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_nato_

542 karma · joined May 20, 2012

Engineering: "How will this work?" Science: "Why will this work?" Management: "When will this work?" Liberal Arts: "Do you want fries with that?"

- OR -

if you love something let it go, if it comes back to you it's yours. if it doesn't, it never was.

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_nato_··on A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of Y-intercept (2012)
I always thought this was a paul-grahamism...
_nato_··on Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them
There was an event when a startup I was at asked Basho (they were the company behind Riak db) about backing up our data. Backing was a little side-feature that was possible to rig up, but I recall they looked at this inquiry as if I had two heads -- as if to say, it's replicated, why jump the shark? There was a bug with one of the Riak releases, and all the data was lost. (When we scaled up with this buggy Riak release, the empty node assumed master roll, and all the child nodes went, ah... the new state has no data, let's all delete records 0..k. Fun times.)
_nato_··on [dead]
The Control Revolution book goes into some great detail about Quaker Oats. Fascinating stuff regarding hacking the minds of the masses.

A very brief overview of it: http://blog.snailtext.com/posts/quaker-oats.html

_nato_··on Inkscape 1.0 Beta 1
Glad to read this. Never used inkscape beyond the CLI tools. I hope they continue to keep this chunk of their software mature and growing, too.

Here's my all-time favorite thing to do... transform font types to paths inside svgs (so one doesn't need to hold that font asset in CDN, ...) :

inkscape -T -A tmp-hack.pdf orig-w-custom-fonts.svg

inkscape -l final.svg tmp-hack.pdf

_nato_··on The last day of linotype at the NYT (1978) [video]
As someone who spent the weekend figuring out `flexbox' to align copy around a webpage, after years of floating divs and pulling my hair out, I can appreciate this video. Creative destruction is an awe-inspiring, yet wistful force of nature.
_nato_··on Ask HN: How do you keep track of your notes at work?
Without too much effort, I keep a NOTES file in each project directory. I keep it out of source-control. Anything that is worth preserving (backed up and checked in) goes in README. I also use a file called SCRAP for ephemeral matters, again, in each project root, not checked in. A great pattern that has served me well.
_nato_··on YouTube to stop 30-second unskippable ads
I wish fixyt.com was still working, but a quick /watch?v=SLUG_ID appending to it still saves the day on videos-with-ads I just cannot bare.
_nato_··on Elixir deployments on AWS
In using cowboy directly, it would be a mistake (at least from personal experience) to rely of cowboy for anything other than your api endpoints and/or dynamic templates. Static assets, including html, are best served via nginx, with cowboy serving requests to your application. I've never had a cowboy + OTP project not lean on nginx in some way (yet).
_nato_··on Vim's 25th anniversary and the release of Vim 8
Long-time vi[m] user, and always learning/amazement. This very morning I learned about the `-c` flag. So, `vim -c "set spell" my-misspelled-file.txt` starts up vim with a given setting.
_nato_··on Hackers Have Stolen Millions of Dollars in Bitcoin Using Only Phone Numbers
The word hacker is giving me an identity crisis every time a headline like this comes out.

http://blog.ikura.co/posts/dear-mainstream-media.html

_nato_··on Writing a cron job microservice with Serverless and AWS Lambda
A slight variation I'd like to plug for random scheduled jobs (3rd party) : http://ikura.co
_nato_··on Nintendo signals end for Wii U
Never bought one, but if Nintendo's 20/20 hindsight claim that the ~Wii U confused consumers~ was the reason for its relative miss, then that's an incredible lesson learned.
_nato_··on Building Better Interfaces with SVG (2015)
For anyone who is a web hacker rather than a designer, I highly suggest trying out SVG here and there in your web projects. SVG is a fantastic bridge for anyone who wants to put some graphics (dynamic or otherwise) in place, is used to just having copy as content, and/or is a bit afraid of opening PS/Gimp.
_nato_··on Elixir Design Goals (2013)
From an Erlang/OTP vantage point, what Elixir ended up being famed for is its relatively good tooling.
_nato_··on Mr. Robot Killed the Hollywood Hacker
David Mamet once lamented that the computer has taken over the horse, in films. Where once the hero would jump onto their ride to go fight justice, now we have her pulling out the keyboard.
_nato_··on Save Firefox
Can someone clarify what is meant by `publisher' in this piece?
_nato_··on Cron best practices
In the same-ish vein, may I suggest http://ikura.co for anyone wishing to link timely jobs w/ their web applications.
_nato_··on The Greatest Violin No One’s Ever Heard
Just wanted to share a sentiment from a living luthier that I like.

Samuel Zygmuntowicz (a modern maker) has remarked, Strad made new violins. It's a reminder that age has little to do with the quality in some fine antique instruments. Strad's craft to fabricate brand-spanking-new violins made him quite a wealthy man (because they were fine instruments then, as they are now).

_nato_··on Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
I use Erlang/OTP as my go-to language. The flack about its ugly syntax certainly puts Erlang in the unfashionable camp. But unjustly. I use it because I like single assignment of variables, pattern-matching, and I also think FP is pretty swell. Someone said recently that the Erlang community could be as small as one-thousand serious hackers. Now that's relatively small!
_nato_··on Yet another blog post about how parallelism is not concurrency
For me, these drawings made it quite clear what the differences were:

http://joearms.github.io/2013/04/05/concurrent-and-parallel-...

_nato_··on Why Violins Have F-Holes
'Just one minor gripe: period instruments -- Strads/Amatis -- that have been upmod'ed, have only been modified with regard to the pitch/angle of the neck. The fingerboard is longer to facilitate the more demanding repertoire, but the neck is certainly the same length. The ribs are not shortened nor elongated in modernizing a period instrument.
_nato_··on When Are You Really an Adult?
I like this~ -- almost like an 'object permanence' for responsibility.
_nato_··on Hiking for Emails [video]
It's amazing to see on one hand, some westerners, want to `heirloom' back to simpler times/aesthetics -- then to see this man who has strong dreams to get Nepal moving forward. Well, I guess it's interesting to see the cravings from the other perspective. Incredibly shot, too!
_nato_··on The Most Militarized Universities in America
I said to myself, if it's not UMD, I'd be worried what was No. 1. Memories of riot-police assembling like storm-troopers in fraternity row before a football game...
_nato_··on How the World's Most Difficult Bouldering Problems Get Made
Just for the record, Max, is a beast of a climber. When I moved to the East Bay, he finished one of the hardest outdoor climbs right in front of me one afternoon in Berkeley. Incredibly strong & gifted climber (and route-setter, apparently!)
_nato_··on I met you in the rain on the last day of 1972
Quite Murakami-esque. Touching.
_nato_··on The Abolition of Work (1985)
Keynes also drew some similar conclusions.

Link to a PDF of his essay from 1930 on the matter is here:

http://www.aspeninstitute.org/sites/default/files/content/up...

_nato_··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2015)
IKURA | Web | Oakland, CA | REMOTE

Ikura is pingdom meets CRON & we are looking for elixir + javascript hackers at this time. http://ikura.co & http://demo.ikura.co as well as our blog http://blog.ikura.co will tell you more about what we are up to.

Inquiries can be sent to nb [at the] ikura [dot] co

_nato_··on The Cheese Board Collective
The Cheese Board just kills. Lines around the block. I'd like to think that their lazer-focus for their product (one type of pizza a day), is aligned with their great success.
_nato_··on How Much Does an Experienced Programmer Use Google?
To quote a great hacker, Joe Armstrong, ``The reason we write code is because we can't find it on Google.''
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