HN user

fsck--off

770 karma

Yes, I regret choosing this username.

Posts0
Comments120
View on HN
No posts found.
Apple Reports Record First Quarter Results 9 years ago

The review pointed out the shortcomings of the first generation iPod. It isn't a review of the entire iPod line that would follow in the future. The first generation was only compatible with OS 9 and OS X, had 5G or 10G of storage, was in black and white and had a mechanical click wheel. Apple sold 236,000 in three fiscal quarters before they released the next generation. Meanwhile Nokia was selling an order of magnitude more 3310s, another portable electronic device (cell phone), every quarter. The iPod became the best music player on the market because Apple kept improving it.

0ThreadHN
Apple Introduces What It Calls an Easier to Use Portable Music Player (2001) 10 years ago

The review has to be looked at in its context. If the sales figures on Wikipedia are correct, the device he reviewed sold just 236,000 units in Q1-Q3 of 2002. Apple didn't sell more than a million iPods in a quarter until 2004, at which point the full-size device had 4x the storage, a click wheel, support for Windows, and a color screen (optional); the Mini was then in its second generation.

0ThreadHN
Show HN: Web Design in 4 minutes 10 years ago

That analogy doesn't work because your screen cannot reproduce every color that is perceptible to people.

#000 is as dark as your screen is when the screen is turned off, which is not the darkest color that you can perceive. And if at any point it is uncomfortable to look your screen because it is blindingly bright, then the screen brightness is set too high.

0ThreadHN
The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996) 11 years ago

I use a low brightness setting on my laptop because I am uncomfortable looking at bright screens for extended periods of time. I prefer the body text to be #000 on something close to #FFF (this website uses #828282, which is fine for me.) The Times uses #333 for their body text which is probably enough contrast for bright screens, but it is noticeably poorer on the dimmer screen that I use. I don't see a reason to make the text more difficult for the people with poor vision, especially elderly, who on the whole have poorer vision, to read. I can use extensions and overwrite their CSS to change this, but I shouldn't have to.

The fixed headers are very annoying on small laptops, where vertical screen space is already limited. It makes no sense to stuff the main navigation menu into a hamburger bar on the FRONT PAGE of a newspaper web site so that a tiny amount of white space may be added to the sides.

A navigation bar shouldn't scroll down the screen with me and steal screen space when I'm reading an article. I would rather hit the back button, change tabs, or scroll to the top and click on a different section when I'm done reading an article. And the layout is just ugly when Javascript is turned off because there is no spacing between the full size images and the body text.

0ThreadHN
Google Design 11 years ago

The contrast of the blue text(62a9e3) in the dropdown menu against the pure white background fails all WCAG guidelines. So it is not perfectly usable.

0ThreadHN
Mastering Emacs 11 years ago

Or you can go to the beginning of the line, press Control-space (set mark), press Control-e (end of line), then Meta-W (copy), and Control-y (paste).

0ThreadHN
How the DEA took a young man’s life savings without charging him with a crime 11 years ago

The WaPo article (the submission) mentions this bill, but finishes:

"But New Mexico's law only affects state law enforcement officials. As a result, in New Mexico — and everywhere else, for that matter — DEA agents will be able to board your train, ask you where you're going and take all your cash if they don't like your story, all without ever charging you with a crime."

0ThreadHN
The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-Computing 12 years ago

The author deliberately used the term "LISP Machine", with all of the letters of Lisp capitalized, but that's an anachronism (and a fairly good shibboleth). When they were developed they ran Lisp Machine Lisp, not LISP. And as far as I know they never used the specific appellation "LISP Machines", where the word Lisp was written in all capitals but the word machines was not.

Edit: It's hard to distinguish someone's tone on the internet, but I did not intend to be captious or mean spirited. My point is that there are enough differences between LISP and Lisp Machine Lisp, a descendent of Maclisp, that the two are not interchangeable.

0ThreadHN
Rob Pike: Reflections on Window Systems (2008) [video] 12 years ago

He said similar negative things about Unix in a 2004 interview with Slashdot.

"I didn't use Unix at all, really, from about 1990 until 2002, when I joined Google. (I worked entirely on Plan 9, which I still believe does a pretty good job of solving those fundamental problems.) I was surprised when I came back to Unix how many of even the little things that were annoying in 1990 continue to annoy today. In 1975, when the argument vector had to live in a 512-byte-block, the 6th Edition system would often complain, 'arg list too long'. But today, when machines have gigabytes of memory, I still see that silly message far too often. The argument list is now limited somewhere north of 100K on the Linux machines I use at work, but come on people, dynamic memory allocation is a done deal!

"I started keeping a list of these annoyances but it got too long and depressing so I just learned to live with them again. We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy."

http://slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-pike-responds...

0ThreadHN
Nimrod is being renamed to Nim 12 years ago

Nimrod was the great grandson of Noah, and he is mentioned in the book of Genesis as "a mighty hunter before the lord." So great hunters were sometimes called "Nimrod" as a compliment.

Bugs Bunny taunted Elmer Fudd, a stupid an incompetent hunter that failed to catch Bugs Bunny, by calling him a Nimrod. But the children who watched Loony Tunes didn't get the joke and so they assumed it was a synonym for "stupid and incompetent."

Imagine that in the future people think that that "Einstein" means "imbecile" because "you're a regular Einstein" was an ironic taunt. It's the same idea.

0ThreadHN