Hacker News Reader

saintxon Path texts my entire phonebook at 6 AM

Software developers are as responsible for this guy's address book getting spammed as fork and spoon makers are for making people gain weight.

Someone built a tool. And someone else used that tool to do an unethical thing. I doubt a software language exists that can control the choices of its users.

saintxon Phdtree: create and discover your academic family history

Or philosophers--specifically logicians.

saintxon The Tech Industry’s Darkest Secret: It’s All About Age

The biggest difference from when I was a starving 19 year-old is that I don't need to use recruiters to find work anymore. It's strange that this article comes from LinkedIn and it does not mention the power of having connections. My hope is that by lifting up the people around me wherever I go, I'll build up a larger, better, and more enthusiastic network of colleagues whose help I can draw on later.

saintxon Glowing Plants: Natural Lighting with no Electricity or CO2

Unsubtle with a capital B.

saintxon A new search engine

I repeated the experiment and got different results than yours. (woot, science!)

http://imgur.com/ghYKH7K shows my results. I can't reproduce the ones you describe.

Regional variations might account for the differences. Do you live in a place where people don't eat ribs? (If so, please accept my sincere condolences)

saintxon A new search engine

How can they trademark the words "Liquid Helium"? The first search I did on Samuru was for Liquid Helium and it brought back about a half million results, all of which I assume are violating its purported trademark.

saintxon I Knew a Programmer Who Went Completely Insane

I definitely sympathize. It feels that the world is accelerating toward the end of some century-long slide from value creation to value capture, where fortunes aren't so much built as they are acquired or harvested from the people who build them.

saintxon Scala and Ruby developers don't believe in weekends

I've found that programming in Scala is the sort of thing that I have to do on nights and weekends, because it's definitely not a day-job sort of language in my neck of the woods.

saintxon Lisp Is Too Powerful

May the s-notation be with you.

saintxon Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men

Specifically, datamancy.

saintxon Lisp Is Too Powerful

http://xkcd.com/312/

Always makes me smile.

saintxon Adam Orth leaving Microsoft proves personal Twitter accounts are dead

The difficulty with being perfectly honest is that you might find out that you're honestly wrong. When technology amplifies our voices to the whole world, those private revelations become public spectacles.

saintxon Neural Network Visualisation in Clojure

Cool, with caveats. Although this is interesting for people who know how neural network structures are built and generally how backpropagation and its successor training algorithms work, it isn't particularly _informative_ as a visualization. It does show how easy it is to encode information visually, compared with how difficult it can be for the viewer to _decode_ that same information. This is a common problem with "information", as opposed to "scientific data" (such as volumetric scan data or vector maps) visualizations, where there's no obvious physical correlative that we can use to help us decode the information as viewers.

saintxon Every Nodejitsu app is down

The existence of this thread is the difference between high availability and disaster recovery.

saintxon Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

When I was learning how to program, I asked the friend who was teaching me the rudiments "How long does it take to learn how to code?"

He replied "Eight hours."

"Eight hours?"

"Yep, eight hours, every day. It's pretty much just like driving a bus. The hard part is keeping your ass in the seat."

Fifteen years and a master's degree later, his advice remains remarkably accurate.

saintxon Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?

I am enjoying this part of the discussion. One of the things that struck me a few years ago was how the design of the web was so heavily oriented around trying to reproduce the print media industry in a browser. Thus, we get the "markup" of HTML, which provides layout at the expense of structure. Later on, we added CSS which ideally should provide layout, but bad habits learned at an early age or provided by tools that came about in the 90s still haven't caught up in many cases to this day.

There's no concept of "line 4 of chapter 3 of book X" in the web, at least not down at its core. You have to shim it in with anchor tags or something similar, and as a result we don't have ubiquitous browser apps that let me highlight a snippet of text in a book, write some notes in the margin (example: "this is a reference to Hamlet's soliloquy"), and then on a whim search for all of Noam Chomsky's (or whoever's) notes on Hamlet, or perhaps search for all public notes on this book in the context of Hamlet. The lack of structure means that everything's this haphazard soup of markup, with the focus being so much on how it looks that structure of the text and the relationship between parts gets lost. I'm not sure the "semantic web" will make up for that lack, but it's probably a good example of how the "next web will be built on the bones of this one" (to paraphrase someone else's comment in this thread).

