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fooandbarifyon The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit

See the guidelines [1]. One could argue that it "gratifies intellectual curiosity", and it is certainly "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon" (for varying values of new; it is nevertheless interesting new evidence).

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

fooandbarifyon Facebook 'likes' and adverts' value doubted

Like all things Facebook I'm sure it wasn't always this way (and won't always be), but these days you can claim any Facebook URL you want for a new page if it isn't already taken, regardless of "Likes".

fooandbarifyon The total price of the Digg acquisition was around $16 million

Facebook's "Like" is surprisingly new; I found a Mashable article[0] from the day it was released in April 2010. Digg, on the other hand, is surprisingly old[1].

[0] http://mashable.com/2010/04/21/facebook-f8-2/

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg

fooandbarifyon Backbone.js views done right

Is there a good rule of thumb as to what constitutes a "large number" of Views? I tend to assign Views to Models rather than Collections, partly because I hate storing Model ids as DOM attributes and extracting them in event handlers (as in the grandparent comment). I've gotten away with several hundred Views on a page before, but that doesn't feel quite right either.

fooandbarifyon Show HN: We launched Pinstagram for iPad

Cross-domain POST is not possible with all browsers (I presume IE is the main culprit, as usual).

fooandbarifyon Show HN: discuss.io - Get feedback on your designs with visual annotations

This is fantastic. Great, simple idea, and looks well executed. I can't wait to have a reason to use it.

fooandbarifyon Parse launches JavaScript SDK: Parse for Websites

I can't see it working well in a game scenario, but the vast majority of CRUD apps out there could be safely implemented using Parse's security model (as described in lacker's link).

fooandbarifyon Parse launches JavaScript SDK: Parse for Websites

Presumably it is exactly the same as in any other web application--the save method is using an HTTP request under the covers, which must be rejected if the user is not authorized to perform that action.

fooandbarifyon If You Have A Smartphone, Anyone Can Now Track Your Every Move

I built an almost identical system this past year as my EE capstone project. The accuracy of these systems is limited by environmental factors (large metal structural/aesthetic features of a building) which can be corrected to a certain extent, but it would still be trivial to avoid being tracked by using a directional antenna.

fooandbarifyon YC Demo Day Session 5: Hackpad, FamilyLeaf, Ark, Chute, 99dresses

You're not the target demographic. Vintage clothing is a huge market.

fooandbarifyon YC W12 messaging - PlanGrid, medigram, Zillabyte, HireArt, Flutter

Readability aside, I found this really interesting, so thank you. Marketing copy is so hard to get right.

fooandbarifyon Analytics from HN vs Techcrunch

I don't find this sort of post riveting, either, but I'm glad someone took the time to put it together. The browser stats from a technical audience are definitely interesting, as is the fact that HN now drives half the amount of traffic as TC.

fooandbarifyon Tutorial: Sending intelligent push notifications without a server

So there's still a server, it's just not mine. Or am I missing something?

fooandbarifyon Startup Recruiting and the Stanford Prison Experiment

You're not alone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment#Crit...

fooandbarifyon Startup Recruiting and the Stanford Prison Experiment

I doubt there is any objective metric for choosing "the two most famous and influential psychological experiments ever conducted" but I immediately assumed you meant Pavlov's dogs as the other.

fooandbarifyon About 33 bits

According to Wikipedia [1], numbers around 100 billion have been bandied about quite seriously, and much lower estimates have been "debunked as unscientific".

An interesting debate, regardless. I had no idea it could be so hard to calculate. At any rate, as you say, 43 bits would have humanity covered for a long, long time.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Number_of_huma...

fooandbarifyon Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill

You're right, I have no source to back that up and was making a flimsy emotional assertion. (I've edited my comment to reflect that.) I stand by the (desired) sentiment of my comment, though: psychiatry and the related sciences are important and there should be no related stigma.

fooandbarifyon Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill

I couldn't agree more. It seems that there are some who think mental illness is a crock of shit and psychiatry is witchcraft (admittedly hyperbolic but not enormously so) while there are others who believe every facet of human behaviour is diagnosable and "correctable". The truth, of course, lies somewhere in between.

fooandbarifyon Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill

I had to log in just to upvote this. Yes, diagnosing mental illness is less clear-cut than the problems we typically enjoy as programmers. Yes, mistakes are made. But for every mistake there are 9, or 99, or 999 successes (EDIT: I have no statistical reference for this assertion, please take with large grain of salt) who, as you say, feel that they owe their life to the professional(s) who helped them. I know, because I am one, and regardless of society's opinion that is no less an admission of weakness than admitting that I had chicken pox one time, and occasionally come down with the flu.

