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jbail

Re:Decline of Rural Lending Crimps Small-Town Business on Friday December 29, 2017 @11:29AM (#16030227)
There's a pretty big difference between a diner in a small town and a global media/technology company. Both could be unprofitable, but only one has large potential upside in terms of both profit and business exit.
Do you have any data to back up your claim that New York is "substantially more sustainable than the rest of the US"? I'd be genuinely curious to look at that data
Re:How Marissa Mayer Failed to Turn Yahoo Around on Wednesday May 25, 2016 @11:33AM (#11770492)
Remember when Mayer banned remote work at Yahoo? She still defends that choice even though she has clearly failed to prove her thesis that you need to sit next to someone collaborate successfully and deliver improved business results
It's actually $30/mo minimum with Mailchimp's new pricing. $10/mo for the Mailchimp account + $20/mo for up to 25,000 monthly emails via Mandrill
I currently use Mandrill on about 6 projects, a few of them use templates, so I've got the added complexity of dealing with that, which sucks

But, I'm not going to give Mailchimp my business ever again after this stunt. I'm going to bite the bullet and port the templates over to Sendgrid.

As it is, Mandrill basically wants us to create new Mailchimp accounts, then manually copy and paste our templates (as if that's an appropriate solution to ask a paying customer to do). If I'm going to do that, I'm just going to leave and take my business elsewhere.

It will take longer, but I'm optimistic it won't be that bad. I'm sure there are blog posts on template migration from Mandrill to Sendgrid. If not, I'll write one when I do it

Re:Why Silicon Valley Works on Monday November 03, 2014 @01:59PM (#8552696)
Good article. It provoked a thought:

In an increasingly digital world, how long will physical proximity be an advantage?

The notion that a region could somehow have its own brand of patriotism centered around startup success merely due to density is somewhat difficult to rationalize. You can't deny SV's success relative to other technology hubs, but I'm wondering how far in the future physical proximity will continue to carry such a steep advantage

Re:Show HN: Picnic.css, a lightweight Bootstrap alternative on Sunday September 14, 2014 @09:57PM (#8316933)
My first impression of min is that it looks nice. Really, for it's goals, it's pretty tight.

As a branding thing, I'd change that URL. I get that it's short but minfwk.com doesn't really look like "Min Framework" to me. It just looks like a bunch of letters. A domain like mincss.com, getmin.com, minframework.com or something more legible would be better.

Re:Product Hunt iOS App on Thursday August 21, 2014 @12:50PM (#8208295)
I am on iOS 6. I've stopped upgrading (intentionally) because every iOS upgrade significantly downgrades the performance of the device. My iPad is a few versions old for the same reason
Re:Product Hunt iOS App on Thursday August 21, 2014 @12:20PM (#8208118)
Why build a native iOS app? What capabilities of the phone are you utilizing?

I ask because this was my experience: I just tried to download the app on my iPhone 4s and I couldn't download it because my iOS version is too old. My Nexus 5, obviously, won't be able to download it either because it's an Android device.

Unless you're doing something majorly different in native than you are in the web version, I don't understand the iOS lock-in and the need to have the most recent iOS version. I mean, I do get it from a developers point of view...it's less devices to test...but it comes at the cost of a lot of people not being able to use it.

These driving while high statistics are pretty error prone. There is no marijuana breathalyzer. A blood test shows traces of THC in your body from up to 30 days ago. So if you get in an accident and get blood tested and it comes back positive, were you high at that moment? Or a week ago? Or a month ago?

I'm sure the technology will improve. In fact, a "marijuana breathalyzer" (using that term loosly because you would need something that can test for edibles too), is probably a pretty interesting product to bring to market

Lived in Denver 5 years. Never driven to work, a pro sports game or a bar. Trains and busses have never been empty any of the times I've ridden them...which is daily
Re:This CEO is out for blood on Thursday June 26, 2014 @05:43PM (#7951721)
I think you're underestimating her intelligence and capabilities. Clearly she had the background and the initiative. There are super smart and dedicated people out there. She sounds like one of them.

Beyond that, I'm not sure if the patent is absurd or not...but I definitely don't think its absurd for a 19 year old woman to write up and be awarded a patent.

There aren't enough (sufficiently skilled) Americans to satisfy the demand for tech jobs (primarily, programming)

Can you provide some proof? I hear people say this, but I'd love to see real data to back it up

Wages are more or less stagnant (source: http://www.epi.org/publication/bp359-guestworkers-high-skill...) and many of the big companies Silicon Valley just got spanked for illegal no poach hiring agreements.

Are the large tech firms REALLY hiring as quickly as they can? Or do they just prefer guest workers they can pay less and exert greater control over via their worker visas?

