rdwallis

The article lists climate change as the cause of the rise in rat populations in major cities but wouldn't cat neutering and spaying campaigns have a more direct impact? The huge reduction in feral cats over the last few decades seems a more likely direct cause, not just in how big the rat population is but also in the visibility of the rats in major cities. Rats don't have to hide as much if there are fewer cats around.

A car license is required when driving or parked but the fine was issued to a parked car without a driver in it. I proved that I was driving the car when the ticket was issued so the claims made by the metro officer about how they issued the ticket were not true.

My car was licensed at the time and the license was displayed correctly. I was not guilty of the offense and the whatsapp messages allowed me to prove that the officer who issued the ticket was lying.

I used my whatsapp chat history to successfully contest a traffic fine.

My parents wanted me to check on their house while they were away. I messaged them on whatsapp when I left my house and then again when I arrived at theirs.

A month or so after my trip I was sent a fine for not displaying my car license while my car was parked on a public road. I had driven down the road where the fine was recorded during the trip. Using the timestamps of the whatsapp messages I was able to show that there was not enough time during my trip for me to have stopped to park.

Maybe you have to login so they can adapt the paper's conclusions to match your social graph.

Imagine a site with users who are all absolute experts in their chosen field. Mathematicians / Writers / Lawyers etc.

The popularity of a post will depend more on how it appeals to the majority than how it appeals to the experts. So the most popular mathematical posts may be posts that the actual mathematicians find mundane but that the writers / lawyers are able to understand. And this is true for all topics in which the non experts out number the experts.

So even though all the people on your site are experts the actual content on your site will be at non expert level, which will attract non-experts to your site who will then tend to vote on content that is at an even lower level.

Eventually the experts find all the content on the site mundane and are driven out.

Abandoned the Ale Tree because I don't think it is a solution to the problem. But there are definite problems with a pure majority vote system. The underlying concept that led me down this path was the difference between a republic and democracy. The Ale Tree was meant to act more like a republic where you elect representatives who vote on issues for you instead of voting on them directly.

It got a lot of spam. Not sure if that shows that it doesn't work or if it needs a certain threshold of users before it can work properly.

The database is on at the moment so you can try it out. I'll only turn it off if the spam comes back.

Built http://www.thealetree.com a few years ago so not related to the current issue. But I'll turn the database on for a few days if people want to try it out.

The source code is at https://github.com/rdwallis/TheAleTree

The idea behind it was that the passionate minority on sites like reddit, hn etc tend to drive the discussion on issues because the less passionate majority isn't as inclined to upvote / downvote.

So say you've got a website where a small minority of the users are racists but the racists are very passionate and always upvote racist content. You'll tend to see a lot of racist posts on the site even if the site as a whole isn't racist. And over time the passionate racists will drive out the rest.

Wanted to see if I could solve the above without moderation, while keeping posts completely anonymous.

Probably doesn't work but the idea is that before users vote you divide them randomly into teams. And then when a user submits a post or a comment the team votes on it and only if certain percent of the team like it does it get an upvote. And the passionate racists would most likely end up on different teams so they'd be less likely to be able to get submissions into the public parts of the site.

For something more fun to read than my intro try Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson:

https://www.watchwords.tv/read/Q6jQrky0m/Warbreaker

Looking for feedback and first impressions.

GWT 2.7 has incremental compilation. During development, recompile takes less than a second.

Wow the whole xapi project is great, thanks for the link.

How much do the threads actually work yet? How slow are they?

Thanks on first glance that looks like a much better solution than gwts' generators.

In gwt, reflection isn't supported because it makes it hard for the compiler to do dead code elimination.

Supporting reflection might make it difficult to reduce the compile size of the javascript code in the future.

Or does c# reflection work differently from java?

Looks great by the way.

The decryption is probably being done by specialized circuitry on the chip. It might perform the operation faster than a much more powerful machine.

More interesting for programmers:

http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=program.programme

And programme seems to be having a very slight resurgence since 2012.

Sorry for the delay in reply.

