ctrager

I lived in Detroit until the mid 80's, now Chicago, but just went back for the first time with a touristic mindset. I met software developers from New York, Boston, and San Francisco who had moved TO Detroit and liked it. Detroit overall is as horrible as the media says, but the central core, which includes a big university, medical center, and downtown, is livable, bikable, and.... just cool.

And about 300 years before him, Thucydides

My wife is Japanese. We chose "Haruki" as the middle name for our son.

I have a decent amount of experience coding in big codebases using C#/Java - compiled, strongly typed languages - on the one hand, and Ruby/Javascript - interpreted, loosely typed - on the other. When I'm working in a big, unfamiliar codebase, I'm grateful for the help that the IDEs (Visual Studio/Intellij/Netbeans) can provide with refactoring, dead code detection. Would it be correct to say that because of the so called verbosity of Java, the IDEs are that much better at giving you instant feedback that you have broken something?

You all might enjoy "Terminally Blonde" at about the 6 minute mark: http://www.thirdcoastfestival.org/library/664-re-sound-27-th...

The designer of a string class in any language. C++ and Java - has to deal with the same issue - that heap allocations are slower than stack allocations. But to do a stack allocation means reserving some fixed length memory which is a waste if you have a lot of small strings. It's a tradeoff. The Ruby approach is reasonable. I think in Microsoft's C++ STL library, the limit is 16 rather than 32. Even with the low-level closer-to-the-metal power of C/C++, the string class designer still has to make a decision about the tradeoff.

Have you read any Kim Stanley Robinson? He's written novels set in Antarctica and Mars. I love the "Red Mars" triology.

Also, for tourists versus locals, this is fantastic, using geocoded tweets. It confirms what I tell out-of-town visitors to Chicago: Locals don't go to Navy Pier. http://www.mapbox.com/labs/twitter-gnip/locals/#13/41.9007/-...

Here's something similar I recently created. http://ifdefined.com/hack_week.html It uses a collection of keywords that you choose and then uses Nokia's HERE.com APIs to create a heatmap. The fun is coming up with the keywords. "Vegetarian" and "yoga" work pretty well for finding hipster places in the US, but for India not so much. Instead I tried "coffee", "pub", "pizza". "Sushi" works internationally except you-know-where.

Just adding my experience: My wife and I are in our fifties. We don't say yes to everybody who wants to visit, and our profile is certainly not very attractive to the element that is being complained about here. So far we've hosted four guests at our house just outside Chicago and the experience was 100% positive and we look forward to more guests in the future.

One datapoint from Chicago: Got laid off at age 56 last year and had two offers within two weeks. But I interviewed at several other places without receiving an offer whereas in the past I almost always got an offer if I got an interview (Google excepted). Here is some speculation about why my batting average dropped. I do feel that age worked against me but I don't think it was because of the companies having institutional biases against hiring older people. Rather, I think it was just the mindsets of individual 20-something/30-something interviewers making individual decisions based on what felt comfortable, based on the vibe feeling ok. Nobody here is doing anything wrong.

Even if the data isn't big, there can be a benefit from the Hadoop infrastructure. Say you have just 86,400 rows of data but each row takes 1 second. That adds up to 24 hours of elapsed time, and waiting for that run can be painful, especially if you are trying to experiment, iterate. With HDFS/MapReduce you can distribute that work across N machines and divide the elapsed time by N, speeding up the pace of iteration. I've worked on a project that had exactly this challenge, before Hadoop was available, and so we had to invent our own crappy ways of distributing the data to the N machines, monitoring them, collecting the results. Hadoop HDFS and Map/Reduce, with Job Tracker, etc, would have been much better than what we came up with.

Sigh...My "Hacker News Reader" Android app, with 7,000 active installs, depended on a piece of Sinatra/Heroku code to do the screen-scraping. My app is dead for now. I'm going to port the code to Java and get rid of the idea of having an intermediary. I thought it was safer if the screen scraping was centralized so that I could fix it once and for all when things changed, but it worked out that it was a single point of failure.

I've been programming a couple dozen years for a dozen companies, with side projects too. Some of that time I've been a 501 developer, and some of that time not. I think my natural tendency is to go beyond 501, and I'm happiest when the company environment positively reinforces that tendency. When the company seems to be indifferent to me going beyond (there can be a lot of reasons for this), then I fall back to being a 501 developer as a coping mechanism.

Right. Understood.

Right, I understand that. At this point, they haven't responded to me at all.

Two thoughts:

1) The operative pieces of wood here are the nut, the bridge, and the fingerboard. These pieces are all non-integral, relatively easily, cheaply replaceable parts of the violin. I can see how a nut or bridge that's too high would make the violin harder to play with good intonation, and for sure, a fingerboard that is worn or misshapen could, but other than that, I don't think there's any other part piece of wood that matters.

