Hacker News: donald_draper

New comment by donald_draper in "Bubble or No, This Virtual Currency Is a Lot of Coin in Any Realm"

donald_draper — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 20:11:20 +0000

"This whole country was made by greater fools!"

–

Oh sorry, wrong movie.

New comment by donald_draper in "Fake Bus Stops For Alzheimer’s patients in Germany (2011)"

donald_draper — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 08:33:36 +0000

I wish we had fake red lights in Germany, to keep all the crazy obedient bureaucrats occupied. The longer they wait at red lights, the fewer Wikipedia pages they can delete or create new tax forms.

New comment by donald_draper in "Samwers Clone Stripe"

donald_draper — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 16:15:44 +0000

Those are special cases for Germany and Spain (I implemented that stuff for a german webshop that has to make the same exception). I'd guess it's the same for Spain.

German customers who buy in a german webshop have to pay VAT and then claim it back later in their tax return, because the german tax authorities don't allow that exemption beforehand.

New comment by donald_draper in "The effect of typefaces on credibility"

donald_draper — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 21:16:23 +0000

It's not random, they're basically numerals fitting lowercase characters. The idea is to integrate them into text flow. Numerals that are all at the height of upper case would LOOK LIKE THIS IN TEXT ;-)

Not sure about Georgia, but most larger fonts have various versions of numerals for tables (where you want them all the same height, and width monospaced width) and for text (as in Georgia). In OpenType print fonts you can select those types of numbers by turning on/off certain 'features' of the font (the glyphs will be exchanged without changing the text itself). That should be possible soon in webfonts too, I think Firefox already supports that, and IE 10 will follow.

New comment by donald_draper in "Louis CK does it again - 2 audio shows without DRM at $5 each"

donald_draper — Sat, 12 May 2012 13:46:39 +0000

Oh, and I can download the audio version of the video I bought for free - nice :-)

New comment by donald_draper in "Louis CK does it again - 2 audio shows without DRM at $5 each"

donald_draper — Sat, 12 May 2012 13:45:10 +0000

Lol - I bought the first video, and now one of the audios. However, at the end of the process I didn't remember my old password. So I clicked 'I forgot my password' and it said 'Oh my god, you're an idiot' and sent me an email with a new one - a random password beginning with the letters 'idiot' :-D Love the humour.

New comment by donald_draper in "Stop writing classes..."

donald_draper — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 21:21:03 +0000

I wish they told me that when I took inline lessons on class-class.org

New comment by donald_draper in "Learning From Data - Online Course"

donald_draper — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 17:26:27 +0000

Agreed.

I think it's actually quite telling if other institutions feel obliged to ridicule efforts (by Coursera et al) to make online learning a new experience, rather than just copying existing concepts as exercised in traditional universities.

New comment by donald_draper in "Stripe CEO Discusses Online Payment Service "

donald_draper — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 16:31:00 +0000

I guess it's like an army of lawyers trying to understand the part national, part european legislation of a couple of dozen countries ;-)

New comment by donald_draper in "Stripe CEO Discusses Online Payment Service "

donald_draper — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 06:23:23 +0000

Now can you bring it to Europe, too ? :-)

We will build you a golden shrine and worship you every morning for doing so.

New comment by donald_draper in "Linus torvalds on security"

donald_draper — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 06:38:11 +0000

People should actually cheer to this expression of the open source spirit. Like in 'if you find a bug, fix it', he proposes to you to kill yourself if you cause one. Nothing special. Off course, if this were corporate software, they would send somebody to your house to kill you, which might be more convenient.

New comment by donald_draper in "Udacity goes live"

donald_draper — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 19:38:58 +0000

Which makes it easier to translate into typical procedural languages like c and c++, which is not completely irrational to assume for embedded systems like robotics. And because many tricks and concepts will be array-index-based, you can just go ahead and use them right from the start.

New comment by donald_draper in "Anonymous intercepts confidential conference call between FBI and Scotland Yard"

donald_draper — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:43:44 +0000

This Anonymous story is interesting as well [Anonymous Hacks Neo-Nazis, Finds Ron Paul]: http://www.care2.com/causes/anonymous-hacks-neo-nazis-finds-...

New comment by donald_draper in "Government Opened Data via APIs in 2011"

donald_draper — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 05:06:32 +0000

I mean live data ;-)

New comment by donald_draper in "Government Opened Data via APIs in 2011"

donald_draper — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 01:17:51 +0000

Still waiting for the embassy cables API.

New comment by donald_draper in "Donald Knuth shares his life's story"

donald_draper — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 19:02:33 +0000

He uses his brain and language so effectively that some parts of the sentence can actually be used as padding.

New comment by donald_draper in "Ask HN: Your code editor, black on white or white on black?"

donald_draper — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:46:49 +0000

Customized Wombat, yep.

New comment by donald_draper in "Thanks HN"

donald_draper — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 19:24:26 +0000

To work at Grimm Library, you don't even need an id or anything. Just go there. But they have some rules about main times of the day like 8-19 reserved for actual students - although I never experienced anybody controlling it.

I go there for anti-procrastination as well, it's great.

New comment by donald_draper in "Open Dylan 2011.1 released"

donald_draper — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 19:20:57 +0000

Given the rather small community size (from what I know), wouldn't it be the best survival technique to port the compiler to JVM, to have at least some usable real world libraries at hand ? I can hardly imagine anyone starting to use a complex typed system like that without reliable and proven libraries from the real world. It just wouldn't be worth the effort of playing around with it.

New comment by donald_draper in "Another free course: Model Thinking"

donald_draper — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 05:57:28 +0000

For the future, it would be really cool if those courses would feature one preview lecture and a schedule to decide if one wants to get into it or not - now that it's getting so broad.