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lepunk

113 karma · joined August 2, 2009

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lepunk··on How to fail on Product Hunt (despite doing everything right)
Well of course that is the goal. Without upvotes your product is never seen by your potential users. If you solely rely on luck of people finding you buried in the Newest section than 99% of the time you won't reach the front page. I dare to say very few product ever made it to the top without the support of their initial beta / power users.
lepunk··on How to fail on Product Hunt (despite doing everything right)
Can you elaborate on the word "manipulate"? In my opinion all we did is let our beta users know that we are on PH that day. The whole article is about how PH block products from going infront of new audiences
lepunk··on CryptoKitties could be the single most important application of our generation
if one viral application can break the ecosystem, then it probably needs to evolve
lepunk··on Ask HN: What are good software architecture interview questions?
I normally go with: "If you could do it from scratch how would you implement the infrastructure of X"

X being a currently widely known service (I'm usually going with Spotify). There is no "right answer" to this question but this shows you how the candidate thinks and how well they can protect their opinion if challenged

lepunk··on Show HN: I created a Github profile widget (learning to code)
Nice job! One suggestion from a person who developed widgets used on lots of sites: You are appending general styles (like styling the a tag, ".container" which is a popular class name) to the containing document's body. This is bad practice, since it will alter all the links on the containing page. Consider using namespaced classes (like .github-widget-link) or build your own iframe and apply the styling there
lepunk··on Show HN: GDOM – GraphQL for DOM traversing
very nice. one thing i'm missing tho is a callback functionality.

for example i did a quick scraper for tesco.com

  {
    page(url:"http://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/browse/default.aspx?N=4294793330&Ne=4294793660") {
      items: query(selector:"li.product") {
        title: text(selector:"span[data-title=true]")
        price: text(selector:"span.linePrice")
        url: attr(selector:"a:eq(0)", name:"href")
      }
    }
  }
now the url field on the page is relative. it would be nice to have a callback param where i could execute a function on the result and prefix the url with "http://www.tesco.com"

trying to make a pull request now

lepunk··on The 99% (of startups)
That is a fair question, and a "what if" type so its hard to answer. if you assume an ideal world with sane CEOs than it shouldn't matter what the investors expect. The startup should burn cash at an optimal rate to achieve the highest profit. Of course don't live in an optimal world...
lepunk··on The 99% (of startups)
"...but there are hundreds if not thousands more startups that will make their founders and investors rich."

I think the correct word here would be "richer". For VCs 5x return on an investment while desirable, it's not the ideal outcome.

Consider a VC invests in 100 companies during X years, $1 million each. Ballparking here but 80 of these will be a total failure. 19 of them will make 5x return. That is -$100 million spent and $95 million gained. So if the last one is "only" a 5x return the VC gets their money back (-inflation, time spent, etc). Thats why they are looking mostly for Ubers and AirBnbs imho

lepunk··on CSS Based Attack fontface
i think thats just a matter of adding this header on the server side Access-Control-Allow-Origin:
lepunk··on CSS Based Attack fontface
tried, but it doesn't seem to do
lepunk··on CSS Based Attack fontface
Neat, but don't think its exploitable in reality, but neat indeed.

Did a bit of play around with it and it does seem to work on input fields but fortunately not on password type fields (which is logical, considering the browser is not rendering the actual characters for password fields)

http://lepunk.co.uk/font_face.html

lepunk··on Show HN: UnSend.it, modify emails after its sent / read by the recipient
we worked around that and it works quite well
lepunk··on Show HN: UnSend.it, modify emails after its sent / read by the recipient
Yes, we are doing it via images which are hosted on our server securely encrypted.

We offer 3 different sending modes: - tracking only -> the email can't be modified after sending but you get a notification when the recipient opens the mail - attachments only -> you can not modify the emails content but you can modify / remove attachments - full unsend -> you can modify / remove contents of the emails after its been sent / opened + same for attachments

lepunk··on AtomPair – Pair-programming plugin for Atom, now with multi-tab syncing
very cool. did a search for a Sublime equivalent of this and found https://floobits.com/
lepunk··on Ask HN: What do you do when you are lethargic?
For years I was only living for work. No girlfriend, no hobbies, virtually no sleep, nothing. Gradually I became burnt out, depressed and pretty fat for that matter. My productivity and the quality of my output declined as well

After a while I realized that this is not sustainable and I have to do something. I started to focus on weight loss since the results are easily measurable and I felt if I succeed that will give me positive encouragement to improve other parts of my life. Started off with simple changes. Started walking home from work (about 6km) instead of taking the bus every day. During my walks I listened to my favorite tracks or just walked in silence and thought about stuff that I wouldn't normally spend time thinking about. The change in my day to day mood was measurable even after the first week.

