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wvl

818 karma · joined August 6, 2008

@wvl, email: wayne [@] larsen [.] st

Try http://hckrnews.com/

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wvl··on Useful apps for Hacker News
Is this manually curated, or are you querying extension permissions from the app store?

I've got an extension that combines the collapsible threads with the ability to highlight new comments. However, I never did put it in the chrome extension directory. It's available here: http://hckrnews.com/about.html

wvl··on Fitness for geeks: my annual review of the Stronglifts 5x5 program
> Two things that weight training doesn't address is inward shoulder rotation/slumping and "turtle neck," something all people working at a keyboard are prone to.

On the contrary, weight training will address exactly that, provided you balance pulling with pressing. Most "gym rats", as you say, seem to do nothing but bench press and curls. The bench press will, if not balanced by pulling, exaggerate the internal shoulder rotation.

Deadlifts, Rows, Pullups (or lat pulldowns if you must) -- all strengthen the back, and offset the shoulder rotation issues.

> Apparently squats and deadlifts will give you pretty extreme imbalances in the hip muscles (that's what the posture specialist and a deep-tissue masseur told me after working on me). You can fix that by stretching. I don't know if it matters, because it doesn't seem to affect me functionally or aesthetically.

This is also not true. Many gym trainees who actually attempt to squat will do it with a very narrow stance, and a very shallow depth. This makes it a quad dominant exercise, which could be a problem if they didn't also deadlift. However, a full depth back squat is a very balanced exercise, and will do wonders to increase hip mobility, not to mention strength. Deadlifts are the single best exercise for strengthening the posterior chain, which anyone who picks something heavy up off the ground needs.

Many people avoid squatting and deadlifting because they think they will hurt themselves, so they end up doing much worse things: leg press, smith machine squats, hack squats. Instead, learn the lifts properly ("Starting Strength" by Mark Rippetoe is a fabulous book for this), and you will realize how valuable they are.

wvl··on Impromptu - A Scheme Based Language for AV Live Coding
Seeing this posted today, I figure someone would have linked his recent holiday performance, "Variations on a Christmas Theme": http://vimeo.com/18008372

When I first heard/saw Stained it blew my mind -- truly an impressive work of art.

wvl··on Better Ways to Read "Hacker News"
Well, it's not automatic, but http://hckrnews.com/ does have that functionality, since that's why I built it. I do store and highlight the last visit time, which is useful for visits of a day or less. For a longer timespan, filter down (top 10 or top 20), then "Get Next Day" lets you page back through days you've missed.

It's an interesting idea to make it adaptive, but I see a number of challenges. For example, you want just the highlights if you've been gone for a while, but perhaps someone else wants to scan through everything? Then there are the UI challenges -- making it obvious what is happening (and being able to change the default behavior) could be a challenge.

wvl··on Better Ways to Read "Hacker News"
The point with http://hckrnews.com wasn't to get into a "minimalism pissing match", but to read the frontpage items sorted by time (and archived).

However, I did strive for minimalism and readability as a goal. I'm not sure why you think it is more cluttered than the original, since every item has less -- one line vs two, repeated words and the submitted user's name omitted.

wvl··on Show HN: HN Unread Comments v1.1 released (chrome extension)
I've been using a simple left border to highlight new comments in my extension (http://hckrnews.com/about.html), and I've found it works pretty well at highlighting new comments without being too obtrusive.
wvl··on Show HN: HN Unread Comments v1.1 released (chrome extension)
This functionality has been available in my hckrnews extension for a while. It works only for individual item pages, since it tracks (in localstorage) the last comment id for each page. It uses a simple left border to highlight new omments, which I think is a little less intrusive (yet easy to spot) than the screenshot for this extension.

It's available here:

http://hckrnews.com/about.html

wvl··on IAmA venture capitalist.AMA
I am highly skeptical that this is a legit posting. Of course, the poster has not answered much of anything anyway, so it doesn't matter too much anyway.
wvl··on Joyent & Node.js
Previously discussed 2 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1888628
wvl··on Netflix wins a longbet from 8 years ago.
Those urls have nothing whatsoever to do with REST.
wvl··on Ask HN: Is there a list of Hacker News projects?
It looks like user yatsyk built http://hnresources.com/ for this purpose.
wvl··on Hacker Slide: HN front page over time
Interesting idea. I built http://hckrnews.com/ so that it would be easier to track what is new as well as catch up on what had been posted since my last visit. I'm not sure why I'd visit this instead?
wvl··on Trying Tim Ferriss's "no grain" diet for 30 days...
Yes. I would advise getting the book (Tim's blog article was just an excerpted chapter). The latter part of the book gives the "how". You should definitely not be feeling hungry from this diet, _especially_ if you're not trying to lose weight.
wvl··on Unofficial alternative UI of hackernews
This was related to the Firefox rendering bug, and should be fixed now.
wvl··on Unofficial alternative UI of hackernews
I gave this a try. I tend to find alternate row colors pretty jarring, so I made it subtle. I might pull it though, so let me know what you think.
wvl··on Unofficial alternative UI of hackernews
Can you comment on why you find it less scannable? In fact, I find the opposite -- just the information I need, with no noise, on a clean white background. But, of course I'm biased.

I did add alternating backgrounds -- I'm not sure I'll leave it like that, but do you find that better for scanning?

wvl··on Unofficial alternative UI of hackernews
It seems this is a common theme. I switched to a sans stack, that should be easier to read, if not so pretty.

