The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box - <AUTHOR> https://blog.plover.com/2020/06/24/#boundary-conditions <comment><USER2> I'm currently working on a project that involves dataviz & mapping, and one of the things I've discovered along the way was WikiData's SPARQL query engine.

Mind = blown.

You can basically ask Wiki(pedia) almost anything you can think of (including the largest city in a bounding box) using the same query language.

Examples:

\- Largest cities per country ([https://w.wiki/UC4](https://w.wiki/UC4))

\- Cities connected by the European route E40 ([https://w.wiki/74E](https://w.wiki/74E))

\- Streets in France named after a woman ([https://w.wiki/34K](https://w.wiki/34K))

<comment><USER3> You can even request a query from the community:

[https://wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Request_a_query](https://wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Request_a_query)

<comment><USER2> That's handy! To be honest, SPARQL is definitely not easy to use.

<comment><USER4> I have worked with SPARQL professionally. The biggest problem: Quality if the data. Yes it is amazing, but if stuff is missing annotations, it is hard to get meaningful results.

<comment><USER5> This was my experience also. It's bad enough that it's effectively useless and requires _extensive_ validation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I quibble with the description of the shapes bounded by 10 degrees of longitude and latitude as "rectangles" \- they're not even planar shapes, and their adjacent sides certainly aren't at right angles. Some of them don't even have four sides.

This bears considering when looking at the map, because some of those regions are much, much smaller than others.

<comment><USER7> > their adjacent sides certainly aren't at right angles

They certainly are. Parallels and meridians always meet at 90 degrees.

[https://www.geogebra.org/m/kNtNZzsS](https://www.geogebra.org/m/kNtNZzsS)

<comment><USER8> Right angles with regard to the latitude-longitude coordinate system, but not with regard to the surface of the earth. Recall that all meridians intersect at the poles.

<comment><USER7> Yes with regard to the surface of the earth.

Take the lines tangent to the meridian & parallel at the point of intersection. Observe these lines are perpendicular. Hence the meridian & parallel meet at a right angle.

<comment><USER9> What about the 'boxes' where the top edge is, er, the point at one of the poles?

<comment><USER7> Yeah not the pole of course, but you can cut them off at at ±89.999 degrees and it still works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think something more interesting might be like a voronoi diagram of all cities such that the city is in like the top 5 within a 1000 miles radius or something (or just that but without the voronoi part). This should preserve the fact that only the largest cities in some area are present, but eliminate the arbitrariness of the boundaries. I think you would want to compute this with a sweep line algorithm.

<comment><USER11> A map projection that preserves area would be better, otherwise there's an excessive number of cities in the far northern hemisphere, and a lack of detail in the tropics.

<comment><USER12> Meanwhile, neither Sweden's nor Norway's capital is in the map. But two smaller Norwegian cities are.

I think this just teaches you the issue with discretization.

<comment><USER13> There are in fact five small Norwegian towns on this map.

Vadsø, Hammerfest, Trondheim, Bergen and Longyearbyen.

<comment><USER14> Denmark has a funnier case. There are 6 cities/town within the Kingdom of Denmark with 0 of them in Denmark. (5 in Greenland and 1 in The Faeroe Islands; Iceland belonging to the Kingdom until 1944 has 2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder if London could be the largest city in _two_ boxes. The zero meridian line goes through Greenwich, which leaves most of London in the western box, but a still sizeable chunk of East London in the eastern box.

Is East London bigger than Hamburg?

Are there any other large cities that straddle the bounding boxes?

<comment><USER16> Brussels (c.1.2m) and Cologne (c.1.1m) are both in that box, I believe.

It seems the population of the parts of Greater London east of the Meridian is something around one million[1] so it would be close.

1\. [https://www.citypopulation.de/en/uk/greaterlondon/](https://www.citypopulation.de/en/uk/greaterlondon/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm fairly sure Toronto is larger than Chicago...

EDIT: Yeah, back in 2013: [https://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2013/03/05/torontos_p...](https://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2013/03/05/torontos_population_overtakes_chicago.html) \- and I'm pretty sure it's almost at or crossed the 3M mark (COVID may have tossed a wrench in the latter).

Ah. It's because Toronto is in the same box as _New York_ - my bad!

<comment><USER18> Chicago is having significant population loss, so that gap will only grow. I believe Houston is about to pass Chicago.

<comment><USER19> Why is Chicago losing people?

<comment><USER20> Many reasons, but probably the biggest one is social shifts causing an overall degradation of city life resulting in people leaving. When the Chicago Board of Trade ended floor trading a significant amount of large finance companies moved elsewhere, some relocated to Dallas, some reduced staffing/office space and had principle officers in NYC already.

There's a lot of conversations about cities in the Midwest simply not happening, even though critical decay is occurring. St. Louis is another example of a city where they were doing very well for awhile and had a strong aerospace/telecom/manufacturing/tech sector and the city has now decayed dramatically to the point many businesses have pulled out and crime rates have skyrocketed. St Louis and Chicago are both more dangerous cities than Detroit, and all the available evidence points to violence being primarily a socioeconomic issue rather than an issue of any other factors.

<comment><USER21> If you're looking for somewhere to invest, anywhere in the bottom of these lists will make it much harder to earn a decent ROI due to a higher taxes to government services ratio compared to places higher on the lists. Chicago unfortunately is at the bottom of both lists.

[https://www.truthinaccounting.org/news/detail/financial- stat...](https://www.truthinaccounting.org/news/detail/financial-state-of-the- states-2019) [https://www.truthinaccounting.org/news/detail/2020-financial...](https://www.truthinaccounting.org/news/detail/2020-financial- state-of-the-cities)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A lot of comments about metros areas and the like, such as how Jacksonville shows up because of city limits being larger than atlanta, but if you start getting I to trying to define what a city's metro area is, you run into a lot of issues with giant powerful cities like NY. Can you really count the population of Newark, New Jersey as part of NYC, NY? Even though newark is firmly within the NYC metro area, it's a separate city in a different state with it's own government etc. And what do you do about the bay? Is San Francisco part of san Jose? What about twin cities, like dallas and fort worth? This probably makes the most sense as a way of doing this map since at least it's clear cut.

<comment><USER23> One way to work around the arbitrariness of city limits would be to only count the population living within a fixed distance of the city center. I would suggest 5 or 6 km, which is approximately the distance that your can comfortably walk in 1 hour, and also (perhaps not coincidentally) the approximate radius of Paris. This would get you a list of dense cities, which is probably what people are imagining when they thing of "large" cities.

Another way would be to count everyone as part of the population of whatever city they are physically closest to, without regard to political boundaries. But this would probably just get you a list of sprawling metropolitan areas.

<comment><USER24> A good way to define metropolitan areas is by commuter patterns. If a certain percentage of residents of a county or town all commute to the same adjoining larger town, then that gets counted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Guangzhou is usually reported as larger than Shenzhen.

A specific issue with the population of Chinese cities, though, is that the administrative 'city' division in China can be quite larger than what might be expected in the West.

<comment><USER26> a lot these are pretty bad representations of real population, even in the US.

ex: Jacksonville is listed as the largest city in the southeast, and strictly speaking, this is true because it's a fairly dense population area. But it's a pretty misleading statement to say that it's the largest city.

Jacksonville's metro population is only about 1.5 million.

Atlanta is in the same box and Atlanta's metro population is nearly 4 times larger (5.9 million), Nashville also beats Jacksonville (1.9 million)

<comment><USER27> To me that's not misleading in that they count city proper rather than metro areas.

Both have their places, but I wouldn't say one is more misleading than the other. One is administrative and one is more demographic.

<comment><USER28> And they both go to show that statements/calculations about things like urban density are heavily influenced by historically and culturally determined political boundaries and definitions. Even look at the US Census Bureau 80% urban metric that a lot of people like to quote. Lots of small towns with farmlands and orchards (like where I live) are "urban" by this particular definition. And they _are_ "urban" relative to truly rural Wyoming. But they're not urban in the sense of having any of the attributes of a dense city center.

<comment><USER29> There must be a way to come up with an (almost) universally applicable metric of city-ness, regardless of the adminstrative boundaries, that can be applied to situations like this map. Something like, the area in which the population density is above a certain threshold, and the population that lives in that area.

<comment><USER28> FiveThirtyEight has done some work in that area for purposes of splitting urban/rural from a political perspective. The article also mentions a couple other examples of something similar.

[https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-urban-or-rural- is-y...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-urban-or-rural-is-your- state-and-what-does-that-mean-for-the-2020-election/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Used to live on Baseline Rd. It originally split Nebraska Territory to the north and Kansas Territory to the south, originally surveyed in 1859. The Colorado territory wasn't formed until two years later in 1861. (Utah territory originally began somewhere in the Rockies beyond Boulder).

</comment><comment><USER31> TIL Atlanta, GA has fewer people than Jacksonville, FL. The Atlanta metropolitan area has a lot more people.

<comment><USER32> This is the problem with how we define cities. Jacksonville is technically the largest city in all of Florida too, but that is because it annexed almost all of its suburbs, so the whole "metro" area is just on city, which is quite different then most other American cities.

<comment><USER33> Jacksonville is the largest city by land area in the continental United States, not just Florida. [https://web.archive.org/web/20021017211112/http://www.census...](https://web.archive.org/web/20021017211112/http://www.census.gov/statab/ccdb/cit1010r.txt)

<comment><USER34> But it's very sparsely populated, not even in the top 100:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population_density)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> What would be awesome is if you can take a grid like this and then drag it to create an offset and change in subtle ways what cities appear in the boxes.

This could be the beginning of something like a gerrymandering tool.

</comment><comment><USER36> Spotted a factual mistake immediately:

> There is a Chinese version of this. The Chinese cities on the map include > the big Chinese cities: Shanghai, Beijing, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Chengdu. > Shenyang. A couple of cities in Mongolia, analogous to the appearance of > Winnipeg on the U.S. map.