After a while I started doing yoga at home following YouTube videos and started meditating regularly. Yoga, besides having positive health effects (flexibility, weight loss) teaches you about being aware of your body and it's needs. I noticed that after a couple of weeks I started eating way healthier and drinking way more water (these days I do at least 3 liters / day) and way less alcohol.

In six months I lost over 26 kilos, which is obviously really nice but what is even better that I feel happier in general and more confident in myself. My life is not revolving around my work anymore. This new found self awareness also had positive effect on my professional life. I'm thinking more clearly, my code quality is better and I solve problems faster than ever.

lepunk··on Show HN: A DOM text-selection highlight renderer
Well done! I know it is not an easy task to do. I built something fairly similar (and way less quick) http://jsfiddle.net/2XLBr/ and the git repo: https://github.com/skimhub/phone-highlight
lepunk··on The button: social experiment driving Reddit crazy
4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42
lepunk··on Show HN: UnSend.it Beta, modify / unsend any email after it's been sent
Thanks, its only in beta so its not perfect but getting there

bramgg is right in his comment. we are using images to display the text. when the user edits / "unsends" and email we simply re-render the image.

bramgg is also right about gmail's image caching however we found a way around it

as for the privacy: we will upload our policy soon (it's being reviewed atm). but simply put: - we do not ever sell your data to 3rd party - all of the email info are stored heavily encrypted on our servers - the images are behind a secure proxy - once you delete an email it completely removed from our servers

lepunk··on Show HN: UnSend.it Beta, modify / unsend any email after it's been sent
here is a video of how it works (sorry about the audio quality) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLYYh_fuCE8
lepunk··on UnSend.it Beta: modify / unsend any email after it's been sent
here is a (fairly bad quality) video of how it works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLYYh_fuCE8
lepunk··on PHP Cross-Platform Desktop GUI Framework
not to mention that the webview this one uses on windows is MSIE 7.0 which is less than ideal for front-end development
lepunk··on PHP Cross-Platform Desktop GUI Framework
node-webkit lets me fiddle with the chrome + i have the ability to install packages with npm.

I can see this being used in internal systems (to replace command line commands for non-technical colleges) but can't see the value in actual end user products

lepunk··on PHP Cross-Platform Desktop GUI Framework
It is nice and everything, but don't really see the point. By the look of it is just a webview + a server running on localhost:8000.

Much rather prefer using node-webkit for this kind of desktop app (note: PHP is my go-to language)

lepunk··on How Apple Cheats
It perfectly makes sense for me for this API. It is an element which could result in bad user experience if used on the small phone screen. So their choice was: "We either a, restrict it for iPad only or b, rejects apps using it badly on the ground of bad user experience"
lepunk··on We Have Luxurious Jobs but We Are Not Aware of It
I'm fortunate enough to been able to do both manual labor and office work (coding) too, so I think I'm less critical about my job compared to someone who got a decent one straight out from uni.

After high-school I had a bunch of temporary jobs working with builders, carpenters, etc in Hungary for less than £10 / day. I was happy because it paid my day-to-day expenses.

Then I moved to London where I took a minimal wage "biorobot " job in a factory for £5.5 / hour. I sincerely thought I have a great, well paid job. I was happy

Then I applied for a startup as the first coder there, got hired and I'm still with them after 6 years. I don't even know exactly how much I make on a hourly basis, but I don't really care. I'm happy

It is all just perspective. You can be the happiest person on a very low salary, or be depressed and cranky about your job even if you make millions.

I do think programmers deserve high salaries, and luxury like working from home. Why? Because our profession is extremely unique. Every single day we have the potential to solve a problem which never been solved before.

lepunk··on Winamp shutting down on December 20th, 2013
great example of how unimaginative AOL is. winamp has (had) a massive user base. it would have been a great base to start a spotify competitor with.
lepunk··on IE11 to support WebGL
my long term dream is to see microsoft finally giving up on using their own rendering engine and move to either mozilla or webkit. both of them are following the standards pretty neatly so it would make dev's life far easier.

with each major release IE promises being better. which is true for an extent but they also introduce new bugs so our css / html has different hacks for each version

lepunk··on Before I Die I Want To
A similar idea was implemented at the 2011 Hungarian "Sziget" festival. They installed a huge wall where visitors were able to write their "Before I die" messages.

http://sziget360.com/panorama/link/762

lepunk··on Prism Button
love the initiative but I have major concerns about the implementation.

assigning $ as an alias for document is totally useless and can kill jquery / prototype running on the user's site.

also please consider moving all variables out of the global scope. you are using variable names such as "link" which could cause major conflicts with 3rd party javascripts

lepunk··on A London pub now accepts payment in Bitcoin
i think this is the moment when we can say that bitcoin became a real currency. [imo a currency is something what you can use to buy beer]
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