bantic

Yeah. I think I get a little extra subconscious background-thread-processing boost when I do this.

I took a month-long sabbatical last Fall to learn a new skill (machine learning). I had a project goal to keep me focused on making progress and staying practical: making an ios app that will use ML to "recognize" the letters on a Boggle game grid and "solve" it, printing out all the words on that grid. I made large strides during the month but the project wasn't quite working at the end. After the sabbatical it was back to work at my dayjob and I had a lot of motivation but little time, so I kept telling myself, "No time to work on it today, but I'll try tomorrow."

After a few weeks thinking this and not doing any work, I despaired that my project would end up as vaporware, blowing away in the smoke of my good intentions. So I started a new habit: Committing to work on it, every day, for just 15 minutes.

I use a pomodoro timer (Vitamin-R) and note-taking app (EverNote) to do my daily 15 minutes. Each time I start, I write down my goal for that session, and keep a running list of things I think of to do but don't get to in that particular session. Every day I successfully put in 15 minutes I mark off that day on a 365-day hanging wall calendar that is on the back of my apartment door.

Results:

* I have worked on the app for 90% of the days this year.

* I absolutely got it to a "working" state (I am now facing a diminishing returns problem where I'm putting in too much time fiddling with UX and UI polish, but that's a problem I'm happy to have).

* On over 50% of the days I end up working more than 15 minutes.

* On days when I feel like going longer, and have the time, I'll still occasionally hard-stop at 15 minutes. This gives me something I'm eager to come back to tomorrow, and also (I think) helps to engrain the habit. I want my subconscious to always think: yes, the cost of starting my session today really is only 15 minutes, I will do this even if I don't feel like I have a lot of willpower today.

Not exactly brain fog but I often find myself in extreme left-brained mode after a challenging day of coding. If I meet friends after work I am a horrible conversationalist for up to an hour while my brain slowly (and reluctantly) stops actively churning on coding problems.

Related to the right-to-left thinking mode changes, sometimes the words that I am using at become eerily meaningless or unfamiliar. I've spent a few moments asking myself "is that really the way 'else' is spelled?". I recently learned this phenomenon is called semantic satiation [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation

I worked at a company that hired a developer who was slightly consumed by his regret at being an early employee and then getting out of Groupon pre-IPO. We'd be at a bar and the conversation would die down and he'd look sort of glum and say, "I should be on a yacht right now...". I felt bad for him.

(biased author of Mobiledoc-Kit here)

The past year or so has really seen a resurgence of browser-based text editors. Off the top of my head I can think of 4 editors/editor-frameworks launched in the past year (Mobiledoc-Kit, ProseMirror, Trix, and now Draft.js). Browsers are creeping toward exposing all the events that are necessary for interpreting the meaning of a user as they input text. (Some notable exceptions remain, such as an event that would be fired when a spelling correction is accepted, but mutation observers provide a fallback for cases where it's not otherwise possible to catch the input on the way in.)

A major focus of Mobiledoc-Kit, which seems to have some overlap with Draft.js, is on exposing an API that allows programmers to programmatically interact with the internal (structured) document. Our goal is to allow developers to be able to construct editors that fit snugly fit their use case, whether that's building their own UI for a toolbar, or more complex procedural rules for document (e.g., add a constraint that there can only be one "H1" section in a document and disallow adding a second one).

Since Mobiledoc-Kit was built for a publisher originally (Bustle), the ability to intersperse text with richer content was a goal from the start. So it has a "card" concept that allows adding any rich content (embedded tweets, videos, slidehows, etc.). In fact, the Mobiledoc-Kit demo page [1] has a demo where a Codemirror editor is embedded inside the Mobiledoc editor.

It's great to see so much new energy in the browser editor world. I am hopeful that as browser features and new editors and editor features converge, we'll see some exciting new developments that broaden the perspective on what sort of content is possible to author from within a web page.

[1]: https://bustlelabs.github.io/mobiledoc-kit/demo/

I read Daniel Stenberg's (he is a maintainer of curl, I think?) "http2 explained" pdf the other day, and it's by far the best comprehensive explanation of http2 that I have seen. Well worth a read if you're curious what's coming with http2. http://daniel.haxx.se/http2/

The thing that made this click for me was realizing the "1" in the regex was not special. The regex is just looping through integers (starting with 2) and checking if the target number is divisible by any of them. It can use any digit if the target string uses the same digit. Ruby example using 5 instead of 1:

def is_prime(n); str = "5"*n; str !~ /^5?$|^(55+?)\1+$/; end

The regex essentially says, for integer n, "does 2 ones fit evenly into n ones", then "does 3 ones fit into n ones", etc., which is the same as "does 2 fit into n", "does 3 fit into n", etc.

To Be (http://tobe.us) is a new way to collage the Internet with images, music, and video. Our users create everything from personalized notes and mixtapes to private sketchbooks, all using HTML5. To Be launched in Japan last month, but our team is in NYC (the East Village).

We have an amazing, expressive app built with Ember.js and Rails. It looks nothing like any web application you've worked on before. Get in touch if you don't believe us.

We need an experienced JavaScript developer (or Ruby developer eager to learn Ember) to help us launch To Be in the US. Ideally someone comfortable with JavaScript, Rails and Postgres. Someone to worry about browser paint speeds, and not to worry about old browser support. To optimize CSS transitions and HTTP responses, not to optimize cubicle space. To move our tested, object-oriented codebase forward.

Come work with us, and push the limits of what browsers and the web can be. Email hello@tobe.us with the words “Interested Developer” in the subject and a link to code you are proud of in the body. You can also learn more at: http://tobe.us/developer

This is a full-time salaried position in New York City, with the opportunity for equity and leadership in a young company.

