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elliottcable

47 karma · joined September 16, 2008

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elliottcable··on US Treasury Guidance on Virtual Currencies (aka Bitcoins)
Unless I mis-understand, isn't this basically money laundering? Or rather, I suppose, bitcoin laundering?
elliottcable··on The perfect standing hacker desk
Actually, I’m moving all of this into an office in the next month or so, and renting out this last room.
elliottcable··on The perfect standing hacker desk
P.S.: Forgive the WoW shot; it’s the only game I had installed when I set it up. Hate that game. >,>

Also, I cannot recommend this GelPro mat highly enough. A several-thousand-dollar Anthro desk is great, and I love it; but this $US 200 standing mat really “makes the setup.” Without it, standing was an absolute pain; with it, I’ve been standing for weeks, and have absolutely no desire to ever sit down again.

elliottcable··on The perfect standing hacker desk
For those interested, here’s the involved equipment:

• Anthro Corp’s “Elevate Adjusta” desk, http://www.anthro.com/computer-furniture.aspx?desk=elevate-a...

• Mac Pro, Apple 27″ LCDs

• a Monitors in Motion “Boa III” fully-adjustable triple-monitor arm, http://www.monitorsinmotion.com/products/boa#boa_iii

• a GelPro Plush standing mat, http://www.gelpro.com/page/gelpro_plush_styles

• an old Drobo for storage (I’ll be replacing this soon)

Since the videos there, it’s been updated with:

• Denon AVR-3310CI receiver

• Martin Logan “Source” freestanding speakers

• Martin Logan “Dynamo 700” mini-sub

• a shitty printer

• a shitty shredder (under the desk)

• a shitty minifridge (also under the desk)

Edits: Fuck Hacker News’s terrible fucking formatting system. JUST GIVE US FUCKING MARKDOWN.

elliottcable··on Google Chrome Beta update: Fullscreen support [OSX Lion] and Native Client
I’ve been using Safari as my ‘relaxation browser’ for ages; Chrome never felt “right” to me, even though I use it every day for development and various other reasons.

Interestingly enough, I’ve heard the same thing as you just pointed out, out of a lot of people since Lion. A lot of people who had previously laughed at me for remaining with Safari (as if it’s somehow inherently inferior to Chrome? I’ve never quite understood it.) are now, themselves, switching back … just for gestures, as far as I can tell.

I have to ask: Is it really that much of a life-changing feature for you, in a browser?

elliottcable··on Going Paper-Free for $220
eBooks?
elliottcable··on Cool, but obscure Unix tools
Not actually true; you can play it in terminal/ncurses mode.
elliottcable··on Sinatra in 8 lines
I actually spent an inordinate amount of time calculating the ideal a while back. As a sometime designer, I’m quite intimately familiar with the limits of comfortable reading for the human eye. After a silly quantity of math, I arrived at exactly 115 columns in fixed-width text as the ideally comfortable balance between readability and compactness.

Subtracting two for `diff` output, I hard-wrap all of my source-code and documentation files at column 113 exactly, and have for quite a while. It results in some quite sane output, in my opinion: https://github.com/elliottcable/Paws.c/blob/d2a5f3f/Source/P...

There are, of course, arguments to be made about source code itself; arguments you didn’t generally need to worry about at 78 characters, but that start to come into play when given that extra 35 columns; you need to start worrying about whether a given line of code is sane or readable once it starts to stretch towards 113 characters. There’s some situations where that’s perfectly normal and looks fine; but there’s also several where that indicates a serious problem in your code’s style. It’s just one more thing to think about while you design your source code.

elliottcable··on Tumblr is Down – Fans Angry
Simply put, what mcdavis said. GitHub also has a history of being communicative during issues; not to mention near-instantaneous fixes of problems (anybody remember how unbelievably quickly they re-architected their entire site to deal with the scaling and speed problems that had barely started to surface? how about the lack of speed issues since?) as opposed to these things I’m hearing of people seeing the same, obvious, bugs over the last two years or so.
elliottcable··on Tumblr is Down – Fans Angry
“… scrupulous amounts of text messages …”

  scru•pu•lous |ˈskroōpyələs|
  adjective
  (of a person or process) diligent, thorough, and extremely attentive to details
    “the research has been carried out with scrupulous attention to detail.”
  • very concerned to avoid doing wrong
      “she's too scrupulous to have an affair with a married man.”
What?
elliottcable··on Tumblr is Down – Fans Angry
Keyword, I think, being “was.”
elliottcable··on Tumblr is Down – Fans Angry
Let’s compare:

http://twitter.com/tumblr/status/11570891053862912 … 130 characters, 21 words, no actual information other than that which could be assumed: we’re working on it (can be assumed), we’re sorry (should be hoped).

https://github.com/blog/744-today-s-outage … ~2,000 characters, 335 words, and an absolute plethora of transparency and information. In fact, more than we probably needed to know, even the techies among us… but nonetheless, quite reassuring and friendly on GitHub’s part.

I’m sorry, Tumblr. You’re failing. Not technically; nobody cares about a little downtime, you’re not Google, you don’t make aircraft stay in the air, you don’t track weather patterns that could tear apart an entire coast, the world’s not going to end. No. What you’re failing at is being that which it is absolutely most imperative for you to be, being which itself being the single impetus for your existence: a friendly, transparent, communicative tech entity that your users can trust.

elliottcable··on [dead]
Actually, I doubt it will take you all that long. At one point, I was following ~1,900 people; I unfollowed all of them to get back to the essence of things… since then, I’ve climbed back to 600, and I don’t believe it took me more than, hm… a few months? If you’re trying to re-amass such a following, instead of trying to keep it down (as I was), you shouldn’t have any trouble at all :D
elliottcable··on Save Google Wave
You’re confusing Wave and Google Wave. Google killing Google Wave essentially kills Wave as a whole, at this point; we all think Google’s web-client sucked fucking balls, but there’s not much we could do about that. What matters is that Google killing their shitty client, along with their back-end provider, also kills the ecosystem, because it’s so young.
elliottcable··on Vows - Asynchronous BDD Framework for Node.js
Oh, and on that same topic; as a personal friend of the creator of this library, I can very very much vouch for his sense of style. ;D
elliottcable··on Vows - Asynchronous BDD Framework for Node.js
This is absolutely fine: a creator who has no ‘style’ will not only fail to care enough to create a quality landing page for their creations, but it’s quite likely that the creation itself will have no style as well.

That means, for you… difficult-to-use APIs, obtuse / nonexistent documentation, a lack of quality (if any) support… the list goes on; and worst of all, it will likely attract a user community of the same type of people, leaving you with an extensions/libraries/modules ecosystem with exactly the same problems in abundance.

The spices, my friend, are what matters. (Also, I personally see a very close correlation between when the current, beautiful, website was contributed to Ryah’s work, and when it took off and gained massive “popularity.” Coincidence? No.)

elliottcable··on Kaleidoscope - File comparison for Mac released
Obvious solution: Stop using SVN. Versions is a great app, but it’s long since time to move on.

That said, Kaleidoscope is pretty neat! :D

elliottcable··on Ask HN: How long did it take you to get ramen profitable?
And here’s the answer, for anyone curious: http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html
elliottcable··on Ask HN: How long did it take you to get ramen profitable?
What’s ‘ramen profitable’ mean?
elliottcable··on _why is no more
Of course, downvote me because I’m not mourning somebody who, if you’ll notice, isn’t dead /-:
elliottcable··on _why is no more
Good riddance.