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EAMilleron Show HN: If you use PagerDuty and AlertSite, this will be of interest

I wondered about generic tools, but didn't find any that would solve this. There's nothing special about my code - it's really just collecting data from the incoming POST vars, rearranging them and passing them along.

I thought it was interesting that the platform (AppEngine) enables simple one-off solutions like this - not everything needs to be abstracted into a ifttt style solution ...

EAMilleron Lucid dreaming: Rise of a nocturnal hobby

I've tried lucid dreaming with limited success over the years. Here are a couple of relevant links:

- RadioLab is a great podcast, they did a lucid dreaming episode: http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2012/jan/23/wake...

- After hearing said podcast, I wrote a quick twitter hack to occasionally ask if you're in a dream (one of the techniques): https://twitter.com/#!/isdreaming

EAMilleron Keeping Instagram up with over a million new users in twelve hours

What sort of hosting do you use for your main Pg (and Redis) instances?

EAMilleron MusicForProgramming();

Gah! I didn't know Clint Mansell did the Moon OST. Must acquire. I have been listening for The Fountain soundtrack (by Mansell) while programming - and I love it. I also just discovered he did the Pi soundtrack.

Other OST picks: Tron (and Tron Reconfigured) and Nick Cave / Warren Ellis soundtracks - particularly The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

EAMilleron Books every self-taught computer scientist should read

It's a good question. I am self-taught, and would never call myself a "self-taught computer scientist" ... "self-taught hacker" is just about right. For me the distinction would be that it's never going to get too theoretical, it's all applied (though I make every effort to make my applications efficient, correct and legible)

EAMilleron What is LESS CSS? Hints and tips

I got bit by the switch from Ruby to Node.js. The Node.js arrangement was considerably more difficult to set up on the older systems we maintain. Most annoyingly lesscss.org makes no mention of the switch away from Ruby. Our plan right now is to abandon less-css and just check the converted CSS into our repo - the (server setup complexity) costs far outweighed the benefits.

[edit] Well I guess the old repo did mention the switch :\ https://github.com/cloudhead/less still frustrating

EAMilleron Sucky Things You'd Rather Not Think About

I was a little dismayed at that point too - but I think the rest of the paragraph clarifies the point well. I think he's talking about a sincere spiritual journey, not "religious people" as commonly encountered. I'm an atheist, but I also think there's a natural "spiritual" instinct that has to do with artfulness, reflection, and transcendence (eg. the attempt to transcend your view of the world as a single individual)

EAMilleron Show HN: Codecademy.com, the easiest way to learn to code

Chrome 13 / OSX 10.6.8 - I can navigate the courses pages, but don't see the CLI interface (just the section list, and the Disqus discussion). Also it's not redirecting to any shebang URLs. Works fine in Firefox.

(nice work btw)

EAMilleron SSH productivity tips

Here's a minor one - handy, and I find most folks don't know it. To escape a frozen SSH connection:

<return>~.

EAMilleron Gamification is bullshit

Looks like Georgify: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ofjfdfaleomlfanfeh...

EAMilleron Apple R&D (1989): Mousing is faster than keyboarding, but users don't believe it

This is a great point - when I was trying to articulate (to myself) why I prefer the keyboard it wasn't necessarily any speed advantage, it was more like the "flow" advantage. Your point speaks to that.

I think there's also a big difference in the amount of physical effort needed when using the mouse. With the keyboard it's easier to keep most of my arms relaxed, and when I need to switch to the mouse everything from the shoulder down has to contract into action.

EAMilleron Organizing Django settings

We just do the inverse. In a local_settings.py we import settings - then set DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=path.to.local_settings

EAMilleron Fish sucks (but your shell sucks more)

I'm always interested in the idea of learning a new shell - but the ubiquity of bash is what generally holds me back. I fear that switching gears for each system I log into would seriously break the flow.

EAMilleron Ask HN: Who's hiring? (September 2010)

Junior Python/Django/Postgres developers - Oakland, CA

We specialize in energy efficiency program and project design, implementation, and marketing, as well as solar and other renewable energy system feasibility studies, project development and financing and water conservation programs. We (obviously) build web apps to support these programs.

more: http://energy-solution.com/jobs.html

EAMilleron The Future of UI

Agreed, every time I see this my arms feel tired.

EAMilleron The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains

I agree they can 'live together' through some kind of deliberate training (like meditation) - but also with the right tools (for example http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom)

EAMilleron The Lost State of Jefferson

wow - crazy that this popped up tonight.

