Hacker News Reader

jasonwockyon It's official: Fez 2 has been cancelled

No, it's not short-sighted, it's good long-term thinking. It may be too simplistic to be of use to somebody whose self-esteem has been reduced to ashes by long-term bullying without any viable strategy for dealing with it, but it's definitely a place that most of us can get to given time.

> At the end of the day, we are a social species, hardwired to function by looking for approval from others, and especially from those we hold in high regard. That's what makes us tick, unless you're a sociopath.

This is bullshit conjecture with some convenient nasty labeling ("sociopath") for anybody that doesn't fit your mold. It's not as hard-wired as you think. It's mostly software, a lot of it installed by our parents, all of it hackable.

jasonwockyon Linus on "acting professionally"

Linus wasn't always "Linus". It'd be interesting to graph his profanity / other communication metrics over time.

jasonwockyon An easy way for NYC renters to schedule apartment showings

Is this specifically Manhattan experience? My experiences in Brooklyn were nowhere near this bad (before I eventually got out of the renter's market and bought here).

jasonwockyon Stop selling your Software for Peanuts

I took "more intelligent users" to actually mean "more informed users", which I don't find offensive at all. Since they lead to less support queries.

And as for less support queries, this isn't snobby...this is just straight economics. Any developer with business sense should be looking to minimize support queries by any profitable means necessary.

jasonwockyon In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

> I wouldn't be surprised if interview scores were a better measurement of "true" skills.

Possibly, but in a sense "true" skills don't really matter. What matters to Google, ultimately, is Google's opinion of the worker. It's almost certainly skewed / flawed / distorted in some way from the individual's true skills, and that's unfortunate but mostly a fact of life.

jasonwockyon A Week with Elixir

damn! sign backwards! /blush

jasonwockyon A Week with Elixir

It's not an appeal to authority. It's Bayesian probability.

P(author_doing_fp_wrong) < P(author_doing_fp_wrong | author_invented_erlang)

jasonwockyon How should I behave as a developer in a project that's headed for failure?

I'd recommend just about anything by Jerry Weinberg, starting with "Becoming a Technical Leader". "How Software is Built" and "Why Software Gets in Trouble" are also great, as are much of the rest of his opus, but I'm one of those folks who really resonates with his perspective.

jasonwockyon A new Gmail inbox

Doesn't that mean that we'd still get knee-jerk reactions from people who are latecomers to the article?

jasonwockyon Why Geeks Get Bullied (It's Not Necessarily for Being Geeks)

Geeks get ostracized because other kids are more or less forced to compete with them for grades in school, and resent the fact that they come up short. This is as opposed to, e.g. jocks who mostly compete with other folks who've voluntarily chosen the same arena of competition.

Geeks get bullied because it's easy for people who are prone to bullying to bully ostracized kids.

jasonwockyon Amazon Is Working On A Plan To Deliver Your Groceries

Interesting. Slightly OT, but my family started using FreshDirect in NYC when we had our second child. Figured we'd use it to get through those tough first few months, exhaust our "free delivery" phase, and be done with it. But what's kept us customers is that the produce quality somehow is consistently better than what we can get at most of our local markets (or on par with the upscale / expensive ones).

jasonwockyon Our Recurring Payment Pricing Was Rejected

A customer wants to pay an exorbitant fee up front, and you're fretting? Why? Take their money.

I agree. If you're bummed about the result, then I suspect that you priced at least one of the options incorrectly.

First pricing rule: price so that no matter what your customer selects, even if it's to not do business with you, you're indifferent.

jasonwockyon DOJ: We don't need warrants for e-mail, Facebook chats

But if you leave your sunglasses in a restaurant, and the government wants to take fingerprints off of them, they can.

jasonwockyon Experiment in paying villagers in India an unconditional basic income

A huge dowry, now that is a waste of money, but it's not mentioned in the article.

Except that it may prevent your new in-laws from harassing your daughter so much that she freaking immolates herself.

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-04-14/rajko...

jasonwockyon Experiment in paying villagers in India an unconditional basic income

The problem is that the economy is often seen as more than a mechanism for efficient allocation and transfer of resources: for many, it's also a source and enforcer of moral order.

"People who work hard and play by the rules should have a shot at success. People who don't work shouldn't be given handouts. Corporations who misbehave shouldn't be bailed out, because they're just incented to misbehave again. We should drug test welfare recipients even though it ultimately costs us more than it saves us, because drug addicts shouldn't get welfare." etc etc etc.

jasonwockyon Tearable Cloth Simulation in JavaScript

> I get that there's some novelty to this stuff, but we already know that asm.js can achieve performance within a factor of 2 of compiled C code.

