jsingleton

Good news and great timing!

I had a four part blog post series on Xamarin.Forms and .NET on a Mac planned for this week. Starting with this introductory post today: https://unop.uk/cross-platform-native-mobile-app-development...

As I understand it, Visual Studio for Mac is simply a re-branded Xamarin Studio and will continue to be. It includes the improvements they had planned for the next release but I doubt they will do a rewrite.

I actually prefer Xamarin Studio over Visual Studio (on Windows) in some respects. For example, the Xamarin.Forms XAML previewer is much better. Looking forward to a full designer.

P.S. I've got a four part blog post series this week on Xamarin.Forms. Starting with this today: https://unop.uk/cross-platform-native-mobile-app-development...

I'd firstly pick a country and then look at job boards for that location. For example, assuming you mean abroad relative to the US, then I run https://cleanwebjobs.com, which is mostly UK based.

Perhaps, but it's hard to prove either way. https://protonmail.com is a better domain though.

I remember this from a few years ago. The only recent updates appear to be a change to the tutorial link.

If you haven't clicked through to the inspiration (http://www.coboloncogs.org/HOME.HTM) then it's well worth a look. Although the Rails page doesn't look like that any more, so it's not quite as funny.

I think it's probably fine. It only pre-populates a form and doesn't automatically submit. It's also almost exactly the same as the official Bookmarklet that's linked to from the footer of most pages on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html

OK, I could have been more precise in my wording. I meant that it monitor photos that you take with your phone camera not that it constantly monitors what the camera sees. I didn't intend to mislead and I think that's a reasonable interpretation.

I still think that this is unexpected behaviour. It belongs in the camera app, not the maps app. The expectation is that apps are sand-boxed and separate from each other.

I have anecdotal evidence from friends who don't normally care about issues like this. Yet they felt compelled enough to pro-actively share this with comments similar to "NO GOOGLE!", which suggests it's not just me.

+1 for OSM and OsmAnd. Often much better data than Google and it works offline. Although the UI can lag a bit at times.

Worth donating to OSM if you use it: https://donate.openstreetmap.org

Seems like people actually like this feature judging by the response‽ Or maybe they just work for Google. :)

Looks promising. There are plenty of issues with Disqus and running a full Discourse instance just for comments is probably overkill.

This is my current low-tech solution on https://unop.uk that works on any page (or any site for that matter):

  <a href="javascript:window.location=%22https://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.location)+%22&amp;t=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.title)">Submit / Comment on Hacker News</a>

Nice work!

How does the initial submission to the sites work? Am I missing something or is this currently a manual process? It would be cool if it submitted on the first comment.

N.B. If you auto add all your blog posts to HN you will get silently blocked from submitting (although it will still appear to work from your point of view). You will then need to, firstly notice this, then email the mods to get unblocked.

I've hit this myself, so now I just include a simple link to:

    javascript:window.location=%22https://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.location)+%22&t=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.title)

You can see this at the bottom of all my posts on https://unop.uk and I've seen others do something similar.

One thing I (and many non-technical friends) found creepy recently is how Google Maps monitors your phone camera. An update quietly pushed this on-by-default feature for the purpose of prompting you to add images to their product.

I wrote more on this and how to disable it here: https://unop.uk/on-google-maps-geotagging-and-privacy

Edit: looks like they have pushed out at least two new on-by-default features since I wrote this (not that long ago); 'photo view count opportunities' and 'new and popular places'.

Disclaimer: I don't use Tesco Bank so this is just speculation and some observations.

The types of 2FA vary dramatically between banks. Some use an SMS OTP but as we know phone numbers aren't secure [0]. Most use a card reader but they often do this differently. Some use the 'identify' function to log on and the 'sign' function for payments (as designed) but others use the 'respond' function for everything. The danger in using 'respond' for payments is that the account and amount aren't entered into the card reader so you don't know what you are authorising.

<pure-speculation>

If Tesco have a flaw in how they are using 2FA, by only using 'respond', then local malware could intercept genuine payments, alter the account/amount details, and get the user to authorise this. Or Android malware could intercept SMS messages. N.B. This assumes the issue is in the faster payments system but it could be in the payment card system. It appears cash points still work but this is a separate system to debit card payments.

</pure-speculation>

From what I've read no one will lose money but having transactions frozen is still a big inconvenience. As mentioned elsewhere here, this is why it's a good idea to have many different bank accounts from various parent institutions (also important from a deposit guarantee position). Some banks share the same infrastructure and liability. Always have some cash available too, although that is getting harder to spend everywhere [1].

[0]: https://unop.uk/phone-numbers-for-examples-and-user-identifi...

[1]: https://unop.uk/do-you-accept-cash/

It's not an apostrophe, it's a single quote. The article title is:

> Smoking 'causes hundreds of DNA changes'

I'm guessing HN trimmed the closing quote to change it to:

> Smoking 'causes hundreds of DNA changes

It's now been changed to:

> Smoking “causes hundreds of DNA changes”

Those are weird quotes too, not the normal ". There are lots of different quote characters. :)

Pedants will probably like this magazine: http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/df/b7/74/dfb7741e5e84...

