Hacker News Reader

joshuahhhon Show HN: Open-source digital stylus with six degrees of freedom

Impressive work! I wonder: is the inertial tracking sufficient to cover for occasional occlusion of the markers?

joshuahhhon A Yukaghir girl writes a love letter

More details: https://books.google.com/books?id=fRqKreZFVTYC&pg=PA22&lpg=P...

joshuahhhon Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism

I am delighted to have the chance to learn what the Hacker News community thinks about capitalism.

joshuahhhon GitHub was down

Pushes are failing for me. (To one repo, at least.)

joshuahhhon To Build a Better Ballot

I am no expert on this, but Wikipedia cites four sources for the claim that "further examination of the Perot vote in the Election Night exit polls ... showed that Perot siphoned votes nearly equally among Bush and Clinton" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Perot_presidential_campai...). FiveThirtyEight put together a little doc making the same claim: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-ross-perot-myth/

joshuahhhon Visualizing How Developers Rate Their Own Programming Skills

I second the criticism of using violin plots here. A violin plot is a kernel density plot. It is designed to show a distribution at a scale much larger than variations in the data. Its raison d'etre is to smooth out and aggregate these small-scale variations.

But in this survey data, the values in the distribution are spaced far apart. The discretization is so large that the violin plots show meaningless and weirdly inconsistent curves between x-values which actually have data. A bar plot would be much clearer.

OP, I think you have done a fine job of styling your plots tastefully. But I recommend taking another look at the visual language you have chosen to communicate the data.

joshuahhhon Career Advice from Scott Adams (2007)

http://comicsalliance.com/scott-adams-plannedchaos-sockpuppe...

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/102881515756/planned-chaos

joshuahhhon Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Aren’t Certain

Pulling data from prediction markets into Guesstimate is an exciting idea. A few thoughts:

* Prediction markets are usually for binary outcomes. I imagine the most useful role of binary variables in Guesstimate would be to mix two different distributions. "If Clinton wins, student debt in 2018 will look like distribution A; if Sanders wins, student debt in 2018 will look like distribution B".

* I'm not sure how Augur (or any other market) reports likelihoods, but it's good to keep in mind that market prices do NOT generally reflect any sort of average belief. See https://www.aeaweb.org/assa/2006/0106_1015_0703.pdf.

joshuahhhon Gallery of Concept Visualization

Thanks for the link!

FWIW, part of what I am trying to do with this gallery is show the power of images to illustrate /concepts/ (or ideas, or systems, or models, ...), rather than just /data/. There is a lot of overlap between "concept viz" and "data viz", in both topics and methods of presentation. But I still think there is a difference worth pointing out, especially since "concept viz" is a lot trickier and less developed.

joshuahhhon San Francisco's Drug Geography

I am impressed by how quickly the notebook goes from raw data to interesting patterns. Nice.

If I wanted to be picky about statistics (I generally do), I'd note:

1. Equating enforcement-related statistics with usage-related statistics is a dangerous thing to do. For example:

a. The rate of non-CRACK incidents in TENDERLOIN is probably low (disproportionate with actual use) due to the focus limited police resources put on crack.

b. I would bet that the high rate of WEED incidents in INGLESIDE / BAYVIEW vs, say, MISSION, is due to police using weed enforcement as a weapon against gangs (and minorities). I mean, people smoke a lot of weed in the Mission.

2. Putting "AMPHETAMINE"-related crimes under "METH" is inaccurate, as is putting "OPIUM"/"OPIATE"-related crimes under "HALLUCINOGENIC".

joshuahhhon Research into psychedelics, shut down for decades, is yielding results

I'm surprised (and disheartened) to hear that psychedelics served as your gateway into harmful drug use. Can you tell a bit more about the role psychedelics played?

joshuahhhon Show HN: JS library to make your website instant

That article says nothing about preloading pages. The speed gains are purely a UI thing -- if you're clever about keeping submenus open even when the mouse leaves the submenu's entry in the main menu, you don't need to provide a delay for menu opening/closing.

joshuahhhon Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers

Wow -- you've described my situation to a T. Except that you decided to do something about it.

I'm looking forward to trying this site and seeing if it works for me. Thanks!

joshuahhhon Lenticular.js - tilt-controlled images

I think you're trying to say something like "as long as developers are primarily men, marketing to developers means marketing to men". I see logic in that. But what you're leaving out is that the lack of women in tech fields is a serious problem, and it's a problem that is reinforced every time you do something that assumes a developer must be a man. So, whether or not this kind of demo is effective, I think it's destructive and irresponsible, in a small way.

(Besides, I find sex in advertising to be distasteful and kind of insulting. I expect it on TV, but I'd hope that the small community we have here would be a bit less base.)

joshuahhhon Lenticular.js - tilt-controlled images

As much as I personally enjoy the demo the creator chose for the main page, I wonder whether said creator could have found a "flo-mo" view of something captivating for reasons other than "this chick is hot". (There's a really unpleasant history of the male gaze being squeezed into tech demos -- I don't think we need to do that anymore.)

joshuahhhon Numeric Pareidolia and Vortex Math

It's actually quite useful to have talks like this spreading across the Net. They act like chemical tracers, flowing through the memetic channels of crackpottery -- once a blog picks one up, you know immediately who you can ignore.

joshuahhhon Museum of Endangered Sounds

Not gonna lie; the MindMaze theme brought me back in a powerful way.

joshuahhhon Sad, Tired, and Alone: My Ongoing Battle With Startup Depression

I am sympathetic both to your comment, and those replying to it. I think what this suggests is that modern psychiatry does not have a rich enough understanding of the enormous variety of mood disorders involving depressed states. If it did, we'd probably have less confusing names for them.

joshuahhhon Visualization of U.S presidents' approval ratings

This appears to be totally broken in Firefox (9.0.1, on Linux)... don't know what's up with that.