My guess is that even if this is common knowledge (which I doubt), lots of people still don't know what that means. Demos like this showcase that.

As to JS vs. AS or Java Applets, well, among the "technical crowd" I'd wager that JS is more popular than those other two platforms. Simple as that, perhaps?

jasonwockyon San Francisco Hangout Becomes Casualty of Tech Boom

> Rent control is the quickest way to turn one of America's best cities into vast slum.

NYC has rent control, and it's hardly a vast slum.

And as a counter-dynamic, overbuilding and its associated crime rate increase is another way to turn a city into a slum. Few things breed crime like abandoned housing.

jasonwockyon Why Should I Care That No One’s Reading Dzhokhar Tsarnaev His Miranda Rights?

Miranda stems from the 5th amendment.

jasonwockyon The Tyranny of Taxi Medallions

> What I don't get is why a city as dense as NYC supports any transportation method that puts a few individuals above the public good.

Well, for one thing, NYC is answerable to NYS. Lots of people commute into NYC from its suburbs, they like to drive, and they do vote.

jasonwockyon How Criticizing in Private Undermines Your Team

> The problem that HBR misses here is making the issue "about Ted" rather than "missing the deadline."

I disagree; I think HBR makes the issue "about the team's working relationships and accountabilities to each other". The only way I can think to effectively discuss such things is with concrete, timely examples.

The problem with TFA, in my opinion, is that it tells the manager the first steps to take towards exploring these issues, but doesn't give enough guidance to help them navigate & facilitate the discussion (which is definitely of the high-risk / high-reward type).

jasonwockyon How Criticizing in Private Undermines Your Team

I don't think people need to be comfortable all the time. The manager who decides to take the team out on this tightrope needs to know how to prevent everybody from falling off. He or she needs to "buck Ted up" by the end of the meeting, and everybody else as well. But if one can do that...both take a team to the edge of chaos and bring them back in one piece...I think everybody will be the better for it.

jasonwockyon Why Every Startup Should Pair Program

To the first, these things tend to spread throughout the team over time, so by the end everybody will be using those 40 hotkeys if they're indeed helpful. If some people like them and others don't, they'll figure out how to resolve the difference with the least possible amount of fuss. With regard to color schemes, I've never seen a dispute over those, personally. People may come to the table with different preferences, but over time those also resolve one way or another.

In my experience, severe competency issues are actually /better/ dealt with via pair programming than the alternative: pairing forces their competency issues to the surface, and can be dealt with more easily. Personality conflicts can be worked through, or the team can be changed up. When things like that don't work out, the worst thing you can do is make too big a deal out of it...reconfigure the team one way or another and move on.

jasonwockyon Texas Declares War on Drones

Depending on the details, the "probable cause that someone is committing a felony" exemption is common to law enforcement. Exigent circumstances. If a police officer hears signs of a struggle in your house, he doesn't have to get a judge to sign a warrant before he kicks the door down.

jasonwockyon Bullying has to stop, now.

That was a good blog post. I largely have the same policy with my daughters, but your post inspires me to consider applying it more strictly. Thanks.

jasonwockyon How the Video-Game Industry Already Lost Out in the Gun-Control Debate

Not to mention Japan. And I hear they play games there.

jasonwockyon Car Dealers Sue Tesla, Citing State Franchise Laws

Far more profitable to pool lobbying efforts with others in the same boat as you.

jasonwockyon Obama's Secret Weapon In The South is 129 Million Years Old

> But picking someone based on the color of their skin, be it white, black, or other, is wrong

In these circumstances, some of us disagree with you.

jasonwockyon Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

> It is not as nasty as voter suppression, but it is no less a form of vote manipulation.

"As" nasty? Nice wording. There isn't a shred of nastiness in it at all.

jasonwockyon RubyMotion Success Story: Cabify

> You must understand that the iOS development community has its roots in decades of engineering community, coming from NeXT, Mac OS and UNIX traditions.

I'm sorry, but Fart Apps need not be the exclusive province of "very serious" developers.

> Or any other of the hundreds (thousands?) examples of junior engineers ignoring history and re-inventing failed architectures that would not have been so broken if they looked at what came before with anything other than disdain.

Maybe. Or perhaps the communication and people skills of the generation that came before them were somewhat lacking.

jasonwockyon I Can Be Just As Capable. Let Me.

Agreed (except for the agony part...I've been pairing for a long time and I enjoy it). In my experience, the people that "rip" keyboards from other folks' hands do so rather indiscriminately.