Hacker News Reader

binomialon Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google

Also, just got a Firefox addon working that provides automatic related links to most web pages. Unfortunately, it relies on search now.

But I'm sure that any sufficiently popular content-discovery tool will have a lot of spammers trying to game it. It's not easy to fight that.

binomialon A persistent multiplayer online programming game

JVM perhaps?

binomialon Paypal alternatives

I do appreciate your suggestions, but this doesn't have anything to do with my ego.

It's great to have constructive criticism like the points contained in your comment, but had it been written without the sarcasm and small insults I would have found it that much more compelling.

Sounds like ego to me. There was no sarcasm in his host, and its critical tone is probably warranted when your site takes that long to load.

binomialon How Germany got it right on the economy

To say that Germans "invented modern thought" is pushing it. Perhaps you can qualify that with an appropriate definition of "modern thought". The first few disciplines were around long before the 19th century.

binomialon Ruby is beautiful (but I'm moving to Python)

I think the GP was referring to "mandating the same function for everything (via a common protocol under the covers) was better than risking people implementing a thousand different method names".

binomialon Teaching My Daughter To Code

It's possible great advice. See these two TED Talks by Sugata Mitra for evidence:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRb7_ffl2D0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk60sYrU2RU

binomialon Which programming book you just couldn’t stop reading from start to end?

Reposting a dead post which should not have been dead, from abecedarius:

    These had high I-want-to-read-itosity, I thought:
    Abelson and diSessa, Turtle Geometry
    Abelson and Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
    Aho and Weinberger and Kernighan, The AWK Programming Language
    Andrew Appel, Compiling With Continuations
    Jon Bentley, More Programming Pearls
    Jon Bentley, Programming Pearls
    Leo Brodie, Thinking FORTH
    W. H. Burge, Recursive Programming Techniques
    Carriero and Gelernter, How to Write Parallel Programs
    A. K. Dewdney, The New Turing Omnibus
    Edsger Dijkstra, A Discipline of Programming
    Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Computation
    Friedman and Felleisen, The Little Schemer
    Friedman and Wand and Haynes, Essentials of Programming Languages [1st edition]
    James F. Gimpel, Algorithms in Snobol4
    Paul Graham, On Lisp
    Philip Greenspun, Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
    Grune and Jacobs, Parsing Techniques: A Practical Guide
    Daniel Hillis, The Connection Machine
    Kernighan and Pike, The Practice of Programming
    Kernighan and Pike, The Unix Programming Environment
    Kernighan and Plauger, Software Tools in Pascal
    Donald Knuth, Literate Programming
    Glenn Krasner (editor), Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice
    Susan Lammers, Programmers at Work
    Wm Leler, Constraint Programming Languages
    Liskov and Guttag, Abstraction and Specification in Program Development
    Peter Norvig, Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming
    Chris Okasaki, Purely Functional Data Structures
    Richard O'Keefe, The Craft of Prolog
    P. J. Plauger, Programming on Purpose I. (and II and III)
    P. J. Plauger, The Standard C Library
    Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface
    Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
    Toby Segaran, Programming Collective Intelligence
    Toffoli and Margolus, Cellular Automata Machines
    Niklaus Wirth, Project Oberon: The Design of an Operating System and Compiler
    Witten, Moffat, & Bell, Managing Gigabytes
    (mostly from my old list at http://wry.me/~darius/personal/books.html)

binomialon Life in Text Mode

Google "uzbl".

binomialon ClojureQL - 1.0.0 now in beta

Idea: Bot which automatically gives relevant replies to comments, using NLP, sentiment analysis and web search to find relevant links. It would only reply if it's certain enough that the link it wants to suggest is relevant enough and has a dissenting opinion relative to the comment as well as decent pagerank/social-media-rank.

binomialon How to Start a Successful Bootstrapped Web App Business (12 hours of audio)

This is the second comment of this form that I've seen made for a submission from this website. What's the context?

binomialon New EC2 Instance Type - The Cluster GPU Instance

Well, rainbow tables are defeated with salt. I wouldn't worry about that if you're salting. And you are salting, right?

binomialon Here's Why Someone Would Seek Rejection for 30 Days Straight

Google "social skydiving" for people's experiences doing this kind of thing.

binomialon Skype for Mac 5.0 beta released

It's not quite a 1:1 correspondence. For example, high quality video came to Linux somewhere in 2.x, when Windows got it in 4.0. That said, I believe it took about a year to get it on Linux after Windows.

binomialon WorkFlowy (YC S10) launches a better way to organize your brain

How about "Just type in anything you want"

binomialon Overclocking SSL

I don't know how cryptography works, so I'd like to know why the key length for all cryptography schemes seems to go up in powers of 2. What's the reason one couldn't have a 1300 bit RSA key, for example?

