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Jacob4u2

126 karma · joined October 27, 2010

Software Developer. Amateur Philosopher. Young Punk.

Bay Area, CA, USA

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Jacob4u2··on Launch HN: Human Layer (YC F24) – Human-in-the-Loop API for AI Systems
Hold up, is that illustrious Sprout Social alumni Dex Horthy? If you and Ravi are in SF we should catch up after the holidays.
Jacob4u2··on Launch HN: Human Layer (YC F24) – Human-in-the-Loop API for AI Systems
Docs link is broken; https://www.humanlayer.dev/docs
Jacob4u2··on The Town of Pullman
It also spawned the American Socialist party. https://www.npr.org/2022/08/31/1120244344/american-socialist...
Jacob4u2··on Pure UI
I also came from a XAML background to React and had the same feeling.

This is a long shot, since most people have a love/hate relationship with the VisualStateManager, but I have been trying to build a declarative visual state thing over at https://github.com/jgable/react-vsm. It's not done, only messed around over a couple weekends, but the gist is there.

Jacob4u2··on Songs of Diridum: Pushing the Web Audio API to Its Limits
Direct link to the game is http://labs.gooengine.com/mozlod/.

The song the band is playing is actually sort of nice background programming music.

Jacob4u2··on Spectacular: a BDD framework for CoffeeScript and JavaScript inspired by RSpec
Seems like the author combined the spec side of mocha with should.js and a stub/mocking library, focused it on node and polished it up with some neat conventions and utilities.

I'll probably give it a shot on my next project. I'm interested in finding out if it went the route of throwing exceptions for error reporting like mocha, or something else.

Jacob4u2··on Soylent Month Three
Like the GP, food is one of the glorious luxuries of life.

The great thing about having values is that each person can value what she/he wants. You and GP value food, soylent green dude seems to value experimenting and optimizing his body/brain with food (lack/substitution of food?). I'm not hating on either one of your values, but pretty much everyone thinks "food is good" (to put it simply) so that isn't really gonna pique everyones interest like soylent green guy over there.

Jacob4u2··on Soylent Month Three
I don't think that's a fair comparison. What if sleeping on the floor and not showering made you think better and your body healthier? It's not simply a privation technique, he seems to be doing it to hack his body for better performance. Although kind of anecdotal evidence, the article mentions several mood and energy changes when not on the soylent diet (I think those things could just as likely be a change in environment/routine though).
Jacob4u2··on Ask HN: How did you learn design? What resources exist to help one learn?
I was the technical reviewer on a recent book called "Design for Software". It's a good introduction to design with a focus on an engineering audience.

More info at http://www.design4software.com/

Jacob4u2··on What Being a Handyman Has Taught Me About Male Insecurity
I also came to post a link to that book. I thought it was along the same lines as the OA, but at times I found Crawford bordering on being a Luddite (the remark about bathroom sink sensors IIRC). How'd you feel about it?
Jacob4u2··on Docco 0.6.0 Released. New design and Literate (any language) support
The concept of themes looks interesting. For anyone looking to see what a theme looks like, take a look at https://github.com/jashkenas/docco/tree/master/resources/par..., though it doesn't look like that is the same theme as the backbone docs.
Jacob4u2··on How not to respond to pull requests
I'm not going to pile on in the GH issue, but I'll at least confirm that his reaction may have been a little over the top. You had good form on your PR and specifically mentioned the "feature request" nature of it.

To be fair, he looks to have had a pretty bad experience with other people doing in-line file changes straight from Github and trying to push them through as PR's (see the other open PR). He was probably just frustrated and lashing out. He needs a CONTRIBUTING.md in his root to explain his preferences.

Jacob4u2··on How not to respond to pull requests
From the original PR comment: "This pull request is a more of a feature request with proof of concept really."

It's definitely not the norm, but if it were my project I would appreciate the working example. You can pull that changeset into your own repo (probably another branch or something) from the command line and test it out without merging the PR.

Jacob4u2··on Microsoft BizSpark includes free Azure access
Something that most people might not know about this is that you can spin up at least 2 small linux instances on this plan.

I run a Node.js app on a small Ubuntu instance with git based deployment (great guide here based on ec2: http://cuppster.com/2011/05/12/diy-node-js-server-on-amazon-...). Right now this server also runs my Mongo server, but as we scale I'll probably move it to its own instance.

