Hacker News Reader

cookrnon Colorado communities secure the right to build their own broadband

This is not true. Longmont has proceeded with building out a fiber utility for its citizens [0] called NextLight. As I mentioned in another comment [1], my understanding is that Boulder city has required private telecom operators to lay city-owned fiber alongside its own.

[0] http://longmontcolorado.gov/departments/departments-e-m/long... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8568436

cookrnon Colorado communities secure the right to build their own broadband

Fair point! My understanding is that, when Xfinity/CenturyLink have laid fiber in Boulder in the past, they were required to lay city-owned fiber along with it. So, hopefully the build out is much more feasible. (I may be entirely _underestimating_ the "last mile" costs relative to larger infrastructure though...)

cookrnon Colorado communities secure the right to build their own broadband

I've lived in Boulder for about 6 years now and stay for the environment. It's about a 40 minute drive from Denver on a good day and has a very different feel from the city. There's definitely a lot of opportunity in technology work-wise, endless opportunities in the outdoors, but some left to be desired culturally.

As a sibling mentioned, the city and the county together own a "green belt" around the city proper that is meant to be permanent. It was actually started in the 50s and has been a great legacy for us nowadays.

Great place just to visit for a few days too!

cookrnon Raptor: a radically new Ruby web server

Here's a relevant Twitter conversation on Raptor from last night:

https://twitter.com/brixen/status/523988304627499008

Interesting tidbit is that the DNS may show that Raptor is being developed by Phusion.

cookrnon Quora Keeps the World's Knowledge for Itself

re: the Library of Alexandria reference, see my reply to the grandparent

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8462237

cookrnon Quora Keeps the World's Knowledge for Itself

I believe the Library of Alexandria reference is to the aspirations of Internet Archive and not Quora per the "majestic temple" link [0] in the post.

[0] http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Brewster-Kahle-s-Internet...

cookrnon The Extropian Roots of Bitcoin

A wonderful, albeit dense, read that touches on Extropianism among many other things is Techgnosis

http://www.amazon.com/TechGnosis-Myth-Magic-Mysticism-Inform...

cookrnon NYU Eats World: An alumna laments the rise of an imperial university

I've been interested in the ITP program [0] for awhile and would be curious to hear any graduates' responses to this article...

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tisch_School_of_the_Arts#Intera...

cookrnon Clinkle

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8358737

cookrnon Shirt.codes: Get a T-shirt of your favorite code snippet

Sweet! The pattern of the code reminds me of morse code too :D

cookrnon Shirt.codes: Get a T-shirt of your favorite code snippet

I love the abstract and colorful look. It actually is really nice without being based on code! Some more code samples for people to click through could be fun to play around with too. Have you printed one for yourself yet? A photo of you wearing a shirt would be wonderful.

dojo4 [1] (Boulder, CO) built and subsequently took down a similar product called Speakteesy [2] last year. It's really hard to get the pricing reasonable, show people definitively what they're going to receive, and get a quality shirt. We did our best by generating a to-scale proof image using ImageMagick that a user would see prior to paying, but it wasn't a huge help. Lastly, the shirts.io [3] service was our fulfillment backend and, barring some light documentation in areas, was great to work with.

Good luck!

[1] http://dojo4.com/ [2] http://speakteesy.com/ [3] https://www.shirts.io/

cookrnon MIT Students Battle State’s Demand for Their Bitcoin Miner’s Source Code

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8350793

cookrnon Passing On: 100 years ago, the last passenger pigeon died

The Long Now Foundation considers the Passenger Pigeon a (strong) candidate for de-extinction [1]. There is also a recent reflection on the passing of Martha from them at that link.

[1] http://longnow.org/revive/what-we-do/passenger-pigeon/

cookrnon The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines

If memory serves, I think TPB is somehow related to iPredator [1][2], though I'm not sure if that is the case anymore. This may give them _lots_ of experience running VPN software, which would be usable if that is indeed how they're communicating between VPS providers.