Baotou and Hohhot are both Inner Mongolian cities, i.e. Chinese cities.

<comment><USER37> Thank you for pointing this out. I will correct it.

(edit: Fixed. Thanks again.)

<comment><USER36> No problem!

<comment><USER37> I really like the idea of Idaho and Montana as the Inner Mongolia of the United States.

Clearly, Mongolia itself is analogous to Canada.

<comment><USER36> Yeah, definitely some parallel there, though Canada is more like Mongolia and Siberia combined.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I love how this says something about the biases that exist in making legible maps. Toronto isn't even shown.

Any time to read a map, remember that at different scales, there's an editorial opinion, whether direct or algorithmic, on what you see.

<comment><USER39> It's not particularly biased to say that New York is larger than Toronto, in my opinion.

<comment><USER17> I think the OP got confused - as I did - on the position of Toronto on the lakes. We both didn't realize that Toronto is in the same box as New York.

<comment><USER38> I'm not confused. That's my point. That Toronto is a big city and the rules defining how this map gets symbolized makes it invisible.

<comment><USER40> It's like saying Pluto is a big planet. It may be true but there is a bigger one nearby that make it invisible if your map is about the biggest in the neighborhood.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This could serve as a good example of how politicians manipulate voting areas to ensure majorities. The results are probably correct, but the result is misleading.

<comment><USER42> Gerrymandering was the very first thing that popped into my head when I noticed the most populace city in my country lose out to what's basically a town because it ended up on a grid with another country's city. I nearly started a "that's clearly a mistake" comment before realizing what had happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Niue isn't a city (nor village). It's a country.

<comment><USER44> Ah, the famous country which has Pokemon, Disney, Star Wars etc. characters embossed at their national currency coins [1].

[1] [https://www.procaffenation.com/niue-currency-cartoon- coins/](https://www.procaffenation.com/niue-currency-cartoon-coins/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I was surprised by Leonora, Western Australia being there with it's population of 556 [1], I tried to find a bigger town in the area but couldn't.

I wonder if that is the smallest town on that map?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonora,_Western_Australia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonora,_Western_Australia)

<comment><USER46> Alert in northern Canada has 62 permanent inhabitants, according to wikipedia [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alert,_Nunavut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alert,_Nunavut)

<comment><USER47> I had a friend who worked up in Alert while he was in the air force. It may be one of the most remote places on the map, it's essentially an out grown air force base/research station, there would be nothing there if not for the cold war.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Interesting map!

What I found particularly interesting is that Fort Collins (in Colorado) was the largest city in it's block with a population of only 167k people. Just goes to show how sparsely populated that region is around Wyoming/Northern CO/Montana.

<comment><USER49> And a good example of why the 10 degree grid is arbitrary and meaningless - Denver is an hour south with a metro population in the millions. But it didn't make the arbitrary cutoff at 40N.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Seems like Malé, Maldives is missing in favor of Hithadhoo, a city 1/14th the size.

Edit: Actually Kochi, India is in Malé's box. So that makes sense. Interesting mental gymnastics at play here!

</comment><comment><USER51> Nauru is not a city, it's a country. Its largest city is Denigomodu

Tristan da Cunha also isn't a city. Though there is only one city there: Edinburgh of the Seven Seas

</comment><comment><USER52> Why are some empty ocean squares colored dark blue and some light blue? Does light blue mean there is some land mass there but it's uninhabited?

<comment><USER53> Yes. That's the concept I believe. I'm not sure how big a landmass had to be to make the map though.

<comment><USER54> It would be good if empty pieces of land were shaded differently, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> The largest city in Canada as I remember is Edmonton the Capital of Alberta this is based on per Sq.M. just find that interesting trivia.

<comment><USER56> Interestingly the most populous cities in Canada--Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, are not there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I think Dingle is bigger than and west of Clifden.

<comment><USER37> Dingle is bigger, and is in the same box. The article mentions this, but thanks for pointing it out.

The author of the map is preparing a corrected version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> How is Jacksonville larger than Atlanta?

<comment><USER59> pop(Jacksonville) > pop(Atlanta)

903,889 > 498,044

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> This is not a good use case for the Mercator projection.

Mercator sacrifices area accuracy to facilitate navigation.

</comment><comment><USER61> A geographically curious conceptualization of the random error in sampling artifacts.

</comment><comment><USER62> Lol. Some of the Australian towns are rather small, showing how sparse our population is:

Leonara: 2,476

Geraldton: 37,000

Mackay: 80,000

<comment><USER63> Google gives Leonora pop 556, which to me is much more believable. There's nothing for 2k folk to do in Leonora.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> There's a typo in Port-aux-Français, the name on the map is missing an x.

</comment><comment><USER65> Interesting that a small country like Cuba has two cities in a square.

</comment><comment><USER66> So what's the big deal of cities coincidentally aligning with one of his drawn lines?

</comment><comment><USER67> Pretty interesting, but it suffers from a common flaw for this type of analysis - it counts the population that lives within the municipal boundaries of the city itself, not the population that lives within the "urban area" or commuting zone of that city. Different regions have different norms and laws for how they define municipal boundaries, so in some places the main municipality (e.g. Boston) is just a fraction of the urban core, while in other places the municipal boundaries include huge amounts of suburban and even rural land. Unless you're specifically interested in analyzing something related to municipal government, this isn't normally what you want to use to compare across regions.

Jacksonville, FL is an extreme example of this. Jacksonville's municipal boundaries are _huge_ \- it covers 875 sq. miles[1]. This is ~1.85x the area of New York City[2], and 3.77x the area of San Francisco[3].

Within the US, it's preferable to use core-based statistical areas (CBSAs)[4] for this type of analysis. They're defined by commuting zones, and they're not sensitive to political boundaries except to the extent that political boundaries actually affect commuting patterns. If you want to limit yourself to the "dense" part of the metro area then you can use the Census-defined Urbanized Areas[5], but the definitions of those might not match your intuitions about what should be included.

Assuming we use CBSA population, then the box that contains Jacksonville should instead have Atlanta, which has an CBSA population of ~5.8 million vs. only ~1.5 million in Jacksonville[5].

The statistical agencies for other countries have similar concepts. For Europe, Eurostat defines metropolitan regions[6], which have a similar definition. The OECD also maintains a data set of population by metropolitan area for OECD countries, although the methodology isn't consistent across all countries in that data set[7].

TL;DR - political and municipal boundaries aren't comparable across regions, use commuting zones or density-based region definitions instead. If you see Jacksonville, FL in a list of "biggest cities", it's always a red flag that they're using municipal boundaries.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacksonville,_Florida](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacksonville,_Florida)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_york_city](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_york_city)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco)

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core- based_statistical_area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core- based_statistical_area)

[5] [https://www.census.gov/programs- surveys/geography/guidance/g...](https://www.census.gov/programs- surveys/geography/guidance/geo-areas/urban-rural/2010-urban-rural.html)

[5] [https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=United%20States&tid=A...](https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=United%20States&tid=ACSDT5Y2018.B01003&g=0100000US.310000&vintage=2018&hidePreview=true&tp=true&moe=false)

[6] [https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/metropolitan- regions/data/...](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/metropolitan- regions/data/database)

[7] [https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=CITIES](https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=CITIES)

<comment><USER37> Yes, definitely. This sort of issue is very hard to resolve adequately. There's no definition that always does everything we want.

A while back I wrote an article comparing each U.S. state's largest and second-largest cities. ([https://blog.plover.com/misc/second-largest- cities.html](https://blog.plover.com/misc/second-largest-cities.html)) I made a perfectly reasonable choice of which definition to adopt, but it still had major peculiarities: the largest city in New Jersey was Trenton, not Newark, because in the data set I used, Newark was considered part of New York City.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Unless I'm missing something, this map might be pretty or impressive that it can be made, but it is entirely meaningless. Meaningless in that I don't know of significant meaning of breaking down the globe into 10° chunks whatsoever. This doesn't tell you anything about the cities shown, nor the area in which those cities exist. There is zero meaning in this map because no meaning can be derived from the filter process. The constraints have no relation to the data.

The article is cool that it takes a dive into the "odder" boxes and finds a flaw or two. The author also recognizes the arbitrary nature of the map. I imagine that almost any other filtering would be more interesting to geek out over though.

I am somewhat surprised by the popularity of this post here and on reddit, but then again that is sometimes how popularity works. The piece is presented well, just meaningless.

<comment><USER37> Not everything needs to have utility. Some things are just for fun. Utility is important, but fun is important too.

<comment><USER68> That's a fair point I respect. It does seem that it would be easy to have this fun in a way which is also useful, with literally any filtering system which had a relationship to the data. Equal work, equal fun, more than zero use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Where is Saint Petersburg, Russia? It seems to be on the border of the boxes and might be in the same box with Helsinki (metro 1,495,271) or Minsk (metro 2,645,500). Saint Petersburg's population is 5,351,935.

<comment><USER70> In the text of the article:

> What the heck happened to St. Petersburg? (at 59.938N, 30.309E, it is _just > barely_ inside the same box as Moscow. The map is quite distorted in this > region.)</comment></comment>


Tesla ranks last on influential JD Power quality survey - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/25/21302804/tesla-ranks-last-on-influential-jd-power-quality-survey <comment><USER2> The comments here are weird and conspiratorial.

 _" the results immediately suspect."_

 _" makes me question just how influential this survey is"_

 _" one "survey".... what happened to integrity?"_

 _" Dodge looks like they paid a lot of money"_

The JD Power methodology is right there to read. If you're going to accuse them of corruption, maybe a bit of evidence?

Or maybe, just maybe, Tesla has reliability issues. Many people outside the tech circles have known about this for a long time. They are being sued for paint issues. Panel alignment is terrible. I've seen videos of people going through the car wash and water _leaking through the headliner_.

