Hacker News Reader

wydayon Andreessen: Watching Netscape Disintegrate

The full video is here:

Part 1: http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-marc-andreessen...

Part 2: http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-andreessen-on-i...

If you haven't heard this story before, it's worth a watch.

wydayon Naked mole rats never get cancer

Where's the full article? All I see is an introduction.

wydayon Blu-Ray Still Blows

> Now THAT's just lazy.

No, it's presumptuous. You made no mention of ongoing negotiation, and I assumed a post entitled "Blu-Ray Still Blows" would muddy up negotiations if they existed.

Since you're here, correct me. Are you working with the owners of the technology to get this solved for independent producers?

wydayon Blu-Ray Still Blows

Ok, complaining is one solution. Many times it's the best option for consumers. However producers like this guy should work with the owners of the technology and negotiate a better deal.

Get support from other independent producers, get a following, get some press, and eventually get your way.

Instead he chooses to just complain. That's just lazy.

wydayon Blu-Ray Still Blows

Besides saying "fuck" over and over again, was the whole point of that post to complain about licensing? If you don't want to deal with licensing issues don't use any proprietary technology. Release your work online in OGG format.

These types of whiny posts don't contribute much of anything. There's no real solution proposed. Other than "I want to use proprietary technology but I don't want to pay the fees".

wydayon Snow Leopard ships with vulnerable Flash Player

Oh, you're right. It looks like Windows XP was the first and last version of Windows to include Flash.

wydayon Snow Leopard ships with vulnerable Flash Player

That was a downloadable service pack, and it was an optional component.

At any rate, I'm using Windows 7 right now. I assure you I'm not lying.

wydayon Snow Leopard ships with vulnerable Flash Player

Windows 7 doesn't ship with flash. In fact, Windows has never shipped with flash.

wydayon #foocamp pulls strings at Google

To one of the 9 upvoters in the know: can you tell us what this means? Google used a high rez picture of one piece of land. So, what's the point?

Or is that the point? The fact that Google made an exception to its algorithm for a conference is newsworthy?

wydayon [dead]

Coogle?

But seriously, what the hell is this doing on HN? Can't we leave this crap to reddit?

wydayon What Entrepreneurs Should Not Do

You're taking the "nice problem to have" meme too far. If I were rich, any problem I have is a "nice problem to have"?

That's just silly.

wydayon What Entrepreneurs Should Not Do

Huh? Having so many sales that your server side script can't keep up is a nice problem to have. Having so much money you can never possibly know your actual self-worth is a nice problem to have.

Getting bugged by people who could never add value to you (emotionally, monetarily, or otherwise) is not a nice problem to have. It's just a problem.

wydayon PayPal Doubles Fees, Forgets to Tell Customers

The rates have changed. I've noticed it in our own sales. It started earlier this month.

wydayon PayPal Doubles Fees, Forgets to Tell Customers

The rates have changed. PayPal didn't tell it's users. But you're right, the blog post didn't make that clear.

wydayon Windows 7 review - Gizmodo

"Microsoft, just fix the unwieldy Control Panel interface, please."

That screenshot is not accurate. You have to work to get it that ugly. (That is, he change the "View by" to large icons). The control panel is incredibly usable with its default layout.

I didn't read the rest of it, no point. I'm using Windows 7 right now and it's great. It puts XP and Vista to shame.

wydayon Firefox: it's just too darned expensive

Right, and that's the entire point of the "expense questions" the reps are talking about. They now not only have to vet Firefox, they also have to find a 3rd party tool to vet & buy.

Plus the cost of training IT people to install Firefox across thousands of computers (you didn't think they'd install it one-by-one did you?).

Etc, etc.

wydayon Firefox 4.0: Early Screenshots Released

This is about the thousandth time I've seen this idiotic proclamation. There's a difference between screenshots and mockups. Screenshots are shots of what is actually on the screen (a.k.a. the program running). Mockups are created in Photoshop from a number of elements.

These are mockups, not screenshots.

wydayon Side business is growing - when do you quit your day job?

Satire is supposed to have wit. Plus, the "angry slacker" humor has been done many times (and better in every instance). This guy's writing is like a much less funny photocopy of Maddox.

I can see tripe like this being on Digg, but why is this on hacker news?

wydayon The four essential laws of software updates

... could be modified, very simply, to read updates for additional software ...

It's only so simple when you have a single binary file with no dependencies running only on the developer's machine.

Beyond that, it's quite a complex problem. I could give you a list of about a thousand major problems that need to be solved to make a "one size fits all" updater. Plus, it's not in the self interest of either Microsoft or Apple to allow update installation from unverified sources.

... similar store for Windows in their own update service ...

The store has been tried before (once by MS, many many times by 3rd parties). Each time it was a failure. Largely due to the uncoupled nature of the "Windows ecosystem".

wydayon The four essential laws of software updates

Oops, typo. I meant "a few".

wydayon The four essential laws of software updates

My company develops an updater/patcher. The updater is open source (wyUpdate) and the update creator is commercial (wyBuild).

You make a few good points in your post. We get a lot of customers trying to solve the very problems you describe. Auto updating in particular is an exceedingly hard problem to solve.

Besides all of the immediately obvious technical considerations (Self updating, inter-process communication, update rollback on failure) there are many problems that developers don't think about until it's too late (admin rights, Vista/7 UAC).

You might be interested in the series of posts I've been writing on creating an updater from scratch: http://wyday.com/blog/

wydayon Great Hacker != Great Hire (2004)

some whipped-sounding guy

He owns the company. Does he also hold the whip?

wydayon Great Hacker != Great Hire (2004)

Sorry, I didn't catch it the first time. Thanks for the link to the original, it has quite a lively discussion.

wydayon Other web devs notice Safari 4 diverges from old text-resize?

This is a trend that all browsers are following (Firefox 3.0+, IE 7+, Opera). It has been going on for a while. Your best bet is to make your text large enough for everyone to read. Or add some JS to dynamically resize text.

Choose your poison.

wydayon [dead]

Wow, that's a needlessly snarky article. "Proofreading emails multiple times before sending" and having hand sanitizer are bad traits? All of these examples are vague rants on reasonable behavior.

The best complaint he has is "parking their car crooked in the parking lot", but how does that make a person "anal"? If anything, it's careless anti-social people who park crooked.

Why is this garbage being voted up?

wydayon The Mythical Man Weekend

He has a point, but anyone who has ever built something non-trivial from start to finish already knows this. It's the subtleties, not the broad concept, that drains time.

wydayon Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus

That's obviously not what I meant. Read my comment below: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=688388

wydayon Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus

Ideally, yes. And that's certainly how companies are marketing their free AVs. The reality is that before we started signing all of our software, the free AVs detected it as a virus.

It's bad for business when you have to defend your product as not a virus (on top of trying to sell it!)

I wrote about it 2 years ago: http://wyday.com/blog/2007/useful-instantupdate-feedback/

wydayon Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus

You're right, it forks a couple more processes. It comes to a total of 8 megs, not 6. I should've checked that the first time.

Still pretty tiny.

wydayon Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus

Higher detection rates is not better. Higher detection rates just means more false positives. This is a very bad thing for small companies releasing desktop software.

Plus, have you used Symantec Endpoint Protection? It uses 8 megabytes of memory. Tiny.