Hacker News Reader

vegashackeron MMS fix for original iPhone

When I first heard about text messages, I thought the technology would (at best) be used for a brief time and then die once people had email from their phones. I was wrong. It turns out there's a huge market for short, in-the-moment messages. And MMS is just text messages with more flexible bits allowed. Yes, iPhone users will continue to email pics, but they'll also MMS pics like crazy--two entirely different use cases, it turns out.

vegashackeron Xkcd book tour announced - meet Randall Sept 22nd at Y Combinator

I don't see information on the SF event. What time is it at, and where is it?

vegashackeron Getting a Fair Toss From a Biased Coin

von Neumann is credited with coming up with the fair toss trick:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_coin#Fair_results_from_a_b...

vegashackeron List of Inventors Killed By Their Own Inventions

Reading this, I kept stumbling over typos and awkward sentence constructions. The content was interesting, but I feel like the writing was much worse than your average Wikipedia article. I wonder why.

vegashackeron Developers, Be Warned: Apple Has Apparently TMed Those Glossy Chat Bubbles

No.

vegashackeron Bug #48669: PHP now includes GOTO

Don't miss the

  goto hell;

at the bottom. Awesome.

vegashackeron Forget Starbucks, work at the library instead

It's strange that he listed "Phone calls" as one of the reasons he loves working at the library. If you read the explanation, it's a wash in terms of coffee house v. library in this category.

One downside of the library is that it's often not convenient to grab a cup of coffee or snack. The main branch in SF has a cafe, but it's way in the basement. The Chinatown branch doesn't have any food or drinks.

vegashackeron Forget Starbucks, work at the library instead

Starbucks has a pretty annoying card registration thing, but once you do that, the internet is usually hassle-free. Also, even though everyone seems to cite this two hour limit (I have too), in practice I've never seen my internet connection actually expire--and I spend a good amount of time in Starbucks. Headed to one right now, in fact...

vegashackeron Spacelocker, A Social Network To Avoid Like The Plague

I think the news here is that this company sent that support email to a user. It's pretty unbelievable. In fact, I'm not sure I do believe that it's real. Would someone really write that?

vegashackeron Chicago Realty Group Sues Woman For $50,000 Over A Tweet

When I read that quote, I was like, "Okay, okay. This is some kind of joke." Check the date. Nope, not April 1st. Check the URL. Not the Onion.

Really? A spokesperson said that??

vegashackeron Apple hardware changes alter Microsoft "Hunter" ads

No, I go to the discount places too (I was just in a Ross the other day). But I hate clothes shopping, and the discount stores do take more effort. Sometimes I feel it's worth it to not go discount just to be in and out of there faster.

Incidentally, I don't have the same "bargain bin" problem in the discount stores...because it all looks pretty bad.

vegashackeron Apple hardware changes alter Microsoft "Hunter" ads

I liked the CD bin analogy. Another good one is the clearance rack at clothing stores. Even though it's the same stuff that, a few months prior, was given lots of floor space and displayed nicely on models--it just seems crappier. And even though I know what's going on, I still totally fall for it. Them's some powerful forces, apparently.

vegashackeron Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule

"Grab coffee" meetings can be particularly bad (in terms of time lost) because of the extra cost in getting to and from the cafe. When I had a normal job, getting to a meeting meant putting my shoes back on and walking down the hall. Now I have to consider which bus I'm going to take...

vegashackeron Cuil Tries to Rise Again

This actually sounds like an interesting idea to me. Most of the time, I suspect, my search results don't need data from my social network to improve. But occasionally social data might be highly relevant. And so if my search results are Google quality most of the time, and even better (due to social network hits) a small percentage of the time, Cuil may totally rock.

I also like how this isn't a social network search engine. It's an extension of normal search. I can't imagine myself (at least today) sending a separate query to my social networks. But obviously I query a normal search engine all the time.