fooandbarifyon The Shy Connector

I apologize in advance for being a pedant but since you do say you find it interesting, "pas besoin" is used in the context of [subject] don't/doesn't need [noun] rather than in the sense of having "no needs" which would be written "pas de besoin".

fooandbarifyon Clear: doing for To Do lists what Dropbox did for file syncing

Document Cloud doesn't strike me as a "productivity app", at least not in the same vein as Evernote and Wunderlist (not familiar with Clear or kippt). As far as I know, it doesn't incorporate "to do" functionality at all. It's targeted at journalists and (presumably) provides real value by helping analyze, research and annotate supporting documents.

fooandbarifyon Tumblr Architecture - 15B Page Views a Month and Harder to Scale than Twitter

The UI is very similar to a Twitter dashboard (if you are familiar with that). I don't think it's possible to search for old posts in either case, and the style of the site doesn't really lend itself to that kind of use (for better or worse).

fooandbarifyon Tumblr Architecture - 15B Page Views a Month and Harder to Scale than Twitter

Yes (demographic). Although all sorts of people use tumblr, it seems to be most popular among (predominantly American) high-school age (and a bit older) teenagers. It has settled into a middle ground between Twitter and traditional blogs for a lot of these users -- single-paragraph posts or photo posts are the norm, and re-blogging is very common/encouraged.

fooandbarifyon Tumblr Architecture - 15B Page Views a Month and Harder to Scale than Twitter

I got the impression form the article that they were referring to passing through a technological gauntlet during the interview process (ie. complicated programming puzzles) rather than life experience. Is that also what you are referring to?

fooandbarifyon Tumblr Architecture - 15B Page Views a Month and Harder to Scale than Twitter

I don't think you should have been downvoted, but you certainly missed something. days != seconds

fooandbarifyon Sample App with Backbone.js and Twitter Bootstrap

I've played a bit with caching models on the client: https://github.com/napoleond/localmodel

I'm planning to implement merges at some point, but the current implementation has still proven useful to me.

fooandbarifyon Backbone patterns

Depending on the other content of the page and the nature of your traffic/user data, it might make more sense to take advantage of caching by making the initial loaded resource (the HTML file) completely static and loading the bootstrapped data in a single separate request.

fooandbarifyon Backbone.js localStorage + remote sync

This is intriguing. I've spent a bit of time building Backbone projects that sync with the server (eg. https://github.com/napoleond/localModel) but until now have always resolved conflicts by choosing the model with the most recent time modified. (I have also played a bit with using WebSockets to keep the models up to date for every concurrent user, although that was mostly just for fun.) It would be way better to actually merge diffs in an intelligent manner, though. Thanks for the link!

fooandbarifyon Backbone.js localStorage + remote sync

Very cool. I wrote something similar a while back: https://github.com/napoleond/localModel

My implementation leaves a lot to be desired with regards to re-use (there are certain project requirements which happened to be met by the project I built it for) but it does nicely manage automatic replication of the most recent version of models between server and client.

As far as I can tell, this implementation reads from the local model if it exists, otherwise it loads from the server? And writes always go to the server unless explicitly told otherwise?

fooandbarifyon IBM Patents Half-day Out of Office Notifications

Why should I spend $1M to bring something innovative to market if it can be copied instantly by a competitor?

You seem to think that WO patents, the answer is different for hardware and software. Why?

Because software companies have shown repeatedly that it's possible to bring something innovative to market for much less than $1M, and the exceptions usually occur when the innovation builds upon previously patented (and expensive to license) technology. This discourages small independent development in favour of larger companies, which is probably the crux of the problem as I see it.

Manufacturing and marketing a new physical device, on the other hand, can rarely be done for less than $1M (or rather, for applications of comparable complexity I think it is fair to say that producing a software widget will almost always involve less initial overhead than a hardware widget, especially at market scale).

That's where my assumptions come from. I know that trade secrets can't be used in every situation, and I accept that software patents may make sense in a minority of cases. I still think we'd be better off without them.

At any rate, I can see this conversation continuing for a long time, and I don't think it will accomplish anything, so this will be my last comment on the thread. Thank you though (sincerely) for your intelligent discourse.