Whitespace

You should know:

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5226117 - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5230585

1700+ karma in 16 days and you complain? Come on now.

Wouldn't it have been better to do an EXPLAIN ANALYZE for the timing measurements instead of having the results returned locally?

Does anyone have a link to a larger version where the New York/LA/Chicago areas are zoomed in?

I'm partially ashamed to admit that I got all of them but one: a piece that had straight eastern and southern sides. It looked like a Canadian or Australian state/territory (large and having flat edges), but I couldn't place it.

Also I had a hard time placing Brazil.

I would not wish a petty/spiteful manager on anyone. I was in a similar situation in my last company: personal problems between my manager and I forced my departure.

In my situation the terrible fact was that my manager's inability to separate his personal and professional life caused the top four of my hierarchy of needs to be threatened (it's hard to be creative and solve problems when you're in a very shitty situation).

At the very end of my tenure, instead of talking about and trying to resolve our personal differences, he chose to go hyper-managerial on me (in manner and communication), making it clear that this was how my day-to-day was going to be from then on.

I loved working with my coworkers and almost everything else about working there, but I found it no longer mattered when I sat next to someone who will only communicate with me in writing with HR cc'd.

I haven't read the article, but the claim of MurmurHash3 having low collision rates is false: you can generate an arbitrary quantity of collisions according to [0].

When this was released last year, ruby[1], jruby[2] and rubinius[3] all switched to siphash[4]. Looking at [5] mentions tomcat, .NET, PHP, etc. all switching away from MurmurHash.

(I'm not saying one would HashDoS one's own database, I'm merely pointing out that MurmurHash3 wasn't _designed_ with low collision rates in mind [siphash is, though])

[0] http://emboss.github.com/blog/2012/12/14/breaking-murmur-has...

[1] http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2012/11/09/ruby19-hashdos-c...

[2] http://jruby.org/2012/12/03/jruby-1-7-1.html

[3] https://github.com/rubinius/rubinius/commit/a9a40fc6a1256bcf...

[4] https://131002.net/siphash/

[5] http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2011-481...

[edit: formatting]

It seems that almost all patent troll cases are tried in the East District of Texas because that district had strongly favored plaintiffs. I'm then curious: if a US company refused to do business with Texas citizens -- citing an inhospitable litigation environment or some such -- could they still be brought to court in EDTX?

Continuing the thought experiment, what if companies continued to do business but added a surcharge to products shipped to troll-favorable districts? It seems that the jurors in those areas would be more intimately aware of patent trolls if they had to pay a 1% extra fee when they ordered Avon products.

I'm sure some companies do such a thing and just bundle it up with the cost of the product itself, but I'm curious if any companies took a more forceful stance.

I fail to see how this would work out. If you get enough good publicity -- the kind that'll keep you busy for the next couple of months with users/scaling/networking opportunities -- how will you be able to fulfill your promise to take on extra work? And if being introverts is preventing you from networking/marketing it yourselves, how do you think you'll handle success?

I made http://tutorials.github.com. It's a variant of a larger project I'm working on to make documentation more personalized and more awesome. I hacked it together during the Emerging Technologies in the Enterprise conference in Philadelphia, and I posted it to HN, but it never made it to the homepage.

I definitely should have polished it up more and included documentation on how to use it and why it's cool and why building it on Github's infrastructure was a particularly neat trick, but I announced it too early because I was excited.

I definitely underestimated the importance of proper marketing and UI, even for an MVP for the high-tech crowd.

Edit: typo and clickable link

I understand most people trying to become more fit are overweight, but I entered in 175 lbs. as my starting weight and 190 lbs. as my target weight, and I was disappointed to see that I was only show people who dropped down from 300+ to 190 lbs.

What about those of us who are thin to begin with?

I've used streaks before, but I never liked how the interface didn't tell me what I had to do /today/ to maintain my streaks. Your app seems to solve this, so you've got a customer.

Also, great design! Are you tracking conversions?

I've always wanted to customize documentation/tutorials for me, and what better way to contribute than to let programmers use their favorite text editors and a workflow/website they already know: git and GitHub!

It might just be that you're getting older but sticking to font sizes for teenagers, so you should simply increase your font size.

I'm 29 and I wear contacts, even though glasses are better for computer work. I have a slight astigmatism in my left eye; so slight that it can't be corrected by contacts. As such, it strains my eyes to read tiny text. So what did I do? I bumped up my font size.

Let's use HN as an example. I'm on a 13" MacBook Air with a screen resolution of 1440x900. In Chrome I hit Command-Shift-+ four to five times to make the text comfortably readable. In Terminal, I use Anonymous Pro at 16-22 pt. I often use OS X's Ctrl-Zoom feature to make things bigger.

I use F.lux to change the white point all the way to tungsten (2700K) at night. Since I was a kid I constantly focus through objects towards the horizon to relax my muscles.

I do all of these things to help my eyes, because I strain them all day long looking at screens. And I'm still in my twenties!

So do yourself and your eyes a favor and make your text gigantic.

