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octane

235 karma · joined April 21, 2009

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octane··on Fix a bug in Ruby’s configure.in and get a ~30% performance boost
It's what you don't want to wake up next to after a night of drinking.
octane··on Face transplant patient is revealed
Damn, couldn't they do something about her cheeks?
octane··on Ask HN: Moving to a New City
Drink booze. But not too much. Sort of like college, but with limits.
octane··on Spolsky: Why Circuit City Failed, and Why B&H Thrives
I would rather click zero times and just read the damn thing.

If you don't like ads, block them. I like well formatted text that doesn't require user intervention every time I go to a new page. That's sort of the entire fucking POINT of web design.

octane··on Spolsky: Why Circuit City Failed, and Why B&H Thrives
Chances are during that time your income went up too, and you were no longer someone who really gave a shit about a $20 difference on a piece of gear and were willing instead to pay that $20 or whatever it was to an outfit like newegg to make sure their excellent service continued.
octane··on Who You Are Now is Who You'll Be in 10 Years
Someone who makes a handsome living through salary but was laid off could very well turn into an entrepreneur through no direct desire of their own.
octane··on The Dark Matter of a Startup
Give me a fucking break, this is the kind of shit that led to the first dot com bubble.

You either sell or develop in a startup, if you're doing neither or these, you're useless. Pick one and do it.

octane··on Peeve of the day
This is one thing that I have never liked about my fellow programmers/developers.

They sit around and speculate and arrogantly pontificate to no end when all that's really needed is a direct question to a person who can provide a direct answer.

Just ask the fucking doctor if he really believes in homeopathy, and if he does, switch providers.

octane··on Ask HN: Is there a bias against hackers from 'name-brand' colleges?
> that seems unfair

LOL welcome to life, buddy.

octane··on Ask HN: How does a non-hacker get into a start-up?
Have cash or the ability to get it. That's what all those other activities you mentioned really mean.
octane··on Ask HN: Any tips for living cheaply in SF?
My honest advice to you is go to college and do drugs and drink booze and have sex, 3 things you've probably never done before in your life. College is an excellent place to do all those things for the first time. The corner of Geary and Polk is not.

Get that shit (into and) out of your system before you move to SF or you'll never make it out alive. Trust me on this one.

SF is a fucking dangerous place if you go there without your adventure meter properly calibrated.

octane··on Ask HN: Any tips for living cheaply in SF?
That's not necessarily the catch of TI, the Marina also suffers from that unfortunate side effect during earthquakes. The real catch is that nobody knows how toxic the soil is.
octane··on Ask HN: Any tips for living cheaply in SF?
I upvoted you because this is a straight up reality check.
octane··on Ask HN: Any tips for living cheaply in SF?
It's a trap.
octane··on Larry Page Commencement Speech
What/who the fuck is Harris? Get out of the South.

-Someone on the West Coast.

octane··on Facebook pays 150 employees ~$50K to keep the site clean
You're one of those name-dropping douchebags who likes to go out of his way to post in a thread where he can drop a bunch of names like he's an important person.
octane··on Poll: funded or not funded?
> I'm not ok with eating ramen.

Real ramen is really good. Like the kind you order in a restaurant.

octane··on Processing + Javascript = Flash Killer
When the fuck did "killer" replace "competitor" in the English language?
octane··on Facebook pays 150 employees ~$50K to keep the site clean
Quite honestly I think that guy is a grade A loser.
octane··on Close to the Problem
> IT decisions made by upper management of a large company are almost always terrible.

Yeah, that's called power. They have it, so they make the decisions with the money. If you want to make the decisions, figure out a way to get into power.

That's Reality with a capital R, folks.

octane··on Poll: Male or female?
Do you really need a poll for this? Just like every other tech site it's a bunch of 18-35 year old dudes sitting around clicking reload every 20 minutes.
octane··on The American Express Blues
Does anyone know of a site on the net where AmEx customers have come together to complain or at least contribute anecdotes so we can get an overall feel of how many customers this is really affecting?

If venture capitalists are getting their purchases denied, this concerns me as a small business owner because I depend on my amex card more than anything else to make purchases for my business and having my buyer protection and ability to make large purchases disappear would be pretty devastating. Buying goods like computers and furniture from multiple vendors with cash out of my bank account is an awful idea that should make anyone uneasy, business owner or not.

And if AmEx is actively shutting their largest and most high-profile accounts down, I'm not sure how easy it would be to get a new "unlimited" line of credit in this environment, with AmEx or any other company.

octane··on Ask HN: Any tips for living cheaply in SF?
$3k isn't going to last you very long in San Francisco.
octane··on Anthropology: Stack Overflow and The Art of Building a Successful Social Site
Yeah, they should have just called it "marketing", but I can understand why they didn't, because their audience hates words that non-technical people like to use.
octane··on Is Spatial Ability the "Geek Gene"?
> I feel my way around it. I'll use my editor/debugger/REPL to jump me from place to place to build up a non-visual structure of the program in my head.

This is interesting because I am a "visual" developer and have never really used a gdb-style debugger at all in nearly 10 years of professional dev experience.

I prefer isolating problematic code programmatically and refactoring my mental picture of the architecture/data structures until I can mentally visualize what's going wrong in my math/logic. This has given me grief with hairy pointer code where running something like 'printf' actually changes stuff in memory that you're trying to look at, but I really just don't understand how anyone can use a debugger to step through things one line at a time when that's essentially what I'm doing in my head when I look at code.

Then again I've never worked on anything as complex as, say, an OS kernel, so what do I know.

octane··on Anthropology: Stack Overflow and The Art of Building a Successful Social Site
I think having two incredibly popular cult-like blogs probably had much more to do with it than the "9 building blocks" or whatever that every other site on the internet now has.
octane··on [dead]
This is so stupid.
octane··on Can you trust 37signals with your password?
> wonder how 'hacker safe' their system really is

It's not. Not more than anyone else, anyway. 37signals and Fog Creek are masters of marketing and mind control. There are free tools, or at least superior commercial tools, that do everything their stuff does.

octane··on The Man Who Made Gmail Says Real-Time Conversation is What's Next
> It is like IRC where you can get msgs by SMS/IM/email/etc

So in other words it's not like IRC at all.

octane··on Reg Braithwaite on Optimism
Why is everything written by a Ruby programmer so damn long-winded?
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