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ctideon Rare Are GC Talks

At the December 2008 Kyushu Ruby 01 Conference, I asked the audience "How many of you here have some interest in garbage collection?" Out of 200 people, only 3 raised their hands

Can you imagine how many people would raise their hands if you asked that question NOW at a ruby conference? Crazy how times change.

ctideon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (August 2012)

SEEKING WORK

Location: San Francisco or Remote.

Experience working at all levels of the stack, extremely proficient in Rails development, Node.js, and frontend development. Have written lots of PHP in a past life, but haven't touched it in a few years. Mostly spending my days doing iOS development for my own projects. Feel reasonably good about my iOS skills, but my strengths are definitely in web programming.

Places I've spent time either managing engineers or shipping code: Basis (www.basis.com), Singly (www.singly.com), Rupture/EA (ea.com). Projects I've built either on my own, or with friends: WAYWN (www.waywn.com) & Lifetracker (www.lifetrckr.com).

Contact info is in my profile. Have about 20-30 hours / week of availability currently.

ctideon RubyMotion Tutorial: Write iOS Apps in Ruby

I wouldn't recommend using a regular text editor and dealing with the iOS APIs. I pretty much despise IDEs, but sadly the objective-c paragraph long method signatures require it. That's actually why I didn't even bother with RubyMotion, it doesn't solve the thing I hate the most about objective-c.

I just use AppCode, with Xcode for interface builder and dealing with things like data models. It's closest enough to something that isn't a total piece of shit so that I can avoid slitting my wrists all day.

ctideon Heroku Releases Free PostgreSQL App for OSX

Error: Failed executing: make install-world (postgresql.rb:67)

Now I have 2 options. I can continue googling this error and trying all the random solutions (fyi, none of them worked, and I spent a solid 2 hours trying all of them) or I can install postgresql.app and get back to doing actual work. I chose #2.

ctideon Boston Bar Buzz-Kill

Public transportation is a million times better in San Francisco. Not once have I ever felt like a car was necessary in the ~5 years I've lived here. In the 7 years I spent in Boston, at no point did I have a commute that was less than 3x as long with public transportation compared to just driving. The only time public transportation works in Boston is if you don't have to diverge off the red line.

ctideon How To Build A Startup From A Beach

I spent a lot of time this winter up in Tahoe. My days consisted of hitting the mountain for first lift, snowboarding for a few hours, back at the condo by noon and spend the rest of the day working. My productivity during these days was absolutely insane. Not being able to meet anyone for drinks, dinner, etc. just means you end up with an awesome 8-12 hour block of completely uninterrupted time to just crank through shit.

ctideon Our Culture of Exclusion (or, why I'm not at JSConf this year)

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but unfortunately for you, lots of people drink. It's not just a programmer thing. It's one of the most prominent ways people socialize. Not programmers, people.

I'm sorry that you feel uncomfortable going to conferences because of the drinking, but unfortunately, it's something you should probably learn to accept. You can move cities, change careers, do whatever you want, but unfortunately, you're going to find that people socialize via drinking just about everywhere.

ctideon Ask HN: Please be more thoughtful when downvoting

I downvoted your comment (and probably was the first to do given that it was still black when I downvoted it) here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3782072 which lead you to immediately post this. Considering you clearly think your comment was constructive (or else you wouldn't have posted this) I'll explain why you were downvoted into oblivion.

Your comment was ridiculous self promotion with a splash of topic relevancy. It was laced with narcissistic bullshit. If you don't want to get downvoted, stick to the topic, not how you (at 23, with 13 years of design experience) are better than 99% of the designers and then link to a bunch of sites that, while certainly are not unattractive, are not what I would include in my list of greatest websites ever designed.

ctideon We Can Do Better: An Apology from Sqoot

Sexism (specifically in tech) is the new racism. If you go down that path of anything remotely sexist, expect to be torn to shreds just as quickly as if you made a racist remark. If people didn't get offended, then people like Sqoot will feel like it's totally OK to belittle women, even if they would never think to include racist jokes.

ctideon The one interview question I always ask

There's a pretty wide range of employees between the dude who is mocking his interviewer because he disagrees with a question, and an under-confident yes man who just goes along with everything. Arguing for the sake of improving things is different than arguing for the sake of arguing. Argumentative dicks, in my experience, do the latter more often than the former.

ctideon The one interview question I always ask

Perhaps. But I'd much rather pass on someone who might have been exceptional than hire someone who has already proven themselves to be a bit of an asshole.

ctideon The one interview question I always ask

I'm not sure why people are so offended by this question. While I've never asked this question as the interviewer, I've been asked similar questions whilst interviewing and felt they always lead down a path that was helpful to both sides.

If the things I care about in a job don't jive with the things your company cares about, why would I even want an offer from you? In my specific case, when interviewing in the past, things I've cared strongly about are things like test-driven development, a culture that values code quality as well as shipping products, and having a meaningful stake in the success of the company. If you aren't going to provide these things, or they don't matter to you, I sure as fuck don't want to work for you. If people are strictly upset about the word 'imagine', then that's one thing. Thinking this question is 'overly revealing' or something seems bizarre to me. Don't you want to work somewhere where the things you care about are valued?

ctideon The one interview question I always ask

I think it's totally cool to ask that question, but if you're going to ask that instead of answering mine, I'm going to assume you're an argumentative dick and probably wrap up the interview pretty quickly. The "I know you are, but what am I?" line of responses doesn't really fly well for me when I'm interviewing people.

ctideon ISPs to start policing copyright by July 12

No, it's their highest bandwidth residential plan. Technically, I still have bandwidth caps (http://imageshar.es/4f675654998b758611000b60) but they don't enforce them.

ctideon ISPs to start policing copyright by July 12

Exactly this. I pay Comcast $200 / mo for 105mbit. In part because it's retardedly fast (I do get the advertised speed generally,) and in part because I don't ever want to think about bandwidth limits or any of the other measures they enforce on people who aren't shoveling over forkloads of cash. If either of those things change, I immediately downgrade.

ctideon How I Built It: Dropbox

Doesn't work. People would just create dummy accounts with 2GB folders, share them with themselves, and have infinite storage.

