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ryanthejuggleron LibreOffice 4.4, the Most Beautiful LibreOffice Ever

The icons need color for easy differentiation. These crisp monochrome icons are nice in theory, but when you're quickly scanning for an icon it all goes to mush in your vision.

ryanthejuggleron Deploying Tor Relays

Is Tor broken? I've heard that its anonymity was proven to be broken, but I'm not sure how reliable my source was. I'm interested in getting involved but hesitant to do so until I have some solid info one way or the other.

ryanthejuggleron PresidentObama on GitHub

I'd be glad to see a public key on whitehouse.gov and a signed message on the GitHub account. Anyone could register this name.

[edit] whoops, didn't realize it was a bot

ryanthejuggleron Wouldn't it be fun to build your own Google?

This would be really cool to participate in, especially if it could be packaged à la Folding@Home/SETI@Home and widely distributed. I wonder if there's some clever method using crypto that can provably discourage bad actors if the network has certain properties (e.g. Bitcoin is nearly impossible to cheat unless one group owns >50% of the network).

ryanthejuggleron $82,982,977 USD: $ 0.04 Transaction Fee

Good point; your explanation makes more sense. I pretty much only use Bitcoin to buy lunch and laptop stickers, so I forget that people with significant amounts of it have to shuffle it like this.

ryanthejuggleron $82,982,977 USD: $ 0.04 Transaction Fee

The implication is that Bitcoin isn't "real" money.

Never mind that money is a social construct and is useful whenever two parties agree on a common value.

ryanthejuggleron Rosetta Probe Discovers Organic Molecules on Comet

As a convention, there ought to be a [paywall] tag appended to the title in these cases. IIRC HN already uses [video] and [PDF].

ryanthejuggleron Phantom Terrains

I was wondering the same thing, but I think that a part of the project is exploring the concept that perhaps one day prostheses will no longer just bring those who need them up to parity with the rest of the population, but will instead extend them past the natural capabilities of a human. Technologically the creators could've recorded these sounds with an iPhone, but the message would've been different.

They're exploring the same space as Neil Harbisson's Eyeborg project [0] and John Scalzi's book Lock In [1].

[0] http://mashable.com/2013/06/01/eyeborg/

[1] http://www.avclub.com/review/john-scalzis-lock-crams-big-ide...

ryanthejuggleron Spider Programming Language

Interesting comment; it seems to imply that some people will learn Spider before JavaScript. Whenever I come across one of these compile-to-JS languages I take it as "this makes you more productive, as long as you've learned JS first and understand the mapping".

Spider does look like it would actually be a really cool first language to learn!

ryanthejuggleron Spider Programming Language

I can't tell you how many times my IDE has "helpfully" tried to autoindent my CoffeeScript for various reasons. In CoffeeScript, if your indentation gets thrown off, your code is going to do something completely different. That's why I'm very appreciative of languages with brackets.

I know in CoffeeScript I could use parentheses to surround indented parts (because everything is an expression), but it just looks wrong when I do it. I wish CS treated parentheses and curly braces as interchangeable in most cases, which they pretty much are.

ryanthejuggleron Spider Programming Language

Implicit returns are the norm in ES6's arrow functions. I use CoffeeScript for most of my personal coding, and I can think of exactly one situation where an implicit return got me in trouble. Generally, if you don't care enough about what your function returns to check it, then it's likely the calling function doesn't either, assuming you're familiar with the particular API you're working with.

ryanthejuggleron Show HN: EverydayCarry.com

This is great! It scratches the same itch as http://thingsorganizedneatly.tumblr.com/ except is perhaps more practical.

ryanthejuggleron “Time Collapse” and My Broken Brain

Doctors do have to be historians; any diagnosis they make (unless it's a disease that's never been seen before) will be in terms of other diseases. I was diagnosed with a fairly rare disease, and my specialist knew a bit about the history of the disease.

Knowing the history of a set of symptoms is exactly what helps doctors figure things out. If it so happens that a famous person once had the disease, well, that's an interesting fact and I'd probably tend to remember that/bring it up too.

ryanthejuggleron Show HN: How I made the print and eBook versions of my web book

I'm going to go ahead and ask the question on all our minds: can you really run Apache/Perl on an Arduino?

ryanthejuggleron Show HN: Professional sound effects for UI projects

Seconded; I think the swishy UI interactions and the sound effects are perfect for each other. There's nothing worse than a terrible site hiding a great product, but you guys nailed it. Purchased!

ryanthejuggleron My $300 Home Cloud Server

> _Oh yeah, did I mention I also wanted a beefier machine at home so I could manipulate large virtual machine images?_

I think he's looking to create a setup where he can spin up and destroy networked VMs, which would indeed make the project count as a cloud. From your Wikipedia link:

