Hacker News Reader

fozon RubyGems.org Redesign

Considering that searching for gems is the primary call to action, adding an autocomplete drop-down would help users a lot.

fozon Rob Eisenberg leaving Angular 2.0

I was just at Øredev in Sweden a couple weeks ago. Rob spoke about Angular 2.0, and the disagreements about direction were pretty evident in his talk [1]. The video is online now.

[1] http://oredev.org/2014/sessions/angularjs-2-0

fozon Sweden has proof foreign submarine entered its waters

Perhaps it was an extremely large narco-submarine [1] smuggling drugs into Sweden.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco-submarine

fozon Microsoft Band

For Surface, Microsoft made $908m in sales, but spent $839m to make the devices. Compare that to last year, when they sold $2.13b worth of Surface devices but spent $2.87b to make them.[1]

I wouldn't say it's a key profit area for them yet, and we also can't call it a success yet (as they haven't reported the total retail purchases).

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/10/24/a-win-for-microsofts-...

fozon When Keurig fights “coffee pirates,” who loses? Loyal consumers

In Europe, a similar situation existed with Nespresso. They are absolutely huge on the market here, and the machines are found in nearly every office place (and many homes, where the capsules are different, to avoid people stealing them at work).

Nespresso has lost nearly every attempt to protect exclusive control of the capsules [1]. In grocery stores, you can find many compatible capsules and a variety of flavors and choices.

[1] http://qz.com/200161/someone-is-finally-forcing-nespresso-to...

fozon A History of Misses for RadioShack

We can see echoes of this in the current mad dash by the Silicon Valley giants to become conglomerates. Google, Facebook and others also fear that their original mission will become obsolete and so they are buying anything new for billions of dollars to avoid a fate like RadioShack’s.

The article lost me on this point. I think Google and Facebook are trying to aggressively expand the reach of their original mission, and not acting out of fear that they will fail like RadioShack has.

fozon I’m tired. So I’m selling my game that just went viral

Please remember, that even if you don't do anything at all - ignore it, let it fade, or whatever - you had a great success. Be proud, let yourself feel the satisfaction. Working for years on something and having people connect with it is an amazing accomplishment. If nothing else comes of it, that's OK. You won.

fozon The Awful Reign of the Red Delicious

There's a great BBC documentary called "Apples: British to the Core" [1] which has a very nice look into the history of apples, how they were cultivated, and how classic varieties are becoming lost. Everything leads back to the Cox Orange Pippin.

I live in Europe now, and enjoy a wide variety of interesting regional apples. Whenever I return to the USA I'm disappointed by the selection and quality of apples available. Red and green. They look nice, but often are waxy and bland.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUAJ0F1oH-M

fozon Ask HN: How many hours can you productively program a day?

Assume 8 hours * your hourly rate. You won't be programming productively for all eight hours probably, but that's normal. Be sure to point out that the day rate assures that you commit to focusing on them for the entire day, being available, and not working on other client work. This is the expectation of day rates for most clients: predictable scheduling and reachability.

fozon July 20, 1969: One Giant Leap For Mankind (2013)

This is an excellent series. There's an entire episode about the LEM computer which goes into detail about things like the famous alarm codes, hand-wiring core memory, and interviews with the developers.

fozon July 20, 1969: One Giant Leap For Mankind (2013)

This is one of my favorites. Not only is it riveting, but for anyone building software with others it's a great course in leadership, team building, and testing.

fozon American Summer: Before Air-Conditioning (1998)

I live in CH now, and I noticed that most buildings have massively thick exterior walls which seem to insulate against the blazing sun during the day, so that at night things are tolerable.

In my office in Zurich, we break out the electric fans during a hot day, and people take off their button shirts and walk around in flimsy undershirts. Most large stores have A/C though.

I honestly don't miss A/C at all, I remember living in NYC during heat waves, and dreading the shock transition from extreme hot to cold that happened when you entered or exited a building.

fozon To Make Yourself More Productive, Simplify

Yes, but at the same time "If you can't explain yourself in a single email, consider calling, texting or meeting in person instead." - so you do exactly to your co-workers what they do to you - in an effort to make yourself more efficient?

fozon Why Every Language Needs Its Underscore

Although underscore.js is more widely-used, I think sugarjs.com is an improvement and makes the syntax much nicer.

fozon Ack is a grep-like tool, optimised for programmers

I used Ack a lot when I was coding Perl (it's been a while). After I switched to Ruby, I used rak [1], which seemed easier to use most of the time, and nearly identical.

However, when you just want to find stuff fast, it's annoying to have to deal with Perl/CPAN or RVM/Rubygems, especially when the dependencies are not installed on your server/workstation.

That's why I've switched to silver searcher (ag) [2], as it can be installed with any OS package manager (brew, apt, yum).

[1] http://rak.rubyforge.org [2] https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

fozon Why Bother With Cucumber Testing?

