Hacker News: hackula1

New comment by hackula1 in "Automatic Music Hackathon"

hackula1 — Thu, 05 Dec 2013 00:47:34 +0000

Love it. I had a lot of fun playing around with it.

New comment by hackula1 in "Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?"

hackula1 — Wed, 04 Dec 2013 23:58:15 +0000

I found it hugely useful in the .Net world. With closed source, obscure errors cannot be as easily tracked down, especially when they are not covered by MSDN or a prominent blog. A couple years after switching to an open source stack, I barely use it at all, and when I do finally hit a wall and ask a question, I get an answer ~20% of the time (compared to 90%+ when I was in .Net). I am a huge fan of SO, but good docs and readable code go a lot further.

New comment by hackula1 in "JackDB – Query and analyze any database in the cloud, right in your web browser"

hackula1 — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 21:10:23 +0000

Looks very cool. Pricing is a bit confusing though.

    1 user, 1+ user, unlimited users

What does 1+ user mean if not unlimited?

Also, row limits are not listed in the top tier, making me think that they are either unlimited, or that the go until they break due to a technical limitation somewhere after 5k rows.

New comment by hackula1 in "How to lose and recover your blog in 30 minutes"

hackula1 — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 03:05:36 +0000

I got distracted and was looking at your other posts, when I noticed that the 5 or so I had looked at all said "1 day ago". I thought you must be a lunatic until I actually went back and read this post and saw that your dates had been lost. :)

New comment by hackula1 in "How to lose and recover your blog in 30 minutes"

hackula1 — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 03:00:10 +0000

I have lost a couple blogs over the years, mostly out of laziness, letting them expire. I got an itch to write some posts recently and wanted to set up a new site. This time around I decided I would do it with something git friendly, so that I could throw it on github and forget about it if I lost interest. I wrote a "from scratch" site with this in mind and it was working well, so I open sourced the core engine today. It runs on express and is about as bare bones as it gets. http://morganherlocker.com/post/badblog

New comment by hackula1 in "How Antivirus Companies Handle State-Sponsored Malware"

hackula1 — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 16:28:31 +0000

I always assumed the handled it through Accounts Receivable.

New comment by hackula1 in "Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community"

hackula1 — Sun, 01 Dec 2013 07:36:18 +0000

> But if he can, we’ll get Node v0.12 delivered a lot faster and have a stronger community.

And of course, Strongloop could not help but make another half way claim that they are the ones "in charge" of node. This current stuff aside, I just cannot believe their lack of shame when trying to take commercial credit for a community project.

New comment by hackula1 in "The Power of a Pronoun"

hackula1 — Sun, 01 Dec 2013 00:09:20 +0000

Ben is not a Joyent employee, but a Strongloop employee/cofounder. I Cannot say I am terribly surprised. Strongloop has rubbed me the wrong way from the very beginning. Since they have launched, they have displayed all the integrity of a used car salesman. I know they have some very strong core devs, and I know they are not all like this, but their public image has been max-sleaze ever since they started marketing in shady ways suggesting that they were the creators of node.js.

New comment by hackula1 in "Americans don't trust each other anymore"

hackula1 — Sat, 30 Nov 2013 23:41:32 +0000

The stuff we are going through right now might seem scary, but McCarthyism was not exactly the golden age of trust. It was not so long ago that "mainstream" society did not trust blacks, working women, the japanese, or jews. We (royal "we" here, emphasis on the royalty) still don't seem to trust gays, atheists, or many other groups. Mistrust is what keeps humanity sharp, but it is also what has been holding us since the beginning.

New comment by hackula1 in "Why are software development estimates regularly off by a factor of 2-3?"

hackula1 — Sat, 30 Nov 2013 20:36:59 +0000

> the person who says 'yes' is more likely to not be fired than the person who says no

Within reason, I completely disagree with this. The best engineers and PMs are the ones who effectively manage expectations.

