Hacker News Reader

stephthon Ć Programming Language - Compile C# subset to C, Java, C#, JS, AS, Perl and D

Does it matter here from a user standpoint? The compiler is strictly licensed but the user's work - Ć code and generated code - shouldn't be tied to any predefined license, or am I missing something?

stephthon Ć Programming Language - Compile C# subset to C, Java, C#, JS, AS, Perl and D

Right. Who would ever want to be able to write libraries that can run on any platform?

stephthon Todo. - The To-Do web-app for overworked hackers

I haven't tried Workflowy but from the AppStore description it looks like a clone of TaskPaper or FoldingText (free form text with to dos / outlining / tagging). Isn't the main point of the poster's app that it chooses the next task for you?

stephthon Todo. - The To-Do web-app for overworked hackers

I like the premise and the simplicity, well done. But what if the app picks a MUST task that isn't actionable at a given time?

stephthon What Major World Cities Look Like at Night, Minus the Light Pollution

Those must be long exposures with post processing. A clear sky without light pollution doesn't look anything like that, but it's beautiful. Go see one!

stephthon Wanted: People Willing to Die on Mars

Why worry about meaningful change, why work against the dysfunctional, towards peace and sanity, why care about reaching our true potential as intelligent beings on this planet when we can instead fantasize about going to Where no man has gone before ?

stephthon Why Use Make

Exactly what I was thinking. Use a scripting language you're proficient at. This article doesn't make Make look worth the trouble if you don't have a more specific reason to use it. Too much complexity, and quirks like you’ll need to delete the previously-downloaded zip file before running make can easily be avoided with a scripting language.

These days any relatively convoluted task that I may need to do more than once, I cook it in Ruby (and sprinkle some AppleScript/appscript if it involves UI). Languages like Ruby or Python offer a good balance of flexibility and abstraction for this kind of automation.

stephthon Psilocybin shows success in medical trials

Mindful coding.

Would you mind elaborating on that? I would have thought mindfulness (being aware of the present and being alive) would sit at the opposite end of a spectrum from coding (being deeply focused on abstract constructs). When I'm good, I remember to use mindfulness in the breaks between coding, but I can't imagine them in parallel. (Maybe you meant the former?)

PS: great comments.

stephthon Massive Dosing - the LSD Thumbprint

The fact that you might just be having an episode of impaired cognition does not actually enter your brain.

It depends. I agree that it should. That said that realization doesn't make it less spiritual. Experiencing a different reality, seeing through different eyes, isn't that the quintessential spiritual experience?

We believe what we see. If one never experiences a different point of view, one might continue to believe her limited window to the world is the truth.

Experiencing other realities can help subjects realize how subjective things are. How to form a perception, imaginary fluff is added to fill the gaps. Like your comment.

It's not a silver bullet. One has to be curious, and brave enough to second guess the ego, which is probably one of the most challenging things we face (and might define how and how well we can last as a race). But it doesn't do us any good to underestimate the spiritual power of psychedelics.

stephthon Relax. You'll be more productive

In the 1950s, the researchers William Dement and Nathaniel Kleitman discovered that we sleep in cycles of roughly 90 minutes, moving from light to deep sleep and back out again. They named this pattern the Basic-Rest Activity Cycle or BRAC. A decade later, Professor Kleitman discovered that this cycle recapitulates itself during our waking lives.

...

In each of these fields, Dr. Ericsson found that the best performers typically practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes.

Uninterrupted work sessions of 90 minutes are not a cycle, since they don't include a rest phase. It may be that 90 minutes is an optimal number for uninterrupted work, but I don't understand how it relates to a "Basic-Rest Activity Cycle" of 90 minutes.

stephthon Turn your browser into a notepad with one line

You can set it as the homepage (enableable in Settings). It adds an extra step after opening a new page (either clicking on the home icon or shift-cmd-h) but I prefer that to replacing the default Chrome page (with its Most visited and Recently closed menus).

stephthon Turn your browser into a notepad with one line

Thank you. I've tweaked it to my preferences. I've gotten in the habit of writing with a black on light grey monospaced font. Removing the web font dependency (and the transition, again matter of taste) made the page snappier.

data:text/html, <html><head><style type="text/css"> html{background-color:#CCCCCC;font-family: Monaco, Consolas, "Lucida Console", monospace;font-size:14px;color:#424242;line-height:1.4;max-width:60rem;margin:0 auto;}body{background-color:#F0F1F1;padding:100px;}</style></head><body contenteditable>Poop.</body></html>

stephthon Does having a high IQ make you less creative?

