Hacker News Reader

d4nton Taskforce (YC W11) Helps You Organize Your Inbox and Become a Taskmaster

This looks like a great idea, but wake me when there's an Outlook extension. Most people who would want to use this are using Outlook (or possibly Lotus Notes).

d4nton 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

Maybe one way to overcome this would be to model the body at the molecular/atomic level and "run" someone's DNA. It's not impossible to imagine that a super computer in 30 years, starting with an model of an embryonic cell, could emulate the growth of the human body. It wouldn't even have to happen in real time. From the point of view of the individual, time would feel normal.

This, of course, has massive ethical and practical implications. It wouldn't be fair to do this without simulating external stimulus (e.g. photo's hitting the back of the eye) or human to human interaction. You wouldn't be able to ask the individual beforehand so it probably would be considered completely unethical... that doesn't mean someone won't do it eventually though.

d4nton Is Facebook making us sad?

I do think that site design has something to do with it though. Like the article says, there's only a "like" button on facebook, no "hate" button. I find it interesting how seemingly subtle differences between facebook's "like", HN's down vote rep threshold, and slashdot's variation in types of up vote create very different cultures.

d4nton The Wikipedia of Long Tail Programming Questions

Don’t answer questions that have already been answered elsewhere. Yeah, you might earn a couple of points of reputation, but...

Doesn't this just suggest that the reputation points system needs tweaking.

d4nton Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google

It's interesting that the way of "gaming" Google appears to be in having thousands of people generating SEO friendly content. I think Google's problem is that it's pushed SEO to the point where the definition of Spam depends either on a subjective view of what kind of site the user is looking for, or it's just mildly worse than something else that's out there (e.g. When I search for something coding related and get one of the stackoverflow scrapers).

Where do we go from here? Well, I don't think the answer is just a radically new way of indexing/ranking websites. That might work in the short term but the spammers will soon catch up. The answer probably lies in a combination of better language interpretation, context sensitivity using browsing history and location, and user profiling based on the social graph and search history. All of which google seems to be working on.

d4nton AI Defeats the Hivemind

Now there's an idea. It would be a beautiful irony if, in a few years from now, the mechanical turk API was used as an open platform for AI applications to make money solving difficult problems.

d4nton New model of the universe fits data better than Big Bang

While I love reading articles about science they are almost always simplified to the point if being frustratingly meaningless. Phrases like "as the universe expands" loose all meaning when you're talking about time being converted into space. If only there was somewhere that explained the implications of what seems like this beautifully elegant idea in an equally elegant way... sigh

d4nton Letters between Wikileaks and the U.S. Government before the leak

Many of the new reports on this contain statements/responses from the US Government, I have not seen any statements where they claim these cables are fake.

d4nton Can LinkedIn predict when companies are in trouble?

It's all speculation of course, but I suspect they could probably create a "disruption index" for every company based on sudden changes in turnover or profile activity.

What I find interesting is, if they ever did try and do that, how might the financial authorities respond. That data could be worth millions if used to trade shares in those companies. Would it be considered insider trading? I suspect LinkedIn would be put under pressure to publish the index to avoid getting into trouble.

d4nton Ask HN: What do you love about your office?

You can never have too many white boards round the office. Always having a surface to draw on within reach encourages people to communicate.

d4nton Joyent & Node.js

The only effective change for developers is that the contributor agreement will be directed to Joyent rather than myself

Does this mean Joyent now own the IP on Node.js?

d4nton WorkFlowy (YC S10) launches a better way to organize your brain

I rarely watch videos like this; if I'm in a shared office environment I don't want to distract others around me. If I'm at home I'm probably browsing while my family watch TV so again, the noise of the video will be distracting. Without anything on the page to make me think it's worth reaching for the headphones, I'll move on.

d4nton Ask HN: How does having a baby change your life?

I have a 3.5 year old and another on the way. Some observations:

* It was about 8 weeks before I could have an hour to myself in the evenings to watch TV. Before that I was in a constant state of rushing to get everything done. Fortunately I rode the train to work so that gave me 30mins to chill.

* It made me way more efficient with my time, I can't believe how much time I used to waste. I'm now ruthless with time management - having 30 minutes to myself is a luxury and will quickly be allocated to fixing bugs or catch up on reading.

* The financial pressure focuses you on what's really important. I've learned to live on a lot less personally - shame I now have higher costs overall.