[1] https://www.ipredator.se/ [2] http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-announces-ipredator-globa...

cookrnon Metriclock

Here's a little blog post from a while back that I wrote about a software bug, time zones, and alternate time systems. It's got a list of HN mention links of decimal time and .beat among other things.

http://cookrn.tumblr.com/post/74190761055/cant-we-all-just-g...

cookrnon Show HN: Backup your public GitHub repositories with GitHub-backup

I released this as a product a few years ago and subsequently open sourced it. With a bit of work, it could be a good little web app to run on your own server to manage repo backups.

https://github.com/antiqua-io/Antiqua

cookrnon Ask HN: Horror co-founder stories.

A few thoughts, which could be helpful:

* Founder vesting schedules can be implemented at anytime, including backdating the start date. For example, the standard 4 year vesting with one year cliff could be be set to start 9 months in the past so that in three months from implementation, all of you would have hit your cliff. This could be used as a negotiating tactic if they are averse to the idea of vesting in general.

* What's best for everyone is what's best for the company. The company is at risk without better founder communication, so to help the company, communication should be improved. Remembers, this isn't about being combative or competitive. When they win, you don't lose. When any of you wins, everybody wins.

* Everyone is biased to appreciate their own work. This goes for you as well as your cofounders. Do they think they're working hard? If this is just about hours worked, them working a fairly normal schedule and you working double-time is only unhealthy for you. Maybe there is a happy solution in some expectation setting.

I've had these issues as well and am happy to talk anytime. Contact info is in my profile.

cookrnon Show HN: Trianglify – low poly style background generator with D3.js

Gorgeous! I've been using http://cl.ly/image/0S0X0V3F2H2K for the last few years and looking for similar, nicely colored images to swap into a rotation. I had two fun thoughts w/r/t your code:

* How would you feel about using https://kuler.adobe.com/ for color palettes?

* Would it be possible to make the patterns repeatable or tile-able?

cookrnon In Some Ways, It's Looking Like 1999 in the Stock Market

It's a small nitpick about the article, but I found it hard to continue reading when the author called WhatsApp "a social media company with modest sales".

cookrnon In Some Ways, It's Looking Like 1999 in the Stock Market

The general strategy when this happens is to do a google search of the URL and then click through from there

cookrnon Meteor 0.8.0: Introducing the Blaze templating engine

I took some time to read through the architecture document[0] on HTMLbars yesterday and parts of the Blaze description sound very familiar. As a general observation, both libraries are focused on outputting DOM rather than HTML strings, which is interesting for various reasons. Maybe I'm missing some of the history here re: interaction between Meteor & Tilde, but I wonder if HTMLbars could have been useful in building out Blaze had it been in the works sooner?

[0] https://github.com/tildeio/htmlbars/blob/master/ARCHITECTURE...

cookrnon GNU Guile 2.0.10

Fancy[0] is one of the most mature languages on the VM other than Ruby I believe.

[0] https://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy

cookrnon Ask HN: What under $100 item would you recommend everyone buy?

http://tiamat.tsotech.com/4k-is-for-programmers

That author has some interesting thoughts on 4k in general as well as the Seiki brand.

cookrnon Breue – The Screening Room for Products

Is this similar to ProductHunt, in a way?

cookrnon GNU Guile 2.0.10

I'm hopeful for Rubinius w/r/t a long-term viable polyglot VM. It has _lots_ of languages built for it but Ruby is still its most popular and mature as far as I know.

http://rubini.us/

cookrnon Seamlessly Buy with Bitcoin using Zinc

Curious how Target/Walmart would feel about that. Do you have any initial feedback? Like sibling comment from aarondf, I would also be confused as a customer.

cookrnon Engineer's Guide to US Visas

I mentioned this treaty in another comment, but are the advantages of the E-2 similar in nature for non-Americans to the those afforded to Americans by the DAFT[1]? Is the E-2 only applicable for citizens of countries that have a specific treaty in place?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT_(treaty)

cookrnon Engineer's Guide to US Visas

An interesting option for Americans looking to move to the Netherlands (or their territories) is the Dutch-American Friendship Treaty

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT_(treaty)

cookrnon Auroracoin: Cryptocurrency for every Icelandic resident

Who is behind Auroracoin? Do they communicate with other Icelandic cryptocurrency enthusiasts?

cookrnon Atom: Now with pair programming

If you add your email to your HN profile, or at least a hint to it, I can send you one. Or you can email me. (See my profile.)

EDIT: all out :(