Hey HNers, I created a game / prediction net where people can tweet in final score predictions for the upcoming March Madness NCAA games. To play you have to post a tweet that includes "@scorecaster" or "#scorecaster", the hashtag for the game (they are listed on the site), and the score prediction (in the same order as the teams in the hashtag), example: "@scorecaster #UMvMU 65-55".

I wanted to make something that adds a playful, social element to watching sports. I tweet and chat with friends back home when watching basketball games, and I wanted to have a way to sort of trash talk/compete with one another. Something more casual and less formal than betting, and more social.

I'd love to get feedback from all of you. My biggest concern is that it might not actually be very fun to try to predict the final score of a game. Sometimes it feels quite arbitrary to me. I'm looking for ways to make that more interesting. If I get a critical mass the first thing I'd want to add is the ability to restrict the leaderboard and predictions list to people that are connected to you on twitter.

This is very cool. There's so much that could be done to better organize and run meetings. It's great to see someone taking a stab at it. I wished there was more of a demo before signup. Even just some screenshots would have helped.

I made this. FF does weird things with non-text bookmarklets so I used the user agent to show a text-based link as the bookmarklet, only for FF users, but it seems it is still finicky. If you want to see the effect, I'd try Safari or Chrome.

I love the idea of making it easier for people to find one another to collab on things. How will you keep out recruiters, though? Seems like they always end up on these things and start increasing the noise.

(New York/remote) MegaPhone Labs (http://bit.ly/mp_ruby): a Manhattan-based startup that designs and develops interactive TV applications and games. Our apps let tens of thousands of simultaneous viewers use their phones/PCs to interact with TV shows in realtime.

We're hiring someone to own the http stack (in a company of diverse technologies), which currently is about 80% ruby, 15% node.js, with other technologies (mongo, redis, ec2, backbone, coffeescript, websockets) sprinkled in.

Email jobs+ruby@megaphonelabs.com to apply. Job description: http://bit.ly/hn_mp_ruby

We are funded and have 7-figure revenue but are still quite small. We're about to hit our inflection point, and that's why we need you.

What we’re offering: We’ll pay you what you’re actually worth, provide full healthcare, commuter benefits, your own office with a view and a door, Netflix vacation policy (take some), and equity.

instapaper -- saving articles for when I truly have time to read them (as opposed to when I first see them -- while browsing HN during a mini work break) has been a huge timesaver for me.

KA plus One Laptop per Child would be an incredibly powerful combination for third-world schools. OLPC should make it the homepage on the XO.

here are a few more:

baR2mJpMfgecD6Ut fgyc54yA4FS2kM85 beb4HZFy4FPxBqHp

Surprised no one has mentioned 1password here yet. It generates passwords, has extensions for most browsers, and can sync between iPhone and your computer. I find it super handy, although it's funny when I'm using a friend's computer and my iphone isn't around and I have to tell them, "actually, I can't log in to facebook because I don't know my own password."

Yes but what does that mean? One can create and "backdate" (touch -t) any file. So how does one prove that an email is real and not created and backdated today?

Honest question: How might one prove that an email is real?

I've noticed after a few weeks of using it that I no longer am aware of the screen changing light temperature. I presume that's because I've adapted to it. Anyone else have that?

I use mint.com to get a high-level overview of all my finances. I have a couple different credit cards (I got them to get different frequent-flyer mileage awards and other rewards), and it's very useful to see a snapshot of all of them at once in mint than to check them each individually. For investing, I've given up on picking individual stocks and just buy index-tracking funds. I like zecco.com as a broker because they are total no-frills and if you maintain a high-enough balance (25k?) you get 30 free trades a month. But I also have a smaller amount of money at covestor.com (I think USV invests in it and that's how I found out about it).

I think the idea of keeping a log of places I've been to is fairly interesting -- especially if there's a good aggregation/search functionality to it, so I can see how many times I go to my favorite restaurant, what places I went to on this day last year, etc. But it's a pretty simple thing to build, and I'd prefer to build it on my own (pay with my time) than use foursquare for it (pay with my privacy). There are a few secondary things that foursquare does that have some potential, though, notably notes from your friends about what to do/eat/see nearby you that appear when you check in somewhere.

Agreed. I'd like to see more detail. C.f. facebook's recent post-mortem (http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/more-deta...). Lots of detail. When a downtime blog post is so vague like Tumblr's was, my first instinct is that there's something they are deliberately not telling about what went wrong. Or maybe they haven't figured out exactly why it went down yet. I hope a more detailed postmortem is coming.

I like this one a lot. Simpler CSS, less verbose, and the in-context visual examples make it a lot easier to follow along.

He had me until the misplaced apostrophe in "client's".

is anybody planning on doing this? I'd sure like to.

nice fermat reference

I gave a talk at Scotland on Rails last year about image processing in ruby, including using OpenCV. Getting it working well with Ruby is a bit of a pain, but it can be done. My fork of the ruby-opencv gem is at http://github.com/bantic/ruby-opencv and examples of using it to do face detection are at http://github.com/bantic/image_labs

This is great. The link to tickets for Fantastic Mr. Fox is broken right now: http://www.fandango.com/fantasticmr$002Efox_109297nu/movieov... Looks like it's a Freebase bug escaping the title properly, though, not on your end. (edit: It's that 'nu' at the end of the movie url fragment that does it, which appears to come directly from freebase)

Wow, that book is really old (2003). I had no idea R had been around that long. Is the stuff in it still relevant? I have no idea how quickly R has evolved.