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azarias

363 karma · joined March 29, 2012

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azarias··on HP Allegedly Time Bombs Unofficial Ink Cartridges from Working in Its Printers
HP just agreed to buy Samsung's printing business.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/12/hp-is-buying-samsungs-prin...

azarias··on HP Allegedly Time Bombs Unofficial Ink Cartridges from Working in Its Printers
Can confirm, this happened to our HP 6830 printer on September 13. Extremely annoyed because we only bought this printer in June, and was working fine with a replacement ink. I was actually researching legal precedents to this, and learned that Lexmark has been fighting something like this in court for over a decade[1].

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160214/16294133605/after...

azarias··on A Python library to import contacts from Gmail, Yahoo and Live accounts
This is awesome. Been procrastinating to add this functionality!
azarias··on Heroku Blog: Routing Performance Update
I think they also addressed the performance issue in addition to saying it is not documented: "...evolving away from the global backlog concept in order to provide better support for different concurrency models"
azarias··on Heroku Blog: Routing Performance Update
It seems to me that Heroku has chosen to be dishonest:

Heroku's blog response: "but until this week, we failed to see a common thread among these reports."

vs.

Adam's response to Tim Watson, a year ago:

"You're correct, the routing mesh does not behave in quite the way described by the docs. We're working on evolving away from the global backlog concept in order to provide better support for different concurrency models, and the docs are no longer accurate. The current behavior is not ideal, but we're on our way to a new model which we'll document fully once it's done."

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/heroku/8eO...

azarias··on Ask HN: Which developer laptop should I buy?
The Asus Zenbook is great, and fits within your budget (a number of options starting from $700-$1200). One of the first ultrabooks to support Ubuntu well. We use these at work.
azarias··on California To Hit Startup Founders with Big Retroactive Tax Bills
I also found this section interesting...and I didn't know about it before:

"Per amendments in the new “fiscal cliff” law, if you started or invested in a QSB between September 28, 2010 and January 1, 2013 and ultimately sell stock under the federal QSB provisions, you’ll pay no federal capital gains tax, and in some states, no state taxes."

azarias··on Transfer Files using Bump
I once built an app on their API for a hackday, and I had to film the demo because I could never get the devices to connect via a bump. It would happen like once every 5 tries.

Just installed it again to see the mobile to pc bump, and although the web app picked the device, my phone never got a confirmation. Considering I still have to download the pictures from their servers, Google+ instant upload does a pretty nice job in this department. Until NFC.

azarias··on How To Be A Successful (African) American in Silicon Valley
As an aside, I am amazed how much conversation CNN's story has fueled and continues to fuel...and it has been so many years! Whether it was a good representation or not, it was one of the first to really discuss the topic, and there is a lot of value in that.
azarias··on A/B testing our friends
You make an important point. We obviously have a lot of testing and refining to do. Thank you for taking the time to investigate our claim :)
azarias··on A/B testing our friends
We actually looked at using MailChimp for this, but we didn't want to go outside of the TOS. So, we ended up merging the mail locally using Thunderbird and sending it from our personal accounts. I am sure there is more to be said about the line between the two, however.
azarias··on A/B testing our friends
Pasting in the emails was going to make the post very long, but to summarize, we presented Meritful as a tool for students to build a positive web presence, as a tool for teachers and mentors to run projects and give feedback to students, as a tool to help with college admissions by creating an impressive portfolio and interaction from respected folk and another comparing Meritful to existing products for teens.

The sample size was roughly evenly split between the total number of contacts we had.

azarias··on A/B testing our friends
That makes sense...that was why we wanted to point out relative performance rather than absolute numbers. It is also probably fair to point out that the content and tone of our messaging differed quite a bit, which explains some of the differences.
azarias··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (October 2012)
SEEKING FREELANCER - Designer

Meritful (http://www.meritful.com) is looking for a freelance web designer to help us with some projects. We really appreciate clean and modern web design and love creatives at Meritful. It would be great if you can deliver HTML/CSS but PSDs would work as well. We are based in Ann Arbor, MI. Remote OK. Please ping azarias at meritful.com with a pointer to your work if you are interested (especially if you have availability soon).

azarias··on DC Taxi Commission Proposes New Rules to Shut Down Uber
I know about the DC taxi commission a little bit...they will go anywhere, and do anything to protect their bottom line.
azarias··on Show HN: Please Review My First Startup. Meritful: LinkedIn for High School
This will always be free for schools and students.

