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estenh

147 karma · joined May 23, 2011

Software Engineer at Twitter. I like storytelling and making cool stuff. Oh, and Python and JavaScript. @esten on Twitter.

Recovering journalist.

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estenh··on My weekend project: A Mac app to convert Vine videos to animated gifs
Glad you like it!
estenh··on My weekend project: A Mac app to convert Vine videos to animated gifs
Thanks!
estenh··on My weekend project: A Mac app to convert Vine videos to animated gifs
I'm kinda terrible at writing Mac apps, so any feedback is much appreciated.
estenh··on Lawrence Journal-World gets out of the CMS business, losing WordPress, etc
Every news organization that I've talked to that's used Ellington loves it. If they want to seriously make a change for the better in an industry dominated by antiquated CMSs that users hate, they need to open-source it. Hopefully they make the right choice here.
estenh··on What's this programming language?
So, uh... what does this say about PHP?

http://i.imgur.com/81uas.jpg

estenh··on Online JavaScript Hacking Game. How do you Rank?
Fun idea, but your auth is quite broken right now. I keep losing my work; very frustrating. Also, already lost my work on one challenge from clicking the I/O button.

I like the cool 80s nostalgia, but it's not super-usable.

estenh··on Unbreaking comments on tiny sites and tech blogs
Hmmm, interesting. Looks great on my Windows/Chrome setup. Mind emailing me a screenshot at esten.hurtle@gmail.com? Thanks so much!
estenh··on Unbreaking comments on tiny sites and tech blogs
Interesting about ownership affecting how users perceive changes to the site itself. You're 100% right on that, hadn't thought about it.
estenh··on Unbreaking comments on tiny sites and tech blogs
I'm just wondering what can be done to sort of capture that feeling of contributing to a community in places that already have large numbers of commenters. You're entirely right that it doesn't work at scale, but there's part of me saying it doesn't _have_ to work at scale. Maybe you can create dozens of tiny communities as part of one large one. I have no idea what that would look like, but it sounds intriguing, at least at this point.

On my blog, someone said they were considering assigning some heavily-moderated "contributor" slots to each post, where each would sort of be treated as an addendum to the post itself. That definitely strikes me as an interesting way to focus discussion to small groups, but also very difficult to handle in any kind of automated way. There's also the concept of focusing discussions into communities with similar topics, but I don't think you'd get the breadth of commentary that you would with other systems through that.

You're right though; the average comment is trash. The question I want to ask people is how they can motivate commenters to realize that what they're posting is trash and either just not post it or refine it.

estenh··on Show HN: Worldle- 24 Hour real time boggle HTML5 hackathon game
Oh, sweet! Thanks!
estenh··on Show HN: Worldle- 24 Hour real time boggle HTML5 hackathon game
Super cool, but I keep clicking the wrong letters when I go diagonally on my trackpad.
estenh··on Epic Systems, Digitizing Health Records Before It Was Cool
I have a friend who recently quit because of the crazy hours they were working him and the menial work he had to do. He told me he wasn't the only one quitting, lots of other people had been hired for similar positions and got frustrated and left.

This NYTimes piece on the company reads like an ad more than anything else. Pretty upsetting.

estenh··on Show HN: A friend and my CMU Webapps final project
Is this in Chrome? I've seen that happen in FF, and I'm pretty sure it's just due to the way the API works in that browser.

Not sure what's going on if it's in Chrome. Fairly minimal latency on both my Mac and Windows machine.

estenh··on Show HN: A friend and my CMU Webapps final project
I'll do my best to hack in a non-Facebook version when I get some time. Definitely a necessity.
estenh··on Show HN: A friend and my CMU Webapps final project
Taught by Anthony Tomasic this semester, but yes.
estenh··on Show HN: A friend and my CMU Webapps final project
Should start a bit slower now, and speed up as you play.
estenh··on Show HN: A friend and my CMU Webapps final project
Interesting. Should start fairly slow... The idea is to catch notes that are in key (black ones) while avoiding those that are out of key (red ones). I'll try to slow down the blocks a bit to make it easier.
estenh··on Show HN: A friend and my CMU Webapps final project
It probably wasn't, but we needed some way to save high scores, and "outsourcing" auth to FB was the simplest way. I've done other projects where that's optional, and that'll probably be the end goal for this as well.

If it's any consolation, I don't like sites that only use FB auth either... this is just a product of the time-constraint.

estenh··on Show HN: A friend and my CMU Webapps final project
We wrote a little game that should help with pitch recognition. Uses Couch for storing high scores, Redis for cache and Tornado for the server.

Makes use of Audiolib.js (https://github.com/jussi-kalliokoski/audiolib.js/) for audio that works in FF/Chrome. Bit weird in FF though, but at least it plays.

I did most of the JS and my friend did most of the backend. We were sorta on deadline, so the design isn't quite what I would call perfect (ha) and my JS is super-messy in places. Also, there are bits where I inexplicably use jQuery for stuff I had been doing without a framework and other weird inconsistencies like that, but hey, it works. Anyway, let me know what you think! Thanks.

estenh··on You Can't Hack Photography
Speaking as a photojournalist-turned-engineer, I think the idea of hacking photography is what got me into hacking software in the first place. I started collecting old cameras and fixing/modding them, making them do different things depending on what I liked, as opposed to what they were designed to do. Admittedly, being a gearhead doesn't help in the slightest, but playing around with cameras does lead to some interesting photography. Of course, all that hinges on having a somewhat relevant subject matter.

I had it explained to me once by one of my photoj professors that the photo consists of a message you're trying to convey about a subject. That can be done through technical proficiency or some strange artistic effects, so long as they all point towards the same message. Anything outside of that is just noise. Either technique for technique's sake or artistic effects for the effects' sake.

estenh··on Something Disintegrates at a Burger King
I watched this happen on Twitter. Hilarious distraction while I was doing some tedious work for class. Definitely didn't expect to see it on Gawker and ABC. Don't think the writer did either.

Now I'm just wondering when people will stop looking at this as some sort of societal commentary and realize it was just one guy having fun on Twitter while bored in a Burger King.

estenh··on Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative
I'm a CMU grad student and had to take a class using that over the summer. It's a cool idea, but sort of poorly written. Lots of time-outs, seems to only really work well in Firefox.
estenh··on [dead]
Muse makes markup that looks exactly like I thought it'd look: ridiculously impractical and invalid. Fun.
estenh··on Suggest HN: Hacker news circle on Google+
dondeesten
estenh··on 50% of iPhones Brought to Genius Bar Have Never Been Synced
Speaking of that, I'm wondering how iOS version updates gain market share so quickly if 50% of them never sync?

http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/01/what-percentage-o...

estenh··on 50% of iPhones Brought to Genius Bar Have Never Been Synced
I guess a better explanation of my point is: This surprises me, because it's iOS. If it were Android, I'd be surprised if 10% of people connected their phones to their computer ever.
estenh··on 50% of iPhones Brought to Genius Bar Have Never Been Synced
Back when I owned an iPhone, I used to sync it every other day. Since I switched to Android, I sync every few weeks. Software geared towards syncing versus software geared towards cloud services; it's all about how the OS is designed.
estenh··on Redesign.techcrunch.com
I like the basic use of space and layout, but the graphics are pretty crap. Bet that'll change though.
estenh··on A year on: Flash still not on the iPad, and that's still a good decision
I still find Flash useful on my Atrix for watching video-on-demand services, but its ability to use a touch-centric interface is atrocious. Not horribly upset that it isn't on my iPad.