Hacker News Reader

jwpeddleon Amazon Sales Take a Hit in States With Online Tax

Best Buy, the place where I had to literally explain to three employees six times that I did not want an extended warranty on my television? I'll pass.

jwpeddleon Blue Eyes Logic Puzzle

Not sure what you're refering to by "count" here. There's nothing to count. What matters is everybody coming into the knowledge that everybody knows at least one person has blue eyes. This takes a prompt about that, which is the foreigner's speech. If the foreigner doesn't cause them to start sorting themselves into blue eyes/not blue eyes groups, there's no basis for them to start deducing anything.

jwpeddleon Blue Eyes Logic Puzzle

No information is added, it just gives all islanders a synchronized reference point to sort themselves into groups. It's the synchronization that matters, not the info itself, per se. Once they all start sorting themselves on the same day (and KNOW that all other residents are doing the same) they start the countdown to day 100.

jwpeddleon Blue Eyes Logic Puzzle

They won't, because they only know that everybody else has brown eyes. They do not know if they themselves have brown/pink/green/purple eyes. They only know they don't have blue eyes.

jwpeddleon Ask HN: Have you remapped the Caps Lock key? [Poll]

I used to think that, but I've found there's way more to gain with Ctrl and using ctrl+[ instead of escape (or imap jj <Esc>)

jwpeddleon Why are software development estimates regularly off by a factor of 2-3?

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

jwpeddleon Steam Controller

no trackball has more than 300DPI

My 1600DPI L-Trac disagrees.

jwpeddleon Color blind accessibility on Bootstrap

My eyes are pretty messed up. Red and green look the same and I can't definitively tell dark blue from grey from purple. However I have no trouble with the default bootstrap buttons.

That said, I find the most helpful thing people can do is add icons or other effects completely different from colors. Because of my difficulty with colors, even ones I can "see" I have to concentrate on. Icons let me skip that.

jwpeddleon Poll: What Internet slang are you most annoyed by?

The only thing that drives me irrationally bonkers is the increasing use of "loosing" instead of "losing", even here on HN (https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=loosing). Mostly because I cannot comprehend how anyone can not know how to spell "losing". However, this isn't slang.

jwpeddleon Oculus Rift Will Change Your Gaming World

Maybe even closer than you think. We've already done simulated tactile feedback in monkeys! http://io9.com/5846275/biotech-breakthrough-monkeys-can-feel...

jwpeddleon Show HN: IRCRelay - Hosted IRC Bouncer Service

I love the idea of this, but the benefit doesn't outweigh the cost when I can get a VPS for less.

EDIT: that said, I do normally only use 2 networks, and I'm fine with the first tier cost. It's just those occasional times I need to connect to a third network. Also I'm not sure how much 10000 messages is, but I imagine idling in a freenode channel could tear through that pretty quickly.

jwpeddleon Common Pitfalls with Django and South

I've seen a couple of articles that have suggested both "don't use the orm" and "load fixtures using loaddata in your datamigration". These things contradict each other. loaddata uses your models, which will be potentially out of date. We have had to manually load up the fixture using json.loads, then create the model instances using orm.Foo and setattr.

Also, not a great solution, but we monkeypatched south to simply use the number in the file name, ie 0001.py. This way if two developers try to commit a migration, they cause a conflict, and we can fix it then instead of finding out later. It makes the filename less friendly, but we usually use grep/ack to find a migration anyways.

jwpeddleon Show HN: Pvsh - A reverse Kickstarter (make feature requests for any product)

For everyone criticizing the app name, you are aware that domain names are a finite resource that cost very little to sit on forever, right? Often naming your company comes down to what memorable domain name you can snag, even if you have to commit a spelling/grammar crime to get it.

jwpeddleon Use Adwords to find the best title for your Hacker News post

I think you underestimate how much attention HN can get you and overestimate the effort of doing what they did here. Seems like a great time investment to me.

jwpeddleon Interactive film built with Three.js and WebGL

Is there some reason you think your browser of choice would bother to implement new technologies if people weren't taking advantage of them on other platforms? This comment doesn't need to be posted every time a bleeding edge demo gets posted on HN.

jwpeddleon Google Nexus 4 goes on sale in US/Canada

There's a temp charge on my credit card, but nothing in Google Wallet, and I never managed to see the confirmation page. Crossing my fingers.

