nairteashop

It's a good question. I have an entire bookmark folder of "cool WebGL demos" collected over the years, but have seen very few full-fledged applications.

One way you could hedge the WebGL vs. Canvas bet is to use something like THREE.js, where you use THREE's cameras, lighting, etc and then specify whether it should use WebGL or Canvas for rendering. But then again, you'd be betting on THREE.js :)

https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/

> HLS support on Android is incredibly spotty

I assume you mean spotty in Android pre-4.0? I'd worked on HLS streaming for Android recently and didn't have issues with ICS and later. But then again with Android you can't possibly test on all OS/device combinations, so would love to know if there are things I should be watching out for.

> Why offer the multiple bitrates on the HLS stream at all? You know what the client's bandwidth is

If you're watching video over a cellular network, it's very difficult to use a single bandwidth since it can fluctuate a lot. So the best practice (as dropbox is doing) is to offer multiple streams at different bandwidths to the client, and allow the client to pick the best one for the following segment based on current network conditions.

Here's what worked for me:

I tried various BMR/TDEE calculators and they all told me to consume around 2200 cals a day to maintain my current weight. (IMO it honestly doesn't matter which calculator you use - they are all approximate anyway).

To lose weight, I created a mild calorific deficit of 200 cals/day, so basically I eat ~2000 cals a day. I use the myfitnesspal app to track calories. I eat anything I want (yes, including the occasional donut/beer) but I keep the daily total to ~2000.

I logged my weight every day, first thing in the morning. (Note that it is important to log your weight daily as it can fluctuate 1-1.5 lbs each day, so you want to be looking at weekly trend lines, vs say measuring once a week).

At 2000/day my weight trend stayed steady for 2 weeks. So I bumped it down to 1800/day. Now my trend is pointed down, and I'm losing ~1 lb a week.

So that's basically all it takes. Precision and discipline wrt daily calories, with some trial and error to figure out what your individual daily calorific need is. I think a lot of folks make it a lot more complex than it actually is with keto, paleo, insulin levels, etc etc.

Using OOP in JS is not necessary per se, but when writing complex apps it helps to keep things clean.

Say you're working on a twitter clone for example. It'll make your life much easier if there's a "NewsFeed" class that contains an array of instances of the class "News", which when clicked on shows an instance of "NewsDetails". (All of these would be "Views" if you used if you used an MVC framework like Backbone, probably backed by a model class that contains news data like the tweet content, the # of re-tweets, etc.)

You could do all of the above without using objects; it's just that your code will be a lot messier IMO.

No, I'm very pro-choice. But a 1 lb baby is still a baby. If we were talking about an actual clump of cells, I'd have agreed with you.

> one-and-a-half-pound globs

This is a human being we are talking about. A child.

I like to think of myself as someone who can usually empathize with folks who hold a different point of view, but I have never been able to understand someone who looks at a human life in terms of a "cost-benefit" analysis.

So what's the "new technology" here? Looks to me like hi-res videos stitched together? Not saying that that isn't useful to law enforcement, just curious if I am missing something interesting.

We had hundreds of expensive Macs at my last gig. Guess how many of those we bought AppleCare for? Zero. This was also true of pretty much every piece of electronic equipment we owned.

Note that this isn't very unusual either at most companies. Given the low failure rate of most electronics, it is simply cheaper for the business/IT team to buy a replacement Mac / router / whatever than to pay any kind of yearly maintenance fee, which is always designed to make more money for the vendor.

$250/year for a $999 piece of equipment is not a good deal. If it were an option, like AppleCare, most would advise you to not take it.

I agree. I don't get what "support and maintenance" means. I currently have a set-top box (Apple TV), webcam, HD camera and speakers, and don't pay a yearly "maintenance" for any of them. Why would running a teleconferencing software on such a setup cost $250/year?

The only motivation I can see is: "well the competition charges a hefty recurring fee, so why shouldn't we", but then the competition isn't doing all that well for this reason. I see a lot of resemblance to Cisco's "Umi" product, which had a $25/mo fee as well, and was a total flop.

