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koopajahon Valgrind is much more than a leak checking tool

I remember trying multiple solutions with exception files and such but not having a lot of luck at filtering the ones I did not care about while keeping my own errors displayed. It's clearly user error on my end but I always gave up and rewrote smaller samples without external dependency when I could.

koopajahon Founders at Work: Steve Wozniak

I read this book last year and my favourite interview was Steve Perlman's, the founder of WebTV (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Perlman). I was amazed at the things they did at Catapult Entertainment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBAND). And even more amazed to discover he also founded OnLive even if it did not work out in the end.

I was also blown away by Mike Lazaridis' stories about RIM especially when reading it so many years after the iphone/android launch.

koopajahon Valgrind is much more than a leak checking tool

I love valgrind and it saved my ass countless time when tracking memory leaks or overflows. The main issue I've always had with it is filtering the output easily. When you use external libraries (portaudio or Qt for example but also proprietary libraries I had to use at work) a lot of the debug messages pollute what is really yours and your leak is then a needle in a haystack.

koopajahon Qt Weekly #21: Dynamic OpenGL implementation loading in Qt 5.4

I've encountered a lot of issues on Windows XP with QT/Angle but also quite a lot on Windows Vista/7 where the graphic drivers by default don't support properly OpenGL or pretend they do but don't answer properly to Qt's requests. This ended up with a big chunk of my users having a blank window or even no window displayed to them and no way to reliably detect this on our end.

This feature has been in the works for multiple months now and I'm really glad to finally see it ship officially with Qt 5.4, so congrats to the team!

koopajahon Slack's New Arbitration Policy

I did not understand the sentence that way even after reading multiple times but that seems to make sense now. I must have been too biased when reading it before. Thank you for pointing this out.

koopajahon Slack's New Arbitration Policy

Sorry if I wasn't clear enough. What I mean is that if in 3 years my company needs to have access to some logs, they will have to go through the multi-steps process but then have access to whatever they need (starting from today's logs)

What I meant was that the possibility to access private chats should stay not retroactive and only happen once the company has explicitly stated it will need this feature enabled.

EDIT: so that if my company has no legal needs today it won't have access to private chats made today once they decide in the future that they now need the feature

koopajahon Slack's New Arbitration Policy

What I don't understand is why not have this be "opt-in". Meaning if your company does not need this feature for real legal reasons they don't enable it and everyone is happy. I've heard a few people saying they did not want this feature in Hipchat and would have to switch to make sure there team was not suspicious. If my company never needs to access private chats for legal reasons, there is no reason it should be enabled today and they can have access to it in 3 years.

I understand specific companies have specific needs and Slack has to meet some of these but there is no reason that this should impact everyone else.

koopajahon Slack's New Arbitration Policy

You could say they just learnt from the Hipchat announcement and remebered to address the issue head-on which makes it seem like they really care. But in the end the problem is exactly the same and your company will now have access to whatever you write including private chats. Personally that means I'll ensure to avoid private chat on Slack and use external tools again on top of everything I already use which is clearly annoying.

koopajahon French bank security breach 25m loss

According to the article the real loss is 800.000€ on a specific branch and could be up to 25 millions nationally.

koopajahon Slack raises $120M on $1.12B valuation

Other discussion based on the techcrunch article here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8538559

koopajahon Tell: Got 50% bump for faking a counter offer

When I look for a job I apply to multiple companies at the same time when I find job openings that match what I'm looking for and also apply to companies I'd love to work for that don't have openings.

So I end up having multiple phone interviews and then on-site interviews until I get one or more good offers. Just recently I got 3 really good offers in the span of two weeks and took the time to chose the one I really wanted to accept. I told each company I was interviewing at other places too and wanted some time to think.

koopajahon Backstabbr: A modern web interface for the classic board game Diplomacy

That's a question I'm clearly interested in! I just moved to another country and am working on a website to play my favourite board games with my family and was wondering if I could publish it on github or if I should keep this private as I don't have the rights for the board game.

koopajahon Move Fast, Don't Break Your API

I understand how you handle it on your end but let's assume I decide to build an API for a language you don't support yet. In a few months when you add new versions of the API where some fields become optional or mandatory, then won't I have to know all this as the library developer and handle each case? Because some of my users would expect to still be able to send the charge amount while others would not.