College admissions (especially the not top-50 colleges) spend a lot of money convincing students to come to their school. We hope to give them a very targeted avenue to reach out and recruit students. You're right...this is a really important issue.

azarias··on Show HN: Please Review My First Startup. Meritful: LinkedIn for High School
Thank you for your feedback.

The goal is to eventually give college admissions counselors a very targeted way to reach out to and recruit high school students. All along, students can use their Meritful profile as part of the package they present to colleges. Since students spend so much time on projects and extracurriculars, we hope it would be nice to have more than a paragraph about it. Thank you so much for you feedback again.

azarias··on Show HN: Please Review My First Startup. Meritful: LinkedIn for High School
SaaS is a very good way to go about it, and we have got inquiries for 'mass signups' from a couple schools we talked to. We were hesitant because we thought it would result in a bunch of phantom accounts, but like you say, I think many organizations already try to achieve something similar.

You're spot on the mentor/recruiter difference...and on the road map is support for groups and orgs. Thank you so much for your feedback.

azarias··on Show HN: Please Review My First Startup. Meritful: LinkedIn for High School
University admissions counselors make the Meritful better for students, and we are talking to those people. But teachers have a lot of face time with students, and can be a vehicle for students to learn about Meritful. If a teacher has a class project, it would make a great entry on the portfolio, and a nice way to share with the rest of the class...so, we were looking at the distribution channel. Your comment on two sides of the graph spot on.
azarias··on Show HN: Please Review My First Startup. Meritful: LinkedIn for High School
Thank you for your feedback...I think they can use it...but a lot of the experiences that high school students are not work experiences...instead projects and activities...which can be better described using visual ways a la a portfolio...while building a professional network at the same time...
azarias··on Show HN: Please Review My First Startup. Meritful: LinkedIn for High School
The main reason we wanted to do this is that LinkedIn is designed to highlight one key currency...work experience. In contrast, this is not necessarily the most important experience in high school.

So the idea was to create a platform where students can document and share their projects and activities in a rich way, while getting feedback from their peers and mentors---along the way building a professional network.

azarias··on Show HN: Please Review My First Startup. Meritful: LinkedIn for High School
Awesome, thank you so much for the kind words! We're definitely thinking about ways of transitioning students, and that is one great idea.
azarias··on Show HN: Please Review My First Startup. Meritful: LinkedIn for High School
Thank you...coming soon. An artist friend is making really nice sketches for us.

The girl in the middle was supposed to be the one. One theory we are testing is that initial distribution will primarily come from adults/teachers/parents who learn about it...and trying to optimize for that audience too....do you have any thoughts?

azarias··on Show HN: Please Review My First Startup. Meritful: LinkedIn for High School
Thank you very much. That is kind of you. I would love to hear what you think all around.
azarias··on Show HN: Please Review My First Startup. Meritful: LinkedIn for High School
Hello everyone! I would really love to hear any and all feedback. As a bit of context, a few months ago, I made a really difficult decision---turning down a faculty job at an Ivy League CS school after my phd---to work on a startup with a few great guys. Meritful is the first iteration, and I will be grateful for your time and feedback.
azarias··on How I Learned to Defrag My Brain
I have found OneNote to be an excellent tool for this. One of the main apps that make it worth running a VM for me.
azarias··on A Letter to Heroku - Please Tier the Dynos
Paying customer here. I hope they don't do that. If you consider a dyno to be a unit of some set of resources, having a free dyno tells you exactly what to expect. Although most apps do not scale as a linear multiple of the number of dynos you have due to other bottlenecks, the resources you have increase linearly. So, having a single unit of resources to try out is a really great model that would give you some peace of mind in scaling.

After all, most successful apps will quickly outgrow their free dyno (and that is without even considering at least an additional dyno for background services).

azarias··on GoDaddy Outage: How to Migrate to AWS Route 53
Just moved ours to Route 53 in the afternoon. I had been on the fence lately, especially after doing a few of the tests on http://cloudharmony.com/dnstest, but the move so far has been simple, and new relic reports nearly similar results for us.
azarias··on GoDaddy's DNS Service is Down
This thread demonstrates that HN needs a comment collapse button a la reddit. The first comment thread, mostly useless, is taking most of the page, and no way to collapse it.
azarias··on Ask HN: how do you stage/push your code?
Have you had to deal with users with sessions across multiple versions?
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