* The way you plan things changes, you have to allocate at least 30mins to "getting ready to go out".

* It'll make you a better communicator, depending on how your career's gone so far, having a child may be your first exposure to really asserting yourself with someone, simplifying technical concepts on a regular basis (the other day I had "Why can't I see my eyes?") and "hacking people" (I'm thinking of things like using distraction or turning going to bed into a race).

* I think it makes you more pragmatic and less idealistic. You know that the way the school admissions system works is supposed to be fair but you will shamelessly game the system when it comes to your kids.

d4nton Is there such a thing as a sustainable todo system?

In the end I wrote my own todo webapp (toodat.com), that fitted in with the way I think. All the others just seemed to have too much friction. This is one area where too many features causes real problems.

d4nton Leaving .net

I agree, but would add this.

Microsoft's (development) tools have never had any underlying principles other than: enabling people with minimal knowledge to get stuff done.

Thinking back through MFC, COM, VB v1-6, Access, SharePoint, WebForms and ADO.NET, none of them were characterised by any particular architectural purity or design aesthetic. But they enabled a generation of corporate developers to hack stuff together quickly (I know MFC and COM aren't all that easy but they were easier than just using the WinAPI). Which is why businesses liked the Microsoft stack and hence 9-5 developers flock to them.

What's interesting is that in recent years Microsoft has been infiltrated by other schools of thought. It's like there's a three way war going on. On the one hand there are VB.NET people using WebForms, EntityFramework, VSS and SharePoint to hack together stuff that will be thrown away in 2 years. The TFS, SQL Server, BizTalk and Dynamics people want to bring in some enterprise style rigour to the whole thing. While the C#, Linq, MVC crowd are trying to keep everything loose and open.

I doubt this is any kind of conspiracy to retain mindshare. It's just that Microsoft got big and Bill Gates started stepping back, so it lost much of it's direction.

I sense a real but rarely articulated confusion among the 9-5 developers about all this new stuff. There are 3x the number of frameworks and tools coming out of Microsoft these days, which ones will all the enterprise recruiters be looking for in 2 years? Nobody knows.

d4nton Why I'm not happy about IE9

Why do Microsoft benefit from having a good browser? This article says the only reason is to protect Window's market share and that will inevitably lead to MS doing something evil with it's OS market share.

Two things occur to me: 1. Windows still has a dominant market share, if they were going to do evil I don't see what's stopping them 2. Having a good browser might protect their browser market share but I'm not convinced it protects their OS market share. Maybe if IE was way way better than anything else it would stop people going to Mac OS, but it isn't and there are plenty of other more significant barriers to changing your OS.

I think it's more plausible that their investing in browsers because they want to help their online services market share, and having that search box default to Bing on 50% of PCs is hugely valuable.

d4nton Password Reuse

I use KeyPassX on Dropbox. It works, kind of.

d4nton The Higher Education Bubble: It's About to Burst

You can't sell your degree, so the price won't crash like it would after a normal bubble. But I expect we'll see an accelerating decline the number of people starting college over the next 10-20 years, during which time the price may drop on real terms and some schools will probably have to close.

d4nton Silicon Valley's Dark Secret: It's all about Age

> "Move up the ladder into management, architecture, or design"

The ability to convert detailed specs into code is a fungible commodity. Management, architecture and design, on the other hand, are areas of software development where you need multiple complementary skills; technical ability, good communication, understanding of your customers and industry area, an ability to influence others, etc. People like that cannot easily be replaced, hence the higher price. In some cases technical guys appear to need those things too, but that's just because they're unofficially doing the job of an architect, manager or designer.

> Even though you may be highly experienced and wise, employers aren’t willing or able to pay an experienced worker twice or thrice what an entry-level worker earns.

Define wise. That sounds a lot like "capable of being an architect/manager/designer". If you're capable but resisting the promotion then I'm suspicious of your claim to deserve more money.

I agree with you that an experienced coder will be more productive than a less experienced one. But I would also say that 20 years experience will never make up for a lack of natural ability. I've interviewed programmers with decades of experience who failed the most basic of our technical tests (think FizzBuzz). I'll bet for every old timer who's excellent and just wants to stay a coder, there are 5 who are just below average and have never been offered a promotion.