I wonder if they will run into Terms of Use issues with Facebook et al. In order to search efficiently, they'll need to store social network data...

vegashackeron Applications open for winter 2010 YC funding

Whoops! Thanks. I think I was distracted because at first I thought "k" was the variable representing # of founders, and then when I figured that out... ah, forget it. I'm an idiot.

vegashackeron Applications open for winter 2010 YC funding

4 founders should get $23k, right?

vegashackeron The complete guide to Microsoft Office 2010

Seriously. Can the editors please fix this headline?

vegashackeron The Awesome Foundation: $1K grants every month in the name of awesomeness

I think this parenthetical is a typo:

  (> ~500 words for you precisionists)

vegashackeron This is your pilot speaking. Now, about that holding pattern...

Honest and classy apology. Nice, Google.

vegashackeron Paul Graham: Lisp in Web-Based Applications (2001)

Ah ha! Thanks, gms. But this brings us to the question... are we getting anything by using side-effecty print statements to make web pages? I don't see it. I think I vastly prefer building up my markup functionally, and then handing it off to the web server when done. Plus, with the PLT way, you avoid writing macros. And a wise man once wrote, "It's considered to be bad style to use [macros] when they're not necessary." ;)

Okay...I'll leave my "Are we getting anything" question there, but it probably shouldn't be answered. Or at least not here. It's essentially the pure-functional versus side-effect debate. To be fair, you get benefits from both, and both have downsides that the others are better at.

vegashackeron Paul Graham: Lisp in Web-Based Applications (2001)

Not sure I buy it. My favorite language is Scheme (specifically, PLT Scheme). You'll find no macros below:

  (define (whitepage . content)
    `(html (body ,@content)))

  (define (para)
    `(p))

  (define (link prose url)
    `(a ((href ,url)) ,prose))

  (define (prbold text)
    `(strong ,text))

So the example from the Arc link

  (whitepage "Hello world!" (para) (link "Click here" "http://news.ycombinator.com")
             "for" (prbold "more stuff"))

yields

  (html
   (body
    "Hello world!"
    (p)
    (a ((href "http://news.ycombinator.com")) "Click here")
    "for"
    (strong "more stuff")))

which is a valid expression that PLT's web server will render as a web page.

vegashackeron Paul Graham: Lisp in Web-Based Applications (2001)

Does someone know offhand why these HTML generators are macros and not just functions? If I need to RTFSC that's fine, but thought I'd ask in case it's a quick answer.

vegashackeron FireDiff - track changes to a page's DOM and CSS

Thanks magical, mysterious editors! :)

vegashackeron FireDiff - track changes to a page's DOM and CSS

Can the editors add an apostrophe to "pages"? Apologies in advance for my insanity, but I really did trip over this headline and had to re-read.

vegashackeron Announcing HackStars

Agreed. Headlines are not supposed to editorialize. The HN editors should fix this one.

vegashackeron Interview: Bruce Lewis on Web Develpment with Scheme

(Disclosure: I was present on the Etherpad when this happened.)

Fave quote from the interview:

"If you want to do [some tricky thing related to grouping photos] the code looks really messy. It’s not rocket science, but it’s painful. Macros hide that pain really nicely. I actually enjoy grouping results. I have fun doing database-driven web programming. A lot of good things don’t get implemented on the web because they’re not fun."

vegashackeron Undo Send in Gmail

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/06/quick-all-actions-s...

vegashackeron Js-scheme - a Scheme interpreter written in JavaScript

  > ((lambda (f) (f f)) (lambda (f) (f f)))

  ;InternalError: too much recursion

vegashackeron Game of life that produces scrolling text "Golly"

Has anyone read Borges' story, "The Library of Babel"? This Golly thing reminds me of this part of the story:

"One [book] which my father saw in a hexagon on circuit fifteen ninety-four was made up of the letters MCV, perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another (very much consulted in this area) is a mere labyrinth of letters, but the next-to-last page says Oh time thy pyramids."

vegashackeron Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator

I've noticed that sometimes the domain name shown in parens next to the link is kind of useless. Take, for example, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=449670. "tumblr.com" is not useful in this case, but "titocosta.tumblr.com" would be more helpful--"oh, it's someone's personal blog named Tito Costa." Interestingly, it looks like sometimes you already do show more than just "domain.com", as in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=449221.