Hacker News Reader

william42on Flash is dead. Long live the internet.

Considering that animated advertisements are the scourge of the Internet, if it weren't for the legitimate uses of the things you mention, I'd consider the crippledness a feature.

Advertisements should be text or images. Even animated GIFs are pushing it.

william42on WikiLeaks: Out of time and money

And that's why so many of them have gone to jail recently...oh wait.

william42on Eclipse launches new language to cut down Java boilerplate - Extend

Sidenote: JFactor is an outdated implementation and I haven't heard anything about it being revived. Factor has compiled to native code for years now.

william42on Programming Languages Suck at UX

Actually, Feynman had exactly this criticism of the way biology was taught; that the students memorized way too many things that they could just look up(and this was pre-Google, mind you!)

william42on A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

Don't bother leaving Ubuntu, just install XFCE, gnome-panel[1], or make a leap into the world of the tiling WM with the package awesome[2].

[1]I think this is the name of the Gnome 2 package. Personally, I couldn't stand Gnome 2 and even preferred Unity; I didn't jump into the world of the tiling WM until compiz started crashing my GPU.

[2] at http://awesome.naquadah.org/ ; I don't like the name, but I love the WM.

william42on The end of an era: Internet Explorer drops below 50% of Web usage

So has anyone found any privacy-compromising code in the open-source Chromium? Nope?

What about Firefox or Opera(which are mostly Google-funded now)? Nope?

Anyone? Bueller?

william42on Loyal Opposition to Const, Private, Freeze, Non-Configurable, Non-Writable...

Because, all else being equal, writing your code in one language is better than writing your code in two languages.

william42on I swapped my MacBook for an iPad+Linode

To be fair, he attached a keyboard to it and worked mostly through ssh.

william42on The FSF is papering over a binary blob

Not as much as you would think. Most people don't quite like the US but vastly prefer us to, say, China.

william42on Klout Is Odious

Berlusconi thinks the same thing.

william42on Richard Stallman on Steve Jobs: correction

Only one deserves legal punishment. Hate speech should be punished with verbal attacks.

william42on BuyWithMe Lays off More Than Half of its Employees

I thought we were still in a recession.

william42on Go Ahead, Sell My Data

At least we can give away our decision making to a myriad of sources, instead of picking between three television channels and the town crier.

william42on Go Ahead, Sell My Data

Okay, how about this: If I write a blog post that mentions you, you should be allowed to have it deleted, because people should have the right to control their own data, and what data is more important than the ability to control what comes up when your own name is searched for?

Oh wait, aren't they doing something similar in Italy?

william42on Signs that you are a bad programmer

Looking at the homepage, it says that the most popular pages were converted into static form, and now they're trying to sell the domain.

william42on Programming Language Development: The Past 5 Years

Yeah, but why would you want to implement Joy[1] when Factor[2] exists?

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_(programming_language) [2]http://factorcode.org/

william42on (An ((Even Better) Lisp) Interpreter (in Python))

From the URLs, it looks like a prequel.

william42on Teenagers Will, Like, Totally Abandon Facebook for Google+

Does anyone have a @facebook.com other than Facebook employees?

william42on 4chan's Chris Poole: Facebook & Google Are Doing It Wrong

The more I think about this stuff, the more I think there's almost a Smeed's Law[1] for communities, where the content quality is statistically dominated by the size of the community and not much else. But this would be next-to-impossible to formalize.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smeed%27s_law

william42on 4chan's Chris Poole: Facebook & Google Are Doing It Wrong

That's not true; the law of diminishing returns applies.

william42on Bitcoin value falls from above $33 to below $3

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/US_Histor...

If you look at this, you can see that gold is more volatile and spiky.

william42on Bitcoin value falls from above $33 to below $3

He's probably trying to claim that the 10x increase in the price of gold over the past ten years is a 10x decrease in the value of the USD rather than a speculative bubble in gold. (And even if it were, it wouldn't be remotely comparable to the 10x decrease in the value of Bitcoin over the past three months.)

As a sidenote, that's a terrible graph(as are most graphs of this nature). There's a wonderful technology called a logarithmic plot for that sort of thing.

william42on Bitcoin value falls from above $33 to below $3

http://falkvinge.net/2011/05/29/why-im-putting-all-my-saving...

"the currency has increased in value one-thousandfold against the US dollar in fourteen months. Yes. Read that again: one-thousandfold, fourteen months. There is currently no indication it would stop or has saturated; quite the opposite."

william42on Ubuntu and GNOME jump the shark

Luakit is definitely an interesting project. I'm checking it out, but I'm not ready to make it my primary browser, if only because the user documentation is bad enough that the best way for me to figure out how to open a URL is to read the configuration files.

william42on Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

http://www.plos.org/

william42on Ubuntu and GNOME jump the shark

I didn't hate Unity, but I did hate that compiz started randomly crashing my GPU, so I ended up switching to xmonad and then awesome, and I couldn't be happier with awesome.

william42on There is only one Cloud Icon in the Entire Universe

To be fair, if you look for it, you'll find it everywhere, because of confirmation bias.

william42on There is only one Cloud Icon in the Entire Universe

Actually, it's probably a Discordian thing. Eris and Fives and all.

william42on There is only one Cloud Icon in the Entire Universe

Well, the Golden Ratio is one plus the square root of FIVE divided by two.

william42on Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t).

The problem is that the $5000 isn't being distributed evenly. The schools that rich kids go to, public or private, get orders-of-magnitude more funding than the ones poor kids go to.