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GilbertErik

140 karma · joined July 17, 2008

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GilbertErik··on [dead]
Both the Daily Show and NYT are both making cogent, compelling cases that a hate crime is similar to terrorism. Should we spend more to proactively police and try to prevent hate crimes or should we spend less policing religious extremists in an geopolitically unstable part of the world?

Making an apt analogy is a clever observation, but what solutions are being proposed? What actions should we all take next?

GilbertErik··on Ask HN: Can I see your rig?
I think there are two types of people. Those who still fetishize hardware, and the rest of us who just care about the product created by the hardware. A carpenter (I don't speak from experience, merely from analogy) is probably more proud to show off something he's made than the tools he used to make it.
GilbertErik··on FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition
I don't get why all you kids love these obfuscation competitions. ;-)
GilbertErik··on Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin
Yeah yeah. I opened this: https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/issues/164

Please comment with clarifications.

GilbertErik··on iOS 8 Adoption at 46% After Five Days
Maybe it's just me, but 'adoption' sounds like a purely voluntary action. Don't mean to sound negative, but is there a word with less negative connotation than 'infection'?
GilbertErik··on Ask HN: Should I be a plumber?
What would happen if this question was inverted?

"""

I consider myself a pretty good plumber, with concrete manipulation abilities. In the same time, I'm handy enough to setup my own website in HTML, style it in CSS, and even animate stuff on my static site using jQuery.

...

In my opinion, all this javascript and css stuff is way easier than septic systems or repairing frozen/busted pipes in a turn of the century home.

...

I constantly see craigslist postings for web developers and entry QA positions at $20/hr...

"""

I'm not trying to be excessively snarky, I'm just trying to point out that our society is at the point where different services have reached different natural values. They're typically based on your standard economic factors like how saturated a market is with available employees, how much experience employees bring to the table, and how much they have determined to charge based on competition.

Alternatively, you can just go with Betteridge's law of headlines. :-)

GilbertErik··on [dead]
Did you ever consider that it's most likely a bug between Skype and your webcam driver?

Here's my thinking. Even if Skype _did_ want to continue recording you after you quit the application, I'd imagine that they'd have the software and hardware know how to turn off the LED on your webcam.

GilbertErik··on AdBlock Plus’s effect on Firefox’s memory usage
I use mostly the same functionality that you describe here, with the exception of "youp". What does that autocomplete to... Ohhhh, I see what ya did there.

Two words for you: Incognito Mode

GilbertErik··on Why developers never finish their projects
I clicked on the link within an hour of the article being posted and the page wasn't loading properly. I thought that's what it was supposed to do and it was a clever commentary on the fact that this page wasn't finished.
GilbertErik··on Netflix disables use of the Chrome developer console
Have you ever tried scanning in a picture of a US Dollar? ;-)
GilbertErik··on JeroMQ: Native Java implementation of ZeroMQ
Is it just me, or do these performance numbers lead anyone else to believe that JeroMQ is more performant than ZeroMQ? I can probably believe that running on a modern JVM would buy you a little bit of an advantage, but these numbers seem like JeroMQ is roughly 20% faster. (I'm reading lower latency and higher 100K msgs/sec)
GilbertErik··on Maximize Your Productivity
Heaven forbid that you spend sometime actually focusing on a single topic and immersing yourself in it to try to see the layers authors may have put into their books.

If you're reading something that requires that little of your focus (i.e. you can read it while on an exercise bike), maybe you should choose better reading material.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for multi-tasking where available, but why are we a culture of trying to maximally absorb information? I was hoping this article was going to tell me that I should spend less time on the dreaded reddit/hacker news cycle.

GilbertErik··on Why I’m ditching Evernote for Simplenote (and Notational Velocity)
Short answer: Yes, LMTGFY

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft....

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-onenote-for-iphone...

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-onenote-for-ipad/i...

GilbertErik··on Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

  --2014-01-01 16:45:59--  https://news.ycombinator.com/
  Resolving news.ycombinator.com (news.ycombinator.com)... 198.41.191.47, 198.41.190.47
  Connecting to news.ycombinator.com (news.ycombinator.com)|198.41.191.47|:443... connected.
  ERROR: The certificate of `news.ycombinator.com' is not trusted.
  ERROR: The certificate of `news.ycombinator.com' hasn't got a known issuer.
GilbertErik··on A Material Point Method For Snow Simulation
Goes to show how much a catchy title matters. :-/
GilbertErik··on Single-Sex vs. Coed: The Evidence
Am I the only one who puts on their 'skeptical hat' when I hear a claim of 'three times more likely'?? Especially when I see numbers as low as 4.4% and 1.4%.

sigh statistics... amirite?

