Hacker News Reader

jmatton Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2017)

I'd just like to encourage people to apply. I work with @cbanek on the LSST EPO team. Working on a large science project is amazing. Every day is interesting. There is a shared goal beyond just making money, similar to a startup with traction. The environment is pseudo-academic, which combines the best of academia and working for a national lab. The portal already has some design work done but is generally greenfield for technology choices. And last but not least Tucson is great and quite affordable.

jmatton Hacker News Leaderboard

I thought the same thing and had to check the wayback machine. He wasn't on the leader boards, at least at that URL.

http://web.archive.org/web/20070302084140/http://news.ycombi...

http://web.archive.org/web/20090722153500/http://news.ycombi...

jmatton Hacker News Leaderboard

An aside, pg isn't on the leaderboards, and never was, since he was always far ahead on points. But, it looks like tptacek has finally passed him.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg

jmatton Statistics Done Wrong – The woefully complete guide

Norvig's "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" is also worth reading and covers the higher level problem of bad research and results. Including mentioning bad statistics.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

jmatton Our interview with Bill Watterson

Yeah a mod changed it, thankfully.

jmatton Our interview with Bill Watterson

The actual interview:

http://mentalfloss.com/article/53216/mental-floss-exclusive-...

It was submitted earlier today but never got to the front page.

jmatton Spotify loses $59.1 million on $244.5 million in revenue

https://www.spotify.com/us/signup/plain/

jmatton Gow - The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

Check out msys/mingw. It's a challenging setup, minimal and supports gcc. Key difference with cygwin: no attempt at posix compliance.

http://www.mingw.org/

jmatton BitTorrent Is The New Radio, Says Counting Crows Frontman

Unless they have credit for writing the song, or self publish, the band makes most of their money from touring and merchandise.

BitTorrent isn't a zero sum game. It's difficult to prevent and any action upsets fans. Why not embrace it and get free PR. Meanwhile, the people that will buy it (or request it on a radio station, or listen on Spotify) need to be aware of the music. And both groups end up attending concerts. So it's really a win for the bands. It's the labels that are at risk.

jmatton About 33 bits

On anonymity and privacy... I always thought this was an interesting fact:

Birthday, Gender and Zipcode is enough to identify someone uniquely approximately 85% of the time.

And a quickly googled source but the meme is older than that: http://godplaysdice.blogspot.com/2009/12/uniquely-identifyin...

jmatton John McCarthy Has Died

This is my favorite John McCarthy story.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803627

I like how one simple succinct relevant question can say so much about Norvig's claims. It seems appropriate coming from the creator of LISP. And, of course, the mutual respect, professionalism they both had to leave it at that.

jmatton Steve Jobs has passed away.

This is from the Think Different campaign (1997+): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Different

I really shouldn't admit this but /cough circa 1997 I had abandoned Apple. I had a PC and Linux box at home and Unix terminal at school. I remember being impressed by this campaign and hopeful that Jobs would fix Apple. But I couldn't have imagined what Apple and Steve Jobs had in store for the world. What a remarkable recovery. Thanks Steve.

jmatton .Net Developer Shortage

I started coding .NET around 1.0. Completely anecdotal but out of the dozen+ people I knew that dove in at the time - zero are still actively involved in .NET.

I rarely take a .NET contract. But what I can say is 1) They always pay my highest rates. 2) Generally it's a bad / scary experience in comparison to python or Clojure (where I do the majority of my work and contracting).

jmatton Some Clarification and Musings

I thought the goal was to motivate users and IT organizations to stay current. This frees up Mozilla developers from fixing bugs in N many different old versions of Firefox.

To me, the reasoning behind the change in version is pretty clear. Especially looking at the disaster that was IE6. As soon as there is any support for old versions some IT department somewhere will immediately decide it's time to freeze their version. Moving forward after making a freeze like this becomes very difficult (that has been my experience). This presents two options 1) It's their own problem and move on or 2) Continue to patch old versions. The issue with patching old versions is bad IT decisions end up costing Mozilla time. Meanwhile chrome just continues chugging along at full speed only supporting current.

The current linux distro versioning and support structure seems to map well to this problem. Ubuntu, for instance, has LTS versions that IT can stick with and are patched for X many years.

Windows users update their anti-virus software and definitions in near real-time. Operating Systems update near real-time... why not browsers. I now use chrome most of the time and I am (surprisingly) happy with their versioning. I was a naysayer when they first started too.

jmatton Try D3 Now - D3 Visualization Tutorial

D3 and ClojureScript:

http://keminglabs.com/cljs-d3/

http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/...

jmatton Apple Awards Tim Cook 1,000,000 Shares of Stock as CEO Bonus to Stay Until 2021

Think Andrew Carnegie.

I know I directly benefited from a Carnegie library as a kid. With philanthropy at this scale there is potential to benefit humanity in a way that may otherwise not happen. Compare this to other paths that wealthy people have taken, such as creating trusts that mostly benefit the family and still exist today (e.g. Rockefellers).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_libraries

jmatton New gaming laptop with innovative UI by Razer

Buying and owning a gaming laptop or desktop is similar to owning a hot rod.