Do you really think that stuff happens with Dodges and Kias?

<comment><USER3> Surprised as well, Teslas are known for their quality issues and huge waiting times for parts.

There are videos on the Tesla subreddit on checklists to go through to make sure you get a decent car with few issues and dozens of horror stories on people that didn't go through those.

And I'm saying that as someone who wants one.

<comment><USER4> I'm just hoping other companies can offer something coming close to competing with Tesla in the next five years (my timeline for getting a new car). I'm already leery of Tesla's autopilot being more camera-based.

<comment><USER5> That might be quite a while. People have been waiting since the original Model S came out in 2012.

<comment><USER6> The reason is that other manufacturers make money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another article posted yesterday noted that the primary complaints were related to the tech stuff in the cars (touch screens, Car Play, Android whatever, etc...). Given how different Tesla's interface is compared to a traditional car it make sense that new users would gripe about those things during the first 90-days of ownership.

Edit, the article: [https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/06/teslas-are-the-most- unr...](https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/06/teslas-are-the-most-unreliable- new-cars-in-the-us-survey-finds/)

and a quote: "Ars readers may not be surprised to discover that the most troublesome of these categories was infotainment, which accounted for almost a quarter of all problems."

<comment><USER8> They finished second bottom in the Honest John reliability survey too [1], so maybe not just the infotainment system. Only Jeep were worse. I love watching the mental gymnastics required to support Musk, it's the closest thing the internet has to a spectator sport.

[1] [https://www.honestjohn.co.uk/honest-john-satisfaction- index-...](https://www.honestjohn.co.uk/honest-john-satisfaction- index-2020/honest-john-satisfaction-index-2020-the-results/)

<comment><USER7> I'm neither for nor against Tesla, but if someone is saying a car is unreliable because people complain about the infotainment systems... that seems deceptive. I think myself, and every driver I have ever talked with, care about two primary things re reliability after the initial cost of a car: how safe it is and how much it costs to maintain every xx,xxx miles. All this other stuff is distracting and is trying to imply important aspects of a car are inferior when they may not be.

Here are the pros and cons that honestjohn focus on re the Model S in their "reliability" assessment: Pros -Excellent performance with usable battery range. Impressive, huge touchscreen interface. Practical interior with plenty of luggage space. Easy to drive.

Cons - Fit and finish could be better for a car at this price. Supercharger network small, but growing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Dodge and Kia were tied for the top-rated brand with just 136 issues per 100 vehicles."

I haven't read much more into this, but if a Dodge is more reliable than a Toyota I'll eat a roll of paper towels

<comment><USER10> This is the "initial quality" survey. Reliability isn't really part of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Dodge is on top instead of Toyota or Honda? This makes the results immediately suspect.

<comment><USER12> It's in the first 90 days. Perhaps Toyota or Honda put additional features in their car that require some tweaking? When I bought a new 2018 Accord, the fancy display immediately had issues from day 1 and needed replacing. After that, no issues.

<comment><USER9> Usage of the word "Quality" rather than "Initial quality" in the article headline makes it all look like some kind of lame hatchet job

<comment><USER12> Yeah, the submitted article's title doesn't tell the entire story. That's why it's always important to comment on the article, not the headline.

<comment><USER9> I disagree. Deception isn't cool and its worth calling it out when it happens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ram is listed separately from Dodge (I'm guessing they are technically different companies now?)

Combined they'd get 277 which would put them last

Edit: correction - as stan_rogers says below, adding gives problems per 200 cars. 277 / 2 = 138.5

<comment><USER14> It's problems _per 100 vehicles_. If you add them up, you get problems per _200_ vehicles. If you go back to 100 vehicles, you'd have 139 (assuming they round up).

<comment><USER13> Good catch - I added an edit

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The fact that Dodge and Kia top the list makes me question just how influential this survey is.

<comment><USER16> Kia, yes, but Dodge looks like they paid a lot of money. Or their users are really very happy. Ram users certainly are for sure.

For Mercedes and Volvo I think the costs of the repairs are also an important factor.

<comment><USER12> This survey only covers issues in the first 90 days. In terms of repair cost, anything that comes up in the first 90 days is likely covered under warranty, so the cost of repairs would be $0.

<comment><USER16> Interesting. Now this completely changes my mind on these cars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "...the JD Power Initial Quality Study, which measures vehicle quality in the first 90 days of ownership..."

Keep in mind this isn't a long-term reliability or quality measure. The more innovative the car, the more likely it may need an adjustment or tweak in the beginning.

</comment><comment><USER17> dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23637920](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23637920)

</comment><comment><USER18> JD Power is a fake award invented by the auto companies to give themselves anyway. I put zero stock in what gets awarded. It's complete BS.

<comment><USER12> "April 1, 1968: Dave Power and his wife Julie start the firm from the kitchen table in their Calabasas, Calif., home."

"1969: J.D. Power enters the auto market with its first client, Toyota Motor Company."

[https://www.jdpower.com/About-Us](https://www.jdpower.com/About-Us)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> how to completely discredit your company (JD power) in one "survey".... what happened to integrity?

<comment><USER12> Why do you say that? Are there legit issues with the methodology etc, or just because they gave your favorite company a bad placement?</comment></comment>


AWS Olympics: Speed-Testing EC2 and S3 Across Regions - <AUTHOR> http://blog.takipi.com/2013/03/20/aws-olypmics-speed-testing-amazon-ec2-s3-across-regions/

<comment><USER2> For anyone interested in optimizing S3 performance, I recommend Jim Sorenson's "Building Scalable Applications on Amazon S3" from re:Invent.

[http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/building- scalabl...](http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/building-scalable- applications-on-amazon-s3-stg303)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYnVRYbUR6A>

<comment><USER3> His comments on hashing for S3 buckets were pretty interesting.

<comment><USER4> Here's a very informative blog post by Doug Grismore that talks more about this if you are interested: [http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/03/amazon-s3-performance- tip...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/03/amazon-s3-performance-tips-tricks- seattle-hiring-event.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Any idea why the results are not symmetrical? Upload from Virginia to California is twice as fast as from California to Viriginia (and it's even worse with US <-> Japan).

Are there strategical interests to not have a symmetric link?

<comment><USER6> Actually, the results are reverse from what you said (y-axis is the origin). It likely has to do with traffic congestion coming out of each datacenter. Virginia has by far the heaviest use out of all the datacenters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You know, I know it's 2013 and all, and things like this shouldn't amaze me, but the fact that you can get data from Australia to Brazil in _minutes_ is still kind of astounding to me.

</comment><comment><USER6> Australia is has low bandwidth to the rest of the world largely due its geography and capacity/path of the undersea cables connecting the country.

Geographically its relatively close to Singapore (compared to other data centers anyway), all of the cables from the eastern side of the country either go up to Japan via Guam or go to the US via Hawaii. Its not uncommon to see a route from Sydney to Singapore go through the US, and/or Japan before reaching Singapore.

</comment><comment><USER8> Keep in mind that the S3 Virgnia location (known as US Standard Regionin AWS terms) includes endpoints in Virginia and in the Pacific Northwest. Hence that may be why the Virginia to Virginia numbers were high compared to the other regions.

"The US Standard Region automatically routes requests to facilities in Northern Virginia or the Pacific Northwest using network maps." <http://aws.amazon.com/s3/>

<comment><USER9> The us-east and SEA end points for US Standard buckets are directly addressable as well. Consistency will be tighter if you PUT and GET to the same endpoint.

Edit: that's be s3-external-1.amazonaws.com for us-east and s3-external-2.amazonaws.com for the PNW. See <https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=185820>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting!! We've tried conducting similar tests where I work a few months ago. We had to deploy a few servers and tried to figure out the optimal spread.

</comment><comment><USER11> Thanks for putting this up. I'd be very intrested to know if anyone has ever done a similar test with Azure?

<comment><AUTHOR> We haven't tested Azure Cloud Storage. However, we did test other cloud computing hosts such as GoGrid and Rackspace. Their upload speeds were almost the same and sometimes even better than EC2 when uploading to AWS S3. Perhaps we will test Azure in a follow-up post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting. It might also be useful to see latencies between regions (or even availability zones).</comment>


Tech's diversity crisis: 40% of VCs went to Harvard or Stanford - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/venture-capital-educational-diversity-harvard-stanford-60ba2369-6a0a-416a-a759-f7ee17e3a8ba.html <comment><USER2> Perhaps in this case educational background is a proxy for "family's connectedness to network of influential/rich people." It's much easier to get your foot in the door when your pops can make a call to have someone open it.

<comment><USER3> When it's insanely competitive to get into a school, schools may also use previous student recommendations as a proxy. So you end up with a echo chamber.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tech seems to be converging to the norms of other highly paid professions. I'd bet that at least 40% of Goldman Sachs' hires come from Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

How about the big law firms? I know they don't really hire much outside of the Top 14 law schools, and I wouldn't be surprised if the top few schools provide 40%-50% of their hires.

I think the discussion has to be broader than just tech ... America is looking an awful lot like an oligarchy with a caste system. Especially when you consider the recent articles about Ivy League admissions policies.

And this seems to have accelerated in the last 30-40 years. It seems to me that in the past it was much more common to see very successful and highly placed people from humble backgrounds, with degrees from schools I've never heard of, or good regional schools which aren't the Ivies. Now it is dreadfully monotonous, with a huge percentage of people in leadership roles from Yale, Princeton, Harvard or Stanford and whose parents have similar backgrounds.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can we replace this with the original source please: [https://blog.usejournal.com/where-did-you-go-to-school- bde54...](https://blog.usejournal.com/where-did-you-go-to-school-bde54d846188)

The current post doesn't add anything above that.

</comment><comment><USER6> So the majority of the people trusted with the money went to two of the best schools in the world? And this is surprising how? And news how? And wrong how?

Come on, its HARVARD! HARVARD!!!! Seems like the system os working pretty well to me.

