Hacker News Reader

It's a broad stroke for sure, but, yes, no one on HN shops at Walmart.

Pointing out the fact that the most successful store in history by a huge margin is one that neither you nor anyone you know shops at is a great way to illustrate the importance of market validation for startups.

mildavwon U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz Issues Statement on Aaron Swartz Case

"six months in a low security setting."

That one word, "setting," puts her squarely in bullshitter territory. The obvious and honest word is "prison". But that's too dark a color for the painting she's holding up for us.

mildavwon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2013)

Portland, OR

Unix Systems Administrator

http://renewfund.com

Responsibilities:

• Maintain internal and external Linux/Mac/Windows systems in a highly automated/repeatable way.

• Improve and maintain service and performance monitoring infrastructure.

• Provide infrastructure support to our development team through the product development and deployment lifecycle.

• Monitor and improve system security.

• Provide occasional support to desktop users.

Desired skills and experience:

• SAGE Level II/III skill set. ( http://www.sage.org/ﬁeld/jobs-descriptions.html )

• 3+ years systems administration experience.

• Experience with Puppet or other conﬁguration management tools.

• Understands the importance of virtualization combined with automated provisioning & maintenance.

• Demonstrated ability and desire to learn continuously.

• A bias towards open source tools.

• A love of command lines.

• Experience with PostgreSQL a plus.

• Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent experience.

We value people, teamwork, innovation, diversity, and a healthy life balance, with an overriding dedication to quality in everything we do.

If this sounds like you, we'd love to hear from you. Send your resume to us at work@renewfund.com.

mildavwon New Official Facebook Poke iOS Application

Maybe it's because my small social network (my extended family) all have iPhones, but we abandoned Facebook about a year ago in favor of iMessage. Group text, photos, and movies fly back and forth almost every day. And when we want it live, Facetime.

I guess Facebook just further validated this mobile multimedia medium.

mildavwon How many of you are allowed to drink beer at work?

Beer is always available in the fridge. It's consumed at a slow pace though, usually at the end of the day by a few people, and not every day.

mildavwon Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

ballots are stuffed into an image scanner (like a high speed fax) as they arrive, the votes are detected, any ambiguous votes are "electronically adjudicated" meaning workers alter the database to correct for voter intent or write ins.

Is this different than how the count works in states whose ballots are delivered via volunteers with ballot boxes?

mildavwon Painless iOS Testing With Cucumber

Two non-programming product owners feed work to our five-person dev team via cucumber tests. They own the features directory (we make small mods here and there to get them running or to clarify). They're smart, completely capable of mastering Gherkin (Cucumber's dialect) and writing logical scenarios. It's working pretty well so far, 3 months in. We get the features and just make 'em pass!

Here's a sample:

Feature: Manage Credentials

  Background:
    Given I am signed in as a superuser
    And there are 3 credentials

  Scenario: Listing Credentials
    When I view the list of credentials
    Then I should see all 3 credentials in the list

    When I add a 4th credential
    And I view the list of credentials
    Then I should see all 4 credentials in the list

    When I change the name of the 1st credential
    And I view the list of credentials
    Then I should see that the 1st credential's name has been changed

    When I delete the 2nd credential
    Then I should see all credentials except the deleted one

mildavwon Beyond Meat: Fake Meat So Good It Will Freak You Out

It seems like collectively changing our diet is just rearranging chairs on the Titanic. Our population will continue to grow exponentially as it has for the last several million years no matter what we eat. If somehow we avoid a massive die-off as has happened with other species due to, say, rapid climate change, a meteor, or a super virus, and actually survive to the point where the acreage of food producing land has a significant effect, then our population will be so large that one or two generations of growth will overwhelm the efficiency gains we make due to diet.

Put another way, if food producing acreage is the limiting factor for humans then as omnivores we may grow for 150,000 generations, as herbivores we may make it to 150,005 generations. Either way, growth will have to stop and we will have wiped out massive numbers of other species.

mildavwon Ask HN: What music instrument do you play?

Well said. I spent 10 years as a full time pro playing upright bass, mostly jazz. Now, I code for a living. Holding and manipulating musical/data abstractions in your head is indeed a strong commonality.

mildavwon The GitHub Styleguide

  # bad
  email_with_name = user.name + ' <' + user.email + '>'

  # good
  email_with_name = "#{user.name} <#{user.email}>"

  # better
  email_with_name = "%s <%s>" % [user.name, user.email]

mildavwon Live ships map

dave@mailbolt.com

mildavwon Live ships map

I built an app that combines freely available AIS data with other relevant inventory data and sell subscriptions to some local oil-spill recovery companies: http://demo.dedicatedmaps.com/

mildavwon SendHub (YC W12) Lets Businesses Text Their Customers, Teachers Text For Free

Did the 80% for $1 ever produce a cofounder?

mildavwon More damaging evidence on open plan offices

Interesting. I was trying to think of any controversies due to "heretical" thoughts. We really haven't had any. (So maybe you are right!) We have our nerd-fights about say, rspec vs minitest, or estimating techniques, but not much beyond that. All of us lead pretty well, when we need to, and follow well when someone else is leading.

