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bonoboon Orkut shutting down September 30

> Isn't that how software is meant to work?

Different schools of thought. Some say software should be able to handle all your data without having to ask you everytime it shifts a bit around — convenient, but with the implicit cost of needing to trust said software with all your info. Others say that software shouldn't grab any of your info without your consent, which gives you control over your data but is terribly inconvenient.

I put myself on the latter group, but I confess being called paranoid. In my defense, G+ grabbed my profile pic from an old blogspot I had about monkeys back when the apps weren't a single profile. It took me a while to find out it was more of an accident than a bad joke, but by then it was too late to recover my trust.

bonoboon Orkut shutting down September 30

Another big factor for the communities' explosion was their misuse. The way communities were displayed in your profile page leaked enough metadata that people started using them as badges instead. Some time around 2006 people started creating communities with nonsense names, and it was not unusual to see people with hundreds of them on their profile. Things like "I cry everytime I see Mufasa die" or "Nobody expects the spanish inquisition" were the kinds of titles used in order to display your sense of humor.

In some sense this is akin to Tumblr's hashtags we see today, in which people abused the metadata channel to convey real meaning.

bonoboon Sleep as a Competitive Advantage

I usually say that I don't have trouble sleeping, my trouble is with changing states :)

I seldom go to bed in time because I hate to lay there trying to get asleep. Wanting to make more use of my day also doesn't help; I don't get home before 7:30pm, and I don't want to just dine and go to bed...

Then comes the morning and I just can't wake up, even after 9, 10hs. I put my alarm clock far away from my bed because I used to just turn it off and keep sleeping. It doesn't help that much though: I "wake up", walk to it, turn it off and go back to under my sheets. "Wake up" as in I'm walking but I'm not totally conscious. It's like I'm drunk, I'll always find a nonsense reason to justify going back to bed, like "hell, I need to go back to my bed now, or it will get too light and float away"

bonoboon Ask HN: Do you have any code currently in production that you're ashamed of?

Lately the only thing I've been feeling ashamed of is the amount of code I DIDN'T write. I think this is mostly because I fear feeling ashamed of my code after it's running or, even worse, after it's public. I don't know...

I'm the epithome of analysis paralysis. Being ashamed of my own code is my next milestone. :)

bonoboon The Case of the Missing Magenta

That's not an uncommon question at all. This is a single instance of a set of philosophical questions related to qualia[1], i.e., the question of subjectivity and conscious experience. Richard Dawkins stretches the question a little more by taking into consideration the experiences of other species, such as bats [2] —spatial sense through audition—, and it's not hard to find more[3][4][5]

Fun questions to ask (and hard to put into words indeed, I had my share of trouble trying this exact same thing), but I don't think we're anywhere close to answer them. At least not until we really understand what consciousness is.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

[1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia

[2] http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/479563-sky-blue-pink-...

[3] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-changizi-phd/perceiving-c...

[4] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/051026082313.ht...

[5] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2166917/We-DONT-colo...

bonoboon Ask HN: I'm building one HTML5 game per week, need feedback

Oh boy, these are awesome! :D

I'm especially fond of game #1. It reminded me of an old html game I played in which I had to use the mouse to drag a rectagle around, avoiding collisions with other rectangles that bounced around. I remember receiving this in an email that said if I were able to stand for X seconds (I can't remember how many) then it meant that my reflexes were above the threshold required for jet pilots — and obviously, as every boy, I wanted to fly a jet.

The only critique I have for you is to have posted it during my work hours.

bonoboon Blue Eyes Logic Puzzle

You missed what I think is baklava's main point: "The only things that have changed are access to such ideas and the volume of our records." Your argument that "The essay reflected that something has gone wrong in our culture" is a pretty bold statement that doesn't take into consideration the volume of and access to information we have today.

To me it seems you're contradicting yourself. What does this bold statement of yours tells you about trying to contribute to a problem one does not understand?

bonoboon Blue Eyes Logic Puzzle

I understand the induction steps, but what I don't get is why the foreigner's statement triggers the logic induction. This quote from your first link sums it well:

    What's most interesting about this scenario is that, for k > 1, the outsider
    is only telling the island citizens what they already know: that there
    are blue-eyed people among them. However, before this fact is announced,
    the fact is not common knowledge.

