hackcrafter

> The Tech Backlash

If there is a tech backlash, I don't see how more tech is the solution.

I downloaded WeCroak, after reading an Atlantic article about it being an anti-app to remind you about your impending death, and it works as advertised. By which I mean, after reading a quote about death, I feel less inclined to pick up my phone for a couple hours!

Be warned of the time sink that is trying to get mods running on desktop Minecraft.

Each version update breaks compatibility and your kids have a hard time understanding why they can’t use that cool mod their friend told them about at school where they portal to the moon!

> Personally I tried BASIC...

JavaScript is the new BASIC, in the sense that it is universally available and a great first language to pick up.

It is easy to forget that self-taught programming is motivated by that intrinsic discovery factor, and JS feeds the dopamine loop!

With high dimensionality data (think many columns), plotting the first two eigenvectors provides a fantastic clustering of the rows.

In genetics for example, this plot may separate samples with different ethnicities (see PCA on SNPs).

But it does prevent a business trying to run off of free supercharger power from just buying up used Teslas...

They called him on this potentially happening too during the pitch.

I hope they bought all the Teslas they need!

I was thinking that too, then I realized he was wrapping the code in `DB.transaction` blocks, which rollback on any type of exception, so that all those staged/checkpoint entries only persistent if the block cleanly executes.

Pretty neat...

Really, the iPhone 7 was just the 6SS. The 'S' revision was spec and camera bumps, but no major case changes and the 7 made no case differences over the 6S.

But probably a 6SS or whatever wouldn't have sold as well, so they shipped a 7, and now the 8 actually does change the case significantly (glass back) and so thats not a 'S' revision.

No product cycle will play out perfectly in a versioning scheme, and your only surprised about the missing 'S' because they have had a naming scheme that has been surprisingly consistent for this long!

Next year will be the iPhone A...

There is definitely a changing Rust definition of good code hygiene in terms of how to write code in the most "Rustic" way, but in terms of code formatting, there is already rustfmt[0]

[0] https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rustfmt

My first thought is are they adding enough value to take a 30% cut off a digital subscription service?

But then I flipped the question to whether as a consumer, I would be more likely to be a digital subscription with a "Subscribe with Amazon" button.

Hell yes!

I just logged into my Economist account to try and cancel my subscription and failed to find any way to do that. Emailed support, they said "we would be happy to help you, call us during business hours...".

I would love all my subscriptions to be managed by Amazon under a single interface.

I would also be more likely to "try out a subscription" knowing I could easily get out of it without dancing through hoops.

This is really cool!

I have been using Exponent (Expo) on a side project for 5 months and love it.

Can I ask what editor this is built on? I've been considering for another project having a "live editor" for writing extensions, and this is the best ES6 + linter I've seen!

Is any of this app open source?

Awesome to hear!

Do you have a general timeframe?

I'm going to be deciding between Azure Mobile Center and AWS Mobile Hub in the next couple months for a personal project.

I'm curious if CodePush[0] can be used along side (or integrated into) Mobile Center.

That seems like a no-brainer if you are supporting React Native based apps.

Also, I didn't see any support for platform native Notification APIs for React Native. The current notification service is for pure-JS / Cordova[1]

[0] https://microsoft.github.io/code-push/

[1] https://azure.github.io/azure-mobile-apps-js-client/

Very cool that their "Mobile Center" SDK has React Native support. [0]

This looks very feature competitive with the "AWS Mobile Hub", even going beyond it with its CI app build integration with GitHub and device simulators!

Also, although they announced Amazon Pinpoint in December, there is still no support for it in their "beta" React Native Mobile SDK [0] (Which has had no commits in 5 months)

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/mobile-center/sdk/getting-s...

[1] https://github.com/awslabs/aws-sdk-react-native

Well, brick is too harsh. I got mine up and running after redoing first-time setup routine.

But most people seeing a blinking blue light are not going to think "oh, I'll just open the WiFi app and a new network in setup mode..."

"Experiencing Issues" is way understating this.

I had two OnHub devices (different models) do this during business hours at two different places that ran on WiFi today.

The first I took as a complete fluke, but the second made me realize this was a Google issue.

They say it wasn't related to a software update, so what the hell resets a device into setup mode?

