Hacker News Reader

piton Challenges in Distributed Systems (Andy Gross, Basho)

You can download Infoq presentations with youtube-dl [1] and rtmpdump [2].

I am the first remote worker at my company, and I definitely feel some of the hurt that DHH describes. I transitioned from working in the office to working remotely a few months ago. We're incredibly meeting-and-email oriented, so I still phone into one or two meetings every day.

Bad idea or not, does anyone have any tips for playing the part of sole remote worker?

piton Nest introduces their Smoke Detector

Plus, you'll sleep right through the alarm!

piton Using Katas to Improve Your Coding

You could try LICEcap: http://www.cockos.com/licecap/, which is free for Windows and can produce an animated GIF. I haven't tried it for anything as long as 20 minutes, though.

piton Github.com unavailable due to a large DDoS attack

Must be my manager.

piton How I learned to Stop Feeling Safe in My Own Country and Hate Border Agents

If you'd prefer to listen to an audio version, here's http://www.wnyc.org/radio/#/ondemand/319368

piton How far the once-mighty SourceForge has fallen

I just switched to CyberDuck.

piton I am writing an Elon Musk biography

Come on, mods! Won't you change it for him?

piton Github now supports rendering tabular data

Is GitHub turning into an operating system?

piton Snake Vim Trainer

In light of the recent comments about mods editing article titles, I gotta say that when I saw this earlier today I didn't think it sounded interesting. After the rename, I clicked on it, and man, it's awesome.

piton fish shell

Oooh, it's like a MUD!

piton Get things done by procrastinating

I think you're definitely on to something. I've thought about a kind of "procrastination redirector" where you have, say, a list of "bad activities" and a corresponding list of "good activities".

For a simple example, you could change your hosts file so that news.ycombinator.com redirects to a tutorial for whatever new language/framework you've been dying to try.

You could come up with a neural-linguistic-reprogramming-esque way of getting yourself to do just about anything: "Sitting on the couch? Why not walk one lap around the house?"

Voila: a machine that nags the shit out of you.

piton Android Is Not Better. Neither Is iOS.

That's exactly why I hate articles like this. "Other peoples' opinions don't matter because they're just opinions. Let _ME_ set the record straight."

piton You Might Have an Invisible Facebook Account Even if You Never Signed Up

Yeah, no shit.

piton Super Mario Melodies (2011)

Los Doggies is an awesome band. Buy their music: http://losdoggies.bandcamp.com, and come see them if you're ever in the Hudson Valley!

piton Should I Use A Button?

Using this site in IE9 is like an existential crisis -- pressing the button doesn't do anything, but it's there, so you're left wondering "should I use a button?"

piton The theory of relativity in words of four letters or less

Maybe he means "The theory of relativity in words of four letters or less [than the theory of relativity]" -- i.e., it is an _incomplete_ explanation -- which some of the people on this page seem to agree with. Seriously, I thought this was extremely clever, and the short, clipped style reminds me of Hemingway or Mamet.

piton You Can't Afford To Stop Using Mail

hi@welovemail.com

So we took a look at the mail's health:

Deliverability of the messages thumbsdown

Misuse of the address thumbsup

Redundancy for incoming messages thumbsup

Tracking of sent messages thumbsdown

It seems the owner needs our service really badly. Please, let them now.

piton How I attacked a fellow student

Wait a minute. Isn't this guy an asshole?

piton Here is today

That was just what I needed to hear.

piton Simple Minecraft Clone in 580 lines of Python

This is, in a word, dope.

piton Google Reader shutting down

Hooray! One time I read the Fleshbot RSS feed, and I've never been able to un-read it -- it just stays in my "Read items" queue.

piton The best programmers are the quickest to Google

Does anyone else find themselves Googling the same question over and over again? How do you deal with that?

piton Hacker News is down, so we made five issues free

Thank you so much. I'm particularly grateful that you bundled different file types in the same zip, so I don't have to be like, "let's see -- should I download the MOBI version? Or the PDF version? Or maybe ePub? Wait a minute, I don't have even have a tablet -- why am I having this debate?"

One fewer decision to make.

piton Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows

Pardon me, but Paint.NET is not open-source.

"You may not modify, adapt, rent, lease, loan, sell, or create derivative works based upon the Software or any part thereof."

I did find this, but I've never used it: http://code.google.com/p/openpdn/

piton I want the world to scroll this way

I like this a lot. I can't stand those image galleries where the frame resizes itself every time you load a new picture. There's a little bug in Firefox 15.0.1 (sorry, not an Administrator):

1) Advance to the last page -- progress is 99.99%. 2) Go back one page -- progress stays at 99.99%. 3) Go back another page -- progress is 57.08% (which happens to be correct).

piton _why's site is back up

That's odd -- I had a dream about _why last night.

piton RubyFlux: a Ruby to Java compiler

Weirdly, I was wondering about the existence of something like this about 20 minutes ago. I'm using Grails for work, and it's pretty unpleasant. I don't want to write Groovy, but I have to write Groovy.

piton StackExchange is down

Where are you? I'm in Vermont and only getting as far as "Server not found."