If they offered a 100GB plan for $20 / month, it would destroy their $125 / year / person plan since I would imagine that in almost all cases that's a much cheaper arrangement for teams.

That's why the current solution is such a disaster. The alternatives are either too easily gamed or they rape Dropbox's revenue.

ctideon Posterous acquired by Twitter

Because an acquihire doesn't have a positive effect on Dave Morin's life. He's back at a big company again, and he's already filthy rich so what's a few more millions?

ctideon Posterous acquired by Twitter

I don't think you really need to worry about Path being acquihired. Given the people involved, and the fact that they already turned down a reported 100 million acquihire offer from Google, I don't really expect Path to go that route.

For your question about a place to store all of your data, check out: http://lockerproject.org/. While it doesn't support Path yet (they don't have a public API) it certainly will when Path makes their API available.

ctideon Why Objective-C is Hard

I actually find it much harder to read as a result of it's verbosity. For example, just yesterday I ran into a bug with these 2 lines:

    if ([[data objectForKey:@"released"] isKindOfClass:[NSNull class]]) {
    if ([[data objectForKey:@"posterUrl"] isKindOfClass:[NSString class]]) {

They weren't right next to each other, and at a glance, I misread to assume they were doing the same thing. There's too much shit in the way of the actual differences (NSNull vs. NSString in this case) that I have a bad tendency to gloss over the details. Coming from ruby, the closest syntactical equivalent:

    if (data['released'].class == NilClass) {
    if (data['posterUrl'].class == String) {

Is so much clearer to me when glancing through code. That doesn't even touch on how you'd actually write that sort of thing (data['released'].nil?) which is infinitely more concise than either example. I know this is a bit of a contrived example, and I certainly could find better ones. I just find the 120 character long method evocations to consistently blur the details for me, and this just happens to be the freshest instance.

To be fair, I've only been doing iOS stuff for about a month. Does this trend reverse after you've been writing obj-c for a while?

ctideon StackOverflow

When you talk to them you realize that on Stack Overflow, answering questions is about learning

I want to reiterate this point, for a while I would make it a point to check the latest questions on Stack Overflow for various languages I was decent at and try to answer a couple every day. There were lots of questions in which I knew 80% of the answer, and the process of discovering the last 20% always helped me learn something new. Between just reading answers to random questions and doing that, I found it to be a really awesome way to become a more knowledgable developer.

ctideon How Path Gets Clicks and Why Foursquare Flops

Yes, without a doubt. Look at how few people use their lists feature. It was months before I even realized it existed, and I check in constantly. People have a very clear picture of what Foursquare is and what it provides, and that makes it incredibly difficult for them to break out of that mold.

ctideon How Path Gets Clicks and Why Foursquare Flops

It doesn't matter that Foursquare added photos later, people have been seeing boring foursquare links on Twitter / Facebook for years now. I don't even notice the [pic] tag because I've been trained to mentally filter out those links because they're boring.

Path is inherently about the photo first, I'm never clicking through to Path to figure out where the person is, only to look at the photo.

ctideon "Make sure we’re winning"

You really have to back that up with something substantial. I can't see how any logical person would make the connection that android market gift cards being available would suddenly cause people to start buying android tablets. The android tablet problems are far more fundamental than 'not being motivated to figure out how to use the market.'

ctideon Tower.js - JavaScript Framework for Node.js modeled after Ruby on Rails

I think you'll have a hard time running their documentation through the Coffeescript compiler.

ctideon Convore Shutting Down

Because native clients are significantly better than non-native clients, and Adobe Air apps are the worst.

ctideon Designing better user interfaces

I was really surprised that G+ was mentioned as a good implementation of photos. Having an onclick event on a bare thumbnail image open the detail view in a lightbox is a horrible abomination of web design. I generally always want to open detail views in other tabs, especially if I'm skimming through a feed.

I feel like G+ has one of the worst implementations of a photo gallery anywhere as a result of this.

ctideon The story of the hardest platform game ever

People on HN are most likely more tolerant/forgiving of this as long as the hacking is good.

Really? Have you read this thread? Any time there's anything remotely immature or misogynistic posted, the comments tend to focus way more on that than the actual content. Not saying that it's bad or good, just pointing out that I'd say HN is MORE sensitive than most places to this sort of thing.

ctideon [dead]

Yeah, you can't use this site without https on Comcast anymore.

I've had the https site bookmarked for months now because http is banned randomly at least half the time.

ctideon Ask HN: Why do you contribute to open source?

90% of my open source contributions come from running into a bug in an open source project that I'm currently using for something, and just fixing that and sending it back upstream.

10% is writing tools to solve problems I have that aren't adequately solved by existing things.

ctideon Airbrake acquired by Exceptional

You can use Airbrake for free (https://airbrakeapp.com/account/new/Free), and it takes about 3 minutes to setup and you don't have to think about it. Sure, you don't get automatic deploy notifications built into Capistrano, but I've certainly upgraded my Airbrake plan for various apps in the past and will do it again.

Why would I want to concern myself with maintaining another app when I can just use Airbrake?