Hacker News Reader

whugheson Hulu announces monthly subscription, support for iPhone/iPad, still ad supported

The answer is yes. Hulu has regularly blocked Flash-enabled devices through various (often circumventable, but still) means. It's just that you never hear about them.

whugheson Is Google About to Launch a Facebook Killer?

I feel like Google is constantly launching Facebook killers and waiting to see what will stick. They have so many different social networks and feed mechanisms that it's hard to discern a coherent strategy from them.

whugheson Less.js will obsolete CSS

Please, no. This is terrifying. Let us browse without JavaScript and in peace. Please.

whugheson John Gruber: I'll Tell You What's Fair

HTC has been building giant-touchscreen-type phones for years. Windows Mobile is not some kind of cheap Blackberry ripoff; it's a Palm ripoff, a lot closer to the iPhone when it came out than anything else. Moreover, the first Android phones didn't even have multitouch or capacitive screens.

Did Apple influence some design decisions? Sure. However, the design of the G1 and the first Android phones were also a logical extension from what was available at the time.

whugheson Everyone dials in

There's a conference call scene in this (relevant, interesting, funny) video which I think applies to this topic:

http://www.theonion.com/video/more-american-workers-outsourc...

I think that it could become a liability to do this at some point, though. When everybody is calling in and people have flaky quality, you are wasting at least some time. If a meeting is more effective in person, then have that meeting in person! You shouldn't be afraid to exclude one or two people if they're traveling; they're already excluded anyway. Why provide an illusion of close involvement?

whugheson Ask HN: Overcoming engineer/developer bias against SEO

The points you make are disturbing. As far as I can tell, the reason why people shy away from SEO is not that it doesn't work. Indeed, it seems like people shy away from SEO because it works too well. At least for me, there's a perception that SEO is evil and crowds out legitimate content. I would hope that these startups are not going over to SEO just because it works; I would hope that SEO is trying to show that it works legitimately.

whugheson Introducing The Kno.. a revolutionizing digital textbook

It's a textbook. Flash doesn't matter. The content needs to be there. I've read textbooks on my iPad before; for the most part, it works OK. There doesn't appear to be any big advantage to the Kno that couldn't be matched in a specialized iPad app.

whugheson Our greatest shortcoming is our inability to understand the exponential function

They lacked metallurgy, banking, agricultural technology... The Industrial Revolution was built on hundreds of years of slow progress and access to tons of natural resources. The Aeliopile was a toy that opened doors; it wasn't going to power any steamships.

whugheson Our greatest shortcoming is our inability to understand the exponential function

So far, technology has solved all problems. What else is there?

whugheson Google is leapfrogging Apple

Palm?

whugheson Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

Extra cloaking for malicious links? Bit.ly can't exactly check the original site to see if it's OK if it's hidden behind a funky redirection layer. I think that bit.ly was reasonable to have an interstitial, although maybe they should be more open about why and how to remove it.

whugheson Postcard from Halden

Well - you basically made the exact reply he was expecting.

I think that letting serial killers out of jail is a bad idea, yes. The reason why we should keep serial killers in jail, though, is not that they're serial killers - it's that, in most cases, they tend to not care and will willingly kill again.

If there is a serial killer who is provably not sociopathic and who can actually become reformed, then that person should be eventually let out of jail. That is a very difficult standard to meet.

whugheson Valve bringing Steam to Mac

wine also works considerably better on OpenGL, as I understand it. A movement toward OpenGL usage would bring immediate benefits to Linux gamers.

whugheson Résumé (C.V.) using Google Maps

Embedding Google Maps in one's own site would probably be a better solution. It also helps if you have a bunch of reference points concentrated in the UK or in some other small region (you could have one world map and one UK map). That would make things clearer.

whugheson Mahalo's new spam is worse than old

It's come to the point where I actively avoid SEO-optimized sites on Google. If I see my search terms in the URL ("how-to-become-a-travel-agent") of a result, I'll just skip over it. Even moreso when there is generic, cut-and-paste content in the description. SEO may help you rank, but you won't get any clicks from me until I've run out of options.

whugheson Candid Camera

He went on to say that they were so focused on revenues in the early days of Zynga that they did some things he didn't like. He then mentioned the Zwinky toolbar and said he installed it on his machine and couldn't get it off. And then went on to say that he told his developer to take that lead gen offer down.