New comment by hackula1 in "Is learning C# as a first language a mistake?"

hackula1 — Fri, 29 Nov 2013 00:42:48 +0000

This is a pretty important note. Especially on the east coast, C# is by far the easiest language to jumpstart a career in for young devs, and is a very safe bet for veterans as well. Java jobs are practically non-existent in many mid size east coast cities. I am now 100% node.js and python, but I probably would not have made it in the door if it was not for C# when I was starting out. The job market heavily favors devs, and the tooling makes it possible for self taught people to gloss over the fundamentals until they have enough time to go back and learn them. Also, if you think Stackoverflow is useful as a dynamic language dev, you would not believe how much more useful it is as a C# dev. I have no idea why, but SO seems to heavily favor C# over everything else. This is not to say that other languages get no love over there, but John Skeet alone has probably answered more obscure C# questions than all the other languages combined. I am only being half hyperbolic here.

New comment by hackula1 in "Hgraph – Your health in one picture"

hackula1 — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 16:29:09 +0000

For some reason it is saying that my ideal weight is 265, which is about 100 pounds to many. Also, it says I should be exercising 27 hrs/wk. 4 hours of exercise per day seems unreasonable.

New comment by hackula1 in "Falsehoods programmers believe about geography"

hackula1 — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 13:56:50 +0000

A couple other oddities of geography I have noticed as a geospatial system developer.

- Outside the US and Europe things tend to get really wacky with geography and geospatial data. Many GIS products are licensed per country for this very reason.

- In the US, zip codes are the most terrible type of geography to use for any meaningful analysis, as they are constantly changing and do not actually have defined borders. Zip codes are basically just labels that get appended to street segments.

- If you look in the back of the ~200 page pdf that comes with most digital geographic data, you will find an appendix. 99% of the appendix is a section typically called "disputed territories", and 99% of the disputed territories are China claiming to own another nation. I never realized quite the extent of the megalomania until I read a few of those.

New comment by hackula1 in "An Ode to Little Data"

hackula1 — Fri, 22 Nov 2013 22:23:18 +0000

As someone who writes predictive analytics software, I can say that you are dead on. Most of analytics is a process of doing one of two things:

1) Extrapolation of data where samples are lacking.

2) Taking big data and making it little data so that you can actually comprehend it.

My goal in practically every algorithm/tool I write is to take a several billion records and condense it into something that can be put in a spreadsheet, put on a chart, or rendered on a map. Analysts roll their eyes every time some big data guru releases another map with 7 trillion points on it. "Oh so you took 3 weeks rendering a map that looks like yet another population map, when you could have rendered this instantaneously with a choropleth?"

New comment by hackula1 in "Meta-study says too much carbohydrate, not fat, leads to obesity"

hackula1 — Fri, 22 Nov 2013 03:24:42 +0000

This applies to type II diabetics, but not to type I. As a type I diabetic, I would be dead pretty quick without carbs. Proteins and fats can raise blood sugar, but they do it very slowly, so I would have no way to correct low blood sugars before they got out of control.

Minor nitpick, I know, but the two types get conflated often, leading to misinformation. I cannot count how many times people have been surprised that I am diabetic, since I am thin (which is normal, since it is not weight related, and actually leads to weight loss when untreated).

New comment by hackula1 in "Zurb Foundation 5 Released"

hackula1 — Thu, 21 Nov 2013 20:49:11 +0000

I launched an app the week before BS 3.0 launched and had to spend several days upgrading.

New comment by hackula1 in "Why open-office layouts are bad for employees, bosses, and productivity"

hackula1 — Thu, 21 Nov 2013 20:07:33 +0000

I share a small office with 1 other dev. This is the absolute max I can handle while coding. I am in meetings a good chunk of the day. I really don't need to be sitting next to 20 coworkers the rest of the time.

New comment by hackula1 in "Software patent reform just died in the House"

hackula1 — Thu, 21 Nov 2013 16:42:58 +0000

IDK, I feel like this has shifted in the last generation. Nobody is shocked nowadays when you inform them that Columbus was a bad guy, and the same historical rethink in pop culture is happening with Edison.

New comment by hackula1 in "Mozilla’s reliance on Google is increasing: 90% of 2012 revenue"

hackula1 — Thu, 21 Nov 2013 16:32:25 +0000

> a Principal Engineer at Microsoft relies on Microsof[t] because it provides 90% of his income

I would not exactly call this hypothetical person completely independent. Sure, they can go off and find somebody else to rely on anytime they want, but they are currently relying on one company in particular.

New comment by hackula1 in "Software patent reform just died in the House"

hackula1 — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 19:47:46 +0000

Except that now a days Tesla is practically worshipped and Edison is known as the guy who shocked elephants in the street.