HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

iamtherockstar

86 karma · joined August 22, 2011

submissionscomments
iamtherockstar··on Archaeologists Officially Declare Collective Sigh Over "Paleo Diet"
I eat paleo as best as I can, but the reasoning for it less about "paleo" and more about thinking about what I'm putting in my body. If you put a package of Twinkies (or comparable snack still being made) on my desk at 9 AM, they'd be gone before lunch. I generally don't like thinking about food; I just want to eat and go on with life. Paleo tends to make those decisions easy for me.

> You want to know what the ideal human diet consists of? Everything. Humans can and will eat everything, and we are remarkably successful not in spite of this fact, but because of it. Our adaptability is the hallmark of the human species. We’re not called omnivores for nothing.

I agree with that, to an extent. Above mentioned Twinkies (I'm actually partial to Raspberry Zingers) tend to make me feel sick. :)

iamtherockstar··on B go beyond – Quadcopter/RC car combo
I can't believe there's not a pledge level like this:

"If you pledge $5, we'll send you a GI Joe to put inside your B"

Kickstart all the functioning GI Joe vehicles of my childhood.

iamtherockstar··on The Day our investors came to see the office (2011)
> I'm sorry, but

Are you? Are you really sorry?

iamtherockstar··on AOL Is Shutting Down AOL Music
I read the headline and thought that HR was literally watching Twitter while the internel jumbles were going on, and any employees tweeting about it were being fired. I thought "how innovative and terrible of HR." Turns out, the headline was just a bit weird.
iamtherockstar··on Alcatraz - Xcode package manager
Yeah, that was my question as well. I've often thought about plugins that I would want to write for Xcode, but there seems to be no documentation.
iamtherockstar··on A White Boy’s Observations of Sexism and the Adria Richards Fiasco
I spent two years as an LDS missionary in the Caribbean islands. Influence by slavery and indentured servitude, the most common races down there were African and Indian descent. White people were a rarity (so much so that it was common to hear people a block away yell out "White boy!" many times a day). Despite this, more than a few people would say things like "You're white. Things are easy for you." I thought this was crazy, since I was definitely a minority in the area, but now that I'm older, I see what they meant.
iamtherockstar··on Game designer Brenda Romero quits IGDA following party with hired female dancers
IGDA asks for opinions, and that's great, but it's demonstrative of how hard social change can be when it's a democracy: You wait for the majority of voting members to speak up about it before you really see it as a problem to address. Social change should probably be proactive, but that's a hard problem to solve.
iamtherockstar··on Game designer Brenda Romero quits IGDA following party with hired female dancers
If you're not familiar with her, Brenda wrote a book called "Sex in Games." She worked on a game about the Playboy Mansion. She's no prude, and she's very anti-censorship.

Combine that with the actions in the article, and I think there's a very compelling discussion that can take place about the difference between sex and sexism.

iamtherockstar··on Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
Android gained popularity because it was tied to Calendar and Gmail. These two services were pretty pervasive already, and so became the default in Android. When that happened, those two services became crucial to Android.

The fear that Contacts and Calendar will go away like Reader did (or, rather, will) is irrational. Reader barely had a mobile client version of it. With Google reigning in the branding on Android and requiring that it be tied even tighter to Google services, Gmail and Calendar became a dependency of Google's mobile OS.

iamtherockstar··on Cd command is broken
Huh? Since when do you always use 'ls' after 'cd' - I can think of many times that I don't need to do this, and it would annoy me if every time I called 'cd' it then printed out the directory listing as well.

The popular Unix mantra is "do one thing and do it well" - both these commands, while definitely connected, are each "one thing" and they both perform them very well.

iamtherockstar··on U.S. wants to attract hackers to public sector
I keep seeing people talking about this, but from my limited experience (< 1yr) working in the public sector, government work is not very hacker friendly. Hacker culture tends to value experience over traditional schooling, which doesn't jive well the public sector. Hackers culture tends to move fast, and get things done quickly, and government work tends to be bureaucratic and sometimes even political (though usually on a small scale).
iamtherockstar··on Kindleberry Wireless: A Portable Outdoor Hackstation
I loved the screen of the OLPC XO laptop. I know we're really pushing for high resolution/Retina displays, but when it comes to laptop and mobile screens, usability in portable/mobile situations is desirable.
iamtherockstar··on There are Ladies Present
At the time, I was young developer being asked to interview a somebody. If I'm honest, I was a little prideful that I was interviewing him, and not one of the other, more mature developers, so I took him through the process.

I think, knowing what I know now, and feeling confident in who I am as a developer, I'd probably at least ask about it in the interview. I'd say "Why did you choose to wear that shirt today?" Serious question. I'd be interested. Maybe the answer is "Because I don't really want this job" and then it's clear. Maybe it's "Because I don't want to work at a place that gets offended easily" or maybe it's "Because I didn't have any other clean laundry." I cannot think of a valid reason to wear that shirt to an interview, but I'd at least be interested in his reasoning (though he's still not getting the job).

iamtherockstar··on There are Ladies Present
I agree with this, fully and unequivocally. I have to wonder if "there are ladies present" might also be construed as sexist. Maybe we just shouldn't use toilet humor in situations where we're not absolutely sure everyone will find it appropriate.

Warning: offensive, but to demonstrate a point...

