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astletron

77 karma · joined December 27, 2011

I design and implement backend systems to support mobile applications using mostly FOSS tools.
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astletron··on Homeland Security refuses to accept US citizenship status of revered director
Did anyone else read that as revered _dictator_? Current political climate is clearly having an effect.
astletron··on Ask HN: Is anyone actually excited about using chatbots?
I can think of many cases where I prefer a text-based interface to a phone call. I can't think of any case where I specifically prefer a bot-driven text-based interface to a human-driven text-based interface, though. If chatbots let companies build more and more effective text-based interfaces to replace call centers, then I'm at least a little excited, but it's the result and not the process that has my interest.
astletron··on Magic Leap: A New Morning [video]
Sometimes you eat the jellyfish. Sometimes the jellyfish eat you. I guess.
astletron··on What happens when Betelgeuse explodes?
"Nighttime will be a different story. The brightness of Betelgeuse’s supernova is about the same as the quarter moon."

This will last maybe a couple of weeks, but we don't expect it for 100K years.

astletron··on A word cloud of the top 1000 most common passwords
You reckon you could have guessed the input to this word cloud without being told what it was?
astletron··on Testflight Exporter
Agreed.

I've been using Beta by Crashlytics as it is nice and cross-platform and works with ios7. Downside is the integration process and management console are a little tricky.

http://try.crashlytics.com/beta/

astletron··on How I Built Nomad SMS in 3 Days
I applaud brave move to base this on (the slightly terrifying) Wordpress because you seem to have made an "eyes-open" trade off between best and fastest implementation.
astletron··on Joe the .gitignore Magician
There can be only one Joe:

http://joe-editor.sourceforge.net/

astletron··on Uber now illegal in South Carolina
John Calhoun would have wanted it this way.
astletron··on Be My Eyes – Help blind people 'see' thru a mobile app
I 'saw' it first? ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8892747

astletron··on Why Google pessimists may be mistaken
"If we are right and it takes 5-6 years for search to mature globally (instead of 2 or 3 years)"

Hard for me to believe that search will 'mature' in even 6 years. Seems to me like there are at least 10 years of work and market expansion to do to address interaction (e.g. voices, gestures), personalization, socialization, and access points (e.g. cars).

astletron··on Peter Thiel becomes marijuana's first big investor
Is there an avenue for a Joe Schmo investor like me to get some exposure to the marijuana market? I'd definitely put some dollars behind the future of that commodity.
astletron··on [dead]
"I should mention that I have no real opinion on the language itself; I’m not a languages person (C will do, thanks), and that’s not the part of the system I have experience with anyway. Rather, the runtime and toolchain are the parts on which I wish to comment."

Might I suggest changing the title of this post to "the golang runtime and toolchain are trash"?

astletron··on Ask HN: Does anyone actually hire from 'developer bootcamps'?
I live and work in a city of 300K people. My experience here is that companies have high hiring standards that border on the unreasonable (e.g. min 5 years of Ruby experience for a junior level job) and have little interest in training. This attitude stands in stark contrast to companies in larger cities which are willing (and even prefer) to invest in people by building interns into juniors and so on. I can't generalize with confidence, but I suspect this small town / big town dynamic may exist otherwise.

To answer the original question - companies in my area are unlikely to hire from a Bootcamp and I think this may be a trend in smaller hiring markets.

astletron··on Environment Variables Considered Harmful for Your Secrets
Please consider the environment before printing this config?
astletron··on Working with queue and stack people
I've always thought about this as heap and stack people - those that are good at managing ideas with random access and those that prioritize the recent. A discussion between mismatched memory models can be difficult. An old (and revered) team leader described himself as a translator between these different storage approaches.
astletron··on The Benefits of Being Cold
Is there any correlation between population obesity and local temperature distribution? That is, are Alaskans generally thinner than Hawaiians and Swedish people thinner than Tunisians (correcting for other factors to the extent that is possible)?
astletron··on Should You Build First for Android or iOS?
You should build first for users (and customers, if they are not the same group as your users). I suggest making a guess at what platform your users prefer and focusing on that.
astletron··on StandupMail: Keep your team up-to-date
We're a generation of coders raised by email. I'm wondering if another email is really the answer we need.
astletron··on The new VirginAmerica.com
Worked terribly in Safari on iPhone 4s. No excuse for that at this late day.