Hacker News Reader

jwardon Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects?

This functionality already exists! It was one of my first times futzing with javascript so it's slow and clunky and could be done a lot better.

http://www.imageboard.net/921/slideshow/

jwardon Food for thought - Eat your way to a better brain

I took a nutrition class through an accredited correspondence school for a science credit. If you look around you should be able to find a school near you teaching the classes. Most of them suggest or require high school biology and chemistry and give you a nice background without marketing bs tossed in.

jwardon ASCII Pronunciation Rules for Programmers

{ } have always been chicken lips to me. Everyone I've said that too has understood and although I may have gotten some strange looks, I've never been corrected.

jwardon How Crocs Rakes in Revenues From Ugly Shoes

Non smelly? Have you ever been in a croc store? I went in with a few girls and I had to leave. The overwhelming stench of plastic fumes was making me gag. I felt physically ill just being in their store. I've worked on drilling rigs that smelled less chemically.

Hopefully it's less horrid than your hockey stuff is right now and is a positive trade ;)

jwardon My New Instant Karma Plan

You need to play more MMORPG's. It's amazing how much people care about integers in databases going up.

jwardon $1 Bus with WiFi, Beats $4 Gas

I love Red Arrow. I just wish it hit Lethbridge as well.

jwardon This is what your customers think of asking for their email password

For me it's not about finding the information by typing in a URL. It's more about scanning and having a clue what I'm going to see by the url I'm clicking on. A giant random number really has no meaning or value in this context.

jwardon Is EF the New IQ?

I'm much the same way. For me it was the classes I didn't like that I did poorly in, like marketing. The less interesting it is going in the worse I do.

jwardon Why you shoud never use your favorite password on News.YCombinator.com

A hash is a one way thing so you can't reverse it. However, if they have that much access it'd be trivial to just change your script to dump the username/password combo into a plain text file whenever the login succeeds.

jwardon Ask YC: How do you keep your place cool in hot weather?

I spent a summer working in a kitchen without AC. The trick I learned to survive it is to get two dish towels and soak them in water. Wring them mostly out and put them in the freezer. Wait a few hours and take one out and wrap it around your neck. The blood flowing through your neck cools down and cools your entire body very well. The reason for two is to alternate throughout the day.

jwardon Ask YC: Have you built a good website that nobody visits?

No real idea of where to take it from here. We have a few ideas that break from the theme of no text, such as tagging and a reddit style interface, and improved ways for the community to segregate out the flock of penises.

We did the bulk of it as a 48 hour coding competition with the theme of 'antitext'. I wanted to make something in Django, and my roommate wanted to make something in flash. So from the start there was no real direction aside from the neatness factor and wanting to see if we could pull it off.

Any suggestions would be appreciated :D

jwardon Ask YC: Have you built a good website that nobody visits?

http://www.imageboard.net/top/

A forum designed without the use of text using just images to communicate with a built in editor and voting tools. Roommate and I made it as a toy for a programming competition, so we weren't expecting grand things. It got grabbed by the 4chan crowd so... uh... yeah. I linked to the best ones for a reason ;)

jwardon Tell YC: Answers from John McCarthy

Basically he's saying that 'quantum mechanics' is the scientific substitute for 'magic'. Most people know jack about it, just that it's really hard and explains weird things.

jwardon Ask YC: What should I ask John McCarthy?

My guess would be through some sort of computer club / group. I got to meet Ken Thompson because he was visiting the university I worked at and the unix users group on campus convinced him to stop by. Join up these sorts of groups, get on mailing lists, ask around.

jwardon Ask YC: Should computer books contain intentional technical errors to keep the reader's attention?

This works great in a classroom because a prof is more interactive than a book. You can't shout 'Bullshit!' at a book and have it do anything other than inanimately mock you with its indifference. This is why I believe the idea of adding intentional flaws to reference / learning books is horrid.

jwardon Ask YC: Do you plan on becoming a space tourist if you make it big?

To be perfectly honest... this is one of the two selfish reasons I want money. To touch the sky is even a goal that seems reasonable in this day and age and I know that if I work hard I will see it happen.

jwardon Ask YC: How do you lose weight?

