Hacker News: JoshM33k

New comment by JoshM33k in "Microsoft Surface Pro 4 Review"

JoshM33k — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 20:31:30 +0000

Agreed, entirely. I adored my original Zune, as far as a piece of hardware, it was amazing. Cool look, big color screen, heck even an FM tuner. It was ahead of its time. The software on the other hand still gives me nightmares. It crashed all the time, would constantly lose large chunks of metadata I had meticulously entered, would randomly freeze while loading music... it was the weak link in the Zune chain.

Verizon increases the price of unlimited data plans by $20 a month

JoshM33k — Thu, 08 Oct 2015 18:07:30 +0000

Article URL: http://www.engadget.com/2015/10/08/verizon-unlimited-data-price-increase/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10354713

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by JoshM33k in "Disabled wrestlers enter the ring in Japan"

JoshM33k — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 18:11:46 +0000

I'm unclear, is this professional wrestling (staged and heavily choreographed) or is this more akin to MMA, where the bouts are not predetermined and the fighting is "for real"?

New comment by JoshM33k in "Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip"

JoshM33k — Fri, 25 Sep 2015 20:09:01 +0000

Those types of fragmentation issues never went away, they just changed focus. Whether it is Slack vs. Hipchat vs. Zulip, or WhatsApp vs. iMessage vs. text vs. Hangouts... more options means more (and easier!) ways to contact friends, family, and coworkers, but also means that you have to memorize a "best way to reach me" chart for each individual person.

New comment by JoshM33k in "Why Do Colleges Give Honorary Degrees?"

JoshM33k — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 13:48:05 +0000

I wonder what kind of entry level positions you could score with a bought-and-paid-for honorary degree?

New comment by JoshM33k in "AT&T Hotspots: Now with Advertising Injection"

JoshM33k — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 12:36:09 +0000

A smaller ISP near me (Bright House) does a similar thing with their hotspots. There are no ad injections, but they inject a little popup with their logo, that says something along the lines of "hotspot provided by Bright House networks".

The funny thing is, this network requires you to log in with your Bright House username and password, so anyone seeing that little "provided by" intrusion is already a paying customer.

New comment by JoshM33k in "Writing a Game Boy Advance Game"

JoshM33k — Fri, 21 Aug 2015 18:26:02 +0000

Both games were very cool from my memory of them!

What led you to using No$, and not having an official dev kit? I have no idea what the relationship would have been like with Nintendo...but did they wonder how you'd written the game if they'd never issued an official dev kit?

New comment by JoshM33k in "Writing a Game Boy Advance Game"

JoshM33k — Fri, 21 Aug 2015 18:18:28 +0000

Oh, interesting! For those of you not versed in the intricacies of playground GBA link cable gaming, this protocol was used to link multiple GBAs, where one would have a cartridge and the others would not, and they would receive the game over the link cable. These single-cart multiplayer experiences were almost always very rudimentary, because as Torgo says, you're loading the entire payload in memory.

New comment by JoshM33k in "Writing a Game Boy Advance Game"

JoshM33k — Fri, 21 Aug 2015 11:35:28 +0000

It would be interesting for the author to get a flashcart, load his rom on it, and add some video of it playing on physical GBA hardware. Then you can really find out if any quirks of the system would prevent it from running, or add any slowdown.

New comment by JoshM33k in "Ask HN: After 20 years of programming, what do I do now?"

JoshM33k — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 15:57:46 +0000

Any advice for how to get past that filter? Things to put on the resume, specific things to say in a cover letter, etc.?

New comment by JoshM33k in "Blinking Commits"

JoshM33k — Fri, 14 Aug 2015 14:17:45 +0000

(The terminal would be the only place it would display correctly it seems, but it would be nice to see the chaos it may or may not cause in Github and other tools.)

Finding someone who can write very technically while also being funny and charismatic is pretty rare (We computer types aren't always the biggest hits at parties). I also really appreciate his "last time on" opening paragraphs... it gives some context to the blog post and where's coming from in his headspace. Neat.

New comment by JoshM33k in "Database versioning best practices"

JoshM33k — Mon, 10 Aug 2015 18:57:25 +0000

I'll second the use of Liquibase. Writing changeSets is simple, and it's very easy to bring a developer's fresh database up to speed by simply letting Liquibase apply all the changeSets in order.

We've found that maintaining a separate "changelog" file for each major release that collects the history of changes for that release and subsequent minor releases is easiest. We also use the Jira ticket # associated with a schema change as the ID of a changeSet, so we can tie changes to feature requests, bug reports, etc.

New comment by JoshM33k in "Netflix and the Napoleon Dynamite Problem (2008)"

JoshM33k — Wed, 22 Jul 2015 18:41:20 +0000

Interesting. What do you think is vague about the five star system? Or is it any rating system that would be "garbage-in"?

Being interested in video games, I've thought a lot about rating systems. Older magazines used to use 10 (or even 100) point scales, and you quickly realize all the rating ends up taking place in the top 30-40 percent of your scale anyway... so why not limit the gradations. For my money, 5 stars makes sense... you've got a middle of the road "average" 3 star movie, and then two stars above and below.