Hacker News Reader

pemulison Rap Genius: Impish Ivy Leaguers Raise Millions for Internet Decoder Ring

Not to mention (potentially!) becoming the place to go to talk about articles on the Internet. This all depends on the direction they take their technology.

pemulison Rap Genius: Impish Ivy Leaguers Raise Millions for Internet Decoder Ring

I doubt they could go so far as hosting full books, but they're going to find out exactly where the line is.

pemulison Rap Genius: Impish Ivy Leaguers Raise Millions for Internet Decoder Ring

I don't know about that. A universal annotation platform that reached its full potential could basically eat the entire Internet. You can see hints of that in the founders' public interviews, when they say they want all of Business Insider's articles annotated on Rap Genius, for instance. The area is fraught with copyright concerns, and who knows if Rap Genius is the company to pull it off, but anything with that sort of growth potential is worth watching.

[Edit] Here's the most interesting quote from the Business Insider interview:

"Some books are in the public domain, like Moby Dick. Then there are some books that aren't in the public domain. And when people start to annotate these things, they create something new so people aren't just coming for the book anymore. They come for the meaning."

That would be a huge expansion of fair use. If they can make this argument successfully in court, everything ever written would suddenly be on the table, and they would be well positioned to gobble it up.

pemulison Rap Genius: Impish Ivy Leaguers Raise Millions for Internet Decoder Ring

Let me start by saying that I like Rap Genius and use it pretty frequently. They've done a great job creating an annotation system for rap lyrics, and I think that it could scale well to other genres of music and certain kinds of poetry. Their public personas may or may not hurt adoption outside of the hip-hop community, but it's too early to tell[1].

I think a bigger challenge will be overcoming the natural constraints of the format. If the goal is to become the Internet Talmud, they will need deeper levels of commentary. You can see the strain when you look at the Rap Genius page for Ben Horowitz's latest essay[2]. The annotations were split evenly between useful links, jokes (which were decent, admittedly), and fairly pointless "explanations" that just repeat what the essay said in a way that's drier and harder to understand. A better set of annotations would consist of comments from other domain experts either agreeing with Ben's conclusions and adding more evidence, or disagreeing and explaining why[3]. There could also be factual notes explaining the context (digging into the history of Opsware, for instance). But Ben's essay is written in plain language and doesn't rely on many external references, so the Spot the Allusion style of annotation doesn't really work there.

To take a couple of examples from poetry, Spot the Allusion goes a long way towards explaining poems like The Wasteland[4]. But how would Rap Genius go about annotating William Carlos Williams? Well, we can actually look and see. If you look at The Red Wheelbarrow[5], you can see the format breaking down. There is no one true exegesis of a line from that poem, but Rap Genius isn't built to handle the kind of commentary the poem needs.

I'm sure this has already crossed their minds, so I'm interested in seeing how they deal with the problem.

[1] For me, at least, it comes across as unnatural posturing and rubs me the wrong way. That's just my gut reaction. I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually led to a backlash within the rap community, too.

[2] http://rapgenius.com/B-horowitz-making-yourself-a-ceo-lyrics

[3] The comments wouldn't have to come from the experts themselves; amateurs could add links to things they've written and said elsewhere.

[4] http://rapgenius.com/Ts-eliot-the-waste-land-lyrics

[5] http://rapgenius.com/William-carlos-williams-the-red-wheelba...

pemulison Color: We Are Not Shutting Down

AppData says 460,000 active monthly users[1]. The original VentureBeat article quoted AppData at 440,000, which is where the ~400,000 number is coming from.

Edit: In reply to the grandparent, because of the huge amount of money Color raised, they would need to make something like ten thousand dollars per user at their current user numbers to meet expectations. Since that's obviously impossible, it makes sense for them to avoid revenue entirely until their user numbers hit eight digits at least.

[1] http://www.appdata.com/apps/facebook/200067376723055-color

pemulison Living in a Van

That's not the purpose of the anecdote. He was contrasting some of the negatives of his old lifestyle with the advantages of his new one. It's not an attempt to sum up himself as a person, let alone impress an employer.

pemulison Living in a Van

So we have someone who didn't play his guitar because it was in another room. And someone who spent 3 hours per day watching a sitcom on netflix. And you wonder why he is living in a van?

