Hacker News: scottostler

New comment by scottostler in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2022)"

scottostler — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 16:12:17 +0000

Alta | Lead Front End Engineer | REMOTE (US) | Full time | www.alta.so

We're hiring a Lead Frontend Engineer at Alta, an AI-powered no-code tool to build mobile apps.

* You’ll be joining a fast-growing early-stage startup based in the Bay Area and reporting directly to the CTO/Co-founder

* You ideally have 5+ years of experience and have mentored/managed junior engineers

* Tech stack: Typescript, Next.js, React, PostgreSQL

Learn more and apply here: https://angel.co/l/2xNjeU

New comment by scottostler in "Google contractors in Pittsburgh vote to unionize"

scottostler — Tue, 24 Sep 2019 23:05:05 +0000

Yes of course, but companies will prefer to work with middlemen rather than directly employing individual contractors because it makes legal and accounting easier. There’s often a lot of hurdles to employ an individual directly, like requiring the contractor to have a million dollar insurance policy say

Seems like a lot of money for that, but companies are willing to pay it

New comment by scottostler in "Planting 1.2T Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions"

scottostler — Sun, 21 Apr 2019 17:00:20 +0000

That is a lot of trees, but a decade’s worth is a lot of emissions

New comment by scottostler in "Who paid 99¢?"

scottostler — Tue, 16 Oct 2018 03:44:11 +0000

I’ve been told the answer is interchange fees: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee

New comment by scottostler in "Building a Production Server Swift App"

scottostler — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 17:57:05 +0000

I use Swift professionally and have written some Rust for fun, and like both languages a lot. I find Swift to be faster to write, not least because it's easier to manually prevent retain cycles than to write borrow-checker approved code. It's also much easier to leak memory and write unsafe threaded code in Swift, so there's a trade-off there.

I'm sure if I wrote more Rust I'd get faster at it, though I do think it has a fundamentally more complicated programming model.

New comment by scottostler in "How basic income could fail in America"

scottostler — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 02:38:11 +0000

I liked this quote from the article: "People don't choose between things, they choose between descriptions of things."

I can't claim to know what BI would look like if widely implemented, but I think it's preferable to mass un/under-employment, which seems like a clear possibility.

New comment by scottostler in "Show HN: Shrink, a free menu bar app for your GitHub issues"

scottostler — Fri, 15 May 2015 13:52:24 +0000

This looks really useful. Thanks for sharing

There was a missed opportunity to name the app 'Shirk', though

Cloudera Acquires DataPad Technology Assets and Team

scottostler — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 00:48:05 +0000

Article URL: http://www.cloudera.com/content/cloudera/en/about/press-center/press-releases/2014/09/30/cloudera-acquires-datapad-technology-assets-and-team-to-strength.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8392266

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

New comment by scottostler in "In Tough Times, Abandon Your Employees"

scottostler — Thu, 08 Aug 2013 15:25:28 +0000

The reason companies don't loudly proclaim this kind of thing seems pretty simple to me. Companies must simultaneously communicate with many different parties: employees, customers, investors, the board, governments, etc. An effective message for one constituency is often horribly inappropriate for another – layoffs are a great example of this.

So when companies do decide that cutting costs is more important than keeping employees, they message that in one way to employees, and in another way to analysts and investors. Employees and the general public who sympathizes with them might call that duplicitous and slimy, but it's a response to the balancing act the companies have to perform.

New comment by scottostler in "How To Get Great Ratings For Your Mac App"

scottostler — Sun, 12 May 2013 16:46:02 +0000

Really liked this article. I'm curious about the professional QA – how did you find the tester, and what sort of things did you ask him to test?

New comment by scottostler in "PonyDebugger: Chrome Developer Tools for Native iOS Apps"

scottostler — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 19:09:40 +0000

Yes, and also DCIntrospect. They're encouraging, but don't currently compare to what you can do with, say, live-editing css or with a Javascript console.

Not that I've used it, but RubyMotion is making progress on a related front. A live REPL, styling apps with CSS, etc. Maybe we're not far off.

New comment by scottostler in "PonyDebugger: Chrome Developer Tools for Native iOS Apps"

scottostler — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 16:26:09 +0000

Awesome, will definitely give this a shot. It's great to see iOS development tools pick up tricks from the web world.

Personally, I can't wait for a Firebug-like tool for live debugging and tweaking of UIView hierarchies.

New comment by scottostler in "Show HN: Pup, real-time app metrics with Statsd"

scottostler — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 13:47:15 +0000

Nice! And that's an awesome logo.

New comment by scottostler in "Smoke: Simple, asynchronous scala HTTP powered by Akka"

scottostler — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 16:57:31 +0000

By this point, isn't HTTP a pretty standard acronym in the web-dev scene? :)

New comment by scottostler in "Goodbye global lock – MongoDB 2.0 vs 2.2"

scottostler — Wed, 23 May 2012 17:42:45 +0000

If you take a look at the benchmarks further down the page, the real improvement seems to be that mongo does a better job of yielding during page faults. That provides an improvement even with a single database.

New comment by scottostler in "OpenShift by Red Hat"

scottostler — Tue, 15 May 2012 13:51:13 +0000

FWIW, heroku does. The first heroku slice for a project is free, with the caveat that it'll be spun down during periods of inactivity.

I imagine that most hobby users of heroku (say for a weekend hackathon) aren't paying anything.

New comment by scottostler in "Show HN: Photo Picker+, New Library Improves Native Photo Picker (iOS+Android)"

scottostler — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 21:28:21 +0000

As an app developer, I'd love to not write custom code for each photo sharing service. This seems to require using the chute hosted platform, though. Can the library be used without the service?

New comment by scottostler in "Notch live coding for Ludum dare 22"

scottostler — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 16:58:49 +0000

I don't disagree, but when I watched for about 15 seconds he was inserting printlns, trying to debug something related to sprite collisions. So I'd guess he still does some of that.

But the better answer is probably that he's been making games for two decades, according to wikipedia. Presumably he's long since worked through much of what you or I would need to think about when putting together a 2d tile game.

New comment by scottostler in "What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies"

scottostler — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 20:21:08 +0000

I'm curious about this as well.

New comment by scottostler in "Is Haskell a Good Choice for Web Applications? (2009)"

scottostler — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 18:28:21 +0000

Presumably it writes to a transaction log, and is memory-resident in the same sense that Redis is. Which is to say that the dataset is kept entirely in memory, but also has a persistent representation on disk.