Hacker News Reader

"Yes, on a desktop or laptop computer. Not so easy on a phone/tablet."

I've never used Android, but it's dead simple in iOS. Just tap and hold.

I can't speak for HN's motivations, but my view as a web developer has always been that, in general, target="_blank" is bad. My reasoning is twofold: 1) It's unnecessary. Opening a link in a new tab is easy for the user to do with a keyboard modifier, if that's what they want. 2) Worse, when you use target="_blank" you force that behavior on every user. There's no keyboard modifier to negate that behavior and keep the link in the same window.

unfletchon GitHub Flow in the Browser

"I don't see why they can't pull in updates from the original repo."

Because github doesn't provide a way to do that on the site. Git workflows that can be achieved entirely on github.com were that subject of the story, and my original comment.

unfletchon GitHub Flow in the Browser

Yes, they could work from a branch, but then we'd have to give them read-write to the repo. There's no per-branch access control.

Working on a branch in their fork doesn't help. They still can't pull in updates from the original repo.

unfletchon GitHub Flow in the Browser

We have some marketing people who want to make trivial updates to our site, but we don't want to give them write access to the entire repo.

We've given them read-only access so they can fork the repo, make edits and send us (engineering) pull requests. But the missing piece that keeps this from being useful is that they can't keep their fork up to date using github.com. The best they can do is delete the fork and fork again, which stinks.

Is the ability to pull new commits from the original repo into your fork actually missing from github.com, or are we missing it?

unfletchon Google Gay Marriage

    "From what I've gathered, they've never really 'doodled' 
     anything that could remotely resemble a religion..."

Maybe that's policy now, but it hasn't always been. They've done easter: http://www.google.com/doodles/happy-easter-2000

In fact, having already done Easter was part of their response to this "controversy" -- there were two subjects for the same day, so they picked the one they hadn't already featured.

unfletchon Google Gay Marriage

As will "sf pride", a reference to the San Francisco Pride parade and celebration, which happens to be this weekend.

unfletchon Airbnb vs. Hotels: A Price Comparison

I take a weeklong trip to San Francisco every few months -- a city with loads of Airbnb uptake. I used Airbnb for the first few trips and was happy with the apartments I rented, but I've stopped even looking at Airbnb because the booking process is such a pain.

Every time I've used it there's been 24-72 hours of back and forth with a host before I even know whether I can reserve their place. Often I lose a day waiting to hear from a host only to find out their calendar wasn't up to date and it's not actually available.

Hotels are more expensive, but booking one is trivially easy. That convenience is worth a lot to me.

unfletchon John Gruber and friends launch Vesper note capture app

    "...sidenote, what's the correct terminology for the opposite
     of 'flat design'? It's certainly not skeumorphic..."

Well, we're talking about GUI design, and beveled buttons/menus etc. have pretty much been the norm for the GUI's entire history. So how about just using "traditional"?

unfletchon Zynga to Lay Off 520 Employees and shutter NY and LA Offices

Nope. I just talked to a friend who works in the SF office and he said he was in the middle of writing an email to his family saying that he wasn't affected when he realized they were still walking around telling people.

unfletchon Zynga to Lay Off 520 Employees and shutter NY and LA Offices

A note is by definition brief and informal. I think the employees deserve that any official communication in this kind of situation be neither.

Edit: And I'm sure I've put more weight on that one phrase than almost anyone else, but I've worked at startups for years now and been through rounds of layoffs at a couple. It's appropriate to err in the other direction.

unfletchon Zynga to Lay Off 520 Employees and shutter NY and LA Offices

The public announcement: http://blog.zynga.com/2013/06/03/ceo-update-4/

    "Our Founder and CEO Mark Pincus today sent a note to employees
     outlining structural changes..."

It might seem like a small thing to some, but I can't believe the casual language on the blog post introduction. The CEO "sent a note" to his company?

I'm sure that softened the blow to those 520 people. It was just a note, after all.

I don't care what your culture is like or that you want to be a "cool" company. Notes are for reminding people to clear their old food from the fridge, or seeing if anyone wants to get together after work to welcome the new guy. This is serious shit to (hopefully) every one of your employees, and especially so to 18% of them. There are times to be formal.

The letter itself is much better, but the blog intro is part of the official announcement. It counts.

unfletchon Amazon's short URL: http://a.co

I don't know a lot about DNS, so correct me if I'm wrong, but this looks like a case where the TLD does have an A record:

    dk.       86400	IN	A	193.163.102.24

In fact, www.dk resolves to a different IP:

    www.dk.   86400	IN	A	212.242.42.44

unfletchon Don’t buy an SLR if you’ll only use the kit lens

"...insecure baldhead attention whores..."