Watching Netflix for a few hours in a row and having an instrument you don't play as much as you should are incredibly common experiences. I don't know how you extrapolate that into some sort of mental illness or moral failure that leads to living in a van. I don't think he was literally too lazy to go to another room to play his guitar. It's just a way of saying that when you have a big house and a lot of stuff you can lose track of things you used to find important and fulfilling.

pemulison Andreessen Horowitz Invests $15M In Text Annotation Startup Rap Genius

There are incredible online annotations for novels by Thomas Pynchon[1] and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest[2], which are what I thought of first when they talked about expanding into annotating literature. The monetization potential in that area in particular is huge, looking at Cliffs Notes and the like. It's interesting that Andreessen Horowitz is investing in a company that seems to be solving the community problem rather than the technical problem of mass annotation. It seems like the technical challenges were the main hold-up back in the early 90s, but Wikipedia has shown the power and importance of community building when you're trying to create a universal reference.

[1] http://pynchonwiki.com/

[2] http://infinitejest.wallacewiki.com/david-foster-wallace/ind...

pemulison Why I Hate Tech Recruiters

The problem is that disruption generally means automation, and there's no good way to automate the developer recruitment process. To really be good, recruiters need to have enough of a technical background to understand what they're looking for and take the time to do research and personalize each pitch. Sites like Github are the most useful and potentially most disruptive recruiting tools, because they take work that used to be hidden away or scattered all over the Internet and make it public, centralized, and easily searchable. Most recruiters don't know how to use those tools effectively, though, because they can't understand the data they're looking at, and aren't good enough storytellers to make just a few pitches per day and be confident that some of them will land.

pemulison Ask HN: Who Is Hiring? (August 2012)

Location: San Francisco, CA and Portland, OR - Remote OK

iOS Developer - Full-Time

Giftr is a fast-moving, funded, pre-launch startup building a social wishlist for kids. The founder is a Silicon Valley veteran and former Apple engineer who has built several companies, resulting in two IPOs and multiple acquisitions. On our iOS development team, you will build and scale apps that solve real-world problems for millions of families and bring people closer together.

As one of our early team members, you will have a great deal of ownership over your own work and play a crucial role in the future of the company. We offer competitive salary and benefits, with generous equity, free lunches, sailing trips, and Apple gear. We’re a team with huge ambitions but a focus on concrete results and quick iteration.

If you're an iOS developer with a startup mentality and a passion for taking on challenges and building cool and useful services, send us links to some of your projects. You should be an expert in Objective-C and have apps in the App Store that we can try out. Experience with HTML5, JavaScript, animation, or Android app development is a huge plus.

pemulison The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit

What do you mean? The "terrifying background" seemed pretty clear to me -- a federal organized crime task force believed that he was involved in seven murders as a drug enforcer in Miami before becoming a contractor for the CIA.

pemulison Attack the Block’s Joe Cornish To Direct Cyberpunk Classic Snow Crash

If you explained why you found Snow Crash mediocre, this could be an interesting post. As it is, though, it essentially has no content. If you had posted it on Twitter or Facebook, it would be a little bit better, since your friends could put it in the context of what they know about you and your taste in books. As strangers on the Internet, though, what are we to take away from the fact that you found Snow Crash mediocre? Sorry for the meta post critique, and I hope you don't take this the wrong way.

pemulison Rms has his bag stolen in Argentina

The words have a specific technical meaning in this case, so it's important to use them correctly. A robbery and a simple theft are treated very differently under the law. Prescriptive grammar is the only way to go when you're dealing with a technical system built out of ordinary language, like law or programming.

