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craigmccaskill

451 karma · joined November 17, 2010

Product and systems guy. I like talking to people. Recovering designer/developer.

Originally from Scotland, transplanted to the SF Bay area for a few years.

hn[at]username.com

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craigmccaskill··on Hacker School is now the Recurse Center
As they mentioned in the post, the name was clearly causing problems for their students. Prospective, current and alum.
craigmccaskill··on Monoprice drops the price of a dual extrusion 3D printer to $700
There are reasons for dual extrusion, but I agree it's likely not worth it for your first printer.

Hybrid prints of ninjaflex and ABS are pretty unique and hard to achieve similar final products even with some clever assembly and forethought. It's just not possible to build certain types of rigid prints with flexible components unless you use a dual extrusion printer.

craigmccaskill··on Bitstamp Accounts Frozen
> try to get your money out ASAP.

This is probably what a lot of people will try to do, which will lead to further drops in price.

I wouldn't be surprised to see prices break the 1y low at this point.

craigmccaskill··on Apple Deleted Rivals’ Songs from Users’ iPods
The very same thing happens with people moving country.

Having moved from the UK to the US, I lost access to everything I'd purchased when I updated my billing details (no longer having a working UK credit card).

All Apple support could do was give me a list of the software/music I was missing, I presume to make re-purchasing easier.

craigmccaskill··on New AWS Directory Service
Amazon is systematically adding service upon service to their offering. I'll be interested to see where this ends up once they're all tightly integrated and working together.
craigmccaskill··on Twitpic blocking archive team from backing up pictures
That doesn't mean this isn't an effort to reduce stress on the user collection download system.

I'm not saying that it isn't malicious. I just don't think it's wise to jump to that conclusion straight away.

craigmccaskill··on Twitpic blocking archive team from backing up pictures
Maybe they're having issues fulfilling individual users requests, so blocked the archive team to help reduce stress?

I can't imagine they'll want to spin up new machines, so it makes sense to throttle/limit/block.

Not sure I'd immediately jump to malice here.

craigmccaskill··on Nexus Player
It wasn't ever a production device. The entire product line was constantly updating to bleeding edge, and thus hardly ever worked. Consumers shouldn't ever have had one. The real mistake was handing them out.
craigmccaskill··on Oculus Reveals Its New “Crescent Bay” Developer Kit
This isn't a developer kit. It's a prototype and may or may not be made available to the public. The techcrunch title was also changed to reflect this.
craigmccaskill··on Apple Watch Is and Isn’t
The heart monitor technology used via diodes on these smart watches isn't very accurate. I can't seem to find the article I was reading but I remember a roughly +/- 10bpm error rate. That's also roughly what I've experienced myself on the LG and Moto watches I've tried.

That said, if you buy a Garmin or similar heart tracker watch, they package it with a Heart Rate monitor transmitter you strap around your chest. Garmin would love to be able to cut costs and keep everything in one piece of hardware, but the prosumer crowd who buy this hardware for Triathlons etc would be furious if the product was inaccurate.

craigmccaskill··on Product Hunt Raises $6M from A16Z
Congrats to Ryan and the team!

I know there must be more to the plan (in addition to divide and conquer), can't wait to see what's in the works.

craigmccaskill··on Ubiquiti announces UniFi Security Gateway and UniFi enterprise switches
I would love to know what this device actually does and where it should sit in a network. Does this perform routing? If not, should it be downstream from a router? What would a typical network topology look like with one of these?

This seems like it has a lot of overlap with the functionality of their edgerouter product, so I just don't see where this fits in.

craigmccaskill··on Uber vs. Car Ownership
My wife and I moved to SF ~6 months ago from Mountain View. We sold one car almost as soon as we moved, as we definitely didn't need a car each. Just last week got rid of the last one as the math really didn't make sense.

All in, gas, insurance, car payment and parking spot we were spending over $900 a month on unavoidable monthly costs, at times this number would also go up based on using the car to get around the city and having to pay $10-40 to park the car at wherever we were going.

Add it all up and that same money can buy a lot of Uber/Lyft/Zipcar at 90% of the convenience. I've yet to see how much we'll spend monthly on various transportation services but so far it looks like we'll be saving close to $400/m.

craigmccaskill··on Prose, a content editor for GitHub
Prose is tweaked specifically to offer additional features to sites built with Jekyll.

They have a markdown editor, similar to the one github offers, but have a few extra features to deal with Jekyll specific stuff like drafts, image uploading and a distraction free writing mode.

craigmccaskill··on Meet the People Taking over Hacker News
Daniel Gackle (dang/gruseom) is a great guy. My wife and I have had the fortune of hosting him via Airbnb during a couple of his visits to MTV. Fantastic conversation from what's obviously a really smart dude.
craigmccaskill··on Credit Card Breach at California DMV
By none he's basically talking about the states. As a British person who moved to the US 4 years ago, chip and pin was everywhere back in the UK. In the US it may as well not exist.
craigmccaskill··on Two big announcements
They were a consulting company initially, not really focused on finding and building a product.
craigmccaskill··on Put.io
It saves bandwidth because a lot of ISPs track upload and download towards your bandwidth limit. This removes the upload component completely.
craigmccaskill··on A useful Caps Lock key
https://github.com/lunixbochs/reslate

Was built by a co-worker of mine (ontop of slate). Pretty great set of defaults.

craigmccaskill··on Edward Snowden is Almost Broke
He was given asylum by the Russian government, snatching him from Russian soil would be a major thing that could possibly start a war.
craigmccaskill··on I want Square Cash to ask Google Wallet out for drinks.
Very unlikely. Google Wallet is heavily integrated into Android and Google Play. It's not going away.
craigmccaskill··on Ask HN: Have you made a profit mining Bitcoin?
Add it all up (usb hubs, power bricks included too) and put the numbers into the calculator on the genesis block.

http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/

The 330MH/s miners were profitable if you bought them a few months ago but with the rising difficulty of the network, they don't seem likely to break even.

