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vangale

147 karma · joined July 7, 2010

Currently developing web applications in Django & Pyramid. Over 40 years of development experience (started with DEC-BASIC on a PDP-11).

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/vangale; my proof: https://keybase.io/vangale/sigs/qCB_W12qUfD8P1op1piS_6-_BU6isCq2nZ-R4AE5UNk ]

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vangale··on Django 5.0
Posthog uses react for front-end and django for back-end. https://posthog.com/handbook/engineering/project-structure
vangale··on Show HN: An API to store balances and transactions
And it looks like a similar effort that was abandoned at subledger.com. It think there can be a market for something like this and hopefully this one works out.
vangale··on The Demise of Physical Comedy
I love this video from "Every Frame a Painting" which also mourns the loss of physical comedy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FOzD4Sfgag
vangale··on Sourcehut welcomes Bitbucket refugees
There's no video (that I know of) but Sourcehut has put up a website with a set of steps/instructions for email based pull requests:

https://git-send-email.io/

vangale··on White House Looks at Replacing Social Security Numbers
Same SS for multiple living people. It's also kind of amazing that the AT&T shareholder database was large enough to have dupes.
vangale··on White House Looks at Replacing Social Security Numbers
OT but can be filed under "Falsehoods programmers believe about Social Security Numbers": SSN's are unique per person.

A friend of mine worked on a shareholder database for AT&T back in 70/80's and discovered this when they tried to make their SSN column unique.

vangale··on Soylent recalls powder after dairy accidentally slips into 1.8 powder
There are a number of meal replacement powders at some big chains (Krogers/Ralphs/King Soopers and Amazon at least):

    "Raw Organic Meal" by Garden of Life
    "All-in-One Nutritional Shake" by Vega One
I can't vouch for whether they "know what the hell they are doing" but I like the quality and really like the lack of sugar/carbs. A big problem though is they are low protein and calorie count so you still need to search for those.

But as a side note, and speaking for myself, I like Mealsquares better than any of the powders.

vangale··on Why Ethiopia is building a space programme
> THE ancient holy town of Lalibela, perched some 2,500 metres above sea-level in Ethiopia’s northern highlands, boasts some of the clearest night skies imaginable.

When I lived in Ethiopia (Haile Selassie was still emperor so it's been a while) there were many nights of the year where the starlight was bright enough you could walk around without a flashlight. Nights with a full moon almost felt like daylight. You could see stars at the horizon.

vangale··on Horrors of Waugh
I lived in Ethiopia at the end of the reign of Haile Selassie and left there right at the start of the revolution, which is why Waugh's writing on Ethiopia just horrifies me: https://www.historytoday.com/jeffrey-meyers/abyssinia-out-sh...
vangale··on The Stack Overflow Developer Story: A New Technical Resume
At some point years ago I must have asked SO not to show me any questions with "soap" tag.

Unfortunately my shiny new developer story now has "I dislike soap".

vangale··on Ask HN: What's your backup plan for 2Factor authentication if you lose your phone
I keep paper keys for google and use authy.

I also use pass (https://www.passwordstore.org) and so I might start using this very new app https://github.com/felipelerena/passotp/

vangale··on The Dropbox hack is real
For example, overstock.com. Their registration page lets you use '+' address, but their login page forbids it.
vangale··on Alternatives to Firing
If the company is big enough to have "other parts" it probably means those other parts have different missions and different tasks/skills to carry out the mission.

But, having said that, it takes some rare managerial skills to pull it off. I've worked with someone who had those skills and it was fascinating to watch it happen. It took an ability to be bluntly honest to the "problem" employee without tearing them down, an ability to figure out their strengths, and then knowledge of where those strengths could be applied elsewhere in the company.

vangale··on Show HN: Intro.js Hints
Hopscotch is one of the few tour libraries that can jump to steps on a different page and (mostly) perform actions on behalf of the user.
vangale··on Show HN: Zappa – Serverless Python/Django on AWS Lambda
It seems like having local lambda emulation would be useful as a companion to this. If I ever do some lamba development I'd love to see integration with emulators like https://github.com/HDE/python-lambda-local, https://serverlesscode.com/post/emulambda-testing-aws-lambda..., or https://ashiina.github.io/2015/01/lambda-local/ (some or all of these may work already, I can't tell just by eyeballing the projects from a distance)
vangale··on A New Kind of Landscape Photography
I was surprised at how easy it was to identify almost everything in the photo and even then Crested Butte stuck out. Weird mistake to make. The only thing that stuck out more (for me) was South Park, which I could identify even in the thumbnail image in the article.

Anyway, completely love the image and would also love to see one pointing a bit more southerly to capture the Sangre De Cristo's and the Great Sand Dunes.

vangale··on The shortest paper ever published in a serious math journal explained
In the "story" PDF linked above by elbigbad it was said the title was added by the journal without input from the authors.
vangale··on Any Open-Sourced Style Guides?
Assuming you mean CSS style guides these should keep you busy for a while: http://styleguides.io/examples.html
vangale··on Domain-validated SSL will soon be free from the large CAs
As a Namecheap customer I was very very disappointed with this post when I read it yesterday. Also, it looks like they deleted a comment on their post from someone else who was disappointed and called them out on their FUD.
vangale··on Confidant: an open-source secret management service
This is the first time I've seen a nicely documented requirements.txt and I like! https://github.com/lyft/confidant/blob/master/requirements.t...
vangale··on The Hostile Email Landscape
I'm surprised as well, since these services reinforce his point even more. In other words, good reputation = $$$.

Also, I currently use mailgun (and dabbling with mandrill on some new projects) but I'm intrigued by postmarkapp.com take on dedicated IP addresses. Apparently they won't sell dedicated IP addresses because of the time needed to warm them up, so you get a shared IP and their TOS is stricter anti-spam than other ESP's: http://blog.postmarkapp.com/post/14127210172/the-false-promi...

vangale··on Guix-tox, a functional version of tox
Yep, initial commit for tox is 2010. tox.chat is 2013.
vangale··on Django 1.9 alpha 1 released
taiga.io (source: https://github.com/taigaio)
vangale··on Why I wouldn’t use Rails for a new company
I think a better way of looking at it is there isn't enough "cross pollination" in big open-source frameworks and languages.
vangale··on Toxy, a hackable HTTP proxy to simulate failure scenarios
Along with this and Kong there is also https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog for testing SMTP failure scenarios on outgoing email.
vangale··on The Gremlin Graph Traversal Language
I'm also needing graph db with Python. I thought I'd go with ArangoDB instead of OrientDB but the Arango python bindings also don't strike me as really stable. So now I'm thinking of using Blazegraph instead. The restful interface should be pretty easy from Python and I'm thinking SPARQL is actually going to be a much better query language for my end users.
vangale··on Standard Treasury Acquired by Silicon Valley Bank
It's interesting going back and looking at their pitchdeck now: http://blog.zactownsend.com/standard-treasurys-series-a-pitc...
vangale··on How Much Does an Experienced Programmer Use Google?
I'm embarrassed to say, but this has happened to me too. More than once!
vangale··on Gary Kildall
Well yes, but it wasn't an alternative OS to MS-DOS and CPM :)
vangale··on Gary Kildall
As mentioned by others, it's pascal implementation and p-code concept were pretty cool. But it left a lot to be desired as an operating system. For example, IIRC, files had to be stored in continuous blocks on the disk and management of blocks were up to the user. If your file needed 10 blocks then you needed to find a hole on the disk with at least 10 blocks... which meant you might need to move other files around to make enough that hole.
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