2) Not a rule, but sort of a default rule of thumb for a certain level of violin playing is don't play on open strings because you can't do vibrato and you can't adjust the pitch while you're playing. I remember my kid's intense, Teutonic teacher saying to him, "Well, your strings are out of tune, but that's NO EXCUSE for playing out of tune!", meaning, she expected my kid to have been able to make the adjustments on the fly with his finger placements.

Re-reading what I wrote, I guess I made it sound like a negative experience, but actually it was a fun adventure. All the buying experiences on eBay were positive. I never felt like I got ripped off. It was fun learning how to fiddle with fiddles. In theory, it could have even been a sort of money-making hobby, although I only managed to only about break even (Am I supposed to count my tool purchases against profit? Nah.)

I've bought a couple dozen $200 violins on eBay. If you are looking for a cheap student violin, and you don't have much experience yourself with violins, I would not recommend buying on eBay. It's too hit or miss.

For that student, spend a little more. The cost of the lessons soon makes a extra couple hundred bucks for the violin insignificant.

You CAN get a great sounding violin on eBay for $200, but you might have to buy and return a couple dozen violins to end up with one you like. My story is, that for my kid, I bought a $5,000 violin from a dealer after doing blind testing among a range of violins with ourselves and my kid's high-powered teachers. Everybody agreed that this was a great sounding violin. A couple years later, I wanted a cheap violin for myself so I bought a $200 violin on eBay. It arrived with a fallen soundpost so I needed to take it to the violin store for them to reset it for $15, plus, I put new strings on it for $40. I ended up selling that one and buying another $200 violin, which needed a new bridge, which costs about $75 at the local violin shop. I didn't want to spend so much money for each of the violins I was trying, so instead of getting it fixed at the shop, I ended up learning how to shape a new bridge myself, to save money. What followed was a couple year period where I bought and sold about two dozen $200 violins. I would buy them on eBay, fix them up into playable condition, and resell them from my home via Craigslist.

So, the buyers would come with their own current violins and I would put my eBay specials AND my kid's $5,000 into the mix for the blind sound tests. The $5,000 violin was always one of the leaders but not always the winner.

Eventually I settled on a single violin that I liked the best to keep for my own. I took it to the violin shop where people had much more skill than me and spent about $600 to get a nicer bridge, soundpost, and for some repair work that I didn't have the skills to tackle. So, yes, I got a great sounding violin for $200, a couple years of trial and error learning, and then another $600 for rehab.

Sorry, about staying in tune, I don't physics, mechanics, can support that teacher's belief. Do the pegs slip? That's adjustable. Are the strings crappy? Replace them. My experience is that there is a lot of false belief and superstition about violins including among violin teachers.

I've bought and sold a couple dozen pre-WWII violins on eBay. The violin I play (which I suck at) is labelled "Antonio Curatoli", which sounds old and Italian, but that name was just marketing by the German workshop that made the violin in the 1920's. I think of violin labelling as like the fake non-working decorative shutters in American suburban homes.

A de facto rule of spoken English: "Everyone should floss their teeth" - Singular nouns of indeterminate gender take plural, and therefore genderless, possessives.

Since your tracker is oriented towards web development, you might want to take a look at my work here, a Firefox addon for taking screen captures of a web page, marking it up with arrows, highlights, and then posting them to the the bug tracker.

This is the addon, http://ifdefined.com/BugTracker.NET.xpi

And it works with BugTracker.NET http://ifdefined.com/bugtrackernet.html

It was the first time I played with the firefox addon technology. I wouldn't recommend my technical approach, injecting a div into the page. If I were inspired to redo it, I would do something more XUL-ish. But I do think that making it fast and easy to capture/annotate/post screenshots is key to making it something people want to use.

Although my app doesn't support logging in, commenting, voting, it is still nice for reading, no?: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.ifdefined.hackernew...

Pardon me for being a provincial Midwesterner, but is it common that an playing for a German audience would be in English? Especially one that relies on the viewers following verbal instructions?

What turned out to be necessary for me was looking at the source code of the android apps themselves, rather than the sample apps in the SDK. Specifically, I developed an app that used the camera (http://ifdefined.com/blog/post/BugTrackerNET-app-for-Android...) and I couldn't have done it without studying/stealing code from the built-in Camera app: http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/packages/apps/Came...

I can't think of any reason why I would spend more time on it. Why are you asking?

My younger son made that icon, and at first the ad was for my older son's website that sells tshirts, http://hackertees.com/ I'll pass along the complement to my younger son.

I concede defeat. gluegadget's app is better than mine: http://ifdefined.com/blog/post/A-Hacker-News-app-for-Android...