Hacker News Reader

fooandbarifyon Expired patent of the day: Lego

I'm sure most or all HN users would agree that the current patent system is broken. However, as is mentioned in the article and as semanticist pointed out, Lego was able to get a patent on an "obvious" idea, and so was Apple. In other words, a similar argument did apply.

fooandbarifyon American college kid joins Libya rebels for 'vacation'

I think I agree with you, although I feel like characterising this as a "vacation" is unfortunate.

fooandbarifyon Understanding JavaScript function invocation and "this"

I don't know why your comment was downvoted - I found your link interesting, if very basic. Certainly a well-written primer and it contains a decent introduction to "this".

fooandbarifyon Social anxiety is crippling my life, what can I do to stop it?

I am obviously not mitsche, but this is my experience:

I think it obviously depends on people's personal situations and circumstance. Anxiety in particular often presents in an almost paralyzing manner - being accountable to a therapist in that case is extremely valuable. It's also easy to dismiss certain ideas when reading them that a real live therapist won't let you ignore so easily - for example, I learned breathing and focus exercises that I would have felt silly trying if it weren't for my therapist. Possibly most importantly, a good therapist will understand your condition better than you do, and advise you accordingly. Not all anxiety disorders have the same cause or the same symptoms.

As far as payment goes, there are often cheap or free resources for therapy, especially for university students. For example, I made use of a free clinic run by my school's psychology department, which is open to the public.

fooandbarifyon Social anxiety is crippling my life, what can I do to stop it?

This is one case where seeing the number of upvotes would be valuable. There is a lot of (very well-intentioned) advice on this thread that it gets better with time, etc and while that is probably true, parent's comment is right on the money. Therapy can feel like a weird step to take but it really does work. Cognitive behavioural therapy and exposure therapy helped me deal with my anxiety much more effectively than I ever would have been able to on my own.

fooandbarifyon DuckDuckGo and Wolfram Alpha are now official partners

Agreed. My first search will be how to switch the default search engine in Safari...

fooandbarifyon Alcohol and Its Effects on Learning

In my well-tested experience, there is a fine line between having fun and making an ass of yourself. The correlation between showing up to class wasted and making an ass of yourself is (again, in my own intimate experience) too large to ignore.

Don't get me wrong, I like to drink a lot. And I don't look down on others who drink a lot. I certainly don't think they're dumb. But I do think promoting/encouraging/bragging about it is generally kind of silly, especially when alcoholism is a serious problem that destroys lives.

fooandbarifyon Alcohol and Its Effects on Learning

I don't see how the two (excelling at language acquisition due to lowered social inhibition vs evolving to excel at language acquisition early in life) are mutually exclusive.

fooandbarifyon Dressed for Success

I actually like the design, fwiw.

fooandbarifyon JQuery Events: Stop (Mis)Using Return False

One counterargument might be that it is unhelpful to prevent default event behaviour depending on its type or target. Events normally bubble - that is the expected behaviour. Clicks are just another event.

In life, rules need exceptions. In programming, it is usually nicer when there are as few as possible.

EDIT: If you desire to preventDefault on multiple handlers and you don't want to type it out every time you can simply add a line like

  $("a").click(function(e){e.preventDefault()});

to your document and stop click event bubbling for every link.

fooandbarifyon Could Twitter be "MySpaced"?

While that approach obviously worked for Facebook, I think this is one of those areas where it's hard to pin down a "formula" that will work in every case without eventually having it be proven wrong in a big way. In this case, for example, it is conceivable (although maybe unlikely) that another major player such as Google or Facebook could disrupt Twitter by starting big. In other words, rather than targeting a niche until they gain mass, they could somehow leverage their existing mass to get ahead.

fooandbarifyon Could Twitter be "MySpaced"?

Sure. Facebook could be "MySpaced", too. The whole point of what happened to MySpace is that it was hard to figure out what it would take to disrupt them until it happened.

fooandbarifyon Ask HN: What are your side projects?

Absolutely awesome. Have fun!

In a similar vein, I'm riding my bike across Canada this summer: http://bybike.ca/

fooandbarifyon Is Tumblr the new WordPress?

I have never known a time where Wordpress was not way more bloated than Tumblr is now, and I've been using Wordpress for about 5 years. That being said, the comparison is only valid when comparing them as services - as far as I know, Tumblr is not available as a platform to use on your own server. (That sucks, because the Tumblr service is extremely unreliable.) As services, though, Tumblr is way more fun to write on.

fooandbarifyon Does Facebook Make Businesses Any Money?

It is obvious that Facebook makes some businesses lots of money (see: Zynga). It would be more interesting to know who is making money, and what their business models look like.

fooandbarifyon Ask HN: About To Finish High School, What Next?

