Maciek416

Hey Cameron, it's sad to see Kera shut down, there were some really neat ideas in there. On the other hand, I'm pleased to see that you guys have seen an idea through until it either succeeded or failed. There are too many long-running projects in Toronto, ideas on never ending life support, never allowed to succeed nor fail, kept alive by either consulting or government support. I think if we took bigger risks and cycled through a variety of ideas faster (even if they fail fast), we might have a better chance at attracting more money to this city. Getting clueful investors here is very difficult, as I'm sure you have learned.

I would love to see you guys write more about your story. Good luck with your next idea.

I attended the conference, and the topic (framework vs. framework vs. library) was definitely timely. There are strong points of contention between the major competing frameworks/libraries right now, and this was reflected in the panel discussions.

What struck me about the talks I saw was the degree to which each project strongly reflects the personalities of its authors; Jeremy Ashkenas was indeed (as the article says) the calm zen master of the panels, taking a minimally-prescriptive stance on how his code should shape your code.

Tom Dale and Yehuda Katz, on the other hand, came in with passionate arguments for the idea that JS frameworks should have strong opinions and exert a great deal of influence on your code and the outcome of your solutions. Katz's central thesis seemed to be that for highly common problems for which Ember would be used, extremely similar (if not identical) solutions should emerge.

All in all a good conference, and very differently-flavoured from JSConf.

At first I was a little irritated at the article's style and how it holds back the truth for a few pages, but the truth of this story turns out to be absolutely fascinating stuff. A quote:

"Cheerleaders frequently come up in case histories of mass psychogenic illness at schools, partly because psychogenic outbreaks often start with someone of high social status. But it might also be that their enviable unity is what makes them more susceptible. In 2002, 10 students, 5 of them cheerleaders, in a rural town in North Carolina suffered from nonepileptic seizures and fainting spells. In 1952, the Associated Press reported that 165 members of the Tigerettes cheerleading squad from Monroe, La., fainted before halftime at a high-school football game in nearby Natchez, Miss."

I would love to hear someone try to speculate on an evolutionary reason for this kind of behaviour. What kind of advantage might this sort of thing have given humans in the past?

Agreed, the almost non sequitur mention of VR feels like a straw man. The authors seem to sort of dismiss VR as a fad that disappeared with the headsets and Powergloves. Meanwhile, every year, we're seeing a steady march upwards in GPU power, mass-market uptake of 3D immersive gaming, and devices like the Wii or Kinect selling like crazy in numbers that would have been unthinkable in Jaron Lanier's heyday. VR, or aspects of its original "dream", are steadily making inroads into daily life.

If anything, 3D printing will be exactly like VR in the sense that it will have an initial burst of excitement in the mass media, followed by a long steady march toward ubiquitous, banal, take-for-grantedness.

Thanks for the link.. I find that thread kind of fascinating, not because of anything in particular about the original comment, but because somehow the person causing so much trouble managed to convince a large number of HN posters to jump in and try to reason with him. Usually it hasn't progressed so far. I think it helps that somehow he got to this point with hundreds of points in karma and has some to burn.

We got some advice from RIM on how to run this inspector, and it's been quite useful to improve our compatibility with the Playbook and especially the 2.0 OS.

That said, there are drawbacks to the Playbook that are hard to ignore and make it hard to recommend as a development target from the viewpoint of a "webkit developer" (oddball term, but there you have it.. :) ).

They feel quite a bit more sluggish than even the iPad1, which is fairly old hardware now. It would be encouraging if at least one non-Apple Webkit hardware+OS implementation out there actually managed to do CSS3 animations even half as smooth as the iPad2. I'm optimistic this is going to happen, but I don't think the Playbook has it right now. One thing I've liked about the Playbook and WebKit implementation is that we're mostly seeing what we interpret as "correct" behavior (aside from some Touch events interpretation, but we just received some help with RIM on that with the touch-mode setting). In comparison, the Samsung Galaxy Tab exhibits crazy smearing and other rendering errors when performing -webkit-transform. Our reference for correctness is Mobile Safari, though it has quite a few fun rendering bugs as well (iOS 5 actually introduced a couple new ones).

I'm not trying to be funny, but one thing that seriously inhibits productive web development on the Playbook is its power button and battery characteristics. Sometimes we literally cannot figure out how to get our Playbook to turn on -- the power button on these things has to be seen and felt to be believed. Sometimes you'll press the power button and it won't come on, and will suddenly spring to life 7 to 10 minutes later while sitting abandoned on your desk. Weird stuff...

I just want to add a datapoint to your "where it's going to be" point, which I agree is the way to go for RIM.

Out of the blue, our startup started to receive suggestions directly from RIM on how to improve our performance and compatibility with the Playbook's Webkit implementation. They actually went as far as cracking open their web inspector and doing some analysis of our handling of touch events, some minor CSS issues (we use a lot of -webkit-transform), etc. I'm not sure whether this is part of an officially-endorsed policy or whether it's just some proactive folks within RIM, but it's been quite helpful.

Whether positioning the Playbook as a really good Webkit runner will win them back significant market share or not is up for debate, since there are many tablets entering the market that have decent implementations on decent hardware now.