Regarding diversity, I actually think we're pretty diverse. Our 8 developers include:

1 Indian, 1 Palestinian

1 woman

2 overweight but not obese

2 introverts, 1 strong extrovert, 3 mild extroverts

1 M.A., 1 M.S. working on his PhD. 2 high school drop outs.

2 Textmate, 6 vim

1 under age 30, 3 over age 40

1 ex-con, 1 former jazz musician

4 married with children

3 prefer dogs, 4 cats

Apparently, though, we all like to mountain climb.

mildavwon More damaging evidence on open plan offices

Yes, we pretty much try to pair on everything. It doesn't work out when there is an odd number or someone gets pulled elsewhere, so it's not all of the time. When we don't pair, we do code reviews (also by a pair).

mildavwon More damaging evidence on open plan offices

Incidentally, our work space was designed by the team. We moved last summer. The management chose the office and we were given $50k to do whatever we wanted with it. We built one conference room, a server room, and two small meeting rooms. The rest was open with clusters of stand-up desks.

mildavwon More damaging evidence on open plan offices

Yes, fleshing out requirements is a big part of it. Our apps are web apps but in financing, so they're not totally trivial. We do both the public facing web-apps and the tool used by loan processors for administration.

Our team has a high number of extraverts, but the introverts seem just as happy. We have no surly curmudgeons.

When I hired on, I was surprised that so many people rode bikes to work. And when I proposed climbing a local mountain to one similarly outdoorsy co-worker, I was surprised that the whole team was interested. 10 out of the 12 in the office either did the warm-up climb or actually camped out overnight and completed the larger climb (Mt St. Helens). I found this amount of shared lifestyle/outside-interests to be unique among places I've worked. I'm certain we weren't hired because of these interests, but it seems to have worked out that we share a lot of them.

mildavwon More damaging evidence on open plan offices

I'm not sure what you mean. Would 80% agree with me? Do 20% of the people give 1.6 cents? What is the 80/20 rule in this case?

mildavwon More damaging evidence on open plan offices

Your snark actually raises a good point: The optimal office arrangement probably depends on who works there.

Last Friday our team presented some of our dev proceses to the local agile group. We had 5 devs and a product person there. Someone observed that our team seems to have really good personal chemistry and we all agreed. We chalked it up to careful hiring. If you wouldn't function well with our set-up, we probably wouldn't offer you a job.

mildavwon More damaging evidence on open plan offices

Our team has very good chemistry, lots of respect for opinions all the way around. So I don't think people feel the need to get their two cents in on every issue. If a subset takes off on something, the rest know that they'll be brought up to speed at some later point, and the code quality will be decent. If there are parts of it that aren't decent, we'll either agree to fix them, or agree that we don't have resources and we'll have to live with them.

Regarding definitions of "in the zone", mine wouldn't include a pair in a good rhythm. Being in the zone, to me, evokes a lone programmer writing lots of code while holding complex mental models in his/her head for hours at a time. It's a pleasurable feeling for most of us with a bent for logic and problem solving, but my experience is that it doesn't always produce the best code.

* spelling edit

mildavwon More damaging evidence on open plan offices

On re-read, I'm guessing the down votes are for tone. It reads a little rigid and preachy to me now.

What I was attempting to describe is the mindset our team currently has, not what yours should have.

Our particular team of 8 devs is happy and productive with it. I do understand that this approach could be less than ideal for a different team, or the same team working on projects of a different nature.

mildavwon More damaging evidence on open plan offices

Our dev culture discourages anyone working in "the zone" because more often than not, it produces crappy code -- crappy mainly in that it's hard for others to understand/maintain. If you're off by yourself thinking about something really hard, you're doing it wrong. You should be hashing out new ideas in conversations with other devs. Grab a conference room if you're conversation gets animated or regards something with a very narrow scope that others won't care about, otherwise do it in the open so anyone can jump in.

"Disruptions" are conversations where ideas and implementations are fleshed out. That's the hard work. Coding quietly means you're doing something so trivial that pairing would be silly.

I really believe this dev culture produces fewer defects and makes the team more responsive since so much knowledge is shared.

mildavwon Cars kill cities

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=45.528017,-122.598179...

We're protected from the busy road and the grocery store parking lot by elevation; we're 50 ft below either. We can hear the highway, but I only notice it when the din is missing when we visit friends in the country!

mildavwon Cars kill cities

I have two little kids (I know that's not three) and public transit or biking (I can fit both on my bike) is great for outings. It turns the journey into an experience itself. Driving with the kids strapped into car seats the whole time is much less fun. I live in a very bikable town within walking distance to light rail, but that was by design. We bought our house by drawing 1/2 mile circles around parks, rail stops, and grocery stores. Bought the first place that intersected all three. I was just thinking recently about how my kids likely be autonomous much earlier. By age 11 or 12 they'll be able to go all around the city on their own.

mildavwon Die, Hollywood, die

Just last week I watched a demo day for a local incubator (PiePDX). Here's someone trying disrupt distribution, but it doesn't sound like they have theaters in the mix:

http://m.youtube.com/?rdm=4pauejn01&reload=3#/profile?us...

mildavwon Ask HN: What do you think of my site name?

"disease or germ..." Yes. I thought of mold growing on a lump of yogurt. Yogurt cultures.

mildavwon Square’s Disruptive New iPad Payments Service Will Replace Cash Registers

That rate is what our accountant told me to put into the accounting software. I didn't actually see the statement. I can tell your that our average transaction is $205 and it's all card-present. There were 1031 transactions over two days. Maybe the tiers average out to that rate.

mildavwon Square’s Disruptive New iPad Payments Service Will Replace Cash Registers

I run an annual used ski equipment sale. We rent credit card machines and have a merchant account set up just for that weekend. We pay $0.22 + 1.79% per transaction. Our average transaction is >$100 so this is cheaper than what Square offers. Am I getting an unheard-of deal? Or is Square's rate really not that great?

mildavwon Ask HN: Standing Desks Feedback and Comments on your experience?

I stand all day. Have for a year. My legs were a little tired the first week, but after that I was fine. I shift my weight around, lean on the desk, pace, etc.

I have no idea if I'm healthier or will live longer or have more sex or my hair is growing back, but I do prefer it to sitting down.