Hacker News Reader

tropicalmugon How Logos are Remembered

Think it's funny that the person who drew the Pizza Hut logo for Domino's is considered more accurate than the person who drew a domino.

tropicalmugon Who Will Command the Robot Armies?

"One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity there ain't nothing can beat teamwork."

Seldom Smith, from The Monkey-Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey.

tropicalmugon Lon.gs: A URL shortener in C

There are other needs for a shortened URL. Perhaps you have to hardcode a link in code and don't want to be tied to a page whose contents may break. If you control your URL shortener, you can hardcode your shortened one, and update the redirect as needed.

tropicalmugon HTTP/2 Is Done

I wish instead of a protocol improvement that focused solely on network resources, the next version will also include improvements for users such as encryption by default and doing away with cookies.

tropicalmugon Show HN: An easy-to-use Text Analysis API – NLP and Machine Learning

What tools would you suggest for doing this? Or even what algorithms to implement for doing this sort of work?

tropicalmugon Sublime Text 3 Build 3059

Open your user key-bindings (in OSX this is Sublime Text -> Preferences -> Key Bindings - User), and put

  [
    { "keys": ["ctrl+tab"], "command": "next_view" },
    { "keys": ["ctrl+shift+tab"], "command": "prev_view" }
  ]

tropicalmugon Feedly is Now Hijacking Shared Links And Cutting Out Original Publishers

Newsblur[0] is a great open-source[1] feed-reader that not only beats Feedly in ease of use, but also has a bunch of great additional features over the standard RSS reader, with apps for both iOS and Android to complement the killer web-app. I highly recommend it.

[0] https://newsblur.com/

[1] https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur

tropicalmugon Google Account Recovery Vulnerability

11 days? Two weeks? A month? Never?

Not every company values this sort of feedback from their users. Some go out of their way to prosecute those that break their services this way.

tropicalmugon NSA Files Decoded: What the revelations mean for you

It doesn't say anything about her backtracking. It says she defends the program and that her "reform" bill maintains the status quo.

tropicalmugon Bloom Filters by example

Another great Bloom Filter library not mentioned in this article is Bitly's implementation on GitHub[0]. It has the best of both worlds: a C implementation and higher-level wrappers (Golang, PHP, Python, and Common Lisp). If you don't want to play around with a fancier DBMS and really just want the damn filters, I would look here.

[0] https://github.com/bitly/dablooms

tropicalmugon One Month Rails (YC S13) Teaches How To Build Your Startup While Learning To Code

"97% of people recommend One Month Rails" is also a little misleading. I'm willing to bet 97% of people don't know what One Month Rails is.

tropicalmugon Loom (YC W12) Launching Cloud Storage for Photos and Videos

Thanks for the quick response. I keep playing with this and it's very cool. I'm looking forward to being able to put those pictures back up.

Congrats on the launch again.

tropicalmugon Loom (YC W12) Launching Cloud Storage for Photos and Videos

I'd love to be able to add the same photo to more than one album. This seems like the sort of thing that's a natural advantage of digital photos over regular ones.

Let's say I was taking pictures of friends at a baseball game, along with a couple of other shots of the surroundings. I want to put the pictures of friends in "friends" album, but I also want to put those same pictures in the overarching "baseball" album, or the album for that particular game. It seems as though you have nested albums, which is nice, but this would be a good usecase to look into.

Also, while I was playing around, I created an album that I wanted to get rid of. I deleted the album and it took all of the pictures in it out of my timeline. I probably should have figured that the albums act more as folders than tags when I discovered that pictures were assigned to a single album, but I can't figure out how to reupload those pictures. Any help?

Congratulations on the launch!

tropicalmugon Impressions of Go

I am one of those programmers: I have no real idea how a compiler goes about its business, my university does not offer an accessible compiler class (only for grad students and very irregularly), and I have no idea where to start besides trying to force my way through the purple dragon book.

What are things I should know about compilers that I probably don't? What is suggested reading on compilers?

tropicalmugon Edward Snowden's Father Gives Interview: My Son Is Not A Traitor

This story is not relevant to the privacy issues at hand. This is distracting from the conversation we should be having.

tropicalmugon Amazon is staffing up for its $600 million cloud for spooks

Right, but couldn't they expand the pane but leave the text at the same ratio? The way it is now, the right-hand scrollbar leaves the right side of the window[1], which is kind of weird. Adding whitespace on the sides might be a better way to achieve the same goal.

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/doaiMyc.jpg

tropicalmugon Amazon is staffing up for its $600 million cloud for spooks

Why does Quartz allow for their menu bar to resize for any window size but prevent the article pane from doing the same thing? I get large grey space on the right side of any story that I read on a large-enough monitor.

tropicalmugon Norwegian lawyer had visa withdrawn after private chat with client on Facebook

You're correct, it wouldn't apply. My naïveté had me a little carried away.

tropicalmugon Norwegian lawyer had visa withdrawn after private chat with client on Facebook

Isn't this a bigger deal than just monitoring supposedly private Facebook communications? This would also violate attorney-client privilege too, right?

