dmerrick

This is so exciting! If it's an official Apple app, it will get access to all kinds of powerful things that other apps can't do.

Finally a way to mute my phone when I'm on a certain wifi network, and other things IFTTT only wishes it could do.

/r/Serendipity

Meta-subreddit designed to introduce you to new subreddits

/r/Showerthoughts

Amusing, often insightful thoughts

/r/wholesomememes

Pleasant pictures that make you feel nice about the world

/r/Justrolledintotheshop

Tales from the auto mechanic

/r/LucidDreaming

Tips and stories for lucid dreaming

/r/marijuanaenthusiasts

Because /r/trees was taken

/r/PastAndPresentPics

Recreating old pics in present day

/r/PlayItAgainSam and /r/youtubehaiku

YouTube videos that get better each play

/r/DesirePaths

Paths created by people walking off the intended paths

/r/DoesNotTranslate

Words or phrases without analogs in other languages

/r/FuckYou

Does what it says on the tin

/r/Heavymind

Trippy, heavy art

/r/hmmm

Pics that make you go, "hmmm"

/r/delusionalartists

Artists who think they are more qualified than they actually are

r/iamverysmart

People who are a little too proud of their intellect

/r/A1B21F8244F

Weird encrypted messages, or just data dumps, or something else. The mystery is the fun part.

/r/AmazonWTF

Strange things you can buy on Amazon

/r/bench and /r/fence

Originally spawned from amusing comments, these subreddits still get traffic

/r/AnimalsWithoutNecks

Yep

r/crazystairs

Cool staircases

I'm a huge Plex fan, but I'm really not comfortable using this until it supports encryption.

I would only use this for media where you have the legal rights to copy it.

I've been using computers my whole life, and a lot of the magic has been explained away. Wine is a project that continues to astound me.

Grats to the Wine team, this is great!

Did she glue her fingers together?

Thanks, this is precisely what I intended.

Perl 6 was too little, too late. It was hyped for a long time and delayed for a long time. During that time, everybody who was impatient and not forced to use Perl ended up moving to the new hotness languages like Python and Ruby.

Ruby is probably the main reason Perl lost so much market share, since it took a lot of the underlying philosophies from Perl and turned it into a beautiful, easy-to-read language.

Honestly that seems like par for the course for the area of town the Twitter HQ is in

Pretty much this.

A little background... the company was in the television industry. The original product was "clickable TV," in which they'd managed to deploy a small Java app to set top boxes over the cable lines, which could display a small icon appear at the bottom of the screen. When a user pressed 'select' on their TV remote, they would get an email sent to them with more information. It launched in a small US city and they approached local news channels ("click now to get the full story") and local businesses ("click to get a coupon code") to sell it.

The product did work (even if you DVR'd the program, which was my favorite feature), but most of the local business that were contacted said "cool idea, but we don't have any TV commercials, so come back to us if you can do something else."

When it proved too hard to sell the clickable TV product (perhaps obviously -- even in 2010 it was 10 years too late), they decided to reach back out to the local businesses with a new idea... a Groupon clone. We ran it for a while and it did "okay," but not well enough to keep the lights on, and the company closed its doors soon after.

Back in 2010 I worked at a startup that ended up pivoting to a regional Groupon clone. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but the company ended up going under a year later.

What I remember most vividly was trying to come up with a good name. LivingSocial was starting to get traction and we wanted to differentiate ourselves from them. The conversation went like:

    Boss: What's the opposite of LivingSocial?
    Me: I dunno, DyingAlone?

I learned how to program on a TI-83 graphing calculator. I was bored in class and I made a simple text-based blackjack game.

Later my friends and I would use the link cable to share programs between our calculators, and I would pour over the source code and try to understand everything. There was an ASCII fighting game I loved and I added new moves and characters.

Once I learned how to "view source" a website I started doing that everywhere and figuring out how the Web worked. That, plus a Linux install disk and an old, case-less desktop got me on the road to where I am today (supporting a SaaS company as an Infrastructure Engineer).

The one that stood out to me most was Jean-Paul Sartre. Wouldn't it make sense for a philosopher to have a philosophy degree?

I'm really happy to see a company so large taking a stand on privacy.

