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ulf

915 karma · joined June 26, 2008

boegeholz (at) gmail (dot) com
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ulf··on Show HN: Squirrel feeder based on Raspberry Pi
Creator here, I used a camera so that I would have video of everything that is happening. As seen in the follow-up post [1], I rebuilt the system so that the nut-release is triggered by a proximity sensor. The camera only records now.

[1] http://blog.ulfster.com/post/114942851719/squirrel-feeder-v2...

ulf··on The future is specific
Looks more promising every time! While I like the idea to not work on your stuff as files, I have a question in that regard:

Do you have specific plans on how to incorporate version control when not primarily relying on files?

ulf··on My Biggest Temptation
Try looking at it the other way:

99.8% of the world's population would like to have a car like mine...

ulf··on Peter Sunde: We need cash for anonymous transactions
Maybe one step too far. more along the lines of:

"Hi there <yourname>. Your usual big latte today or something else?"

"The usual please (It's nice not having to make those big decisions.)"

ulf··on The World Would Be a Better Place if Everyone Was a Hacker
> Increase the average income of residents of your community.

Let's aim for raising the median income instead

ulf··on Lessons from Valve - How to build a designer's paradise
Integrate an emergency energy unit and you do not even have to reboot for changing your location
ulf··on 7-inch Amazon Tablet launches in October, 10-inch Version in Q1 2012
"We have seen reports that one of the major weapons Amazon wants to use against the iPad is price."

Finally someone gets that this might be a good idea.

ulf··on Steve Jobs' Best Quotes
I think he meant it more in the context of olden times, where neither pirates nor navy had "high tech playtoys" and piracy was a little more common than today
ulf··on Mark Cuban: What Business is Wall Street in?
Wall street just followed a general theme among banks. Once upon a time they were institutions built to control capital flow, from where it was available to where it was needed, to provide some social value by allowing enterprises to thrive. But apparently the credit interest was not a big enough margin, so they decided to do all kinds of other shit, investment banking was born. Which mostly makes rich people richer, without any kind of social benefit.

Wall Street just followed that model.

ulf··on Show HN: Our Django Dash project: Proposalmatic
I was thinking about marriage proposals when I got to the page.

"Use ProposalMatic to save snippets of text that you use often and mix and match to create personalized proposals" This really struck me as odd...

ulf··on Things you should know when interviewing for a programming job
Furthermore, if you say "at least X", then guess what: their offer will be "X"
ulf··on Google made my son cry
The service is not free, you just don't pay with money.
ulf··on Ordinary Income vs Capital Gains
The major problem with the much cheaper taxing of capital gains remains the growing inequality: Of every you dollar you earn through your own labor, you get less (until you pass the max threshold). And this while your capacity of personal labor is clearly somehow limited. On the other hand, people earning one million dollars from capital gains are taxed equally with people who earn one billion.
ulf··on Questions you’ll (probably) get asked at your YC interview
Great subset, one has to hope people do not read this as "this is how you game the interview process" but rather as "reflect about your idea with these points in mind".
ulf··on How to hire a Rails developer
This might be another incarnation of the "Nobody ever gets fired for using IBM" phenomenon. HR are more likely aiming at avoiding errors, and not necessarily hiring the best people possible, if those come at a risk. So you can always say "but he had x years experience with Rails" if the hire doesn't pan out.
ulf··on How to hire a Rails developer
The "quickly" argument is a strawman, if you plan on having a working relationship that lasts longer than 3 months or so. If you just need someone to upgrade your current Rails 2.3.8 project to 3.0.6 and then move along, by all means get someone with Rails experience.

But if you intend to employ that person longer, the specific experience is of diminishing importance.

ulf··on How to hire a Rails developer
This is a very big problem: the constant focus on tools and specific technologies instead of looking at the people and their abilities.

A great developer will always be able to pick up a new language/framework/paradigm quickly. So if you plan to have a longer relationship with your hire, you can by all means afford not to check every bullet point regarding technologies. By strictly requiring explicit experience in the fields you are working in, the only thing you really accomplish is to drastically reduce the number of possible applicants.

For example, since Django is still a lot less common than Rails, if you need a Django developer and specifically require Django experience, you will not have an awful lot of candidates. If you broaden your search to anyone with experience with a web framework, you are almost guaranteed to attract some more good candidates. Once you screen those, you pick the best. Best case: he/she was already familiar with Django, congrats to you. Worst case: the dev was not familiar with Django, but still a better fit than ALL the candidates with Django experience. Sounds like win-win for me...

ulf··on You can't do that
"Let your limits be determined by physics and other real world constraints, not by the lack of imagination or (wrong) knowledge of others."

Awesome takeaway! Without people taking that attitude, we probably would still be living in caves.

ulf··on Germany shuts down seven reactors‎ because of Fokushima
This is more likely just a publicity stunt to calm down the people, since there are elections coming in several federal states and the reigning party CDU already lost a lot of ground. I would be surprised if anything really changes
ulf··on Adding GIT SHAs to your application's HTTP headers
Awesome. A real hack. Beautiful, simple, useful.
ulf··on Is it normal to get hundreds of break-in attempts per day?
Even better is to additionally setup a fake SSHd at port 22, so that port scanners do not even bother keeping on looking for the port and instead use what they suspect to be working
ulf··on Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)
Another way to look at it: If all companies only hire the top 1% of software developers (as a lot say), and in total employ 100,000 developers, this would have to result in 10,000,000 unemployed developers. Sounds a little unrealistic, doesn't it?
ulf··on Pictures of kittens for use as placeholders in your designs or code
The Kitten-Color-Clock: https://gist.github.com/849093
ulf··on Linus Torvalds: Pearls before swine
"So here's a shout-out to my new BFF's Jon Hamm and DJ."

Can someone please make it happen that Linus gets an appearance in Season 5 of Mad Men? He could play an IBM salesman or something like that...

ulf··on Beautiful Time-Lapse of Milky Way over Lake Tahoe
Somehow I was expecting a candybar and really starting to wonder what the video would be about. Still, very beautiful
ulf··on Automatic client-side form validation in Django
Reading http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2165751 got me thinking, so I started a little experiment
ulf··on How Dropbox Did It and How Python Helped (PyCon 2011)
Still, apparantly it hits the right buzzwords to generate a lot of upvotes...
ulf··on VC’s Are Not Your Friends
duplicate http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2174722
ulf··on How Facebook Ships Code
The problem with that is the relative performance. If you have no shot at being top 20% all you need to do to survive is pick one of four peers and "outperform" him or her. No wonder cutting throats occurred...
ulf··on Django Software Stack
Great list, one thing that might be interesting for a lot of folks is django-sentry, developed by the folks at disqus. That app allows you to do centralized logging from an arbitrary number of django (or other python) applications. Saves a lot of hassle especially for widely distributed systems!

EDIT Link: https://github.com/dcramer/django-sentry

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