Hacker News: webbore

New comment by webbore in "Good Enough Practices in Scientific Computing"

webbore — Sun, 30 Oct 2016 15:14:07 +0000

It's important to differentiate the general concept of "Good Enough" as in "that's good enough" from the software engineering approach that, while coined from the same term, is surprisingly more formalized around balancing risk/effort vs. achieving perfection

New comment by webbore in "SQL style guide"

webbore — Sun, 09 Oct 2016 18:53:37 +0000

If you're writing a lot of ad-hoc queries, I prefer to have keywords on their own line and also put commas at the start of the following line vs end of the previous. It lets you comment stuff out easier as you experiment. In a production query the only hard rule should be, "Please be consistent!"

New comment by webbore in "SQL style guide"

webbore — Sun, 09 Oct 2016 18:50:37 +0000

ON second reading I think you are correct. I agree on this point then, as it helps when joining through a denormalized table that references multiple PK ids, ex: I think: user_id = role_id is more readable than the likely alternative: u.id = r.id

New comment by webbore in "Accelerating Innovation with Leadership"

webbore — Sun, 09 Oct 2016 18:44:55 +0000

The same public "government largesse" that Gates credits with the microchip and internet is what Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google et al have constantly worked to erode with closed-source, walled-garden ecosystems. They all would have been unable to build their empires on top of the very ecosystem that today they try to cultivate.

New comment by webbore in "How Norway spends its $882B global fund"

webbore — Wed, 21 Sep 2016 21:59:46 +0000

I live in Calgary, Alberta which is pretty much the exact counterpoint to Norway with a very similar historical starting point (size, population, dynamics). It doesn't matter who's in power, all our governments spend like drunken sailors on shore-leave, no sales tax to even out the boom/bust (and counter low-ish taxes), A savings fund that is now empty going into an incredibly rough period.

I'm not says one is better than the other - Norway looks great right now, but didn't when I visited ~10 years ago and my Subway "value" meal cost over $25 CDN - just an interesting counterpoint.

I keep waiting for that manufacturing "bump" from Eastern Canada we were promised from a sinking dollar...

New comment by webbore in "How Norway spends its $882B global fund"

webbore — Wed, 21 Sep 2016 21:54:35 +0000

The thing about both Buffett and Soros is that they get deals that the general investor, or even really good and kinda famous investor, would never get. For example, Buffet did 300 million in unsecured loans (but with front-of-line payback) with Harley Davidson in 2009 at 15 percent, essentially to cover customer financing (i.e. cashflow) not because the company was in any real trouble. You and I would be lucky to find that sort of return from the riskiest loan, let alone a profitable manufacturing company. AND, Buffet could have made more than a Billion extra if he'd bought stock instead of debt, so even when he's wrong he's still getting a sweetheart deal.

New comment by webbore in "Tripadvisor now lets users rate flights like hotels"

webbore — Thu, 14 Jul 2016 15:47:08 +0000

This implies airlines compete on customer service, which, with very few exceptions in niche areas, the most certainly do not.

New comment by webbore in "Tell HN: Winners of Apply HN for YC Fellowship 3"

webbore — Thu, 05 May 2016 16:01:07 +0000

don't call it a tweak or nudge when the experiment's parameters were deliberately altered to avoid the outcome the data was indicating.

"We had an idea for figuring out where we'd spend our money. We didn't like what happened so we spent it based on other criteria."

So the experiment was maybe the voting / HN selection, but they don't get to paint it as the experiment was "let's see who HN selects, then compare their outcome with traditional participants" like we were led to believe...

New comment by webbore in "Tell HN: Winners of Apply HN for YC Fellowship 3"

webbore — Thu, 05 May 2016 15:51:04 +0000

don't forget - a true "growth hacker" only needs the thinnest veneer of ambiguity to really go to town.

I think the biggest shame is that under the guise of an experiment they had the opportunity to "really disrupt" themselves and "change the face of" ...money.. giving...

What hashtag should I use to support the twitter campaign to get Maciej into a program that he probably shouldn't be under which we're discussing on a message board... UGH! crashing under the meta-overload...

New comment by webbore in "Tell HN: Winners of Apply HN for YC Fellowship 3"

webbore — Thu, 05 May 2016 15:38:25 +0000

If you read Maciej's comments and interpret them as "entitled to what's mine" you are obviously unfamiliar with the general vein of his work. In support of my opinion I expect the man himself to reply refuting this completely, stating no, it is in fact about the money.

If anything I'd expect that he (and a lot of other people) are disappointed with not seeing what he was going to do with the cash, not the loss of the money itself.

If funding is rocket fuel, I was excited to see what could be done with it in the hands of a proven SV-venture arsonist.

New comment by webbore in "Tell HN: Winners of Apply HN for YC Fellowship 3"

webbore — Thu, 05 May 2016 15:32:29 +0000

The attitude (or opinions) comes from the creator/operator. The service itself appeals to me due to it's utter lack of attitude. What? A vanilla service that people pay for?

If the primary criteria is "quality of founder(s)" I have no idea why they passed. Except maybe seeing someone everyday who's been successful with antithetical values might have been too much to bear.

New comment by webbore in "Down and out in the magic kingdom – A tale of software consulting in the midwest"

webbore — Fri, 29 Apr 2016 19:13:19 +0000

I understand why, but it's too bad this is a throw away account; this is a very well thought out and compassionate response.

New comment by webbore in "Down and out in the magic kingdom – A tale of software consulting in the midwest"

webbore — Fri, 29 Apr 2016 19:10:10 +0000

Totally agree - I've contracted as an independent for about 8 years now, often with the same companies over and over, and I can honestly say I went into the office every day totally prepared for it to be my last and leave without a job. I have great, ongoing relationships with their employees and managers, I do well respected work and the projects have been generally very successful, but this is just the nature of the business. I see contractors in the same gig for years who let themselves become "employees who get paid more" and then are incredibly hurt when they don't get renewed. Again - this is the life of a contractor.

New comment by webbore in "Porn site xHamster blocks North Carolina users to protest anti-LGBT law"

webbore — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 15:43:15 +0000

If your establishment is big enough to have multiple person facilities, you can add a single bathroom as well. Even smaller restaurants seem to have a individual handicap or family washroom. Then label it "toilet" and who cares who uses it.

The whole "men identifying as women in the washroom with little girls" thing is a big red herring rally cry for a very vocal group (based on a single case of a male pedophile who did not id as a woman). So raising headlines against this, regardless if it's judged appropriate, is good as far as I'm concerned.

New comment by webbore in "How your data is collected and commoditised via “free” online services"

webbore — Wed, 16 Mar 2016 23:13:13 +0000

I saw a (I believe) 60 minutes story about WalMart a while ago and they stated they stored everything at line-item resolution for 2 years of sales. With their volume it's an amazing amount of data. UPDATE - did some quick googling and that was 10 years ago. I have no idea how big their DW is now (was 583 TB then)

New comment by webbore in "JavaScript libraries should be written in TypeScript"

webbore — Wed, 16 Mar 2016 15:35:33 +0000

I do quite a bit of library development in TypeScript and one of the biggest wins is with new developers doing their first non-trivial bug fix or refactoring. The compiler has saved us from introducing all sorts of edge-case bugs because it catches downstream impacts that developers who are not intimately familiar with all of the code can introduce. A nice bonus feature is single line jsDoc comments replacing giant blocks of descriptive text.