I'm learning Clojure and figured it'd be neat to just record Minecraft in-game events to Mixpanel and see what the data looks like. I'm only logging a few events right now, and only have data from me playing around on my test server, but the data works really well with Mixpanel's segmentation feature.
The screenshot shows block broken by a player, grouped by block type.
The font used on that site is literally broken and unreadable in Chrome, on Windows. It cuts out parts of the letters. For an example of what I'm seeing, here's a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/e6SVAsY.png
Pretty cool. One minor bug I noticed was that links in answers are not clickable. When you click them they just hide the answer box instead of open the link.
The defacing message is pretty deep, too. This is copied from the website, and is not my own. I'm just pasting it so that it's readable here, too:
I used to think I was a pretty good person. I certainly didn’t kill people, for example. But then Peter Singer pointed out that animals were conscious and that eating them led them to be killed and that wasn’t all that morally different from killing people after all. So I became a vegetarian. Again I thought I was a pretty good person. But then Arianna Huffington told me that by driving in a car I was pouring toxic fumes into the air and sending money to foreign dictatorships. So I got a bike instead. But then I realized that my bike seat was sewn by children in foreign sweatshops while its tubing was made by mining metals through ripping up the earth. Indeed, any money I spent was likely to go to oppressing people or destroying the planet in one way or another. And if I happen to make money some of it goes to the government which spends it blowing people up in Afghanistan or Iraq. I thought about just living off of stuff I found in dumpsters, like some friends. That way I wouldn’t be responsible for encouraging its production. But then I realized that some people buy the things they can’t find in dumpsters; if I got to the dumpster and took something before they did, they might buy it instead. The solution seemed clear: I’d have to go off-the-grid and live in a cave, gathering nuts and berries. I’d still probably be exhaling CO2 and using some of the products in the Earth, but probably only in levels that were sustainable. Perhaps you disagree with me that it’s morally wrong to kill animals or blow up people in Afghanistan. But surely you can imagine that it might be, or at least that someone could think it is. And I think it’s similarly clear that eating a hamburger or paying taxes contributes — in a very small way; perhaps only has the possibility of contributing — to those things. Even if you don’t, everyday life has a million ways that are more direct. Personally, I think it’s wrong that I get to sit at a table and gaily devour while someone else delivers more food to my table and a third person slaves over a stove. Every time I order food, I make them do more carrying and slaving. (Perhaps they get some money in return, but surely they’d prefer it if I just gave them the money.) Again, you may not think this wrong but I hope you can admit the possibility. And it’s obviously my fault. Off in the cave, I thought I was safe. But then I read Peter Singer’s latest book. He points out that for as little as a quarter, you can save a child’s life. (E.g. for 27 cents you can buy the oral rehydration salts that will save a child from fatal diarrhea.) Perhaps I was killing people after all. I couldn’t morally make money, for the reasons described above. (Although maybe it’s worth helping fund the bombing of children in Afghanistan in order to help save children in Mozambique.) But instead of living in a cave, I could go to Africa and volunteer my time. Of course, if I do that there are a thousand other things I’m not doing. How can I decide which action I take will save the most lives? Even if I take the time to figuring out, that’s time I’m spending on myself instead of saving lives. It seems impossible to be moral. Not only does everything I do cause great harm, but so does everything I don’t do. Standard accounts of morality assume that it’s difficult, but attainable: don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t steal. But it seems like living a moral life isn’t even possible. But if morality is unattainable, surely I should simply do the best I can. (Ought implies can, after all.) Peter Singer is a good utilitarian, so perhaps I should try to maximize the good I do for the world. But even this seems like an incredibly onerous standard. I should not just stop eating meat, but animal products altogether. I shouldn’t just stop buying factory-farmed food, I should stop buying altogether. I should take things out of dumpsters other people are unlikely to be searching. I should live someplace where others won’t be disturbed. Of course all this worrying and stress is preventing me from doing any good in the world. I can hardly take a step without thinking about who it hurts. So I decide not to worry about the bad I might be doing and just focus on doing good — screw the rules. But this doesn’t just apply to the rules inspired by Peter Singer. Waiting in line at the checkout counter is keeping me from my life-saving work (and paying will cost me life-saving money) — better just to shoplift. Lying, cheating, any crime can be similarly justified. It seems paradoxical: in my quest to do good I’ve justified doing all sorts of bad. Nobody questioned me when I went out and ordered a juicy steak, but when I shoplift soda everyone recoils. Is there sense in following their rules or are they just another example of the world’s pervasive immorality? Have any philosophers considered this question?
