HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

jm3

587 karma · joined February 23, 2007

i don't throw bombs i write code.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/jm3; my proof: https://keybase.io/jm3/sigs/nrbwUxRe4ie110jlT18E46Z44QmQ1MjdMap0eX0FHHY ]

submissionscomments
jm3··on Why Hoon?
Is this real?
jm3··on A closer look at Apple's breathing light
Internet lore claims Apple modelled their design after much research into sleep breathing rhythms. This piqued my curiosity, how did this wonderful little light work and how true was it to human breathing?
jm3··on Vote brigading: IMDb down-votes as revisionist genocide-denial
backing context:

[1] Distribution of votes: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4776998/ratings

[2] “Viral” genocide denial: https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2016/11/14/genocide-de...

jm3··on Shop: 180+ cognitive biases – an algorithmically designed poster
A visual remix of Wikipedia's 188 different cognitive biases that distort and refract our thinking: a beautiful cheat-sheet for your home or workspace.
jm3··on The Readability bookmarking service will shut down on September 30, 2016
would love to try it. what's it called?
jm3··on My time with Rails is up
Thanks for posting this, I otherwise I would never have learned about dry-rb, hanami, trailblazer, and rom-rb!
jm3··on Make Ruby Great Again [transcript]
I feel similarly: it's a scary message! I posted it and emphasized some of the points because I think it's important to not be complacent. If you're a rubyist who lived through the excitement and explosion of 2006-2010-ish, you might dismiss Node.js and friends as fads. You might assume that the rest of the world will have learned from the lessons of the Ruby community. Even if you don't believe those things, I wouldn't blame rubyists for assuming that previous pillars / saviors of the Ruby community — Yehuda, DHH, _Why, Matz, etc. — will soon stand up again and "make things right" by setting the tech community straight as to the benefits of Ruby / Rails.

But what this post concisely shows is that those heroes of the past probably won't. Many of them have moved on. Ruby hasn't been the "new shiny" darling of the open source community for some time. Ruby is in a very delicate transitional time. And unless the current group of active Rubyists take this very seriously, and ask how they (we!) can help make Ruby a durable, meaningful, dynamic, powerful community for the long-term, that much of the efforts and great work of Ruby and Rails will likely forgetten faster than you can say "down-vote".

see also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11789913

jm3··on Make Ruby Great Again [video]
This link jumps to the actual beginning of the talk, skipping the preamble which is mostly specific to RSpec, focusing instead on the crisis the Ruby community currently faces[1] and the opportunity / responsibility the community has to respond.

[1] namely that the shiny newness of M.E.A.N. and Node/React/Angular plus the widely discussed performance challenges of Ruby & Rails have put Ruby + Rails on the back burner in the zeitgeist.

jm3··on Showbox – Create amazing videos right in your browser
Few souls on HN will remember as far back as the (ahead of its time) Amiga / NewTek VideoToaster, but Showbox reminds me of how I felt when I first saw the 'Toaster.

One view of Showbox is that it's basically a browser-based version of something that 20 years ago was a industry-changing hybrid hardware/software workstation, and I think that says a lot for how far we've come.

jm3··on You Could Almost Do Anything Part II
satire is alive and well in the brand design world.
jm3··on Twitter will lock your account if you use a SharkLasers email address
you can; you can receive emails sent to the address via the website.
jm3··on Twitter will lock your account if you use a SharkLasers email address
I guess Twitter really wants to send you spam!

1. update twitter account to use a spam-proof SharkLasers email (click OK, confirm password)

2. Twitter sends automated email confirmation link to SharkLasers, click the link on SharkLasers website

3. Twitter locks the account

jm3··on Don’t Build a Billion-Dollar Business
1. Being male

2. Being white

3. Being cis

4. Being straight

5. Being born in the US

jm3··on Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
WTF do those acronyms mean? #ALM #PTC #FLOSS
jm3··on Show HN: Summaries of Paul Graham's essays
nice idea!

did you consider expanding this into a single page with inter-textual headers, instead of having to click to read each one? would love to speed-surf this :)

jm3··on Create iWatch UI product mocks and prototypes
now with editable  WATCH band colors. LADIES, START YOUR ENGINES
jm3··on Anyone Actually Using AWS Mobile (vs. FB Parse or CloudKit)?
well, i guess not
jm3··on Why doesn't Rails use SemVer?
WHY?
jm3··on Protean Echo – Fuse All Your Cards into One
Is it? Not sure, but the Coin team went gangbusters on the promotion and it seems to have worked great for them. I couldn't visit any social site today without someone talking about Coin. But I've a feeling that payment cards are far from a winner-take-all business.