In my frontend web team, we used Cucumber for over a year. We slowly came to the same conclusion - Cucumber tests are hard to maintain, run more slowly, and overall take more effort to develop.

As of today, we're in the process of ripping out all of our Cucumber tests and replacing them all with RSpec features.

In our largish company we found that product owners generally didn't care about reading Cucumber features. The definition of the products and how they works are defined in the agile boards and cards we write together, along with documentation and wireframes which live on our intranet.

fozon Progress Button Styles

I really love this effect. In use, I would suggest changing the text from "Submit" to "Saving", to better explain what's happening.

fozon Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

The hula hooping event simply took on a symbolic meaning for her, give what she went through. I don't think the act itself was dangerous or so terrible, but through her eyes, at that moment, it was the last straw.

fozon Frequency

I was lucky enough to see Randall Munroe speak at the OreDev conference last year. The video is online, highly recommended for XKCD fans:

http://oredev.org/2013/wed-fri-conference/art-and-code-with-...

fozon De La Soul to Make Entire Catalog Available for Free

This always bugged me about Spotify. The only reason I still use iTunes for music is because of De La Soul and The Beatles.

fozon Ask HN: Do you have any code currently in production that you're ashamed of?

I find that by calling it "legacy code", it helps to feel less ashamed. In general, I would be worried if I did NOT have production code that I felt could be simpler, faster, or more stable. Maybe just a side-effect of becoming a better developer.

fozon Elance Flappy Bird jobs

As the creator of that old game (which is long gone), I can say there are still people coming back asking for the theme song, which apparently, they can't stop listening to once it's started playing.

fozon Personal Computers – Hardware Review – Apple Weighs in With Macintosh (1984)

Encountering my first Mac is a memory I will never forget. I also remember being blown away by the crisp screen, the soft feel, and overall polish of the thing. What made the biggest impression on me however, was the interface. I could not stop moving, resizing, minimizing windows. Playing with the preferences and making my own patterns. It was like someone handed me a finely-crafted interactive journal, where I could personalize everything. Being able to explore the fonts and move icons around was astounding. It was a whole new experience. I went home that night, and with paper and pencil began to draw graphical UIs with windows, something I continued doing for many months, until I finally had access to a real Mac.

fozon CNN website hacked: "China dumps all bonds"

unfortunately, today, it's all about the clicks.

fozon New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline

This is something Apple Numbers did right. Option-Up or Down makes a new row. Bliss.

fozon CMS Trap

No we normally never need to re-deploy the app for new content or edits. We treat Locomotive like a service: it provides us a customizable content API. So only in the case of breaking schema changes would we need to re-deploy.

fozon CMS Trap

From an architecture point of view, I'm convinced that the CMS is better treated as a service, and not as part of your web application. This is especially true in a larger organization where content needs to be collected and managed in different ways (via import, or where people edit or curate content).

At the start of this year, the company I work at had about six different CMS platforms. Many of the applications that used them were built on top of CMSs, and were tightly coupled to them. As for static content generators, we tried that. It really didn't scale, especially for dynamic content. Too many hacks, deploys, and hard to train people.

As of today, our team has switched nearly all public content for our company to LocomotiveCMS (http://www.locomotivecms.com/), and deployed a centralized multi-tenant system. In many cases, we use our Locomotive instances as an API, pushing content via the API or the command-line tool, wagon. The CMS then renders HTML templates (or even JSON), which are consumed by our applications via HTTP. Sometimes it's just a tiny part of a page, or sometimes entire mini-sites. As a result, most of our apps don't need to know about a database.

Whenever there's a change that requires a new model, or the addition of a field, it can be done quickly through the LCMS back-office UI (or the wagon CLI tool). We update the application(s) affected, and re-deploy. Non-techies can edit the content using the admin web UI in a familiar way.

In any case, it's been working really well for us. The CMS has become an API, a service, and a separate app, shared by many applications. We've become more flexible and efficient as a result, our web applications are no longer burdened by CMS frameworks or admin interfaces of their own. And we dont have to struggle with Sharepoint or Wordpress or any other nonsense.

It's been a fundamental shift in how we think about the CMS, and has scaled well across multiple projects.

fozon OpenNote – an open web-based alternative to Microsoft OneNote and EverNote

Yes, pretty much. Maybe it exists?

fozon Open-Sourcing Rearview: Real-Time Monitoring With Graphite

Thank you for your work on Graphite. For all it's UI strangeness and quirks, it is a great solution that a lot of people love (myself included).

I'll peek at the pull requests and see if my company might be able to contribute some help.

fozon OpenNote – an open web-based alternative to Microsoft OneNote and EverNote

I would love to see an EverNote/OneNote replacement that was based on the filesystem and git. In addition to a great web UI, any client could then access and edit notes via git. Sync could be provided with Github or your own repo.

Maybe markdown + git + nice UI clients?