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mcmire

Re:Ask HN: Why are you off Facebook? on Wednesday March 25, 2015 @05:48PM (#9266185)
I deactivated my account. It's still around, of course, and I can log in again when I want. But I didn't want the distraction anymore. I found that checking the feed on my phone became an automatic habit for no observable benefit. I don't mind so much the whole privacy thing, because I don't think Facebook is that evil. Your information is public somewhere, and you're being tracked by someone, whether you like it or not. And this happens outside of the internet -- it's how business works. So it's not a big deal to me.

The usefulness of Facebook is a big deal though. And it's just not useful anymore. My friend group tends to be pretty selective, and is mostly made up of people I know and interact with in real life. So I do that instead.

Re:Word Perhect on Tuesday August 19, 2014 @11:19PM (#8200957)
Thanks for this, I needed a laugh today.
Re:VimR – Refined Vim Experience for OS X on Saturday August 16, 2014 @11:26AM (#8186496)
I think that was a reference to MacVim, maybe?
Re:Painting in Clojure on Friday August 08, 2014 @03:38PM (#8154647)
Did not realize it used math to simulate paint hitting the canvas like that! I like the research that went into this. Pretty neat stuff.
Omigosh I remember this. This is ooolddd but so cool. I used to mess with the creatures by dragging around the joints and such and then get freaked out when their movements changed from being lovely and life-like to being grotesque and unnerving.
Re:The Video Game That Maps the Galaxy on Thursday July 10, 2014 @12:25AM (#8013609)
This sounds sick... I did a bunch of research a while back about stars back when I wanted to make a friendly version of the SIMBAD database[1], but it would have been so cool to make a 3D version of our galaxy and fly around it. Probably not as glamorous as it sounds, and certainly a pretty backdrop does not a game make, but still sounds neat anyway.

[1]: http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-basic?Ident=sirius&sub...

Re:Xanadu: we have a working deliverable on Thursday June 05, 2014 @12:30AM (#7850235)
Only runs on Firefox, it seems.
Re:Xanadu: we have a working deliverable on Thursday June 05, 2014 @12:21AM (#7850209)
Anyone else get a JavaScript error when they attempt to load the demo?
"Who thought you could have fun with the Germans?" Really, Kara?

Anyway, obviously there were a couple of mistakes by the speech recognition, and they were taking care to speak very clearly, but still, I'm impressed. The future looks bright.

Re:Earnest – A writing tool for first drafts on Saturday May 17, 2014 @12:25AM (#7759223)
This makes sense. I don't write a lot, but when I do, I actually use Evernote on my phone or TextEdit on my computer. I find the smaller the space to write in, or the shittier the tool, the better. Basically limitations are actually a good thing. You're not compelled to write anything beautiful, and so there's no pressure, and you just write anything that comes to mind. You can always edit later...
Re:Stripe: Bitcoin Sign-up on Thursday March 27, 2014 @01:28PM (#7481915)
Why are they doing this? It's too late. No one is going to want to make Bitcoin transactions through a US-based company now because you know the Fed is going to start creating all sorts of lawsuits unless people follow the rules. I have zero Bitcoins but if I had any I'd play it safe and put it somewhere overseas (or if I did put it in a US-based company I'd want to make damn sure they were backed by an overseas bank).
Re:Projects that power GitHub on Tuesday March 25, 2014 @05:35PM (#7469124)
Wonder if they manually curate these lists or if they initially populated them with some sort of machine learning?
Re:Speed Up Your Rails Specs on Wednesday March 12, 2014 @03:27PM (#7387703)
The problem with dependency injection in this manner is that your test code is using a fake class that's injected while your production code is using a real class.

This is fine if all you want to do is unit test your classes. That's beside the point though -- I would posit if you're bolting dependency injection onto your interfaces just to make your tests faster, you're not doing it right. Instead, bring that dependency injection into the forefront: to the constructor. Yes, this means to make an object, you'll have to make another object first, both in your production and test code. But now your interface acts the same way in both places. If this sounds very Java-like, well... maybe Java got it right. (There was an article on the Twitter blog in the early days about this but I can't remember where it is now...)

Of course, this is going to introduce complexity and now you have to decide whether that complexity is worth it.

Re:Visualizing Rails Schemas with the RailRoady Gem on Wednesday March 12, 2014 @03:02PM (#7387551)
The problem I have with these tools is that the diagram it produces is really not that great. I guess it tells you what models you have, the columns they have, and whether a model is tied to another one... but not much else.

Here's the thing: I already know how many models I have (I just look in app/models) and which columns back them (I just look in db/schema).

The thing I often want that 1) ActiveRecord doesn't give me and 2) I haven't seen in any tool yet is a diagram of the relationships. So I have two models, A and B, and A has many B. How do you diagram that? Typically I've seen arrows: B points to A, with the words "has many" written next to it. The thing is, if I have 30 models in my app, I'm not going to be able to read this at a glance. Words are too small. Diagrams are meant to be rough pictures.

The way I visualize this in my head and consequently diagram this on a whiteboard is, multiple instances of B point back to A. It's easy. If you have a has_one instead, then only one B points back to A. Makes sense right? No one does this. I often wonder why.

