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drum

712 karma · joined May 8, 2013

Ryan Friedman
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drum··on Ask HN: How do I get back into the tech industry after 4 years of unemployment?
Even though you may not feel good at LeetCode type questions, study algorithms and data structures anyways!

Try watching YouTube videos, reading 'Cracking the Coding Interview' and get familiar with the programing language you are most competent with already or are trying to get a job with.

The best way to make up for a gap in resume or short stints at other companies is to prove you have the technical knowledge anyways.

drum··on Show HN: Pep – Turn Your Website into a Progressive Web App
The demo videos in the 'Installable' section should be up in your hero with the benefits listed alongside as subtitles. It took me a while to fully understand what your service does.
drum··on Pros and Cons of Coworking Spaces
Coloft (closed), ROC (closed), and now Spaces - which is owned by Regus.
drum··on Pros and Cons of Coworking Spaces
I have nothing but positive things to say about coworking spaces after having worked at them for the last 3 years. I've met great friends, business partners and clients. I think they'll continue to be important as the freelance and remote working economies grow.
drum··on “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”
Cool dialogue between PG and Jeff Atwood (StackOverflow cofounder) on the tweet thread - From Jeff: “You can always borrow concepts and ideas from other startups, too. It's good to look, and understand the competitive landscape in detail, but not to obsess over.“
drum··on Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M
Doh! Thanks for asking. Voltron is a white labeled version of Jira (which I did not realize when writing my post). Edited.
drum··on Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M
After using Jira for the last 2 years, Atlassian has struck me as the 800 pound gorilla that's resting on its laurels.

On my dashboard, I'm consistently annoyed by being shown the option of creating a new user account and having to decipher the UI to choose wether my ticket is a bug or feature during mission critical moments. Just give me one big button that says 'Create Ticket', we'll figure out the rest later. Secondly, why aren't tickets shown on the dashboard by default? When I log in, I'd expect to see what's going on, not have them tucked away in the nav menu.

Recently during a mission critical ticket, email responses to Jira threads were not creating new messages in Jira, creating massive delays in communication with the team until we figured out messages weren't posting. Diagnosing the issue later, it seemed to be due to file attachments in the email responses.

drum··on Upgrading GitHub from Rails 3.2 to 5.2
The problem I have with statements like this are that they apply to every large framework, not just Rails. ASP, Django, Zend, Cocoa etc. A combination of libraries are bound to be hard to update two major versions later when methods and variables are deprecated.
drum··on Why We're Ditching Ruby on Rails for JavaScript and Node.js
It seems like the core of the argument is Javascript has wider adoption than Ruby, in enterprise and startups.

I was expecting a more technical comparisons to Rails and Node. The point made about Ruby not being adopted by well established companies seems half true considering adoption of Rails - AirBnB, Twitter, Coinbase, Github, etc

drum··on Jack Ma to Retire from Alibaba
The brewing trade war can't make running the company easy for Ma, considering Alibaba does more volume than eBay and Amazon combined as a portal to Chinese manufacturers. Taking into account that the company's listed on a US stock exchange yet still has to answer to government regulation back in China, I can't imagine he's having a good time being caught in the middle.
drum··on Ask HN: What do you struggle with?
Maybe you're being too hard on yourself and expecting drastic results too soon. Day of meaningful work + gym consistently over an extended period of time will help further you in life. Reading can help further you in life (obviously pending what you read). Only thing I see up there that I'd consider as a time waster would be video games... but even then a few hours a week to unwind can't be all that bad. I think Steven Spielberg and Elon Musk are known to game from time to time
drum··on How to Succeed with a Startup [video]
The upcoming videos in this series are mostly presented by startup founders, employees, and investors speaking from their personal experience. To your point about generic advice not working for startups, his advice seems distilled down to the most general advice that does work for startups. Given the number YC has incubated he probably has a good grasp on that. To me these videos are like candy, intuitive but great reminders nonetheless.
drum··on Sonder Raises $135M to Turn Airbnb Apartments into Hotels
"Comfortable beds, nice linens, soft towels, and well-chosen amenities and essentials."

Clean linens alone has me interested. That is by far the biggest headache for me when comparing an AirBnB to a hotel. Can I trust that the host actually cleaned the bed sheets?

drum··on Lessons learned as a React contractor
Other things I'd add after building a React project:

1. "Configuration over Convention" seems to be the mantra with build settings and organization of the entire application. This can make adding features slower if you're used to frameworks like Rails.

2. SEO will require additional effort via server side rendering

drum··on Once mocked, Facebook’s $1B acquisition of Instagram was a good move
I think you have a great point looking at the deal in hindsight, however Instagram couldn't have looked that impressive to the typical institutional investor at the time. Facebook already had 845 million monthly active users with a large portion using mobile. Instagram was much smaller and if anything people were skeptical if a social network could be profitable. The acquisition could've made Zuckerberg look wreckless and backfired.
drum··on Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars
Interesting title considering the article's as much about Uber and battery efficiency a la Tesla as it is Larry Page.

