News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

edwardog

Re:The Early History of Smalltalk on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @03:25PM (#49982863)
Was it at Carleton? Ottawa seems to have a fondness for Smalltalk and seems to have been a… hotspot for it.
Would you say ctDNA tools are sensitive and specific enough now to be able to make a decision about post op adjuvant therapies? “Now that I’ve had surgery, did the R0 resection get it all, or do I need to do chemo and challenging medication like mitotane?”
Re:Gene therapy restored hearing in deaf patients on Thursday July 03, 2025 @09:21PM (#44460400)
Thank you for this! My wife recently got a pathology report back reporting a rare variant of a rare cancer and I’m trying to get back into genomics (an almost masters degree) now to see if there’s anything my computering can do to aid. I’ve contacted Broad Clinical Labs.
Re:Glamorous Toolkit on Sunday April 06, 2025 @09:20PM (#43606529)
Yes, still relevant. The same can be accomplished with other tools, but it will probably be more difficult.

The idea of Glamorous Toolkit is that it’s a collection of tools you use to solve software problems by making little explanatory tools. You might start out with some bigger problem like “I need to make this service fast”, come up with a question like “what does the flow of data I care about look like through the service?” and then try to answer that question by making tools that could analyze/visualize logging output or a stack trace or whatever makes sense in your software’s context.

The technique of “making little tools that explain to help answer a question” is Moldable Development, similar to how Test Driven Development is “make a failing big feature test loop, write little tests and make them pass until the big one passes”.

You can make little tools to explain away questions you have while you’re working with plugins or shell scripts or whatever you’re comfortable with and that’s “Moldable Development”. The Glamorous Toolkit just happens to be a nice system of tools that make it easy to make more little tools to help explain away problems.

Hope that helps! Lmk if you want to see some examples.

Source and bias: I worked closely with the developers before I had to take a break from work and computer stuff.

Re:Shuffleboard at McMurdo on Wednesday May 18, 2016 @09:36AM (#11721773)
The author is very much joking.
Re:Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2013) on Friday November 01, 2013 @10:34AM (#6653994)
Shopify

Shopify is the best platform for online stores, as well as a diverse company of happy polyglots who hack on everything between UX, data warehouses, and low-level CRuby VM performance issues. We value personal growth, and developer quality of life in a huge way and show it by having safe deployment systems anyone can trigger; facilitated retrospectives + off-sites with Corey Haines; GitHub and PRs for everything; small, mixed teams of folks with 0 to 30 years of experience, and encouragement from the still-hacking CEO to give back to open source on company time.

http://shopify.com/careers – apply to any dev/ops job and mention HN and I’ll give you a hand.

Here’s a sampler of the current teams at work:

Reports

High throughput + realtime tools for customers; we hired the author of SkyDB to continue making it more awesome. People on this team have backgrounds in low-level kernel work, Smalltalk VM development, and deployment of national wireless systems.

Stack

The right thing to do should be the easiest thing to do; this team works on things like implementing Kafka across the entire Shopify system to let anyone pub/sub to any call-site, opening the door for easy instrumentation/experimentation.

Performance

We’re in the process of sharding Shopify in order to isolate and better service stores experiencing $3000000+/hour flash sales. People working on IBM’s specialized JVM are now hacking here, while also contributing context threading patches to CRuby off the side of their desk for fun.

Point of Sale

If you like making beautiful hardware + beautiful software that you can see used by customers who tell you this is the Holy Grail of retail systems, then you go here.

Operations

Engineers here work on projects like Chef, distributed cloud+iron failover systems, DDOS mitigation stuff and our new datacenters.

More teams

Data (giant, columnar data-stores + PhD withbackgrounds in finance and astrophysics)

Admin (Batman.js + UX professionals + designers who code)

Self help (machine learning for people learning)

Apps (JS SDKs for seamless iframes + APIs)

Checkout (provide low-latency experiences while dealing with high-latency payment gateways; don’t drop any of the zillion$$$ going by)

Platform + Growth (biz dev science + gamification of ecommerce education)

Internal tools (Fast Company-covered staff bonus system aka “Unicorn”, Bayesian classification of customer questions assigned to support experts, hand-made phone queueing systems wrapped around Twilio, etc., etc.)