Re:Frameworkless JavaScript on Thursday January 09, 2014 @07:22PM (#7034218)
Is this the same guy who wrote head.js?
Re:The Muse: Team on Sunday December 08, 2013 @02:10AM (#6869195)
I'm not sure why this was posted but I will wager a guess it's the high ratio of women to men. So... good for them! You don't see this a lot and it's a bold statement. Rock on.
Re:StackOverflow and Github Visualized As Cities on Sunday December 08, 2013 @01:59AM (#6869185)
This is really, really cool. Never seen this before. Nicely done!
Re:Medium 1.0 on Wednesday December 04, 2013 @06:26PM (#6851309)
I don't get the "Beautiful Stories" section. All of the articles look pretty much the same. Same full-width image peekaboo parallax banner thingy at the top, same font, same look.

This article (https://medium.com/beautiful-stories/66e87553d22c) is a hodge-podge of design decisions. The way images are displayed is a mess: some images float next to text, some float next to text with a caption next to them, some images are centered, some images have quotations in them. To divide sections of text, sometimes there are hr's, sometimes there's a single line with a little loopy thing, sometimes there are parallaxy headers.

Medium may be easy to use but if people think they can click a few buttons and pop out a "beautiful story" they are mistaken.

Call me an old-timer but I would rather just read text without a bunch of stuff in my way.

Re:The Impossible Music of Black MIDI on Wednesday October 30, 2013 @12:29PM (#6641330)
MIDI was never intended to be playable by people. It's just a protocol, you can do whatever you want with it. So saying that this is "impossible" doesn't make any sense.

That said, this music sounds atrocious when you run it through a computer, it'd sound better if it were spread out across multiple instruments, but whatever.

Re:From Zero To Kickstarter In $5k on Wednesday October 23, 2013 @03:45PM (#6601184)
I was going to say... this already exists...
Re:Ruby Association: ruby-lang.org Design Contest on Tuesday October 01, 2013 @03:39PM (#6478575)
This isn't very useful, unfortunately. There aren't any requirements for this. All it says is "come up with a design!" This is about as useful as saying "Write something about any subject!"

Has there been any pre-discussion on this? Where did this come from?

Re:An open source prosthetic hand costing $1000 on Monday September 09, 2013 @04:52PM (#6356109)
This (and actually bodily augmentation in general) seems like something that 3D printing is perfectly suited for. I see this sort of thing blowing up in the next 10 years.
Re:A human way to define regular expressions in Ruby on Thursday September 05, 2013 @04:06PM (#6336584)
Not true. Regexes have been around for a long time and there are a few standards -- POSIX basic, POSIX extended, and PCRE. Any language/tool worth its salt these days will follow one of these three implementations (usually it's PCRE as it's the most complete). It's usually older tools like awk, vim, find, etc. that have their own quirks -- they were created before these standards existed and so they generally follow extended regex but then introduce their own syntax for certain concepts (in vim, for instance, \<...\> does the same thing as \b...\b in PCRE).
Re:Show HN: noteZilla - Interactive sheet music on Friday August 16, 2013 @06:43PM (#6227146)
Wow this is so great. As a musician listening to a classical piece (well and an engineer too) I often think, "How does this work? I hear a clarinet here, is that what it is or something else?" So yeah, very cool.
Yes, you should master JavaScript -- it's used all over the web and people will continue using it that way. But I disagree it's making all other languages irrelevant and that it's a "game changer". Devices are not going to be coded in JS any time soon (the runtime isn't robust enough and the language is not designed to be used that way). Yes, people may use asm.js more and more to convert bigger programs to run on the web, which is super cool, but asm.js isn't JavaScript.

So master JavaScript, but then learn Rust, Elixir, Go, Haskell, and Lisp, too. These are as much "game changers" as anything else.

Re:Ryan Davis, 1979 - 2013 on Monday July 08, 2013 @03:41PM (#6008775)
Thanks for the clarification. So weird. Was this just a random thing? Does anyone know?
Re:Google set to acquire Waze for $1.3B on Sunday June 09, 2013 @10:44PM (#5851985)
Yeah, I'm bummed to hear this news too, I've been rooting for them since the beginning. Granted Google Maps is way better than Waze, but, I think the whole crowdsourcing angle that Waze takes is interesting, and I think it's impressive how far they've gotten with a small team comparatively.
Re:Firefox 25 will get a major UI overhaul on Wednesday June 05, 2013 @12:41AM (#5823742)
Isn't this the theme update they've been working on for over a year? I seem to have heard word about this a long time ago.
Re:Skycraft: Minecraft clone in WebGL on Monday June 03, 2013 @09:56PM (#5817250)
Right, at first I thought this was done by the creators of voxel.js. Perhaps this was an exercise for the OP and that is fine but it seems there is a fair bit of reinventing the wheel going on here.
Re:How do I quit my job when I'm the only developer? on Sunday June 02, 2013 @01:54AM (#5807512)
Look, here's the reality. You say they could keep you on for another year and yet they obviously see you as an employee who will do whatever they tell you to do. While this is far too common, it obviously means they don't care about your opinions or whether you are happy there.

At the same time you have to look at it from their perspective. You don't want to suddenly leave. I think two weeks is too short for this sort of situation. I worked with a guy who gave four months' notice; that's the agreement he made with my boss, and when those four months were over he left peaceably. Granted, we did have other developers to take over, but we also happened to hire more people in the meantime too.

Just be honest and tell management what you are feeling. You need to push them to hire another developer as good as you are ASAP (vet them personally). If they are not willing to do this, then they do not care about their product -- but that is their problem and not yours. But if they are willing, when the new person comes in, teach them what you've built. This is going to take time. I don't think one or even two months is enough time, you might consider more like four months. You can start now by writing up all the stuff you know.

If you are concerned about not burning any bridges (and believe me I would be too) then this is a surefire way of doing that. You just have to make sure they agree you will no longer be working with them after the allotted amount of time... and then stick to it.

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