HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

tomafro

126 karma · joined May 25, 2009

submissionscomments
tomafro··on What will happen to Bit.ly links when Gaddafi shuts down the Internet in Libya?
LY domains would have to be phenomenally lucrative to make any significant impact in an economy with billions of barrels of oil.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves_in_Libya

tomafro··on Lemmings is 20 years old today
There a browser version: http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/
tomafro··on Toy Store: ORM for Riak, Redis, Cassandra, Memcached, darn near anything
I think that's a good tactic; certainly a valid problem to solve. I think the headline on HN oversells the ability to use different backends, whereas the real value (as explained on railstips.org) is much more about destructuring data into this scalable key-value access pattern.
tomafro··on Toy Store: ORM for Riak, Redis, Cassandra, Memcached, darn near anything
I'm not sure I quite get this.

The code looks great. The mapping features seem strong (thanks in part to the power of ActiveModel). However, by restricting the adapter interface to a simple key/value store, don't you lose access to many of the features that make each backend distinct?

I think Redis, Cassandra, MongoDB, etc. are great, but to me it't the differences amongst them which are interesting, not the similarities.

tomafro··on Vulnerability in Sendmail Delivery Agent code in Mail, affects Rails
You'll also have to do 'bundle update <broken-gem>', commit the resulting Gemfile.lock and hopefully wait for your CI build to pass before deploying. Doing that 15 times would be onerous.
tomafro··on Will high reputation in Stack Overflow help to get a good job?
I wouldn't be swayed either way by a high Stack Overflow rating.

That said, asking and answering technical questions can be really beneficial. It's much harder to write about something clearly than some people realise, and a great skill to develop.

Also, rather than the whole reputation, I might take interest in particular answers: a single solid answer to a difficult question demonstrates a lot more than many point scoring answers to easier ones.

tomafro··on Do you know Ruby’s ‘Chainsaw’ method?
He should also define respond_to? on the DoNotDisturb class. Relying on method_missing to pass calls to respond_to? to the proxied class will not work, as it is defined in Object. Responding to a method when respond_to? returns false breaks the class contract.
tomafro··on Do you know Ruby’s ‘Chainsaw’ method?
I can see how method_missing can break introspection, but I don't see how the same is true for Autoload. Could you give an example?
tomafro··on Are Dreadlocks Unprofessional?
The two ads I had to click to hide and the sharing toolbar on inc.com are all more objectionable than dreadlocks.

As tptacek has written, is there even a controversy here?

tomafro··on Twitter 'onmouseover' security flaw widely exploited
It looks like twitter have fixed the issue in their own tweet parsing library, but not deployed the fix (to old twitter at least).

Here's the relevant commit: http://github.com/mzsanford/twitter-text-rb/commit/cffce8e60... (thanks to Paul Battley for finding it).

tomafro··on "How hard can it be to implement?"
Your French version feels authentic to me, but then so does the Irish one. I doubt one can say where jokes like these originate. All cultures and languages probably have versions of them.
tomafro··on "How hard can it be to implement?"
The comments here remind me of an old Irish joke where a hopelessly lost tourist asks an old man by the side of the road "Can you tell me how to get to Dublin?". After a few minutes thinking, the man replies "Well, you don't want to start from here".

I doubt 37signals wanted to be in a place where an apparently simple change would involve so much work, but that's where they found themselves. They did what they had to do. There's no point snarking about their starting place without knowing how and why they got there.

tomafro··on Github listens and lowers price for Organizations
If one of your projects becomes dormant, you always have the option to move it off the site. If it becomes active again, it's easy to push the repository back up to github.
tomafro··on Github listens and lowers price for Organizations
This is excellent news. We will upgrade as soon as we can. Well done github.
tomafro··on GitHub adds Organizations
This is exactly how I feel. The new features look great; we'd be happy to pay extra for them. But with less than 10 developers, we're too small to make full use of them. $78 extra/month is too high a price for the benefit we'd gain.
tomafro··on Awesome Flash World Cup calendar
It's definitely got an interesting UI, but I can't see myself actually using it during the tournament.

On a similar theme, the best ical world cup calendar I've found is here:

http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/rp57smf89rsb1hgo09abvq1m...

tomafro··on New Banksy Film about street art
It was released in London in March so is no longer on in most cinemas. That said, the Prince Charles in Soho is showing it on Monday and Wednesday lunchtime: http://bit.ly/9AqEZ7
tomafro··on Ruby official mirror on Github
Yeah, it looks as though it's a work in progress, rather than a working import. I'd be amazed if there wasn't an announcement on the github blog when the repository is actually ready.
tomafro··on Google Has A Solution For Internet Explorer: Turn It Into Chrome
And doesn't this plugin kind of achieve this? Rather than marking sites which should be rendered in IE6, you mark them to be rendered in Chrome. So all legacy sites work without modification (using the IE6 engine), whilst modern sites can add the chrome meta tag and get rendered by Chrome.
tomafro··on Apple Approves Spotify for iPhone : Six Million Songs in Your Pocket
I doubt it's a mistake. The fact the BBC and Wired have reported this so quickly to me indicates the hand of Apple PR, slowly working to turn the tide of negative App Store stories.