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michaelrkn

1,103 karma · joined January 2, 2010

Founder of Epicodus.
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michaelrkn··on Remove Attachments from Gmail Messages
I've been inching close to running out of free Gmail space for years, doing a round of cleanup just before I run out, but I finally got to the point where I can't find any more places to save room without deleting messages I want to keep a record of. I was frustrated that I couldn't delete attachments from my messages, since I don't want to delete the messages themselves. I stumbled across this tool and was excited (clever approach - copy the message without the attachment, then delete the original), then annoyed that it never mentioned the $5 I would have to pay until the very end of the signup process, then decided to go for it since it is cheaper than paying Google. Anyways, it works and is a very handy way to save space on Gmail! Just wanted to pass it along in case it could help anybody else.
michaelrkn··on Americans are choosing to be alone, but we should reverse that
My girlfriend and I moved into a small apartment building and got 4 other families with kids to move into the other units. We’re trying to create a more supportive and social environment for us and our daughter: chicagofamilyhousing.org
michaelrkn··on Ask HN: How Does Zelle Work?
Thank you!
michaelrkn··on Show HN: Zoom Redirector
I once used Zoom's web interface and the video quality was horrible. When I switched to the downloaded app, it was much better. Not sure if this was a one-off problem or an underinvestment in their web interface.
michaelrkn··on Ask HN: Starting Your Own LLC?
I made a simple website to walk you through the nuts and bolts of starting an LLC or S Corp: https://www.startmybusiness.us/. Let me know if you find it useful!
michaelrkn··on Show HN: Textile – Return Facebook photo exports back to nicely-named galleries
There's also https://www.fbexporter.com/, which uses the Facebook API to get the metadata and put it back in the EXIF data, but unfortunately it will only export photos you are tagged in, not all photos you've uploaded.
michaelrkn··on Time Warner Cable owes $229K to woman it would not stop calling
I sued a telemarketer once and got a few thousand dollars: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4023834
michaelrkn··on How Standing Desks Can Help Students Focus in the Classroom
I've bought many tables from multitable.com. They start at $550. By using IKEA tops and buying in bulk I keep the price under $500 each.
michaelrkn··on Getting to work on diversity at Google
I think a lot of it has to do with the environment where you grew up and/or have spent a lot of time. I'm white and grew up in a heavily Asian community; when I'm the only white person in a mostly Asian group, I don't feel self-conscious, but when I'm in a mostly black or Latino group, I usually do.
michaelrkn··on Rails Google Summer of Code students and mentors
Is there any update on the outcome of last years SoC projects?
michaelrkn··on Rails Google Summer of Code students and mentors
It's actually mostly done.

To connect to your database, simply run:

ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(:adapter => 'sqlite3', :database => 'db/development.db')

Or, if you'd like to store your database config in a YAML file:

database_configurations = YAML::load(File.open('./db/config.yml'))

development_configuration = database_configurations['development']

ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(development_configuration)

To use the Active Record rake tasks, use this gem: https://github.com/rosenfeld/active_record_migrations. It also provides a rake task for generating migrations.

It would be great if that gem weren't needed - I think that's where the big opportunity for improvement is.

michaelrkn··on An In-Depth Introduction To Ember.js
Angular and Ember have the same use case. They're just different approaches to client-side MVC.
michaelrkn··on Engine Yard's sponsorship of RVM is coming to an end
> I wish bundler was more integrated with rubygems, which would for instance make the `bundle exec` dance unneccesary.

https://github.com/mpapis/rubygems-bundler

michaelrkn··on Programming is a Terrible Job
Protip to employers: Make your jobs interesting and fun, and you'll find that your employees are way more productive than you ever thought they could be.
michaelrkn··on How I used Dropbox to store my website content
Check out site44.com - it's an off-the-shelf solution to do this.
michaelrkn··on Camino browser reaches its end
+1
michaelrkn··on A Better Way to Manage the Rails Secret Token
I had the same feeling. Inspired by this post, I just moved my secret token config into production.rb, test.rb, and development.rb, and deleted secret_token.rb.
michaelrkn··on Introducing the Europe Region, Now Available in Public Beta
woot! here's to hoping we get support for regional redundancy in the US soon.
michaelrkn··on HTML5 Video at Netflix
they have a reputation for only hiring very senior-level engineers.
michaelrkn··on Three Wise Monkeys: a plain speaking, easy to read, open source NDA
you might also enjoy Contract Killer, an open-source contract for web designers and developers: http://stuffandnonsense.co.uk/projects/contract-killer/
michaelrkn··on The Ruby on Rails Tutorial for Rails 4.0 (beta)
Congrats, Michael!
michaelrkn··on Heroku's Ugly Secret: The story of how the cloud-king turned its back on Rails
My company switched off of Heroku for our high-load app because of these same problems, but I still really like Heroku for apps with smaller loads, or ones in which I'm will to let a very small percentage of requests take a long time.
michaelrkn··on Heroku's Ugly Secret: The story of how the cloud-king turned its back on Rails
That's exactly what happened to us - switching to unicorn bought us a little time and a bit of performance, but we hit the exact same problems again after a couple more weeks of growth.
michaelrkn··on Heroku's Ugly Secret: The story of how the cloud-king turned its back on Rails
We did this, but all it did was buy us a bit of extra time before we ran into the same problem again - a very small percentage (<0.1%) of requests creating a queue that destroyed performance for the rest of them. Also, FWIW, Heroku does not officially support Unicorn, and you have to make sure that you don't run out of memory on your dynos (we tanked our app the first time we tried Unicorn with 4 processes).
michaelrkn··on Heroku's Ugly Secret: The story of how the cloud-king turned its back on Rails
Thanks for the blog post, by the way. When we were struggling with our own Heroku scaling issues last year (we eventually moved to AWS), I came across it and it was good vindication that somebody else was facing the same issue.
michaelrkn··on Heroku's Ugly Secret: The story of how the cloud-king turned its back on Rails
We ran into this exact same problem at Impact Dialing. When we hit scale, we optimized the crap out of our app; our New Relic stats looked insanely fast, but Twilio logs told us that we were taking over 15 seconds to respond to many of their callbacks. After spending a few weeks working with Heroku support (and paying for a dedicated support engineer), we moved to raw AWS and our performance problems disappeared. I want to love Heroku, but it doesn't scale for Rails apps.
michaelrkn··on GoDaddy deletes my domains and charges me to restore them
Try badger.com - it's the only non-shitty registrar I've ever used.
michaelrkn··on Show HN: Playbook - Share your hookups with your bros (at PennApps)
you could make a facebook for white supremacists and say you weren't encouraging racism, just making the process more digital and secure.
michaelrkn··on Launch Academy: Become a Software Developer in 10 Weeks
looks awesome! it's great that boston is getting one of these schools now!
michaelrkn··on Learn web development in 8 weeks
thanks for the tip! i will check it out.
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