EDIT: about 20 minutes later it showed up in Google Wallet as pending. There is hope!

jwpeddleon Python for Humans

I'm not sure why you feel this niche requirement requires three question marks. The point of modules like this is to make it easier to do the tasks that 95% of developers are likely to need to do regularly, at the cost of not covering all rare use cases.

jwpeddleon Python for Humans

Also there- loved it. I think the key is what he said about writing the readme first. Write the docs on how you'd want to use the software, then hold yourself to that API when you actually write it.

jwpeddleon Python for Humans

Some feedback from reading this page:

  - Why is your example logger named d? It might seem nitpicky but it's hard
    to read an example with a meaningless single character variable.
  - "d.close() # stop logging" - what is this? What does it mean to "stop
    logging" and why do I want to?
  - "Add a coroutine" - I would wager the lay Python developer doesn't even
    know what this word means.
  - lggr.Lggr() - Why not just name the class Logger?
  - The default format variables are inconsistent about when words are
    separated with an underscore.
  - I can't make sense of the example logging calls. In one you pass a 
    dictionary as the second argument, in another you pass three strings as
    separate arguments. Why would anyone pass a message like this instead of
    just using standard string formatting? Especially when there's other
    legit arguments like extra. It's not even really clear why you'd want to
    pass something in extra instead of in the message.

I fully support your goal, but at a glance this seems like a confusing alternative to logging.

EDIT: hot dang it's hard to format a bulleted list on HN

jwpeddleon Python for Humans

It was reposted today because he gave the talk again this morning at Pycon Canada, I suspect.

jwpeddleon Uses for cURL

I prefer HTTPie because after years of using curl, I still have to Google simple use cases. HTTPie has a very simple a intuitive api.

jwpeddleon MMO in loving tribute to xkcd-1110

Probably the 1000th person to name themselves "import antigravity", but I'm still giggling about it.

jwpeddleon Facebook Users Report Seeing Old Private Messages Showing Up On Timelines

It's no coincidence that people that have tried to verify this by comparing to email notifications have posted as much, and people that have "confirmed" based on memory have yet to do so and post the result of their verification.

Do not trust your memory. Do not trust your assumptions. Just because this is plausible and everyone is claiming to be affected by it is not proof that it is in any way true. Check your notifications and find real evidence.

No one in here has even claimed to have confirmed this with email, let alone posted any evidence.

jwpeddleon Facebook Users Report Seeing Old Private Messages Showing Up On Timelines

They aren't confirming anything. People are looking at wallposts and thinking/remembering they are private messages, but everyone that has tried to verify using email notifications has found only wallposts. Until someone shows that a verifiable private message showed up publicly, than there's no reason to continue spreading this. If it's a problem, it can easily be confirmed. Even Techcrunch, who criticised Facebook's response have now backpedaled.

jwpeddleon Swedish rape warrant for Wikileaks' Assange cancelled

Or not? I'm confused. Why did they tweet this?

jwpeddleon Swedish rape warrant for Wikileaks' Assange cancelled

The article was posted in 2010, but the headline changed and bold text were added in the past two hours.

jwpeddleon Family trees: Tracing the world's ancestor

At the risk of downvotes, religion used as anything other than philosophy is bad science. Even if there was/is a creator, it can't be "magic". Science doesn't allow for magic.

jwpeddleon Vim - Putting arrows to use

I map left/right to next/previous tab, and up/down to next/previous buffer, since if I switch files my hand is often coming from the mouse and the arrows are along the way.

jwpeddleon Pair (YC W12) is a Path for the Two of Us

Agreed. I scrolled past it and actually thought "oh, must not be indexed yet"

jwpeddleon Chrome: plz fix security hole that has been around too long

I can understand why people would still want this fixed, but if you have saved passwords, someone can reveal them in any browser using just javascript (for example: http://blog.amwmedia.com/post/3043988338/reveal-hidden-passw...).

If you're concerned about other users stealing your passwords, don't let them use your profile at all.