Hacker News Reader

typicalrunton Coin

It's a neat idea, but what I'd really like to see is a way to use randomly-generated numbers as my credit card for one-time payments instead of handing over my full credit card details to an online store. I hear this is done by a few credit card companies now but I have yet to see it in Canada.

Coin could even take this idea one step further and allow you to store your credit card, but when you swipe their card it provides the merchant with a randomized credit card number useful only for a one-time purchase. Now that'd be cool.

typicalrunton Does life end after 35?

I wonder what kind of rationalization Bob Dylan, The Beatles, et al went through once they reached 30 years of age. Do they move the goal posts to not trusting anyone over 40? Or do they admit that they were youthful and wrong and state that untrustworthy people, at any age, are the only people that shouldn't be trusted.

typicalrunton First Bitcoin ATM

While I'm happy to see the world's first anything happen in my hometown of Vancouver, I do question why Vancouver was chosen over San Fran, Portland or New York. Those cities seem more fit for World's First. Even if its a Canadian market they are targeting, Toronto is our financial centre and would make a better choice for this currency.

typicalrunton Why being a thinker takes quiet time

No. When I submitted the article I copy-pasted the title from CNN into HN. CNN must have updated the article's title since then.

typicalrunton Why being a thinker takes quiet time

In case you want to put a name to this act, this is known as Rubber Ducking [1].

[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RubberDucking

typicalrunton The 2013 Mac Pro summed up in one picture

One the one hand, a plug 'n' play architecture is great for expanding the system with new components over time. However, the Mac Pro (and any ATX tower computer) is usually easy to expand with expansion cards. The 2013 Mac Pro is telling me that Apple is playing to the audience that doesn't want (nor need) to know about hardware components, and the only technical expertise is to line up connector A with slot B.

typicalrunton Why being a thinker takes quiet time

I'm a legs-up-on-table type of dreamer and thinker when I work. However, after working in corporate environments for many years I'm developing what can only been called a cognitive dissonance about this type of quiet thinking. The issue is that managers have always wanted me to track my time in 15-30 min increments, and there is never an expense category for "quiet thinking and reflection". Thus I've started to feel like a time thief [1] and it weighs on my conscience even though I know, deep down, that my quiet reflections are being used to solve difficult problems.

[1] http://timewellscheduled.com/time-theft/

typicalrunton Why I Built an AngularJS Training Site on Rails

heh. I get the title now, and explains my confusion with the article content. It led me to believe that you build an AngularJS-and-Rails-powered website.

Thanks for the clarification.

typicalrunton Why I Built an AngularJS Training Site on Rails

I browsed egghead.io (it looks great, btw!) and I'm trying to figure out what parts are Angular and what are simply Rails server-generated views.

The signin/signup look to be using standard Rails, but what parts are using Angular?

typicalrunton CryptoSeal (YC S11) Shutting Down Private VPN

Talking to people? What a concept!

Seriously though, it is amazing how much information can be gleaned from someone (rightly or wrongly) if you just sit down and talk with them for a bit. And even more information about someone's true feeling can be determined from their non-verbal communication, something that electronic surveillance (like email snooping) can do nothing about.

typicalrunton The problem with taking too many vitamins

In school, I was taught a mnemonic for fat soluble vitamins: DEAK. In other words, you want to "deke" [1] out of the way from these vitamins. You want to watch how much of vitamins D, E, A, K you ingest because they are fat soluble and you can easily overdose on them (unlike vitamin C). It's not a catch-all but it helps when you are taking vitamins.

[1] it's a play on words and a homonym, "deke" comes from hockey where you dodge or fake out an opponent to get around them. It must be the Canadian school system further injecting hockey into our lives. :)

typicalrunton Melatonin

This is similar to something I read a couple years ago, where overactive/hyper children could actually be a result of lack of sleep, since tired children do not act "tired" like adults do.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8016531.stm

typicalrunton Free HTML Starter Templates for Bootstrap

That's not necessarily true, as answered here [1]. Choosing the right license depends on how your SaaS product is setup.

