Hacker News Reader

mendelkon Cloudflare’s fight with a “patent troll” could alter the game

I talked to an Oracle lawyer a few months ago, and told him their lawsuit just makes Oracle look bad. The lawyer was dismissive, and tried to explain how it's silly how people take lawsuits personally, and talked about how layers _understand_ that lawsuits aren't personal, and that they are still friends outside the court.

I'm sure a lawyer can "understand" how lawsuits aren't actually something personal at all, but lawyers really seem to be the _only_ people who "understand" that.

-- Linus Torvalds [0]

[0] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-discuss/...

mendelkon Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

There is also a framework by this name that is (was?) being developed by Asana.

Naming is hard in the global namespace!

mendelkon Speeding Up Rendering Rails Pages with render_async

If you're interested in these types of improvements, you'll love intercooler[0]! It's basically this, with lots of more options and patterns. It's been great for me in the (small-ish) projects I've used it.

[0] http://intercoolerjs.org/

mendelkon Fiduciary Rule Fight Brews While Bad Financial Advisers Multiply

Yet another problem of TLH is that you must have all your investments with Betterment to ensure you don't trigger the "wash sale" rule. (Alternatively, you can handle it yourself manually, but that negates most of the benefit of having Betterment from a TLH perspective.)

mendelkon Optimizing React Rendering

Along the same lines as the advice in TFA: If you pass an object literal as the `style` prop, it'll always re-render, because the object reference will change. Solution: instead of the object literal, pass a reference to an existing object.

mendelkon Access codes for United cockpit doors accidentally posted online

s/Grisham/Crichton

mendelkon Etsy has ousted its CEO and is laying off 8 percent of its staff

Not sure if it's related to this, but I was scheduled to have an interview with them on 1/24/2017 for a Full Stack position, and an hour before our scheduled time, they sent me an email that "due to some changes in hiring priority this role is currently on hold", and cancelled the interview.

I wasn't too impressed :)

mendelkon ConvertKit: How Nathan Barry Bootstrapped an Email Marketing Business

There's also this: https://gumroad.com/l/authority

mendelkon ConvertKit: How Nathan Barry Bootstrapped an Email Marketing Business

It seems to be available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Authority-Become-Following-Financial-...

mendelkon Kim Jong-Nam Was Killed by VX Nerve Agent, Malaysians Say

Welcome to HN :)

It's one of the reasons I leave this site every day feeling wonderfully inadequate :)

mendelkon Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

Uber CEO responded in this article[0]:

> I have just read Susan Fowler's blog. What she describes is abhorrent and against everything Uber stands for and believes in. It's the first time this has come to my attention so I have instructed Liane Hornsey our new Chief Human Resources Officer to conduct an urgent investigation into these allegations. We seek to make Uber a just workplace and there can be absolutely no place for this kind of behavior at Uber -- and anyone who behaves this way or thinks this is OK will be fired.

[0] http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/19/14664474/uber-sexism-alleg...

mendelkon Former engineer says Uber is a nightmare of sexism

Related to this post[0], but The Verge has comments from Uber CEO:

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682022

mendelkon RES dev describes how Edge team went extra mile to accommodate ext. integration

Sorry for the r/titlegore, but I thought the HN community would appreciate this!

mendelkon A French Grocery Chain Is Trolling Amazon Go

If my understanding of this Google-translated French page[0] is correct, it costs 1€, and there is a minimum order of 50€. I may be mistaken.

If so, that can be a big difference, especially to the crowd that puts groceries in their personal bags, as depicted in both ads.

[0] https://www.monoprix.fr/livraison-a-domicile?menuName=servic...

mendelkon Jasonette – Native App over HTTP

Can this be considered an extension of Atwood's Law? :)

  Any application that can be written in JSON, will eventually be written in JSON.

mendelkon Don’t Mess with The Google

TL;DR: At least 200 people participated in a scheme in which they purchased (multiple) Pixel phones and had them shipped to a dealer in NH for resale to others, in contravention of the Google ToS.

