Hacker News Reader

nhanceon Impatience: The Pitfall of Every Ambitious Person

Came here to mention the discipline I've learned through endurance running as well. There is something beautiful knowing that it will take hours to finish and all you can do is wait

nhanceon The days of .dev domains for testing code are over

Just use lacolhost.com: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13749515

nhanceon Why SaaS Companies Can't Win on Features and Must Win on Brand

This whole thing feels like an advertisement. Why is it on HN?

nhanceon Internet Draft: Let 'localhost' be localhost

I have no clue, it's all handled by the registrar's DNS. I know when it last expired I was getting a good number of emails from people begging for it to come back asap.

The other commentators here are right, it won't solve a good number of the issues in this proposal, but works well if you need something for developing against subdomains.

nhanceon Internet Draft: Let 'localhost' be localhost

If this doesn't happen or takes too long, there's always lacolhost.com and *.lacolhost.com. I own this domain, have registered it out until 2026 and vow that the domain and all subdomains will always redirect to localhost.

It's easy to type and easy to remember and should always do a good job of expressing intent of usage.

nhanceon Power BI, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence set of tools, is getting smarter

I've recently switched to start working with Microsoft products, with both this and their Dynamics 365 platform. It really seems like there's a huge opportunity here for guys like me to bring years of experience hacking on UNIX systems into the Microsoft world because there's a lot of "this is how it's done" and legacy systems thinking.

Many of the developers I've seen working in this space seem a few years behind, so I'm excited to see this published here. Gives me faith that I'm making the right call (even if it is a bit painful to develop for these things. XML and all.)

nhanceon Ask HN: Can anyone recommend a web development company to fix my webiste?

This is a really interesting article. I'm enjoying watching the responses come in.. it appears the only way the poster would be able to choose here is based on who responds first, as there's little qualifying information to make anyone stand out without investing a ton of time researching each lead.

Granted, there hasn't been a lot provided in the request. I just find it fascinating to watch the sales process work out somewhat in the open here.

How would you stand out if you were looking to win this?

nhanceon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (November 2016)

I bet you're being downvoted because that rate in SF means you can't even pay rent. The SF market has a strong incentive to keep the rates high, driven by property prices that are out-of-touch with reality.

nhanceon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (November 2016)

  SEEKING WORK - Pennsylvania, USA - Remote only
  
  I'm the leader of a small team (there are 3 of us) with a long history in web development.

  Where I excel is in big picture development strategy through building re-usable pieces, laying one brick at a time. I can help lay a good base for your developing projects that will last for years, despite changes in technology and display incredible endurance on difficult challenges.

  I take a long-term strategic view and believe that I only win when you win. No bullshit shiny new tech, no getting lost in rabbit-holes following "the next big thing". The right tools, for the right job and a focus on the results.

  Technologies: Ruby on Rails, React, React Native, Swift.

  Award-winning developer, with a small team behind me to help achieve even more.

  215-804-9408
  nhance@reenhanced.com
  
  P.S. While it has nothing to do with my work, I'm an avid endurance sports athlete and endurance motorsports racer. I seek difficult challenges too big to conquer. Let's do the impossible, together.

nhanceon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2016)

  Location: Pennsylvania
  Remote: Yes. Remote only.
  Willing to relocate: No.
  Technologies: Ruby, Rails (back to 1.x), Angular, React, React Native, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Android, iOS
  Résumé/CV: Award-winning developer. Experience since 1999. http://github.com/reenhanced http://buildbettersoftware.com/
  Email: nhance@reenhanced.com

I specialize in building software tools to help businesses defend profit margins and competitive advantages. Let's get started with a competitive analysis so we know where you stand. Together, we'll build a plan to help you remain adaptable against the coming exponential change in the world.

Start here: http://www.agileasaservice.com/

nhanceon Building an $80k/month business with a software testing community

Have you looked at agileasaservice.com? You can connect your repository via github or bitbucket and we'll be in touch to collect videos from you.

We then convert those videos into tests that are merged into your repository as a part of your CI process.

nhanceon Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

And the negative comments help wipe out a great bit of future competition. If you kill an idea before it gets started, you reduce the risk of it actually working.

