Hacker News Reader

bgammonon Twitch nabs exclusive streaming deal with Blizzard for e-sports events

I hope Twitch chat never becomes more of a police state than it already is. Streamers consistently demonstrate the ability to create the chat environments they want with the scarce tools Twitch has provided them. That seems good enough to me.

The problem you are describing is easily solved by simply joining a different chat room while watching the stream. For example: I'm a member of more than one "<streamer name> civil-chat" chat room which I can hop over to if the main stream chat is a bit too cancerous for my veteran eyes.

Echoing sibling comment sentiments about enforcing a top-down moderation policy: it's a bad idea. One of the most important things that watching Twitch and playing online games with notoriously toxic communities has taught me is that fun is unmotivated.

If you don't understand how someone derives pleasure from an action you find repulsive, it's because you're not meant to. Stop considering other's motivation and suddenly it becomes much easier to enjoy yourself, now that you're not raging at how dumb everyone is.

bgammonon Storage ‘not fundamentally needed’ for future power grid, scientists say

Are you suggesting the grid will turn into an interconnected graph of power supply lines with a routers and a routing protocol to supply power dynamically based on usage? Sounds a lot like our favorite graph.

There are obvious political problems with rate advertisement. Some are actually beneficial, such as being able to guarantee critical power supply on a more granular level. But what about ending up with a handful of backbone power providers with shady preferential practices and lackluster competitive spirit?

Self-regulating devices that turn themselves off during peak usage (back off packet sending...quiet broadcast radios...) seems extremely susceptible to bad actors. Perhaps I underestimate how bad current power infrastructure consistency is.

bgammonon MusicBrainz: an open music encyclopedia

I discovered MusicBrainz Picard about a year ago and it handled my collection pretty flawlessly.

I was always wanting to know since then if there are other maintained/curated music databases.

I also didn't realize at first that they offer a public API. The Picard client was decent, but I'd be interested in a command-line solution. Does anyone know if this exists?

bgammonon My Awful Life as the Internet's Janitor

After reading this, I'm just wondering about two possibilities for the development of Internet culture:

Increased policing -- people fear repercussions for posting disturbing content. The darkest corners live on.

Increased exposure -- people share the psychological burden of knowing disturbing content exists, and develop meaningful discussions and coping mechanisms.

bgammonon [dead]

Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14338328

bgammonon Ask HN: Using a version control system for your resume?

I do not build my resume from scratch. Often it is exported to PDF from some other service. I store this PDF in the git repository for my website, which is published on GitHub Pages. So inevitably, my resume has snapshots.

File formats like PDF do not lend themselves to version control. It would be hard to merge improvements on a shared "feature" of your resume from one branch into another branch.

bgammonon Don’t Build a Startup, Build a Business

> Remember, the focus of a business should be on delivering value and making money while doing so, unlike a usualstartup, whose sole purpose often seems to be burning money and thinking of ways to eventually turn a profit in the future.

Rewrite: offering a free service, then boiling the frog by slowly introducing more ad revenue schemes until eventually users are fed up and jump ship to the next iteration of the same service.

bgammonon Ask HN: How would you handle a large traffic spike (eg. being frontpage on HN)?

Prepare ahead of time. Short of using an elastic load balancing service, predict when you may have traffic spikes, and choose a cheap-to-implement solution such as request-level load balancing.

Create replicas of your web server processes on different machines for the duration you expect a potential traffic spike. Use a fast dispatcher like nginx[0] as a reverse proxy to load-balance requests to the appropriate replica web server machine.

If you see consistently low traffic, spin down the replicas and remove them from your load balancer configuration.

[0] http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/load_balancing.html

bgammonon How do self-taught developers get jobs? (2016)

I am a recent undergraduate. My undergrad CS major did not offer courses in line with my interests (they focus on data science, I focus on systems). The bulk of my working knowledge has come not from that program, but from the countless hours I spend reading at practicing at home.

Undergrad has given me credentials, and provided invaluable momentum to get me started, but over 4 years has acted as a hindrance to allowing me to become a strong candidate for jobs in the focus area I care most about.

bgammonon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2017)

  Location: New York, NY, USA
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Yes
  Technologies: JavaScript, Node.js, HTML, CSS, Python, Django, Java, C#, Unity, C, GNU/Linux, nginx, DevOps
  Résumé/CV: http://bradengammon.com/resume.pdf
  Email: 1dvo1t299d7ihmrh@bgammon.me

bgammonon Pink Trombone: Speech Synthesis Simulation in JavaScript

I haven't examined how it works, but in the same vein:

http://www.whalesynth.com/

bgammonon Latin America is set to become a leader in alternative energy

While riding in an Uber through Washington DC, my dad and I had a chat with the driver about his plans to build two solar installations in the US.

He also mentioned the likelihood that their company would soon enter Latin America, where higher electricity rates for consumers would allow them to make more money for selling the same amount of electricity compared to the US. He said this was the main angle he was using to attract investors.

bgammonon Sweden Wants to Fight Disposable Culture with Tax Breaks for Repairing Old Stuff

Impermanence could be considered a value in certain cultures. "Disposable Culture" vs. "Repairing Old Stuff" isn't a useful dichotomy. Everything has an expiration date, and often that date is carefully considered as part of a product's design. The goal shouldn't be fixing old stuff, but finding out how to increase efficiency either by making product's expiration dates further in the future, or compromising having an imminent expiration date by making the product easy to recycle.

bgammonon The Apple TV Aerial Video Screensavers

I wish there were footage of a large urban area in China. Would there actually be too much pollution to get a clear shot in most areas?

bgammonon Atom Reaches 1M Active Monthly Users

I have no idea what the system is, but it could be something as innocuous as automatic updates. In reality, they probably do send some form of diagnostic information, but since the application is open source, it seems unlikely there would be no way to disable that if it exists.