Hacker News Reader

zenspideron How to get your lying printer to use up all its ink

afaik, almost all new printers come with half-full ink/toner cartridges.

zenspideron Pretending to game the system: Fans hoax "Girlfriend" vid to the #1 spot on YouTube.

Monica Lewinsky

zenspideron Netflix’s Product is Bloated & Outdated… Attention iPhone App Gallery

PEBCAK

I've got 244 DVDs in my queue and I've rated 1496 so far. I don't seem to have any of the problems that the author seems to have.

Their recommendation system is far better than I've seen in any field and it is incredibly accurate in my experience. The UI hasn't updated much, but it has updated. It really doesn't need to. You find movies via the recommendations made on _every single page_ or you find movies by following a particular director or actor to their page. It is a very easy site to navigate and use. I have no idea why the author seems to have such a hard time with it.

zenspideron Colorful programs for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows

points to x11 and squeak smalltalk

that's why... GUI objects that have intrinsic knowledge of networking are actually really powerful and useful.

zenspideron Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists

The actual reading material he chose is immaterial. Much more important is that the tools required to build his system were trivial and yet he had a wide array of search parameters to choose from. There is a lot of power there.

zenspideron Are you capable of pink box testing?

Congratulations... you've learned how to bias your samples! Out of my last 20 comments, 4 are me being "HN police". 20% vs your 60%.

And you're right, I don't come here for humor or jokes or any other bullshit. I come here because the name is "hacker news" and thus far, it has done a pretty good job of living up to both words in that name. The reason I come here is 80% for the comments, 20% for the actual links. I learn more from the comments than I do from most of the articles and I'd like to keep it that way. I go elsewhere for humor, and I don't want to spend my time sorting the two out here. Is that asking for too much?

I see now in the guidelines that my original comment is frowned upon. I only have a 56 karma currently so I apparently don't meet the threshold for downvoting/flagging (I'm more of a gatherer/reader than a karmawhore) so this is all I've got available as a tool to shape things. So, I retract my request and I'll go back to lurking and if/when the signal:noise ratio goes to shit I'll go looking for something else (tho, HN does seem to be the last resort for good S:N so my hopes aren't too high).

zenspideron RescueTime Gets a Shiny New Logo (Less red, still a plus)

new logo? how does this relate to hacker news?

zenspideron Are you capable of pink box testing?

Can you not? Please?

I'd prefer YC's comments not go the way of Digg or Reddit.

zenspideron Every 100ms of latency costs Amazon 1% of profit

Disclosure: I used to work at amazon.

I find it immaterial considering the easier thing to speed up is the number of HTTP requests on the site, and that has clearly gotten worse over the years, not better. I pushed heavily to get HTML cleaned up and valid (showing an easy 10-20% reduction with HTML alone), reduce the amount of javascript, etc. It simply wasn't a priority. To be fair, at the time I was there the priority was to grow as fast as possible and deal with profits later.

zenspideron Traffic jams are not caused by flaws in road design but by flaws in human nature.

I sorta agree, and I sorta disagree...

Here in Seattle I've been held up for over an hour on the 520 bridge because of an accident THE OTHER DIRECTION. Having screens would prevent rubber necking on the other side of the highway (with a large cement barrier in between).

Also, I think you can do a lot to the screen itself to increase driver safety. Make it 15' high and entirely yellow/black diagonal stripes and it'll catch driver's attention and get them to slow down. TV and radio educational ads can help too.

zenspideron Build Status Interfaces

This is lame and I don't think it is YC material. As someone who's worked on many build systems, I was actually (naively?) hoping for some build status UI ideas. In particular, my current build system that I'm working for needs to visualize a 4D matrix (testsuite revision, impl, impl revision, OS) and I'd love to see what others have done in this area.

Instead, stupid granny pictures. Welcome to the internet, here is the first of an endless supply of stupid.

zenspideron Niklaus Wirth: Compiler Construction (Addison Wesley book)

This is my favorite parser/compiler book. It is better on paper tho. :P

zenspideron Wearing Out My Delete Key

I totally agree, and this is exactly what I do an the method/micro level. Generally I can get something working in just a few minutes but then I spend another 5-10 really polishing it up in 5+ small iterations on it (all test driven, so I know my changes still work).