I started learning English with videogames too. I bought an English translation dictionary that was about half my weight to play Zak McKracken, on a 286 my dear avó owned. My tipping point came much later, with a pretty and sweet native English speaking girlfriend.

Great read by the way.

stephthon A/B Testing Art – Why Mondrian Was a Great Optimizer

I re-read myself and got uncomfortable with how negative my comment sounds. Even though it sort of ended up sounding like I wrote it to be dismissive of other's work, I didn't, I thought my experience would be useful to others as a constructive point. Next time I should express myself with more tact.

stephthon A/B Testing Art – Why Mondrian Was a Great Optimizer

Nice read, thanks! It made me more hungry to learn about artistic processes.

I have to say though, as a plug to a service that helps improve your website presentation and flow, in the context of that blog page, to me it's a big turn off. They talk about a master of visual flow, and then present it in that visual mess of a blog. A link to the .com can't even be found around the top left and instead must be dug up from a cloud of menus on the right, basic visual hierarchy point (point that actually makes a short appearance in the actual article) that so many company blogs get wrong but you'd expect web design experts to get right. I'm not saying their tech isn't good, I have no idea, but I find it hard not to think that if it was good, they'd have figured out how to use it to improve their own promotion site.

stephthon Small Refactorings in Ruby

Agreed, this is an example where returning true or false would be more useful. I presumed the point was assuming a situation where a method returning either a value or nil would be desirable.

stephthon Small Refactorings in Ruby

I hear you, and I realize Rubyists tend to avoid ternary operators, but I think this case is one where idiomatic Ruby makes unnecessary compromises against readability. Your arguments still don't convince me the latter is more readable.

Ruby Idiom: "Return symbol foo_matches if instance variable foo equals symbol bar"

You forgot the "else, it doesn't get called and the method returns nil by default" part. Although it's implicit, it doesn't mean you don't have to reason about it. On top of that, being implicit raises the barrier of understanding.

you may have to pause a bit longer on them since the ? and colon are frequently used for query-style methods and symbols respectively

I copy pasted from the article but I agree that readability could be improved with parentheses:

    (@foo == :bar) ? :foo_matches : nil

I don't think the colon is a problem for readability either, being surrounded by spaces. I'll give you that a programmer coming from another language may make the mistake to think the space is optional.

stephthon Small Refactorings in Ruby

I enjoyed reading that, thanks.

One thing: replacing

    def my_method
      @foo == :bar ? :foo_matches : nil
    end

with

    def my_method
      :foo_matches if @foo == :bar
    end

doesn't look like an improvement to me. The first style is direct and readable, and lowers the barrier of entry to understand it. The second one requires to be familiar with the subtleties of Ruby, which adds difficulty when you're working with multiple languages daily or getting started with Ruby. I'm not saying you should avoid pushing Ruby to its best capabilities so that it's readable by any programmer, but in this case, winning 4 characters doesn't seem worth the compromise.

stephthon Small Refactorings in Ruby

If it helps you/the code (readability, DRYness, ...) then go for it. Avoiding it on the basis of guessing it would make a difference is a slippery slope down premature optimization hell [1]. I'd say code away, and when/if you need to optimize, use a profiler. Likely you'll be surprised at what makes a difference and what doesn't really.

edit:

[1] Note that by guessing I'm referring to any optimizations that don't involve profiling your project, and that includes benchmarks of Ruby style, which are interesting to observe and can help you learn certain things about Ruby but are deceiving as far as understanding what actually makes a difference in your project. The sane way to optimize is to profile.

stephthon Instacart adds Trader Joe's

For produce, why not order it directly from farms?