EDIT: This is just naïveté on my part.

tropicalmugon The Smears Against Edward Snowden Have Begun

I wish he hadn't come forward. There was no real reason for him to release his name or tell his story yet. This is going to distract us all from the real issues at hand.

tropicalmugon The Solitary Leaker

"For society to function well, there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. By deciding to unilaterally leak secret N.S.A. documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things."

I'm amazed that the solution to being spied on by my government, showing that they have no basic level of trust in me or my fellow citizens, is to bow my head and treat this as a common procedure.

"He betrayed the privacy of us all. If federal security agencies can’t do vast data sweeps, they will inevitably revert to the older, more intrusive eavesdropping methods."

Wait...what? He didn't betray my privacy, my government did. The second part of the argument there is the most amazing leap of logic I've ever seen. "If we outlaw this invasive procedure, then they'll do something far worse that we've outlawed." I don't understand this at all.

There are so many objectionable parts of this article that while typing out my problems with it I just started raging at my desk. I don't know what to say. I'm just appalled. Any discussion on Snowden and whether or not what he did was right is a sideshow and should wait until we figure out what to do with the information he gave us.

EDIT: No, let's keep going.

"He betrayed the Constitution. The founders did not create the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed. Snowden self-indulgently short-circuited the democratic structures of accountability, putting his own preferences above everything else."

The leaker of secret programs that on the surface appear to clearly violate my Fourth Amendment rights is the one who is not being held accountable? It was self-indulgent to tell the world about how the NSA is spying on everyone, all of the time? This is an ad hominem attack that makes no sense. The programs he exposed "short-circuited the democratic structures of accountability," not him.

tropicalmugon The declining value of the MS in Computer Science

As an undergrad making the choice of a coursework-based MS and simply graduating with my BS in the next few months, this could not be more timely.

What makes me want to do get the MS is that my undergrad performance was not stellar. I struggled in the middle of my time in college, and while my grades have rebounded and I have been doing well for myself since, my GPA is pretty dismal. I can't see myself getting into any of the good MS programs around the country, and the easy remedy to this is to staying at my university for another year and getting my MS with the goal of having a much better GPA in order to demonstrate my ability.

That said, if the value of such a degree is declining at the moment, maybe it's a lost cause to redeem my academic credentials.

tropicalmugon Is Silicon Valley getting too big for its boots?

And the HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5745444

tropicalmugon Bruce Eckel on why he's moving back to Windows from Mac

It also sounds as though he never discovered common keyboard shortcuts. He complains about command-tab behavior being different from Windows, but I've found that command-tab for switching between applications and command-` for window switching within application windows on that desktop works even better for me. I'm almost never guessing what the order of windows will be.

tropicalmugon Princeton mom: Women have a 'shelf life'

For those interested, she expressed her rationale further on the Huffington Post[0].

[0]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-patton/why-i-told-female...

tropicalmugon America's raisin regime

Unfortunately it is not. New Deal era laws such as this one existed to help prevent a flood of excess food ruin the market for farmers during the Great Depression in the United States. Unfortunately, nobody is keen to revisit any laws from the New Deal, no matter how outdated, because of the kind of scrutiny it might bring on programs like Social Security.

tropicalmugon America is raising a generation of interns

I feel like the title might be a bit misleading. Nowhere does the article say how this is going to stretch out and impact the workforce over the next 10+ years, but instead sticks to the same discussion of serial internships that has been tread with numerous other articles.

I do think it hits the nail on the head with: "So here's another chasm in the 20-something cohort: the one between the liberal-arts kids and the engineering and science majors." There's plenty of anecdotal (as well as hard) evidence out there that supports that claim.

tropicalmugon How I develop Django projects

I used a script called crouton[0] developed by a Googler to install an Ubuntu chroot. I get to use Chrome OS as my browser (and it's a very good browser) and I get a fully powered Linux instance to develop with locally in crosh (and it's a very good-looking shell). I use vim, but if you want a GUI, it's very easy to install your DE of choice, since it's the same as it would be as any other Ubuntu machine.

I haven't run into any problems using it this way that many other people seem to have. Judging from online forums, many people install a chroot, Unity, and then everything falls apart for them because Dropbox/Sublime Text/something isn't ARM compatible. Sticking with just a browser and a CLI has made development on the Chromebook simple.

[0]: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

tropicalmugon How I develop Django projects

One thing that I think would be helpful in posts like these would be database configuration with Postgres. While Heroku has made it incredibly simple on OSX[0], figuring everything out on Ubuntu was a nightmare in comparison.

Also, fun story: I've been working on both my MacBook and my Chromebook, and I've been deploying to Heroku. This resulted in me accidentally ending up with three versions of my settings.py. Always a pleasant sensation to runserver only to end up staring at a database error. Not at all terrifying.

[0]: http://postgresapp.com/

tropicalmugon Why I'm Not Applying to 37signals (But Why You Should)

I am a student, and I can completely empathize with how you feel. I can tell you that a lot of what I've seen is that it's one-hundred percent completely worth the stress and fear of rejection if even one long-shot (in your mind) pays off. I've had that happen to me firsthand, and I've seen it in other people. The more experience you have dealing with tough problems, the better you'll be thinking about them, and tough interview problems by extension. Just make your interview count as best you can, and step back and wait. I promise it's worth it.