[1] http://themeforest.net/forums/thread/picking-up-the-right-li...

typicalrunton Free HTML Starter Templates for Bootstrap

This looks great. One issue popped up: a 403 on http://startbootstrap.com/templates/business-frontpage.html

typicalrunton Why it's probably safer if your pilot is asleep than awake

15 mins seems like a lot of time for a timeout. The B777 top speed is 950 kmph, which means the plane can travel ~237 km before someone wakes up. That's scary.

typicalrunton Going to work from home today – our office is too loud

My apologies if it seems like I conflated the my hearing loss by infection with headphone usage. That wasn't my intent...merely to show that the requirement to wear headphones in an open plan office could have potential negative effects down the road for people.

typicalrunton Going to work from home today – our office is too loud

That's completely false.

Pump your brakes...

But I'll tell that to my audiologist the next time I see him. I guess he's been reading the wrong research all these years.

There is a balance to be struck with everything and the message I'm making is that headphone usage should be done in moderation. Wearing headphones and listening to music without breaks is going to damage your hearing no matter what. Hell, even wearing ear plugs in prolonged use can backup earwax enough to potentially cause impaction and bacterial infection.

typicalrunton Going to work from home today – our office is too loud

I'm aware of WorkSafe and I know several people that work there. The form you submitted applies to occupational hearing loss, the kind where you work in a loud workshop whose environment noise is in excess of a specific dB level, not the kind self-imposed by listening to music 8 hours a day.

typicalrunton Going to work from home today – our office is too loud

Whenever this topic comes up on HN, something that nobody discusses is the impact to people's health surrounding the overuse of headphones. Talk to any audiologist and describe how often you wear headphones; they will want to reach out and slap you across the face.

Even if you play your music at a low volume, your ears were not meant to be covered by ear buds or over-ear headphones constantly (as in, hours at a time). And yet, this is something that people in the IT industry have accepted as common practice. Just think of the looming health implications when everyone's ears get a little older, and less likely to heal properly.

About 5 years ago I had an ear infection that left one of my ears with a permanent loss of hearing. Now, it's only 5% at the top end of the spectrum (soft Ss, iirc), but it's enough to aggravate me daily. But the downside is that I can no longer wear headphones for anything more than 20 minutes at a time (it feels like pressure is building up in my head...a very weird feeling), even with no music playing. So here I would sit, in a loud open plan office without the ability to wear headphones and being asked to solve hard problems. If this were a leg or back injury and I was made to use something in the office that aggravated that problem area, I'd have a worksafe (OSHA?) problem, but for some reason people's ears are not a health issue.

Just remember, your ears are extremely sensitive instruments and they rarely get better if you destroy them. And if you think not being able to hear properly is the only side-effect, just ask someone with hearing loss what they go through. They'll likely tell you about slurred speech[2], random phantom noises, pain, etc.

[1] http://www.osteopathic.org/osteopathic-health/about-your-hea...

[2] This is caused (over time) by you not being able to accurately hear what you are saying. You hear your own voice via two mechanisms: internally through your jaw bone (mandible) and externally through your ear. Fun fact: most of your voice is heard through your jaw, which is why everyone says their voice sounds funny through when they hear themselves on video.

[Edit] spelling

typicalrunton Is 25 the new cut-off point for adulthood?

So if 25 is the new cutoff for adulthood, and 30 is the new BS cutoff for an employable programmer, that leaves 5 years to learn everything?

typicalrunton The Real Reason The Poor Go Without Bank Accounts

In this case, treat a bank like you would a family member; let them know that you will be out of the country for a period of time and they will make a note of it on your account. Whenever any transactions occur it may cause an automatic tripping of a flag on your account, but a human will be able to read the note. This has helped me greatly in the past.

PS: This can also (and should also) be done on your credit card accounts.

typicalrunton Vimdeck - Vim as a presentation tool

Nice work on vimdeck. I like the idea. I ran into a problem while using this gem because it didn't automatically install the required dependencies while installing the vimdeck gem, so I submitted a pull request for the fix.

typicalrunton Technical Interviews Make Me Cry

There's a much easier way to solve this problem than what you've done. And this is sorta/kinda the point of the article, where you will do well at a technical interview if you know some tricks in programming, whether it be through academic study or just on-the-job stuff.

To find if two words are anagrams of each other, do this:

sort(word1) == sort(word2)

done.

