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Brainix

129 karma · joined July 19, 2010

I'm Turing complete.
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Brainix··on Minesweeper: Advanced Tactics (2005)
Amazing article. I had underdeveloped but original (to me) ideas along these lines, as I'm sure that many Hacker News readers did.

Apologies in advance for bikeshedding, but "Final Solution" is a jarring phrase, and that section heading diverted my attention.

https://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007...

Brainix··on Map of gang territories in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley
About a year ago, I got hit on the head (hard) with a metal pole at 9:30 AM, on my way to BART to get to work. The guy asked for my phone. I was too disoriented to take it out of my pocket. He grabbed my earbuds (but didn't get my phone) and walked away.

I lost a lot of blood and had a bad concussion. In the ambulance on my way to the hospital, I couldn't recall my zipcode. I needed seven large staples in the back of my head. After that, the mental fog persisted for about two weeks and I wasn't productive at work.

Up until that point, nothing bad had happened to me. Thankfully, I'm ok now, but I'll never live in Oakland again.

Brainix··on Ask HN: How you did you meet your co-founder?
On OkCupid. Not even kidding.
Brainix··on Ask HN: What's your go-to back end for simple projects?
Flask! It's Pythonic and good. Once you've done a couple of Flask projects, you can spin up a new microservice in a couple of hours. It's much lighter weight than Django, so it forces you to keep fewer moving parts in your head while hacking.

http://flask.pocoo.org/

Lately, I've been using Flask on the back-end, and React on the front-end.

Brainix··on Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?
Pottery. A Pythonic way to access Redis, the same way that you use Python dicts. I use it in production, and I hope that it's useful to other people too: https://github.com/brainix/pottery
Brainix··on Show HN: I invented a caffeinated toothpaste
Can't you see? You're not making toothpaste better. You're making coffee worse.
Brainix··on Google Is Shutting Down Google Search Appliance (Enterprise Search)
Google built GSA at a time when there were limited options for search, and when most tech companies had to manage their own hardware, and when it was magical to have any kind of search at all. It made sense at the time.

But now, the problem itself has changed. Companies host on the cloud, there are many options for search (even hosted/managed solutions), and customers' expectations are very high for good search results. All of this boils down to the biggest issue that most companies face re: search - the business logic of providing fast/good search results (rather than maintaining a search engine itself). Also, companies increasingly view search engines as a first class information retrieval system (a good compliment to a source-of-truth database), which can empower internal analytics to make business decisions.

Most companies don't need/want Googly algorithms/hardware to power their search. I'm guessing here, but I bet that recent versions of Solr and Elasticsearch put the last nails in GSA's coffin.

Brainix··on Ask HN: What book impacted your life the most and how?
The Essential Calvin and Hobbes. That book taught me to be a decent person.
Brainix··on Google will use Chrome browsing data for ad tailoring
Dear 2016,

You haven't figured it out yet, but we consider advertising unethical.

Yours, 2066

Brainix··on Flask 0.11 Released
Who's got two thumbs and has already deployed Flask 0.11 to production? This guy.
Brainix··on Women’s coding school Hackbright Academy acquired by Capella Education for $18M
I believe that my joke (perhaps in poor taste) isn't being taken as I intended. I'm a Python programmer, and my favorite feature of Python is the community. https://www.python.org/community/diversity/ I was only trying to make light of an otherwise painful reality.

There's a need for women's coding schools, and their alums will only make our field better. Congratulations to Hackbright Academy on an acquisition well deserved.

Brainix··on Women’s coding school Hackbright Academy acquired by Capella Education for $18M
If it had been a men's coding school, it would've been acquired for $25M.

Edit: Apologies, couldn't resist.

Brainix··on Changing Education – How bootcamps outperform a university education
We're painting in broad strokes as there are exceptions to every trend. But in my experience, bootcamp graduates are more like tinkerers and university graduates are more like engineers.

Most bootcamps don't cover computational complexity, for example. Or functional programming, or objected oriented design, or music or ethics or philosophy. Instead, most bootcamps focus on tools rather than ideas.