It seems natural to me why they didn't commit the suicide before the statement (somehow induction doesn't work here), and why they did it after the statement, but I don't understand why. Isn't the fact that there are k > 1 islanders with blue eyes common knowledge too?

I mean, what bit of information is added here?

bonoboon Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

Yes, it's still the same coin, but you don't know which coin you got. You know that you got 10 consecutive heads though. How improbable this is if you got a fair coin? How probable this is with the double-head coin? This is the data you can use to update the probability.

bonoboon The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming (2006)

Or perhaps you're misinterpreting him. I don't think there's a need to call the author a special kind of asshole, there's nothing there implying that he's referring to himself when saying egoless. At least the way I see it, being egoless is a goal to the reader, not the author's self description.

bonoboon What’s Wrong with Git? A Conceptual Design Analysis

I don't think this problem applies though. You're stashing right after a commit, so your stage is empty at this point.

bonoboon [dead]

I find myself guilty on that last strain of procrastination: feeling so anxious about being late on a deadline that I end up delaying it even more, closing the loop.

Gathering the courage to face the task didn't work so far. Every time I try tackling it I feel it drains so much energy from me that I soon give up, only to feel more guilty afterwards (and with even less disposition to face it from the beginning once again)

bonoboon Falsehoods programmers believe about geography

I've never seen this definition, but I've seen two different ones that were often confused: the division in North, Central and South Americas where Mexico belongs to North America, and the division in Anglo-Saxonic and Latin Americas where Mexico belogs to the latter.

Are you sure you're not mixing them up? I'm asking because I've seen people mix them up so frequently, in some cases you can even find notices in geoography books making this clear.

bonoboon Hawala

I don't think it's appropriate to make fun of somebody else's culture "for a real laugh," but these links were interesting anyway. So, thank you.

bonoboon Facebook CSRF leading to full account takeover (fixed)

Something I don't get, why is a hotmail account a pre-requisite? Wouldn't this work with any other email account?

bonoboon Digital physics

This idea that consciousness emerges from complexity is the study field of Giulio Tononi[1], and I find his point of view particularly interesting. This is not to say that we have something concrete in hands yet, but I like his approach nonetheless.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/science/21consciousness.ht...

bonoboon Digital physics

You might find this story quite interesting: http://qntm.org/responsibility

bonoboon Comonads

> Comonads tend to well represent a notion of computing where you're isolating a particular section of your data in relation to its context.

This was the piece missing for me to understand comonads, worded exactly the way I needed. Thank you.

The author mentioned zippers, but for some reason I didn't quite get it (`a collection with one of the items being at the focus,` perhaps it sounded too specific for me at first)

bonoboon Haskell Lenses In Pictures

This isn't the first time I got myself wondering "where do people derive these ideas from?" I need to read and re-read (and perhaps read once again) a post full of pictures every time someone try to explain me a new concept in Haskell. And the more it happens the more I'm convinced that this language is not an everyday tool.

I don't want people to misinterpret me, I decided to learn Haskell and I don't regret it. But I often feel it's more like trying to cut vegetables with a katana: it's challenging, it's fun to practice, and surely it's a powerful tool, but even if I become a master at it I won't accomplish much alone, and I definetly won't want people trying this next to me.

The thought of a bad programmer trying to look smart while fiddling in my Haskell code scares me to no end.

bonoboon This is a web page

First time my in-laws saw "the book" they were trying to find information about vacation spots in Brazil but their grandpa's diaries were obsolete, I found a printed book a monk had written up about where the best places to stay and see were in Brazil.

I could almost see the dots connect when they realized that someone they didn't know, in Brazil, had written up a piece of information at some point that they were now seeing and using, and many people could do that. It was like looking into the darkness and suddenly seeing a firefly blinking :-)

...

My point here is, the printing press had it's impact, nobody denies that. Seeing the times changing is what leaved ChuckMcM's in-laws astounded.

bonoboon Introduction to x64 Assembly

The greedy alligator always wants the bigger prey.

It took me a long time to differentiate the symbols because, before using the alligator metaphor, my teacher tried this one: cross a line that goes perperdicular to the bottom part of the symbol. If it turns into a 4 it's smaller than; otherwise, if it turns into a 7, then it's bigger than.

