Hacker News Reader

blogimuson Best practices in modern web projects

Ability to run on Heroku

blogimuson Amazon Loses Bid For .Amazon Domain

> Not exactly a geological timescale

A. Humans don't live on a geological timescale

B. .com TLD's are in the formidable first ~15 years of socializing the web the mass public.

blogimuson TV is broken

Like climate control in your house

blogimuson I'm starting a new magazine, The Startup Magazine

But you'd be one typo away from being blocked by proxy filters

blogimuson The Next-Generation Browser: No URL Bar

Consider tablets and desktops versus notebooks and smartphones. Biggest impact is on notebooks whose vertical real estate is at a premium. Second are smartphone because of their form factor. As far as tablets and desktops: You can rotate your tablet and you can use a big monitor (or rotate that too if supported).

blogimuson Pythex: a Python regular expression editor

Kodos hasn't seen a release since 2006

blogimuson A Simple Filter to Weed Out Non-technical Co-founders

I think what the blogger is saying indirectly that is a test that is necessary but not sufficient to qualify a non-technical co-founder. If you ask this as the first question, then it will save you the time for the rest of the questions.

blogimuson Apple’s Three Laws of Developers

Kinda like Congress, huh?

blogimuson Engineering Is Not Science

What kind of book? A math book? biography? romance fiction? In that respect, programming is also like cooking. For cooking, you can go from one extreme of food science, like NASA practices for food going up in space, to popping a frozen pizza into the oven, to many points in between. Programming allows a wide range of discipline to be executed in the process.

blogimuson Email from Steve Jobs re: Java and OS X

What might be important which I've observed is that no one of importance seems to read signature disclaimers. Or at least they didn't in my case.

As a grunt programmer while working for one large defense contractor some years ago, I put something similar to the following, embedded in a paragraph of mind-numbing boilerplate and no one up the food chain seemed to notice.

If you are not the intended recipient, you need not do anything. Men in black will come to erase your memory. Have a good day.

blogimuson Down with fun: The depressing vogue for having fun at work

One could argue that it is inaccurate, but how is it dangerous?

blogimuson Down with fun: The depressing vogue for having fun at work

Unless you can hit the Balmer Peak

http://xkcd.com/323/

blogimuson No, you are not "running late", you are rude & selfish

This is what I got when I tried the page an hour after posting to Hacker News:

Error 403: Forbidden

Your PHP settings have been disabled by an H-Sphere administrator

Now that is rude

blogimuson [dead]

I tried to link to the original AP, but guess it is problematic. Too late for me to try to fix the link. Google search any number of consumers of this feed:

http://www.google.com/search?q=Schwarzenegger%20orders%20min...

blogimuson Why Enterprise Software Sucks

For some reason I had a sense of deja vu on this exact topic, so searched the archives and found this (from my earliest days lurking before I signed up for an account on HN)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=72115

blogimuson Tomorrow's World - Home Computer Terminal (1967)

What I like better of Tomorrow's World is the mobile phone (1979):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vix6TMnj9vY&feature=chann...

blogimuson U.S. Discovers Est. $1 Trillion of Minerals in Afghanistan

Did you read the article? The discovery was accidental. There were charts secreted away by Afghan geologists during the Taliban years.

In 2004, American geologists, sent to Afghanistan as part of a broader reconstruction effort, stumbled across an intriguing series of old charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country. They soon learned that the data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but cast aside when the Soviets withdrew in 1989.

blogimuson What real life bad habits has programming given you?

I find myself categorizing people into 10 types.

And I have to actively not slouch in front of computers.

blogimuson How We Beat the Nazis with Bureaucracy

What is old is new again

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=833443

blogimuson DHH: Being at the right time at the right place is not the secret ingredient.

