Hacker News Reader

reminds me of "The Inner Game" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12520444

jottoon Show HN: Better SQL group by date

Here's a Ruby library (similar to his groupdate gem) I made with an SUM as an additional feature (but no timezones). MySQL and PostgreSQL support https://github.com/jotto/ar_aggregate_counter/blob/master/li...

jottoon Airbnb vs. Hotels: A Price Comparison

2 other common reasons to organize against airbnb are 1) neighborhoods don't like transient guests when their expectation was that the neighborhood were permanent residents and 2) airbnb is avoiding state taxes

http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2013/03/28/airbnbs-tax-and-tena...

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/newtechcity/blogs/new-tech-city-bl...

jottoon Ruby on Rails 4.0.0.beta1 released

does threadsafe and ruby 2.0 mean we can create multiple instances with something like unicorn without forking the entire codebase?

jottoon Semantics3 (YC W13) Is A Massive Consumer Products Database To Rule Them All

I haven't tested their data, but 1 reason why this is hard is due to the SKUs at Walmart and Best Buy. There may be a Samsung 42-inch TV that exists at Amazon, Walmart and Best Buy but have slightly modified specs for each of those mega retailers... and with this, Best Buy has a lot of SKUs that simply die. So once semantics3 has "reconciled" that samsung 42-inch TV across retailers, they'll have to continuously check whether any of the retailers have changed the SKU and/or URL on them.

source: I do this at dealzon.com for a very limited set of data where it's practical

jottoon I'm Betting on Elon

several years ago damon cali (op) told me: "startups don't sell a product, they sell a dream"

jottoon Heroku's Ugly Secret: The story of how the cloud-king turned its back on Rails

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6370479/heroku-cedar-slow... (from june 2011), the first discovery of cedar stack being slower than the bamboo stack

jottoon Windows 8 Pro upgrade to jump from $40 to $200 on Feb. 1

i used this guy's hack to get Windows 8 for $15, no official license, but hey, no prev license required either - supposedly lasts until jan 31

http://everymantech.com/post/40133879737/windows-8-for-15-no...

jottoon Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

One POSSIBLE explanation for what Facebook would use anonymous bots for: verifying the advertisement goes where the advertiser said it would go.

Facebook has problems with fraudulent or confusing advertisements. for example, iPad's being advertised for $2, but the user clicking the ad is sent to a penny auction site that bills you $100 when you sign up.... so that domain ends up getting banned, but those advertisers/spammers either create a new domain or they use a redirecting domain that redirects to a non fraudulent domain when they see an Facebook IP (in theory, the Facebook IP would mean it's an intern or Facebook bot checking the URL).

Here's an example of the penny auction crap http://www.fastcompany.com/1771099/facebook-spam-ads-damage-...

and an example of manipulating the landing page URL with a redirect http://www.larrylim.net/seo-online-marketing/facebook-ads-pr...

so maybe it's Facebook's engineers trying to verify the ads are going to the place they're intended to go, but they are obviously incorrectly counting them as billable clicks

jottoon Gandi.net will contribute $1 per inbound transfer to EFF until Jan 15th

Worth noting that Gandi is not a US company and has no telephone number to call in case you need real, live support.

jottoon 2012: The Year That Movements Go Mainstream?

Would this be considered price fixing by the surgeons? Is it even possible for a true market price to exist when insurers are involved?

jottoon Backbone.js Fundamentals

https://github.com/codebrew/backbone-rails will generate backbone scaffolding and includes JS that binds your rails model set/get to html element change events so you can go from 0 to functional and see how Backbone could work. Try a new Rails project with a basic model and generate the Backbone scaffolds for great examples to mimic in your app.

jottoon Occupying Wall Street

the "too big to fail" situation is dangerous. the banks are _correctly_ making big bets because they know it's impossible to default since the government HAS to bail them out to prevent contagion.

