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damncabbageon Show HN: Vinepeek - watch the world in realtime in 6 second snippets

YouTube for the Attention-Deficit Generation?

I unfortunately find watching these jumpy snippets jarring. I can see the appeal for getting tiny slices of someone's day, but I'm finding it hard to enjoy it.

damncabbageon Segment.io (YC S11) Lets Developers Integrate Multiple Analytics Services

It's good to know http://xkcd.com/927/ has reached parable status.

damncabbageon Evil Ruby

I'd argue that it's really two functions:

* One to do the lookup and potentially explode; this always takes an argument.

* A second to provide the default.

Have the caller call the appropriate one. User provides params[:search] (or some other "explicitly trying to search"), then call the first. If not, call the latter.

damncabbageon What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs

Then again, this whole discussion could be related to the fact that Apple users are about 985% more likely to nitpick a product than any other group of people on earth.

Or just that it was vastly wrong in a lot of places that weren't San Francisco. It was missing one of the two major train stations in Sydney for crying out loud.

damncabbageon Evil Ruby

I'm still trying to think of a situation where I want to know if someone has passed the default value or not.

The method itself shouldn't care; it returns the same result regardless whether an argument was passed explicitly or not.

What am I missing? :(

damncabbageon Set good defaults

I use a standing desk a lot (six of eight hours, doing it for the last couple of years), am a bit unfit and pudgy, and I'm doing fine. I can get in the "zone" just the same as sitting, and as far as I can tell it hasn't negatively affected the quality of my work.

To me, it feel like it kills the post-lunch haze, and reduces the friction to move around. I find it easier when brainstorming to pace or just walk away to a whiteboard, for example. I shift my weight from one foot to the other, bend my knees, and generally move around a bit during the day. I take sit-down breaks every hour like you'd take a stand-up break.

I tried it out by stacking some things on my desk[1]. Make sure to keep the same sort of ergonomic setup with standing as sitting (eg. monitor at eye-height, arms flat to the keyboard, etc); staring down at a laptop is just going to make you unhappy.

I'd be careful before jumping on the stand-all-day bandwagon, though: http://ergo.human.cornell.edu/CUESitStand.html

(And beware of confirmation bias[2] when first switching over. If you're happy with it at first, give it a little while before deciding whether or not to go for the long haul. Last thing you want to do is regret dropping the cash on a standing desk.)

1. http://instagram.com/p/MUmlP/ http://instagram.com/p/SWS7gDO6Tg/ http://instagram.com/p/Jy1d6Qu6cj/

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

damncabbageon RubyJS: A JavaScript standard library based on the Ruby core-lib

Shades of http://phpjs.org/functions/?

damncabbageon The Golden Rule of Programming

"If it can be null, it will be null"

So explicitly define what is allowed to ever be "null": http://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/null-pointers-vs-none-vs-m...

damncabbageon We switched to Node.js: the good and the not so good

dagw has the best response to this below: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5054382

I agree; it's a shortcut for people who know JS, not for people who are learning it for the first time. As soon as you need to use or look into the internals of a library that isn't written in CoffeeScript, everything's going to get unstuck pretty quickly.

damncabbageon In which Ars is allowed to see—but not touch—an Ubuntu phone

"We're just doing all of the driving for the demos for now simply because we understand how the experience works"

This is a pretty limp excuse. I wish they'd just drop the PR-speak and say that it's not quite ready yet.

damncabbageon Common JavaScript Gotchas

I see this problem all the time in my own code and that of my colleagues: callbacks that have been registered either more or less times than the author of the code expected. Usually more times.

I've yet to run into this problem before, and I'm an even split between JS / Ruby these days. Are you building on top of any particular libraries or frameworks? Could you give some examples of where you've encountered this?

damncabbageon Common JavaScript Gotchas

Or http://www.jshint.com/ if they feel jslint is too harsh or arbitrary about some things.

damncabbageon Buffy vs. Edward Remix Unfairly Removed by Lionsgate

I think Lionsgate is wrong in this case (although I'm not wholly sure, because using their source material for ~30% of the video is pretty substantial in my view) ...

Please see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5033525 above.

damncabbageon Are Designers Crazy?

The flip-back-and-forth example given in the post: http://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Design-Di...

Notice how the edges are now fuzzy? On the buttons, on the edge just below the map, on the cog. That sticks out to me personally on this monitor here, and I tend to find differences like becoming even more noticeable when looking at the phone with it's hi-res "Retina" display.

They may not be crazy; they just notice different things. :)

damncabbageon Show HN: The home automation system with an API

I'm looking at using https://www.braintreepayments.com/tour/international for online ticket sales a little later this year.

(I'd love to use Pin, but I'm still waiting for a way to use them without the massive bugbear of anything beyond PCI SAQ A, which comes into play as soon as you're POSTing CC numbers to your server.)