There are as many different philosophies to how and what to buy as there are gamers. On one end of the spectrum people track pricing trends and chase the best possible value/performance and build it all themselves. On the other end people pay a premium for an innovative case or component or a name brand. This is clearly on the far end of the spectrum, including the expected premium price to get anything Razer.

In the end it's purely for the sport of it. You are right that there are better deals. But there is definitely a segment of people that are more than willing to pay a premium to get an awesome case with a ultra new innovative component like this. Bring a laptop like this to a gaming night at a local coop and everyone will be oogling it and checking it out... That's what it's all about.

jmatton HN now comes with HTTPS?

Yep. For further explanation:

http://codebutler.com/firesheep

jmatton Show HN: New way to search for used cars (my weekend project)

There's a 2005 Bentley Continental GT for $29,800. Seems like a good buy. I think someone forgot a zero?

http://www.cars.com/go/search/detail.jsp?tracktype=usedcc...

Your app made it easy enough to find an exception like this.

jmatton Computable Document Format

I thought his comment implied it. In addition his profile has his website which makes it quite clear he works for Wolfram (about and github): http://taliesinb.net/

If someone posts a link in their profile and you don't follow it, they can't be held accountable.

jmatton Results of the 2011 State of Clojure survey

If you are already familiar with another lisp check out Rich introducing and discussing the language in detail:

http://blip.tv/clojure/clojure-for-lisp-programmers-part-1-1...

http://blip.tv/clojure/clojure-for-lisp-programmers-part-2-1...

transcript: http://clojure.googlegroups.com/web/clojure-for-lispers-tran...

It's not 30 minutes but it's what pushed me past using it on side projects to using it whenever possible and advocating it.

jmatton SearchYC is shutting down

Yeah I nearly missed it too.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2619736

jmatton Sergey Brin Guesses That Only 20% Of Googlers Still Use Windows Machines

What programs do the Windows devs use as a terminal? When I'm using my windows box I use Console 2 - which is great. But still doesn't compare to Mac OS X or Linux terminals.

Of course using a Linux VM or VNCing into one is the easy solution but it's heavy weight in comparison to having a great terminal app :)

jmatton Hacker News Analysis

I'd also be interested if there were any correlation between meta discussion and it's affects on trends. So I'd be curious to see ycombinator (and/or hacker news) in the "mentioned companies" section.

jmatton The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries

I know a number of teachers and administrators, and caterping's comments ring true. It sums up what I hear over and over.

At this point it comes down to what is the low hanging fruit? Of these problems what are the easiest (and/or best value) to solve? The biggest change I've seen is the relationship between teacher/school and student/parent. That same problem is all too often described as a "student's attitude" problem. But really the school administration and parents are just as complicit.

We all had the same ornery students around when we were in school. Arguably I was one of them. The way I remember it is we just had a much shorter leash. So, in the end, I was forced to just comply and "play the game". Which was a healthy life lesson. If I was given the options that these kids were, I'm sure I would have exploited fuck out of it. And I can promise I never would have learned that sometimes you just have to jump through all the hoops and "play the game" to get things done.

jmatton The curious case of the number 3435

I agree.

I recommend "A Mathematician’s Lament" by Paul Lockhart. It's an excellent essay on math education. The entire paper is long but even the first 5 pages are great. It covers everything from the unacknowledged creativity that is involved in math to the culture and curriculum.

http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_08.html

http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

jmatton Poll: Display points on comments?

I generally support not displaying points on comments. But I did run into a case where it would be useful to have some sort of feedback on a series of comments (even if it's just dots or some other non numerical indicator).

I was reading a recent post on the open-sourcing of some of Greplin's Lucene and Bloom filters code. sigil made a comment asking about performance based on how they implemented prefix matching. Then nostrademons responded[1]. When points were displayed it was trivial to get a consensus of whether the community agreed on the performance assessment or whether it was dubious/questionable. Since points are not visible I can't rely on the consensus of the community to help verify or make a decision. Instead I just have the posts and order of the posts. Which, of course, isn't necessarily bad. But has taken away my ability to use the HN community's consensus as verification.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444585

jmatton Ask HN: Selling to educators

Check out Imagine K12[1]. It was recently on HN[2].

[1] http://www.imaginek12.com/index.html

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2337362

jmatton Hacker News, say hello to the Flagging Bury Brigades

I have seen a good hack to get around this problem.

At the end of the article add a link "Discuss this on Hacker News" linking to your submission of the article here. Then you can just tweet your article directly and all the HN'ers will click through and comment and vote for your submission. It's not ideal but it works.

One problem is old comments. Anyone that sees the article and wants to add to the discussion is pretty much screwed if it's been more than half a day. HN submissions older than that get few views and fewer responses to any late additions.

jmatton Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

Make voting transparent. Provide access to who has voted a comment up or down.

The community will act differently if they know others can see their behavior. Then again this may have negative effects.

I think that in general I'd be more thoughtful when voting comments up or down if I knew others could see.