R.I.P Aaron Swartz
Hacked by grand wizard of Lulzsec, Sabu
GOD BLESS AMERICA
DOWN WITH ANONYMOUS
reddit sucks, k hacked by aush0k and tibitximer
Does it keep intact original request host names and such, or do all requests appear to come from your servers? Also what about mixpanels user stream functionality - would this break stuff like that? I can see the value prop and usefulness of this, but it is just another fee on top of a fee, in a way.
It does kind of suck to look back and realize that his own people turned their back on him, though. Not very hacker of us, sadly. I remember reading that article originally, and obviously looking back I wish I had taken some kind of action. Didn't have to be money, I'm sure, but something would have been better than basically rejecting his plea for help in a condescending tone.
Just some advice. It's not about "not being a yes man". It's about just laying low. There's no reason not to, and all you've done with your responses is make me want to avoid whatever you do, as well. No good can come from this type of crap.
Personally, when I see a blog post like this I make a mental note about the author and the accused. I generally avoid both of them in the future. Yes, it says all of the bad things about the accused that the author lays out, but it also tells me the the author likes to stir up drama. When I do business, I like to do business with those companies that you often don't here about, positive or negative. The ones that just "do work". Companies like Mixpanel, for example. You only hear about them when they're offering some new feature. They don't blog about how somebody on Twitter did something dumb. And I just realized that this was dmor's personal blog, but hey guess what, I only have ever seen her picture on her blog associated with her company, so those are now linked and that's enough for me.
I have yet to have this feeling for a company that I work at, but I do remember having this feeling for an online gaming "clan", back in the day. On battle.net, for Diablo, people would make clans and just game together, and eventually war other clans, etc. It was normal to "clan hop" around and join basically every clan until you're in the best clan. I remember the day when a friend and I jokingly joined what we thought was going to be a lame no-name clan, and we had intentions of sneakily doing something as members of that random clan. Turns out that we really enjoyed that clan and stayed with it. I remember the strange change of perspective that I had on clans when I realized that the clan I had joined was so enjoyable that it was without a doubt going to be better than any other clan out there, in my opinion. Because of that enthusiasm for the clan, we all ended up sticking together and ended up being like one of the longest lasting and well known clans of that time period. We moved off of battle.net and onto our own IRC server which we've all been on, every day, since like 2001. It's awesome what that kind of realization can lead to, if given the chance.
Nothing directed at the writer of this one single blog post, but who are these bloggers to be talking about innovation? They all use the same blogging platforms and write the same articles. And why have blog posts of this topic started to appear? Arrington writes something and all other blogging websites feel like they have to get a piece of the story trend pie and write a similar post, as well? I'm sorry but these are the kind of posts that make me shake my head.
Push notifications are not necessarily what I'm looking for, as far as I know. I don't want to have to subscribe and be available to receive notifications. The whole point is to ask for X amount of messages since the last message I saw, for example. Now, the server side irc client component could connect to ZNC and function, I think. Although I have not tested that.
I use irssi, as well. The point of my app was probably lost in my wall of text, though. On the iPhone, an SSH client into screen and then irssi is pretty nasty. Now, on an iPad I might be able to put up with a nice, expensive SSH client, like the one from panic. Even then, that's a lot that you have to do just to check IRC. Also, the required overhead of a constant network connection at the mercy of the phone's wifi. I'm not wrapping a protocol or extending IRC in any way. I'm funneling IRC data into a database so that I can use it in a more natural way from a native iOS app. That's what's ideal for IRC, on a phone, in my opinion. Your mileage may very, though, and to each their own. Everybody likes their IRC their own way and I'm not even sure I'm 100% sold on this way yet, but I'm going to try it out. :)
I guess after that wall of text I didn't mention that this is nice because the mobile client maintains no connection. No messages are missed while your phone is sleeping or dead, etc.