I remember seeing a "5 < 8" and thinking "ok, I know which number is smaller and which one is bigger, and I know how which symbol is named, but which one should I use?" For some reason it wasn't obvious to me that I should read the assertion from left to right. I just saw two numbers and I didn't know if I should indicate that one of them was bigger or that another was smaller—both assertions were true. I remember having a list of exercises to do as homework and just circling the bigger numbers in frustration.

When I hearded the alligator metaphor, however, I got it instantly.

bonoboon Key points to look for in your next job if you are a developer

It's not just you, I thought the same thing while reading the article.

It may be a different thing if you're working on a profit center vs on a cost center I guess. If your clients are outsourcing their software needs to you (so, basically, you are in a cost center), the focus is on reducing the costs of production: you want to deliver as cheaply as possible, no need to innovate. Usually what happens in this situation is that the average joes end up taking the job of building the (boring) product while the best guys build tools to automate the job of the joes, reducing costs in order to increase the profit margin. The innovative work end up in the hand of the tool builders.

However, if you work on a profit center, innovation is the core of the job; the meat is on the external product, and the tool builders just need to automate the boring parts (doing the job the other guys don't want to do.)

bonoboon How to determine if my calculation of pi is accurate?

This one[1][2] is the only one that I remember seeing his name, but it's a very good one. In his answer he explains branch prediction, and ended up receiving more than 5000 upvotes for it.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4637196

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/a/11227902/240905 (direct link to his answer)

bonoboon How to determine if my calculation of pi is accurate?

I wouldn't give much importance to it, the only problem I see is the amount of visibility this kind of contribution have. I think it should instead be only a small footnote.

It's an edit, we can't assume the editor contributed significantly to the answer. If the editor had a better answer, he should post an answer himself; if he had a minor but still significant contribution, he should post a comment complementing it. An edit is IMO the lesser of the contributions, only grammatical and spelling corrections, and a name attached to an answer as an edit means barely nothing to me.

bonoboon Games Physics: Basics and Implementation of Predictive Collision Detection

Use the cache, Luke: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Acodet...

bonoboon Why MongoDB Never Worked Out at Etsy

What I meant was that the article was not about MongoDB at all. I think thefreeman summarized it better than me on his reply: the author is talking about his experiences on running more than one DBMS in production, not about MongoDB in particular.

I'm not even saying if the article was interesting or not. It surely has it's merits, it touches a point worth discussing (the downsides of trying to cover one DBMS's weakness throwing in another DBMS in the mix), but I was uninterested. I was expecting to hear why MongoDB wasn't fit for his use case, to better understand when to use NoSQL and when not to, so yes, I was indeed biased waiting for something different—but, in my defense, I say I was biased because the title made me think this way.

bonoboon Why MongoDB Never Worked Out at Etsy

I was expecting a post describing why MongoDB specifically weren't fit to their use case, but the TL;DR version is basically:

"Before you get too excited, the reason for the failure is probably not any of the ones you're imagining. Mainly it's this: adding another kind of production database was a huge waste of time."

The blog title is misleading IMO. It could as well be titled "Why [any other DBMS] Never Worked Out at Etsy" and the conclusion would be the same.

bonoboon Why MongoDB Never Worked Out at Etsy

Foursquare[1] and Codecademy[2] are two that I know of.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBauy0o-Wzs

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkPmVQNesZA

bonoboon How we gave colors names

Ask a tetrachromatic woman: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Possibility_of_hu...

bonoboon How we gave colors names

Now our vocabulary grew past the basic white-red-yellow-green-blue-black separation and I believe it will keep growing. I say this because I consider cyan and magenta to be new ramifications of that spectrum, both colors are well recognized by name today.

I think this is due to how information is accessible today. Languages seem to be able to separate a hue in two or more once the actual names are already established—when the burden of naming and categorizing hues gives place to the lesser burden of only memorizing the already named hues, then we can afford to create another new name. Although brands of nail polish and ink have dozens of different names for their colors, they often don't reach a consensus, and the same color can have different names between brands. Without a consensus (language is primarily based on consensus) all these subtly different hues can be said to remain unnamed, I guess...

I also wonder if there's a limit to this, to how many colors we can name before considering naming all colors in hexadecimal on a daily basis.