Yes it is.

blogimuson Not just oil: US hit peak water in 1970 and nobody noticed

So we add a bunch of oregano and call it the great gulf salad dressing?

blogimuson Why Nobody Understands Your Visualization

That car data plot is an example of a multidimensional parallel graph. Too bad he didn't go into more depth on this since he showcased this visual representation in his blog post. Some more info you get your feet wet is here: http://filer.case.edu/~dbh10/eecs466/report.html

Parallel graphs were a starting point on multidimensional al visualization. They are useful only to a certain point of complexity, then they are counterproductive as it takes more time to analyze the graphs than to view a number of simpler graphs side by side or in series. Newer techniques involve radial visualization, such as

http://www.infovis-wiki.net/index.php?title=Radial_Hierarchi...

Something to consider with your animations is the cognitive load of animations of complex visualizations. See the following paper:

http://geoanalytics.net/GeoVisualAnalytics08/a15.pdf

blogimuson Ask PG: Sub-HNs as a solution to cluttering of HN front-page?

To me, the thing that makes Hacker News, well, Hacker News is that the site is really simple, from a technology contraption point of view. It is controlled and shaped and molded (and whatever other verb you want to use) by us users (counting PG as, well, prime user?) and not shaped so much by arbitrary software constraints such as binning topics (putting in buckets). The touch to tuning this site has been light, with such adjustments as flagging and tuning the rise and fall of topics based on a variety of heuristics. Some tuning has been undone, such as color coding "most valued posters"

If anything, I would say if we were to change the site, the next experiment would be to put a greater collective downweight on titles or source sites if there is a strong local temporal grouping (glut within a timeframe) of those tags/keywords posted. Example: lots of facebook posts at one time then facebook posts drop off the front page a little faster than if there was only a small number of facebook posts. But even that, I'm not sold on this.

blogimuson Ask PG: Sub-HNs as a solution to cluttering of HN front-page?

I disagree. I really don't see what is broken with Hacker News (and I've been here for a while too).

blogimuson Togetherville, social networking for kids 6 - 10

I've got two kids under 10 and I've got mixed feelings on networking sites for kids this young. On the one hand, they will have the opportunity to get familiar with the technology they will spend the rest of their lives using. On the other hand, why rush into it when they are happy without it (really, regardless of happy or not).

I'm a programmer (developer/engineer/whatever), been programming since I was about 10, but I've not encourages nor discouraged computer use for my kids. I figure the computer is there and they will pretty much decide how much they are into it.

I have to also confess that I've thought of developing a kids website that my kids can play with. What are your experiences or thoughts here?

blogimuson Ask HN: What's your morning routine?

I don't think the skeleton has the guts to walk into a bar.

blogimuson World's Simplest Portfolio

I first heard about index funds from "The Motley Fool Radio Show." Figuring I have the choice of dedicating at least a good chunk of my free time to understanding financial markets and trading stocks, or just dropping my money into index funds until I decide I want to play games with my money and then use that time to surf the web and peruse Hacker News, I chose the later.

blogimuson Boston to Develop 'Innovation District' and Funding Competition for Startups

Spencer Trask & Co. will be holding a startup competition starting in July that will award the winner $25,000 to locate a business in that part of the city

I can imagine that 25K going really fast once you pull up out of your apartment and set up a "real" office. The idea sounds half-baked to me. I'm in the Boston area and would really like the startup culture to grow here, but I get the feeling that our local government just doesn't get it.

blogimuson Lightweight Living (1999)

I struggle to think of somebody I know personally who couldn't do their job from anywhere in the world, if only they had the courage to demand it.

I have a friend who is going to college and paying for it with housekeeping. She could always unleash a roomba, but if she's going to clean the toilet, then we'll need some robotic tidy bowl man. For hands-on work, I guess if you are a surgeon, you might have more luck working remotely:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/04/worlds-first-remote-heart...

blogimuson What Would You Answer If Jobs Asked “What Have You Done That’s So Great …”?

I really wonder what would have become of Steve Jobs if he didn't have that opportunity to stand on the shoulders of Steve Wozniak.