If you really have the itch, my vote is to take a year and go all-out entrepreneur. I'm on the far side of an electrical engineering degree and by the end of it an extra year one way or the other makes no difference, but the amount of experience to be gained from just one year of trying to run a business is invaluable. If school is a priority for you, set a benchmark for yourself so that you are not tempted to drag along a failing business for years instead of going to school.

If you don't have access to a good network of hackers (to be a part of your team and to go to for advice), ignore what I just said. Go to school - a CS degree is probably the best way for a young person to build up a network of programmers.

fooandbarifyon To Figure Out Google’s Priorities, Just Look At Team Larry

It's not necessarily true that the person who created the content will share the link. Even if they do, if they are far removed from my social network then the only way I will find that content is still by searching for it.

fooandbarifyon HN: How do I know if I have a worthy idea to implement?

Talk to the people for whom you think this will solve a problem

If you don't know who those people are or how to find them then it doesn't matter whether or not you implement your idea. I know that this isn't always easy, but finding your target market and communicating with them before you write a line of code is extremely valuable. For certain niches this can be accomplished by posting on forums, other times it involves physically visiting a place.

fooandbarifyon Georgify: Hacker News meets beautiful typography

I hate to be "that guy" but are downvotes really warranted here? Wouldn't it be sufficient to provide a correction?

fooandbarifyon Ask HN: PHP to RoR, dreamhost to what?

It's worth noting that you can run Rails on Dreamhost. Don't really remember the details (I'm a Python guy, and it's been a while since I used Dreamhost) but it's probably searchable and if not, I'm sure customer service can help you. Dreamhost may not be the right choice for a heavy-load web application, but it is probably an excellent place to get your feet wet.

fooandbarifyon Ask HN: Depression, Loss of Motivation, Feeling Lost. Please Help

This is what I came here to say. OP, I've been in your shoes. In fact, I'm not entirely out of them. But talking to an unbiased third party, especially a professional who has experience helping people, is invaluable. I have had good luck finding (free!) help through my school - if your school or one in your area has a clinical psychology program, they will offer free counselling.

Talking to a doctor might also be a good idea, but if that is too big of a step for you right now just make an appointment with a shrink.

fooandbarifyon Quadrocopters juggle balls cooperatively

[EDITED:] Your condescending tone is unhelpful.

fooandbarifyon Ask HN: Are you working on any side projects that make "small/passive" income?

My most profitable side project actually plays in an extremely competitive space but I usually stay quiet about it because it's boring, extremely uncool, and borders on sleazy. Anyways, I wrote it in a weekend and it makes me about $400/month.

fooandbarifyon Groupon CEO: We Placed Too Much Trust in Agency for Super Bowl Ads

They succeeded in starting conversations, which is clever advertising.

Still, I think Groupon ends up on the wrong side of the controversy here - the ad just makes them look kind of insensitive or ignorant/ambivalent towards an issue many people feel strongly about. I'm curious whether the net effect of the extra publicity generated by the controversy outweighs the negative backlash.

fooandbarifyon AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA

I think it's reasonable to assume that every North American (and European, etc) carrier does this, so quitting AT&T won't help much. I'm sure there are many other good reasons to leave them, though.

fooandbarifyon Subject: Airbnb

One huge difference is that couchsurfing is free... do some chores around the place maybe to be nice, but the whole point is sharing and using each other's space for free. I think Airbnb is aiming for a different market, actually - for example, my parents would feel "weird" about crashing on a stranger's couch but booking a quaint and unique little bed and breakfast over the internet makes them feel cool. Conversely, I would feel bad about charging somebody to stay in my disgusting apartment but I'll happily host somebody just passing through.

fooandbarifyon The pi is a lie… Happy Half Tau Day!

Ahh yes, of course. My apologies!

fooandbarifyon The pi is a lie… Happy Half Tau Day!

Danger being, of course, that sin(1/4) != 1.

(sin(0.25) = 0.247403959)

fooandbarifyon Ask HN: What would you like to see in Ubuntu 11.10, Oneiric Ocelot?

I suspect this is a complicated issue, but my biggest gripe with installation has always been related to third-party drivers. It would be cool if there was some way to bundle wireless card drivers with the install CD/USB stick, for example. (Was recently setting up a machine where wired internet was not readily available - I know that's sort of an edge case.) I know that problems related to the drivers themselves are out of your hands, but making it even easier to track down and install the right drivers would be a step in the right direction.

As was mentioned over at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2321584 power management needs a lot of work.

Nevertheless, I'm eternally grateful for the excellent work you guys are doing over there. Please keep it up!

fooandbarifyon A musician tells his story of switching from Mac to Ubuntu

Exactly. On top of that, popular DAWs have significant eco-systems built up around them - it isn't unusual for professional users to have hundreds or even thousands of dollars invested in plugins, making it more difficult to jump ship.