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ahmacleod

75 karma · joined September 15, 2014

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ahmacleod··on Show HN: Download any song without knowing its name
This is pretty cool. I usually had to add a little more context to get the correct result though. It would be nice to see the top ten results, maybe with a relevance score.

It would also be great if I could pipe in the search and bypass confirmation, e.g:

> echo hide your love away | instantmusic -f

ahmacleod··on Coming Soon: EC2 Dedicated Hosts
I found this odd as well, especially given how competing services (e.g. SoftLayer) so often cite the performance of dedicated servers as their competitive advantage over AWS.
ahmacleod··on Ask HN: What stack would you use to build a CRUD web app on the JVM today?
I'm actually pretty amazed at the diversity, and how few of these frameworks I'm familiar with.
ahmacleod··on Ahead-of-time JavaScript compiler
> It is not expected that the performance of compiled applications will ever rival 'v8'. JavaScript is an awful language for static compilation - it almost seems designed to foil any attempts at optimization, and so a JIT will always have a significant performance advantage.

For the compiler un-initiated such as myself, is there a simplified explanation for why static compilation is inferior to JIT for languages like javascript?

ahmacleod··on How Google killed my startup
Just to clarify: I'm the OP, not the Author.
ahmacleod··on How Google killed my startup
This. The Author pulled a serious coup here, translating an aborted business into a personal profile piece in a national paper.
ahmacleod··on How Google killed my startup
The article is interesting and relevant, even if its premise is flawed. It certainly merits discussion, critical as it may be.
ahmacleod··on How Google killed my startup
Title is from the article; I am not the author.
ahmacleod··on Show HN: Algebra.js – Build, display, and solve algebraic equations
Nice work. I've built roughly half of this before, but your API is cleaner and the docs really tie it together.
ahmacleod··on Crafting Icons
These are all beautiful illustrations, but they don't feel iconic to me. Granted, there is a spectrum when it comes to detail, but isn't the purpose of an icon to distill an idea to its visual essence?
ahmacleod··on The Electric Car
There was a time when you could say the same about street view. Now they're working on the bottom of the ocean.
ahmacleod··on Why I Left the Thiel Fellowship for Quora
"However, we continued our attempts at possibly making our product work but by mid-February, we realized that we were grinding through our days. Grinding is okay and sometimes necessary for a startup, but it was during this time that I realized I was not passionate about ours."

Five months in, grinding is pretty much the job. Everybody’s passion wanes when faced with (potentially) years of hard work. It’s legit to decide you don’t want that for yourself, but it’s sad to see someone abandon a viable funded business.

As an aside, I dislike the criticism “doing a startup for the sake of a startup.” It implies that someone needs a special calling, and provides an easy out in the absence of one. “Starting a business thinking it looks easy,” might be closer to the truth.

ahmacleod··on Show HN: Matterhorn – Your new project manager
Even better: use data from your own project management (or at least pretend you're using it internally).
ahmacleod··on Frameworks are for hacks, libraries for seeds
Frameworks are great for startups. Before market fit, they make it easy to quickly build (and tear down) functionality. Afterwards, they make it easy to integrate new members into your team. At either stage, you don't want to spend your time reinventing the wheel or teaching the intricacies of your bespoke wheel to someone else.
ahmacleod··on FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition
Thanks, that's what I was looking for.
ahmacleod··on FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition
"Convenient proxy factory bean superclass for proxy factory beans that create only singletons."
ahmacleod··on FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition
I was trained in Java, but I never had to do any Big Enterprise Java coding. Can anyone summarize why and when this style of development began?
ahmacleod··on KaTeX: Math typesetting for the web
This is great news for server-side tex rendering. Valiant efforts on behalf of projects like svgtex (https://github.com/agrbin/svgtex) notwithstanding, MathJax is abysmal for pre-rendering content.