Not silly at all. It can't run faster, as there is a maximum speed your machine could do this. Doing it in the background can't change this but it is non-blocking. Many threads won't always help speed it up, but it does get it off of the UI thread. For example, the browser process may be single threaded or already using all the available cores it can.

Asynchronous behaviours, including synchronising with the UI aren't free and all add overhead. Of course the benefit is that the app stays responsive to user input.

Some problems can be performed in parallel, but even if they can then it may slow them down. Orchestration isn't free and unless you can use more cores it probably won't help. I wrote a simple demo of this in .NET Core [0] for a book [1] (where I've written more on these topics, from a C# perspective).

It may not be intuitive to web developers, as the server is naturally blocking and async has a different effect on HTTP request/responses. Yet if you've done any desktop/mobile app work then you'll know it's very important to not do anything intensive on the UI thread. It's a pretty common mistake to make.

[0]: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/ASP.NET-Core-1.0-High-Per...

[1]: https://unop.uk/book

+1 for worrydream.com. I don't mind the scrolling, once you're in a post it's fine. It's an experiment in UX after all.

This is the best one I've read: http://worrydream.com/#!/ClimateChange

The visualisations and interactions are really helpful in aiding understanding. It's nice to see people trying out new ways of presenting information.

ASP.NET Core 1.0 High Performance: https://unop.uk/book

The book is already out: https://unop.uk/book

The examples are in .NET Core (the cross-platform parts are more Mac than Linux focussed) but really it's a general guide on how to make web applications perform well.

I really like C# and .NET as a stack, just like the OP. It may not be cool but it works well and they are good skills to have for stable employment prospects.

The new .NET Core stuff is looking very promising too. I really hope it takes off, and not just because I have a book out on it :).

C# and .NET Core are really nice to work with but there is still quite a bit of change going on with .NET Core. Hopefully it will bed down a bit after 1.1.

C# is a great language if you use the features well. Async/await and ThingOf<T> etc.

I know .NET has a bit of a bad reputation in some parts of the tech community but it's a great skill to have for stable job prospects. It doesn't matter if it's not cool. :)

Disclaimer: I wrote a book on .NET Core so I clearly have a vested interest in it doing well.

C# is a really nice language. I'm hoping that the new .NET Core work will expand its reach beyond mainly Windows and get it popular on other platforms. Otherwise my book isn't going to do very well. :)

There are a few issues, but to be fair I've encountered similar things in all the cloud and VPS hosting services I've used. However, I do remember that I was once trying to push Azure as a solution and they promptly had an outage. We went with AWS instead. It's not that AWS don't have outages, they do, just that the timing was really bad.

Also, don't use the preview services in Azure apart from to try them out. They really are previews.

I've recently written a three part series of blog posts on AWS vs Azure. The third part, on pricing, is out today.

https://unop.uk/on-aws-vs-azure-vendor-lock-in-and-pricing-c...

Edit: One plus of Azure (at least for me) is that it runs on renewable energy. https://www.microsoft.com/about/csr/environment/renewable_en...

Greenwash is definitely a problem. As a rule of thumb, if the company does something regular and some elements have simply been marketed as green then that doesn't count. The main focus has to be improving the environment.

I've heard good things about both https://www.fastmail.com and https://protonmail.com so would be good to hear your experiences after a bit more use.

Simply !s works too.

The criteria aren't set in stone but the company should be environmentally focused. In other words, they should be actively trying to do something green. Take a look at the example companies I mentioned above and also the about page for a better idea. I could write something down if that's in demand but I think it's better to stay flexible on the definition and not be too formal.

Use alternatives? For example, https://duckduckgo.com for search.

To add to this, here are some charts that I put together for https://cleanwebjobs.com.

Tech skills desired by employers: https://twitter.com/CleanwebJobs/status/767684601615704064

Tech skills available in the marketplace: https://twitter.com/CleanwebJobs/status/767683809714245632

Python and JavaScript are the biggest players along with UX/UI design (not really development). Seems to match the data above.

Unfortunately we don't track remote work independently, but I may be able to trawl through the location data to extract this information.

BTW I have a recent Show HN on this if you have other comments that would take this thread too far off-topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12759415

If you are ever required to give a phone number but don't want to then you can use an official fictional one. This means no-one else will have access to it (or be annoyed by it). Same with email addresses.

If you need access then you could use https://smsprivacy.org or https://dtmf.io. I've not tried these though. Or of course you could build something yourself with https://www.twilio.com or https://www.nexmo.com.

I wrote a bit about this here: https://unop.uk/phone-numbers-for-examples-and-user-identifi...

I think it would be good to add an optional salary range field and then you could test how many people fill it in. You could even try and scrape existing posts to see who has put it in the description.

Then you could allow candidates to filter/sort on it. Or even better, prioritise jobs with salary above those keeping it secret, highest at the top.

We require a salary on Cleanweb Jobs and it hasn't put that many companies off. However, we're mainly UK focused and a lot of job ads already list a salary here.