zacstewart
phpThumb finally deprecated in its own home
Designing society for posterity
Ask HN: Anyone else noticed the 3px margin-top on embedded Google map iframes?
A client complained that I added a white line above his map the other week. Sure enough, there was a 3 pixel line above the map. I investigated further and it's actually in the iframe, inline, applied to the body tag.I figured it was an anomaly at first, but then I started to look at other projects I'd used embedded iframes on. Now I'm noticing it all over the place. I found a bug report, but...
"Naenara" North Korean government online
However, while we're talking about fixing IE6, who wants to port WebKit to Javascript with me?
Value and the State of Google Search Results
I have a job at a web agency now and doing anything better than what's there simply wouldn't make since.
1. Restaurants have tiny margins. 7% profit is doing well, and dishing out $1k or more for what they perceive to be a Yellow Pages ad is unthinkable for a brick and mortar store.
2. Restaurant people are techno-iliterates (in general). I set up a Google Apps account so the managers could communicate with branded email, share documents, schedules, etc, and had to give more than a couple training sessions on these basic tools.
3. They don't consider it something to be 'involved' with. I've tried to press the point of building a presence through social networks, etc, but they can't wrap their heads around it. To them, you should pay someone (as little as possible) for it and it does it's job.
4. They explicitly ask for the faux pas. Owner asked me to take down the "outdated announcement" that we'll be having an event, since it was from last month. This is on the blog portion of the site. Owner asked me to upload the rest of the photos from an event (at least a hundred), even though the entire album is on Facebook, even though I explained no one in the world is going to care enough to flip through hundreds of jell-o wrestling photos on the news page of some restaurant's website. Owner asked for a photo background versus the subtle textured one I had designed the site with.
In the end, trying to teach them what emails is, arguing over design elements and explaining how people will use the site isn't worth it because they are going to be more work and less money than just about any other business owner. Slap something together and collect your $500.
I'm not too sure I'd be enticed to use lots of python modules. I think this may be a programming character flaw, but I am averse to using pre-built stuff in my code, otherwise I'd be using CakePHP or Codeigniter instead of my own framework right now. I always want to build everything from scratch.
Ask HN: Appropriate platform for a data crunching app
I'm in the process of building a social Bayesian suggestion engine. I've coded out a large portion of it from scratch in PHP following an MVC design pattern, but I'm starting to wonder if this is the right environment for doing some Bayesian inference. Will good ol' MySQL work on a grand scale?Reading about the obstacles Hunch has encountered has made me reconsider PHP, but that's what I know...
It will help you find something to do with your possessions in the place you live. E.g., if you have a bike, it might suggest you right critical mass on the last Friday of the month. If you have a dog attend the people with dogs party at your local park this weekend. I can't really come up with a great example myself, but once it's in action, I can see some pretty interesting "recipes" of place, items, people and activities arising.
Value insofar as monetization, is obviously affiliate income from retailers. We're planning to establish an API for any retailer that wants to sign up to add their link to an item's page, which is also helpful to users so they can sort by price and compare retailers.
We don't want to just push more crap from amazon on users. We want to help users become aware of activities they could be doing with the things they own as well.
"789 users that own a MacBook and a DSL camera are doing photography. Maybe you'd like to try it"
From that inventory, we calculate interests in other items. From aggregate user input, we suggest interesting things to do with things you have, things you might want, etc.
I'm still learning how Bayesian networks work, and we might decide on another algorithm entirely, but we'll see how it goes :)
Thanks for your suggestion. We're building an FAQ out of questions like the one you just asked! Is there anything I could explain better?
Show HN: Osmoar: A Bayesian Suggestion Engine
A friend and I are launching an alpha first thing in 2011. We're trying to gain some momentum and whatnot, so we're opening early registration as of tonight.We're planning to develop a Bayesian network to derive suggestions. If you're interested in seeing our progress, check it out.Edit: Any and all suggestions, criticism, advice, etc is highly appreciated!