In response, Google suspended all their accounts, without the option to download any their stuff, including email and drive data, etc.

mendelkon Regular meditation may be more beneficial than vacation

From the referenced WP page:

By the end of 1980, the collaboration between Bandler and Grinder ended. [...] In July 1996 and January 1997, Bandler instituted a further two civil actions against Grinder and his company, numerous other prominent figures in NLP and 200 further initially unnamed persons. [...] On this matter Stollznow (2010) comments, "[i]ronically, Bandler and Grinder feuded in the 1980s over trademark and theory disputes. Tellingly, none of their myriad of NLP models, pillars, and principles helped these founders to resolve their personal and professional conflicts."

It may not be a very scientific rebuttal, but I always find that interesting. (Kinda similar to how psychics never win the lottery.)

mendelkon Logo Pizza: Hot and ready logos for sale

Cute idea. Note that it was just changed to go up by $20 per logo sold, but that still doesn't really solve the economic problems posed by some of the comments.

mendelkon I’m Joining Stripe to Work on Atlas

Is there any official communication re Starfighter?

All I can find is this:

> Starfighter is not only not hiring, but also closing its doors. We are 'pivoting.'

https://twitter.com/boboTjones/status/774303916464930816

mendelkon 3D Printer Comparison: $200,000 vs. $2500

"Amateurs Practice Until They Get It Right; Professionals Practice Until They Can’t Get It Wrong"

mendelkon Lenin was a mushroom

This is great :)

On a related note, someone posted a question to r/newzealand if it was true that having a vegetable garden is illegal in NZ[0]. The entire subreddit then spontaneously decided that indeed it was.

The deadpan was so well done, that it had lots of people actually confused, if not convinced!

r/OutOfTheLoop post "outing" the hoax: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/4ovxb1/is_the...

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/2nem47/can_you_...

mendelkon Flow vs. Typescript

Tweet from npm ceo Isaac Schlueter in 11/2015:

> 42% of @nodejs users use Windows as their desktop env. More than any single *nix.

https://twitter.com/izs/status/661597221763203072

mendelkon Flow vs. Typescript

Not sure if this will do, but there's Contracts for Ruby: https://github.com/egonSchiele/contracts.ruby

mendelkon Show HN: Search YouTube without stopping the video, and make your own playlists

There are shortcuts to change the speed! > to increase, and < to decrease.

mendelkon Pixar in a Box

From an answer on that page to a similar question:

> Renderman, what we use at Pixar, is also fast but for the quality we strive to achieve is very high, so we we squeeze as much as we can into it until it just becomes too slow.

So if the renderer became faster, we would just add more quality, and make it "slow" again.

mendelkon Universal.css

I know this is meant as a joke, but having used BassCSS[0] in a production webapp, I believe it really is a valid approach to CSS.

To each their own, I guess.

[0] http://www.basscss.com/

mendelkon The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]

Off topic:

I attended a school with little to none "secular" education, but I was by nature really curious about things.

At some point, I got my hands on "How Stuff Works", the book[0], and devoured it. It was a super-enlightening book. I'd even venture to say it set me on my autodidactic path to programming.

If this book serves the same purpose for someone as that book did for me, it's benefits cannot be overstated IMO.

As an extra bonus, I was considered by my peers to be far more knowledgable than I actually was, due to having a layman's understanding (or at least the appearance thereof) of _so many_ esoteric concepts. 10/10 would read again!

[0] http://amzn.com/0785824324

mendelkon CSS Variables landing in Chrome 49

For those commenting about SASS having this forever etc, note that this goes a step further:

    :root { --color: blue; }
    div { --color: green; }
    #alert { --color: red; }
    * { color: var(--color); }

You can't accomplish that with SASS today. More info [0].

In fact, this feature isn't even covered with cssnext:

    The current transformation for custom properties aims to provide a future-proof way of using a limited subset (to top-level :root selector) ... [1]

I'm very curious whether or not this paradigm will be accepted as "best practice", or how it will be used.

[0] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/02/css-variab...

[1] http://cssnext.io/features/#custom-properties-var

mendelkon The Founder’s Battle for Mental Health

  I'm afraid that some times
  you'll play lonely games too.
  Games you can't win
  'cause you'll play against you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh,_the_Places_You%27ll_Go!

mendelkon My adventures in medical tourism

If they can get pool tables to stabilize on ships[0], maybe this can done too :)

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DNGjGH-IB8