<comment><USER7> Is this a joke? Check any ranking system of "top cs/business" schools and you will see that they are all extremely close with any small change to the weight of the features resulting in different orderings. The only way to explain these stats is that there is some simple-minded tribal behavior that skews the ratio. Not what you want to see from the people trusted with the money.

<comment><USER8> > The only way to explain these stats is that there is some simple-minded > tribal behavior that skews the ratio.

That seems like a strong conclusion to reach. Is it possible that there's another explanation that just hasn't occurred to you?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Asian representation climbed from 23% to 26%. "

This totally ruined the diversity of America.

</comment><comment><USER10> SV is definitely a Meritocracy though right guys??

<comment><USER11> More than any other industry in america

<comment><USER10> So more than Professional Sports?

<comment><USER12> Moneyball by Michael Lewis says yes.

This is from memory, but baseball scouts historically rely heavily on athletic appearances (what they think a good pitcher, hitter, etc looks like), more than hard stats.

<comment><USER10> Wasn't the whole point of Moneyball that the A's were able to perform far above their level and salary cap based on evaluating players on hard stats and not appearances? Not sure what your point is.

<comment><USER13> Yep - the real world bows to no one's preconceived notions...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The XY problem - <AUTHOR> http://xyproblem.info/ <comment><AUTHOR> Previous discussion – [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10023882](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10023882).

I think it is pretty interesting, that we are here basically between two fires, assuming too much or too little. This balancing is true art, so the problem is to get enough information to assume with enough reliability without spending too much time.

Also I'd like to point out that in my opinion junior and more senior engineers are often separated by attitude described here ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys)) – when to stop and how to identify root of the problem.</comment>


Show HN: Vuiet – a music player and explorer for Emacs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mihaiolteanu/vuiet <comment><AUTHOR> I've been a last.fm user for over 10 years now. My routine for listening and discovering new music has been to ask last.fm to play similar artists to some artist I already loved and liked or just let last.fm do it's job and play its suggestions for me based on my listening history.

This worked nicely for me. But as I've drifted more and more to a mousless world thanks to Emacs and StumpWM, I became more and more frustrated every time I've had to change songs, add a song to my favorites or just browse an artist page. This back and forth between the browser and Emacs got tiring after a while. Besides, a few years back, last.fm dumped its old system where it used it's own database to play songs and just played the songs directly from youtube. This got me thinking that maybe I can use last.fm's huge dataset to create my own playlists based on similarities between artists and even browse an artist page as I would do in a browser, only inside Emacs. And since youtube is available to everybody, and mpv can play youtube links and can even do searches, I've started playing with this idea.

Another pain point that I've had is lyrics. Sure, if I can get the above thing working, Emacs will know what song I'm currently playing, and fetching the lyrics and displaying them in a new buffer would be a no brainer. But, lots of times I'm having trouble finding the song FROM the lyrics and not the other way around. Especially if I'm not remembering so many words from the song. So why not keeping a local database with all the lyrics I'm interested in and do a local search, from Emacs, and not from Google. Since counsel and helm are such nice tools, I can use those to browse through the results, hit enter, and play my song. No leaving the Emacsland required.

I've tried to implement this first in Common Lisp and call it directly from the window manager (StumpWM). It worked, but it was somehow hard to use. I then tried to implement it directly in Emacs. The first package was lastfm.el with which I can have access to the whole last.fm database. All artist's songs, similarities, user top tracks, everything. With authentication, the user can also add loved tracks, scrobble tracks and all that. In short, everything you can do from the last.fm page, you can now do from Emacs. This was a nice first step. The second step was to implement the lyrics functionality. This is another package, versuri.el.

And the last step is this package, vuiet.el. It brings together lastfm.el and versuri.el with mpv.el for playing songs and some org-mode for displaying and browsing artists and genres. I've gone wild with the playlists and created more options for them than what is available by default on last.fm. I can pick a random artist from my loved songs list, for example, and then play a random song from a random artist similar to it, ad infinitum. Or, when browsing an artist page, I can do a search first and let counsel guide my way as to the exact name of the artist. Maybe I'm lazy, maybe I forget. All in all, it has been a great tool to listen and discover new music, for the lazy people.

I got mostly positive first impressions until now, and I'm sure there are more exciting features to explore with this tool which I cannot think of right now. Improvements and features are waiting to happen, in short. Some bugs are also lurking in there, for sure. But I'm using it for approximately two months already and I really like it. I'm curious how others would use it, what features do they miss, what bugs do they find, etc.

Thanks for trying it out and happy listening!

<comment><USER2> This should be a blog post, my friend.

And incidentally, things like this are one of the (many) reasons I love Emacs.

<comment><USER3> Agree, would love to see this as a blog post!

<comment><AUTHOR> You mean, in an expanded format, with more details and more of the backstory of how this tool came to be? If that's the case, it sounds interesting, I might do it. Thanks for the suggestion!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is really nice!

In my nonexistent free time, I'm very slowly learning Lisp. (well, mostly emacs lisp) I love seeing these sorts of Emacs projects, because I can read through the source and figure out a little bit more about this strange and wonderful language.

This brings to mind one of the reasons I love Emacs so much now. It's the editor with the smallest barrier to learning and extending it, since everything is Lisp, you configure it with Lisp, you customize it with Lisp, and packages are written in Lisp.

Anyway, a long-winded roundabout way of saying: Thank you for sharing this!

<comment><USER2> C-h f, C-h k and helpful are your friends for that sort of thing (spelunking through the Emacs source).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anybody: "what's your primary OS?"

Me: "Emacs." /s

Wanna-be hard-core Emacs user here. Tried this out today, worked beautifully. A few glitches (I'll send a bug report if I can reproduce) but splendid by and large.

There is something to be said for using Emacs an application platform. It is the ultimate IDE, and a self-contained marvel of hackage that somehow works.

Thanks for posting this!

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a really really cool project. Awesome that it exists.

I wish it was a general CLI, instead of relying on Emacs. Or, I wish I felt comfortable enough in Emacs to give this a shot.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you can turn it into that if you use Emacs as Daemon [1]. Then you would be able to call vuiet from the command line as this, for example

> emacsclient -e '(vuiet-play-artist "queen")'

You can then turn it into a full CLI tool for interacting with vuiet with some nice wrappers around the above command, and similar ones. I would be glad if someone gives it a try. I, for one, feel very comfortable inside Emacs.

Thanks for your nice words! I really appreciate it.

[1] [https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsAsDaemon](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsAsDaemon)

</comment></comment><comment> trey-jones I've been using _pianobar_ which is a Pandora CLI and has an emacs package. It's pretty neat and I have Pandora, but this really looks cool and maybe better. I'd like to give it a shot.

[https://github.com/PromyLOPh/pianobar](https://github.com/PromyLOPh/pianobar)

[https://github.com/agrif/pianobar.el](https://github.com/agrif/pianobar.el)

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me know if you're thinking of some feature that you're missing. Feel free to open an issue, I'll gladly look over it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Really want to give this a go but having some troubles figuring how to start it! I've installed it via melpa and then i'm trying to M-x vui[tab] but nothing's coming up?

I know it's often the most boring bit but an installation and quickstart guide on the readme would be super appreciated!

Thanks for all the work

<comment><AUTHOR> You must of course (require 'vuiet), as any package, before using it. Similar with use-package. Or am I missing something?!

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure how it works, but definitely some packages manage to autoload.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was pretty sure you're Romanian based on the app's name :)

<comment><USER9> Very fitting for much of today's music indeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> saw this on reddit, still excited about it, gunna see about actually taking a minute and installing it</comment>


The New Ruby Ecosystem - <AUTHOR> http://ducktypo.blogspot.com/2010/06/new-ruby-ecosystem.html

<comment><USER2> "So, where did the once-vocal Ruby community go?"

Well, it turns out there are many Ruby communities, some vocal, some not. Talking abut _the_ Ruby community is going to end up missing a lot of what is going on.

Mostly, though when people talk about a singular Ruby community they mean Rails.

"In a world where a standard can take years to be discussed, approved, implemented and supported, Ruby standards such as Rack skip from conception to widespread support at blazing speed."

Wish the same could be said for Ruby itself. Everyone who's completely moved to 1.9, raise your hand.

Overall the points made are interesting, but much the same is happening in other language communities. People building stuff in Haskell, Clojure, JavaScript, Scala, etc. are more than happy to steal the best ideas from other realms and make them their own.

So long as people don't start believing in The One True Framework or The One True Languge, we're doing quit well.

<comment><USER3> Seems like there are now around 1/4 on 1.9: <http://survey.hamptoncatlin.com/survey/stats> I expect that to increase a lot once 1.9.2 is out and Rubinius, MacRuby, and JRuby match the spec. And I raise my hand, I'm happily on 1.9 for over a year now.

<comment><USER2> "Rubinius, MacRuby, and JRuby match the spec."

What specs do they all match right now? The implementation teams are doing stunning work, but last I heard they were not all completely compatible and complete.

"And I raise my hand, I'm happily on 1.9 for over a year now."

Sure, but you're part of one those quiet Ruby communities that gets ignored by surveys such as Hampton's.

<comment><USER4> Rubinius, MacRuby and JRuby are all 1.8 implementations now with 1.9 still on the roadmap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Paolo sounds a bit like a fanboy but he makes a lot of interesting points. I work in a Clojure+Java shop yet I use Ruby whenever I can get away with it because it is the fastest language (for me) for getting stuff done. The article talks about Ruby's ecosystem, and that is key to Ruby productivity. That said, I think that Clojure will be super-awesome in a few years as its ecosystem continues to develop.

</comment><comment><USER6> I do my dev on an archlinux box and the standard Ruby version in the repo (1.9.1_p378-2, I think) was doing something screwy to Jekyll.

