HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

DerekH

192 karma · joined February 13, 2011

Software engineer. Rails. I'm always looking for a new experience. Never satisfied.

Twitter: derekjhopper Email: hopper.derek@gmail.com

submissionscomments
DerekH··on How 'Advantage Players' Game the Casinos
Professional poker players streaming on Twitch is rising in popularity. You can learn quite a bit about the game by simply tuning in on a regular basis. There are people who play small stakes ($10-$100) and people who have streamed tournaments where they've won >$100k for a 1st place finish.
DerekH··on Latest version of Chrome can't copy and paste urls to Outlook
Thanks for pointing that out. I've been reading through the bug reports and some people have been mentioning other apps in addition to Outlook: Notes.app and Mail.app. I haven't noticed any others yet.

Source: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=618771

DerekH··on What Happened When Venture Capitalists Took Over the Golden State Warriors
On an interesting note, Kawhi Leonard's advanced stats were marginally better than Curry's as of two weeks ago. They're both equally exciting players in my eyes. Also, have you seen the size of Leonard's hands?!
DerekH··on Show HN: I signed up for every presidential candidate's email list
Originally, I finished the first version of the code and forgot a few of them (went to bed). I forgot to tag Bernie, Bobby Jindal, Huckabee, and Rand Paul.

I fixed it last night. Also, for the life of me, I can't sign up for Ben Carson's email list anywhere. I keep getting errors from https://api.hubapi.com/emailvalidation. Valid email addresses throw an error as well.

DerekH··on Show HN: I signed up for every presidential candidate's email list
Hey everyone,

I signed up for every presidential candidate's email list to see what happens. I hooked up a Gmail account to this Twitter handle, uploading all incoming emails to Dropbox.

Also, I used an email address variation that I can identify with every candidate. My plan is to watch how my email address gets bounced around to different parts of their campaigns. If anything, by the end of the election cycle, I'll have some interesting data points to play around with.

DerekH··on [dead]
Hey everyone,

I signed up for every presidential candidate's email list to see what happens. I hooked up a Gmail account to this Twitter handle, uploading all incoming emails to Dropbox.

Also, I used an email address variation that I can identify with every candidate. My plan is to watch how my email address gets bounced around to different parts of their campaigns. If anything, by the end of the election cycle, I'll have some data points to play around with.

DerekH··on Ask HN: How do technical non-developers help with open source projects?
This blog post by Steve Klabnik would be a great start. He talks specifically about managing the issues section of an open source project (Rails).

http://words.steveklabnik.com/how-to-be-an-open-source-garde...

DerekH··on Baseball’s Fight with Fatigue
In general, the public has a poor understanding of being a professional athlete. Typically, when I try to explain it to others, I usually just say "it's a job like any other" - the same as staying on top of your game in the music industry, running a startup, etc.

It's easy for us to dismiss the effort professional athletes put out when you only see them on TV a few times. However, it's somehow different when we see Steve Jobs or Tim Cook on stage a couple times each year. We recognize all of the hard work Steve/Tim likely put in behind the scenes.

For some reason, a lot of people don't recognize that same level of effort for professional athletes. They just assume they show up for the game and perform at a high level.

For every hour on the field, there's probably two hours of study (mental preparation) and two hours of treatment and/or rehab (physical maintenance). Pair that with a rigid schedule every day, fatigue is a real concern.

We all know the overnight success myth. The myth exists for professional athletes as well. Athletes that make it to the highest level didn't simply wake up one morning and have all the tools to succeed. Hours and hours and hours of training, both mental and physical, had to occur. It's like anything else - you don't simply get good. It takes practice.

It also takes commitment, dedication, and perseverance to succeed at a professional level - just like everything else in this world.

DerekH··on Engineering is the easy part except when it's not
I hope I was able to communicate clearly. This wasn't meant to be a rant on why engineering is so hard.

Instead, it's meant to show why the technology part may not be that important in the beginning; however, as your product grows, it becomes a vital part - just like customer support, product ownership, project management, etc. etc.

I didn't want to point to specific examples because I didn't want to throw people under the bus. If you feel like this post comes across the wrong way, I'd love to hear about it. Thanks!

DerekH··on Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit
That's how I read it as well. I mean, there's definitely some hints of sexist behavior. Though as I was reading, it felt like I was in the hallways of my high school years ago. Loads of gossip and craziness.

It's sad to see this story come out of GitHub though. Why can't we all just get along?

DerekH··on Bootstrapping is thinking long, not small
Thanks for sharing. I particularly like your comment, "We haven't taken any outside money yet, but I'm not saying we never will."

It's also important to really believe in what you're doing, funded or not. You don't get a special medal for taking money or by bootstrapping. You're still a business and you're all competing.

DerekH··on Ask HN: Do you cold call?
Did you mean Predictable Revenue? Just checking.
DerekH··on Ask HN: How do you invest?
No problem. It's important to take your time and build it up slowly. After awhile, you'll realize you've put away good money and have made some substantial gains. If you're lucky, you'll collect a few 10 baggers and maybe even a 100 bagger in your lifetime. Couple that with a good product and/or a good job and you'll be pretty secure.
DerekH··on Ask HN: How do you invest?
Great advice. I get antsy when I start to have too much in savings.