We live in downtown San Francisco and get our organic produce delivered weekly from http://farmfreshtoyou.com

We've been using it for more than a year and have been happy with it, that said I'd be curious to hear other suggestions, specially services that deliver organic produce from a group of farms instead of only one.

stephthon Reader-submitted Objective-C / XCode tips of 2012

Displaying his characteristic brilliance and familiarity of Cocoa internals Cédric Luthi submitted a reverse-engineered implementation of the NString equality methods. Fascinating!

Forgive my ignorance, but how do you go about and reverse engineer NSString equality? Looking at the code is interesting but what I'd really like to understand is where it comes from and how it was extracted; is it supposed to be close to the original implementation, is it an informed guess based on CFLite, ...? Please be patient and again forgive my ignorance.

stephthon The Power of Concentration

I'd recommend studying The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. I tried to read a few books on the topic, and this is the first one that managed to catch my attention. It's straightforward and thorough, and he's very good at explaining things that are very hard to put words to. Mindfulness is the core of the book, meditation (as in exercises) is secondary. I think it's an outstanding introduction to the what and why of mindfulness, and a gentle intro to meditation. The audio book version is quite good to, he's an outstanding speaker, with a distinct voice. Look him up.

Anyone who often feels like the mind is a chaotic stream of thoughts and emotions that one can barely control might find this read quite useful. I wish I had read it twenty years earlier. That said I've met a couple people who couldn't latch onto it, so your mileage may vary.

stephthon Staffer axed by Republican group over retracted copyright reform memo

After watching (and thoroughly enjoying) mtgx's second linked video [1] it's become a little more complicated to discern the left or the right of copyright. I think the talk's final point of speaking of "values" is very pertinent and in a way relevant to the way this conversation branch progressed.

From your quote about DJs your copyright values seem to be at the opposite side of openness (whatever the antonym of openness is), but having been reading and enjoying your comments for a while I suspect that comment might just be misguiding. I think I'd like to read more about what your values on copyright are.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyf_0SMAsFA

stephthon Google Analytics for developers

Note: Data must be dispatched and received by 4 a.m. of the following day, in the local timezone of each profile. Any data received later than that will not appear in reports.

Do your mobile apps require an Internet connection? From what I'm seeing I imagine that's a prerequisite to use GA. It's a deal breaker for me though, I can't intentionally throw away a slice of offline usage data (iPods, iPads, etc).

stephthon Google Analytics for developers

Is anyone using GA to track mobile apps? The mobile SDKs shows a lot of potential until you start wondering about offline usage, GA being a website tracker first. I couldn't find any final answers but from what I can see it might be a sore point: the SDK docs dodge the topic [1] and I see complaints, ie events can be batched for later but get the timestamps of when they were uploaded, instead of when they happened [2,3,4].

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=site:https://developers.goog...

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618719/how-does-google-a...

[3] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4484748/what-happens-with...

[4] http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/analytics/132Eet...

stephthon Unity 4 is here

Interesting. Is this process - plugin based game development in Unity - documented anywhere? I assume you lose browser support, are there other major drawbacks?

stephthon Show HN: Instrumenting and visualizing JavaScript with d3.js

Wow. Kindly+thoughtfully toned, pertinent and constructive criticism that is rewarding and encouraging. And at the top. I wish this wasn't as refreshing in HN as it is, but it is damn refreshing.

stephthon If You're Too Busy to Meditate, Read This

Focus on your breath going in and out. Every time you have a thought or an urge, notice it and bring yourself back to your breath.

From what I've heard so far, meditation is based on focusing on your body in order to quiet your mind. Are there other schools/techniques?

stephthon The Magazine

and a few ARC things

According to this document [1]: ARC is fully supported in iOS 5, and there aren't any iOS-6-only Objective-C features.

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#releasenotes/Objecti...

stephthon The Magazine

Apps that have hundreds of thousands of daily users are already seeing over 80% of their users are on iOS 6

Link(s) please.