Well, there are a few folks who are on the phone quite a bit, but if you need privacy this is not the best setup. There is a small "phone room" with a desk and a door, but just the one.

However, I believe some of the other co-working spaces in SF (including the other NextSpace ones further into the city) have multiple phone booths so you may want to check those out. Drop-in cost for most spaces tends to be about $20 - $25/day.

In case it helps: I work here on a monthly "cafe plan" for $325/mo, which means I can take any available seat in an open "cafe" area. A dedicated desk is $525/mo. Full pricing for this location is here: http://nextspace.us/nextspace-potrero-hill/

Daycare costs extra, but unfortunately I don't know how much (I don't use the daycare facility), and it doesn't seem to be on their website either. My guess though is that it'd be comparable to other daycare places in SF, so basically another $1000-$1500/mo?

Hah yeah, if the work & daycare sections weren't separate, I would've jumped off a bridge too!

Re: watching over kids: it's like a regular daycare, so they have dedicated staff to take care of the kids. (Which also means the daycare costs extra, on top of the fees for the co-working space itself.)

I've actually been working out of this space for the past few weeks. Don't have kids but I see everyday how amazing it is for all the people who work there who do. The daycare is sectioned off so there isn't a whole lot of noise or distractions from the kids.

If you're based out of SF, freelance / work remotely, and have kids, I think this is a fantastic setup.

...and calories, unfortunately. 2 cups of peanuts and you've nearly hit the recommended 2000 calories for the day. Nuts are certainly good for you, but not in "significant quantities". As they say, everything in moderation.

I actually liked the questions because if you spend enough time writing web apps, I feel you will run into all of these situations, e.g. manipulating arguments, losing the "this" context, catching the wrong click event, etc. (You will however not run into puzzles, fibonacci heaps, or whatever else is unfortunately asked far too often IMO in front-end dev interviews.)

As a parallel, when I interview developers for a Java position, I ask them to list some methods in java.lang.Object off the top of their head. A few have objected to this, calling the question arcane, something they could look up in 5 mins, etc, which are all true, but the thing is if you've written enough Java, you would definitely have run into at least equals(), hashCode(), and toString(), and likely wait() and notify() as well. This one simple question has been a surprisingly good proxy to the developer's general level of proficiency and experience with Java.

It most certainly is unpleasant, for the parent and for the child. One thing that helps is to keep it mind what the alternative is - having your child actually getting the disease.

One of my middle school classmates (from India) had leg deformities from polio, and could not walk without the help of crutches. He couldn't participate in most school activities, and was teased often. I wasn't able to find out why he wasn't vaccinated, but he was from a wealthy family so we always assumed they were in the anti-vaccination camp. Can you imagine being in his place? He has to suffer for his entire life because of a dumb decision that his parents made.

BTW I realize that polio vaccination does not require painful injections, but just pointing out that there are severe downsides to not vaccinating your child. Most certainly severe than a few jabs.

It's a good question, as it's a very vaguely defined job title, but generally the CEO sets overall vision, and managing the board, investors, etc (i.e. external facing) - and the President focuses on execution of that vision (i.e. internal facing). President/COO are interchangeable in this case.

Think about Facebook: Zuckerberg sets direction/vision, and Sandberg executes against that. (I'm sure it's not as clear-cut in reality, but you get the idea.)

In some larger companies, there are multiple presidents with responsibility for their own divisions, who all report up to the CEO.

It does appear that way, but pg had said that they'd been planning this before all the controversy, so it's just a case of unfortunate timing.

See email snippet at the bottom of this post: http://paulgraham.com/wids.html

He probably meant ruthless with respect to competition.

Does someone know how this feature works?

I thought this was difficult/impossible to do because plugins like flash communicate directly with the OS APIs, bypassing Chrome (this was confirmed by the Chrome team in a reddit AMA a while back).

I suppose this is possible with the Flash plugin that comes bundled with Chrome, but what about other plugins, like Java?

Edit: never mind, found this on omgchrome: "the indicator will be successfully triggered by most browser audio...this means the flash version that comes built-in with Chrome, HTML5 content and apps making use of PPAPI/NACL plugins. But a few things aren't picked up, including anything making use of "out of Chrome" plugins, like Silverlight and Quicktime."