> The main enabling technology for cloud computing is virtualization. Virtualization software allows a physical computing device to be electronically separated into one or more "virtual" devices, each of which can be easily used and managed to perform computing tasks. With operating system–level virtualization essentially creating a scalable system of multiple independent computing devices, idle computing resources can be allocated and used more efficiently. Virtualization provides the agility required to speed up IT operations, and reduces cost by increasing infrastructure utilization. Autonomic computing automates the process through which the user can provision resources on-demand. By minimizing user involvement, automation speeds up the process, reduces labor costs and reduces the possibility of human errors.[27]

Admittedly, it depends on what he wants to do with this that would determine whether it's "really" a cloud or not.

ryanthejuggleron Apple Pay and NFC are obsolete: This is how payments could work in the future

> "You open Uber, ask for a driverless cab. Sometime during the ride the car tells you the ride costs $ 15.00 and asks for a payment. As you tap into 'My Wallet', the screen tells you 'You are inside Lyft #412...'"

2016 is going to be an awesome year if you can open your Uber app and get a Lyft.

ryanthejuggleron IKEA Channels Apple in a Hilarious Ad for Its New Catalog ‘Bookbook’

http://www.twelvesouth.com/product/bookbook-for-macbook-air-...

Cue infringement suit in 5, 4, 3...

ryanthejuggleron A family of 5 goes digital nomad

I was excited to read this, but unfortunately it was more "here's what's going to happen" rather than "here's what has happened, here's how our lives have changed, here are the pros/cons, and here are the lessons learned". Looking very much forward to the "during" and "after" articles.

ryanthejuggleron Google, it's time – We want Scala for Android

You can use Scala for Android right now, as people are pointing out. However, it feels like a "second-class citizen" because the Android JVM has been optimized for enterprisey, Java-style coding with fewer, longer-lived objects than functional programming usually demands.

At a guess, I'd say that with Java 8+ they'd have to fix that. Probably why they said "no comment" as pjmlp pointed out (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8192614).

ryanthejuggleron Ask HN: Do HN comment display rankings utilize exponential decay?

I'd imagine it's just because earlier comments have more time to gain points than later ones, and as a comment gains points it also gains visibility, which kind of snowballs.

If you think about it, it wouldn't really make sense to have comment rankings decay. Breaking news is only breaking news for so long, so it works for the front page, but a valid, insightful comment on a particular story doesn't lose value over time.

Side note... I might be wrong, but I think the stories use a rational decay (current point value divided by time since post) and not an exponential one.

ryanthejuggleron Terraform

I don't think it seems silly... VentureBeat [1] seems to think the same thing:

    Mitchell Hashimoto, the guy who created the popular
    Vagrant tool for setting up development environments, has
    gone and built another useful tool for developers working
    on public-cloud platforms.

[1] http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/28/terraform-hashicorp/

ryanthejuggleron Chris Beard Named CEO of Mozilla

Read this backwards at the first go. "CEO of Mozilla named Chris Beard."

ryanthejuggleron Forget the Shortest Route Across a City – New Algorithm Finds the Most Beautiful

This is pretty neat; I'd definitely use an app that did this. Not really a "new algorithm" as they say, though; when you boil it down it's really just A* and MTurk. However, it's a really cool application, and what use is science without its applications?

ryanthejuggleron The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

I originally discovered this through the "fortune" program that's still available in many Linux package managers.

ryanthejuggleron GitHub Is Your Resume Now (2012)

I read this as a satire, and laughed thoroughly.

I do agree that GitHub provides a good look into a coder's abilities, though, and many companies agree. It's disappointing that, 2 years after this article came out, you still can't select which repos you want to display on your profile. <sigh>

ryanthejuggleron On Pull Requests

I've never been exposed to Phabricator before today, but its site[1] reminded me distinctly of http://xkcd.com/1293 . Pretty sure Phabricator is maintained by Beret Guy.

[1] http://phabricator.org/

ryanthejuggleron Ask HN: Which desk lamp do you use?

Maybe it's silly, but I'm pretty happy with the $5 USB lamp I got from Amazon [1]. When I'm at my desk, it's plugged into the USB hub on my overhead shelf, illuminating my whole desk; when I'm at my workbench I plug it into a USB port on my 3D printer. I've debated getting a "real" desk lamp but I get so much use out of that stupid little thing that I can't justify it.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Super-Bright-Laptop-Light-Black/dp/B00...

ryanthejuggleron The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: Why Paper Still Beats Screens

Paywalled :-/

ryanthejuggleron Ask HN: did hordes of hackers swoop in the first hours (minutes) of Heartbleed?

The exploit only works on whatever data's in memory. If someone had started attacking servers when Heartbleed started being publicized, they'd be getting passwords and data from users who were active at that point in time.

Unfortunately (perhaps interestingly) right after the announcement I would imagine that much of this activity would be changing passwords. I'd like to think that they were good about telling people not to change passwords until the hole was patched, but presumably some people would still start to change their passwords. Ironically this hurts more than helps.