After reading this article, I checked out RVM and installed a couple different Ruby versions to play with. If you're doing anything with Ruby, I'd definitely suggest checking it out. Set up a 1.8.7-head install inside of RVM and fixed all my Jekyll woes. It also gave me a chance to play with Rubinius and the latest 1.9.3dev release.

I always enjoyed being able to use eselect to switch between Ruby versions on Gentoo and RVM is able to duplicate this functionality and then some.

<comment><USER7> To the best of my recollection, Jekyll itself plays nicely with 1.9.1. It's Liquid that was a problem for me. The Gemcutter.org version of Liquid (2.0) is not 1.9 safe. However, the version at Github (2.1) _is_.

<http://github.com/tobi/liquid>

Since the commit to fix Liquid for 1.9.1 was in April of 2009, I wonder why it's not the version on Gemcutter? (Or some version of that version, if there are other issues...)

 _Edit_ : Yup, just checked. Jekyll with Liquid 2.1 is fine on 1.9.1. (I'm on OSX here, but the 1.9.1 I checked is also patch level 378.)

All of that said, rvm is outstanding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I will be happier when more Ruby coders take the time to actually document their code; rolling through the Rails source has been an exercise in pain, even with all the cleanups that have gone into Rails 3.

I recall an unhappy core contributor awhile back ranting about how people file bug reports but not fixes; the reason is because it takes a significant time investment to find and fix problems if you _aren't_ a core contributor and have no interest in becoming one.

Sinatra and Sequel do it right -- solid documentation, both on the website, and in the .rb files.

</comment><comment><USER9> I find the frequent major changes in the Ruby ecosystem to be quite frustrating. That's not to say that I wish this progress wouldn't occur... I just wish it would occur in a more controlled manner. Documentation seems to suffer the most and I have definitely come across a few libraries that don't "just work". I love Ruby and the Ruby community, but I long for the day when things move at a less frenzied pace... I know it would put my managers at ease, too.

</comment><comment><USER10> Much as I love Ruby and all the things he talks about, I worry that publicizing all these self-congratulatory posts about the Ruby community will create a lot more resistance to what we do. I get the impression that that's how SmallTalk died.

<comment><USER11> It is my impression that corporate drama around the smalltalk vendors helped to quicken its demise. Image-based development (in the smalltalk, not "rockstar" sense of image) also didn't sit well with a lot of people, though there were projects to support exporting source to files.

<comment><USER12> _It is my impression that corporate drama around the smalltalk vendors helped to quicken its demise._

Absolutely true! The merger-politics, the marketing missteps, and the cool technology that got buried are all epic.

 _Image-based development also didn't sit well with a lot of people_

Not so true, for those who really "got it" and hit their stride, and anyone who comments who didn't get to that point is commenting as a clueless newbie. In image-based development, all of your programming meta-data are there as live Objects, instantly scriptable, totally and instantly obedient to your every whim. Ditto for runtime state -- everything available as live Objects and instantly scriptable. Really, once you learn a suitable style, it's heavenly, intoxicating and addictive. The same thing is true for Python and Ruby, but only about half as much. For example, a lot of advanced IDE functions require one to detect changes to files and _re-parse_ things to keep programming metadata current. That problem just _vanishes_ with image-based development. Literally hundreds of problems just vanish because everything is an object and they're all instantly available.

On the other hand, image-based _deployment_ SUCKS. Sucks sucks sucks. Just about every Smalltalker agrees. The big advantage of being file based is that your development test environment resembles your deployment, or is at least halfway to deployment by comparison. Image-based Smalltalk development is like the ultimate monkey-patching uber-debugger. Very cool to develop in, but _you do not want to give it to your users_!

<comment><USER13> Isn't it possible in image-based environments to have live objects but not the code that created them? This idea makes me extremely uneasy. Being able to derive everything in a running system from source code seems almost necessary for maintainability and comprehensibility.

<comment><USER12> You have that in the Smalltalk environment in the Changes Log. It is -- wait for it -- a text file! In fact, it gives you database-log like replay-ability in your entire development environment. "Being able to derive everything in a running system from source code," is exactly what it's for, and it's actually more capable and powerful than what you can get from source files. All of that scripting against the objects I was talking about? You can replay all that stuff too! If you do something stupid-dangerous like, "Semaphore allInstances do: [ :each | each release ]" then you can just exclude that last action when you replay the Change Log. Combined with image save, it gives you the freedom to live as dangerously as you like!

The classic demo -- have your students spend 1/2 hour writing some toy system. Then have them _hard-reboot their machines without saving the image_. Show them how they can restart the image, grab the Change List tool, and voila, all their source code is back!

To answer your question: it's possible that the source can be absent, but you have to execute an explicit command or do some sort of willful sabotage to make it happen that way. Really, it isn't so different from having separate source and executable files.

<comment><USER13> So why does image-based development suck for deployment? If you can regen an environment from a simple text file what's the issue?

<comment><USER12> Because the environment that thing is designed to regen is the _development environment_. That's not the environment you want to give to your users. This isn't so big a deal with things like web application servers, but it is very much a big deal with desktop applications.

It used to be, the way you deploy environments involved stripping out the parts you didn't need for your application. This is doable, but it is a pain, and if you do it wrong, your app blows up sometime when you don't expect. ObjectStudio Smalltalk can bootstrap itself from source files, so you can avoid stripping. VisualWorks tries to build itself up from components (Parcels) on a base image as a deployment strategy. These are less painful than stripping, but your app still blows up if you do them wrong.

Combine that with some vendors not being all that concerned about testing deployment, and you have a potential mess.

Image-based deployment done right - have two images. Your devlopment tools go in the second image. To deploy, you simply leave out the 2nd one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Agreed. I was a little worried about the state of ruby a few years ago when MRI was flaky and Rails deployment was a real hassle but now it's just such a productive and pleasant environment to work in. There's still work to do, of course, but I still reach for Ruby when I need to get something done quickly.</comment>


Sen. Josh Hawley readying broadside against big tech's ad business, legal shield - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/15/josh-hawley-big-tech-ad-business-legal-318823 <comment><AUTHOR> > Republican Sen. Josh Hawley is preparing legislation that could require > major online platforms like Google and Facebook to stop selling certain > targeted ads to keep key legal protections, according to an individual > familiar with the plan that would strike the heart of industry giants' > business.

> The individual told POLITICO the proposal would make industry protections > under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — a 1996 law that > shields online businesses from lawsuits over user content — contingent for > some platforms on not allowing advertisers to target users based on > behavioral data, which includes information such as web-browsing history and > online activity.

> It's the latest GOP-led plan to target Section 230, which has come under > fire from President Donald Trump, his allies and a loose coalition of > lawmakers. Trump has called for the legal shield to be "revoked" over GOP > allegations that social media companies stifle conservative viewpoints, and > last month he asked federal regulators to reinterpret that law to limit its > scope.

Original title lacked context; Josh Hawley is a US Senator (R-MO). Original title was:

Josh Hawley readying broadside against big tech's ad business, legal shield</comment>


Labs Shuts Down Free Developer Access - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.com/2014/11/18/labs-shuts-down-free-developer-access/

<comment><USER2> [http://hackaday.com/2014/11/18/thalmic-labs-shuts-down- free-...](http://hackaday.com/2014/11/18/thalmic-labs-shuts-down-free- developer-access/)

I see what you did there...</comment>


Screenshot Saturday - <AUTHOR> I really enjoyed last weeks Screenshot Saturday[1]. So here is this weeks post: "If you like the idea, please post a screenshot and a few words of explanation on what you have been working on for the past week."<p>[1](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7579982) <comment><USER5> I'm working on a game titled Aerannis about a female assassin who may or may not be schizophrenic. She fears that she's losing touch with reality entirely and trapped in a world of her own delusions, but comes to realize that she may really just be the center of a global conspiracy.

[http://i.imgur.com/Li0guL8.png](http://i.imgur.com/Li0guL8.png)

[http://i.imgur.com/Sstch17.gif](http://i.imgur.com/Sstch17.gif)

[http://i.imgur.com/j0yUGI8.png](http://i.imgur.com/j0yUGI8.png)

[http://i.imgur.com/tE5nfAU.png](http://i.imgur.com/tE5nfAU.png)

Nothing as complex or inventive as the other projects here, but it's all that I'm working on at the moment.

<comment><USER6> Fucking awesome art, dude.

Any gameplay vids? Demos?

What are you deving in? What platforms do you hope to release for?

<comment><USER5> I'm a few months away from releasing a demo and I haven't recorded any videos in a while. I'm making fairly rapid progress on it, so any videos I have are tremendously out of date.

I'm making it in Lua/Love2d and I'll be releasing it for Windows/OS X/Linux. Love apparently works on Android as well, so I'll see if I can port it to that after I finish it.

<comment><USER7> Awesome work! How do you plan to distribute it?

Also I love how the traffic light seems to have eyes. Pretty creepy.

<comment><USER5> If all goes well, being greenlit and selling through Steam would be nice. The Humble Store seems to be another good option.

And yeah, every object in this universe serves as a sentient surveillance device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm working on a web-app which starts like a feature-rich to-do list app, but shifts the focus towards planning out larger life goals, and tracking progress:

[http://imgur.com/a/tSPHP](http://imgur.com/a/tSPHP)

In particular this week, I've been working on solidifying the quantification side of the app (see the first two screenshots) - i.e. making day-to-day productivity (and lack of productivity!) towards big goals something that's measurable and the user can be held accountable for as they look back over past performance.

I've added more of an explanation to the imgur captions.

The site's currently in a launched-but-heavy-iterating stage at [https://nachapp.com](https://nachapp.com)

<comment><USER9> That's a great idea though I worry that it would totally tickle my OCD productivity crazy side...