jottoon It’s the end of the web as we know it

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3035418

jottoon Krugman on BitCoin

in your thought experiment, the buying power of a unit of currency would go up so the prices would go down. a big reason for a non-fixed money supply is so the government has the ability to change the money supply to maximize employment

jottoon Alternatives to GoDaddy

i dropped gandi this year because they emailed me asking for 1) copy of drivers license, 2) proof of residence, and the current drivers license address must match whatever your current address is. they gave me 1 week to comply or face deletion of account. they claimed it was a regular/random check, but offered no answer to my questions other than "you must provide". i immediately transferred to name.com because they have a telephone number and they answer it. gandi does NOT have a support phone number.

jottoon What If Drivers Were Hired Like Programmers?

TED talk on this. guy calls it a "filter bubble": http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu... TL;DW: filter bubbles/group think might be bad for a functioning democracy because functioning democracies rely on good information

jottoon Facebook Ads: How to Get 1 Cent CPC (and why you might not want to)

this whole article is practically useless without data on how the incoming traffic ultimately converted on momentgarden.com. (how many sales did you generate from picture B over picture D?) just like eve online's a/b testing that led to using pictures of attractive, loosely clothed women indicates you can always increase click through rates by getting closer to porn. what good are CTRs when your traffic is more interested in the picture they clicked than the product you're selling?

jottoon Sublime Text 2: Public Alpha Released

Any thoughts on what this is written in? How is it cross platform?

jottoon Register a Business Today

this is not exactly true, there has to be a reasonable chance that this is a profitable enterprise defined both by your effort/intention and at least some profitability over a period of time. if it doesn't meet these standards, it's a hobby and you cannot deduct associated expenses. see here: http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=169490,00.html

jottoon Why asset bubbles are a part of the human condition that regulation can’t cure

The people in their study (a group of 12, "bunch of volunteers, usually undergraduates but sometimes businesspeople or graduate students") don't seem like a group that would actually understand the value of their assets despite the value being explicitly clear for purposes of this study. They should do the study with a group of 100 financial experts and see if the results are the same.

jottoon Ask HN: My startup failed. $9k in debt and need to pay most of it in 12 days.

http://www.prosper.com/ for those that dont know, it's basically peer to peer lending. investors decide how much risk they want to take on, and prosper auto allocates it among people requesting loans. you'll probably get better rate from prosper than a bank.

jottoon Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

if you're concerned with CPU performance at all, then stick with dedicated. VPS is performant, but i think you can yield a decrease of 10-30ms in pageload times from dedicated.

jottoon How long has Mahalo been using keyword domains like this?

where did you learn these details about how google's indexing algorithm works?

jottoon Twilio Launches Roll-Your-Own Google Voice

anyone know when we'll be allowed to transfer our cell phone numbers (from ATT/verizon/tmobile etc..) to skype/google voice/twilio?

jottoon LifeLock CEO’s Identity Stolen 13 Times

i guess this could serve as a kind of honeypot so the company can observe the attacks on this guy and then improve the service. but according to the FTC in this article their service doesn't work so apparently it was nothing more than a marketing stunt.

jottoon Stuff

fight club: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJdfWdIBfE8

"byproducts of a lifestyle obsession" "things you own... end up owning you" "working jobs we hate so we can buy ish we don't need"

edit: link fixed

jottoon Apple iPad's iBook rips off indie dev's creation

Let us not forget that one of the originals behind Delicious Library now works (or did work) at Apple - http://www.mikematas.com/

jottoon Performance comparison between EC2, Slicehost, Linode, Rackspace Cloud, Prgmr

they had system-wide (cross data center) downtime (as low as 1 hour, others several hours) on October 7th.

jottoon "Ruby Metaprogramming PDF Beta Book".discount(21.00, 0.40)

  String.send('define_method', :discount, lambda{ |*args| "#{self} = $#{(args.first*(1.0-args.last))} (#{args.last*100}% off)" })