Hacker News Reader

alistproducer2on 110 N.F.L. Brains

Historians will look back at American Football as our analog to the Roman's gladiatorial games. A lot of people don't realize that during the Imperial era of Rome fights to the death had become uncommon.[0] The games were watched in an arena and primarily sold hard-hitting violence between members of the lower castes of society and sometimes people got killed or horribly maimed....sound familiar? I stopped watching American football last year once I could no longer consciously watch men destroy themselves for money and the amusement of a country that largely despises/fears them in any other setting.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator#Victory_and_defeat

alistproducer2on Working in a Prison Goat Milk Farm

I recommend that everyone watch the Netflix documentary "13th." The central theme is that slavery has never stopped being legal in the United States it just moved to the prison system. Below is the text of that amendment.

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

alistproducer2on Ask HN: What framework/platform do you use for app development?

I've learned how to build and extend plugins via WordPress.org. I've also spent a lot of time just digging through the source. Combine that with SO and that's been how I've come up to speed. I do remember a good book from back in the day called "digging into WordPress"

alistproducer2on Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

>Until the laws change people can't be outraged or surprised when they got caught up

Bad laws are usually changed because of public outrage and surprise so.......

alistproducer2on Ethereum Price Rally Continues Despite Market Cool Off

I agree. I don't think they add anything to the discussion. In fact, I wish a lot of the new folks who have joined HN in the past year would go back to reddit or where ever they came from because they don't seem to understand what HN is all about.

alistproducer2on Ask HN: What framework/platform do you use for app development?

I've used WP as an access control middleware on a electronic health records project and I'm currently using it to build a electronic contract SaaS platform. As a concrete example with my e-contracting app, I was able to get account management (changing passwords, deleting accounts, etc.) by using the Ultimate Member plugin. It would've taken me at least a week of coding to build this from scratch.

alistproducer2on No, ICO Market Caps Are Not Crazy. The Reason Is Basic Economics

Ummmm, yes they are. They're a function of all the "free" money sloshing around in crypto due to the bubble. Etherium did what it did with $18 million. Now there are projects that are proposing to do things orders of magnitude less complicated raising $30-50 million.

alistproducer2on Ask HN: What framework/platform do you use for app development?

I usually start with WordPress because of the mature plugin ecosystem. Most really difficult-to-implement features are available as free or cheap (<$100) plugins. Couple that with the fact that most plugins are designed with extensibility in mind via WP's hooks and actions (callback system) and there's not much I haven't been able to get done in a fraction of the time compared to starting on a different platform.

alistproducer2on Show HN: SignRequest – Electronic Signatures for everyone

I'm heartened by you guys making it to the front page and getting a good response because it definitely confirms that there is a market out there for these kind of services. Hopefully I can snag a big enough piece of it to be able to control my financial destiny.

I wish I still used Python and Django cause I wouldn't mind applying to work with you guys. I've really enjoyed programming in this space, although my stack is PHP. Anyways, good luck to you!

alistproducer2on Show HN: SignRequest – Electronic Signatures for everyone

I'm working on something similar right now'although, it's targeting a different audience. Obviously this has been under development for while, given the complexity of the service.

I'd be interested to hear the origin story of this idea and company.

alistproducer2on Ask HN: What is going on with mainstream website usability?

I keep JavaScript turned off on my phone for this very reason. A lot of sites are almost unusable because of how long they take to load or the performance once they do. I have about 15 sites on my exception list but other than those if I can't read content on a site without JavaScript on, I just go somewhere else.

alistproducer2on A link-aggregator for writing-related articles

I've always wanted to be a good writer and have been looking for another productive time waster. Thanks so much for posting this because I've already read about 3 things that really interested me.

alistproducer2on Ask HN: Would you want to sell code of complete websites?

I'm inclined to agree. There's a wordpress plugin for almost any generic use case one can think of. Social media site? Ultimate member and a bunch of others have that covered. Need it more customized? Jump in the source and fiddle until it does what you want.

I just did that yesterday. I needed to control access to certain pages to only include users that have paid for credits using stripe (provided by WP simple pay). I modified the Wordpress Access Control plug in and in about an hour I had a solution for a very specific use case.

alistproducer2on Math education: It’s not about numbers, it’s about learning how to think

For me, before you get a level where you can understand proofs or even how to read them, you need to understand why lemmas, axioms, and other components are true. My take is more about how to learn to understand the calculatory side of math, which I think is a prerequisite for taking on the reasoning and logical side of it.

alistproducer2on Math education: It’s not about numbers, it’s about learning how to think

I can't agree more. Math is about intuition of what the symbols are doing. In the case of functions, intuition about how the symbols are transforming the input. I've always thought I was "bad at math." It wasn't until my late 20's when I took it upon myself to get better at calculus and I used "Calculus Success in 20 Minute a Day[0]" did I finally realize why I was "bad" at it; I never understood what I was doing.

That series of book really put intuition at the forefront. I began to realize that the crazy symbols and formulas were stand-in for living, breathing dynamic systems: number transformers. Each formula and symbol represented an action. Once I understood Math as a way to encode useful number transformation, it all clicked. Those rules and functions were encoded after a person came up with something they wanted to do. The formula or function is merely a compact way of describing this dynamic system to other people.

