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nhooey

40 karma · joined January 26, 2010

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nhooey··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking Freelancer? (June 2019)
SEEKING WORK - Toronto/Remote, willing to visit

I'm a full-stack software engineer with 12 years of experience, including Endeca, Vine (Twitter), and as the tech lead for Search at Shutterstock Images. I'm available for full or part-time work. I also have a bachelor of Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Waterloo.

I can build a web application from front to back, providing guidance to plan a simple, iterative implementation that meets your needs. I can also lead a team of engineers.

I also have DevOps experience at TunnelBear and Vine (Twitter). Most of my experience has been building scalable web applications, making build systems and doing configuration management, and React web apps.

  Skills:
  * Java, Scala, Python, JavaScript + TypeScript
  * React, Redux, Angular, Spring Boot, Django
  * Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Heroku
  * ElasticSearch, Solr, Redis, MySQL, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, MongoDB
  * Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Chef, Puppet
  * GitLab Continuous Integration
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nhooey/

Email: nhooey at gmail.com

nhooey··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (December 2016)
SEEKING WORK - Remote

I'm a full stack software engineer with 9 years professional coding experience.

I specialize in search and DevOps, with experience writing front-end web applications. I can help build your web application's frontend and backend, set up continuous integration and deployment, build search and indexing systems, plan and deploy backend infrastructure with configuration management, and more.

Technologies:

- Backend: Python, Java, C++, Ruby, Flask, Django, MySQL, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, Solr, Redis, RabbitMQ, Docker, AWS EC2

- Frontend: Angular, JavaScript, JQuery, CSS

- DevOps: Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Sensu, Nagios, Icinga, Supervisor

Professional Experience:

- TunnelBear, Vine (Twitter), Shutterstock, Endeca (Oracle)

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nhooey

Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/users/14193/neil

GitHub: https://github.com/nhooey

Email: nhooey+hn@gmail.com

Open to hourly or project-based billing.

nhooey··on Code sober, get things done drunk
I wouldn't call a glass of wine a toxic.
nhooey··on Who's your SSH buddy?
I've had an "ssh buddy" for years, but for a variety of things such as asking for a "download on how to hotwire a motorcycle".

I have an agreement with many friends to be an operator so they can look something up on the web, or anything else requiring some efficient technical prowess.

We just call up each other and say "operator", and if you're near a computer, you help out with whatever it is.

nhooey··on Light - If you view the Earth from far enough away can you observe its past?
But if you could travel faster than the speed of light, you could send a mirror to the edge of the universe to figure out what happened in the past.

Figure out what happened to the tops of everyone's heads when they were outside, that is...

nhooey··on RIM implodes: announces layoffs, 500,000 PlayBooks shipped
Some Americans care about "buy[ing] American", but most don't. A prime example is the Japanese auto manufacturers taking market share away from American companies with better quality cars since the 80s, eventually becoming dominant.

Not to mention that the US isn't the only market for smartphones out there, so a large portion of the market certainly don't care if something is manufactured in the US.

Making quality software is probably the biggest opportunity for RIM right now, not the location of manufacture.

nhooey··on Formatting your web content to be a pleasure to read
I totally agree. I have two 1920x1200 screens, and I put two browser windows per screen, so I always max out at exactly 960.
nhooey··on Geohot seeking donations for legal defense against Sony.
Donated.

I've never donated to anything like this, but Sony's actions are fundamentally corrupt and if unchallenged, will set a terrible precedent for all of us, and severely hurt this individual.

nhooey··on The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4A has been published
Does anyone know if The Art of Computer Programming will be released as an eBook soon?
nhooey··on RIM kicks Kik off Blackberries: Revokes keys, disables push
The Google Talk client is horrible. It wastes tons of CPU when it's loading up the contact list, and still uses a bunch just while idling. If you have it on all the time, it will eat your battery away such that a Blackberry 9700 with no other apps running won't last a full day. I tested this on my own device a while ago, it might have gotten better, but I doubt it.

Blackberry Messenger (BBM) also has a typing indicator, delivered and read indicators, and it's faster than anything else out there.

Also, the fact that it's only on mobile devices and not desktop computers means that you know your message will get delivered to someone's pocket instead of the computer they may have left on. An odd side effect of its lack of portability.

nhooey··on RIM introduces PlayBook -- the BlackBerry tablet
I'm not really sure, maybe Gartner has some vague reports on that.

RIM does make money on the use of their Business Enterprise Servers (BES), so in corporate installations they're taking in large sums of money on a per-year basis. Given that, and my assumption of Apple's superior profit per-unit, it might be hard to tell who makes more money on their phones overall.

nhooey··on RIM introduces PlayBook -- the BlackBerry tablet
Do you not find the Adam Tablet compelling? It's going to have the NVidia Pixel Qi screen that can go greyscale so you can see it in the sun, and runs Android.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Tablet

It should be coming out in a few weeks, so it should be one of the first decent iPad competitors.

nhooey··on RIM introduces PlayBook -- the BlackBerry tablet
By the 2nd quarter of 2010, RIM was still beating both Android and Apple in market share for Smartphones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone

It's more like everyone else tried making Blackberry killers, and has yet to succeed.

nhooey··on The myth of razors and razor blades
You still have to shave your neck to avoid looking like a slob.
nhooey··on Google Instant Proves Google's Design Process is Broken
To extend your idea about redundantly entering a password when downloading a free application, Apple also sends you a redundant receipt for $0. That can't be anything but training the user to a set of behaviours.
nhooey··on Machinarium suffers 90% piracy rate, offers $5 amnesty sale
Don't just make assumptions, there really isn't a risk from running pirated games that you get from torrents. People tend not to be malicious when seeding.
nhooey··on Why Google Became A Carrier-Humping, Net Neutrality Surrender Monkey
I can't believe nobody else mentioned this sooner or that you haven't received many more points for your comment.