Even if most of their users are unsavvy and don't understand/care about the implications, Apple is making an example that other companies can now follow.

Darn, that's what I was worried about.

I wouldn't have anticipated it, but this is an critical feature for me. Without WoL, I need to have a mouse/keyboard attached to the guest machine, which completely defeats the purpose of using Synergy.

I just purchased this recently (having used it ages ago) to drive a second computer on my desk.

My problem is that once the guest machine goes to sleep, I can't seem to wake it via Synergy. Is this expected behavior? I have WoL enabled, so theoretically I should be able to just move my mouse over to the sleeping monitor to wake it up.

It's really unfortunate that Imgur took such a turn for the worse.

Originally it seemed like Imgur was a benevolent gift to Reddit users... a clean, simple, easy to use image hosting service that everyone could use for free. I guess it was too good to be true, because now it's tricky to link to a direct image (though not impossible), and the standard landing page is filled with unnecessary clutter.

As an aside: if you're looking for an amusing read, the "IgnorantImgur" subreddit[0] is filled with examples of people from the Imgur community who seem to be oblivious to Imgur's origin as an image hosting site for Reddit users.

[0]: http://www.reddit.com/r/IgnorantImgur/top

That is exactly what Plaid is... a tool for developers. Savvy users can use the Plaid API to build apps that use their users' financial data.

It's free to use if you have less than 100 users, so you could easily build your own tool to manage your personal data for free.

The extremely-talented folk-metal band Kauan recently released an album about this[0]. It's worth checking out if you like ambient, moody, atmospheric music.

[0] http://www.metalsucks.net/2015/10/22/stream-kauans-new-album...

There's a lot more info and documentation here:

http://sanctuary.js.org

EDIT: with really cool REPL examples, too!

Infrastructure guy at Plaid here.

> Is there really no way to get closer to normal performance for networking in Virtual Box?

Unfortunately not! It takes many different tweaks, tunes, and hacks to squeeze performance out of VirtualBox. To make matters worse, NPM as a tool is pretty slow in general -- in fact it's become somewhat of a joke in the community[1]. npmserve solves this by offloading the work to a remote server, so the npm install process becomes as simple as fetching and expanding a tarball.

> Also, why not use Linux VPS?

This is something we may move to if performance becomes an even bigger issue. We use vagrant-aws[2] in our integration testing environment to achieve a similar effect.

> Also, take a look at Docker as an alternative to Vagrant/Chef.

We don't currently use Docker (in this use-case at least). It's definitely an option, though! Using Chef here is pretty handy, insofar as we can use the same infrastructure code we use on production, so our developer environments are as close to production as possible.

> Also, take a look at pnpm.

Nice, this is the first I've heard of this project. We looked at ied[3], but we weren't comfortable moving over to it without also moving our production infrastructure.

    [1]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/nplaym
    [2]: https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws
    [3]: https://github.com/alexanderGugel/ied

I like the idea here, but I don't really see how drawing ASCII art is easier than running:

    tmux list-windows

I do agree that it's nicer to read the ASCII art version, but making edits seems like effort. The list-windows syntax isn't fun to look at, but it's simple to manually make changes to the current layout and export it in the native tmux syntax.

Depending on when the channel was introduced, the backend implementation of a channel can vary wildly. Some were written in Node, others in Ruby, some where written internally, others were written by the service owners.

When IFTTT released the developer platform, they were solving two needs: 1) creating a consistent channel infrastructure, and 2) providing a tool for developers to write channels so they don't have to.

It seems like they are shutting down some of their legacy services, which is probably a good plan for a company with no revenue stream. Not a good plan, however, to make it look like it is the developers' fault.

I've always thought of it as a tax on people who are bad at math.

Might still be cheaper than owning a car.

It's the worst when it says something to the effect of "you made a typo, so we already ran this unrelated command for you!"

Tip: run the following to add a 1-second pause between the message and the "fixed" command being executed:

  git config --global help.autocorrect 10

It's really great to see that with every big release, Ruby is making the language even more pleasant to use in addition to the regular performance improvements.

Ruby just keeps getting better and better.

He has a son named Colt, apparently:

http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/#family

I wonder if Ruby 2.3 will be released on Christmas Day this year (a Ruby tradition).