<comment><USER8> Thanks! Hmm, well, if you leverage that attribute in the right way, it could be a big asset. The thing which I'm trying to do differently from other habit- building apps is get users to put a real focus on making tangible progress towards goals. So instead of just ticking "go to the gym" of a to-do list every day for the sake of feeling productive, actually setting a target and monitoring progress towards it. If all your goals are set up in this way, then having an internal drive to come back and keep up the routine day-to-day, will mean you're consistently improving yourself, which surely can't be a bad thing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [http://i.imgur.com/PnmDT5z.png](http://i.imgur.com/PnmDT5z.png)

I have had some time off this week so decided to work on something a bit different. I have been working on a concept fuzzing framework for security testing. In the screenshot you can see some of the files produced by it - <USER2> bottom right is the configuration used to generate the file format (for this case Bitmap, although I have tested a few others like WAV)

Bottom left is a bitmap produced with no defects. The top shot is a bitmaps produced with some random changes - you can see the green bitmap is now corrupted due to a change somewhere in the format.

<comment><USER11> Neat. Have you found any bugs with it yet? Any sense of where you're going to take it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nothing really fancy like other people here. I'm making an admin template based on bootstrap. It's my first attempt at it and I plan to sell it on wrapbootstrap/themeforest (if they find it good enough for their marketplace).

[http://i.imgur.com/Q12ACJu.png](http://i.imgur.com/Q12ACJu.png)

[http://i.imgur.com/7gqyQiN.png](http://i.imgur.com/7gqyQiN.png)

[http://i.imgur.com/sEVu6lG.png](http://i.imgur.com/sEVu6lG.png)

<comment><USER13> Love the design. What are you using to make your graphs?

<comment><USER12> Thanks! Sorry for the late reply. I'm using flot charts [1] for the big traffic graph and peity [2] for the smaller ones. Apart from that, there are some other good options like morris.js [3], Chart.js [4], flotr2 [5], xCharts [6] and sparklines [7]. There are more if you search for them but I've used the ones I mentioned in the template. Added more screenshots of the charts pages. [8] [9] [10] [11]

[1] [http://www.flotcharts.org/](http://www.flotcharts.org/)

[2] [http://benpickles.github.io/peity/](http://benpickles.github.io/peity/)

[3] [http://www.oesmith.co.uk/morris.js/](http://www.oesmith.co.uk/morris.js/)

[4] [http://www.chartjs.org/](http://www.chartjs.org/)

[5] [http://humblesoftware.com/flotr2/](http://humblesoftware.com/flotr2/)

[6] [http://tenxer.github.io/xcharts/](http://tenxer.github.io/xcharts/)

[7] [http://omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/](http://omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/)

[8] [http://i.imgur.com/MvaDsJk.png](http://i.imgur.com/MvaDsJk.png)

[9] [http://img845.imageshack.us/img845/2875/k3uv.png](http://img845.imageshack.us/img845/2875/k3uv.png)

[10] [http://i.imgur.com/SKhFxiC.png](http://i.imgur.com/SKhFxiC.png)

[11] [http://img835.imageshack.us/img835/5030/jygx.png](http://img835.imageshack.us/img835/5030/jygx.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm working on an app to help me find a job: [http://i.imgur.com/sam9Cgt.png](http://i.imgur.com/sam9Cgt.png)

I'm using it right now to search through a year's worth of HN "Who's hiring" threads and starring places that I want to work at / hiding those that match criteria that I don't want.

Pretty soon I'll be adding the "application management" piece to it so that I can start to track my applications, correspondences, phone screens, etc.

[https://medium.com/@sfdev14](https://medium.com/@sfdev14)

Backbone.js frontend powered by a Rails API with MongoDB as the datastore. Wanna hire me? firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been working on [https://thesquatrack.com/](https://thesquatrack.com/)

It does workout, nutrition, and body measurement tracking and I'm in the midst of deploying the routines and meta-routines - [https://thesquatrack.com/soon](https://thesquatrack.com/soon) over the next few weeks.

* Better search result info - [http://i.imgur.com/RassIwF.png](http://i.imgur.com/RassIwF.png)

* Flexible nutrition goals - [http://i.imgur.com/8dabrHg.png](http://i.imgur.com/8dabrHg.png)

* Some meal fast logging - [http://i.imgur.com/PdOBm0U.png](http://i.imgur.com/PdOBm0U.png)

* Improved the dashboard a bit - [http://i.imgur.com/hbs8ZTS.png](http://i.imgur.com/hbs8ZTS.png)

I'm not a UI/UX or business person, but I love code, so as long as it's functional, I'm happy.

100% solo founder and 100% bootstrapped ... it's been a heck of a fun journey :-)

<comment><USER16> I've used i[T] since early beta, shorty. Much better than fitocracy and I think you really hit the nail on the head that your website should help me be more effective (with wil[K]s calc, program templates, and nutrition [2]), instead [o]f just [G]iving me MORE e-points.

Best 5 bucks a month I spend.

I should also say that your site is one of the few startups that I've seen that doesn't completely neglect security. Not sure if it's just part of your framework (symfony?), but I rarely look at startups sites that I can't break in less than a minute.

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the support it means the world to me (literally, you're keeping me fed!). On a more serious note, I've got a lot of things planned and I hoped the announcement of the automated meta-routines shows I'm not dicking around with making an entirely new platform ... I just need to get some people on marketing it if I want to go faster :-/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Highschooler here building a reddit bot that can be summoned to create posters, tshirts, mugs, mousepads, etc from images and comments posted on reddit.

It's around 70% done. The hard parts: creating the posters from comments (imagemagick) and creating a product page (zazzle api) are both done.

Now i'm just working on getting a rabbitmq cluster up and running so that it can process multiple comments at once. Also working on the design of the the items because right now it's pretty bland with just b/w text.

Here's a screenshot: [http://i.imgur.com/8SOMHBl.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/8SOMHBl.jpg)

<comment><USER18> This is super awesome. That's a great idea and your code (what's in the screenshot at least) looks nice as well.

<comment><USER17> Thanks! I've been working on this on and off for the last couple of weeks and getting more ideas and feedback before releasing an initial version.

Also here's a better screenshot of what a poster might look like: [http://imgur.com/YMGwlCo](http://imgur.com/YMGwlCo)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm working on a music and member management system for my university's radio station [1] as part of an independent study. I'm cheating and using FlatUI [2] for the interface. Using Bookshelf.js + MySQL/Express/Angular/Node

Screenshots here: [http://imgur.com/a/uw8I1#0](http://imgur.com/a/uw8I1#0)

[1]: [http://www.wrct.org/](http://www.wrct.org/) [2]: [http://designmodo.github.io/Flat-UI/](http://designmodo.github.io/Flat-UI/)

<comment><USER19> Huh, been getting a lot of hits on imgur. If anyone's curious, the repo is here. I'd totally love any suggestions! I'm doing a lot of this stuff for the first time.

[https://github.com/bichiliad/warmd](https://github.com/bichiliad/warmd)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This has been my first project working server-side. It's like, more complex than Pinterest and less complex than Tumblr.

[http://imgur.com/sQkJPcI](http://imgur.com/sQkJPcI)

One thing I have really enjoyed in this app is having built something in an industry which I have 0 knowledge and almost 0 interest. (fashion, beauty, health). I believe it's allowed me to build much more effectively and detach many of the emotions from building and any preconceived ideas about a particular industry. I normally work in front-end and because I'm looking for a job now I've seen a lot of employers give me a stink eye when I dont have experience in a particular industry or even an interest. I think it's odd and I can see their concerns but I also sometimes like to point out that I can also add to the team something nobody else can, a fresh perspective.

In order to stay motivated I have found inspiration not through the industry and the space itself, but through efficiency and learning new tools that power this website. One of the things I'm most proud is a prototype of a client side feature in which I'll be allowing users to create 'hotspots' anywhere in the image they upload. A typical use-case would be for a user to create a hotspot over a particular item of clothing or accessory and reference a referral link to that product. I've also re-created this hotspot feature in mobile and in videos on top of the Youtube API.

</comment><comment><USER21> [http://imgur.com/JJVvmy9](http://imgur.com/JJVvmy9)

I just finished my portfolio website [http://grant.cm](http://grant.cm)

Github: [https://github.com/grant/grant.cm](https://github.com/grant/grant.cm)

<comment><USER22> Extraordinary beautiful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm building a book-reader app using the Spritz API. I started this at LAHacks with help from Spritz developers, but I've decided to keep working on it and try to get it in the App Store.

Main view when paused: [http://imgur.com/2IyQkSG](http://imgur.com/2IyQkSG)

Main view when reading: [http://imgur.com/yukcvyW](http://imgur.com/yukcvyW)

If you don't know what Spritz is, it's a technology / service to let you read more efficiently, by displaying each word in the same place. Your eyes don't need to scan to find the next word, and most people can increase their reading speeds by a lot because of this. Many dyslexics find reading with Spritz far more comfortable than reading printed text. I'm not going to argue it's use for reading in ranges upwards of 1000 wpm, but I do think it's comfortable and usable for general reading (300 - 400 wpm personally).

Features already integrated:

\- Chapters.

\- Change the speed as you're reading with a slider. Most Spritz applications don't have this, and it's a shame.

\- Pause, play, jump back a few words.

Things left to do:

\- EPUB & MOBI support. Shouldn't be too hard. Currently it just reads TXT documents.

\- Add Books. From URL initially, next step will be GDrive + Dropbox.

\- Bookmarks. Very easy to do with .txt documents, maybe a bit different for e-book formats.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm working on my first (major) project -- an app that will show live winning probabilities for each team in ongoing NBA games. I'm hoping to get it done before this year's NBA playoffs are over.

I just started, and I'm scraping JSON play-by-play data. This is my first experience with databases, so hopefully it works out well.

[http://i.imgur.com/1OafJuj.png](http://i.imgur.com/1OafJuj.png)

<comment><USER25> Hey that's some Golden Gophers stats right there!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Real-time FFT analysis of mic/line-in, with logarithmic scale showing the corresponding music notes. [http://i.imgur.com/3WJcXTK.png](http://i.imgur.com/3WJcXTK.png)

<comment><USER27> This is really cool. It looks a lot like baudline; have you ever used that?