Saving is tough to master. I wish more people would embrace the emergency fund. It's so nice to have. You don't really need to worry about any catastrophes and if you want to splurge, you've got the money to take care of it.

But, anything above your emergency amount, put that money to work. Funds that pay dividends are also nice to haves.

DerekH··on Ask HN: How do you invest?
Personally, I invest in individual stocks like Starbucks (companies you think won't be going away anytime soon). I've tried to think like Warren Buffet. If you're investing in a company like Gillette, you're asking yourself, "Are men going to stop shaving?"

That being said, I also put money in more conservative investments like mutual funds. You can usually set it and forget it. With the markets doing pretty good the last two years, I think I was able to grow at 10-15%.

I also try not to spend too much of my time reading up on this myself. I pay Motley Fool for investment advice and follow their thesis. They have a pretty good track record and they've gained my trust.

It's also important to have no fear. I've known people who lost out on the recent market gains because they were too scared to buy in at the low point. Now, they put themselves in the market when it's booming.

I've also played around with Bitcoin, but that was more for fun and I definitely wasn't planning for the long-term there.

DerekH··on The Onboarder Test: 12 Steps to Better Onboarding
I went to a bar for one of my last days at a company. I felt like I really got to know my co-workers even better. I wish we would've done that on the first day.
DerekH··on The Onboarder Test: 12 Steps to Better Onboarding
We tried to put together something useful to help companies bring on new employees. I know I'm not Joel Spolsky, but I've always been inspired by The Joel Test.

I've also had some tougher experiences transitioning to new jobs. Lack of direct deposit and not having a laptop on my first day were some of those problems.

DerekH··on Michigan launches civic hackathon - Code Michigan
For some reason, I'm always fascinated by governments releasing APIs for public data. It seems like a data set you could do some powerful things with. When governments take the time to build out a nice API to consume this data, it makes me like them more, too.

AT&T just did a civic hackathon in Chicago with Chicago's open data portal: https://data.cityofchicago.org/browse?limitTo=apis

DerekH··on Show HN: Manage access to Basecamp, GitHub, Heroku, and more
Yep, looks like it. Thanks for posting this. I was focused on the big players in the space, and I missed this one. It's interesting that it never came up while I was talking about it with others.
DerekH··on Show HN: Manage access to Basecamp, GitHub, Heroku, and more
I'm still trying to learn more about Active Directory everyday. Companies like Okta and OneLogin offer user provisioning (what Onboarder is doing) and they integrate with Active Directory.

Onboarder is definitely not that complex yet, but I'm still learning about this space. My goal was to make it simple. Connect with OAuth or give us an API key, and we're good to go.

DerekH··on Show HN: Manage access to Basecamp, GitHub, Heroku, and more
Thanks! Yes, I definitely agree. For the first version, I picked the ones I felt could generate the most interest. I've had people mention Google Apps, the Atlassian suite, Campfire, and many more.
DerekH··on Show HN: Manage access to Basecamp, GitHub, Heroku, and more
Hey everyone, I ran some Facebook ads and received some feedback from Reddit /r/startups. I decided it was enough validation to build it.

If you're like me, you've probably used Basecamp, GitHub, Heroku, HipChat, and many other apps on a daily basis. One of the things I found annoying was sending out invitations to all of these different apps. Onboarder solves this. When you need to invite someone new, type in their email (and GitHub username) and you're done. Onboarder handles the rest.

Better yet, when you need to remove access, you can do so with just one click.

I'm exploring opportunities to make this process even simpler. I definitely think it would be better with deeper integration. For a first version, I think it's pretty cool.

Thanks a lot for listening and I welcome any and all feedback.

DerekH··on How I Raised $350k as a Solo Founder using these 4 Email Templates
Would you like to write a few templates for the library? Maybe around SEO or similar topics?
DerekH··on Purdue "compliment guys" holding final court, get banner on campus
I was on campus when these guys were first starting out. I believe they setup camp in the same spot every week and hand out compliments to people. It's an awesome sight to see, and most people are more than surprised. It's amazing what two guys can do to spread cheer.
DerekH··on Last week I asked about iOS components, today I released one. Feedback?
Thanks, I'll have to try out the demo. I don't have an iOS device available, but I should try it out in the emulator. Also, when I touch a cluster, does the map zoom in and show the pins in the area?
DerekH··on Last week I asked about iOS components, today I released one. Feedback?
This looks so cool. When I click on one of the +50 buttons, does it expand the pins?
DerekH··on Show HN: Extension makes it easier to unfriend on Facebook
This is almost trivial, but I put this together this morning. Basically, I thought it was too much trouble to scroll to the bottom of someone's profile to remove them on Facebook.

There's more you could do with this i.e. a Chrome extension popup window showing a list of friends with easy unfriend buttons. I just wanted to see if other people want an easier way to unfriend unwanted people from your list.

DerekH··on Sell your used textbooks for beer
I'm not sure of the margins exactly, but I'll get one of the other co-founders to comment. I think 5% is in the range.
DerekH··on Sell your used textbooks for beer
We're working on the Firefox issues. Sorry about that. Thanks for the feedback though.

We don't actually sell beer, but rather give you a quote of how much beer you could buy if you sold your book.

DerekH··on Sell your used textbooks for beer
Thanks for letting us know. We'll work on it and fix the bugs.
Page 1 of 2Next →