HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

schmrz

116 karma · joined July 15, 2011

www.randomshouting.com
submissionscomments
schmrz··on Wt, C++ Web Toolkit
Hah, this reminds me of high school!

For my final year project, I knew I wanted to write some kind of software, and my Programming Languages professor suggested that I pick a generic topic like "A program in C++" and then I can build whatever.

This was at a time when we just started using mobile data (GPRS) on our phones and SMS was very expensive. It's also when I met my girlfriend, now wife, and we were constantly messaging of course.

I needed a cheaper way to communicate. This was before there was WhatsApp, Signal, etc.

So I wrote Tiruriru. It consisted of:

- a Java mobile application that you could use to send messages to your contacts over GPRS - a GSM modem written in Python that would call and ring the contact's phone number 3 times when you send a message to them because no one was connected to GPRS at all times - and finally a REST api written in C++ with Wt Toolkit that was communicating with the app and the GSM modem service.

Since this used very little data it was 10x cheaper to send messages like this than to use SMS. We ended up upgrading to Android phones soon after and 2g/3g/wifi was available everywhere.

That's the story of how I wrote "A program in C++" in high school :)

schmrz··on WeWTF
Only if by fundamentals you mean the fundamental idea behind coworking spaces. Sure, that makes sense. But the WeWork company fundamentals are out of whack. Nobody is arguing that coworking spaces are a bad idea. WeWork is a company that turns 2$ into 1$.
schmrz··on New Dell XPS 13 developer edition now available
I would offer another anecdote because I really believe this to be a very high quality laptop. I have bought my Dell XPS13 9360 around the same time and have never been happier with a laptop (running Fedora flawlessly, 10 hours of battery). And it cost me around 1250€ (~1420 USD).
schmrz··on Goodbye, Trello
Wow they are really aggressively comparing to Trello which isn't really the same product niche.

Compare your product to Airtable please. Why would someone use this product instead of Airtable?

schmrz··on Managing Remote Teams
What did work in your experience?
schmrz··on Ask HN: Do you use a Chromebook or Pixelbook as your primary machine?
I'm also using Dell XPS 13 (model 9360, non-touch, 1080p screen) with Fedora 26, and I haven't had any issues. This is by far the best linux laptop I've had. Just another data point in case someone is looking into buying these.
schmrz··on Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework
Most likely not, as it's supposed to be backwards compatible.
schmrz··on Don't use flexbox for page layout (2014)
I'm not sure what you mean by that, flexbox has been supported by Chrome for a while now: http://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox.
schmrz··on Ask HN: What do you regret in life?
> I mainly regret not taking university seriously half a lifetime ago, but as a result I became a lifelong self-learner.

Can you please expand on this? Why do you regret that?

I've read a great book about this topic: The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. It's a bit more general of course, but it might be interesting to you or others.

schmrz··on React.Js: Achieving 20ms server response time with Server Side Rendering
I'm quite interested in learning why the author decided to use React for the user-facing part of the blog in the first place.
schmrz··on Ask HN: What is a way of making residual income with $5K a month?
While it may not be "right", you don't need an inventory, not even a payment system. You will not be charging the potential customers. The point is that you test the market, just to see if anyone would be interested in buying. Once they get to the checkout, simply say that it will be "available soon" and optionally ask for email so you can actually sell to them later.

For anything you want to build and sell, you need to make sure that you (a) have a market, (b) can reach the market (marketing).

Again, it may not be completely right, as you may feel (as I do) that you are misleading customers a bit.

schmrz··on KeepassC – Curses based keepass written in Rust
> [Rust] allows me to realize my vision of a secure password manager which is not possible with Python.

Not trying to debunk this or anything, but could anyone expand on this (eg. what does secure mean in this context)? Has the author written somewhere about his decision (I couldn't find anything)?

schmrz··on Ask HN: I'm considering trying a 4-day work week. How has it worked out for you?
I assume that you are self-employed. If you are not, then I guess it all depends on your employer.

I've been thinking of working 4 days a week during summer, but since I mostly work full-time for one client at a time, it would definitely disrupt their plans as well. So I'm still kinda thinking about it, but not doing anything about it :)

I think it works best if you have a business that doesn't depend on you being there all the time.

schmrz··on Ask HN: Ok to ask retainer fee for being avail during office hours?
It's definitely ok, and it will probably work out better for you than asking a higher hourly wage. The client may of course be reluctant to accept this if they haven't done any similar arrangements before.