I'm more thinking in the idea of doing some "pre-validation" in my library to avoid an API call from the client when something is already expected to fail (like missing the amount field right now) which would not fail with a new version of the API. So I would have to adapt to each version to know that this user would require the amount field while another one would not.

koopajahon Move Fast, Don't Break Your API

Does it also mean that when doing an API client library for stripe you have to handle all this complexity about versionning? Because if someone updates to the latest version of the library but still wants to use the old way of creating a charge (staying on the example where charge would now always be 1$) he would want to be able to do it without having to find an older version of the library that supported this API version.

koopajahon The Quality, Popularity, and Negativity of 5.6M Hacker News Comments

Found it quickly on https://hn.algolia.com/ it was a thread titled "Steve Jobs - To All iPhone Customers" and here is the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=51226#up_51333

But I agree, I read some of the worst comments and would be nice to get a link to the discussion for each of these to get some contexts!

koopajahon Rails dev needed to help build a community in the video game space

you should consider posting in the monthly "who's hiring" thread, the october one was posted a few hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8394339

koopajahon Show HN: HackerBracket – What are you working on?

Was gonna say this now that I've seen it work! From a first inspection this makes me think of producthunt but maybe for projects in progress or not launch-ready?

koopajahon Show HN: HackerBracket – What are you working on?

Oh just tried in Chrome and loads fine, might be a Firefox issue there?

koopajahon Show HN: HackerBracket – What are you working on?

Seems to be loading indefinitely for me, do you have to signup to see anything?

koopajahon Open-source client scaffolds and API pricing

Helpdesk/support applications would need this too to automatically create tickets, update status, send your answer, etc.

koopajahon Ask HN: What's your best startup idea that you're not going to pursue?

We bought a tactile desktop computer designed for elder people (www.ordimemo.com) for my grandmother 3 years ago. She loved it... at first. The idea of receiving emails and pictures from all of us and having access to "the internet" really pleased her. But after a few months she kind of stopped using it because it had too many issues. I'm going to list some of them in case it gave ideas to people:

* based on IE7 so a lot of websites don't work/render properly. This does not seem important when the core of your users go on google/wikipedia and that's it. But my grandmother loves to order online but is limited to amazon because most of the other websites don't work properly. She would gladly pay more to be able to simplify most of the main websites UI for her and ease her order flow.

* Impossible to have more than one tab. This seems logical at first because it simplifies everything, but when she is ordering something as a gift and wants to look for an address she has to close the whole application and go in "notebook" and start over again. Same with the idea of having multiple tabs in IE.

* Email services really limited. Their idea is to avoid spam you have to whitelist every email address. But this is not negotiable, so when you order for the first time online you can't use your system's email because you'll never get the "confirm your email address". Or you use a gmail account for this which immediately make things too complicated for her.

* Most of the other features (games especially) are really limited/dumb such as having to recognize a banana. Creating games for her is something I'm planning to do but with the old browser inside the machine it makes things harder.

* Pictures management! We all send pictures to her by email but she can't organize them at all. I've been thinking of a UI for this but when I draw it/explain it I immediately see she would be completely lost. She needs a simple UI on top of explorer of something that would do "delete, crop, move, rename, add comments". And on top of that the main feature she needs is "print it for me and mail it to me". Websites already exist for this feature but she would have to understand how to upload photos and then use them which is clearly impossible.

* Keyboard! Another big issue for her is being able to raise her arms high enough for a long period of time to type an email on the screen with the tactile keyboard. At the same time, the keyboard delivered with the computer is not in alphabetical order. I've been trying to teach her but it takes her a long time to write so she mostly gives up and limit herself to a few words!

Hope this helps!

koopajahon Show HN: Share many links? We made it better with highlights

I maily share links/articles/videos through email with friends and family. This is way easier to do when you want to share a link with a specific group a friends/people and not with the "world" or "one person only".

koopajahon Why open floorplans are bad for programming

I've never been in a situation where I was working and people around would all the time interrupt me and ask for my opinion for everything everyday. And I've worked in big open floorplans. So I would not say it is always the latter here.

koopajahon Why open floorplans are bad for programming

Easier? For them? Or you? A perennial argument for open floor plans is that it 'fosters open dialogue' and other such twaddle. For someone to be standing 6 feet from you and be told it'd "easier" to go back to their desk and send you an email instead of just talking to you is ... counter-intuitive at the very least. Unbelievable to some.