Here to the crazy ones.

nhanceon Visual DOOM AI competition results

I'd love to see this happening with self driving cars versus race drivers in an endurance race

nhanceon Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path

From what I've seen on HN, many commenters are experts on what won't work.

The faith that big things come from little ones is a bigger factor in success than is often acknowledged.

nhanceon Git Workflow Basics

My apologies if this comes across as overly harsh! This article was really quite well written, and it's only after having been burned through rebases that I've gotten so headstrong against it.

We need more articles like this! Thank you for your work!

nhanceon Git Workflow Basics

This workflow is scary. A rebase should not be part of any everyday workflow and must be reserved _only_ for exceptional situations.

Rebasing can cause the loss of history and developers should be as careful with it as system admins are with `sudo`. I can't recommend any workflow that includes it without treating is as a terrifying and scary thing. How easy is it to accidentally remove a line during interactive rebase and lose all work associated with it?

This is why my team and I moved to squash merging. Sure it has it's own drawbacks, but they're far less worrisome than rebasing. If you screw up a rebase, the history is re-written or force-pushed by accident. If you screw up a squash merge, you can still check out the intermediate commits if you know the hash.

We won a Ruby award for our work on Git Reflow. There are big improvements coming this week that can make it easy for teams to tweak the workflow to suit any special needs you might have. It works on github and bitbucket and automatically creates pull requests (and makes sure they're reviewed.) Gitlab support coming soon (maybe this month).

http://github.com/reenhanced/gitreflow

nhanceon Inside the tiny RFID chip that runs San Francisco's “Bay to Breakers” race

I use a system like this for tracking drivers and cars in an automotive racing series. I built a system that's hooked up to twilio to send the team a text message with their official pit stop timing.

Sounds like there could be interest in a writeup on this

nhanceon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2016)

Location: Philadelphia, PA

Remote: Required

Willing to relocate: no

Technologies: Ruby on Rails 1.2, 2.3, 3.2, 4.2

Description: I've developed a system and tooling that helps us upgrade old rails apps. This is our only focus and it lets us be more efficient than generalized developers.

We've got a low-priced "upgrade track" that enters your app into our development pool of our semi-automated upgrades. All code delivered by pull requests, with no writes to your codebase.

http://www.railsasaservice.com/

Email: nhance@buildbettersoftware.com

nhanceon GitHub Flow Like a Pro with These 13 Git Aliases

This is a more complicated version of the 2015 Fukuoka Ruby Award winner Git Reflow:

http://github.com/reenhanced/gitreflow

nhanceon Polish company named Dariusz Jakubowski x'; DROP TABLE users; SELECT '1

http://xkcd.com/327/

nhanceon Google Glass sales halted

Having used Google Glass in a racecar, I can say that it has no place in a race cockpit. The display is too far out of the line of sight and it is less ideal than the gauges already in the car.

It was able to capture neat videos, but I think a gopro stuck to the helmet would do a better job.

nhanceon Introducing transparent pricing

There are lots of ways to run a business and this is one.

It reads like what you'd expect to read from a charity.

nhanceon Y U NO commit??

Squash merging is only of the feature branch to master. If your feature branch makes it through code review and acceptance and you still need to update the typo, then you make the commit to master directly.

It would be great if we could be perfect, but sometimes small commits to master do have to happen. All we do is make sure we subject every feature to code review and acceptance before it gets to master. If it slips through, then it's technically a new change request in our eyes

nhanceon Y U NO commit??

Yes, master is merged into the feature branches before going upstream. We consider it to be the responsibility of the feature branch owner to make sure their code will work with master.

Because we don't care about the commits on the feature branches, we prefer doing a regular merge, not a rebase of the feature branch, so that there's no need for force pushing at any point. We consider a force push of any kind to be unnecessarily dangerous.

The tool will handle the merge up for you, but if there are conflicts you'll have to resolve them before you can release the feature.

nhanceon Y U NO commit??

This is the workflow we've adopted at my company. There are 2 types of commits, you either want to release some new feature or bit of work and do it atomically, or you want to develop the feature, fix typos and throw it between machines without a care.

