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gmack

51 karma · joined May 21, 2010

multinerd

previously chopped wood and carried water at Sun Microsystems, various online fashion companies, MotoLogic, and most recently as Director of Engineering @ Etsy.com

twitter: @gpmack

submissionscomments
gmack··on Show HN: PHPunctional, a PHP Functional Programming Library
So, when does P#P come out?
gmack··on YouTube Founders to Sell Delicious, a Social Bookmarking Site
Pinboard.in + Delibar = done.
gmack··on The fallen heroes of virtual reality (2014)
Yes, that is a strange omission. My first VR experience was using his equipment at a VR conference in the 90's, playing a virtual tennis game. It was cool as hell, but during a 'racket' swing, I accidentally smacked an observer that got too close. I still like to think it was one of the first "VR accidents."

Just a few years later, I bought one of these: http://www.mindflux.com.au/products/io-display/iglass3D.html

It was crude and required way too many cables, but playing Descent was awesome.

gmack··on Hack Isn't PHP
He says it's like "PHP++" but I like to say it's more like P#P.
gmack··on Forests Around Chernobyl Aren’t Decaying Properly
What about bioremediation? Bring in microorganisms, bacteria and fungal spores, from healthy forests, and inoculate this one?
gmack··on The Adulteration of Italian Olive Oil
I always open such links in a Chrome incognito window. Apparently there is still a page count, but it gets reset every time you open a new window.
gmack··on Money can buy happiness
Maybe it can't buy happiness, but it can definitely rent it.
gmack··on Online Color Challenge: How Well Do You See Color?
7, among the highest for my cohort. Although it's possible the sorting heuristic I used helped, basically a loose binary sort followed by closer inspection and comparison of proximate squares. Increased the zoom level of the page to get a bigger sampling area for my eyes.
gmack··on Google vs. Death
Succeed or not in their stated goal, it could end up throwing off a lot of interesting science, assuming actual bio/neuro/genetic science is backed by the venture. Presumably all this enhanced by vast amounts of computational prowess, as well.

That said, there are a lot of questions about what the philosophical, cultural, sociological and political underpinnings and implications might be. Creating a friendly environment for discussing those could be a worthwhile exercise as well. For example, what is the interaction between individual wellbeing and longevity, and the quality of world in which you live? Perhaps it's a two-way street, a wholistic set of factors that includes social wellbeing in addition to medical health, taking for example the case of that Greek island with famously long-living people (Ikaria).

As someone said, it's not the years in your life, it's the life in your years.

gmack··on Introducing Trello Gold
I'd pay for Trello 3D. With music.
gmack··on Report finds that Human Genome Project has added $1 trillion to US economy
It would be interesting to see a comparative ROI study of several large, publicly-funded, projects similar to the HGP. Such data would be useful in debates about policy, one would think.
gmack··on Letter To A Young Programmer Considering A Startup
Thank you for posting this. I know it's from last year, but there are realities here that should be understood by every engineer who is considering working for a startup.

Be as hard-core about your negotiation skills and awareness of employment terms, as you are about your coding skills.

gmack··on Experiment in paying villagers in India an unconditional basic income
Another great organization working on this model is http://givedirectly.org, co-founded by the irrepressible Rohit Wanchoo. We had lots of discussion around this model, since his team had done a lot of research around it. It appears to be working well, and recently received a large donation from Google.
gmack··on Medical Care in the U.S is Bad, But Insurance Sucks Too
Right, but presumably Medicare's prices are significantly lower due to its negotiating power (which is why "Medicare for All" may not be such a bad idea). As we can see from many of the comments here, the prices vary widely, even when you make the effort to find out what they are for your provider and insurer.
gmack··on Medical Care in the U.S is Bad, But Insurance Sucks Too
Granted, the OP indicates that indeed it is difficult to get advanced pricing because it entails asking the doctor for the code, then checking with the insurance company.

But what's stopping people from voluntarily posting the procedure_code=>price information they obtain? Are there contractual/legal reasons that prevent you from sharing that information? If patients get that price in the normal course of getting healthcare, then why not share it all, and force transparency in the market?

gmack··on Squash
This is all fine and dandy, but there's too much emphasis on finding the "engineer at fault" and blaming.
gmack··on Moving On
It's great that he decided not to jump immediately to another job. Unless you are in a financially tight situation, you really need some time to decompress your mind, and clear it of any company-dynamics residue.
gmack··on German Scientists Create Aerographite, the Lightest Material in the World
IANAP, but if this material is "jet black", i.e. absorbs most light, and also highly conductive, wouldn't it also be a great component for organic solar cells? Graphene is apparently already an interesting candidate for this application, promising lower costs of manufacture (if not higher efficiency).
gmack··on The Silent Majority of Experts
The irony is that many of this "silent and modest" group, would also not bother to react to the discussion here.
gmack··on Rails 4 will establish a new background job queueing API
Although certainly not without its issues, the most popular solution for that platform is Gearman http://gearman.org . It's fairly ops-intensive, but the most friendly for PHP without having to resort to things like Stomp to interface with messaging (MQ) systems. Which are not optimally designed for job enqueing, per se.
gmack··on Hudson moves to Github
FWIW, we have followed along this move at Etsy, where we've been using this CI server for many months now.

We started out with Hudson, but after observing the unethical shenanigans from Oracle (particularly the erasure of the author's contributions from their wiki), we moved to Jenkins.

gmack··on [dead]
1: create webcam-n-gun rig.

2: mount the whole setup on a walking robot.

3: ??

4: apocalypse

gmack··on What’s The Secret Behind Diapers.com Success? A Kiva Robot Warehouse
Wait, they fly airplanes full of diapers to the West Coast!? I wonder what quantity of jet fuel exhaust gets spewed into the atmosphere, just so you can get diapers the next day. Even with the increased per-worker efficiency, is the overall environmental impact worse or better than cloth systems, or simply getting them from the corner store?
gmack··on Ask HN: Lets talk about Etsy
Hey Joshwa, thanks for the tweet-vite, I'm glad to share.

Etsy is successful, ultimately, not because of some putative secret sauce (though we do have very powerful and unique behind-the-scenes tech).

We are successful, ultimately, because we are providing tools that support and enable the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people, help their artistic and creative achievements be seen and recognized around the world, and subvert the common shopping experience people have to add a personal connection to the creators of the goods they buy.

If anyone were to identify a similarly unmet need, another ignored and under-served community, and created a place online that had a positive impact on the lives, they would also succeed. What "business model", which metrics or revenue streams make sense, depends on that community's characteristics, and it doesn't have to be complicated or some sort of trick.

That all said, it's of course crucial to have reliable, flexible, scalable, rapidly evolving technology behind you. I have been working here relentlessly to get our team to the point where we are free to innovate as much as we can. To be honest, there is already abundant information on the web and elsewhere about what works, and what doesn't; it's not really a mystery.

But you need the resoluteness to actually execute on these best practices, and the courage to innovate even in the face of occasional mistakes.