Not sure why I read that far, frankly, but I stopped there. Mr. Arment expressed an opinion. He didn't attack you personally. Why did you resort to name-calling?

unfletchon Google is sending out blankets to open-source developers

Glad I'm not alone. Maybe there's a technical misuse of grammar in there somewhere and the poster is being pedantic? Whatever the issue, I don't see it either.

unfletchon My first Mac App - a distraction-free note taking app

First thought: The screenshots could easily be mistaken for FoldingText (http://www.foldingtext.com).

unfletchon Bitcoin URL scheme whitelisted in HTML5

The name is always "Ian Hickson". He's the only committer on the HTML5 SVN repo:

   $ svn log -q | egrep "^r\d+" | cut -d "|" -f 2 | sort | uniq -c
   7850  ianh

unfletchon Show HN: HN Store

Thanks for bringing that up. It's fixed.

unfletchon Show HN: XKCD-inspired StackSort

FYI, you can link to a specific line on GitHub by appending #L<line no.> to the URL. In this case: https://github.com/gkoberger/stacksort/blob/master/js/script...

GitHub even adds the anchor for you if you click on the line number in the gutter. (shift-click to select a range of lines.)

unfletchon Unix tricks

    '!!:n' selects the nth argument of the last command, and '!$' the last arg

A lot of people know about "!$" (which is shorthand for !!:$), but that's just the tip of Bash's history expansion. I use these things all the time. One of my favorite keystroke savers is adding :h, the head modifier, to !$. For example:

    $ cp file.txt /some/annoyingly/deep/target/directory/other.txt
    $ cd !$:h
    $ pwd # => /some/annoyingly/deep/target/directory

Once you understand how each component works it's easier to put them together into new (to you) combinations. For example, once you know that !$ is shorthand for !!:$, it's not a huge leap to reason out that you can use !-2:$ to get the last argument to the 2nd-to-last command. Or !ls:$ for the last arg to the most recent `ls` command.

I also prefer to do substitution with the :s modifier rather than ^ as suggested at the link, for consistency's sake:

    $ echo "foo bar"
    foo bar
    $ echo !!:s/bar/baz
    foo baz
    $ echo !?bar?:s/foo/qux
    qux bar

Relevant Bash manual pages:

http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Event-Desi...

http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Word-Desig...

http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Modifiers....

unfletchon Expected arrival times for Apple products

I just want the current Thunderbolt display with the current iMac's screen, which has less glare. I'm hoping that they're only waiting on that until supplies aren't constrained by iMac production.

unfletchon Evernote 5 for Mac

You can set syncing to manual (and then never do it), but you still need to sign in to use the app.

unfletchon Jam With Chrome

  Now, if only it could work with real instruments plugged to the computer.

I haven't seen this in action, but isn't that what these guys do? http://ejamming.com

Just a few weeks ago an extended family member mentioned them to me. He'd been using their software to play with his old bandmates, who are now scattered around the country.

Edit: Here's a link to their "learn more" page, which is hard to find: http://ejamming.com/learn-more/

unfletchon Verizon is Selling Your Personal Data

Does anyone know if this applies to iPad-only customers? That's my only Verizon account, but the opt-out link requires a phone number to log in. (Ditto for the "forgot user id" form.)

unfletchon How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking

    "...but had to settle on the next best thing - spamming my email address with
     hundreds of emails per minute in an attempt to cover up the emails sent by
     my CC company."

Here's an article from just last month about this very technique: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2012/07/cyberheist-smokescreen-e...

Flooding someone's inbox (or telephone) is now available as a very affordable a la carte service.

unfletchon Readability: An Important Announcement

I use Safari Reader all the time and it loads paginated articles very well as far as I can tell. When you scroll down a bit you should see an actual separated second page, labeled "Page 2 of N."

Maybe there are certain sites whose pagination Reader can't figure out, but try this for example: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/world/europe/putins-return...

unfletchon 6.5 Million LinkedIn Password Hashes Leaked

Or prompt for it:

   grep `read -sp "password: "; echo "$REPLY" | tr -d "\n" | shasum | cut -c6-40` hacked.txt

unfletchon Password Rules

    What kind of company asks you to tell them your password by phone?

I don't remember for sure. I think it was a utility company.

unfletchon Password Rules

I've used 1Password generated passwords for years. You're right, it is awesome, but only until you have to relay one of those generated strings to a support person over the phone:

"...left curly brace. No, it's like the parenthesis, but squiggly. Are you using a regular keyboard? Hold shift and type the left square bracket. The square one. It's to the right of the P..."

Nightmare.

unfletchon Redesigning the hotel icon

There's really something to this. The original symbols needed to be universally understood because they were intended to be used on signs, which are obviously a static medium. The web and apps can be tailored to the observer's language preference. Maybe a universal symbol isn't necessary here.