I once interviewed a guy who decided to wear a t-shirt to the interview that read "Thousands of my potential children died on your daughter's face last night". There were no women there. I was not really even offended (toilet humor is really hard not to giggle at, if for no other reason than I'm still 15 in my head somewhere). I was, however, careful not to let on that I noticed it at all. On the way out, he asked for a tour (he thought he was getting the job). When another coworker commented on his shirt he said "Yeah, I got another one that says 'Swallow it or it goes in your eye'." It was a 5 person company at the time, and none of them were female. Still, he wasn't getting the job; anyone with that much disregard (dare I say arrogance) for other's feelings isn't getting the job.

It's not about having men or ladies or kids present; it's about having a mutual respect for others, and being conservative about what setting they think toilet humor (or any humor) is appropriate.

iamtherockstar··on Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost
I saw a tweet yesterday that said "We test life in production".

I'm ashamed of companies that don't let their employees make little mistakes. If I made a mistake and the internet decided to DDoS my employer's site, I'd hope my employer thought the internet needed to cool off.

iamtherockstar··on Name.com hijacks non-existent subdomains and redirects to their servers
I actually just ran into this. I had a client forget to add a www CNAME record, so they thought the site was "hacked" when they added the www to their domain and got this parked site. Luckily, it's not a cached record, so when we fixed it, DNS servers started finding the right record immediately.
iamtherockstar··on Open source html5 roguelike 'Wayward' goes beta
I'm curious how they plan to monetize this. It's hard for me to invest too much into the "open web" for browser games when there's not a very clear way of monetizing browser games that doesn't mean "ads".

I feel like ads would affect the user experience. I'd rather be bringing your attention more to the game, rather than distracting you with things to click on that will take you away from the game.

iamtherockstar··on My experiences with Hacker News.
> it's obvious that HN cannot have calm discussions about a variety of hot-button topics

I have a need for my personal conversations with people to be enriching and helpful, and so this makes me super sad. It's a large reason why I don't often comment on things in Hacker News.

iamtherockstar··on Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones
On the contrary, due it being the same base, it will actually make the apps faster and more memory performant on the desktop, because it has to run in a constrained environment on mobile. I think it'll make for a more performant desktop OS.
iamtherockstar··on Ubuntu in 2013
And Mark with his millions out of pocket to invest in a company he believes in. If they were votes, he wins.

Do the capitalist thing and stop giving them money if you hate it ohsomuch.

iamtherockstar··on What It's Like To Work Future Style
After working remotely for more than 5 years, I can say with confidence that one of the best things you can do is not wear pants with an elastic waistband more than once a week (i.e. stop working in your pajamas).
iamtherockstar··on Building my Own Laptop
FPGA development has been one of those things that I've really wanted to get into, but each time, I spend days trying to get a toolchain set up (using the free Xilinx tools on Linux and/or Windows), and by then I'm tired, and decide to take a break. By the time I get back to it, the toolchain doesn't work anymore (because of some licensing crap) so I have to start all over.

I don't think I've been this excited about hardware in a long time. I'd kickstart this thing in a heartbeat.

iamtherockstar··on Show HN: An app for middle school students, made by a middle school student.
Someone should give your teacher a medal.
iamtherockstar··on Apple blocking SkyDrive from iOS store, wants cut of revenue
I work on the Ubuntu One iOS team. Our apps have this same issue. I think it really affects user experience, because you can't allow sign up for premium features, but you also can't even mention those premium features (say, with a link to where you can find out more). If you don't already know about them, you're not going to find out in the app.
iamtherockstar··on Forget Extinct: The Brontosaurus Never Even Existed
Related: There's apparently a similar thing happening with the triceratops/toroceratops. It's likely that the former is just an young version of the latter, not a different species.

http://www.newser.com/story/97112/triceratops-never-existed....

iamtherockstar··on Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?
My sister home schools two kids, cooks three squares a day, and doesn't care if someone knows she googled for "bread pudding recipe." They have an old, aging computer, and when I gave an Ubuntu CD to her husband, they were so incredibly grateful.

I see this feature being excellent for her, because she has a bunch of documents on her computer that contain her recipes, and then maybe she'll see a cookbook she might want to buy. Maybe she'll be looking for the days curriculum, and see a book that might help her youngest figure out her multiplication tables.

These are all relatively impractical use cases for the nerds of Hacker News. Ubuntu will still serve their needs, but Canonical wants to "cross the chasm" and have ordinary muggles using Ubuntu. Those people will find all of these features "valuable" and don't actually want to turn them off.

iamtherockstar··on Google+ Is Growing at Facebook Speed
I have my feed open a lot, but not because I'm reading it. It's because I opened the tab, clicked "Start a Hangout", and that Hangout window opened in a new window. The feed window is now hidden by the Hangout window, so the analytics might be skewed.
iamtherockstar··on Netflix CEO Hastings faces SEC action over Facebook post
I heard a story on NPR recently about how the SEC is dramatically underfunded, but I can't seem to find it now. If they're really that underfunded, I wonder if this is someone trying to make their career by finding a new and cheap way of bringing in revenue in fines.
iamtherockstar··on Tor exit node operator raided in Austria
The nature of Tor is such that you'll never, right? I suppose you could keep logs and analyze them, but that kind of defeats the purpose.
iamtherockstar··on Tor exit node operator raided in Austria
If you go to a bank, rob it, and then walk outside to a waiting taxi, and have the taxi drive you home, is the taxi driver an accessory? I think that in the US you'd really have to make a case that the taxi drive had knowledge of what had transpired.
Page 1 of 2Next →