pemulison Why We Don't Believe in Science

This happened to Kant. In Critique of Pure Reason, he presents Euclidean geometry as a set of incontestable, fundamental truths that human beings understand intuitively, and uses that as a launching point to argue for the existence of an ideal universe outside of our own perceptions and experience. Problem is, Euclid's parallel postulate is contradicted by observable evidence, as per general relativity. Other fundamental logical ideas about causality seem to be contradicted by experiments involving quantum mechanics. For science to work, though, we do have to take one thing on faith: That the universe can be understood through observation. Everything else, even logic, is fair game.

pemulison The futures of Facebook and Google are embedded in these two images

Make them exclusive. Only let a handful of people wear them, so that they become a social status symbol. Make them so rare that people share photos of them "in the wild" like they were pictures of celebrities. The early announcement and slow public roll-out are necessary for pragmatic reasons -- you can't test Glass in the real world if you're trying to keep it secret -- but I think it's also a brilliant marketing strategy. Right now the only people who have worn them are high-level Google folks and a handful of Friends of Google. They're living in the future, and we're living in the past. Exclusivity breeds desire. I think that's the general idea.

pemulison Peter Thiel's Rise to Wealth and Libertarian Futurism

Saying that people who disagree with you politically must be mentally ill is ignorant and obnoxious. You follow it up by saying "there's no point in clarifying it" because there's no way you could possibly defend your opinion. If you assume your political opponents are crazy, there's no need to try to understand them. They're just cold, unthinking, unfeeling robots, right? Or they're Looney Toons, they have no grounding in reality, right? If that's the case, debating them is pointless, and there's no need to consider challenges to your own viewpoint. Assuming that people who think differently are crazy is just a way to justify intellectual laziness.

And you think the problem with libertarians is that they don't have any empathy? You're brushing aside millions of people as "basically robots" and "lacking humanity" because they have different opinions than you.

pemulison William Gibson: Seeing the Future in Science Fiction

Ah, good point, I forgot about that. As a general rule, though, Card's novels aren't very quotable, and when they are, the quote is closely tied to the plot. If you didn't know how it related to Ender's development as a tactician and thinker, "The enemy's gate is down" wouldn't be a very impressive line. Meanwhile, Gibson throws off eye-popping lines every other page. Compare these two examples:

"Knocking him down won the first fight. I wanted to win all the next ones, too." - Ender's Game

If you don't know what Ender is referring to, this quote loses almost all of its power. If you've read the story, though, this line is killer.

"The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there." - Neuromancer

You don't need to have read the novel to appreciate the quote. Beyond the novelty and aesthetic beauty of the writing, it's very information-dense: You can get an excellent sense of the novel's setting, themes, conflict, and main character just from these three sentences.

pemulison Matt Mullenweg: I’m Worried That Silicon Valley Might Be Destroying the World

I think that you're partly right, and it ties in with one of the points in pg's essay about addictive technology[1], that societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things. The problem (also noted in the essay, which grows more frightening the longer I think about it) is that most of the people who succumb to the addictive thing will not change their lifestyle to overcome it. Meanwhile, many companies in Silicon Valley are working to make their products as addictive as possible, soaking the most vulnerable users for the most money. The poster boy for this behavior is Zynga, but you see it everywhere.

What's the solution? Maybe we need to try harder to add addictive properties to activities we value. Or maybe we need a cultural movement away from things that are low-value and addictive to things that are high-value but not very addictive. It's difficult, because almost anything that's fun is potentially addictive. Reading, coding, and exercise are all valuable and can all be addictive. Not all addictions are equal. Running for two hours a day is probably better than playing Farmville for two hours a day.

I think that Matt's comments hit home because we're often in a position now of building things that lock people into harmful addictive behaviors. We all have to ask ourselves whether the work we do is valuable, or just lucrative.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

pemulison Author John Birmingham on eBook Piracy

I'm preparing my first book for publication with them later this year, I doubt I will make much but I have a day job

I've been working with an author-run e-publishing group for the past few months, and this is an attitude I see a lot. I understand where it comes from, but it's not really good for readers or the literary ecosystem. Amazon has no real stake in any of the books they publish. They own the platform that sells all of the content, so as long as they're selling something, they're fine. There are no publishers giving books the criticism and support they need, and no passionate booksellers to promote them to readers. If even the authors don't care if a book sells, where does that leave us? I don't know. But I'm going to keep buying traditionally published books until someone figures it out.

pemulison William Gibson: Seeing the Future in Science Fiction

A good thing to keep in mind when reading the Sprawl trilogy is that the writing style and sense details are more important than the plot, which is basically a series of Macguffins. Orson Scott Card's stories are the opposite: Plot drives everything, and simplistic prose carries you through. They're both valid types of fiction, but make for totally different experiences.