An aside, but one thing I love that both Safari and Chrome now do (at least, maybe others do as well) is remember the font size instructions for a site. So, if you bump up the font size -- next time you visit it keeps it at the larger font size.

wvl··on Unofficial alternative UI of hackernews
Is that better for you now?
wvl··on Unofficial alternative UI of hackernews
I'm not sure who posted this this time, but when I first posted it, it never found much traction.

One of (IMHO) the problems with Hacker News is that there is no good way to store and locate meta information. So all the mashups, meetups, resources that have been inspired or built around and by the community live and die by being posted as stories. If someone isn't an obsessive reader of the site, it's pretty easy to miss these things. Resourcey is a good link, but you must also know it exists in order to find the other links.

wvl··on Unofficial alternative UI of hackernews
I can understand why you thought they would be sortable. However, it's designed around being a chronological list. When I want to scan the higher rated stories, I use the filter links -- top 10, top 20, top 50%. Sorting by points or comments does make some sense, however, it is also a function of how long a story has been posted -- so I don't really think a javascript sort in place would be too useful.

As for the UI design -- I wanted a simple list of stories that I could scan, plus I wanted to be able to see the points and number of comments associated with that story. While I understand your point about highest importance, if I had placed the numbers on the right the ragged right nature of the text would make it hard to scan.

wvl··on Unofficial alternative UI of hackernews
Thanks for the input. I'm working on my startup as well, so don't be too worried about how I'm spending my spare time.

In fact, in one way, I made this so I could spend more time on my startup. I found myself wasting too much time reading Hacker News. Either I was procrastinating and refreshing too often, where I found it hard to either identify what story was new that I hadn't seen, or which ones I'd already seen but did not interest me. Or, I was going back and reading simply so I wouldn't miss anything, since stories tend to trail off pretty quickly unless they get a lot of votes.

wvl··on Unofficial alternative UI of hackernews
Thanks! I'm glad someone appreciates it. Seems everyone else is very worried about my spare time and how I wasted it... :)
wvl··on Unofficial alternative UI of hackernews
Hmmm, that is strange. I did test it in Firefox a while back, but I must have changed something in the meantime. I run Safari and Chrome personally, so I never noticed that. I'll see if I can fix that.

edit: It should be fixed now. Thanks for reporting the problem.

wvl··on Unofficial alternative UI of hackernews
What OS/browser are you using? What is your issue with the font? edit: Others seemed to be saying the same thing. I switched to a sans family stack. Let me know if that is better.

As for the column thing -- this is something I use every day, so I designed it mostly for repeat usage. I didn't want to pin a header or add extraneous text to make that clear. Use it for a while, and it should become second nature that points is closest to the story description.

wvl··on Unofficial alternative UI of hackernews
If you go to the about page[1], you'll find extensions for both chrome and safari. These extensions will highlight new comments, as well as make comment threads collapsible (a la reddit).

http://hckrnews.com/about.html

wvl··on Unofficial alternative UI of hackernews
Sure, I could. Which is why I didn't.
wvl··on Unofficial alternative UI of hackernews
Author here. Part of the reason I built this is so that I could skip a day or two, and still come back and see what was posted. Unfortunately, that means finding this thread 11 hours after it was posted. I'll respond to the comments.
wvl··on How to Keep Feces Out of Your Bloodstream (or Lose 10 Pounds in 14 Days)
> Cut out vegetables from your diet, for example, and you will experience serious intestinal distress when you reintroduce them.

I've actually done that[1], and experienced the complete opposite. I found myself dreaming about eating broccoli, and absolutely craving all kinds of vegetables. When the diet ended I ate lots of vegetables -- and certainly no intestinal distress when eating them.

[1] - "Velocity Diet": the very definition of fad diet, which basically consists of drinking a protein shake 5 times a day for 4 weeks, with 1 solid meal per week. It worked, but I'd never ever do it again, nor recommend anyone ever do it.

wvl··on How to Keep Feces Out of Your Bloodstream (or Lose 10 Pounds in 14 Days)
99% bullshit, really? It sounds like its working pretty well for you.

> If you don't need to lose weight I wouldn't recommend it, because frankly it's hard to eat enough paleo food to maintain weight while physically active.

It's really not hard to get plenty of calories -- those calories are just more likely to come from fat. Make sure you get enough protein (~1g/lb bodyweight), eat lots of veggies, then fill up on fat sources -- coconut oil, animal fats, nuts, olive oil, etc.

wvl··on How to Keep Feces Out of Your Bloodstream (or Lose 10 Pounds in 14 Days)
From the article:

Now there is a caveat to this. You only need to be exposed to things like gluten once every ten to fifteen days to keep the gut damaged. This can bedevil people as they “cut back on gluten” but do not notice an improvement in their overall health. I’m sorry but there is not a pink “participant” ribbon given out for doing this “almost correctly.” You need to be 100 percent compliant for thirty days, then see how you do with reintroduction.

As for: Is it the fact that you are likely eating more fiber and nutrients? Is it a difference in blood sugar levels that you notice?

Those are both directly related to what you are eating. I feel better when my blood sugar levels don't spike -- which is why I'm eating paleo.

Also, you didn't really put for an argument as to why the advice to cut out foods then add them back in is bad. If your body has healed itself and is functioning great without grains, then you eat a big pizza -- you will almost surely see how it affects your system.

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