Power cycling did nothing, I had to re-configure the devices from scratch: switch to its setup network, use the Google WiFi (renamed from OnHub) app to set network name password, reset to bridge mode etc.

Were those not acquisitions that withered as opposed to Dropbox new product ventures?

To be honest, I read through that whole page and I really am not sure I understand what "Paper" is.

I'm guessing it's like slack + specialized components (lists/document snippets) and file sharing designed around collaborating on a product or more generally a project...

The killer feature I still keep Google Voice around for is transcription of voicemail sent to your inbox, even for direct calls to your cell (non GV #).

I stopped giving out my GV number, but you can set up your Verizon cell phone to use Google Voice as your voice mail service, and I love getting transcriptions to my email inbox of missed phone calls!

The app update is welcome, as you still have to use the app to listen to the voice message on the rare occasion when the transcription didn't pick it up.

It's a bookend to the recurring point that building a business requires a good understanding of markets and how companies fight for their place in them.

The Economist covers a lot of macro-economic news and frames the world in terms of market forces.

I think Slava is saying the type of biz-savy "personal development" he experienced (belatedly) could have been accelerated by more of this perspective.

I appreciate the emacs bindings [0]!

Between this and eslint+flycheck I will feel less envious of Visual Studio Code's editor environment (if only there were a way to leverage some of its fantastic IntelliSense from emacs...)

[0] https://github.com/jlongster/prettier/tree/master/editors/em...

This.

Especially family. It's a fantastic place to raise kids, if a bit isolated.

Absolutely I think they still should be considered fundamental.

By definition, these are the subjects that allow you to keep going when your abstractions leak[0].

To say a job "requires" them is pedantic, but what's the point of calling something a CS degree if it is not at least signaling an understanding of these fundamentals.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...

Maybe from a tech perspective, but the SharePoint "brand" is still heavily used in O365 enterprise for the same file-syncing stuff that OneDrive does in consumer-services.

Which brings up another O365 nit, MS has these direct consumer services and O365 services all on different account silos such that when I log into O365 I have to go through a decision tree that answers two levels of questions about which _account_ my company email address is referring to: MS Personal vs Organization Issued vs Organization but Personally Created (not sure how the last category exists)

Yes!

I swear I googled for something like this and came up empty multiple times. Thanks!

I was confused when writing a NodeJs script last night which ES* features were supported in the node runtime I had installed (6.9.x).

This blog posts mentioned Node already fully supports ES6.

Is there a table anywhere that lists ES6/ES7 features and which nodejs version supports it natively?

I assume async/await (which I love and use from TypeScript) will only be available in Node 7.x and not 6.x.

The Node.js home-page makes node 7.x look scary unstable, is there any real-world caveats to using it?

Yea, I agree.

I'm also amazed at how much suckage people are willing to put up with in O365, but still consider it a better choice than Google Docs for the company.

Sharepoint is complete crap, and the off Sharepoint file syncer client is absurdly flaky, but there is a huge tolerance for that kind of thing.

Or at least, it's not the biggest factor when considering making year+ commitments to one office suite or another.

Price, familiarity and feature-richness are definitely in MS favor.

The model of natively cloud-hosted documents was Google's lead to loose, and I think they are losing it.

O365 took the idea and ran. Yes, their web-based UI isn't as rich, but it has some decent collaboration, really good mobile apps and of course excellent desktop native apps.

Google could have held their lead IMHO if they kept building out their Docs/Sheets to be closer to feature-parity with Word/Excel and started earlier on good mobile and desktop native apps (which don't even exist!)

I love me some google docs for collaborative editing, but your right in the scaling of large docs in Word and Excel functionality.

The Just my Code debugger support, where stepping through callbacks can just skip all the in-between functions handled by third party libs looks fantastic.

Especially with await / yield-promise type stuff, I could imagine this will make debugging much nicer.

[0] https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_8#_just-my-code-nod...

I understand why CentOS/RHEL is preferred by some server admins to Ubuntu (longer support cycles, hardware drivers etc), but I never got why individual devs run CentOS versus Ubuntu on their own machines.

Every time I have tried to get tech stacks up and running on CentOS, there is just more friction/pain than doing the equivalent with Ubuntu LTS.

Am I missing something?