saintxon My Code made it to a Hollywood Movie

I bet they could increase the throughput if they modulated the plasma coils.

saintxon Facebook Home destroys any notion of privacy

The problem with online privacy, is that people believe it exists.

saintxon Anonymous takes control of North Korea’s Twitter and Flickr accounts

Certain details about the images on the photostream at http://cdn.thenextweb.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/... , such as the image that reads "We are Anonymous", leads me to believe that "Anonymous" is, in fact, the culprit in this case.

saintxon Professor tells 1700 students to edit Wikipedia, 85% plagiarism rate

A potential solution to their problem is to establish a WP editing aberration detection mechanism, which would run quietly all the time and establish statistical baselines for editing frequency, and recognize when an unusually large number of edits from a geographical area or maybe CIDR block are coming in during a short period of time. This would help them automatically identify cases where a professor tells a couple of thousand students to make updates without supervision. Maybe correlate these with accounts or IPs that have few prior edits. This could then raise some sort of quality control flag on the edits and simplify the process of reverting the topics.

I shudder to think of what the Wikipedia-editing analogue of a global DDOS attack would be.

saintxon Saddle: Scala Data Library

The more I look into this, the better it looks. In particular, I appreciate that you used good existing solutions on the backend (EJML, Apache commons math, etc) where appropriate.

saintxon Saddle: Scala Data Library

By sparse vector support, do you mean the Sparse Fast Fourier Transform reported by MIT last year? http://www2.technologyreview.com/article/427676/a-faster-fou...

saintxon Saddle: Scala Data Library

I was sort of sad to learn earlier this year that the scalala project had become inactive, and when a friend pointed me at Breeze, the first thing that concerned me was that it seemed to "do ALL the things!", rolling in a bunch of other functionality along with a scalala revamp. What I really wanted was an elegant, fast, well written numerical computing library in Scala, and this seems to be it. This is great. Now all we need is to be able to tell this to use GPU hardware acceleration under the hood for things like FFTs and we're set!

saintxon No to "No UI"

Seeing people reason about this subject in the main article and the subsequent comments brings me back to my college "literary theory" courses. Instead of tossing up pithy declarative statements like "The best X is no X", or "The best Y is as little Y as possible", and then commenting on how these statements strike our intuition, we can bypass the literary methods in favor of scientific ones.

There's an entire body of research on visual design (a great introduction to which is Colin Ware's "Information Visualization") that gets right down to the nitty gritty details of human perception, like eye tracking speed, visual channel capacity, move and scan loops, visual working memory, the relationship between luminance channels, motion and shape as opposed to color channels, and on and on and on.

It turns out that "good" design principles can be quantified, communicated, taught, and learned, are based on our common biology, and that they needn't come at the expense of aesthetics or sound reasoning.

saintxon Show HN: An anonymous P2P social network for Android, written in Clojure

I wonder how they're going to get around the problem of malicious collectives and Sybil attacks, given the anonymity constraint. You should be able to set up dozens of fake accounts to vouch that you're a "good" person, or that someone else is a "bad" person, use astroturf tactics to wage malicious campaigns against other parties, and basically sow havoc.

saintxon Arch Linux: MariaDB replaces MySQL in repositories

The queen is dead. Long live the queen.

saintxon "Getting started with Ember.Js is easy." - No it isn't

It's a revealing commentary on the nature of the project and its developer community that this entire conversation seems to be about one dude. Suddenly, the "ember.js" brand collapses and becomes subsumed by the "trek" brand.

All other factors aside, it doesn't sound like the sort of healthy, active project that I like to use.

saintxon Frederick W. Smith: No Overnight Success

Yeah, this is unworthy of HN.

saintxon An apology to open source

Perhaps the reason this resonates so strongly is that it's a painful reminder that, after all of the enthusiasm and excitement of living in the information age, we still live in a world where ideas can be bought and sold. Nothing, not even a good idea, is immune to the corrosive influence of money.

saintxon O’Reilly Media Has Lost Its Soul

Not anarchist, but disruptive. The attitude comes from five decades of technology innovation rapidly rendering its competition utterly obsolete without warning. Picasso once said "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge", and the hacker community understands that the urge to create is also a destructive urge.