Is it ever going to help anyone to `git blame` a line of a file and see a commit message like "Whoops, fixed a typo!"? No. But you can't avoid those types of commits.

What you can do is prevent those commits from going into the released history of the product. We develop all new features in feature branches (made _very_ easy with the commandline tool we built for it) and only after code review and acceptance testing do we squash merge it to master.

This lets us put together all of the commits, typo commits, WIP commits and whatever else into a combined commit that contains all of the changes that make up that feature. We even enforce a special syntax on the commit so when you look back in the history, you can trace it back to the code review and to the actual ticket that requested the work.

This means we keep all of our dirty backup commits until release time when we throw them all away in favor of the squashed commit. It makes git blame on any line of any file a sexy experience that provides accountability and an easy way to figure out why the code is the way it is.

Our commandline tool automates a lot of this for us. It's biggest benefit is the tie in with github (and this week bitbucket) to create pull requests and the "deliver" command that handles squash merging and providing the structure for the final commit.

It's all open source and available here: http://github.com/reenhanced/gitreflow/

nhanceon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (September 2014)

This is exactly what we do:

http://buildbettersoftware.com/

nhanceon Gartner Predicts App Monetization Will Only get More Difficult as Time Goes On

The real problem is with the app stores. They are terribly organized for discovery of any apps, the iTunes store specifically. How are you supposed to find new apps if they're not in the "top XX" portal?

1: If search is how you access the huge variety of apps, why is the search bar hidden all the way in the top corner? When you open the app store on an iPad, you have a beautiful, but ultimately very limited view of apps.

There really needs to be, and I believe there is room in the market for, a service that helps discover new and upcoming apps. Both Apple and Google do a poor job helping users find apps they might like.

2: "Genius" is useless if you have to find apps you like first. It may help provide limited exposure to apps similar to ones you've tried, but it provides poor results if you don't know what you want in the first place.

3: Each of the categories provides only the "top XX" or "newest XX" apps. This incentivizes a cutthroat market and disincentives large investment into apps. Sure, there is a ton of VC money to chase many different app ideas, but ultimately, successful apps will need to make a return on investment. Both Apple and Google do no favors to developers by fueling the "turnover" game. You get one shot on the "new releases" board, then you're on your own for marketing outside of the app stores. In the long term, this will decrease the quality of apps on both platforms. Amazon has a shot at getting it right, and I believe this strategy may favor them in the long-term.

If you really want to win, find a way to improve discovery or "browsing" of apps. The market will follow the incentives to their logical ends, and right now, both of the big players are missing the opportunity to incentivize discovery of quality.

Nick

P.S. I don't know the solution to these problems either, but look for yourself and tell me they don't exist.

nhanceon Comcast Will Spend Millions on Khan Academy for Low-Income Broadband Adoption

Every so often a company will make a move that is so smart that it boggles your mind. To me, this is one of those moves.

For a company so evil in so many ways, this really surprised me.

Think about this, if this works, low-income households can increase their earning power through learning skills that will allow them to make more money. Once they're making enough, they'll be more stable customers for Comcast and having used the internet to improve their lives, the internet will be one of the last things to cut. (If I was in the position to benefit from this, I'd never "bite the hand that feeds me" if I can avoid it.)

If they don't screw this up, Comcast stands to win hundreds to thousands of new lifetime loyal customers (assuming they don't screw up retention).

Low income families increase their earning power.Comcast wins more business. Khan is more successful. There are no losers.

This is absolutely brilliant. Good job Comcast!

nhanceon Dad Arrested for picking up kids from school by foot

America!

nhanceon Snapchat Spurned $3 Billion Acquisition Offer from Facebook

I cannot understand the mindset of someone who turns down an offer of $3 billion dollars for their company that has no path to revenue, let alone profit.

IMO, this is why you avoid investment money. Can you imagine VC "partners" forcing you into a decision like this?

$3 Billion dollars _IS_ changing the world. How much more could you possibly want? What kind of future is preferable to the one you'd have had you taken this deal?

Can anyone make sense of this?