I'm still curious about how highways for these types of aircraft will be implemented. I imagine the goal is ubiquity and at some point, with thousands of these things flying around, flight paths will be the bottleneck.

drum··on Once mocked, Facebook’s $1B acquisition of Instagram was a good move
I admire Mark Zuckerberg's confidence to pull the trigger on an acquisition like this, especially doing it without consulting his board. My initial thoughts was that he has a visceral feel for the rate of growth that makes a social network successful, having gone through it himself. He could probably tell just by their publicity of growing to a million users within 2-3 months that they were going to be huge.
drum··on Show HN: Write ajax requests with template literals
I agree. Unfortunately I think this is only subjectively better to the author, provides less functionality than the example it compared itself too, and adds an extra dependency.
drum··on Web App and REST API with Express, PostgreSQL and Nunjucks on Yarn
Nice job! I've spend the last 2 months learning React and other tools in the ecosystem and was baffled at how complicated most of the tutorials were. I appreciate that this one is simple to follow yet powerful. Maybe for a part 2 you can show how to integrate React (client and/or server side).
drum··on [dead]
How about the discussion around the post? Like this comment section. That's a masssively different value proposition that you only access by linking to HN rather than the article itself.
drum··on [dead]
This seems like it might be an automated response but at any rate - give him a break. Mentioning the HN post to people on Twitter hardly translates to "manipulating upvotes" to me.
drum··on Ask HN: What are the best web tools to build basic web apps as of October 2016?
I can't agree with this more, and with the addition of Turbolinks in recent Rails versions you get the snappiness of a JS front end framework in areas like page load. After building a service oriented architecture with React and Rails I truly realized the benefit of a tightly coupled front end / backend for speed of development and deployment. Building bespoke API's for other clients isn't as much of a headache as it's been made out to be.
drum··on Maybe Blockchain Really Does Have Magical Powers
Being a general ledger, the Blockchain also can be used as a more professional way of proving you made a prediction at a certain time. Sure, as an individual, I can tweet where I think the P/E of Amazon will be in a year and refer back to it to prove my point, but is that the best way for a financial institution? Having an entry in the blockchain has a more business oriented feel to it.
drum··on One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence: 2016 Report
Meta - What's the reasoning behind labeling it a '28,000-Word report' as opposed to a page approximation? I find 28,000 words hard to conceptualize compared to pages

Edit - I could have phrased this better. I definitely understand that word count is a more concrete measurement than pages, however it seemed unnecessary to include in the title because length doesn't imply quality and it was hard to conceptualize. The title of this post has since been edited to '100 year study' which I think supports my initial point.

drum··on Ask HN: What keeps you from exercising?
I've been working out on and off for the last 8 years but found a groove recently by going to the gym and thinking about the following four things:

1. Music / Podcasts - I actually think I've Pavlov's Dogged myself into associating that blissful feeling of a new song with the endorphins of working out and now I can't get enough. Podcasts are also a highly productive pairing.

2. Mental health - If I'm feeling drained or a little down, it's almost always cured by 30 mins of cardio. Once I figured that out, I starting craving workouts and now have a hard time avoiding them even when on vacation.

3. Social - The gym is another social circle outside of the workplace that's great for meeting people. I've met fellow programmers, metal heads (as in music), and know many a romance that began there.

4. Physical Goal - I like the idea of sculpting my body or at the very least having good posture and minimizing the 'inner tube' on my belly. Seeing the changes manifest over time truly does motivate you to keep going.

Final piece of advice - don't beat yourself up in the beginning! If you only workout once or twice a week, that's a start. Just be consistent and try to let it snowball.

drum··on Masquerade Acquired by Facebook
This strikes me as a response to Snapchat's recent success with fun video filters. If you look at the App Store rankings, they've clearly boosted Snapchat's ranking past Instagram and Facebook recently, as they're totally viral and people seem to be using them nonstop whenever I'm on.

Congrats to the MSQRD team!

drum··on Ask HN: Do you help beggars?
I'll typically help with food. Rarely cash these days. It's just too hard to tell where the money really goes. (Unless the donations are through an organization)

Short anecdote - A friend met a homeless man on Haight St who in exchange for a burrito showed him some of his wild world. The man ended up taking him to an abandoned warehouse covered with mattresses and needles. The man opened up a bit and told my friend that when he asks for money, he doesn't care so much if people don't give it to him. But what gets to him after a while is how most people won't even acknowledge his existence when he asks. He said he understood if people said no, but he appreciated at least being told no or even simply looked at.

drum··on Ask HN: What accomplishment are you most proud of?
Agreed, kudos.
drum··on CEO of 5 year-old company who raised $4mil enters pitch contests to win $15k
It's stated in the prompt that the pitch could be for a "new business idea, solution or product". That seems clearly inclusive of existing businesses regardless of age. i.e. A 5 year old business releasing a new product. Sounds like fair game to me.
drum··on Show HN: GitHub Notifier – Emails for stars/forks your repos and new followers
Wow, as someone who just made their first public repo I can't believe GitHub doesn't already offer this. Great idea considering I've been checking my profile constantly to see if anyone's starred or followed me. With that being said, trust is my biggest barrier to entry right now. I'd be devastated if using this somehow affected my repos.
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