Hacker News Reader

marcusboosteron The Github Follower Problem

The problem with the news feed is it assumes I want the same level of engagement with every project I follow. On my own repos, then yes, show me every comment and commit. But usually if I'm following a framework, I just want to know when something important happens, like a new version tag. And it's these larger frameworks that are usually busy and crowd out the other stuff.

marcusboosteron GitHub: Block the Bullies

You could chalk it up to stress testing that pointed out a flaw. And to GitHub's credit they provided a quick fix and a professional response, kudos to them. Peace has been restored in the Valley, and the trolls are left to twiddle their ASCII dongs.

marcusboosteron Glasgow’s parking lot thugs get entrepreneurial

Mafia thugs in Italy have been doing this for years.

marcusboosteron Zed Shaw: Github's Favorite Joke

I was referring more to the latent sexual confusion.

marcusboosteron Zed Shaw: Github's Favorite Joke

I think his sentiment resonates with the numerous outsiders who are amazed that this kind of drama always seems to bubble up from the Ruby community.

marcusboosteron On path to riches, no sign of fluffy majors

And less likely you'll actually find it.

marcusboosteron California Bill To Give Parents Access To Kids’ Facebook Pages

I'm only going from the article, which is evidently flawed (TechCrunched!), but it could effectively add a tax on social networking sites operating in the state. States compete for companies all the time and this could provide an opening for somewhere else to put together a more compelling package. Obviously the big drawback to leaving is the lack of tech people, so I guess you weigh your options. Personally, I feel like Facebook and Google would set up shop on the moon if it were in their financial interest and they could find someone to run it.

marcusboosteron California Bill To Give Parents Access To Kids’ Facebook Pages

It doesn't. And it would.

marcusboosteron [dead]

How many unicorn dollars can I pay you to keep these posts off the front page?

marcusboosteron Google’s Music Beta first look: it’s miserable

For what it's worth, LifeHacker liked it: http://lifehacker.com/5800500/first-look-at-google-music-our...

marcusboosteron An Argument Against JavaScript Minification

This sounds more like an argument for open source. Ignoring efficiency issues, I'd much rather view a JavaScript framework on GitHub than in a View Source window.

marcusboosteron The Wall Street Journal Launches a WikiLeaks Competitor, SafeHouse

I don't mean to disparage all the good journalists out there, they certainly exist and I have massive respect for the ones that go to jail for their sources. But WikiLeaks has already built a reputation and technical infrastructure, important things that this new site doesn't have.

marcusboosteron The Wall Street Journal Launches a WikiLeaks Competitor, SafeHouse

This is probably way for them to aggregate potential exclusive story ideas. I'd treat it like you were going to speak to a reporter anonymously, they may have your back, they may not.

marcusboosteron Arguing for Immortality

The biggest argument against immortality is that your chance of ending up in eternal pain goes way up. There are countless scenarios where you end up stuck in the bottom of the ocean, in a cave, maybe in jail, forever and ever.

marcusboosteron Systems Programming with Racket

Also check out "The Little Schemer", it's great.

marcusboosteron Systems Programming with Racket

The debate over hygienic-macros is not as straight-forward: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/comp.lang.lisp/dcX15VC5BdM...

Some* argue that hygienic-macros are an unnecessary burden because sometimes you need to capture variable names and this is easy to do with Common Lisp. The situation with Scheme is different because it stores variable and function definitions in the same way (Lisp-1 vs. Lisp-2).

* http://p-cos.net/lisp/guide.html

marcusboosteron David Flanagan (JavaScript Definitive Guide author) on piracy

He makes a good point. Since Google recently went after the content farms that hurt their search results, it would be nice if they extended that to authors and legitimate content producers.

marcusboosteron Android location service cache dumper.

It makes no sense to store it on the device for tracking purposes.

