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dgouldinon How I Helped Potty-Train My Kid Using Twilio and an AWS IoT Button

Author here.

I don't want to interrupt a good flame war, but I am just a normal dude who posted a tweet about a hack project and was asked by Twilio to write a post about it after the tweet got popular.

I prefer not to post pictures of my kids publicly out of respect for their privacy, so I won't prove to you that I'm a dad, but some cursory twitter-stalking should provide sufficient evidence that I'm not a marketing shill for either AWS or Twilio.

dgouldinon How I Helped Potty-Train My Kid Using Twilio and an AWS IoT Button

Fixed, thanks for letting me know!

dgouldinon Show HN: Real-time file sharing site

I'd hoped this was something like Napster built on WebRTC data channel. No such luck.

dgouldinon Show HN: Tracking voter discussion of the Presidential debates

Fellow Votizen dev.

I agree about the white flash. We decided to give nvd3 a try for charts, and it does that as part of its default animation. We'll probably disable animations or figure out some way to keep redraws from flashing like that.

dgouldinon Your job is not sexy

Humility breeds a state of mind which evidences itself through action. There's not really more, except that actual humility isn't something you can measure directly. So the advice "be more humble" isn't actionable. "Work to pay back the debt you owe" is.

dgouldinon Your job is not sexy

It was specifically prompted by the way I see people headed in software, particularly in the bay area. I used the general term maker though, as I think the same ideas apply to many disciplines.

dgouldinon Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture

I'm a developer at Votizen.

Just our voter history (whether a voter actually voted in a particular election) is, on average, 10 rows per voter record. 200 million voter records * 10 history records per voter = ~2 billion rows.

dgouldinon Show HN: My weekend project: Play Zork on Twitter

The rate limit has been increased a bit but still remains. So, the bot is up for now, but it's not really a solution, just a temporary fix. Go get your nostalgia on while it lasts! ;)

dgouldinon Show HN: My weekend project: Play Zork on Twitter

Aaand looks like I went over twitter's daily tweet limit. I didn't know that even existed. Its api says statuses/update is not rate limited. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted ... :)

dgouldinon Localno.de - serve a local site with no deployment:

It's setting iframe src on a timer to detect when the hosted html file is present. Yeah, that's unfortunate about the back button, something we didn't think about during the hackathon. It would be easy enough to have the user ask to validate the existence of the hosted file instead.

dgouldinon Some rules kids won't learn in school (1996)

Perhaps I'm alone or in the vast minority, but I love being an adult and would never trade it for the "good old days" of being a kid. I can completely identify with the complaints of teens Skyes rails about. My work gives me a sense of accomplishment and challenge that structured education never did. In my personal life, I never have to worry that decisions are made for me without an understanding of my perspective as I'm the one making those decisions. The range of experiences open to me is therefore much broader and more satisfying.

Rather, my advice to teens would be: "Just hang in there and try to make good decisions when you can. Your life is one big transition, and transitions are hard. Be assured, life will get much better when you come out the other side."

dgouldinon The Gaiman Principle: piracy is advertising & why Ramen Music encourages sharing

I think Neal Gaiman is the only one calling it "The Gaiman Principle" ...

dgouldinon Dr Dobbs - The Rise And Fall of Languages in 2010

The kicker for me was discovering that Facebook's PHP shell (http://www.phpsh.org/) is in fact written in Python.

dgouldinon Ruby and Python: pivot points

It is, but I don't get to show you the result of the chain that way. :)

dgouldinon Train before you hire

Doesn't that limit you to potential employees who aren't currently employed?

Hiring should be at least as important to the team as to any manager. (After all, they're the ones who have to "live with" the new hire.) I can see this working if the team is flexible enough to accomodate the potential employee's current work schedule, assuming the potential is also flexible enough to take on the extra load for a bit.

dgouldinon Train before you hire

In a previous life, I was a C# dev for fat client windows apps. Without any serious web development experience, a Django shop took a chance on me, and I learned the whole stack on the job. I feel comfortable saying they were happy with my work, and I came out of the experience with a new set of skills, a new career really.

All that to say, I'm a big proponent of taking the time (and yes it does take time) to find out if somebody is smart and willing to learn and leaving resumes with #yrs experience in technology X to the HR monkeys. If a skill is in demand, a latent expert is of much higher long-term value than a present one.

dgouldinon Ruby and Python: pivot points

It's not pretty, but you can do it:

  >>> sum([['a', 'b', 'c'], ['d', 'e', 'f']], [])
  ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f']

This makes use of the optional start argument and list add operator. However, Python's docs suggest using itertools.chain instead:

http://docs.python.org/library/functions.html#sum

  >>> import itertools
  >>> [l for l in itertools.chain(*[['a', 'b', 'c'], ['d', 'e', 'f']])]
  ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f']

(Of course you lose the benefit of a generator by using a list comprehension, but this is just an example.)