That really isn't the impression I get from watching the mentioned clip: http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/06/zynga-scamville-mark-pinkus...

whugheson Revised Mac Developer Program

Those are device developer programs, though. XNA for PC is free, and pretty much all major desktop PC development tracks are free. iPhone/XBox/etc are a different story (and my understanding is that $99 is cheap for such a program).

whugheson Father of the moderm tiling WMs proposed for deletion in Wikipedia.

If people are complaining about their articles getting cut, doesn't that mean that they care about those articles and would maintain them? Wikipedia is actively spurning volunteers and reducing that "finite number" with deletionism.

whugheson Keeping the Pirates at Bay

Note: This is a PlayStation game!

It's a key fact which you have to keep in mind when reading this article and considering it for use on PCs. Console copy protection is today important, but not critical as PC copy protection is. Chances are, this protection would have been instantly defeated on a reasonably high-profile PC game.

whugheson Roger Ebert: Hello, this is me speaking

Isn't this mainly an aesthetic thing, though? Consumer text-to-speech is certainly adequate for vocalizing almost any conversation. One could just use that to carry out "covert voice communication."

whugheson Opera 10.50 out for Mac, impressive performance and more

Tree-style tabs:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890

Still not matched anywhere else. The bogging-down from ridiculous numbers of Firefox tabs may soon force me to switch, however.

I also like some of the highlight plugins for translation and search.

whugheson Adobe announces Flash Player and AIR for Android

Yes, it was (how else do you use Flash, anyway?).

It worked in IE mobile and I believe there were tricks to get it to work in other browsers (Opera). There was Flash Lite and a normal Flash plugin -- the whole thing was pretty confusing, I admit.

There are also apps like Skyfire ( http://www.skyfire.com/ ) hanging around which claim various degrees of Flash support built-in. In any case, as far as I'm aware all Flash support was and is via web browser.

whugheson Adobe announces Flash Player and AIR for Android

Bizarrely, Flash Player has been available for Windows Mobile for years and nobody has noticed. Windows Mobile also has a YouTube app and most of the other major apps, but they're all terribly neglected and have virtually no users. Microsoft had every advantage even before the iPhone came out and yet they managed to squander them.

I predict a Zune phone/PDA which will add even more confusion to the brew of brands Microsoft has managed to concoct. Windows Live Bing Connect Mobile CE XP Pro .net System 8 2010 for Home Users, Enterprise Edition, anyone?

whugheson Video: Notion Ink Adam, iPad alternative

Android? Chromium? These are not exactly traditional desktop OSes.

Ubuntu I'll concede, but if they're putting Android on it by default it will be a lot closer to the iPad than to your Windows/Mac desktop. I think this was something you brushed aside too quickly earlier. Android was shown in the video, and if they want to compete with the iPad it's a very good starting point (being at least in the same league, if not on par with, the iPhone OS).

As far as I know, there are no files in Android or Chrome-OS. Android also has a touch interface (and this tablet doesn't have a mouse anyway).

whugheson Amazon Wants To Give A Free Kindle To All Amazon Prime Subscribers

Yes. Have you missed the past few weeks of discussion on whether the iPad has a niche? The Kindle already has one. I don't have an iPhone, and I don't want yet another multipurpose device, but bigger. I have a Kindle because I want the e-ink screen.

whugheson Amazon Wants To Give A Free Kindle To All Amazon Prime Subscribers

History texts for what? Past histories will remain in print form, and new revisions to them will still be published in journals and such. History from now on is going to be radically changed by the giant primary source called the Internet and its offspring. I think you're looking at it on too small a scale.

whugheson I am a guy who sold his startup and I have like $20M in the bank. AMA.

That's a given, though. I don't know what kind of fun you're after, but everything I can think of won't put much of a dent into a large sum of money.

whugheson Here's the Vision of iPad Gaming Greatness Apple Overlooked

The problem with these kinds of scenarios is that they rarely pan out. Most of the time you just don't have access to 3 iPhones/iPod Touches and an iPad. It's too rare and usually not well-known enough to be worth implementing as a major feature: just a gimmick.

whugheson The Irony of iPad: A Great Day For Open Technologies

It doesn't matter how open HTML5 itself is. Going "to the cloud" is still a step backward for openness. I'd much rather be stuck with .doc files than have everything stored on Google Docs and transmitted using open Web standards. Openness is more than just file formats. Moving to the cloud is just as big a step back, if not more, than the App Store.

whugheson A new approach to China

Come on. Only Western search engines exist? There's more to it than just Google and Bing. Baidu has 60+% of the Chinese search market.