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joallard

899 karma · joined November 24, 2012

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joallard··on Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface
Weirdly, it reminds me of Aptos, the new default font in Microsoft products.
joallard··on On Coding, Ego and Attention
The author has overfitted for his own psychology. There are a lot of assumptions in there. My brain doesn't work like that at all.
joallard··on Keybase cancels Stellar token airdrop
Seems like a lot of people are saying the airdrop and integrating Stellar to Keybase was a bad idea, but I don't think so. There's a lot I like in the Stellar-Keybase integration.

Keeping cryptocurrency keys secure has always been a challenge. Keep them too well, lose your money; keep them not well enough, someone can steal your money. It's a thin line to walk.

Keybase wants to make encryption user-friendly, and keeping cryptocurrency keys secure fits very well to that purpose. This is probably the least painful way I've kept crypto private keys.

Besides, the wallet is pretty functional, and is integrated to an app that's already sync'd to my phone and computer. It's without fuss and just works. Compare that to yet another app which I don't know, need to evaluate, don't trust to keep my secrets, or won't share them across my devices. Here, it's painless.

I personally knew Stellar already, but as a technical user (which I feel is a natural demographic for any crypto to start to get early adopters), this brought back Stellar in my mind and renewed my interest (or would've interested me if I hadn't known it).

Besides, I quite like Stellar as a cryptocurrency for payments: fees are low, and confirmations are near instant. And I'm not even naming the fact that it natively allows you to keep fiat money as a Stellar asset instead of exposing yourself to the risk of losing value to fluctuation. (Though there are caveats, but the infrastructure is there natively to build very useful things.)

I don't think this was quite bad a move as some make it out to be.

joallard··on What I wish I knew when I became CTO
I've seen exactly this in a local well-regarded startup. Incompetent hires with problematic behaviors thriving and being protected, and competent hires being unprotected, not cared about, and almost pushed out.

They would hire almost anyone, and then not take active action in maintaining a healthy staff. Needless to say, it's not going very well over there, regardless of the CTO being quite technically proficient.

joallard··on “a single PHP file called ”index.php“ generating $2,342.04 in a day”
As always, the implementation here, the lines of code in index.php, doesn't really matter. Anyone can code a job board given enough time. The questions that matter are rather how he got his audience to come to it:

- How did he make his offering known to potential clients? - Why did the clients choose his page, over the N many competitors out there? What's different or better about it? - Conversely, how does he get his job-seekers? Are they of particular quality?

The index.php file is old news. The getting employers and candidates together in a nice package is the valuable part.

(I'd actually be looking forward to hearing about the making of this job market.)

joallard··on Git 2.11 has been released
Case-insensivity is important for some to be able to reliably remember a string. I won't easily retain the difference between 'b4dQbFs31' and 'b4DqBfs31'.

Same thing when speaking it out loud. 'B four D capital Q B capital F s thirty-one' is way more convoluted and error-prone than 'B four D Q B F S thirty-one'.

The best thing I've found that fits this criterion is Crockford's Base 32 [1], basically the extension of hex digits, removing letters ILOU.

But Base 32 (case-insensitivity by proxy) constrains us to 5 bits, which is only a 20% reduction over the 4 bits of base 16. So instead of the 20 bits `1ab2f` we could express them with something like `1qm3`.

Or we could be using words...

[1]: http://www.crockford.com/wrmg/base32.html

joallard··on The P programming language
"rlang" is not really fun to search for either
joallard··on I created Godwin's Law in 1990 as a warning
Not at all, trolling is just a way to provocate people and make th— waaiit a minute...!
joallard··on How we use Slack in our family
Evil coder is making it easier for his family to buy stuff from our site, better send him a cease and desist!
joallard··on CodeReddit: Cover UI for Reddit at Work
I guess JS really is the new PHP
joallard··on Game about squares
Can't click or interact with anything on Firefox 33a. Just an unresponsive start screen.
joallard··on Hachette/Amazon Business Interruption
What about Paypal? I've heard complaints against them time and time again, and alternatives have popped up in competition because they sucked too much. Stripe, Square?
joallard··on Google Made My Daughter Cry Today
The problem with that is that it's unsustainable. How many ie. Ben Adams would this work with, ben@adams.me? 1. Now Ben Adams owns `adams.me` and has no incentive or mechanism to offer his domain to the million other people with his last name.
joallard··on Show HN: Probabilistically Generating HN Post Titles
A Man Walks All Day to Create Spectacular Snow Patterns

Understanding the code quality of the Fibonacci Sequence

Gmail.com being MITM'd by Iran using this idea by now: Font Icons.

joallard··on Show HN: How much does Twitter owe me
Ah. So this takes my no. of tweets, * (hourly/60) and feeds me back that number? Genius.

(Protip: if you estimate at 60$/h, it's 1$/tweet. You're welcome.)

joallard··on Show HN: How much does Twitter owe me
This fails to explain by what logic would Twitter have to pay me/owe me for my tweets.

Are they selling my tweets? Are they asserting rights over what I've written? Maybe I've missed something, but there's no explanation.

joallard··on Show HN: Roomerly - Find the perfect roommate.
I wish I could use this with critical mass in my home city of Montreal. I just searched HN for 'roommates' thinking, "there's gotta be a better way to do this! someone must've talked about it." And here we are.

Searching for a new home with other people is indeed tiring. I wish you well!

joallard··on Foundation 4.3: Paving the Road to 5
There's even a mixin for that!

    @include grid-column(3);
(There's a mixin for practically everything, documented at the bottom of every docs page, eg http://foundation.zurb.com/docs/components/grid.html)
joallard··on Ask HN: How do you focus?
I find having a pair of headphones on with music makes all the difference; it's like getting into a bubble. Over time, I think I've associated it with the state of being focused.
joallard··on Can I help you? Why retail customers always say No
When I was working at an electronics shop, we would ask "have you been served yet?" It's a much harder question to get out and customers responded better.
joallard··on Distributed Personal Wiki
There's also Gitit (https://github.com/jgm/gitit), backed by Pandoc and Git, supports Markdown and anything you can throw at Pandoc.
joallard··on New GitHub Pages domain: github.io
May I interest you in the .src project instead then? ;o) http://dot-src.info
joallard··on Two-Factor Authentication: Too Little, Too Late
That's an article from 2005, as someone would have surely pointed out, but I found the topic to be relevant as there is now a trend of companies like Google, Dropbox adopting two-factor auth and the security implications of that.
joallard··on The Handshake Deal Protocol
Replies are usually embedded in email.
joallard··on Your Credentials Are Holding You Back
For happiness, I agree, although often a significant lack of money will hinder happiness and render unhappy.
joallard··on Your Credentials Are Holding You Back
> First, eliminate your debt load.

Need money?

1. Make money

Now here's my guide to happiness in life:

1. Become happy.

Voilà. Problem solved. Enjoy.