GilbertErik··on Google Shopping: Upload Your Content Without Watermarks or Be Banned
Exactly. What's the difference between the cpap.com watermark and this sort of watermarking which is designed to prevent reuse. https://cdn0.iconfinder.com/data/icons/ballicons/128/magnifi...
GilbertErik··on Moving from Google Appengine to NodeJS on Amazon EC2
I'm glad the title of the article isn't some sensationalist junk like, 'App Engine should be shot in the face,' or 'Why I left the barren wasteland of useless App Engine and moved onto the greener pastures of my homerolled Accumulo/Scalatra stack on Rackspace'.

I think enough people who're reading this have had a good to fair experience with GAE and, like me, are wondering what hiccups other people are finding with apps on app engine. Subsequently, I also think that we like feeling smart because we've read enough docs and articles to be able to identify ways that their app's design may not mesh with the App Engine way of doing things.

The thing I need to keep reminding myself is that there are many right ways to do it. If vpj and his cohorts are spending less time trying to figure out App Engine and more time on their app, then more power to them. At some point you have to just figure out when the effort expended outweighs the potential benefits and cut your losses, and I think this post is written in a clear and fair way.

The thing that makes me upset though is that there isn't a central place that can clearly explains the pitfalls that he fell in, what the best way to do it on App Engine, and why. Those docs are kind of a mess, amirite?

GilbertErik··on Bamboo: An open-source real-time data analysis system
Yes, and while Atlassian's Stash bears the same name as the git command, bamboo.io has nothing to do with continuous integration or Wacom tablets or any such related software. I'm going to keep calling Bamboo bamboo and if I ever need to refer to this project, I'll call it bamboo.io.
GilbertErik··on Why I’m not paying the Troll Toll
I think it's difficult to refrain from such sophomoric behavior when the title of the article so blatantly aligns with the joke. If an article was submitted with the title, "Beans, beans, they're good for your heart..." I think we'd all have a tough time abstaining from ANY sort of reaction.
GilbertErik··on ASUS Launches Monitor with 3840 x 2160 IGZO Display
Are you happy with it? I've had my eye on Zenbooks for a while. I was about to pull the trigger on one, but have decided to either wait for Haswell, or consider getting a (silly) taichi 31 when they come out.
GilbertErik··on Humble Indie Bundle 8
If you happen to have a game controller, either an Xbox Controller for PC or a PS3 controller hooked up using DS3 Tool/MotioninJoy, I'd highly recommend Hotline Miami as a fast and fun action game.
GilbertErik··on Testing Google Compute Engine - Visit this URL
It's never too late to provide an explanation. In fact, providing an explanation will probably drive even more traffic (depending on how interesting whatever it is the heck you're doing).
GilbertErik··on We understand why Etsy removes Electronics projects
Sorry to be pedantic: 'sewers' transport human waste. Tailors and seamstresses are people who make their living sewing/mending garments.
GilbertErik··on Indian Coders Found Cheating in Google Code Jam?
I see an interesting point in this:

How much of a difference is there between using pre-existing code in the form of slapping down some copy-pasta vs. using a known and established library? If someone has a bank of algorithms commonly used for just these types of problems, how different is using that as opposed to the real-world usage of apache-commons or boost?

I realize that copying from other competitors is wrong, but where is the line between standing on the shoulders of others and copying-as-cheating?

GilbertErik··on Google Now on your iPhone and iPad
...and then I'd have to have the person in India with my phone turn on mock locations, and then be constantly borrowing someone else's phone. I'd probably have to get another personal assistant here in the U.S. to follow me around so I can borrow their phone and task them with updating where I am to the resource I hire in India.
GilbertErik··on Google Now on your iPhone and iPad
...but then I'd have to send them my phone. ;-)
GilbertErik··on Turn Gtalk Into A Command Line for the Web With Zapier
You can use something like Google Apps Script to plug data into a google spreadsheet (http://developers.google.com/apps-script/storing_data_spread...), but the big problem you're going to have, as Bryan mentioned, is getting the data out of your email.

It really would be easier if you just had the creator of the email not BCC you on the subscription fee and just had them cobble together a daily sheet for you. Doesn't need to be anything fancy, just a CSV would do nicely.

GilbertErik··on Google Now on your iPhone and iPad
Having tried that myself, I discovered your suggestion causes Google Now to go a little cuckoo. It spent a week trying to suggest that I work at our local grocery store because I went there one morning for coffee, milk, and lunch ingredients.

Then when I met up with some associates at a coworking spot, it tried recommending that I drive home to the grocery store. :-?

GilbertErik··on BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public
> Then I ran out of space... over 100GB of photos, where next?

Uhm... how about the 200 GB plan? Or the 400 GB plan. Or 1 TB for $49.99/month? Or you could contact sales about Google Cloud Storage: https://cloud.google.com/pricing/cloud-storage Or you could just buy S3 storage.

Actually, there are literally dozens (to maybe even hundreds) of alternatives for hosting static content for less money for more bandwidth.

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