<comment><USER26> Thanks, no I have not, but always interesting to look at similar tools. I'm more interested in going in the gaming direction though (like trying to follow a song singing/whistling, or by making it multiplayer somehow) I was inspired by plink (by dinahmoe)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Working on a mitre sled experiment for use on a table saw. This will allow me to get precise mitres between wood panels. Using Rhino3D/Grasshopper. A few more real-world tests before I redesign it parametrically.

[http://i.imgur.com/McFWvHl.png](http://i.imgur.com/McFWvHl.png)

</comment><comment><USER29> [http://imgur.com/a/qryZL](http://imgur.com/a/qryZL)

The CRM webapp I'm working on with the basic features I think such a system should have :

      - Customers, suppliers and leads management.
      - <USER3>
      - Tasks (billable time tracking)
      - Opportunities, Quotes, invoices, credit notes and purchases
      - Expenses (rebillable)
      - Products and services with inventory and moving average costs
      - <USER4>
      - customer dedicated page

<comment><USER30> do you have a blog or sth on the detail of making this web app? I would love to follow.

<comment><USER29> I should definitely open a blog detailing the progress on the webapp. It's just I never felt having the writing skills to do it. But these kind of skills do not come without practicing, so I will surely go ahead and see ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm writing an iPad app for Mediabrowser 3 (mediabrowser3.com) with another developer. Mediabrowser is in the same space as Plex and XBMC. If everything goes well we plan on launching later this month.

[http://i.imgur.com/xCyfnjt.png](http://i.imgur.com/xCyfnjt.png)

[http://i.imgur.com/RNAUaNN.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/RNAUaNN.jpg)

[http://i.imgur.com/n3j11jI.png](http://i.imgur.com/n3j11jI.png)

[http://i.imgur.com/mA4JTNu.png](http://i.imgur.com/mA4JTNu.png)

We have invested a lot of time and effort into making the app _fast_. Our mantra from the very beginning was that speed was going to be a keystone feature for our app. The fluidity of scrolling in our views was one of the main things we focused on. We wrote test code that continuously scrolls our views up and down while we profile it. We are utilizing Path's FastImageCache along with a lot of other caching to get the performance levels that we wanted.

We are considering writing a new backend for our client app so we can launch a similar app for XBMC as well.

<comment><USER32> Really cool, I love the UI. As a Plex user I look forward to some alternatives and competition. I will certainly download this app

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This should be an automated post (like whoishiring).

I'm working on a command line spreadsheet app. Screenshot: [http://i.imgur.com/snyBhYH.png](http://i.imgur.com/snyBhYH.png)

</comment><comment><USER34> Added a set of questions that customers can answer after starting their Candy Japan subscription. Hopefully this will let me understand them better and help with setting the tone in the way I write, possibly influence product choices and help with marketing.

[http://i.imgur.com/3wNZrSN.png](http://i.imgur.com/3wNZrSN.png)

It's amazing what a nice bunch my customers are. Out of 500 subscribers already 70 have volunteered their time to answer the question set that I just sent out. For typical ecommerce emails, 14% might be the number of people who open an email, but here they not only opened, but clicked through some obscure link on the bottom and spent time answering a long questionnaire for me.

I haven't collected the answers yet, but here are the questions.

\- Why they subscribed

\- Who will eat the candies?

\- Do they have kids?

\- Are they into anime?

\- Have they been to Japan?

\- What are their hobbies?

Also included some that might help with online advertising:

\- Age

\- Gender

\- Education level

\- Married?

\- Social networks they use

\- Other websites they visit (5 people mentioned Hacker News)

I'm thinking of writing up a blog post describing what I learned, will post it later.

<comment><USER35> As soon as my economy clears up i gonna subscribe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Working on a Shopify backend for my startup [http://originalfuzz.com](http://originalfuzz.com). We make handwoven Peruvian guitar straps.

Here's my local dev setup: [http://i.imgur.com/cb0WuDH.png](http://i.imgur.com/cb0WuDH.png)

New backend uses node and grunt along with the shopify theme manager. I can develop locally and keep it in git. Grunt watches the changes and the shopify theme manager uploads the new files. So I'm able to develop locally with haml and sass and deploy to my Shopify store as I work.

Also using [https://github.com/toolsforliving/foundationify](https://github.com/toolsforliving/foundationify) to integrate Foundation with Shopify. It's a good setup for anyone that needs to make an e-commerce site.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm working on a mini-spreadsheet app for Android. The core idea is to keep notes in a key-value format and do basic spreadsheet functions. I have a prototype but not sure if anyone wants it and if I should invest more time to finish it. Here's a screenshot: [https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B17zGMpsqZu- clk1RkNfSnNxLXc/...](https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B17zGMpsqZu- clk1RkNfSnNxLXc/edit). So, anyone wants this?

</comment><comment><USER38> I have been working on a salary crowdsourcing platform [http://salaryfairy.com](http://salaryfairy.com)

After receiving great feedback from a show HN, we are glad to have been able to implement almost all of the suggestions we received from HN.

screenshot: [http://salaryfairy.com/static/fairy/images/report_page_new.p...](http://salaryfairy.com/static/fairy/images/report_page_new.png)

</comment><comment><USER39> Working on getting a '94 miata I recently bought track ready. So far I've installed a rollbar, bled and replaced the brake fluid and fixed a leaky valve cover. I have a brake rotor dial indicator coming in soon so I can diagnose whether the rotors need replacing or not (which will probably be next Saturday's project).

</comment><comment><USER40> A QA test case management tool integrated with Github Issues.

[http://imgur.com/a/0oqGO](http://imgur.com/a/0oqGO)

Designed to be easy to navigate with the keyboard and replace the spreadsheets I normally use on projects.

If anyone out there needs something like this please shoot me an email. Planning on launching a V1 this weekend.

</comment><comment><USER41> Working on a agile task tracker with some friends (similar to trello, but more dev oriented): [http://imgur.com/a/4PF4z](http://imgur.com/a/4PF4z) .

(written with spring mvc for the server side, angularjs for the client side, use websocket/socks.js).

Will be available as a open source project.

<comment><USER29> I like the UI a lot actually. Really nice. What are the parts making this one more dev oriented ?

<comment><USER41> It's still work in progress, but compared to trello:

\- it has a flexible tagging system which combined with the search can provide some nice filtering views (on the board view the filtering is done client side and it's applied in real time on new or updated content)

\- use of github flavored markdown for comments and description (and code highlight)

\- multiple login are supported (at the moment we have oauth2 for google/github/bitbucket, mozilla persona, ldap)

\- support for categorizing the tickets in milestones (and a dedicated milestones view)

\- a permission system which is quite fine grained

\- it's not a SaaS

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> After the huge success [1] of SoundCloud Instant [2], I started working something else using the SoundCloud API.

For the purpose of surprise, I'll just leave the screenshot here: [http://i.imgur.com/PP4LN2J.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/PP4LN2J.jpg)

The prototype is ready and it does what it's supposed to, but it's not ready to be released yet. If you'd like to know when it's ready, you can join my (new) email list: [http://eepurl.com/SRIPT](http://eepurl.com/SRIPT)

[1] [https://twitter.com/TheKaranGoel/status/457563836225056768](https://twitter.com/TheKaranGoel/status/457563836225056768) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7602045](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7602045)

<comment><USER43> So it plays 6 songs at the same time? Neat.

C'mon, what does it do? :)

<comment><USER42> You're almost right! :p

EDIT: Hint - it makes music discovery easier and less time-consuming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I love the idea, didn't see last week's but I'll join in today.

Currently working on a project known as Senescere, latin for 'to grow old'. Before working in HVAC optimization, for grad school I was a research assistant to a face recognition laboratory that specialized in digitally aging the face based on statistical data such as race/age/gender. Recently, our system was used by Allure magazine to get the opinions of plastic surgery from college-aged women; we're looking to piggy back the exposure with a web app that you can use to see how you age.

Right now, I have a base front-end built up, though we are tweaking to think of better wording.

Front-end Top Portion (Image from PlaceIt by Breezi)- [http://imgur.com/50zZgs3](http://imgur.com/50zZgs3)

Front-end Second Portion - [http://imgur.com/f48NGGF](http://imgur.com/f48NGGF)

After an image gets uploaded, we ask to point out the eyes and nose so we can align all 252 'landmark points' to the face through affine transformation. As of right now, I'm in the process of switching where the payment part comes into play. If someone uploads an image, it is added to their dashboard (where I am currently cleaning up).

Uploaded Face Labeling - [http://imgur.com/JvtTcoB](http://imgur.com/JvtTcoB)

User Dashboard - [http://imgur.com/Rk95jTI](http://imgur.com/Rk95jTI)

Affine Transformation - [http://imgur.com/eBeVydI](http://imgur.com/eBeVydI)

Once everything is squared away, I'll be looking towards automating our aging process, since it currently is very 'hands on'. If we get enough traction through this, I'd like to branch out from the 'app' area into working with cosmetic companies to build something they can use to show makeup/aging creams without wasting product.

<comment><USER45> Oh wow that is awesome, the makeup idea is especially solid. Even if you don't end up partnering with a large company, hobbyists and door to door salesmen/women would be a possible market.

More and more of them are already using things like Square in their purchase processes, I imagine having an app on hand to transform clientele beforehand would be pretty enticing.

<comment><USER44> Yup! My thought process is to have a standalone system installed at cosmetic kiosks in malls. Then, you're not wasting product on someone that doesn't buy, and if someone does want to buy, you've already got a list of products they've tried you can ring them up for.

Payment-wise, I'm going with Stripe, but also going to be adding Paypal into the fold tomorrow.