When you put down a Card novel, you remember the story arc. When you put down a Gibson novel, you remember the images. Everyone knows the opening line of Neuromancer, but few people quote lines from Ender's Game. Everyone remembers the ending of Ender's Game, but many people forget the ending of Neuromancer, even if they enjoyed it.

pemulison Facebook Tries Again on a Smartphone

How do you become head tech news guy at the New York Times when you think Facebook is an operating system and that the company could "easily scoop up" RIM?

pemulison Please don't let gaming consume your life

There are people who enjoy smoking and playing Zynga games, though. Positive benefit is relative. Just because you don't like cigarettes or Farmville doesn't mean that no one does. The argument that Blizzard doesn't care how much time you put into World of Warcraft doesn't hold up, either. The lower levels have a lot of grinding and the higher levels have multi-hour raids. World of Warcraft has addictive properties baked in to keep you playing, just like Zynga games. You could make the argument that Zynga is "evil" for milking addicted players for thousands of dollars, but Diablo III's auction house creates a similar dynamic. Isn't it enough to say that you think Zynga's games suck, but Blizzard's are good?

pemulison How to find an apartment in San Francisco during the tech boom

I sleep in the top bunk with my backpack between my body and the wall, which would make it really difficult to steal anything without waking me up. I don't totally trust the lockers, since every lock small enough to fit them is trivial to pick or just slice through with bolt cutters when the room is empty. Honestly, though, most of the people who pass through the hostel are rich young people on backpacking trips. The only thing I have to worry about them stealing is stuff I leave unattended in the bathroom.

pemulison How to find an apartment in San Francisco during the tech boom

If you don't have any friends you can stay with in San Francisco, a good alternative is booking a bed in a hostel for a few weeks. They're cheap (as low as $25/day, if you're willing to share a room with a few people), centrally located, and sometimes offer perks like free breakfast and coffee. You should take a few extra precautions with your valuables -- I keep my laptop, wallet, and phone next to me when I sleep, instead of putting them in the locker -- but most of the people who pass through are young travelers. There are plenty of options to choose from in the Tendernob, which is basically a hostel/student district, and not nearly as bad as this blog post makes it sound.

pemulison The story of the ‘secret’ room at Pixar, frequented by Steve Jobs

Do you know if anybody has pictures? That sounds interesting.

pemulison Responding to Beggars

The three main causes of homelessness in America are sudden economic misfortune, mental illness, and addiction.

People in the first category are actively looking for a way to get back on their feet. Giving them money is better than giving them a meal, a ticket, or a bit of clothing. They know what they need most, and will spend their money accordingly. Insisting that they choose from my list of pre-approved spending options does more harm than good, from a utility standpoint. From an emotional standpoint, it's condescending and demeaning.

In the second case, the person has few employment options and a weak support network, otherwise they would not be out on the street. They won't use the money I give them as well as people in the first category, but who am I to say what they want or need? I'm not trying to solve a social problem. I'm trying to ease the suffering of an individual.

It's difficult to distinguish people in the third group from the people in the second group, since mental illness and addiction often work in tandem. I don't bother to try. Anyway, the addict's hierarchy of needs is roughly: Food > Drugs > Shelter. If I buy them a sandwich, they can spend the remainder of their money on drugs. If they're a serious addict, a lack of charity won't stand between them and the drugs they need. If they can't scrounge up enough money through legitimate means, petty crime is the next step. Overcoming addiction is a complicated process that comes from within. You can't starve the addict into going clean. If I give a homeless person a dollar and that money goes towards drugs, that's a shame, but at least it eases their suffering for a moment.