Hoff's point was well above that, at the design/macro level. For that I alternate releases between adding features and house cleaning (bug fixes, refactorings, etc). With a sufficiently short iteration time, you can appease both the client/users with new features and the developers by keeping things clean and happy.

zenspideron Smalltalk 80: The Language and its Implementation

This is totally deflating the value of my blue books!

I will say tho, that there is still value in owning these books in paper. I swear it makes a difference in readability, comprehension, etc. I can vaguely remember something, open the book, and flip very close to it most of the time.

The blue book is one of the best computer books I own, hands down. I will always cherish it.

zenspideron The most misunderstood book in CS

Alternatively, I've used that book to _prevent_ all sorts of nonsense. It can be great when you have a manager who is inexperienced with software development (sad, but too common in some places).

"No, we shouldn't add an offshore team to meet our deadline, and here's why..."

zenspideron Coffee shop programmer

Fully agreed, from another full-time Seattle cafe denizen.

zenspideron YC is a cult

The best definition of a cult that I've heard was from some guy on NPR (no clue who, I was driving and came in mid-program)... he said, quite simply, that a cult is any organization who's ulterior motive is to have sex with minors. I'm sure there are counter-examples, but I think it fits pretty well.

zenspideron ProFont: The ultimate programming font.

aye. back when I was coding on a 9 inch B&W screen with bitmapped everything, it was a great font to use. damn crisp and non-ambiguous at 9pt.

now I use deja vu sans, which is a fork of bitstream vera sans with full unicode.

zenspideron "Turns out my nephew is really good with computers, so we're going to give him the job"

what... the ones with VB code samples seem more legit? WTF isn't worth time

zenspideron Minimalism (computing)

perhaps they mean in terms of UI design, not software design?

I saw in one of Ian Piumarta's talks that OSX has considerably more lines of code than vista. Kinda surprises me, kinda doesn't.

zenspideron 30 Abstract Satellite Images of Earth

What does this have to do with hacker news?

zenspideron Moleskine Tips, Tricks and Hacks

Care to write up said sigils, scan them, and post them somewhere? I'd love to see your system.

zenspideron Ask YC: What's the greatest number of projects you can work on at once, successfully?

yup yup...

I prefer the shotgun approach. In the last 6 months: 22 releases across 8 projects (with differing levels of inter-relatedness). I've worked on 19 other projects in that period of time (this number might be low as I polled the filesystem, not perforce).

zenspideron Hello: Macs are about to get interesting again

"After citing my confusion as to why OSX doesn't have a decent package manager, doesn't ship with apropos, doesn't come with gcc, etc."

    wrong: macports or fink.
    wrong: apropos apropos: apropos(1) - search the whatis database for strings
    wrong: gcc -v: gcc version 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)

Maybe you could actually TRY things before you make completely false claims that you haven't bothered to test... There is nothing "fussy" about it... I don't even really know what that means. 10.5 ships with xcode just like (pretty much) all the iterations before it. I think 10.0 was the only one to not include it.

zenspideron Ruby’s Vulnerability Handling Debacle

actually they've done that several times now.

zenspideron 100 Vim commands every programmer should know

"Once you get the hang of that, you'll find yourself cursing any editor that doesn't have an easy way to move to the end of the 3rd word from the current location."

I find myself cursing any editor that is moded. Moded editing is simply wrong. That said, I doubt there is any movement command in vi that is missing from emacs. The editors are the same in basic text-editing functionality. They differ drastically in philosophy and extended functionality.

zenspideron I have finally seen the Emacs light

100,000 source files? and you haven't quit? you deserve eclipse. :P

zenspideron 100 Vim commands every programmer should know

as an emacs user, that's the only one I'm required to know. :)

Actually I'm competent in vi, so I can pair with others, but man I don't like it.

zenspideron Ask YC: Ethical Question, possible fraud

seconded... you certainly don't need the feedback of strangers to justify your decision... just act on your gut.

zenspideron A couple GC algorithms in more detail

It is really hard to write a generic precise GC (knows and follows object structure) that you can open source because every project that would want to use it has a different object structure. So pretty much every one has to be written from scratch. It is cheap and easy to throw in a conservative GC. It just isn't as good.

Squeak and the other smalltalks pretty much all have precise GCs. I'm not as familiar with the GC systems in the lisps, but I'd guess that they're all precise because the memory structures are so damn simple/clean. It is the scripting languages that start to fall down. Perl used reference counting for years, prolly still does; same with python. Ruby has a mark/sweep conservative. But hey, they work well enough. shrug