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jcfiala

34 karma · joined September 8, 2010

Web developer working in open source, most recently with Drupal and working for Examiner.com.
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jcfiala··on Show HN: Domino Fit – Domino Tiling Puzzle
Thanks! This is a lot of fun. I enjoy tumbling the ideas in my head.
jcfiala··on Colorado doesn’t need to replicate Silicon Valley
Having worked here for the last two decades, since I arrived in '94, I've never had real trouble finding a computer programming job.

(I don't count the time period when all I knew was Visual Basic and was re-training in another language while job-hunting, because really, that was on me.)

jcfiala··on The xkcd survey
Me too, but then the form wouldn't submit until I added a few more.
jcfiala··on The Man Who Saved Southwest Airlines with a '10-Minute' Idea
I do know that families with small children often board between the A and B groups. Which is nice, because families often want or need to sit together, but it still makes having an A ticket special.
jcfiala··on Air Fares 101 – Why do fares change all the time?
As a parent, I fly Southwest so that I can take advantage of the two free checked-in bags you get per ticket. Not having to wrestle several overfull bags of clothes on and off of the plane makes Southwest a great bargain for my piece of mind.
jcfiala··on Brendan Eich Steps Down as Mozilla CEO
The mob on the internet got it this time due to some rather specific circumstances. There are plenty of companies out there that Brendan Eich could have been promoted to CEO of, which wouldn't have cared nearly as much about this level of controversy.

It basically comes down to this - if Mozilla cares this much about what the internet thinks of it this strongly, then why didn't they pick someone else to begin with?

jcfiala··on Brendan Eich becomes Mozilla CEO
Well, if donating money is political speech that's covered by the first amendment, then he shouldn't be surprised if his money talks.
jcfiala··on PayPal Denies Providing Payment Information to Twitter Username Hacker
The Pragmatic Programmer website uses this system to allow you to prove that you bought a hard-copy of a book, so they can offer you a discounted ebook.
jcfiala··on What is the best way to programatically detect porn images? (2009)
It seems to me that if you could somehow solicit comments on the picture, you then could do text analysis on the comments to see if someone thought they were porn or not. (Well, I'm being a little silly, but there's a germ of an idea there.)
jcfiala··on Github.com unavailable due to a large DDoS attack
You could, but now you're just forcing the attackers to fork an existing project and push some nonsense code to it before they can attack.
jcfiala··on B&N Decides That Purchased Ebooks Are Only Yours Until Your Credit Card Expires
My 15 month old daughter has started being a little destructive to books as well.
jcfiala··on When A Kickstarter Campaign Fails, Does Anyone Get Their Money Back?
I think my One Page Dungeon Codex came out fairly quickly, although this was before they made you estimate delivery: http://kck.st/9oJ3jq

And the Miskatonic School for Girls was actually a bit early, shipping in March when it was estimated for April: http://kck.st/rlbUrH

I'll admit I usually assume that the estimated delivery date is an early bound on the time range when it will actually be delivered.

jcfiala··on A New Flavor... Still Delicious
I missed it - I don't even know which email account it went to. I didn't authorize them to move anything, but they seem to have moved it anyway.
jcfiala··on NYT Crossword editor: "I was willing to endure a life of poverty to do this."
GAMES magazine usually has a few cryptic crosswords per issue, so if you want to give it a try pick up an issue. I'm sure they've also got collections out there... or you could probably look for used issues to play with. I know all of my old issues had unsolved cryptics.
jcfiala··on Dropbox TOS Includes Broad Copyright License
"We sometimes need your permission to do what you ask us to do with your stuff"... " or publicly display that stuff to the extent we think it necessary for the Service."

So, they need to cover themselves legally if you put something in your public folder, or share it with someone else.

Besides, if you encrypt everything then it's not like they can do anything with it.

It's just a cya clause.

jcfiala··on Poll: How much do you average per freelancing gig?
I'm not sure how to answer that - I do my work hourly, usually. For that, I'm usually at $85/hour, although I discount it for projects that will take several months where I don't have to look around for the next job. I probably would have started increasing that rate, except now I've got a fulltime job and aren't contracting after this month.
jcfiala··on Be careful of who you work with
I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one having that problem - site is nigh-unreadable with both firefox and chrome.

Also, there seems to be a continue reading link on the page that doesn't actually do anything.

jcfiala··on Dropbox (YC S07): Simple Tasks for Extra Space (768MB total)
I'd love to work for dropbox, if it weren't for the fact that I'd have to move. Great work, though, I'm a big fan.
jcfiala··on Is Drupal truly an Open Source Industry Leader? (and other questions)
Hmm... a bit of a survey?

I've been working in Drupal for three years, starting with version 5.x. I think Drupal development is moving forward in a positive direction. I don't know of any major incidents of Drupal being compromised or failing. MySQL works fine with Drupal, and I've even used a mixture of MySQL with Mongodb.