Wow, this is an interesting spin on a lot of previously-disconnected ideas. I really like the branding and name. The intro screencast was well done.

I'm looking forward to hearing how well this takes off, especially with the pricing plans currently in place. I have an idea for a political action campaign, but I'm kinda on the fence with your lowest tier price.

This is a great idea.

This goes beyond just which digital services you can't get in Canada, but also many other types of products which aren't offered here for whatever reason. Models of automobiles, consumer electronics (TVs in particular, with sparser ranges of models), etc.

Our currency routinely reaches or exceeds par with the US dollar, and yet many products are dramatically more expensive than you'd expect to be explained simply by currency differences alone (I guess there are a lot of other issues at play, but it doesn't help the widespread impression that we're getting screwed).

It would be awesome of your project also tracked how much more expensive products and/or services are in Canada than in the US.

Was anyone able to find a way to easily contribute to this project? There seems to be no SVN or git repo.

This is awesome.

How are the spammers identified?

What are the meanings of the column headers "FrC FoC TwC" ?

Works well and snappy. I like the tiled presentation

Entered my neighborhood and actually got a bunch of instagrams of locations within walking distance of my office.

Perhaps a given automaton could be told to open a bucket of paint and then have that paint expend itself over time (drop in color intensity, increase in opacity, or whatever).

This is awesome. I'd love to add color generation options.

Here's my favorite so far:

http://demoseen.com/langton.html#*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/....

[EDIT: and its cousin: http://demoseen.com/langton.html#*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/....+-+... ]

I agree, it would be nice to see some data on that.

A few days ago we had a discussion here on HN about the viability of Montreal as a startup hub, and when I raised the question of what Canadian cities in general could do to counter the higher pay and better climate down south, I somehow completely forgot (as did any responders) about the potential advantage of our kinder (if at times sluggish) healthcare system, especially in light of medical tourism options.

One simple immediate consequence may be that you cannot answer a question like "do you have any reason to believe that you may be at risk for XYZ" anymore without potentially having to rely on a result that may or may not have statistical significance -- or which you may have misunderstood. A lot of 23andme reports are in the form of "if you are east asian and have the following genotype for SNP rsXXXXXX, you have a 3% chance of developing condition XYZ". Personal genomics services like 23andme are going out there and saying that SNPs are pretty reliable, but the reality for some conditions and traits may still be fuzzy as more data comes in. There may be as-yet undiscovered SNPs that have a bigger effect on your cancer risk than the ones their v3 chip happens to cover, for example, and just having a 1 or even a dozen SNPs may not be enough for a clear picture. On the other hand, an insurance company might find it risky enough to deny you coverage. Nobody knows how that will shake out.

In the future, if a given insurance provider knows you have purchased a service like this, they also can then figure out which SNPs you know your genotypes for (it would be fairly trivial for any insurance company to find out which 950,000 or so SNPs 23andme tests for), and can then craft a survey form asking about these specific traits.

Many people will likely still try the service anyway because they'd rather know, pro-actively address certain issues, and risk the insurance game, than not know at all.

[EDIT: Apologies for not having read your question all that clearly. Just assume the above applies to "admitting you've used the service in public"]

The health results didn't freak me out either (for the most part, I got lucky with nothing unexpected or terrible).

On the other hand, I like yourself also thought I had a "boring white Polish as far back as anyone can remember" background. Instead, I got some rather awesome results on the ancestry front that changed a lot of what I know about my background.

The results in both haplogroups are interesting (if a bit broad) in their own right, but what really blew my mind was the sheer numbers of very close cousins I have amongst "neighboring" or not-so-neighboring ethnicities/religions/countries. There's a definite history in my family of "running away from the Russians", and so it's fascinating to find out just how much of those Russians (and other people round the 'Bloc) are in fact directly related to me by only a couple generations.

I've had better luck with relative finder as well. My very first contact was able to trace his great-great-grandparents roots to a village that is only 30 minutes away or so from my Dad's ancestor's town. This person is marked as a 5th cousin, so I'd consider that pretty compelling.

Regarding your "mostly seem not to be cousins" comment, I think people have an overly narrow definition of cousins where 23andme has a much more strict genetic definition. If you look at their FAQ, they claim that it's fairly accurate that if someone is marked as a relative, that's a relative. The degree of relation may be off by a generation or two, but it's there.

I find it interesting how many people, even those who sign up for the service and enable visibility on relative finder, heck, even those who fill out their profiles with surnames and extra information, either don't respond to contact requests or entirely dismiss relations dubbed by the system "likely 3rd cousin" as "impossible".

At the 6th, 5th, and even 4th cousin levels, especially going into the past with typically large families, we are talking about fairly large networks of people. I see a lot of folks say things like "I can trace my roots back 10 generations", when they really just mean one single paternal line, for example. How can you be sure that someone didn't jump in the hay with someone else in secret that one summer in 1807, or that some forgotten sister of a great-great-grandparent went off to America for 5 years before returning to her homeland, etc? With such large numbers of people, the likeliness of having huge numbers of cousins goes way up.