I've been working on a variant of the latter idea on and off for about 4 years now. We got some funding (through an NSF grant) but I couldn't maintain full-time development on it. I'm presently working on a project that sprang up after I identified problems in the original design.

I'd love to hear more about your ideas; ping me @gmail if you want to chat.

I would continue to do what I already do on the side: teaching my girlfriend how to do qa/support/product/design/engineering while working on our side project (dynamic documentation). She gets to learn some marketable skills and understand what my job is like, and I get to spend more time with her.

Thanks for your comment; this is really helpful information.

To clarify what I meant by asking in her stead, I meant if I were at a meetup or mixer and was talking to some founders, not applying for a job in her stead (which would be really strange).

I've been hacking at gollum (github's FOSS git-based wiki) for some time, and I might have some interesting uses for it in the education space that go well past a basic wiki.

I used to wake up in the middle of the night and sneak downstairs with my brother, lugging our family's first computer, a Compaq Presario all-in-one (similar to the gumdrop iMac) onto the dining room table so we could connect to the internet. With a 486DX2/66 and 4MB ram, we'd load up Tabworks and use the /worst/ browser in existence (don't recall the name, but it was probably a rip off of Mosaic) and dial out to IDT.net to connect to the internet.

Later on, after saving money to upgrade to a whopping 12MB ram and Windows 95, that same computer allowed to to play multiplayer Diablo, which was my first taste of IRC. Naturally it was all downhill from there, and I played Diablo for two years straight.

There were a lot of fights in our household over phone bills and busy dial tones, and I'm sorry that my sister was left stranded at school with no ride because I was busy downloading FreeBSD, but now I'm a successful software engineer and budding entrepreneur in the education space, and it's all thanks to those formative moments panicking at 3 am, trying so hard to muffle the sounds emanating from my 9600 kbaud modem as it connected me to an exciting new world.

Thanks, Peter. Thank you so much.

Funny, I do the same exact thing with John's MongoMapper codebase!

(Not trolling, there is an acknowledged lack of documentation for MongoMapper; I'm just poking fun at John)

This is very interesting and I plan to do a piece on the wall in my apartment. I've previously done some Varini pieces in another apartment out of tape: http://www.varini.org/02indc/indgen.html

My favorite part is in the Mona Lisa: look at her left eye, close to the screen, noticing the slight variation in stroke size, and then quickly squint.

Software Engineer - New York, USA

Patch.com is looking for both front- and back-end engineers. I'm one of the back-end devs there, and my job is so awesome that I'm posting this of my own volition.

We're a rails shop that's really proud of our engineering team. Some of the things we built are:

* Sunspot - outoftime.github.com/sunspot - The most popular Ruby interface to Solr/Lucene for full-text search

* Template Streaming - github.com/oggy/template_streaming - Progressive Rendering for rails (which may become part of core eventually)

* HTML Namespacing - github.com/adamh/html_namespacing - This is some craziness the likes of which I can't explain in a text area

* Record Filter - aub.github.com/record_filter - It's like Arel++ for rails 2.3

Patch is a hyperlocal news site, but we're different because we have physical editors that live in the same town, covering it daily. We recently had (2 weeks ago) a media blitz where we opened our 100th town. Since then we've hit 130, so we're growing _very_ quickly.

We're owned by Aol but we have our own place in SoHo, which means great lunch options!

Telecommuting isn't an option, sorry.

Send me a message! tomc{at}patch

I'm a Rails coder with 2+ years of experience. My sister is giving birth soon (yay!) and my mom wants to take off a month of work to help her out, so I have to pay the mortgage & bills for my family for a while.

I prefer back end work, since I'm not much of a designer (but I have a design guy as well). I'd take on a gig only if the client and I mesh, and the work could be contracted out in small chunks, since I already have a full-time gig.

haml/sass/jQuery/RSpec preferred.

Discount for a Rails 3 project!

gmail me @ username

Here's a story: I was in Little Italy in NYC today and I stopped to have a panini at a place that advertised the best Tiramisu in Little Italy. Both the panini and the Tiramisu were palatable, at best, but far from what I would have expected. The waitress was a little rude too.

I paid the bill, left 25% gratuity, and made a mental note to try the place across the street.

I didn't create a support group for victims of false advertising, I didn't drone on and on about how I was gastronomically assaulted, and I didn't demand to publicly crucify their chef.

Your reply smacks of the hyperbole, so I'm singling you out. These guys are people just like you or I. They were wrong, they admitted it, and they're trying their best. Relax, buddy.

Awesome! You can send me an email at gmail.com (same username)

37signals (and many here, I suspect [myself included]) believe differently: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2330-diasporas-curse

That's a great idea: techroommates.com. I would seriously pay for that.

Marc-Andé Cournoyer (the creator of Thin) did something similar, I'd check it out: http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=1159445

Great idea! I'm looking for the same situation but in NYC (and because I'm homeless).

Postscript: Sadly, Larry McDuff was killed in a hit-and-run accident while riding his bike near his home in June 2005. His wife, Ann, died in a similar bike accident just two years earlier.

Ahh Logo, my first true love. That Swastika -> Star of David animation was also really clever.

(Please don't invoke Godwin's Law against me!)