I live in Durban, South Africa. Lots of people speed here and sometimes the fast lane will be moving faster than the limit. But I don't think I've ever been in a situation where all of the traffic is moving faster than the limit.

Is it common for all lanes to be moving faster than the speed limit where you are?

I've chosen to never speed because it reduces my cognitive load.

Nobody speeds all the time. Even people who speed a lot will try to slow down for speed traps.

So everyone who speeds even those who speed only every now and then have to be constantly making a choice for when to speed.

They must constantly assess whether the benefits of speeding in this specific moment outweigh the disadvantages. There are dozens of variables: how much quicker will speeding be? will I be caught? is it safe to speed on this road at this time?

Much easier to ignore all that and just to drive below the speed limit.

Thanks Tim, I know it wasn't malicious. The only reason I decided to make the point was because it is a trend. And because I think to half the world it's an invisible problem.

Ok so this is my first post on hn to get so many downvotes. I'm sorry if this annoyed you. To me the continued use of northern seasons for global events is an actual problem. You're welcome to downvote me without giving reasons but I'd love to hear a reply that defends the practice.

Summer of Swift, Summer of Code, Steam Summer Sale.

It's winter where I am.

Unless your event is local please don't use seasons to denote a timeframe.

That's an argument from survivorship. Just because they've been successful doesn't mean this code shouldn't be improved.

You have a very small chance of being caught if you ride the subway without a ticket. If you are caught some countries will work out what to fine you by multiplying the chance of being caught by the price of the ticket you didn't buy. So if they check your ticket once every 100 times you catch a train the fine for not having a ticket will be more than 100 times the cost of the ticket. That way not buying a ticket works out more expensive than buying one.

If you actually want to deter this kind of crime you need to fine the people who are caught the amount of money they stole multiplied by the number of people who don't get caught. So you should probably be thinking 20 or 30 times the amount stolen.

Of course such large fines might take entire industries down with them so you're unlikely to ever see corporate crime punished as excessively as it should be.

Looks like they're putting in place infrastructure for an API affiliate plan.

To use the API you must display a copyright link whose href points at a url included in the API's response.

Ignoring the nice boost this gives to Google rank, the urls change based on the request and so can point to a place where the viewer can buy the API response's content from Marvel.

Plus each url includes a tag so Marvel can know which app sent them the customer.

Not sure why they're putting such a powerful linkback/affiliate scheme in the copyright notice though. If they're sending back custom urls it's no extra effort to include call to action text for the link as well eg: Buy 'Avengers: The Quest For Profit'.

More info in the linking section of http://developer.marvel.com/documentation/attribution

Ok sorry if my question came off as snarky, the first example in your readme shows how mson can be converted to json which doesn't seem to be very useful.

I think you should better highlight the connection to json schema.

Also json schema is new to me. Any examples of it being used in the wild?

What problem do you have that MSON solves?

Thanks, this is a common suggestion and I've tried a version with a shadow below the line. It is far more distracting especially when you use the autoscroll feature (play button at the bottom right corner.)

If you want to experiment the source code is at https://github.com/rdwallis/MagicScrollWebReader

The line is an impossible challenge to design because the break between pages should be very obvious but also not distracting to the reader.

The line takes a bit of getting used to. The trick is not to use it to underline the text you're currently reading but to keep the line a good distance ahead of where you are in the text.

Scanning and skimming is a problem caused by UI. The way we scroll text on computers and other devices destroys reading flow.

I built an extension / bookmarklet that allows you to scroll websites in a different way and goes a long way to solving this problem on desktop browsers. I hope no one minds me reposting it, it was very popular on hn a while ago.

http://www.magicscroll.net/ScrollTheWeb.html

I made this, the source code is at https://github.com/rdwallis/ChessAnarchy

I created MagicScroll.

BeeLine doesn't detect line breaks.

Instead it puts a span around every character and sets its color manually.

Anyway the individual spans cause issues for MagicScroll but it should be relatively easy to retrofit MagicScroll to add the beeline gradient to each line.