For example, look how many hops it takes to get to your 4th cousin:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=4th+cousin

Can we all vouch for all the surnames, brothers and sisters, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc in a relation even as "close" as this?

I think climate also counts too.

I can't remember where I saw this mentioned in the context of tech startups (pg's essays, probably), but if you're good enough and ambitious enough to choose whatever location you like, why not choose a location that has all the "nice place to live" qualities? Not to mention, "a nice place that wealthy tech investors want to live in".

Last week I saw Lane Becker give a talk at SproutUp here in Toronto. He's originally from Winnipeg, but was pretty blunt about the climate in California vs Canada. There's no way he'd ever come back. It's not the first time I've heard it.

Taxes, business, and tech-investment-friendly environment issues aside, this is a major weakness that our bigger eastern cities (Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ottawa, Montreal..) need to make up for in other ways. What things can we use to make up for our crummy climates? I'm not sure... but I don't think local pride, ambition, or even "we have smart people" really resonate with anyone outside of those locales. Smart people are everywhere, and are globally-mobile.

I got the surge of nostalgia too.

Another heartbreaking (but no less attempt-discouraging) bug that would occasionally happen would be that after loading a saved game you'd discover that the contents of your bags had all turned into UW's ubiquitous piles debris (or pools of blood, I can't remember anymore), and that your saved game had been saved in a corrupted state.

Underworld wasn't the only Ultima that had a hit-it-with-a-stick-till-it-does-something-funny-or-undefined quality to it. You could do some fairly unsanctioned things (climing on top of stuff, going where you weren't supposed to go) in 7, and in Ultima 9 (Ascension) you could visit places long before you were "meant" by mountain climbing with stairways constructed from objects out of your inventory (my favourite was using books and loaves of bread).

Origin games always had such a rough-but-polished quality to them. Whenever I broke an Ultima in this manner it never quite shattered my suspension of disbelief (like, for example falling out of a Quake level into empty space) but instead gave me the impression that wow, they had a fairly open environment here where you could expect the unexpected.

With a lot of modern games that seems to have been lost, where typical map design is simply a straight march through a series of set pieces, with invisible walls blocking off any chance of looking behind or underneath something or coaxing some kind of unsanctioned behaviour out of the game. Not to mention the flood of quality control these games enjoy..

Too bad! On the other hand, one of the most popular games out right now, Minecraft, seems to have brought back a little bit of this spirit.

[EDIT: did any other UW players here hoard objects in that room near the dwarves on level 2? Good times.. ]

Counter-datapoint:

I'm in Canada (Toronto) and have fiber to the home, and have had it since about 2002. If you see more of this sort of thing in Canada, I suspect it will likely be brand new neighborhoods in metro areas, large scale condo projects, etc.

[EDIT: speed test: http://www.speedtest.net/result/1145884475.png ]

I'd really like to move to an IDE that understands js code as well as Netbeans does but without the sluggish performance of the editor. I like Sublime Text so far, but I really miss the ability to see out-of-scope variables and catch minor errors.

Anyone know how to accomplish this in Sublime Text ?

This flow chart seems to leave out quite a few "work for free initially" scenarios I've seen happen to friends, etc, that eventually led to companies being formed, productive connections, etc. While nobody should work for "nothing", there are far more subtleties to this than are expressed by this flowchart.

I'm sure there are more than a few HNers who can attest to this. Many here have worked on side projects with friends (or even strangers) with hardly any hope of profit or payback. It's not always exploitative.

If there's one example of this out there showing that it could in principle work in the Windows world, it's gotta be Steam. I wonder if Valve has thought about expanding beyond games?

Wow, the map at top left when expanded looks awesome. This seems to draw nicely and fast on the iPad, but I can't get it to scroll around. Anyone figured it out yet?

I've been doing some tests with sprite.js. For what I want to do, it seems a bit sluggish and has some bugs. You can switch between DOM and Canvas mode, which is neat, but there are some bugs in the canvas mode that cause my sprites to disappear, and sprites with a repeating texture seem to show a seam. Impact looks quite a bit more polished.

The automated video interview idea is really cool. This would have been useful to us earlier this year when we were filtering through many candidates for a junior role, where you don't necessarily want to disqualify people with a lack of experience, but want to get a good feel for their personality and their ability to talk about what they're interested in.

I think the biggest comment I'd have with your project is that the name of the product doesn't communicate to me what it does nor does it hint at the video idea -- I had to dig in and find it myself.

Not only that but it would be interesting to see natural selection processes evolving using something other than what's familiar to us (DNA). If something like this were truly separate from us, wouldn't it have evolved its own genetic system (or equivalent) as well?

I guess I might have phrased the question differently. I recently saw a video somewhere of Richard Dawkins talking about what he thinks of the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and among other things he was talking about his high degree of certainty that whatever life may exist on other planets, it's likely to be subject to the same forces of natural selection as exist for life here on Earth. It would be very nice to have a second example to suggest, "wherever life happens, evolution as-we-know-it happens".

If this story turns out to be true my first questions would be:

1) Do the arsenic-feeding microbes have DNA/RNA or some other system in place?

2) Do they appear to be subject to natural selection?

3) Have they spent this entire time in the lake?