As a side note, having flexible hours is great if you need that kind of flexibility in your life. If you don't, consider billing by day/week.

schmrz··on Google launches Contributor, a crowdfunding tool for publishers
Not sure if I'm reading this right, but is the amount limited to 3$? If it is, that's a pretty low limit. I wonder what's the reasoning behind that.
schmrz··on Show HN: RemoteCoder.io – A jobsite for remote programmers
I know that one thing I don't like about https://weworkremotely.com is that many of the listed jobs are not truly remote (they are limited to one country). At least on this board I can filter those out.
schmrz··on Show HN: SEO for JavaScript, HTML5 and Single Page Applications
A web site can be Javascript-heavy[0] without being a web application[1]. There's a big difference.

If you just need auto-completion, modal dialogs and similar features then you shouldn't build a web application, and you definitely should make your site work without Javascript.

On the other hand, if you are building Google Maps, then you should build a web application. Google Maps doesn't work when you disable Javascript.

Supporting clients without Javascript in web applications often doesn't make sense. If it does, you should consider building a standard web site. Just imagine building Google Maps without Javascript. Or better yet, imagine using a version of Google Maps without Javascript. I'm sure that there are people that could pull that off and still end up with something good but it's not the case for most teams (not enough time, resources or skill) building web applications.

[0]: What's considered Javascript-heavy anyways? I think that including support for standard stuff like auto-completion, modal dialogs or even just including bootstrap's javascript these days makes your site Javascript-heavy.

[1]: By this I mean a single page web application that uses Javascript for state management/routing, rendering, communication with the backend, etc. You should be able to deploy an application like this on S3 and it should work. That's not a requirement but I'm just trying to point out that it's an application built completely with Javascript, with no backend support (except for the api that it communicates with).

schmrz··on Another Big Milestone for Servo: Acid2
> Many kinds of browser security bugs, such as the recent Heartbleed vulnerability, are prevented automatically by the Rust compiler.

Does anyone care to explain how this would work? If you used OpenSSL from Rust you would still be vulnerable to Heartbleed. Or am I missing something?

schmrz··on Poll: What is your level of education?
Why do you regret it (unless it's too personal)?
schmrz··on We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)
There's a comment below the article where Ryan says that they have been working four days a week since 2006.
schmrz··on Slow Tests Are the Symptom, Not the Cause
I'm not sure I follow. What exactly would TDD advocates disagree on?
schmrz··on Slow Tests Are the Symptom, Not the Cause
Don't get me wrong, I agree with the idea that you should look at the root cause of why your tests are slow instead of trying to "fix" the tests. I just feel that what you demonstrated is bad design. So you ended up with bad design and fast tests.
schmrz··on Slow Tests Are the Symptom, Not the Cause
I don't know (and don't care) if this makes your unit tests faster, you shouldn't write code like that. He took something that should be simple and made it really complicated. The execution time of your tests shouldn't dictate how you will design and write your application. Especially if it makes things harder to maintain and understand.

Edit: I love tests and they should be fast so that you can run them every time before pushing your changes but as I said they shouldn't dictate how you design and write your application.

schmrz··on These young SF professionals choose to live in RVs
You read the whole article (while ignoring the fact that you have to follow a link to get to the second page) and then the last sentence is that he's not really living in his car anymore. What's the point of this article?
schmrz··on Teaching Someone To Code Is Partly A Hardware Problem
As others have pointed out this is far from being accurate. You most definitely don't need awesome hardware to learn how to code. In fact I wasn't sure if that quote about quitting over bigger monitors is serious or not but after following the linked article it seems to be.

I also wrote an article about how bad hardware actually made me a better programmer: http://www.randomshouting.com/2010/12/14/Scarce-hardware-as-.... Not trying to spam my articles or anything, I just feel like it's an interesting contrast to this article.

schmrz··on Elf Electric Pedal Car: When 1 Horsepower Is Enough
The first thing that crossed my mind when I read this is that it would be a huge and tragic disaster if that person would get hit by a car. It just doesn't seem safe enough.
schmrz··on Solar Impulse – Around the world in a solar airplane
I didn't know about this google project. This seems really awesome.

Can someone more knowledgeable please comment on how big is this? Is this something revolutionary, or is there some catch?

schmrz··on Dotcom alleges Megaupload raid was part of deal to film The Hobbit
But then you have to generate the hash each time the source code changes. And you also have to verify the source code each time yourself because you can't know if it's a regular update from mega (they probably update daily or weekly) or if someone compromised the source code.
schmrz··on Ruby is too slow for programming competitions
Given two developers, one proficient in Ruby and one in Go there would be probably no difference in implementation time for such a trivial problem.
schmrz··on Ember 1.0 RC3 released
I've been wondering about the same thing.

You can print out {{controller}} in your template to see the name. If it's generated it will say something like "generated controller xyz". If your custom one is picked up it will print that out.

It would be great however to include some debugging tools since sometimes you can even wonder how to name your templates.

Page 1 of 2Next →