Hacker News Reader

jexeon Kim Ung-yong: The man with the highest IQ

After a certain IQ, I think it's 120, the rest is about emotional maturity and how deeply your understanding goes.

It would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of people like this. He may not be the largest "producer" or whatever your personal metric for being successful is, but even solving a small problem that you or I won't ever be able to will have a unique, lasting, permanent effect on the world.

jexeon [dead]

What makes you say that geeks are not desirable - and could never be?

jexeon Ask HN: Where's the outrage?

I am way too excited about the possibilities to be outraged that I'll have some interesting work to do.

jexeon ITunes update screws text. Official solution: remove all your third-party fonts

I suppose "your" prone to these imprecisions as well? ;)

jexeon XKCD Explained, One Strip at a Time

This guy is writing a blog explaining the comic XKCD using a dry, faintly sarcastic tone.

Note: He seems to have issues with XKCD's apparent feminist slant.

jexeon WebMynd (YC 08) launches RedesignGoogle Contest.

Impressed more with their ability to get the word out about the stunt than the stunt itself.

jexeon From Nothing To Something. How To Get There.

Hopefully he'll get there. Anyway, it's a good place to start a series - essentially, how to start.

Maybe it's not a typical symptom in the HN community as much, but in general, I really hear a lot of people working on startups from the outside in: high concept, powerpoints, spreadsheets, raising money, legal nonsense, THEN finding someone to build their idea.

It's good to be reminded occasionally to just build the product when you're getting started.

jexeon 6 Awesome Apps Begging to Be Developed

I believe you, but do you have something(s) in mind?

jexeon GraffitiGeo shows first augmented reality app for restaurant recommendations

Not exactly the first - Zagat released one a couple months ago: http://www.zagat.com/Discuss/ForumPosts.aspx?SNP=NFZE&TI...

Albeit a slightly different variety of AR (using the compass and GPS, but no camera. Still fun). Perhaps there are others?

jexeon Forget Starbucks, work at the library instead

If you're trying to get some work done in Manhattan, give up trying to find a cafe with a seat, and hit the Rose Reading Room at the NYPL. Free wifi, lots of outlets, and it's freakin dramatically gorgeous.

http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/grd/rosemain.html

jexeon Phil Schiller Responds to App Store Dictionary Censoring

Hey, look at that! Tried it and it works. Thanks for the correction.

jexeon Phil Schiller Responds to App Store Dictionary Censoring

Well for one thing, Apple does not let you give out promo codes for 17+ apps, which is a big handicap for promotion of your work.

Similarly, I wrote the Jishobot app and had to change its rating up to 17+. I'm calling bullshit on Phil Schiller's response. Am I allowed to say that?

jexeon Apple now censoring dictionaries in the App Store

All that this really doing is diluting their own censorship rules until they're meaningless. It's as if every movie featuring actors showing their legs above the knees was rated R.

jexeon Other Companies Should Have To Read This Internal Netflix Presentation

You know, I was hesitant to click through, assuming TechCrunch picked up another hacker's internal docs and they were slinging secret strategy around again.

But it's actually just an extraordinary layout of their culture.

jexeon Apple now censoring dictionaries in the App Store

I've got a language translation dictionary in the app store. When I tried to get an important 3.0 bugfix through, I was rejected by the same logic, until I changed the rating to 17+. Crazy thing is, you can set your app rating to "Frequent/intense profanity or crude humor", and it'll just bump the rating to 12+. Still unacceptable to Apple (presumably, at least. I asked the review team if this would be suitable, but of course heard nothing back).

So my dictionary now appears to have "Frequent/intense sexual content or nudity" because the review team tried to translate bad words.

In a moment of frustration, sent a sarcastic quip to Apple's review team about not allowing dictionaries to minors, and I'm left wondering if that knocked me into the slow queue - because it took well over a month to finally get the update approved.

jexeon Training Your Focus

Totally. More generally, setting lots of small, tight deadlines really helps force my focus, if you're a deadline-driven type maybe you might feel the same way. I ran into the term "forced efficiency" the other day and it pretty much encompasses this practice: http://gtd.marvelz.com/blog/2007/06/27/maximize-productivity...

jexeon [dead]

And, you know, there are 169 million other voters in the US, so don't bother voting because it won't make any difference.

jexeon What Went Wrong With Joost?