Again, giving money to a homeless person isn't a long-term solution to social problems. It's a small gesture from one individual to another. They have a cut, so I give them a band-aid. Homelessness is a difficult and complicated problem. Withholding charity won't suddenly result in homeless people straightening up and flying right. The reality is that many of them, at least in the short term, are unemployable. Withholding charity just increases their suffering.

pemulison Responding to Beggars

For the most part, I only give money to homeless people who put out a cup or a hat and don't try to sell me on a story. I've been lied to so many times that I assume every story is a lie. I don't try to buy specific items like food or train tickets, either. I don't want to dictate what they ought to spend the money on. If they want to spend it on food or clothes, great. If they would prefer to spend it on drugs or lotto tickets, I'm not going to reverse a lifetime of bad habits by forcing them to get a sandwich. The money is theirs once I give it to them.

pemulison The Real E-Publishing Story: It’s Not the Millionaires, It’s the Midlist

For those of you who want some background on why big publishers have mostly abandoned the midlist, this article[1] by Kevin O'Donnell is a good summary. Short version: A Supreme Court ruling related to tax markdowns on slow-selling books made it too expensive for publishers to hold paper inventory of midlist books from year to year. On the other hand, since e-books don't create excess inventory, there are no tax penalties for Amazon (or Apple, or B&N, or whoever) to keep a midlist book "in print."

[1] http://www.sfwa.org/bulletin/articles/thor.htm

pemulison Why You Shouldn't Code Alone

Our stories are even closer than you think. I looked for people like me in my college town, but it was a small city with few tech businesses (mostly state government contractors), so I didn't find much. Now that I've returned to coding, I decided to move out to San Francisco so that I could be a part of a larger community. I've been out here for just over a week now and I've already been to a conference and have an interview with a startup tomorrow. (Not as a developer, but still!) There are tons of meetups and interesting events out here, so I'm really optimistic about the future.

pemulison Why You Shouldn't Code Alone

The problem with the manic loner method of learning to code is that it can lead to burnout really quickly. I taught myself to code in a similar way. It was my senior year in college, I was getting a degree in creative writing, and my only programming knowledge was whatever was still rattling around my head from an introductory course in high school. I had an idea for something that I wanted to build, so I bought an HTML for Dummies book and started working my way down the stack. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, jQuery, cron, VPS hosting, web APIs, and on and on.

After three months of manic reading and coding, I had a working product and enough programming knowledge to get a job with a local startup. I was also a wreck. It got to the point where opening up a text editor made me nauseous. The main reason I applied for the job at the startup was to work with other coders, to alleviate my stress and isolation, but it was a marketing startup at its core, and all the other developers worked remotely. The people I worked with were great, and they had nothing but good things to say about my work, but I was the only on-site developer. It made me feel even more isolated.

Honestly, I felt like a fraud. I spent most of my time at work teaching myself new tools. I felt like these were things that I should just know, and I couldn't convince myself that I was doing a good job, because there was no developer community around me. In retrospect, I know that my stress was irrational. Textbook impostor syndrome. Every time I fixed a bug for a customer, which I did a few times every day, I was protecting a revenue stream worth several times my hourly wage. But because the community wasn't there, and because I had burnt myself out over months of manic self-education, I couldn't internalize this at the time. I brought up my issues with the CEO - who was in the room next to me, since it was a small shop - but no matter how many times he assured me that I was doing a great job, it didn't cut through the burnout and the stress. When I graduated, I left the job behind. I also left coding behind, for about eight months. I made a few static HTML/CSS pages for various projects, but that was it.

I'm back to coding again now. Everything is fresh and fun again. I'm working on an ambitious project, and I'm still a team of one. But I'm going to start visiting meetups and getting involved in the community, because I've felt the stress of being completely on my own.

Your mental makeup may be different. You may be able to continue learning and coding on your own indefinitely and never succumb to burnout, paranoia, panic, or isolation. If so, that's great! I'm a little worried about your note at the end, though. Most people can't do this on their own, and it's not a knock on their aptitude. The emotional toll of isolation is what brings people down, and it's perfectly normal.