The irony was I always thought math was boring. In retrospect it was because it was taught as if it had no purpose other than to provide useless mental exercise. Once I started realizing that derivatives are used all around me to do cool shit, I was inspired to learn how they worked because I wanted to use them to do cool shit too. I went through several years of math courses and none of them even attempted to tell me that math was just a way to represent cool real world things. It took a $10 used book from amazon to do that. Ain't life grand?

[0]:https://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Success-20-Minutes-Day/dp/15...

alistproducer2on Students Are Better Off Without a Laptop in the Classroom

"Duh" - anyone who's ever been in a class with a laptop.

alistproducer2on I'm a startup founder and I had sex with an investor

So some how the investor is still painted as at fault here? It's not like this dude was her boss and by her in admission the guy was lording "I'm an investor" over her head. Got to be honest, this piece feels like extended click bait.

alistproducer2on SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

SC had a unique product and at one point I really enjoyed discovering music. In fact, I had a music blog where I reviewed indie and folk music I found there. I found some incredible talents. For example, this dude Packwood from Australia. I ended up buying his albums on Bandcamp, but never would've found him without SC. Looking back it's surprising that SC never tried to get into selling music. I would've bought download for lots of the indie music I found; if for no other reason than I wanted to be able to listen to it in the event that SC folded.

I switched to Amazon music, which I pay ~ $6/mo. I couldn't be happier. I'm actually happy to pay money to have access to almost anything I ever want to listen to. they even have obscure Drum n bass albums (which surprised me). As great as AM is, it doesn't fully replace SC for me. No podcasts or indie music by random Australian dude without record deals.

alistproducer2on I'm not a Woman in Tech

But you also can't solve a problem if everyone pretends it doesn't exist.

alistproducer2on Blue Apron May Need to Raise More Money Soon After Shrunken IPO

"In its IPO prospectus, the company warned that it may never be profitable, adding that it anticipates that “operating expenses and capital expenditures will increase substantially in the foreseeable future.”

Wait, what? Between the ICO craze, the amazing levitating stock market, and things like a company that admits it probably won't ever make a dime of profit being able to IPO, I've been feeling like nothing in the financial world has made any sense for so long that I barely remember when it did.

alistproducer2on [dead]

Darwin award of the year. These morons thought a 1.5 inch book would stop a bullet from a dessert eagle shot at a distance of 2 feet. Words cannot explain how retarded that is. That being said, the woman really doesn't belong in jail.

alistproducer2on How Not to Encrypt a File – Courtesy of Microsoft

If I could down vote this twice I would. I can't tell you how much I've been on the phone with MS support to try and do basic things with their software but can't because a.) the only existing documentation is wrong or b.) there's no documentation. My company pays MS a lot of money to not be able to do basic things with its software.

alistproducer2on The Benefits of Talking to Yourself

I grew up an only child and so in absence of anyone else, I learned to talk to myself instead. I naturally have a busy mind and over the years I've found that getting a thought out of my head is the quickest way to get it out of the way.

I've had anxiety issues over the years. One day I was feeling a bit anxious and suddenly the idea came over me to just try to shut off my inner voice - completely. I focused on trying to silence it and suddenly, once it was quiet, my nerves completely melted away. It was amazing. For the next few days I tried to continue my "quiet mind" exercises. It got to the point where I began to wonder if something was wrong with me. The silence became deafening. Scared I might've broken something in my mind I gave up quiet mind but it was incredibly effective against my anxiety.

Now I try and be more balanced in how much I talk to myself and how much I let the voice in my head narrate the world.

alistproducer2on Develop native apps using Go, HTML and CSS

If the author is here, for context can you describe a little bit about how this matches up with similar tech?

alistproducer2on [dead]

Flagged for being from /r/The RedPill. Maybe it's a valid thing to discuss and if so repost from a different source, but HN shouldn't be sending people to garbage pile subs like that.

alistproducer2on The future of MDN: a focus on web docs

I always tell my co-workers that MDN is the de-facto documentation for JavaScript. Whenever asking a JS question, they almost always ask me to look at some crap W3Schools article. The first thing I do is always check MDN first.

alistproducer2on Elon Musk threatens to leave White House councils if Trump drops Paris accord

Let me be clear that I was not calling for violent removal of the president. I would like to see people with the power and influence of Musk do more to pressure those who have the responsibility and duty to protect the republic to actually do so.

alistproducer2on Elon Musk threatens to leave White House councils if Trump drops Paris accord

I understand the argument that by working with Trump, people like musk could positively influence the administration; however, it never sat right with me, given what has been known about the danger Trump represents to the republic and the world. I don't say this as a partisan. It has always been clear that Trump is manifestly unfit for the job he holds. Winning via a technaluty didn't change that. The goal for people like musk should've been to eliminate the threat, not to work to normalize it. That's just my two cents.

alistproducer2on Turning Off GitHub Issues (2016)

So the only people able to report bugs should be contributors? Do whatever you want, I guess, but this sounds like a good way to have a very buggy project.

alistproducer2on The Blockstack Browser: A Gateway to a New, Decentralized Internet

>Unless I can unplug the WAN connection on my router and connect to your product instead, keep in mind that you haven't invented the next internet.

My thoughts exactly. A truly new internet would require new pipes, not just another protocol layer.