Hacker News Reader

And it was just over ten years ago when Erlang took over the front page of hacker news in a flash prank:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145

Unfortunately, I cannot find a screenshot or archived view now (web.archive.org took a capture on March 10th, and not again until the 14th).

dpapathanasiouon Show HN: Cinc – GitHub for recipes

Nice project!

If you need more data, check out this:

https://github.com/dpapathanasiou/recipebook

I've also enabled it to talk to this via TOTP, if you ever decide to switch to/want to enable mongo as your recipe doc store:

https://github.com/dpapathanasiou/ARMS

Good luck with it, and keep us posted!

dpapathanasiouon Ask HN: Best way to learn HTML and CSS for web design?

Great, thank you for the link.

dpapathanasiouon Go Concurrency versus C and pthreads

Thanks for those references; when I was searching for how to do concurrency in plain C, only pthreads came up in the results.

dpapathanasiouon Foreword to “High-Output Management”, Second Edition

I borrowed the book after hearing Ben mention it at a talk at Columbia, and I posted the 100 point worksheet here:

http://denis.papathanasiou.org/posts/2014.05.27.post.html

dpapathanasiouon DSL processing in Scala

I'm still a scala newbie, so any comments/suggestions are appreciated.

The full source code is here: https://gist.github.com/dpapathanasiou/b9d85685a0381f1deea0

dpapathanasiouon PiScan: An Open-Source Version of the Amazon Dash Button Using a Raspberry Pi

I did think about doing this as a phone app, since there are libraries for converting pictures of barcodes into the corresponding numbers.

The rub is you need a fairly accurate camera, and while it would probably be ok in iOS, the experience in android would vary depending on your hardware.

The dedicated laser scanner is cheap, accurate and reasonably compact (only the head is important, the rest of the handle is cabling and empty space), which is why I'd like to try combining it into a small handheld device, ultimately.

dpapathanasiouon PiScan: An Open-Source Version of the Amazon Dash Button Using a Raspberry Pi

Thanks!

My initial vision was a single enclosure to house everything, in a small handheld package.

But I just wanted to get all the parts working first.

I'll take a look at the ESP8266; thanks for mentioning it!

dpapathanasiouon Hacking Business Reply Mail

Actually, the post office may have noticed, but they probably don't care, since I'm not really cheating them out of revenue; they just charge Fidelity as if the envelope were legitimate.

Only Fidelity might complain, but they created these postage-free envelopes so customers like me would send them deposits, so they probably don't care, either.

It was a just a fun thing to try, and great to see that it worked!

dpapathanasiouon Hacking Business Reply Mail

No, of course not.

The permit number corresponds to a specific address.

dpapathanasiouon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2014)

Ha, nice catch!

dpapathanasiouon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2014)

Yes, there are post-docs in the lab; please get in touch via the jobs page.

dpapathanasiouon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2014)

New York City

Tired of the startup goose chase?

Change the world for real in 2014.

Work on projects involving solar power, hardware controller software, data science, and mobile apps which really are life-changing[1] at the Sustainable Engineering Lab[2] at Columbia University in NYC.

You'll be joining a like-minded peer group of hackers working in python, R, go, mongodb, nodejs, and other interesting technologies, focused on making the world suck less.

There are no sales/MBA types, no scrum masters, and we strongly disapprove of code written in Enterprise FizzBuzz style[3].

More information[4] here: http://sel.columbia.edu/jobs/

[1] Data-driven planning projects in Nigeria, Myanmar, Indonesia; Android apps for rural nurses in India

[2] http://sel.columbia.edu/

[3] https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris....

[4] As the jobs page says, "The right person for the team matters more than the description for any particular position", so if you don't see anything specifically for you, but are interested in general, please contact us!

dpapathanasiouon Orders projected to begin shipping 4/21

"Soylent is betting on the fact that consumers want to separate the nourishment of food from the ritual of eating. That's a bit like saying, 'We can offer you the ability to reproduce without the inconvenience of having sex.'"

This is the best criticism of soylent; what they're doing just goes against the grain of how peoples' minds are wired.

Maybe it'll wind up gaining traction as a fad instead, like the meal replacement product on House of Lies[1] this past season[2].

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLPhbw0IBk8

[2] When I saw that episode, I wondered if it was meant as a deliberate spoof of soylent.

dpapathanasiouon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2014)

New York City

Tired of the startup goose chase?

Change the world for real in 2014.

You'll be joining a like-minded peer group of hackers working in python, R, go, mongodb, nodejs, and other interesting technologies, focused on making the world suck less.

There are no sales/MBA types, no scrum masters, and we strongly disapprove of code written in Enterprise FizzBuzz style[3].

Deets[4] here: https://github.com/SEL-Columbia/jobs

[1] Data-driven planning projects in Nigeria, Myanmar, Indonesia; Android apps for rural nurses in India

[2] http://sel.columbia.edu/

[3] https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...

[4] Somewhat out of date; if you don't see anything specifically for you, but are interested in general, please contact us!

dpapathanasiouon Readlang – My Bootstrapped Language Learning Web-App

"Well, as you see it's not an earth shattering amount, but thanks!"