A more likely profitable venture would be to use the same money and buy into bitcoins. Secure your wallet and sit on it in hopes the price rises.

craigmccaskill··on Google Founders' Jet Fleet Loses a Pentagon Fuel Perk
The OP was suggesting this was a bribe or 'kick-back'. The scales for which are entirely ridiculous. Of course Google cares about money, but to suggest that they would make sweeping changes to their infrastructure and privacy policy for something on this small a scale is nothing short of hilarious.
craigmccaskill··on Google Founders' Jet Fleet Loses a Pentagon Fuel Perk
The dollar amount saved on fuel costs would be under $2 million. Their 2012 cash reserves were just shy of $4.8 billion. You're barking up entirely the wrong tree.
craigmccaskill··on Ruby 2.0 is now supported in the OS X window manager for hackers, Zephyros
A coworker of mine wrote this on-top of slate. https://github.com/lunixbochs/reslate

Basically a set of sane defaults (slate really isn't that powerful out of the box unless you really dig deep into the undocumented config files). I started using it and haven't looked back since. I can move windows to almost any size I want and send them to other monitors. My only want would be a keybind to send to another space, but OS X doesn't really expose any clean way of doing that.

craigmccaskill··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2013)
WiFast (http://www.wifast.com) Mountain View, CA We're a well funded 15 month old startup just starting to poke our heads out of stealth mode. We're reimagining what internet access looks like in the modern world. We've proven and prototyped a lot of the necessary components. They work.

We are looking for true generalists. Yes, some of our work is in Python and Django, but we also have to work with embedded device C code, internal APIs for client applications, networking and firewall configuration and at times even finding and working around the occasional kernel panic. Silly kernel, everything is going to be OK. You are;

* A Polyglot Programmer. Contribute all up and down the stack, from JavaScript and Python to C and shell scripting, from traditional MVC web development down to TCP/IP, DNS and iptables.

* Autodidactic. Learning is fun. Prepare to do a lot of it. We have way more components than team members and we intend to keep it that way.

* Autonomous. Be comfortable working with minimal oversight. We don’t have any PMs and we don’t plan to hire any for quite some time. Downside: you don’t get a spec. Upside: you don’t get a spec.

* Product-focused. Understand and appreciate the human-facing side of the business. You are comfortable thinking through what needs to be prioritized next and how that affects our customers.

* Attentive to Detail. You know when to git merge and when to git rebase, and it makes a difference (nobody likes a messy commit history). Your code feels obvious in retrospect. You take pride in your work.

* Test-Friendly. The best way to make sure we're creating value for our users is to make sure our changes don't break things.

More info on the website, if you're interested you can apply on the site or you can contact me directly at craig at companyname.com for more information.

craigmccaskill··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2013)
WiFast (http://www.wifast.com) Mountain View, CA

We're a well funded 14 month old startup just starting to poke our heads out of stealth mode. We're reimagining what internet access looks like in the modern world. We've proven and prototyped a lot of the necessary components. They work.

We are looking for true generalists. Yes, some of our work is in Python and Django, but we also have to work with embedded device C code, internal APIs for client applications, networking and firewall configuration and at times even finding and working around the occasional kernel panic. Silly kernel, everything is going to be OK. You are;

* A Polyglot Programmer. Contribute all up and down the stack, from JavaScript and Python to C and shell scripting, from traditional MVC web development down to TCP/IP, DNS and iptables.

* Autodidactic. Learning is fun. Prepare to do a lot of it. We have way more components than team members and we intend to keep it that way.

* Autonomous. Be comfortable working with minimal oversight. We don’t have any PMs and we don’t plan to hire any for quite some time. Downside: you don’t get a spec. Upside: you don’t get a spec.

* Product-focused. Understand and appreciate the human-facing side of the business. You are comfortable thinking through what needs to be prioritized next and how that affects our customers.

* Attentive to Detail. You know when to git merge and when to git rebase, and it makes a difference (nobody likes a messy commit history). Your code feels obvious in retrospect. You take pride in your work.

* Test-Friendly. The best way to make sure we're creating value for our users is to make sure our changes don't break things.

More info on the website, if you're interested you can apply on the site or you can contact me directly for more information.

craigmccaskill··on Larry Page "providing free flu shots to all San Francisco bay area kids"
Kids get some flu shots, Larry Page gets some press. Who isn't a winner in this situation?
craigmccaskill··on The ban on electronic devices rests on anecdotes
Citation? I'm genuinely curious.

I don't think anyone is against doing something that could potentially save lives -- but I've never seen any evidence to support the current status quo and the number of these types of articles is growing. If there were credible proof of disturbance why isn't it being brought out to counter this debate? This is too big a potential PR problem for the FAA to not try to convince us they're just looking out for our best interests.

craigmccaskill··on Just pay me.
A late fee is a tool to encourage payment, if they ignore it and pay even just the invoice amount earlier than they otherwise would have you could say it has done its job.

As long as they pay the invoice, most people at that point will waive the late fee (providing it's not a very large sum of money as would be the case with the suggested 10% per week). I know I've done this in the past when a client has called me up after weeks of nagging and apologised for the late payment and the lack of a fee.

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