The trick is knowing that an anagram has a signature, and that signature can be found if you sort a word's characters alphabetically. Then you do the same to the other word and compare both of their signatures together. Voilá.

    "genuine class" == "alec guinness"
    because
    "aceegilnnssu" == "aceegilnnssu"

In Ruby you'd write your own alphabetic sorting function first, then apply it to each word.

    def sortAZ (word)
      word.downcase.unpack("c*").sort.pack("c*")
    end

    def is_anagram (word1, word2)
      sortAZ(word1) == sortAZ(word2)
    end

    puts "is_anagram(ARGV[1], ARGV[2])"

I recall seeing this trick in a Ruby book (probably PickAxe or something) and thought it was cool because I had never thought about finding an anagram in this way. Regardless, it stuck with me so, if this was asked in an interview, I'd be able to answer the question easily and look like a rockstar...when really it's just knowledge that stuck with me.

By the way, the alphabetic sorting here is done by unpacking each character into its number representation and then sorting the resulting numbers.

typicalrunton Unix Commands I Wish I’d Discovered Years Earlier

It might be system-dependent. I'm on OSX and the command works properly.

typicalrunton Square open-sources its Vim repo, Maximum Awesome

Another thing that people often forget when they use plugins on their development machine is that if they happen to ssh into server (or work on another user's machine), it is unlikely that it will contain the same plugins. It is better to become effective at using the bare vi/vim commands first and only use plugins as a time-saver.

typicalrunton Soylent: What Happened When I Stopped Eating For 2 Weeks

Even funnier, the first sentence in the Wikipedia entry for EGFR states:

This article is about a cell surface receptor. For estimated measure of kidney function (eGFR), see Glomerular filtration rate.

The author could have taken a few minutes to research both the EGFR for cell surface receptor and the kidney function measure and come to a reasonably good conclusion as to which one is used on the lab tests. Instead...

typicalrunton They're Using it at Coffee Shops

Food. Money. Desire to fit in.

I beg to differ. Those are all part of sex and death.

Without food I will wither away until I die. Without tasty food I will feel like I'm in a living death.

Money buys power (consumer power, or what have you) and with that grants you the possibility to expand your genetic profile, just like sex. And the desire to fit in is in the same realm as sex, because we want people to find us desirable so that we can potentially become a mate. I'm stretching and only using male-female desire here, but it's not a great leap to see how male-male desire (not sexual) is just a form of males wanting to become alpha- rather than beta-male to increase attractiveness.

typicalrunton ORMs vs SQL: The JPA Story

I loved iBatis the moment I used it (some 8 years ago or so). And yet I always felt like a black sheep because I liked working in SQL and also liked my "ORM" to be a simple translation engine for results into a data structure that can then be used by Java.

So I was happy to see this author come to the conclusion that iBatis is A Good Thing, but I do wonder if we are still black sheep in a flock of Hibernate/JPA enthusiasts.

typicalrunton One Month Rails (YC S13) Teaches How To Build Your Startup While Learning To Code

With these types of companies popping up, I'm left wondering how carpenters feel when someone watches a few episodes of HGTV and decides they can build their own house. There is so much more to programming and building a product than simply typing some magical symbols into an editor. Sure, it's a start, but once a product is built, deployed to production, and then has customers, it will need constant nurturing. Databases get slow, hardware fails, logs fill up diskspace, and yet that's only the tip of the iceberg in programming. Stating you can learn to code in one month is nothing more than the 'Teach Yourself $LANG in 24 Hours" from yesteryear. It minimizes the amount of skill and experience one needs to be a programmer and make $120,000 per year (which is still a lot of money).

OneMonthRails is a start, especially if you want to learn how to program, but I find it unethical to insinuate that one can land a $120k/yr job after 1 month of training.

For all my fellow Canadian compatriots, I read the marketing page of OneMonthRails and see visions of Tom Vu [1] trying to tell us about his guaranteed technique to becoming rich (later found out as the greater fool theory).

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQNdi-fRExc

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

typicalrunton Why I Quit Microsoft To Join A 5-Person Start Up In Toronto (2012)

I don't think you could pay me enough to go back

or, as I am wont to say, back up the dump truck filled with money and then we'll start talking. It has to be worth it (however you measure what "worth" and "it" are) to go back to something that goes against your principles. :)