I'm still encouraged that you managed to get any revenues, so kudos for that.

"Just checked out your site. Looks cool and shares some similarities with Readlang. Intrigued by the crowd sourced translation engine - is there anywhere I can read about that?"

I do have a lot of data, and I'm still working through the best way to leverage it and make it accessible.

I'd be happy to talk to you further, offline, so please feel free to email me through the contact form.

dpapathanasiouon Readlang – My Bootstrapped Language Learning Web-App

Nice work, Steve!

It's great to see someone making money with this; I have a similar project for Japanese + English[1] which is more of a hobby site right now, but I'll start following readlang.com more closely.

[1] http://macaronics.com/

dpapathanasiouon Inside the race to rescue a health site, and Obama

Does anyone know what the author meant by this?

"Software that assigned identities to enrollees and ensured that they saw only their own personal data, known internally as the EIdM, was being quickly overwhelmed. Customers could not log in to create accounts."

"Experts disagree on what went wrong. But several said that errors in the software code written to stitch the Oracle product into the online system and improperly configured hardware trapped users in endless technological loops. It would take eight days to resolve just that one bottleneck."

dpapathanasiouon How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

Not to worry, the last two paragraphs explain why it won't take over the world:

"I was euphoric. I felt the endorphins rushing through my body, the gob of chicken skin wandering down my esophagus, the juices staining my chin. Rob, who'd joined us, led a conversation about the food technology; the chicken was sublime. Before long, I might as well have been stoned. For a half an hour, I sat there, overwhelmed, unaware of any foodless world outside my brain."

"For a few minutes, the future didn’t matter; the taste, the the swirling talk took over. The food anchored me to the glorious present, and eating was all."

dpapathanasiouon Why I won't get a Google+ Custom URL

In 1994, someone at Wired magazine (which was only in its 2nd year of existence) registered mcdonalds.com to see what would happen: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/mcdonalds_pr.html

dpapathanasiouon Show HN: a simple command-line rss reader great for browsing unobtrusively

This is a simple command-line based rss reader which is great for browsing your favorite sites unobtrusively, without having to open a browser window.

Unless people look really closely at your terminal window, they will think you are compiling code or doing some other low-level work related task.

It's great for meeting rooms and work environments where other people are able to see your screen easily and without warning.

dpapathanasiouon Due to the lapse in federal government funding, this website is not available.

It's more about bureaucratic procedures which make no common sense: "White House memo: Shut down government sites, even if it’s cheaper to leave them online"[1]

[1] http://jonchristian.net/2013/10/01/white-house-memo-shut-dow...

dpapathanasiouon Everything we know about Ross Ulbricht, outdoorsy libertarian behind Silk Road

Right, it wasn't just the fact that the code was the same; it was that he initially posted those questions under his real name.

dpapathanasiouon Everything we know about Ross Ulbricht, outdoorsy libertarian behind Silk Road

Number 3 was huge because the stackoverflow answer was used on the site nearly as-is:

Based on forensic analysis of the Silk Road Web Server, I know that the computer code ... includes a customized PHP strip based on 'curl' that is functionally very similar to the computer code described in Ulbricht's posting on Stack Overflow, and includes several lines of code that are identical to lines of code quoted in the posting.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/02/silk_road...

dpapathanasiouon D3.js: How to handle dynamic JSON Data

I'm just getting started with d3 myself, and I found this ebook, which is free online, to be a great tutorial for all of things mentioned in the OP's post, but in greater detail:

http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000345/index.ht...

dpapathanasiouon An Aberrational Way to Learn a Language

I'm doing something similar for Japanese and English, though there's no machine translation involved.

Instead, it's a pure wikipedia-style site[1], where anyone can post their best attempts. Multiple translations are allowed per sentence, and the best (as voted by expert editors) are shown first.

Even if you don't speak Japanese at all, you can take advantage of the parallel texts in both languages[2], both online and as pdf files you can download.

[1] http://www.macaronics.com/

[2] http://macaronics.com/translated_articles

dpapathanasiouon Tarsnap logo contest

But given that I have no idea what I want, I figure the more people I invite to provide ideas the better.

You can just do what Steve Jobs did with Next: pick a designer you like, and leave it entirely up to him.

Ironically not because Jobs didn't have ideas on what he wanted but because the designer insisted:

"I asked him if he would come up with a few options, and he said, 'No, I will solve your problem for you and you will pay me. You don’t have to use the solution. If you want options go talk to other people.'"

http://www.logodesignlove.com/next-logo-paul-rand

dpapathanasiouon The Second Coming of Java

I can't figure out what the target audience of this post is.

It's part of Wired's "Enterprise Technology" blog[1] so it's for CIO/CTO and other IT consultant types who don't write any code themselves, but make "best practice"[sic] recommendations.

[1] http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/

dpapathanasiouon Show HN: Send Secret Messages over Twitter as Public Tweets

The content of the corpus doesn't matter, so the answer to your first question is no, and yes, if you're clever in terms of how you've composed the corpus so that no one could re-create it easily, then it's ok (relatively speaking, of course).