I don't think they had sinister or non-genuine intentions; I think they were deluded by their previous successes that this would be a clear win, and went fast into it without considering the obvious (to us now, at least). They were mistakenly trained to think that P2P was their technical-advantage hammer that they could hit every nail with.

jexeon The Better You Program, The Worse You Communicate

Some interesting points, but obviously a coder bait topic.

I'd argue that the best coders express themselves to humans and computers both pretty well: with clarity and brevity, and without introducing unnecessary new concepts. And they cover their corner cases. :)

jexeon You are the problem: the reason why so many startups don't get venture funding

VCs seem to start with whether they like you and get swept up in your vision, and work backwards from there to come up with reasons why they should or shouldn't invest. The same probably goes for any supposedly rational decision founded on human interaction.

jexeon The iPhone Crapp Store?

So RussB is looking at the summary of all these apps and declaring them crap? Sounds something like the flood of bogus app reviews in iTunes put there by people who haven't even downloaded the apps.

But he has a point - In a (somewhat) open catalog like the App Store, we as users desperately need a better filtering mechanism than the one iTunes currently has. The answer isn't to restrict app entries to someone's definition of quality or marketability, but to provide tools to make the user's decision making process simpler.

I think there's a startup opportunity in there somewhere.

jexeon Anyvite (YC Summer 08) in the Boston Thrillist

That's awesome, congrats! We were lucky enough to get Outalot onto the new york Thrillist, I agree with fallentimes - it's great exposure. We saw about 3000-4000 new visitors, many of whom were engaged enough that they even bothered to create accounts.

jexeon Yelp 'pay to play' pitch makes shops scream for help

So Yelp puts businesses up for public criticism and simultaneously try to sell advertising to those same businesses.. that puts them in a tricky spot of trying to stay fair and still make money.

The local advertising market is hot, but maybe they should be exploring other revenue ideas if they want to keep from descending to Citysearch's depths of mistrust - licensing the data they collect (like InfoUSA), data mining (like Macrosense), maybe even selling a product?

jexeon Ex-Google engineers debut 'Cuil' way to search

Could be that we're just jealous of how thoroughly the press covered their adequate-but-not-earth-shattering startup. ;)

jexeon Twitter to buy Summize.com

A lot of times, buying a company is just a fancy way to hire a bunch of good people. In this case, it would be people with good product development skills who are thinking a lot about the same problems Twitter is. Sounds like a good fit to me.

jexeon For 3G iPhone, AT&T drops rev-share model with Apple

There goes Apple's main motivation to try and prevent iPhones from being unlocked.

jexeon Five Tips For the Effective Use of PNG Images

Is pngcrush still in vogue, or is there something better these days? That tool was a huge help over the years.

http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/

jexeon Ask HN: Ethics and laws regarding scraping websites?

Definitely check the TOS of the sites you plan to scrape. Some data, in particular factual data, isn't copyrightable, but that doesn't necessarily give you the rights to automatically collect it from any place you can find it. Businesses spend a lot of money and time collecting and hosting data, so they can get pretty particular about how you're allowed to use their service.

Here's an excerpt from the yellowpages.com TOS. Without it, their company names, addresses, and phone numbers would be more or less fair game for any competitor:

"You are prohibited from data mining, scraping, crawling, or using any process or processes that send automated queries to the YELLOWPAGES.COM Web site. You may not use the YELLOWPAGES.COM Web sites to compile a collection of listings, including a competing listing product or service."

jexeon We need a Wikipedia for data

Finding high quality data is very expensive, and very well-guarded with license restrictions once you do cough up for it..

Seems like factual data will inevitably gravitate toward free, though. The sooner the better.

jexeon Who do the Y Combinator companies go to for design?

Sure: http://outalot.com

Incidentally, we did get some proposals from other, more experienced web designers, but they all looked too formulaic and, er, web-site-ey.

dkokelley may have some good points, too.. It could've gone very wrong, especially if our site interaction was much more complicated (and surely someone else will think our design is a train wreck anyway ;) ), but I'm very glad that we took a chance on it.

In the end, the key was really that we were all just seeing the vision of what we wanted the same way.

And the site's artwork was designed by: http://nish.net