I want to steer away from the app market since its already overwhelmed with AgeBooth and the like. We're marketing this as more than just slapping a Photoshop filter on your face (ala AgeBooth).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Working on sql dashbaords that allow charting databases in real time: [http://www.sqldashboards.com/help/video-tutorial/kdb- databas...](http://www.sqldashboards.com/help/video-tutorial/kdb-database- live-charting)

</comment><comment><USER47> Edit: Ah, I missed the point. Here it is in screenshot form: [http://adambard.com/img/screenshots/extsearch.png](http://adambard.com/img/screenshots/extsearch.png)

My idea is to deliver a fully-customizable drop-in search widget in the form of a javascript snippet. I saw a gap in Adwords coverage for similar searches (I hope it wasn't just Google quashing competition), and thought there might be potential. I did a bit of proof-of-concept coding, and now I'm trying to validate the market.

\---

Before edit:

A competitor to Google Custom Search (yeah, I know) called ExtSearch. Right now there's just a lander at [http://getcustomsearch.com/](http://getcustomsearch.com/)

<comment><USER48> Good luck! In terms of competition, all I know of is one [https://swiftype.com/](https://swiftype.com/) (2 yrs old ~$10MM raised)

<comment><USER49> There's also Searchpath [http://searchpath.io](http://searchpath.io)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Working on a design & layout app for html. I recently switched to om/react.js and it's been a huge improvement in my workflow. [http://i.imgur.com/fvUiUpa.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/fvUiUpa.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER51> I'm working on a parallel EEPROM programmer using Arduino. I'm not using the Arduino IDE since it's a pain and instead using vim and cmake.

[http://imgur.com/a/IxQs5](http://imgur.com/a/IxQs5) [https://github.com/manicolosi/ardburno](https://github.com/manicolosi/ardburno)

I'm experimenting with SPI to transfer the addresses to the shift registers faster and as you can see by the serial output, it's not quite reliable yet. Debugging timing issues is tricky.

I'm also making a PCB. I plan on making it using toner transfer method once some blank PCBs arrive.

</comment><comment><USER52> [http://a.pomf.se/fbbmlu.png](http://a.pomf.se/fbbmlu.png)

I'm busy adding splay tree[1] support to OlegDB[2]. The idea is to use them for searching/cursor iteration. If you haven't seen them before they're basically binary trees with the caveat that newly inserted elements are at the top of the tree. Of course, segfaults abound until I get it working...

[1] - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splay_tree](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splay_tree)

[2] - [https://olegdb.org/](https://olegdb.org/)

</comment><comment><USER53> I'm working on a simple expense/income tracker that me and my wife can use. Excel sheets/templates and other finance apps are way too complicated, we both agreed that in the end accounting is as simple as taking down notes in a ledger -- why not enter those entries just as easy as tweeting (categorize expense/income in hashtags, etc.)

[http://imgur.com/a/fCJJv](http://imgur.com/a/fCJJv)

It's not as complex or innovative as other accounting systems and projects in here, but it's working out for the both of us and we're using it.

</comment><comment><USER54> [http://i.imgur.com/XFyKSak.png](http://i.imgur.com/XFyKSak.png)

Trying to filter oDesk job postings using a naive Bayesian filter. Using method described in pg's _A Plan for Spam_.

<comment><USER55> Naive bayes seems like it would get clobbered on this task... unless maybe you're taking a more simplified approach than I'm imagining.

How's it working out for you?

<comment><USER54> It's pretty good at tossing out posts that are completely irrelevant, which is most of the crap on oDesk. I.e. I'm a web developer who writes custom code, so it tosses out anything about design or Wordpress. But "web developer who writes custom code" is as good as it gets. It scored "MVC" a 77% chance of being good even though I don't use MVC frameworks.

<comment><USER55> Yeah I see. If you're essentially doing a multi-round elimination test based on your custom keywords, you might be able to reduce your noise a bit by preprocessing the 'phrase' stream with something like tf-idf (it looks like your working with the raw data right now?). Then you get a list of the keywords in the document, an estimate of how important they are to that document, and you know how important certain keywords are to you. With that info you can try to classify s.t. you admit jobs with a high intersection if keywords that are important to both of you.

I think something along the lines of a knn classifier be pretty efficient at doing that. Anyhow, just a suggestion, I'll leave you alone now ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> It's Easter break in Australia - 4 days weekend.

I'm working on [http://www.hackathonwatch.com](http://www.hackathonwatch.com) It's a hackathon discovery site - it helps you discover new hackathons.

[http://imgur.com/CQU4TGU](http://imgur.com/CQU4TGU)

I've been working on it for several months, but did not really get a chance to add "watch/monitor" feature.

[1]: optimize contractor work flow to increase my ROI

[2]: adding "watch/monitor" feature

<comment><USER57> I wish it was easier to browse by locations

E.g.: hackatonwatch.com/seattle

<comment><USER56> Thanks! I totally missed this critical feature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> UPDATE: WOW! Thanks, currently there are more users than the whole week. :D

I've been working on a minimalistic game collection site with Flash and HTML5 games: [http://playszone.com/](http://playszone.com/)

Why to play here?

        - Big images that actually shows the real game at almost 1:1 scale;
        - Social integration: when you like an item, like on facebook, share on facebook
          or tweet about it, it will be stored on my server. (You have to be logged in
          in order to work.)
          - Why this is cool? - You have a feel of accomplishment as you will always try to do all the social tasks.
          - Where exactly is this? - Everytime you play a game, you have a right navigation with
          6 buttons. Those are the buttons.
          (The only problem is the like button which takes a lot longer to get accounted)
        - No ads, at least not in my site. The flash games and some html5 games comes bundled with ads (Any way to remove them?).
        - Minimalist UI, which can be closed (Click on the 3 bars at top right of the page).
        - Played games have an watermark (Only for logged in.).

Interesting views:

\- Main: [http://playszone.com](http://playszone.com)

\- In game (flash) Road of Fury: [http://playszone.com/games/id:5334632f8984d74232b8925d/road-...](http://playszone.com/games/id:5334632f8984d74232b8925d/road- of-fury)

\- In game 2 (flash) The Peacekeeper: [http://playszone.com/games/id:5339d19cc6af0b434c2dc9d2/the-p...](http://playszone.com/games/id:5339d19cc6af0b434c2dc9d2/the- peacekeeper)

\- In game (non-flash): [http://playszone.com/games/id:5332e034775c56a02cc4a1cf/flapp...](http://playszone.com/games/id:5332e034775c56a02cc4a1cf/flappy- hearts)

\- Submit game: [http://playszone.com/submit- game](http://playszone.com/submit-game)

\- Login or register: [http://playszone.com/login-or- register](http://playszone.com/login-or-register)

\- Categories: [http://playszone.com/games](http://playszone.com/games)

Login required:

\- Manage games: [http://playszone.com/manage- games](http://playszone.com/manage-games)

Technology used:

        - Node.js + Express
        - MongoDB + Mongoose
        - Server side rendering with React.js

Anyway, I find very very very hard to promote such a site. :/

<comment><USER7> I might be missing something, but is this legal? Where are you getting all the games from and why are you trying to remove in-game ads? There's a reason these games are free and while I think users should be allowed to bypass ads using ad-blockers, it seems bad-natured to do it en-masse for everyone.

<comment><USER58> I know is not a good way to remove the ads. This would create the best experience for the end user. I would like to take another approach to monetization and then of course, reward the actual authors with a part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Been learning Ruby via Learn Code The Hard Way for a part time Rails course that I'm taking over at BrainStation.it [https://www.evernote.com/shard/s51/sh/b463df04-03b4-44cc-9f0...](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s51/sh/b463df04-03b4-44cc-9f03-972a4df29797/6b2dd34cf8e86fd85874237d88f4c4e1/deep/0/Exercise-38 --Doing-Things-To-Lists---Learn-Ruby-The-Hard-Way.png)

</comment><comment><USER60> Continuing to work on my bookmarking / high performance link management and archiving system called Metamarks. Will be done in ~2 months.

[http://imgur.com/ihULyxb](http://imgur.com/ihULyxb)

higher res: [http://jonathanlahijani.com/metamarks/metamarks_screenshot_0...](http://jonathanlahijani.com/metamarks/metamarks_screenshot_001.png)

</comment><comment><USER61> apologies for the repost (had to fiddle with something), but here is a quick and dirty userscript to display imgur links in hacker news threads. I thought it would make screenshot saturdays nicer.

[http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/471215](http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/471215)

the screenshot i'm posting is _everybody 's screenshots_ ^^

</comment><comment><USER62> I've been doing a lot of 3D modeling recently and have wanted to sign my work, so I added text rendering to the Clojure library I've been using:

[https://twitter.com/adereth/status/457217237313925120/photo/...](https://twitter.com/adereth/status/457217237313925120/photo/1)

Learned a bit about font rendering and Java's awt packages.

<comment><USER63> I've been using this library, it's quite nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I'm working a new product addition for my startup, here's an example of what job postings will look like. We're marketed as a "dating site for companies and people", we help people get their dream jobs and help companies grow in the best way possible.

[http://i.imgur.com/HQhMUkV.png](http://i.imgur.com/HQhMUkV.png)

<comment><USER65> This looks pretty cool. I like how it shows potential coworkers.

</comment></comment><comment> TD-Linux Javascript-based axial flux motor simulator. [http://imgur.com/Iv5qbFC](http://imgur.com/Iv5qbFC)

Being used to play with parameters for an in-hub solar vehicle motor. The next step is integrating it with FEA-derived flux densities for higher accuracy.

</comment><comment><USER66> I am working on a new dating site: [http://dump.fm/images/20140419/1397946451238-dumpfm- bendover...](http://dump.fm/images/20140419/1397946451238-dumpfm-bendover- Screen-Shot-2014-04-19-at-6.29.44-PM.png)

<comment><USER67> I'm sad that domain did not work :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Got lobi.mobi domain, Have no idea.</comment>