Hacker News: joallard

New comment by joallard in "Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface"

joallard — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 15:10:38 +0000

Weirdly, it reminds me of Aptos, the new default font in Microsoft products.

New comment by joallard in "On Coding, Ego and Attention"

joallard — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 20:11:36 +0000

The author has overfitted for his own psychology. There are a lot of assumptions in there. My brain doesn't work like that at all.

New comment by joallard in "Keybase cancels Stellar token airdrop"

joallard — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 05:01:41 +0000

Seems like a lot of people are saying the airdrop and integrating Stellar to Keybase was a bad idea, but I don't think so. There's a lot I like in the Stellar-Keybase integration.

Keeping cryptocurrency keys secure has always been a challenge. Keep them too well, lose your money; keep them not well enough, someone can steal your money. It's a thin line to walk.

Keybase wants to make encryption user-friendly, and keeping cryptocurrency keys secure fits very well to that purpose. This is probably the least painful way I've kept crypto private keys.

Besides, the wallet is pretty functional, and is integrated to an app that's already sync'd to my phone and computer. It's without fuss and just works. Compare that to yet another app which I don't know, need to evaluate, don't trust to keep my secrets, or won't share them across my devices. Here, it's painless.

I personally knew Stellar already, but as a technical user (which I feel is a natural demographic for any crypto to start to get early adopters), this brought back Stellar in my mind and renewed my interest (or would've interested me if I hadn't known it).

Besides, I quite like Stellar as a cryptocurrency for payments: fees are low, and confirmations are near instant. And I'm not even naming the fact that it natively allows you to keep fiat money as a Stellar asset instead of exposing yourself to the risk of losing value to fluctuation. (Though there are caveats, but the infrastructure is there natively to build very useful things.)

I don't think this was quite bad a move as some make it out to be.

New comment by joallard in "What I wish I knew when I became CTO"

joallard — Tue, 13 Feb 2018 23:19:25 +0000

I've seen exactly this in a local well-regarded startup. Incompetent hires with problematic behaviors thriving and being protected, and competent hires being unprotected, not cared about, and almost pushed out.

They would hire almost anyone, and then not take active action in maintaining a healthy staff. Needless to say, it's not going very well over there, regardless of the CTO being quite technically proficient.

New comment by joallard in "“a single PHP file called ”index.php“ generating $2,342.04 in a day”"

joallard — Sat, 09 Dec 2017 06:28:53 +0000

As always, the implementation here, the lines of code in index.php, doesn't really matter. Anyone can code a job board given enough time. The questions that matter are rather how he got his audience to come to it:

- How did he make his offering known to potential clients? - Why did the clients choose his page, over the N many competitors out there? What's different or better about it? - Conversely, how does he get his job-seekers? Are they of particular quality?

The index.php file is old news. The getting employers and candidates together in a nice package is the valuable part.

(I'd actually be looking forward to hearing about the making of this job market.)

New comment by joallard in "Git 2.11 has been released"

joallard — Wed, 30 Nov 2016 00:28:17 +0000

Case-insensivity is important for some to be able to reliably remember a string. I won't easily retain the difference between 'b4dQbFs31' and 'b4DqBfs31'.

Same thing when speaking it out loud. 'B four D capital Q B capital F s thirty-one' is way more convoluted and error-prone than 'B four D Q B F S thirty-one'.

The best thing I've found that fits this criterion is Crockford's Base 32 [1], basically the extension of hex digits, removing letters ILOU.

But Base 32 (case-insensitivity by proxy) constrains us to 5 bits, which is only a 20% reduction over the 4 bits of base 16. So instead of the 20 bits `1ab2f` we could express them with something like `1qm3`.

Or we could be using words...

[1]: http://www.crockford.com/wrmg/base32.html

New comment by joallard in "The P programming language"

joallard — Mon, 10 Oct 2016 00:22:33 +0000

"rlang" is not really fun to search for either

How American Politics Went Insane

joallard — Wed, 22 Jun 2016 04:23:39 +0000

Article URL: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/how-american-politics-went-insane/485570/?single_page=true

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11951530

Points: 9

# Comments: 1

New comment by joallard in "I created Godwin's Law in 1990 as a warning"

joallard — Sat, 28 May 2016 19:42:38 +0000

Not at all, trolling is just a way to provocate people and make th— waaiit a minute...!

New comment by joallard in "How we use Slack in our family"

joallard — Mon, 01 Feb 2016 17:45:59 +0000

Evil coder is making it easier for his family to buy stuff from our site, better send him a cease and desist!

New comment by joallard in "CodeReddit: Cover UI for Reddit at Work"

joallard — Thu, 07 Jan 2016 01:22:40 +0000

I guess JS really is the new PHP

New comment by joallard in "Game about squares"

joallard — Mon, 28 Jul 2014 02:53:49 +0000

Can't click or interact with anything on Firefox 33a. Just an unresponsive start screen.

New comment by joallard in "Hachette/Amazon Business Interruption"

joallard — Wed, 28 May 2014 05:07:53 +0000

What about Paypal? I've heard complaints against them time and time again, and alternatives have popped up in competition because they sucked too much. Stripe, Square?

New comment by joallard in "Google Made My Daughter Cry Today"

joallard — Sat, 07 Dec 2013 23:47:36 +0000

The problem with that is that it's unsustainable. How many ie. Ben Adams would this work with, ben@adams.me? 1. Now Ben Adams owns `adams.me` and has no incentive or mechanism to offer his domain to the million other people with his last name.

New comment by joallard in "Show HN: Probabilistically Generating HN Post Titles"

joallard — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 19:18:02 +0000

A Man Walks All Day to Create Spectacular Snow Patterns

Understanding the code quality of the Fibonacci Sequence

Gmail.com being MITM'd by Iran using this idea by now: Font Icons.

New comment by joallard in "Show HN: How much does Twitter owe me"

joallard — Fri, 08 Nov 2013 07:19:18 +0000

Ah. So this takes my no. of tweets, * (hourly/60) and feeds me back that number? Genius.

(Protip: if you estimate at 60$/h, it's 1$/tweet. You're welcome.)

New comment by joallard in "Show HN: How much does Twitter owe me"

joallard — Fri, 08 Nov 2013 07:09:16 +0000

This fails to explain by what logic would Twitter have to pay me/owe me for my tweets.

Are they selling my tweets? Are they asserting rights over what I've written? Maybe I've missed something, but there's no explanation.

New comment by joallard in "Show HN: Roomerly - Find the perfect roommate."

joallard — Mon, 04 Nov 2013 06:45:46 +0000

I wish I could use this with critical mass in my home city of Montreal. I just searched HN for 'roommates' thinking, "there's gotta be a better way to do this! someone must've talked about it." And here we are.

Searching for a new home with other people is indeed tiring. I wish you well!

New comment by joallard in "Foundation 4.3: Paving the Road to 5"

joallard — Thu, 18 Jul 2013 22:37:21 +0000

There's even a mixin for that!

    @include grid-column(3);

(There's a mixin for practically everything, documented at the bottom of every docs page, eg http://foundation.zurb.com/docs/components/grid.html)

"Disable Javascript" option removed in Firefox 23

joallard — Mon, 01 Jul 2013 02:11:34 +0000

Article URL: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=873709&resub

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5968237

Points: 445

# Comments: 365