I see the issue more as a failure by the good experienced coders to differentiate themselves in the marketplace than a conspiracy against old people. If you've been doing something for 30 years but all you're selling is "5 years python experience" just like everyone else then why should I pay you more? Tell me why you're worth more. Convince me you're lack of promotion comes from a passion for your craft and not just down to a lack of ambition or ability.

d4nton Books that will Substitute for a Computer Science Degree

I'd add "Code" by Charles Petzold. It's a sublime step by step guide to building a computer.

d4nton Confirmed: HOPA Dry Erase Girl Is A Hoax, Identity Revealed

I like the idea, although I don't think it will stop this kind of thing spreading. I think most people suspected it was a fake, but still spread the story because it was a funny story. Its a bit like a modern version of "Two guys walk into a bar..." jokes. Everyone knows two guys didn't really walk into a bar.

Even if a meme is obviously not true, many Media outlets would still be prepared to report it as a "looks what's causing a stir on the internet" story. Although, having a slight possibility of it being true does give them some "journalistic cover".

d4nton Stephen Hawking: mankind must move to outer space within a century

Given the distances involved, I'd say our best bet would be build self sustaining "arks" that would travel around indefinitely. Rather than aiming for another planet.

d4nton In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome (2001)

This works the other way round too. For many companies, if something breaks they want a support contract in place with agreed SLAs.

The threat that a crucial back office system might break and the only people they could call to fix it are Ray and Moss from the IT dept in the basement, is worth paying a premium to avoid.

d4nton Sauce Labs responds to UK govt's decision to stick with IE6

I work for a startup that supplies enterprise systems to some very large companies that are still on IE6. In my view, when these companies refuse to upgrade it's a way of pushing (very real and substantial) costs onto us. We're now at the point where our starting position in sales negotiation is that we require IE7, if potential customers don't like it it's a negotiating point. If we really had to we'd support IE6, but we'll look to recover those costs in license/support fees.

Ultimately, this is good for the industry. Until companies like us start attaching a visible cost to IE6 support, these departments will not upgrade.

d4nton Team Foundation Server vs. Subversion

Having used both for a couple of years each (not at the same time) I'd have to say that TFS is the more frustrating of the two. So long as you're on a fast corporate network and in Visual Studio it's ok. The moment you try to edit a file outside VS you get problems. Say you're comparing two files in a comparison tool, the files will be readonly. You can overwrite but TFS doesn't know that you've changed that file so you have to manually check it out. Sometimes devs forget to do this.

Another bug bear is the Pending Changes list in VS is cached so if you have two instances of VS open things can get out of date and confusing.

And try opening your solution when you're off the network. Dialogs start opening everywhere. Assuming you click the right things you'll be ok... until you go back to the office. Then you'll have to prompt it to go back online and wait while it figures out what you changed.

I've tried explaining to people who've only ever used VSS and TFS that things don't have to be this way. But they tend to imply that source control is just complex and it's not the tool's fault.

By contrast, within a week of using SVN the tool faded into the background and I rarely thought about it.

d4nton There Are No Famous Programmers

I can't name the architect for the office building I'm sitting in. Or the designer of my (distinctly average) car.

Having said that, I know that Tim Berners Lee created the Web, Jon Resig built jQuery and James Dyson designed my vacuum cleaner.

I don't think creating something "you use all day" should qualify you for being famous. Doing something new and very innovative sometimes does though.

d4nton Are Today’s ‘Entrepreneurs’ Actually the Unemployed?

This strikes me as a very good thing. Yes, many of them will fail but they'll learn a huge amount in the process and make themselves more employable at the end of it all. Others will succeed of course. Meanwhile, the state isn't so many economically inactive people.

d4nton A new Windows? Please supplant the old one.

Microsoft have had a "WIN" project one the go in one form or another for years. "Cairo" anyone? For years, Longhorn was going to be an almost complete replacement of the platform. They've never got it to work though, perhaps because it's always been an engineer driven revamp rather than a UI driven one.

To get something like this done they'd probably be better off abstracting the OS and making it insignificant in the way as web browsers do. Imagine the Windows Phone 7 OS running on laptops and tablets, all silverlight driven and no sign of a filesystem anywhere. Then they could release a version that runs on classic Windows, OSX and linux.

d4nton [Ask HN] How do you organize your tasks/to-do lists?

I use http://toodat.com

I wrote it myself because, like you, I didn't like the complicated nature of the other tools out there. It's pretty basic but it works.

d4nton Ask YC/HN: What's a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve?

Solar powered 3D printers that use the carbon in CO2 to make stuff.