A friend and I just finished a project based on this. It's called "The Virtual State of Jefferson" - it's a router that alters pages to "claim" cities in that area. I just posted a tech description about how the project works: http://ethanmiller.name/notes/virtual_state_jefferson_tech/

EAMilleron Triumph of the Cyborg Composer

To be clear, my comment was made in surprise that that his creativity/passion goes unappreciated - I agree it's an amazing accomplishment.

In general though I think the binary of warm/emotion vs. cold/heartless is kind of useless. As in his quote : "I can understand why it’s an issue if you’ve got an extremely romanticized view of what art is" Art is amazing stuff people make, be it software or music.

EAMilleron Triumph of the Cyborg Composer

I'm fascinated by this. It's interesting that in that context the creativity/passion/humanity of somebody like David Cope doesn't count. If he's writing software then it's just cold, heartless automation.

EAMilleron Links to Spirituality Found in the Brain

Deciding that spirituality is a defect from this is the wrong conclusion.

The experience of spirituality itself is natural and desirable. As described in the article, it's "self-transcendence." I experience self-transcendence when I listen to good music, look at good art, or otherwise get wrapped up in ideas that are bigger than (transcend) my day-to-day life in an inspiring way.

EAMilleron The Chinese Perspective of Avatar

"Anyone who is educated about script writing ..."

I am to the extent that I've seen enough movies to recognize the patterns... but are you suggesting those formulas are taught somewhere as a formalized script-writing practice?

EAMilleron I hired 50 people today. This is what they look like

Aaron Koblin, of the flight patterns visualization fame (http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/flightpatterns/index.html) has a few art projects based on MTurk. Bicycle Built for Two Thousand was a project where each worker was asked to sing a tiny part of a song, without knowing what the song was, then the complete song was reconstructed: http://www.bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com/

EAMilleron Paul Graham On Two Kinds of Programmers and Painters

"Cézanne could not draw, he makes the same drawing mistakes that every one makes in introductory drawing classes." This is not the case. Cézanne could draw exceedingly well. Drawing != photographic representation.

EAMilleron An artist-mathematician illuminates a world of infinite beauty

I really like the first paragraph of this article, but at this point:

"Art starts to happen when we project these personal maps back out on the world. Each of us has an impulse to express his or her experience of reality."

He lost me. This is the kind of formulaic definition of art you hear all too often. The reason art isn't math is that there is no such formula. Art is contradicts itself. It's messy and evades attempts to pin it down.

EAMilleron Ask HN: What artists do you like?

http://www.vvork.com/

I like it because it's contemporary art, but the feed is almost entirely images - so it doesn't weigh too heavy in your feed reader...

EAMilleron Ask HN: What artists do you like?

I'm surprised there hasn't been any software based artists mentioned yet.

How about (I'll add examples of specific work so you won't have to search it out):

Cory Arcangel http://www.beigerecords.com/cory/Things_I_Made/SuperMarioMov...

Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin http://www.earstudio.com/projects/listeningpost.html (see video gallery)

RSG http://r-s-g.org/carnivore/

GRL http://graffitiresearchlab.com/?page_id=76

There's many more. If you're interested in this kind of art there are festivals too:

Bay area: http://01sj.org/

Europe : http://www.aec.at/index_en.php

Various location : http://www.isea-web.org/eng/index.html

EAMilleron Our Changing Information Diet

I don't think the analogy is very good. Whereas eating a twinkie is clearly not going to benefit your health, with information it's not so cut and dry. A stupid YouTube video might just set of a chain of associations that lead to a new creative project of your own, or useful observations about our culture/technologies.

It's as if you could occasionally reflect on a twinkie before eating it, and transform it into wheatgrass juice as it goes down :P

EAMilleron GNU Screen - A Hacker's Ideal Terminal

I got frustrated with tabs in Terminal.app because of the keyboard shortcuts : Shift+Apple+arrows

In screen I use ^a, " to get a list of screens, then j/k to pick a screen. That may not seem like a win, but it keeps my fingers on the home keys, and feels smoother.

That and the fact that I split windows in screen fairly often means I won't go back to terminal tabs...

EAMilleron Efficient Editing With vim

Another nice script I discovered recently is Nerd Tree : http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1658

EAMilleron Efficient Editing With vim

I never got the hang of tabs. I got comfortable with buffers before tabs were out, and I didn't see anything that tabs could offer that buffers don't. I probably have my screen split between two buffers 60% of the time. Once in a while I have my screen split with screen AND with vim :D