Hacker News Reader

awhittyon Carriers Are Making More from Mobile Ads Than Publishers Are

I thought it was fighting the reverse: content creators/publishers pay to have priority access to consumers. Or is it fighting both directions?

awhittyon The New York Times Makes 17k Recipes Available Online

Awesome, I'm working on some ways of slicing through recipe data right now (cocktail recipes, really), and I'll consider this tree structure as I go about things.

awhittyon The New York Times Makes 17k Recipes Available Online

They also have great write-up detailing their use of CRFs to extract structured data from recipes.

http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/extracting-structur...

awhittyon Building Building Blocks

Slightly unrelated, but whenever I load a page from Segment for the first time, it renders without a stylesheet. Does this happen to anyone else?

awhittyon Highlight.js – Syntax highlighting for the Web

It does seem more appropriate to have a separate module for line numbers. I would definitely understand the separation of concerns argument, but the maintainer instead makes some sort of emotional appeal about clutter and simplicity to explain why there is no line number support.

awhittyon Merry Christmas to HN

Python equivalent for convenience:

  map(lambda x: chr (x + 32), [45,69,82,82,89,0,35,72,82,73,83,84,77,65,83,1])

Just paste it into a python terminal and run it :)

awhittyon How to Survive in SF as a Broke Startup

Super uninformed question, but is there access to beaches or the ocean at all over there?

awhittyon What I use instead of Google services

SkimFeed[0] aggregates mostly tech news, but it's not nearly as feature-heavy as Google News. Maybe check it out?

0 - http://skimfeed.com/

awhittyon Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

I wonder if this kind of scroll-hijacking can be used to prevent accidentally going back with gestures in Safari and Chrome on horizontal-scrolling websites.

awhittyon Show HN: Reactable – fast, flexible, and simple data tables in React

This is pretty cool. Sorting by the datetime field in the demo sorts the strings alphabetically though. I'm not sure if that's an issue with the plugin or the demo, but it probably isn't the right behavior.

awhittyon Ask HN: Object you'd like to see connected to the internet?

I see someone mentioned Lono. Another company called Rachio[0] has a connected sprinkler controller available for purchase now. It's connected to Wifi instead of Bluetooth which I think is interesting in the Internet of Things discussion.

0 - http://rach.io

awhittyon Russian Gang Said to Amass More Than a Billion Stolen Internet Credentials

"Hold Security would not name the victims, citing nondisclosure agreements and a reluctance to name companies whose sites remained vulnerable."

awhittyon The seL4 microkernel

Can someone explain to me what it means for a kernel to have an end-to-end proof of implementation? Does it just mean that the kernel is implemented bug-free? That it will never panic?

awhittyon StreetScore scores a street view based on how safe it looks to a human

This isn't the best visualization, but I just spent a couple minutes overlaying the New York map with Trulia's crime risk heat map[1,2]. I think the important takeaway is that the green dots visible in the red areas can be interpreted as false negatives for danger. Of course, this is a really, really rough sketch so take it with a grain of salt.

[1]: http://www.trulia.com/local/new-york-ny/tiles:1|points:1_cri...

[2]: http://imgur.com/HOuJFKZ

awhittyon Macroscopic quantum objects cannot exist if P ≠ NP?

I understand that people get a little passionate about their fields of study, but the tone of Aaronson's response is wildly inappropriate. Phrases like "a common novice mistake" and "as if he just emerged from a cave" are unnecessary and entirely condescending. This style of discourse fosters a really awful and exclusive atmosphere, and I wish it wasn't the norm.

I don't know this guy at all, and I'm guessing he's pretty respected in his field, but at the end of the day, he doesn't have to be a jerk to get his point across.

awhittyon How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

This is clever! I think it can be circumvented by removing all spans in a paragraph with more than 1 character.

awhittyon iOS 8 randomises the MAC address while scanning for WiFi networks

I think that's the "easy way out," in a way. Sure, it's not easy to provide the services for free, but it also doesn't particularly excuse them.

