Hacker News Reader

jnpatelon iTunes will never work well

Which book are you referring to?

jnpatelon Show HN: HN Chat – Minimal Hacker News Chat with User Verification

I'm getting a 500 from Heroku.

btw, care to share the tech stack this is using?

jnpatelon Goodbye, Password. Banks Opt to Scan Fingers and Faces Instead

+1 to U2F: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_2nd_Factor

jnpatelon How to Pass the Product Manager Interview

Are there any other must-read/watch resources for first-time PMs?

jnpatelon Richard Stallman's Personal Site

It's also worth mentioning, that this was his autoreply :)

  I am not on vacation, but I am at the end of a long time delay. I am
  located somewhere on Earth, but as far as responding to email is concerned,
  I appear to be well outside the solar system.
  
  After your message arrives at gnu.org, I will collect it in my next batch of
  incoming mail, some time within the following 24 hours. I will spend much of
  the following day reading that batch of mail and will come across your
  message at some point. If I write a response immediately, it will go out in
  the next outgoing batch--typically around 24 hours after I collected your
  message, but occasionally sooner or later than that. Please expect a minimum
  delay of between 24 and 48 hours in receiving a response to your mail to me.
  
  If your message is hard to understand or responding takes real work,
  the response could take longer.
  
  So please wait 48 hours after sending a message before you resend it,
  remind me about it, or ask if I have received it. If it has been less
  than 48 hours, the absence of a response from me only means you have not
  given me time to answer.
  
  If you are having a conversation with me, please keep in mind that each
  message you receive from me is a response to the mail you sent 24 to 48 hours
  earlier, and when writing it, I probably had not yet downloaded your later
  mail.

jnpatelon Richard Stallman's Personal Site

I remember I once sent sent RMS a short message about a small bug on his website. He responded within 4 hours.

  > Small typo on line 724 of the source of your homepage... 
  > I believe you meant "that is NOT an excuse to carry out the promise"

  Thanks, I fixed it.

  Would you like to join the FSF, perhaps?

jnpatelon Ask dang: How many HN comments per day do you read?

also: do you use any special tools to help monitor comments, or just https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments ?

jnpatelon Geocities Forever – neural network generated geocities pages

Agreed about wishing there were an explanation.

It's not clear to me that NN are the best way to get interesting Franken-pages. Maybe a Markov chain instead?

jnpatelon Geocities Forever – neural network generated geocities pages

In case it's not clear (it wasn't to me), refreshing the splash screen and clicking the big `Enter` will show you a different generated page.

jnpatelon Inside Palantir

Do you have any recent pictures of the products?

jnpatelon Seldomly Used SQL: The Bool Aggregate Functions

Neat! I use the Python equivalents, `any()` and `all()` quite frequently.

jnpatelon My first DDoS attack for a $200 ransom

I'd suggest replacing the use of cat with:

    tail -n 10000 apache.log

jnpatelon Jupyter Notebook 4.2 Released

I find Jupyter great for the single-user use case, but I'm often frustrated with how it "breaks" with version control, when collaborating.

jnpatelon YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

Do you know if this downloads the file to completion, or streams it?

jnpatelon Apply HN: Wildfire – Waze for Safety

Thanks Josh!

We have two mechanisms to try and mitigate false alerts: (1) accountability via Facebook login. The poster's name and face is associated with every post to Wildfire, which helps reduce anonymous trolling seen on platforms like YikYak. (2) alerts are always displayed in the feed by default, but notifications are only sent if they meet our community guidelines [a]. Right now, our team is manually verifying authenticity [b] of posts with eye-witnesses and news sources, and deciding what merits a real-time alert, but in the future we hope to crowdsource this moderation process.

[a]: https://medium.com/@Wildfire.App/community-guidelines-46bbf2...

[b]: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

jnpatelon Why not just a simple spreadsheet of salaries?

What's a scalable way to handle data cleaning, while still keeping things simple?

jnpatelon Google Maps Streetview Player

Neat project!

Small suggestion: consider using autocomplete on the textboxes to make it easier to find the starting and ending point.

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...

jnpatelon Why GNU Emacs?

That's a hefty endeavor. Care to share more about your experience writing your own?

jnpatelon BugRex: Fix HTML, CSS and JavaScript Bugs with Live Chat

Just curious, how many experts do you currently have?

jnpatelon USB-Dongle Authentication List

U2F[0] requires browser support, and currently only Chrome supports it. Microsoft's Edge and Firefox are expected to support it "soon".

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_2nd_Factor

jnpatelon Facebook at Work

I'd argue that they consciously make it work for them internally, despite lots of pain points solved by other tools better suited for the job.

For example, Zuck says he runs the company via Messenger - but a chat tool without selective muting/@mentions (or equivalent) is bound to be messy at the scale at which he's working. Similarly, Facebook's group chat isn't the best archival tool, nor does it support features like merging posts or transferring them from one group to another.

jnpatelon Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video]

For another interesting talk on "extracting simplicity" vs. "mastering complexity", listen to Scott Shenker motivate Software Defined Networking:

https://youtu.be/WVs7Pc99S7w?t=375

jnpatelon A letter to our daughter

To quote the letter itself: "We know this is a small contribution compared to all the resources and talents of those already working on these issues. But we want to do what we can, working alongside many others."

jnpatelon Show HN: Play games together on a big screen using your smartphone

My friends and I have a little bit of fun with Chromecast games, which seem to be in the same spirit.

https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/chromecast/apps/

jnpatelon Introducing the new Google+

Are you really active in Gmail? It could be lots of people you correspond with clicking through to your profile, from the link that typically shows up in the right sidebar.

jnpatelon How the Pomodoro Technique changed my workday

Right now, you’re probably thinking, "Twenty-five minutes of work? That’s nothing! This is gonna be easy!"

Actually as someone who mostly formed my study/focus skills during the age of distraction (Facebook, SMS, YouTube), I don't think this is trivial at all.

If I were to go all in on the Pomodoro Technique, I'm pretty sure have to start training myself from just 10 minute undistracted work sessions.

jnpatelon Show HN: MarkRight – Electron-powered GitHub-flavored Markdown editor

For those not familiar with Electron: http://electron.atom.io/

jnpatelon Why Johnny Still Can't Encrypt: Evaluating the Usability of a Modern PGP Client

It's worth mentioning, the original paper [0] recently won the USENIX Security 2015 Test of Time Award [1], which highlights papers at least 10 years old, that have made a lasting impact on their field.

[0]: http://www.gaudior.net/alma/johnny.pdf

[1]: https://www.usenix.org/conferences/test-of-time-awards

jnpatelon Flutter – Cross-platform mobile framework from Google

"[Flutter] is familiar to anyone who has done Java or JavaScript"

At a superficial level, seems like a strange statement to make since those languages are quite different. Unless the point is that Flutter is C-like?

jnpatelon Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

I was also curious about this. As the article mentions, Slack doesn't make it easy for your organization to allow open registration. People have developed hacks around this by running a server on Heroku [0], or using Typeform combined with Slack's API [1].

0: https://github.com/rauchg/slackin

1: https://levels.io/slack-typeform-auto-invite-sign-ups/