binomialon Gmail Creator Joins Facebook Co-Founder, Donates 100K To Legalize Marijuana

Alcohol has many other disadvantages which are, IMO, worse than just the harm to personal health, though these normally only surface when overused. Can't say the same about marijuana though, and I agree with you about that.

binomialon NoSQL Took Away The Relational Model And Gave Nothing Back

Do you really need SSD's to do a thousand reads per second? I'm assuming this is with a hot cache, and the access pattern on the 10TB of data is pretty heavily skewed towards a much smaller portion of the total dataset. Also, RAID-ed 15K drives, and the nature of the queries matter. We don't really know enough about the whole setup to know what's possible.

binomialon A Google Suggest Venn Diagram Generator

Google, Microsoft and Apple: http://www.technomancy.org/google-suggest-venn/#start=why+is...

binomialon CMU Researchers Break Speed Barrier In Solving Important Class of Linear Systems

Please elaborate. Solving linear equations with software is nothing new, this algorithm just does it faster. So I'd like to see prior art for what you're describing here, sounds interesting. How exactly would one apply linear algebra to solving the first and third questions for example?

binomialon Real Go Projects: SmartTwitter and web.go

I just wanted to point out that it's not 90k concurrent users, but 90k total users (for some unknown definition of "user"). But it does process a couple dozen tweets per second according to him, with low load. That's quite a far ways off from 90k concurrent users. That's not to say that Go wouldn't help in that case, it really depends on what the application is doing.

binomialon Embarrassing Flaws That Made My ‘Weekend’ App Possible

I'd love any resources you could point to that were helpful to you when builder your recommendation engines (also, do you have links to the actual engines?). I've been going through a tutorial to understand how SVD works [1], but it would be nice to find something that will help me deal with implementation details. I thought I might just use Gensim [2] for now, but the authors of that tool themselves say that Gensim is more of a framework to learn about these things rather than a production-ready tool.

[1] http://www.miislita.com/information-retrieval-tutorial/svd-l... [2] http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projekty/gensim/index.html

binomialon Ask HN: What are you working on right now?

My main thing: http://jellly.com/

Also, a real-time multi-player browser game built on node.js and socket.io, but this is just for fun.

binomialon Ask HN: Python gaining popularity

Oops, I did not realize that you are the same person who I had replied to till later. Well, I'll assume you aren't trolling then, but realize that many shared the sentiment for good reason (the comment was at 5 points surprisingly, before I made the last, very stupid reply). The reason would be that there have been thousands of wasted programmer hours due to discussions initiated by someone saying "rails can't scale", when they obviously don't know what they're talking about, so it does come off as trollish.

It became a something many said because of Twitter's scaling problems, which is probably how you heard about it. But later, it became clear and commonly accepted among the community that Twitter's scaling problems did not stem from rails itself, but other parts of its infrastructure. Saying "rails doesn't scale" really doesn't make too much sense, because scaling the application layer is arguably the easiest part of scaling: essentially you add more app servers, and load balance between them. The hard part is scaling the database etc.

In Twitter, at first they had a lot of issues because the queuing software they wrote wasn't great for their workloads and was pretty slow. And there are a ton of other moving parts as well in the application and the team must have kept hitting walls in all the various parts. They may have even had some rails issues at some point, but that's a far cry from saying it can't scale.

And anyways, if you want to keep it light weight, I'd use one of the smaller Ruby frameworks. You really can't go wrong with Sinatra.

binomialon Ask HN: Python gaining popularity

I was trying to see to it that people don't respond to the trolling as if it were a real question. If it was a real question, perhaps the person needs to do some research.

binomialon Ask HN: Python gaining popularity

Subtle trolling.

binomialon How to Start a Hedge Fund

The insult may be in that it implies the person to be married is being swayed purely by money basically.

binomialon End of the Road for Xmarks

Apparently they researched it, probably by asking some sample of the users: http://blog.xmarks.com/?page_id=1883#premium

binomialon End of the Road for Xmarks

On an opportunistic note, I do wish they'd everyone access to their "1 billion bookmark corpus", in anonymized form of course.

binomialon Start ups, please don't force me to log in with Facebook

If you put up a few photos of a good looking girl for the profile pic and a random album, it's quite easy to get over a hundred friends, and not too hard to get many hundreds if you post on a few of those friending groups.

binomialon Products For People Who Make Products For People

Though graphic design surely includes all those things you've mentioned, I was using it in the sense that most "web designers" might use it, as in the ability to make pretty stuff in photoshop. I'm not sure that someone who can, for instance apply Tufte's advice on data representation, necessarily also makes nice looking logos.