It depends. When someone is stuck on a compiling issue, pinging me on our chat/IRC is clearly easier than speaking loudly and hoping I'll hear and help. But at the same time, being able to hear other people discussions and chose when I think I'd be able to help is awesome. It also helps me learn a lot just by hearing other people technical issues.

Also open floorplan does not mean "just 8 members of your team" in the same place. Where I was before it meant 120 developers working on different project for the company but in the same place. An issue with this is that people outside of the developer teams would just pop over to my desk because I was the one that seemed available to ask for things. This can be annoying if it happens 10 times a day especially when none of the questions have anything to do with you. Explaining them that sending an email with questions would help worked most of the time and forced them to try and contact the right person instead of asking the developer closest to the door especially at lunch time.

If this is actually the case, you're in the minority. After doing this for... 19(?) years, few developers I've met or worked with are actually more productive in open environments

That may well be true. I've worked this way for 8 years now and clearly enjoy a lot more open floorplans especially when it is "developers-friendly" so no sales team next to you using the phone all day.

I'm in favor of private work spaces and open common areas where people can meet to collaborate when they want.

The issue with this is that I then lose the ability to follow what other people are working/stuck on and whether I can help, etc. Because people will most of the time stay in quiet area and use the open spaces only for informal gathering, having fun, or even meetings when no rooms are available.

koopajahon Why open floorplans are bad for programming

I'm in a coworking space right now and I'm one of the only one I can see with headphones on all day. And I wear them by choice, I really love to work with music, not because I want to avoid the noise around me

koopajahon Why open floorplans are bad for programming

It's the same for me I really dislike the idea of having people behind me and not knowing what they are doing. I also don't really like knowing people can stare at my screen so I always try to win a spot in a corner or with my back to a wall

koopajahon Why open floorplans are bad for programming

I think there's a difference between willingly join a conversation when you know you can help and being pulled in the conversation by someone asking for your opinion all the time. I agree that if the second one happens all day that's a big issue for me too.

koopajahon Why open floorplans are bad for programming

I think the real title of the blog post "I Hate Open Floorplans, It Makes Roger Come Out…" makes a lot more sense. I understand why open floorplans don't work for some people but I personally enjoy working in one and always have so I don't see them as bad for developers, only bad for some. The conversations floating around, the noise and animation helps me focus a lot more than in a closed office at work. I don't know exactly why but I work a lot better with a lot of people around me. Also it is so much easier to follow what is going on around in your team, who is stuck on something, who is speaking about something new that might be useful to you.

I've always worked this way, focusing on something while a part of me was processing what was said around and being able to "pause" what I was doing to help around and get back to my work pretty easily. Of course it does not work all the time and some times you just need to focus for a few hours and in this case I just increase the volume of my music in my headphones and stop caring about the rest.

For me the main issue with open floorplans is when other people assume they can just come to your desk and ask you anything without thinking you could be busy and/or in the zone as you describe it when having a closed office would make them think twice before just dropping by unanounced. For me this was easily solved by explaining that it is a lot easier to drop me a line by email or chat and I'd get back to them as soon as I was available.

koopajahon Inside the Billion-Dollar Hacker Club

I do use IRC at work daily. I had to learn Qt/QML for my new job and since school I've always thought that IRC was the best place/platform to learn a new technology. And once again in this case it has proven clearly invaluable. A lot of the QT devs are on IRC daily and help newcomers. Also just hearing about bugs, new patches, ideas and discussion help greatly to increase my knowledge of the platform. I'm pretty sure it would have taken me a lot more time without IRC to be up and ready at the start of this job.

koopajahon Rakuten to Buy Voice-Call App Maker Viber

Some new rules are supposed to take action in Europe and end roaming charges and has been discussed before [1][2] so this might help a lot when it is in place

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5892957 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6339434