The Protean Echo, OTOH, has been in development for some time. Thiago first gave me the demo at the Tech Brewery in Ann Arbor, MI and it blew the doors off anything we'd ever seen that was remotely similar. The form factor of the card itself — clear “Gorilla glass”, like the iPhone screen, with embedded circuits — and the whole user experience are beautiful. I just wish they'd hurry up and release it!

jm3··on Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before
His point was that people could use bare git without github, but many use Github, which isn't free according to three of the four freedoms RMS lists in the essay [1], no matter how much we hackers might love it. Lots of people love Excel, too, but that doesn't make it free software.

[1] Github:

    (0) freedom to run the program as you wish - YUP
    (1) freedom to study & change the source - NOPE
    (2) freedom to make and distribute exact copies - NOT SO MUCH
    (3) freedom to make and distribute copies of your modified versions - NO
jm3··on Underscore Price Dynamics
Agreed, it's completely unintuitive to a lot of software developers. I run a revenue API company for app developers to help them monetize free apps, and in three years, of all the paid app developers I've spoken with, exactly zero have initially believed me that free App Store apps can generate revenue to even approach the revenue they think they'll capture with a for-pay app. They don't realize that the avalanche of free apps is going to crush them like a Mack truck.

Common sense, creator's optimism, and B-school economics all suggest that paid beats free, I get it. But, sh-t's changed. Chris Anderson wrote Free: The Future of a Radical Price five YEARS ago, but I wish more creators and developers on HN took the ideas described there to heart.

jm3··on How to Publish Open-Source Code
When you sent me this last night, I lost a few minutes getting my head around what it was best used for. Now I can't stop thinking about it as a pointer to the future of JS lib loading.

    + 1 star: Identifies inefficiencies in the sea of endless loaders & metaframeworks
    + 1 star: Zero-configuration network-based lib loading
    + 1 star: Clean presentation & clear thinking about the problem
    + 1 star: Tests!
    + 1 star: Brilliant name
Five stars, would do business again.
jm3··on Show HN: a slightly smart dotfiles installer
"Smart" in the sense that:

* it keeps itself current by simply running `dots`

* it installs / uninstalls vim plugins from git

* it cleans up after itself with `dots remove`

"Slightly" in the sense that it doesn't require a lot of external dependencies like other ruby gems, homebrew, etc. to bootstrap.

Feedback + suggestions welcome!

jm3··on Why isn't there a Kickstarter for killing patents?
RPX[1] is doing some interesting things with Patent Troll Insurance, but it's really only a viable option for huge corporations who want to buy into the troll-defense patent pool.

[1] http://www.crowell.com/NewsEvents/AlertsNewsletters/all/Cour...

jm3··on Bootstrap 3 RC1
That's great news if it's true. Happen to have a link or citation backing that up??
jm3··on Media Queries are a Hack
And the first computers were humans (women) doing things like plotting missile trajectories for the military. Technologies drift.
jm3··on Why Ruby?
Hard to imagine anything more horrible or harassing than posting a photo of someone.
jm3··on Why we're moving away from Ember.js
It would be helpful if some of you could share links to the production Ember apps you're working on.
jm3··on GIMP 2.9/2.10 Feature Preview
It's hard for me to imagine any software reaching adoption "escape velocity" with a name as noxious as The Gimp. Rather than adding more features, a more evocative name might make "GIMPing" more appealing to a larger community.
jm3··on Svbtle Funding
At least 40,000 if Twitter followers are anything to judge by: https://twitter.com/dcurtis
Page 1 of 4Next →