I've dropped 60lbs over the last year and over half of that was within the first two months. All I did was be mindful of my weight and convince myself that losing it was important. From there I just stopped eating as much crap and bought an exercise bike and made a simple rule. If I'm not watching tv / movies with friends, I'm on my bike.

As a note of interest, if you do nothing but watch all the star trek episodes and ride an exercise bike with minimal effort you will end up burning over 50 fat-lbs worth of calories. I still haven't made it through the first series I picked yet ;)

jwardon Ask YC: Any hackers here ever in an online coding competition?

Ditto with pyweek and also LD48.

jwardon Ask YC: Do you watch TV?

I fully agree on this point. Also, I really don't like our culture. I think the two are strongly correlated. I really don't want to be told what to think, what to buy, who to like, where to go, what to do, and why worry when I can just take a pill for that with possible sexual side effects talk to your doctor.

I download specific tv shows to watch but for the most part, I ignore it. I find whenever I'm at someones place and they have a tv on, my brain just fully shuts down and I sort of drool out of the corner of my mouth.

jwardon Ask YC: Is the lack of comments on most submissions a sign of declining quality?

You weren't around last time applications opened for YC, were you? ;) The entire site seems to sort of shut down. Submissions drop off, commenting becomes practically non existent. The silence is very surreal.

jwardon Applications now open for summer 2008 YC funding cycle

I wonder how well it'd go over to attend a 4 month long entrepreneurship seminar in Boston. I also wonder how they define 'working in the US'. If my start up is incorporated in Canada, can they stop me from working on it while I'm visiting the US?

jwardon Anywhere.FM acquired by imeem

Way to go :D

jwardon The 247 lb. Vegan

Speaking as someone who cooks a lot for himself and is very interested in nutrition and proper diet, I have no idea why you're even asking this. Nutrition wise, vegans who play it smart are just as if not more healthy than the rest of us. Finance wise it's often cheaper because lets face it, meat is expensive. Time wise it's no different than any other type of meal preparation, which I believe studies have shown is actually faster than waiting for delivery or going out and ordering at a restraunt.

The fact is that it shows a level of dedication above and beyond what normal people exert. I'd say that puts them well in the running for a startup.

jwardon Ask News.YC: What are you doing this saturday night?

Birthday party at a pub until 4am. Much drinking and delight.

jwardon Ask YC: What music do you listen to when programming?

I'm exactly the same way but I've found that sighs j-pop fits in this as well. If I can't understand the words then it doesn't break my flow. German techno also seems to work.

jwardon Erlang: What the Cool Kids Are Doing

It's sad. After coding in Haskell and Erlang I moved back to Python for a project and my code was just littered with extra variables. I had become so used to the functional way that varying variables just seemed so wrong and foreign.

jwardon I Despise Facebook...

One of their first investments was into time travel technologies. It's the CIA, they can do that.

jwardon How do you prevent factions from taking control of a community-driven site?

This isn't an easy problem. One thing you could do is mod the moderators. Have each persons vote count a certain amount. People who report true spam you bump up, and people who are abusive get bumped down, perhaps to the point where their opinion doesn't matter. Then require a minimum threshold before you have to deal with it. Also have this ranked against the up votes and popularity.

On imageboard.net we have it setup so more than one person has to mod something down to hide it. It still doesn't work that great, but it's better than nothing.

jwardon Holding a program in one's head

I'm pretty sure what you described is what he meant by brevity. It's not about writing less code per say. It's about adding layers of abstraction, which classes are, to shrink the problem space.

Comparing python to assembly, python has basically added in another level of abstraction. It's easier to translate a concept into python because of this. A good hacker can build up these abstractions himself no matter the language, but it's just easier and nicer to use a language that has the type of abstractions you'll be using already built in.

Once you fully trust your classes then they become like DSLs and you build your program out of them rather than the raw bits of whatever language you're using.

jwardon Is anyone making something women want?

I was on a first date the other week and was explaining some of my ideas and the lady I was with nearly wet herself with excitement telling me about a webapp she'd love to have. After thinking about it and asking a few other women I know, I'm going to start working on it and apply to YC with it.

Most every idea I came up with seems like someone else has already done. This one... I spent two days searching and found nothing comparable.