It would make sense to store this information on a server, so why aren't they? Is it a mistake, or are there laws that preclude this? Maybe it's track now, figure out what to do with it later. The data is extremely valuable.

marcusboosteron Robot Journalist writes a better story than human sports reporter

Going off-topic, but what the hell. I grew up memorizing stats on the backs of baseball cards and playing sports video games, so I agree that knowing the numbers is as much a part of my understanding of the game as the actual rules.

What I enjoy about the English football writers I read, is they'll link sport with culture, history, and politics. An upcoming match preview can feel like a history lesson for an entire region. That's something you rarely find over here (though Hunter S. Thompson used to do a sports column for ESPN that covered all kinds of ground). I'd say most Americans get their sports news through highlight shows, but there's always been the tradition of "checking the box score" in the paper.

When soccer does hit mainstream news here, like during the World Cup, most of the conversations seem to be around "how can we fix the game?", ie. goal-line technology, etc. Maybe as a culture we like things that are more concrete, which leads to something like the current NFL, new rules every year so it takes 5 minutes for the officials to sort out a play.

marcusboosteron Robot Journalist writes a better story than human sports reporter

Only because of the horrid sports journalism in the US that reads like a police blotter. I follow some Euro-soccer and was amazed at the difference in quality and breadth of the writing.

marcusboosteron Paul Allen breaks his silence, calls Gates a rip-off artist in new book

Here's the full segment from 60 Minutes: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7363070n

marcusboosteron [dead]

It's back up, with comments disabled: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWYqsaJk_U8

And it's a very well made video.

marcusboosteron Ask HN: How would you make a site resistant to government takedown?

If "poker" doesn't have broad enough support—enjoyed by millions in the US across the political spectrum, large television presence—I don't know what does.

Wikileaks does not continue to operate because the US backed off, it continues to operate because they took the appropriate technical measures.

marcusboosteron TSA security looks at people who complain about TSA security

Someone who "became visibly upset and arrogantly pointed his finger in the agent's face when asked why he did not have an airline ticket for a return flight." is different than someone who expresses discontent in a non-threatening manner.

The anecdote described by the agent about finger-waving is not in the guidelines. The actual guideline is very loose and will be interpreted by screeners as they see fit and as they see convenient. And they could use it in both situations you described.

marcusboosteron Seedbombs

This is a commercialized version of a technique used by the "guerrilla gardeners" movement that has taken root in many blighted cities. The idea is that there are many vacant, ugly, fenced-off, lots that the owners/flippers have no plans to do anything about—so you might as well try to add some nature since local residents are the ones who have to look it at.

That's some background, I guess it's HN worthy if you are looking into various sub-cultures for ideas to mainstream in a popular marketplace.

marcusboosteron Is LessConf laughing in the face of feminism?

I don't disagree that the points being made are over the top—at least at this time—but it seems like the Ruby conferences have brought this increased scrutiny upon themselves.

And you're probably right, my limited impression of the Ruby community is that they don't "give a shit". Which is why my advice is to pressure the sponsors. Misogyny is bad for business these days, who wants that kind of P.R.?

marcusboosteron Is LessConf laughing in the face of feminism?

Pressure the sponsors. They include such HN favorites as GitHub, MailChimp, Twilio, Balsamiq, and others.

marcusboosteron How HTML5 will kill the native app

If the evangelists from the article say html5 will overtake native in 2 years, then is the likelihood more along 5 years? And who's to say it'll use the web for distribution? Consumers aren't using Google to find apps, they're using the App Store.

marcusboosteron Programming is a Super Power

So something that could be done by anyone with a paper, pen, and the technical know-how to operate a ruler, is now replaced by someone with a specialized domain knowledge that is creating something that will need to be maintained and likely obsolete in a few years. And they call this progress.

marcusboosteron It's still unclear whether having Flash is better than not having Flash.

I really thought I'd miss Flash for certain sites, but it turns out that if it can't be done with html5 then there's usually "an app for that".