Billing (hard-core testers need only apply)

Payments (integrations with Stripe + fraudster f-ing)

Core/API (everything not here)

(more but secret)

Seeking full-time programmers, and data analysts to work in Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa, Canada. We’ll help with visas. Seeking operations staff anywhere (remote friendly).

http://shopify.com/careers – apply to any dev/ops job and mention HN and I’ll give you a hand.

Re: on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @12:00PM (#6134686)
AFAIK, you should not be discussing iOS 7 beta stuff, bugs or otherwise, in a public forum.

Have you tried filing a radar ticket for this issue?

Re:Reginald Braithwaite is a GitHubber on Tuesday July 23, 2013 @04:00AM (#6088757)
Yeah, Reg!
Re:Zapier (YC S12) Raises $1.2M Seed Round on Wednesday October 31, 2012 @12:48PM (#4723761)
Woo woo! I love to see Shopify Apps like these grow up :D
Re:Crowdsource Your Company’s Bonuses on Wednesday May 30, 2012 @05:08PM (#4044875)
Shopify employee/original author of unicorn here.

This bonus/props thing is really just for fun and recognition more than anything else. Performance reviews and salary adjustments have their own separate process.

Re:Crowdsource Your Company’s Bonuses on Wednesday May 30, 2012 @05:00PM (#4044821)
Nope. The funds allocated to them just go back into the next payment cycle’s pool.

There’s an email/newsletter that’s auto-generated every few weeks that summarizes what’s going on and makes it easy to remember to spread some unicoin around.

Re:Crowdsource Your Company’s Bonuses on Wednesday May 30, 2012 @04:56PM (#4044792)
I wrote the first version of this at Shopify.

We anticipated the need to see this kind of behaviour, so there's clear auditing trails for everything that HR and Accounting can see where the bonus money's going.

Having said that, we haven't seen this problem appear yet.

Team email from Shopify CEO re Diablo 3

Team,Diablo 3 comes out tomorrow. Since 90% of you won't be able to concentrate anyways let's just meet tomorrow after lunch in the Lounge for an impromptu Lan party.Need a refresher on why you need to play Diablo 3 ? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geuAc8F7Gt0&feature=g-histP.S: I call dips on jewelry drops.- tobi CEO Shopify

( Read More... | 6 comments | 19 points | on HN )
Re:This is what every modern Cease & Desist should look like on Wednesday February 22, 2012 @02:07PM (#3622047)
Disclaimer: I am a Shopify employee.

Backstory: Shopify.com was recently ripped off as Shopqi.com – the job was pretty impressive! They copied our brochure, wiki, theme store, and from the look of their Rails app, a good chunk of our domain models too. Nice to see the Chinese version of Active Merchant as well.

The author of the ripoff posted the source on http://github.com as open source: https://github.com/saberma/shopqi

Tobi, Shopify CEO, decided to make a pull request in response.

Re:Declassified Bunker of the USSR on Sunday November 20, 2011 @02:47AM (#3257564)
The [Deifenbunker](http://www.diefenbunker.ca/) near Ottawa, Canada is a similar declassified setup that’s well worth exploring.

Looking around the C&C rooms that had “X millions of casualties” on maps of blast epicentres really makes you think about what living during the Cold War must have felt like.

Accelerating sustainable startups w/ a list of problems

Is there a maintained list of market-researched problems that exist in non-web-centric industries?I’d love to see more web-based startups attack problems that businesses in industries like farming and forestry face instead of making more todo list phone apps.Do lists like these exist? It’d be so awesome to point energetic students at something like this that came with librarians and domain...

( Read More... | 3 comments | 19 points | on HN )
Re:Let’s Suck at GitHub Together on Tuesday August 30, 2011 @10:59AM (#2941711)
Chris Coyier is the man.
Re:Announcing the first release of batman.js on Thursday August 25, 2011 @12:28AM (#2923766)
Haha! Yes! Good call.

The first version of Batman was written in plain Javascript, but Shopify has really been falling in love with CoffeeScript, so we decided to rewrite it before it was released.

Batman.coffee is more correct but sure doesn’t have the same ring to it…

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