I recently switched from Mongo over to CouchDB. The reason that I favor Couch over Mongo is primarily because I felt like Mongo's querying capabilities suck when dealing with embedded documents and that Mongo's MapReduce is not their first-class focus. Second, though, was because with CouchDB, I'm forced to basically put all of my query logic on the database server, which keeps it out of my client code. This cleans up my client code a ton, and querying from views gives context to what the data that you will be getting in return is. I don't think I'll ever look back to Mongo as long as I can choose CouchDB.
Your comment doesn't make much sense, to me. It's obvious that they've thought about adding search to their client. What about it not being in, at launch, makes you think that it'll be slow? Why is it not worth discussing the mail client? We have a basic web app that we built at work that stores information about tasks that our automated applications perform, so that we can monitor them as they run. We added full text search to it almost six months after building it, and search was a complete after-thought. We chose elastic search and store about 12 million records in a small cluster. We add maybe several thousand per day, on a busy day. This is not a large amount of records, from what I've seen of other clusters. We easily average less than 200ms response times of search queries across all documents, while testing it with about 100 queries per second. I don't know whether or not you consider this fast or slow, but it's pretty snappy, in my opinion. So search doesn't seem all that mystical and complicated to me, but maybe our scenario just makes it appear that way.
This is pretty neat. I think a minor tweak that makes it easier to glance at, and see the scores, would be to wrap the score in a span and style that span with a light colored background to make it stand out. Perhaps some light yellow-ish color. I like to use #fffeca for this, on a white background.
I don't think that's necessarily fair to say. I've been using Ubuntu since it first came out for probably the same reasons as most other people - aptitude was dead simple and generally seemed to "just work". It probably also won me over initially because out of the box my audio and NIC drivers all worked. Most other features of your average linux system could be found on other distros, so these were the main drivers of me sticking with Ubuntu. Prior to Ubuntu I generally went with Slackware or FreeBSD.
I don't think that they're making any sort of direct choice to stop doing those things. I just think that their current desktop manager choices have been bad. I tried installing the latest Ubuntu on my main desktop PC this past weekend and it was a failure. I did get all my drivers working, but they didn't work out of the box anymore. Even once I had them all working, Unity seemed very unstable and in general the experience was very disappointing. It appeared to me that they were positioning themselves so that they could start throwing money making ad software and garbage onto my desktop. Now with the recent blog announcements that they might be enabling direct-from-desktop 1 click purchases and stuff, I doubt I'll ever consider installing it as a desktop, again. At least without xwindows, all of the original reasons for why Ubuntu was awesome still shine.
You can follow all the checklists in the world, but it still boils down to passing the eye ball test. Just a simple test of judgement as to whether or not something looks/is high quality or not. This is the test that your visitors will be using, anyway.
I guess I just don't understand that logic. I also work in a hosting-focused industry. We host large amounts of files for paying customers in a much less sexy industry, but we still revolve around file hosting. As a result, we have a lot of storage space and at times we have a lot of free storage space. What would be the benefit of letting people upload files to our open storage and then download them, as well, entirely for free? Seems like it'd only really "get your name out there", but with a lot more downsides than that.
I don't see any ads anywhere, and this service looks entirely free. It's not cheap to host large files for people en masse, especially since you allow up to 250MB. For example, if this were hosted using Amazon's S3, somebody could literally just upload a lot of 250MB files and directly hit your wallet. How do you plan to keep this service afloat?
I am using Oracle's Outside In PDF export library, for which I have written a Node.js module for. My module is open source and can be found here: https://github.com/ryancole/topdf
I've been working on various underlying components for this for a few months now. The components are part of a larger vision, but this site is the start of it.
This site is a very simple concept - upload documents and they're converted to PDF for you. The remainder of my plan builds on this, so I'm wanting to make sure that this core feature works really well. So, I thought that there's no better way than to launch it as a stand-alone website.
It's currently free to use until I can feel like charging for it is the right thing to do. I also require user accounts because it helps to future proof the service by allowing me to organized files on a per-user basis.
I'm also interested in any feedback positive or negative! Sorry for the initial posting with the incorrect URL, too. I specifically meant to not do that but ended up doing it, somehow. Thanks.