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ajstiles

54 karma · joined June 28, 2007

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/ajstiles; my proof: https://keybase.io/ajstiles/sigs/07HM5A0ki-KR-eR1RBdigU7_6nOLMQ892EGCLHsv_BM ]
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ajstiles··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell
Awesome - subscribed!
ajstiles··on Show HN: My small program from 2007 that gave Internet Explorer tabs
Get out of here CB
ajstiles··on Show HN: My small program from 2007 that gave Internet Explorer tabs
I did something similar (NetCaptor)… starting in 1997. It’s cool to see that Maxthon is still around.
ajstiles··on Monarch: Google’s Planet-Scale In-Memory Time Series Database
Wow - that was a doozy.
ajstiles··on Ask HN: What Are You Reading?
On deck is “Failing Up” by Leslie Odom Jr. and “Risk: User’s Guide” by Stanley McChrystal.

Fav listen on the last few months was Dave Grohl’s “The Storyteller”.

ajstiles··on Ask HN: What Are You Reading?
“The Obstacle is the Way” by Ryan Holiday, Neuromancer by William Gibson, and “Thinking in Systems” by Donella Meadows
ajstiles··on On Browser Tabs
I built the "first tabbed browser", NetCaptor, back in 1997. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/meet-th...

My take - some of us leave tabs open way too long because we fear not being able to get back to those sites again… it’s loss aversion. Tabs aren’t the core problem per se, it’s recall. We need to solve the “I want to get back here again” problem.

I primarily use Brave and effectively start fresh every day. I might get up to 20 open tabs at any given time, and I sometimes use tabs as a sort of Inbox that needs to be cleared. But sometimes, it’s best to declare tab bankruptcy and start over.

ajstiles··on Ask HN: Which books have you read more than once?
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, every three years or so.
ajstiles··on Ask HN: How can I automate sending a payment to my user's student loan provider?
Here are a couple of options.

https://www.q2ebanking.com/biller-direct-api/

https://bbvaopenplatform.com/docs/guides%7Capicontent%7Cbill...

https://www.marqeta.com/api/docs/W5hOzB0AAH0Cssxk/bill-payme...

ajstiles··on Looking for an iPhone Developer
What is local to you?
ajstiles··on Ask HN: Back end engineer trying to build a mobile app, would love some guidance
I've recommended a "web app first" approach to some of my clients.

You might find parse.com services cover your user and notifications requirements, and perhaps even your REST backend.

ajstiles··on FiveThirtyEight’s NCAA Tournament Predictions
Silver's round-by-round projection percentages are included in the HTML source. If you like building rule-specific points projections, here's the data, extracted:

https://gist.github.com/ajstiles/06e2ac52927d3f292255

ajstiles··on Need a browser with one Tab
Fun to see NetCaptor mentioned here... I wrote it. The first version was released in 1998. I put the tabs on the bottom because HomeSite, the HTML editor that inspired NetCaptor, had tabs on the bottom.
ajstiles··on Groopic.com Expiring - Anyone Want It?
Drop me an email - ajstiles@gmail.com. I've got the authorization code ready.
ajstiles··on Ask HN: Should I take this offer?
You can't move to the Bay Area now?

Sorry - I have an ulterior motive. We're in desperate need of high-level JS/Backbone.js engineers.

ajstiles··on Ask HN: I just wasted 4 years of my life. Now what?
Exactly. Just sent you an email. Let's chat.
ajstiles··on Ask HN: I just wasted 4 years of my life. Now what?
Are you open to relocating to San Francisco?
ajstiles··on Can you solve it? The Greplin programming challenge
30 minutes. Would have been less but the IVR response was a little confusing. Took about 40 lines Ruby code to solve.
ajstiles··on Ask HN: How could buildings apps that process incoming email be less painful?
The solution I've been envisioning would require you to pick a domain or sub-domain and allow the service to handle all incoming mail for it. You'd change your DNS settings for that domain/sub-domain to point to something we'd provide.

Then, when new emails come in, they'd be captured and we could do one of a couple of things with it: - post just the headers to a webhook - do something in response to the webhook response - delete the message - post full message to another webhook - put the message in an S3 bucket - put a pointer to the S3 message object in an SQS queue ...etc...

I've worked on other solutions that monitor specific accounts via IMAP, or have monitored Maildir queues, and they can be kind of a pain... that's why I'm looking at the service solution.

What do you think?

ajstiles··on Ask HN: How could buildings apps that process incoming email be less painful?
Sorta. SendGrid lets you point an MX record at them and they will process incoming emails by posting them a webhook. Google App Engine does something similar... but neither option is particularly flexible or can handle emails with large attachments.

Personally, I'd pay for a service that let me point my MX records somewhere, then be able to specify if I wanted a webhook called, or to get the emails pushed to S3, or a message queue... or some combination thereof. I'd still be developing, just not worrying about the mail server interaction itself.

There are lots of "simple services" that make developers jobs easier. Why write my own file storage system when I can use Amazon or Cloud Files?

ajstiles··on Ask HN: How could buildings apps that process incoming email be less painful?
I have played around with Lamson. It still requires app developers to install, customize and maintain. I'm trying to understand if there is a market for a service that makes it super-simple to process incoming email.
ajstiles··on Ask HN: Looking for interns / entry level?
We're hiring a bunch (interns and full-timers in search engineering, search tools, query intelligence) at AT&T Interactive (YellowPages.com) in Glendale CA. Email me for more info: astiles@attinteractive.com.
ajstiles··on Did Google just get into the real estate biz?
There for me too.