Like Netflix vs. YouTube. Netflix fights for your ability to stream HD videos comfortably because you pay for the service. YouTube crams a perfectly-buffered, crisp HD ad down your throat before leaving you with a video that might stutter or fail to load even at 480p. Sure, people can't complain when it's free (though they do), but I think it really limits what an experience can be, and I don't consider that particularly user-centered.

Anyway, just my thoughts.

Edit: Fixed some parallel structure

awhittyon iOS 8 randomises the MAC address while scanning for WiFi networks

Maybe I'm a little high on design rhetoric right now, but I see this less in terms of Apple being a privacy/security company and more along the lines of Apple being a user-centered design company. No user wants their data shuffled around and sold, so any company that relies on the commodification of its users' data is inherently at odds with its users' needs.

awhittyon FileMap: File-Based Map-Reduce

As someone who has never used Map-Reduce before, something about this implementation makes the technology feel 100% more accessible to me.

awhittyon Today at 16:53:20 GMT, it'll be 1400000000 in Unix time.

Does anyone else get a sense of vertigo when they try out numbers like 3000000000 (January 23, 2065)? It's like it's close enough to be tangible but far enough to be scary.

awhittyon Harvard scholars may have been duped by a forged ‘Gospel of Jesus’s Wife’

Just curious, but how do you get in the loop on the ancient manuscript trade? It's not even an area of work I have ever thought about before.

awhittyon A new book compiles knowledge necessary for society to recover after disaster

What I find interesting is that many (if not all) people who buy this book aren't really anticipating having to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. Instead they're more likely interested in learning about the essentials and fundamentals of society in this dire frame. It almost seems like a "500 things you should know" book dressed up with a more serious tone.

awhittyon Wikipedia redesign

Relevant link: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Typography_refresh

awhittyon Hacking Sonos

This article is the reason I think you're the most badass designer out there. Wireshark + wireframes + Raspberry Pi and thoughtful redesigns? Who else blends all four into such a cool project? You're a real inspiration, so keep it up!

awhittyon ChucK: Strongly-timed, Concurrent, and On-the-fly Music Programming Language

I'm a big fan of CCRMA. Just curious, but what is Ge working on now? And do you folks in the Knoll have any events coming up soon?

awhittyon Using Bootstrap the Semantic Way

I appreciate the comparison to the ancient Web, but this article doesn't say much more that I can't find in Bootstrap's documentation.

Anyone who has used Bootstrap's mixins with semantics in mind knows there are some bigger issues to address than the layout. Some questions off the top of my head:

* How do you build semantic forms with Bootstrap without going to markup fluff hell?

* How can you avoid the unsemantic class names for components that are tied too closely with child components (I'm looking at you, .panel)?

* What is the semantic purpose of a row element? It seems purely presentational to me.

* How do I add icons without peppering span.glyphicon.glyphicon-X's all over my markup?

* How should I organize/maintain all of my LESS files as my stylesheets scale? I'm not looking for any one "right" way, but suggestions are always nice.

* Are there any optimizations I can consider when I'm only using a bit of Bootstrap's functionality?

* How can I extend Bootstrap's mixins for my own needs?

awhittyon Show HN: Flappy Block – Flappy Bird clone using the iOS7 Physics Engine

Wow! He has come pretty far in one day. When I cloned it this morning, it was just a bunch of rectangles rendered to the screen.

awhittyon Show HN: Flappy Block – Flappy Bird clone using the iOS7 Physics Engine

I'm just going to point to FlapFlap [1] as well though it doesn't look like collisions are implemented yet.

[1]: https://github.com/nathanborror/FlapFlap

awhittyon Oh my god, it's a girl (2010)

Do you mean that not all of them have accomplished something of merit in the sense that their contributions to feminism were unimportant? Or do you mean that some of them detracted from the discussion?

I have to admit that I know very little about feminism, so I'm honestly all ears here.

awhittyon Oh my god, it's a girl (2010)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_feminists

I would say all of these women have accomplished something of merit while talking about gender inequality.