Brainix··on The Idiomatic Way to Merge Dictionaries in Python
This is exactly what copy.deepcopy() is for. Although if you're headed down this road, you're generally in for a bad time.
Brainix··on A Manager at Google Wrote the Perfect Email on Time Management
My thoughts exactly. Why doesn't the article identify the "Google manager," and how did "Hustle Con" acquire this email? Seriously: [citation needed]
Brainix··on The 40% Rule: A Navy SEAL’s Secret to Mental Toughness
Enough with the clickbait. I had to scan the article 3 times before finally finding what the 40% rule is. And when I did find it, it's just like, your opinion, man. Seriously, citation needed (and some Navy SEAL's deeply moving personal anectote is not a citation).
Brainix··on Apache Geode: Distributed, in-memory database
Feedback on the documentation:

It's not immediately obvious to me how Geode is different from Redis. When would I want to use Geode over Redis, and vice versa?

Brainix··on Show HN: Tipping culture for developers on the Web
Great idea! Why hasn't anyone tried this before?
Brainix··on Show HN: Potbox – A premium cannabis subscription club
slackerne.ws, amirite?
Brainix··on New NSFW content restrictions enrage Tumblr users
theworstdrug.com scrapes a lot of NSFW animated gods from Tumblr.

TechCrunch article here: http://m.techcrunch.com/2013/05/22/what-is-it-about-porn-an-...

Brainix··on Ask HN: Web apps, Mobile Apps or Desktop App Developers - What's your Dev Setup?
I'm a web and mobile (Android) app developer.

Hardware: Last gen MacBook Pro (15" with matte screen), iPhone 4.

Operating systems: Mountain Lion, iOS 5.

Development tools for web apps: Terminal.app, bash, vim (for Sinatra apps), TextMate (for Rails apps), git, GitHub, Ruby 1.9.3, Sinatra (with DataMapper and Haml), Rails, jQuery, Google Chrome. In my experience, vim is better for projects with fewer or larger files, and TextMate is better for projects with more or smaller files.

Production environment: Heroku Cedar stack, Heroku Postgres, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront, MemCachier (through Heroku), New Relic (through Heroku for profiling/performance info).

Development tools for Android apps: Eclipse, git, GitHub. I hate Eclipse, but I haven't found a better way to develop Android apps.

Brainix··on Show HN: AidName.com - We'll Help Find Your Startup's Perfect .Com Name
Hi, AidName.

Your product seems really interesting, and I almost signed up... Then I noticed that "AidName" isn't a very inspired name.

I don't doubt the quality of your offering - by my advice would be that your own project needs a name (and branding) with more sex.

Just my $0.02. Good luck! Raj

Brainix··on Ask HN: Would you like a free invite to our SC2 tourney in SF on June 13th?
Eh, "terrible" is relative. ;-) As long as you enjoy SC2, come and have fun!
Brainix··on Ask HN: Would you like a free invite to our SC2 tourney in SF on June 13th?
Pics or it didn't happen.

BTW, happiness is getting beaten at SC2 by a girl. ;-)

Brainix··on Facebook Co-Founder Eduardo Saverin Backs Mobile Wallet Startup CrowdMob
Thanks for the feedback. I'd read that writeup on the website before, but in my head, I think I pronounced "elite" as "l33t." ;-)

Maybe "motivated" would've been a better word. We all love technology, and I think we wanted to get that across in one way or another.

Brainix··on Ask HN: What are your favorite films about startups?
Warning: The parent comment contains a spoiler. ;-)
Brainix··on Ask HN: How do you organize/manage your bookmarks?
I wrote my own very minimal social bookmarking service:

http://imi-imi.appspot.com/

Brainix··on Ask HN: What are your side projects?
A social bookmarking site, with Twitter's follow model and auto-tagging search: http://imi-imi.appspot.com/

An Omegle / Chat Roulette clone, but that works over Google Talk: http://social-butterfly.appspot.com/

Brainix··on DuckDuckGo chat bot: imddg.gg
Chat bots are a lot of fun. Google App Engine handles incoming instant messages just like other web requests, so developing a chat bot for App Engine is quite similar to developing any other webapp.

For more info on App Engine's XMPP integration:

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/xmpp/overview.h...

And my shameless self-plug:

http://social-butterfly.appspot.com/

Brainix··on Ask HN: Where do you host your webapp?
Google App Engine. :-) Download the SDK. Write your app in Python. Click one button, and deploy it to Google's cloud.
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