Re:The next version of DuckDuckGo on Monday May 05, 2014 @09:43PM (#7702435)
The Related Topics algorithm needs a lot work.

I search for "Denver" and the top related topic is "Gang Activity in Denver." Really?

I search for "Chicago" and the entire related topics list is places on the historic register in Chicago. Really? The whole list?

I'd turn this off until you make it work better. It grabs a lot of attention and degrades the rest of the experience. My first impression is that if DDG gets that part so wrong, what else are they getting wrong with the search results? Cruel, perhaps, but that's my impression.

The new interface is nice and fast otherwise.

Re:The Engineer Crunch on Tuesday February 18, 2014 @03:54PM (#7260973)
I never said I thought equity is worthless. I said I would choose cash over equity if the equity is not weighted heavier than cash to account for the risk and illiquidity inherent in startup equity.

I am engineer #1 at a startup right now. The equity was very generous and weighted appropriately vs cash.

Re:The Engineer Crunch on Tuesday February 18, 2014 @03:21PM (#7260773)
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

If market rate is $105k and you're paying me $55k in cash, then I'd want $100k in equity, not $50k. This is something many startups get wrong. It isn't a one-to-one swap.

Even if you have some sort of reasonable valuation, equity is worthless until there's someone to sell it to. There needs to be an uncertainty/illiquidity multiple applied. Otherwise, I'll take the cash. That has literally always worked out to my benefit throughout my 15 year career in software development (even working for companies that got acquired for 9 digits).

Re:Django 1.6.2 and 1.7a2 released on Thursday February 06, 2014 @07:13PM (#7193861)
There is a striking contrast on HN between this release and say, when Node or Rails release a new version. At the one hour point since this was posted and there are no comments.

Anybody use Django? Or just not excited about this release? I'm genuinely curious.

Re:YogaGlo Update on Friday December 27, 2013 @06:24PM (#6973098)
Sorry, but I don't think you're right. The data shows that in east Texas, patent holders win injunctions or damages nearly 2x of the time. That's why they go to trial there.

Since you didn't provide data to back up your assertion, I will provide a link to mine: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/19...

Re:Payza dropping payment to and from US on Monday December 09, 2013 @11:34AM (#6875014)
This article didn't contain any mention of the US government.
It's not SaaS if there's no code. The first "S" is software.

That nit aside, the site looks nice. Good luck!

Re:Show HN: Color in your browser console on Monday November 25, 2013 @03:04PM (#6796547)
Thanks for checking it out!
Replying to myself to say that I added color support. If you're using Firefox or Chrome (which I believe are the only two browsers that support color in the console at this time), then your stream names will be printed in color. This really helps the console to pop and be more legible. You can view a demo here: http://jbail.github.io/lumberjack/demo.html
I just pushed an updated Lumberjack using constructors. Take a peek: https://github.com/jbail/lumberjack

I need to update the Readme to show doing stuff like: var cat = console.stream('cat'); cat.info('Meow'); cat.warn('Hiss!'); But, that should work now. I really like being able to do that. Thanks for the suggestion.

Next steps...I'm not sure. I'm going to put this in place at my day job tomorrow and see how it feels in production use. I was thinking it might be cool to append/color the console with the stream name. Again, just to make the console even easier to read if you do have a ton of streams getting logged concurrently.

Prefixing messages could be cool too. Now with the Console constructor, you sort of have a parent/child relationship. As long as the stream is a child of the parent, it would work. Are you thinking something like this?

cat = console.stream('cat');

boobie = cat.stream('boobie'); karl = cat.stream('karl');

cat.log('boobie:meow'); cat.log('karl:hiss');

I'm not sure how that holds up when you want to log objects or arrays. What do you envision? Let me know.

Thanks again for the comments. This is the first time I've open sourced anything I've written. Getting feedback and hearing how other people might use it and what they do and don't like about my code has been awesome. It's already made this little utility way better than it started and its only been out in the wild for 24 hours.

Thanks for the comment!

An insanely noisy console was bugging me this week, so I whipped up the Lumberjack script in about an hour this Saturday while my daughter was napping.

This is a super quick and dirty version #1 to prove that it can work and would work as I imagined. I agree the "stream" name string stuff is wonky and could be better. I've got some ideas I'll be playing with tomorrow. Basically taking what I have and wrapping it up in a constructor, so console.stream('foo') actually creates a 'foo' stream. You could then do (as I believe you suggest) var foo = console.stream('foo'); foo.log(1); foo.warn(2); etc...

Well said. Not sure why you got downvoted.

The fact that this is making news at all is silly. This is business as usual for Facebook and business as usual for a billionaire. FB doesn't care about your privacy and a rich guy bought some houses. I'm shocked!

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