Hacker News Reader

jpace121on Uber shareholder group wants Benchmark off board

This whole situation has to be impeding Uber's CEO search. Finding someone willing to step into this kind of circus, particularly when the circus is over there heads, is going to be very hard.

jpace121on Disney acquires own streaming facilities, will pull Netflix content

This is an extremely smart play by Disney.

Everyone realizes that content is king, which is why Amazon and Netflix are busy making their own content. Disney already has the content. This is them building the distribution network. People complaining about how this will lead to each studio having their own service, are missing that this is where things are going anyway, just with Netflix and Amazon playing the role of studio.

This isn't really out of character for Disney anyway. They really like vertical integration (they own their own film distributor, for example).

jpace121on Architect explains why large development in LA seems to be luxury development

I wonder how this would practically work in somewhere like America, where the cities are so diverse. I have a hard time believing that the rules that are the best for a big city like LA and San Francisco are the same rules that would work for middle of nowhere Iowa.

jpace121on By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

I wonder if any of this is related to the new NIST Standards[1], which have to be followed by research labs who receive government funding. I could see MIT, already having to retrofit a lot of their research networks, also changing around the network architecture in other places aswell.

[1]:http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP...

jpace121on Ask HN: Using a version control system for your resume?

I have my resume in LaTeX and keep versions of it tracked in Git, which works pretty well for me.

One thing I like about using LaTeX is that I can comment and uncomment bullets for various jobs I've done and modify the job description based on what I'm applying for.

I don't think tracking a doc or pdf file would work as well.

jpace121on Disney seeks new patent for soft robots playing characters

Actual patent documentation can be seen at [1].

Based on the names on the patent, the work came out of Disney Research Pittsburgh, which does awesome research.

[1]: http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...

jpace121on What Are the Tricky Parts of Embedded Development?

The big benefit of using mbed is there really nice API which abstracts the hardware. The code for the API is Apache, and available on github[1].

Furthermore, you don't even need to use their online IDE to do anything. The online IDE has an option to export your project such that it can be built with arm-none-abi-gcc and make[2], or you can use their mbed-cli tool, which is a python based command line tool, and is also on github[3].

The mbed guys have way embraced open source and working with existing tools, and I wished the community would embrace them more, since I think their API's beat the snot out of Arduino.

[1]: https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbed-os [2]: https://developer.mbed.org/handbook/Exporting-to-offline-too... [3]: https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbed-cli

jpace121on How to start a company with no free time

Not the OP, but I swear by cardboard, hot glue, and play doh.

I make lots of rough scale "prototypes" with the above tools to get started, and spot lots of problems this way.

jpace121on Arduino.cc and Arduino.org have settled their differences

There is something to be said for having the underlying hardware be relatively simple. Someone who started with Arduino could reasonable be expected to grow, study the data sheets, and progress on to AVR C. Moving from the Arduino API to any of the other things supported by ARM is quite a jump to make in a single leap, without some sort of intermediate learning step.

jpace121on My year in startup hell

While this article somewhat makes fun of the overally idealistic, sugary, positive culture HubSpot built, I'd much rather work there then somewhere where everything is done out of fear.

jpace121on Facebook at Work

In my undergrad studies in college, Facebook groups were commonly used as a way to create light weight shared group pages for study groups, projects, etc. I could see this being useful in the business world working in the same way.

Specifically, most of the time someone would make a group for a study group and then everyone would use the group page to post meeting times, relevant files, etc. Group chats were used for quick communication, etc.

The benefit this has over something like Slack is that it is something everyone is used to and comfortable with already. People, for the most part, understand what a group page is and how to post on one. People get how to send an IM or start a group chat. There is virtually no learning curve.

jpace121on OCaml 4.03 will, “if all goes well”, support multicore

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CwJ0MH-4MA

The talk above was on the front page last week some time and describes one method to write Python extensions in rust.

jpace121on A Response to “What's the Point of a Professor?”

Link to the original Hacker News discussion here:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9518814

As a recent graduate, I much more agree with this author than the author of the original.

jpace121on Use GitHub as Your Professional Portfolio

How does you system handle people who don't necessarily have large online presences do to other commitments. It seems like if you weed people out largely by what you can find on GitHub and Hacker News, you'd have lots of false negatives.

jpace121on Take notes by hand, not on a laptop

I disagree. Writing down the important parts of a lecture can keep you focused on what's important. If your goal is to write down the important parts of a lecture, you're going to constantly be asking yourself what's important.

Also, by writing something down, you're repeating the fact in your head a second time. Once when you hear it, the second when you rephrase and write. I find notes improve comprehension, because notes force this kind of comprehension.

jpace121on OS X Yosemite

The lack of AirDrop integration before is probably one of the obnoxious things Apple has done recently. I'm really excited for this simple new feature.

jpace121on Google Debuts Classroom, An Education Platform For Teacher-Student Communication

It's going to be interesting to watch how this competes with Blackboard.

Anecdotally, it definitely looks like Blackboard has an almost monopoly on class room management stuff. Since the education market is so slow to adopt new things, Google definitely has their work cut out for them.

With that being said, Blackboard definitely leaves a lot to be desired, and with classes supposedly going online more and more, the market is definitely ripe for some disruption.

jpace121on Breaking Madden: The Super Bowl, in which the machine bleeds to death

I'm not sure I would call a false start an easter egg. It is a fairly standard penalty called all the time in real life games. The reason it was special enough to mention in the article is that he had specifically turned off penalties for the game.

jpace121on Mayer Is Aiming to Bring Back Search Tech to Yahoo

Is DDG really that much of a name brand outside nerd circles? Maybe I just have weird friends, but almost no one I know IRL has ever heard of DDG, while quite a few have heard and used Bing.

jpace121on Breaking Madden: The Super Bowl, in which the machine bleeds to death

SBNation is one of the sites that spends lots of time making their site look really cool, but it definitely makes their websites kind of large.

jpace121on The descent to C

You definitely notice the difference when dealing with mutable types in python, like lists.

  >> a = [1,2,3]
  >> b = a
  >> a.append(4)
  >> b #[1,2,3,4]

This is one of the things that throws off many beginners, and is an easy trap to fall into, not exotic at all.

jpace121on Scaling Mercurial at Facebook

In response to your last sentence, yes.

jpace121on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2014)

Do you guys do internships?

jpace121on How does robot startups work?

At what point in these ventures do you try to get funding? It seems much harder to bootstrap than a software startup because you can't expand easily to demand. At the same time, I doubt anyone would give you money without a prototype, and prototypes are expensive...

jpace121on Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600

Stuff like this is personally really cool, and is one of the reasons I learned to program in the first place/ still play with programming.

jpace121on I, Glasshole: My Year With Google Glass

I think wearable computing is definitely the future, and Glass is probably a good first stab at it. I don't think anyone thinks glass is the perfect solution, though.

jpace121on What’s New In Emacs 24.4

I like how both emacs and vim continue to make improvements, while still maintaining a lot of the features that make them great.

jpace121on How to Escape the Community College Trap

Transferring from a Community College to a state 4-year is very common in Florida. I dual-enrolled in high school and wound up only a semester short of my AA, so I stayed and finished it up before transferring. The local CC does a very good job at preparing students and giving tutoring/other services necessary to teach students what they need to know, which Universities can't really do, and MOOCs flat out fail at.