitive game with teammates cheering you on. The fact that you personally don't want to play doesn't mean that making healthy things fun with technology is an insurmountable problem, or that people should give up on all this fun stuff and pull themselves up by their bootstraps as you've made it so very clear that you have.

tdoggetteon Stephen Wolfram Uses This

Click the down button: it'll knock them down another karma point and fade out their comment more, but it won't display lower than -4 to prevent pile-on downvoting to -50.

tdoggetteon Use brute force to find an available domain name for Web 2.0 projects

I just registered a matching .com and.org that I got from here, and they don't even sound Web 2.0-y.

tdoggetteon Google Reader reader? Would you find this service useful?

I have about 15 pages of legal pad scribblings along this line.

tdoggetteon Google Reader reader? Would you find this service useful?

I get my content from a lot of RSS feeds, plus HN, plus Rediit, plus all the other miscellaneous places one finds links.

It'd be neat if there was a way to detect when a piece of content was just a reblog of some picture or article or link that's doing the rounds: maybe if the content is only a link plus less than a hundred words?

tdoggetteon Why Women Programmers Aren’t a Fad

Who is the author arguing against here? Did I miss it when someone said "Chicks writing programs? Psh, that'll go the way of pogs and pokemon in no time at all!"

tdoggetteon Firefox 4 Beta 1 Released

The single feature that forever ties me to Chrome is tabs on top.

On top of the address bar isn't the point. It's a nice touch that emphasizes the metaphor for "real" tabs, like on a paper folder, but it doesn't have the huge usability bonus of Chrome's implementation.

The important thing is that in Chrome, the tabs are on the very top pixel of the screen (in Windows or a Linux UI with no top bar). Since I browse with a hand on the mouse, this means that I can switch between tabs by chucking the pointer at the top of the screen and scrubbing left and right, instead of having to pay attention to vertical alignment.

http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html

tdoggetteon AP Not Amused By The Woot Story, Tries To Play The Oil Spill Card

Were I Paul Colford, I'd have bought the headphones, sent Woot the receipt, and noted publicly that this is in no way a payment for the quote, but merely a very good deal on headphones.

tdoggetteon Being God is a big responsibility

Sam Hughes' entire fiction section on qntm.org is worth reading if you enjoy stories like this. I'd recommend the "Ed stories" (http://qntm.org/ed), "Time Loop" (http://qntm.org/timeloop), "Valuable Humans In Transit" (http://qntm.org/transit), and the entire set of "Fine Structure" (http://qntm.org/structure), which is a large piece of fiction made up of small stories that he recently finished up.

tdoggetteon Unity: a lightweight netbook interface for Ubuntu

Now that I've acclimated to Chrome on Windows, I don't think I could give up having the tabs on the very top of the screen. Me and my man Fitts love having the browser tabs at the top and the open applications at the bottom. It's really fast to switch tabs using the mouse that way.

tdoggetteon Facebook is Dying

Okay, so I meet someone and decide that we ought to keep in touch. We swap phone numbers, and I say, "add me on Facebook when you get home."

They say, "nah, I don't use Facebook anymore. Do you have a _______ account?"

Someone should really fill in that blank.

tdoggetteon The iPad, the Newton, & the "Of Course" Model of Innovation Diffusion

A small, italic, grey-on-white pair of words, one of which is an uncapitalized name

versus

The vast majority of tech writers and geeks in general being male

Downvoting the guy pointing out the incorrect assumption is unwarranted, yeah, but the assumption is one that'll be correct really, really often.