fno's comments | WingNews

fno | 15 years ago | on: How I Made Money Spamming Twitter with Contextual Book Suggestions

That is a great idea and I do not find it too spammy. Twitter could implement something like that themselves as advertisement (simple context aware text ads).

fno | 15 years ago | on: The shit finally hits the fan....(James Gosling on Oracle vs Google)

Could someone be so kind to explain why this is bad for Java instead being bad for patents? I guess we all agree that software patents are bad. This issue seems to be just about them. Why is Java dragged into this? (Genuine curiosity.)

fno | 16 years ago | on: Nokia's first Linux phone rocks

If it was not so darn expensive, I would be psyched. But this way I will wait for the OpenPandora for my mobile mini-PC needs (for a telephone I love my Nokia 6310 and will use it until the day it ceases functioning).

fno | 16 years ago | on: Google Opens Up Its EPUB Archive: Download 1 Million Books for Free

Now if only they'd make it truly free, provide an easy download option (also the possibility to get the whole archive) and use the crowd to improve the quality of the text.

I wonder if re-hosting is allowed, then someone could start a plain archive where people can upload the files.

fno | 16 years ago | on: Review my Webapp: How to make ______? (food)

Great!

Doubleplus grest because it fully works without the need for Javascript and even Cookies, thanks.

I searched for a Pizza Salami, selected about 10 of the top ingredients and got about 6000 results. I then added some of the suggested ingredients and got more results (until I added an obscure one). Shouldn't more ingredients means a smaller set of recipes? Maybe you are using less strict rules (OR instead of AND) for later result pages, otherwise I cannot imagine why this happened. Well, minor observation really. ;-)

fno | 16 years ago | on: Review my Webapp: How to make ______? (food)

It is rather hidden but here are the formatting options: http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

fno | 16 years ago | on: The 1KB CSS Grid

I have to disagree, the font looks terrible for me (Windows XP, Opera). Maybe he forgot to use a good fallback font?

fno | 16 years ago | on: Set Up Your Server Right, Part 1

Enlighten me: How is a user with sudo rights different from a root user?

fno | 16 years ago | on: Wolfram Alpha: a shortlived fad

It is completely irrelevant how many users use it. If it is a great tool for just a minority, then it deserves attention in that minority.

edit: Am I missing about the number of users deciding about the quality of something? Or why on earth am I getting downmodded? I don't have a problem with that, but I feel stupid and I rather not.

fno | 16 years ago | on: Jeff Bezos apologizes for 1984-Kindle debacle

You are allowed to watch it with your friends though, of course that might depend on the country you live in. In Germany you are even allowed to give copies to close friends and family members (but you are not allowed to break copy protection).

fno | 16 years ago | on: Bill Gates: My 1979 Memories

And here is Jason Scott's (BBS Documentary, textfiles.com, Get Lamp, etc) mail exchange with Gizmodo after they asked him to contribute: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2079

Here is the "article" he could have been part of http://gizmodo.com/5316206/the-desperate-times-before-intern...

fno | 16 years ago | on: The Firefox 3.5 fiasco

It was something like no alt text being rendered when images are not displayed or found, I don't fully remember and could not find it in 5 minutes Bugzilla search hell. I did stumble on the still-open bug some days ago though, I think it was 8 years old now.

fno | 16 years ago | on: The Firefox 3.5 fiasco

I wish the Firefox developers would focus on bug fixing for the next big release. There are so many bugs that are not fixed for many years. For example alt-text on images not correctly shown or disable-output-encoding on XML/XSLT being ignored. Instead that add more and more features. The awesome bar already made me switch to Opera, I miss some extensions though so I do keep an eye if Firefox gets "better" for me.

fno | 16 years ago | on: CSS Sprites are Stupid - Let's Use Archives Instead (Firefox Demo)

If you are thinking of local directory traversal (src="jar:http://kaioa.com/b/0907/test.jar!../../somefile) then I think you are underestimating browser coders. Introducing that security issue would require a dedicated effort.

fno | 16 years ago | on: Chris Anderson's Free Audiobook [zip]

Who is Chris Anderson, what is this audiobook about and why should I check it out?

fno | 16 years ago | on: Patrick Collison Puts the Squeeze on Wikipedia

Since this is open-source, is there a fork for PC/Linux yet? I am not the slightest bit interested in the iphone, but having this on a USB stick would be handy.

fno | 16 years ago | on: VirtualBox 3.0 Released

I love VirtualBox so much. Thanks to Innotek for the free and open-source distribution. I do use the closed source version though.

If only they would support branching snapshopts. For example a main VM and then you could have one work tree and one webbrowsing tree. This would make using it for daily work even more appealing. Well, some day, I am sure.

fno | 16 years ago | on: Ramdisks - Now We Are Talking Hyperspace

For several months I have a 500MB tmpfs ramdisk (which I will probably turn into a ramfs one after reading that article).

I put my browser cache, several logging files and other volatile things there. Whenever I download something just to dispose it later, it goes in there. If I try something stupid with a lot files or some big ones, it goes in there.

It feels much nicer than to fragment the harddisk for such things; maybe it is just a placebo but it makes me happy. And of course access and usage of those files is blazing fast.

PS: Having Opera's temporary download directory automatically wiped away alone is worth it... :)

fno | 16 years ago | on: Ask HN: How to bulk transfer ~50 domains? (+ Registrar suggestions?)

I moved a domain to them and I really really like them.

fno | 16 years ago | on: Review my startup: Revizr. You haven't seen this before.

I found the page rather hard to read and it took a "long" time until I understood what it is all about. Putting the text in 2 columns might help. Not sure about the serif font too.

Nice idea. I like it. The revizr name does not appeal to me though, it sounds a bit too fresh and young. My first association was a razor and green/metallic colour, heh.

The logo has some weird spaces ("kerning"?).