An attempt to catch the top news of Hacker News on a Friday evening and summarize the top 10 stories; I won't make any decisions about what should be in the top 10, just note them here with a summary. It took me about 30 minutes to summarize 10 stories, without being selective about which ones were important.
1. Ben Howdle is "Too scared to write a line of code" (Medium). This reminds me of the Donald Knuth quote, "Premature optimization is the root of all evil".
2. Yahoo has "submitted a bid for the video site" Hulu (All Things D). They're not the only ones bidding, with Directv, Time Warner Cable, and several others in the running.
3. Benjamin BenBen lets you visualize "how CSS rules are applied to a page" (css.benjaminbenben.com). If it's hanging, give Chrome a try.
4. B is "fast on the road and agile in the air" (Kickstarter). It's a four-wheeled remote control vehicle that doubles as a quadcopter when the going gets rough.
5. "If you already have a strong passphrase on your SSH private key, then converting it from the traditional private key format to PKCS#8 is roughly comparable to adding two extra keystrokes to your passphrase, for free." (Martin Kleppmann) Bonus: it's only four lines of shell to do this and verify that it works.
6. Plan 9 has some very tightly written, very strange C code; "it’s not every day that you come across code that makes you feel funny because of its unusual syntactic structure" (Spiros Eliopoulos). In this case it's nested if() clauses without indents that replace a more traditional use of &&.
7. "In December 2007, I left a cushy job to start a company. That company failed. This blog outlines that story." (Ryan Angilly) Today: the day our investors came to see the office.
8. vnc-over-gif "serves screen updates as animated gif over http." (Github) See also "gifsockets" which lets you do socket communication in a browser via an animated gif. [:dancing banana:]
9. "main;" is the shortest crashing C program, which will compile and then SIGSEGV. ( Jesper Öqvist)
10. New versions of jQuery (1.10 and 2.0.1) are out. (jQuery) What's new: "Our main goal with these two releases is to synchronize the features and behavior of the 1.x and 2.x lines, as we pledged a year ago when jQuery 2.0 was announced."
Edward Vielmetti's Wordpress weblog 