PS: Hi Marcus. ProgSoc Rob here. :D

damncabbageon Show HN: The home automation system with an API

It's also unfortunately one of the few ways to accept USD online in Australia, unless you hop through a ridiculous number of hoops with NAB (a bank)[1][2].

(BrainTree just launched in Australia[3], though. I'll be checking them out shortly for a project of my own. :) )

1. http://blog.angrymonkeys.com.au/why-being-an-aussie-startup-...

2. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3098224

3. https://www.braintreepayments.com/tour/international

damncabbageon Programming Your Culture

... but when a shocked new employee asks why she must work on a makeshift desk constructed out of random Home Depot parts, the answer comes back with withering consistency: “We look for every opportunity to save money so that we can deliver the best products for the lowest cost.”

It's probably not a good idea to hold up the "cheap door desk" as a good example; from what I've read it seems like it's turned into more of a cargo-cult-of-frugality thing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3102401

(From a much longer thread, back when Steve Yegge accidentally posted his, uh, feelings about Amazon: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101876 )

damncabbageon W3C finalizes HTML5 specification

To quote @tabatkins[1]:

"The W3C violates its own process, lets HTML go to CR with 100+ bugs still active: https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/buglist.cgi?query_format=adva...

(Regarding the process to move to Candidate Recommendation[2], which is what HTML5 just hit.)

[1] https://twitter.com/tabatkins/status/280825291620896770

[2] http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/tr.html#transitio...

damncabbageon Wikipedia (English) starting to migrate to MariaDB

In case anyone else was wondering about InnoDB like I was:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MariaDB/Storage_Engines

MariaDB has XtraDB, which is a drop-in replacement for InnoDB; I'm not sure if it's encumbered or not, given it's Percona's fork of InnoDB.

(Does anyone have any experience using XtraDB that they can relate?)

damncabbageon Web Discussions: Flat by Design

The Twitter example was terrible, mainly because it does have a tree structure to the discussions, but you can only have a flat view of them. You have to manually sift through replies to find the branching points and then trace it from there.

For example, these are two discussion trees branching from the same conversation starter:

https://twitter.com/lgarvey/status/279088834115940352

https://twitter.com/nitecoder/status/279088173743747072

damncabbageon Web Discussions: Flat by Design

But it also gets frustrating. Conversations can go in many very interesting directions, but you can't, and you often end up railroaded down one path with the others mostly forgotten as you come across more branching points in the discussion. It feels like a Choose Your Own Adventure book where you only get to read it once.

With HN, Reddit, Usenet, or whatever, you can keep that line of discussion going at whatever speed you want.

damncabbageon Book Translates American Minutiae for Russians

As an Aussie who has to occasionally suffer without mixer taps, I must ask:

What do you do when it's cold and you want to wash your hands with warm water? Your choice is freezing-cold from one tap, or boiling hot from the other. Why separate them?

damncabbageon Android Overtakes Apple in Australia

On the contrary, I saved a couple of hundred dollars by getting a Macbook Pro from Japan. There's an Inquiry going on right now into IT-related pricing by Apple, Adobe and Microsoft:

http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w...

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/thestump/2012/04/15/parliamentary...

damncabbageon Letter to TEDx India Licensees

So how do you explain removing the limit[1] if your organiser has attended TED (needing a $6,000 ticket[2])?

1. http://www.ted.com/pages/tedx_faq#A13

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TED_(conference)#Controversies_...

damncabbageon Pushing Nginx to its limit with Lua

> C doesn't have a package manager; people still seem to be able to get the relevant packages when they need them through the OS's package manager.

This is fine with Linux, which has at least a few sane package management systems between the different distros. This goes out the window with OS X and Windows.

(This may just be an argument that anyone working on server-side software should be working inside a VM that matches your production environment. The Ruby community seems to have shown that people push back very hard on that.)

damncabbageon You can now create files on GitHub

Have you tried switching to the fork-and-pull-request model instead of everyone directly committing to the main repo?

(It's how many, many open-source projects run, and GitHub has a good write-up of it here: https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests )

damncabbageon Steam releases Big Picture mode

Please do submit it; this is a great write-up. :)

damncabbageon How script kiddies can hijack your browser to steal your password

There are two linked examples of this in the article:

* http://h43z.koding.com/blog/leaked.html

* http://boomer.neohapsis.com/searchbox/index.html

damncabbageon Cuddle Mattress

This comment confused me on first reading. In Australia, it's very much common that you bring your own bed (and other furniture) with you from place to place. (You can get furnished apartments, but they're much less common, at least in Sydney.)

Are you in the US, or somewhere else?

damncabbageon Meet the Obama campaign's $250 million fundraising platform

Did this account get hacked between this post and the ones that immediately reply to it? (This post is rational, the others are completely nuts.)