Hacker News Reader

xiriumon Sony has lost over $3 billion on the PS3

Some telcos seem quite intent on charging more for bandwidth than the cost of a film in a bargain bin. If telcos continue to strangle bandwidth then physical media will remain viable for a longer period.

xiriumon How-to: Full-text search in Google App Engine

It may be that each search term in a full-text index is held in a separate but hidden table and therefore large chunks of text create a large number of rows. This would explain why inserts would be slower and why quotas are more likely to be encountered.

xiriumon Word cloud of Paul Graham's essays (applet, see comment for png)

The dataset is available via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=218782 and a tag cloud is available via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227932

xiriumon Smart Enough Not To Build This Website

Why are you not performing a one way hash on passwords?

xiriumon Smart Enough Not To Build This Website

Sending passwords via plain text forms and plain text emails are both bad practices. However, plain text email is distinctly worse because the data can linger for months or years in less secure systems.

A credit card number sent over unencrypted HTTP may only be vulnerable for a brief period. However, a credit card number sent over SSL and forwarded as a plain text email may be vulnerable until the credit card expires.

xiriumon UC San Diego computer scientist turns his face into a remote control

Well, you'll be much less likely to loose a remore control.

xiriumon Facebook needs to quit with its thuggish attitude

> I started a group for people with the same last name as me

This is blatant discrimination against people with common names and common surnames! They obviously wouldn't like the Lloyd Woods' Newsletter: http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/others/newsletter...

(If you're wondering how hundreds of people called Lloyd Wood refer to each other then the convention is to use middle name and/or location.)

xiriumon Facebook needs to quit with its thuggish attitude

> nor do I want constant emails or notices

Is Facebook unaware of Nagle's algorithm? It is trivial to reduce bandwidth by batching notices. You could even set the maximum frequency yourself. Or is this not implemented because it would make the service less addictive and less viral?

xiriumon Hardware Hacking

http://www.howstuffworks.com/ is a good primer.

xiriumon Ask YC: What tool to build a web widget

JavaScript gives you the most possibilities because you can place semi-transparent items anywhere in a webpage, they can resize with user interaction and move down a webpage as a user scrolls. JavaScript can also be used to re-write a webpage, including changing images, fetching more text, revealing optional form elements and the changing the destination of hyperlinks.

Some, if not all, of this can be achieved with IFrames and Flash but web browser security is such that you'd have to include JavaScript anyhow.

xiriumon Thursday at Noon is the best time to post and be noticed

I'll be a pedant and note that the dataset is 10,000 posts to Delicious, Digg, Reddit and Mixx. The results may be less relevant on this forum.

xiriumon 6 things that killed Waifmail (another Diary of another Failed Startup)

> 3. There is nothing wrong with your technology choice.

Exactly. LAMP is a good, safe choice. Many of the largest websites are LAMP (Slashdot, Wikipedia) and its the others that have the most scalability problems (EBay, Twitter).

From the article: I come from a Microsoft background, and you can say what you want about Microsoft, but their development tools and libraries are rock solid. If they have a library called System.Web.Mail, you can rest assured that it will actually send emails when you ask it to. Unfortunately, this is not the case with PHP.

I'm astounded by this comment. Some Hotmail's most spectacular outages were from failed attempts to migrate away from a Unix MTA.

xiriumon Y Combinator News Tag Cloud

Profile temporarily changed.

xiriumon Ask YC: Aquisition Advice

Your profile contains the string #--hackrtrackr:3dwKMm0SsrZSeNg08YUOnuJBfQ3igl#

All your doing is polluting this site (and the web) with nonsense. You should really stop it.

xiriumon Y Combinator News Tag Cloud

The former may be fun with ampersands in shell commands. Try double quotes around the URL. The latter is a world of pain. What version of what browser are you using?

xiriumon Y Combinator News Tag Cloud

Specifically, anything that matches the case-insensitive regex \[[0-9A-Z_\.\-]+\] and there's already a surprising number which provide useful searches.

Tags: [search] [tagging] [regex] [meta]

xiriumon Y Combinator News Tag Cloud

There's a section in the script to only give the top 100 tags. I commented it out so that you could initially see the full range of curiosities. Long term, there will be a more concise list.

Tags: [tagging] [outliers] [singletons]

xiriumon Ask YC: Aquisition Advice

I'm working on tag search. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227184 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227932

Tags: [search] [tagging] [meta]

xiriumon Ask YC: Aquisition Advice

Your deal doesn't have to be exclusive. Indeed, it may be in your interest to supply content or functionality in a non-exclusive deal. (A good example of this would be Microsoft licensing MSDOS to IBM on a non-exclusive basis.)

If you've got good content and functionality which is wanted by one website then there exists the possibility of others wanting it too. Getting the first sale is the hardest and one customer has already "beaten a path to your door".

A licensing deal would allow you to remain independent and it would reduce the legal complexity of an acquisition to that of a simple business deal.

Tags: [business] [licensing] [acquisition] [Microsoft] [IBM] [MSDOS] [content] [website] [sales] [legal]

xiriumon Does Your Gmail Suck Too?

You'd probably enjoy using SquirrelMail. It is a web interface to an IMAP server which implements an interface similar to Yahoo's old interface. You can configure your own instance to access a third-party IMAP server.

Tags: [SquirrelMail] [webmail] [mail] [IMAP] [Yahoo] [webapp]

xiriumon Faceparty tells critics to F*** Off, suspends entire site

Unlike Twitter, you've got to have good uptime for this sentiment to be effective.

Tags: [Faceparty] [Twitter] [uptime] [reliability] [denied]

xiriumon Google's Gmail verboten in Germany

If they charge a German company to advertise on a German user's email account and they are trading a GMail then it could be a trademark infringement. It doesn't matter where they have offices and it doesn't matter that they don't have control of gmail.de

Tags: [google] [googlemail] [gmail] [mail] [webmail] [german] [germany] [trademarks] [advertising]

xiriumon The new dotcom boom

The article mentions Damien and Max, founders of New Bamboo! They do very tasteful design and they're extremely keen about Ruby On Rails. Indeed, they were early adopters and I first heard about Ruby On Rails from them.

Tags: [opencoffee] [new_bamboo] [ruby] [rails] [ruby_on_rails] [design]

xiriumon Ask YC: Where to learn web design?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216833 - Beginner.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191171 - Design prototyping.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=128713 - CSS and XHTML.

Tags: [html] [design] [css] [xhtml] [newbie]

xiriumon YC blog

http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?...

I also added tags, which may become increasingly useful if blogging is implemented:

http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?...

Tags: [search] [blogging] [tagging] [meta]

xiriumon A Cellphone's Missing Dot Kills Two People, Puts Three More in Jail

Punctuation and capitalisation can also be problematic: http://www.bash.org/?367896

xiriumon YC blog

Try http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?...

xiriumon Intel won't touch Vista

I don't know a single person who uses Vista and prefers it over XP. Not one.

xiriumon Ask YC: Fewer lines of clever code or more lines of clearer code?

You should have more abstraction. Date handling code is rarely clear. Embedding it presentation code is rarely advisable. Calculate day of week in one function. Calculate time of day in another function then generate position based on these functions.

xiriumon Reddit goes open source - the actual announcement from reddit.

> after serious scalability and trolling problems arose, they reverted to regular slashcode.

That's very pertinent because reddit haven't released code to reduce spam:

From the article: There are a few portions of the code that we're keeping to ourselves, mostly related to anti-cheating/spam protection.

Anyone deploying their own instance of the reddit code will have to develop their own protection against spam, trolling and rigged voting.