Jacob4u2··on Google Glass and the Segway Paradox
How does a typo in the first freaking sentence get passed an editor, or even a single proofread?
Jacob4u2··on Building Backbone.js apps with Backlift part 1: Views and Templates
I believe this is handled by Backlift: http://backlift.github.com/docs/basics.html#backlift-variabl...
Jacob4u2··on JavaScript Time Zone Conversion with Walltime
Wow, you're a winner. Have a good day dude, time to go back to work.
Jacob4u2··on JavaScript Time Zone Conversion with Walltime
I'm interested in why you think this comment you made contributed anything to the discussion here. I'd encourage someone who _can_ downvote, to downvote you, since I can't.
Jacob4u2··on JavaScript Time Zone Conversion with Walltime
That's an interesting post, and an equally interesting library. However, Walltime is more concerned with the displaying of dates than the detection of timezones.

The example I give from the post explains it like this "... if I’m a user in Australia, and I want to post something at 3:00 AM Chicago time, where the majority of my followers are, how do I calculate that accurately with JavaScript and send it up to the server?". Or, if I'm a user in Australia, but I want to display all my dates on the site like I'm a user in Chicago, how would I do that?

Take a look at the github page description for more info about the type of problems it can help with: http://sproutsocial.github.com/walltime-js/

Jacob4u2··on JavaScript Time Zone Conversion with Walltime
Interesting... never seen gist's fall on their face before like that. Here is a direct link if you are still interested: https://gist.github.com/jgable/4091298
Jacob4u2··on Hamming: "dubious that great programmers can be trained.."
That is a fantastic read. Just had to say it was worth more than an upvote.
Jacob4u2··on Show HN: Designing Web Applications
I've been helping as a technical editor (programming perspective) to another book you might be interested in as well, http://www.design4software.com/. It's a good introduction to design for programmers of applications, whether they be websites or native.
Jacob4u2··on Ask HN: Obtain a domain from a squatter by trademarking
Is there a way to see how long he has owned the domain? From there, estimate a yearly cost to him (12$ * years registered) + 10% profit and start from there. That seems reasonable.
Jacob4u2··on The Insourcing Boom
I found the story they give about GE forgetting how to make water heaters interesting. The line you usually hear about startups creating their core technologies in house and outsourcing non core things comes to mind.

Was GE originally known for manufacturing (or ability to manufacture) and then lost that core ability? If they did, what would their core ability be after outsourcing, management of manufacturing? Maybe I'm not making a good connection there, but I think it could be.

Jacob4u2··on What Happens When A Twitter Client Hits The Token Limit
The message from Twitter reads "It does not appear that your service addresses an area that our current or future products do not already serve", which I interpret to mean they could be planning a future native app that this might be inferior to.
Jacob4u2··on Preventing memory leaks in Backbone.js
I've been using chaplinjs as a backbone architecture for my last couple side projects and I really like it.

https://github.com/chaplinjs/chaplin

Simplified router, subviews, model binding techniques like described in the OP are all helpfully baked in.

Jacob4u2··on Escape from Callback Hell: Callbacks are the modern goto
The author offers an alternative that would require a change to the language. Callbacks and their use in "callback hell" are a little different than use of "goto"; "goto" appears to have an obvious alternative that was more logical to use already implemented in the language. For javascript, there is none of the nice syntactic sugar (reminds me a lot of C# recent async changes) that the author suggests and is not even being proposed for ECMA 6.

I agree it would be nice to have that stuff, and that callbacks can get a little hairy, but they are the best solution available at present. Shall we stop developing applications in the mean time while the language catches up, or even worse, browsers actually consistently implement the changes?

Jacob4u2··on A Retina-ready version of the deJong Attractor
I noticed that dragging around causes the graph to change. I know I should just look at the source, but can someone tell me what inputs the dragging changes for the computation? Also, bonus points for some cool drags I can do that you notice.
Jacob4u2··on Show HN: Errorface
In case people don't catch it in the upper right corner, you can also view the project page for more information here: http://jgable.github.com/errorface/
Jacob4u2··on Nerf guns don't matter
Sometimes things like nerf guns are indicative of a culture at a company that would be more fun and upbeat than working in a corporate cube farm. Now, obviously, cube farms can just as easily buy nerf guns and I'm just picking nerf guns because it's in the link-baity title. Free coke, social gatherings and nerf guns might also just be indications that the company values you and wants to provide whatever they can to make you happy. However juvenile you may or may not find them, at least their trying.
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