Apple's MO has always been to do a few things, and do them well. Perhaps home automation is not on their radar. Google, on the other hand, is used to running a million different unrelated projects, so they are better setup for something like this.

One use-case: at my last gig, we assigned each customer a new sub-domain, under our main one. Route 53 worked great for this. We used boto (python API for AWS) to create EC2 instances, get a static IP, and then create a new DNS entry in Route 53 to map to that IP, all in about 5 minutes.

Prior to Route 53, we used to do the mapping manually, as our primary DNS provider did not have an API.

I have to second this. The UI does suck, and the product is expensive ($65/user/month! once you cross 5 users, and $125/user/month if you want to use the API / build any custom apps), but it does scale very well as your sales team grows, and you start dealing with territories, quotas, etc.

It's also a de facto standard, at least in the enterprise space, so an additional benefit to us was that most of the sales folks we hired were familiar with it already.

The virtual eyewear demo is pretty cool!

The closest thing I've seen to this is DITTO (http://ditto.com) where they create a virtual head using your webcam onto which you can then try various glasses and see yourself at different angles. But that requires an additional "head scanning" step using flash, which isn't needed here. The range of motion is also limited.

I hope this type of technology will be standard in clothing/accessory sites in a few years - I can see it working for ear rings, watches, ties, t-shirts, etc.

Sure, but I see the payment as just icing on the cake. If you're a talented developer, you probably have a few offers in hand from pretty good companies. What better way to pick one than actually work 1-2 weeks at each to see what it's really like? It's a reasonable investment, given that you'll be there a good chunk of your life in the coming year, likely more.

Edit: BTW, I disagree with the rate (flat $25/hour for everyone) mentioned in the article. IMO it should be closer, or equal to, what the candidate will eventually make at that position. Compared to what companies pay recruiters and the lost money/time on dealing with a bad hire, 2 weeks of full pay is nothing.

You could look at this another way: you are trying out the company, and they are paying you to try them out.

A few hour interview may not tell you much about the candidate, but as the candidate, it doesn't tell you much about the company either. The future boss/colleagues could appear pleasant for the hour you get with each of them, but could be real jerks when you actually work with them. Maybe they just have a different style of work than what you prefer. Or maybe they said "agile" when you asked them, but they are anything but. I could go on.

For me, I really like companies that hire this way because it also allows me to try out what it's like to really work at that company. And get paid to do it. No one wants to be the guy who quits after 2 weeks coz the job sucks.

If speed is of importance, I would second the SimpleNote suggestions. You might also want to take a look at Notational Velocity and its fork, nvALT - the speed of launching, searching and creating notes is unbelievable, and both apps can sync with the SimpleNote service.

http://notational.net http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/

We didn't track vacations at my last company, because we agreed with the Netflix principle of hiring the right employees and giving them a lot of freedom, including allowing them to take whatever vacation days they needed, whenever they needed it.

There were worries initially by some about employees abusing this policy, but that has not happened once in the 6+ years we've been around. However as we've grown, I strongly suspect that the opposite is happening, i.e. employees are not taking as much vacation as (I feel) they should, perhaps due to the feelings of guilt mentioned in the article. This sucks because, unlike jobs where vacation days are tracked, we can't even compensate them for any unused days.

So over time I've come to believe that unlimited vacations days is something that sounds good in theory but not so much in practice, especially as a company scales. I would instead recommend the traditional model of tracking vacation days, but with a very liberal number of days (vs. the typical measly 10 days a year or whatever).

I was wondering too. There is a nice answer at SO that expands on what dcherman said: http://stackoverflow.com/a/9107367

No offense taken, but I'm curious as to why you hate that phrase.

"Getting work done" is essentially what we're hiring people for right? As long as you can get done what you were hired to do, it shouldn't matter whether you suck at algorithms, are not a "ninja", don't fit "culturally", and whatever other weird things companies look for in candidates. It's as prosaic as it gets, and IMO it's the absolute correct metric to use.

It's as different as it gets from "changing the world", which honestly very few companies are actually doing, and is hence a source of irritation for me as well.