mikeknoop

OP (and the article) refer to the uid tracking mentioned here: https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/google-analytics-mea...

As of Jun 27 it hasn't shipped according to a GA team member.

The last paragraph is important. I spent some time earlier this week when I learned about Universal Analytics -- but quickly discovered that UserID tracking hasn't shipped yet.

Can anyone on the GA team speculate about a release date for the uid bits?

You might find it interesting that a fellow HN-er (read: me) totally geeked out to this in college.

I even built a better version of the game engine which is still actively used at Mizzou and Truman State: https://github.com/mikeknoop/knoopvszombies

Adding weights to the tip helps dramatically, even without rotation. There is a small hole in the tip of streamline darts which you can push metal BBs into to achieve this out-of-the-box.

However one of our design requirements was not to modify the darts because it was disallowed for safety concerns from another student-org of mine: http://muzombies.org

Oh man! Who would have known my undergraduate capstone project would be so relevant?

To improve accuracy of Nerf Blasters, we realized that barrel rifling had little effect. So we took a different approach.

Prototype: http://zpr.io/PphB.png

High-speed footage of added rotation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87Y0A6IMJM8&list=SP0FF1657C0B...

(all videos: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0FF1657C0B08FAB8)

PPT report: http://mikeknoop.com/upload/MAE4980CapstonePresentation.pptx

Major problem is fishtailing. Adding too much rotation and the darts just aren't rigid enough to hold a solid spiral.

In the end, adding 4 degrees per flywheel off the horizontal gave the best rotation vs. consistency (the darts held about 1500-1800RPM). There are already Nerf Blasters in production that use flywheels, so it's not hard to imagine introducing a small tilt.

We didn't do hardly the statistical analysis from OP but our numbers:

Distance +4.6 ft. (14%)

Accuracy Standard Deviation -2.3 ft. (40%)

What's spelled wrong?

I'm still excited; I think it's the type of innovation required to bring something like this to a mass market for a reasonable price.

I can't comment on why it resonates so well with people, but I noticed that the same Kickstarter was posted earlier today using the original OP title "Omni: Move Naturally in Your Favorite Game" and it received hardly any attention.

The "aha" moment for me, as an outsider to this industry, is using a special shoe to reduce friction and increase lateral stability versus only focusing on developing a 3D treadmill itself.

The reason they attract upvotes, or at least not downvotes, is because the ethos of the site seems to encourage all views of a argument to be expressed and allowed.

I know I personally have dismissed down voting several "middlebrow dismissals" in the past because they seemed like valid counter arguments whereas outright useless comments like "lol this sucks" are easy for me to clearly distinguish. Maybe the rules just need adjusting to discourage mean comments whether or not the argument is valid? Is that the core problem?

Shoot me an email (in profile) if you want to get up and going on Zapier, I can help you work through an MVP API or what kinds of integrations might be popular.

That API was actually added by an awesome user (hi, Shalom!) via our developer platform. We're not shy about unconventional APIs.

I bet this thought might be shared by others, with any number of APIs out there we don't yet support.

One cool tidbit about the status board is we automatically track global apps added via our developer platform! https://zapier.com/developer/

We've even had folks add APIs for products they don't own simply because they really wanted to use an certain service with Zapier.

Awesome! I'm trying to visualize how some of the features from the Javascript video in OPs post (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtXpOD6jFls) would work. Are you using it as a straight editor or are you able to take advantage of the killer LightTable features in conjunction with Coffeescript (perhaps the new source-maps stuff takes care of it)?

Someone below mentioned the same thing, with a response from Chris: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5633069

Can you elaborate a little on how Coffeescript works in your setup? I was thinking of trying 0.4 out but I wasn't sure how exactly that language (which I use daily) might fit in.

Yup there is. Check out our variable syntax: https://zapier.com/support/questions/119/passing-named-varia...

It's certainly much simpler than a regex but imposes more structure. We're always open to suggestions, so let me know if you've got any cool ideas on how we can parse smarter.

Sure, I can elaborate. The article assumed a little bit of familiarity with Zapier. The basic mechanics are creating a new Zap on Zapier (which is a pair of one trigger and one action).

For the trigger, choose "GTalk" and "New Message". Specifically, the Zap will trigger whenever you send a message to our always-on bot.

You can pick any action that suites you, see the article for ideas.

We'll automatically perform the action whenever the trigger occurs.

There is a lot of flexibility in the system but that's the 500 foot view.

I tend to agree walkthroughs seem like band-aids. Can you justify your position against them more concretely? (more than just a "feeling")?

"White hat guy" vs "Sunil Tripathi"

http://i.imgur.com/3Bh7rkc.gif

I think we can do a lot better too. It's a classic problem: how would you sell Excel if it were a web app?

We like to call ourselves "zap-ee-er" but I'll accept any pronunciation since that means you're talking about us!

Fun side note. We integrate with a lot of European and Australian companies. Most of the time on intro calls they default to the more "French" sounded version ”zap-ee-air” whereas most of the US companies seem to default to a more "English" pronunciation "zay-pee-er".

Nice eye. I think over time the color got subtly shifted by a few percentage points here and there. Nonetheless, the color you see today is directly influenced by that early random decision.

I've always wondered if the HN Topbar color option somehow influenced my subconscious...

I'm actually around Columbia, MO for the next month and half or so. We have a few employees in town, too. Care to make a trek to Mizzou?

Out of curiosity, which service did you try to sign up to use?

Anyone know the story about ChirpMe? The Alexa rank seems really high (~3400) for a "beta" product:

http://i.imgur.com/2rAlmVX.png http://i.imgur.com/OcTNU5s.png

Thank you.

This is one of those really cool use cases we (Zapier) couldn't have predicted. In fact, given the final behavior of Sacha's setup I still have a hard time reversing out the Zaps he used to make it! One of my favorite thing is seeing the new unique use cases folks come up with.

You can that error when you execute `python extract.py`? Sounds like the Python interpreter can't find the extract.py file on your path.

Also make sure you use double backslashes for directories like the example in Github: https://github.com/mikeknoop/pioneer-dvr-filesystem-tools/bl...