Most people don't even think about the fact that they're locked into a contract for 2+ years (in the US), they just think about how the other phones are cheaper. But even for the people who consider the costs of being locked in, they can see that not being locked in provides little advantage.

If the entire market wasn't locked in to their contract, and could trivially take their phone number with them, they would have maximum provider mobility and the competition would get steep. If only a few people do this, it won't actually improve service or make the companies willing to adjust prices to keep these specific customers.

I'm not sure how the market came to this in North America and other select places, but I can see how it's going to be very hard for it to change.

nhooey··on Mr Segway's difficult path
Not getting sweaty in the summer, especially when going up hills.
nhooey··on Mr Segway's difficult path
Also most important, a car has heat and a car has air conditioning. There are parts of Canada that are so horribly cold in the winter that it's unbearable to walk around even if you're all bundled up. It would be even worse on a Segway because you wouldn't be generating body heat with your muscles.

Waiting for the bus really sucks in cold places in the winter, way more than when it's too hot in the summer.

Maybe if everyone had personal super-small Popemobiles that went slow enough they were no more a threat to pedestrians than bicycles.

nhooey··on Mr Segway's difficult path
One of the advantages a Segway has over a bike is that you don't sweat when you ride it.

You can only ride your bike to work if you don't care if you're sweaty, or if you have a shower and the time to use it once you get there.

And one major problem I see with not having cars is being able to go somewhere outside of the city on a weekend, when all the ZipCars are taken. If you reduce the amount of cars a city needs on average, everyone is seriously screwed during peak time. Maybe a graduated pricing scheme would fix this: With all of the cars being more expensive on the weekend, you could have a special set of reserve cars which are even more expensive on the weekend so people who really need them and are willing to pay can depend on that reserve.

However the advantages gained from people sharing cars instead of everyone having their own, far outweigh the costs.

nhooey··on Estimates of oil spill officially DOUBLED
The editor in chief of the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, similar to the BBC) left the CBC two years ago and became the managing director of Al Jazeera English.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Burman

That should give you a sense of how legitimate Al Jazeera has become.

nhooey··on Cycling Cadence and Bicycle Gearing
If you're riding through Williamsburg in Brooklyn, you won't really fit in if you have more than one gear on your bike... ;)
nhooey··on Ask HN: What are your best life hacks/best tools in life/time savers?
You can get to work some quicker way and run instead. Running is much more valuable than walking.
nhooey··on AT&T Learns Exactly the Wrong Lesson About Data Usage
Changing the plans so that people get charged for data over 2GB will certainly curb unlimited usage. It's the basics of economics.

Especially when you pay $25 per GB, and it costs an extra $10 per GB. People will probably stop streaming Pandora over the cell network, and heavily watching movies.

Canada has had data limits the entire time, and Blackberry has been constantly cautioning US providers about offering unlimited data plans in the name of providing better service to their customers.

This kind of limitation for regular ISPs is ridiculous, because the cost of bandwidth is actually cheap, but it's different and much more expensive with cell phone networks.

nhooey··on Steve Jobs single-handedly restructured the mobile industry
The iPhone was not the first smartphone that really took off, Blackberry was. They were dominating before Apple arrived.

I would guess that most of the confusion around this point is that Apple's rate of adoption was high given that it came so late into the game, satisfying a part of the market that wasn't before. Apple also has the most marketing, and adoption in the consumer market specifically.

There are tons of businesses that deploy blackberries to a substantial portion of their staff, this is not true with iPhone and is unlikely to change.

One can probably find the numbers if they look, I've only got anecdotal experience for now.

nhooey··on YouPorn to offer HTML5 video tag support
Hey, it's the first business model that worked on the Internet when commerce was allowed on the network.

I think you're definitely on to something.

nhooey··on You Can’t Look for a Job from a Remote Location – It Doesn’t Work
At the University of Waterloo just west of Toronto, almost everyone gets a job from a remote location during their CO-OP terms while in university, and then also when they graduate.

I got a job in Boston from Toronto, and then one in New York from Boston. Getting flown out to Silicon Valley or Seattle for the bigger companies is also pretty common. It's even easier when you have a friend working in another city. The best places to work don't care where their candidates come from if they're good and willing to move.

I think the guy who wrote this article meant to say that it's easier to find a local job. But he's seriously out of touch with reality if he believes it's really hard to find a job in another city.

nhooey··on Ask HN: Too much soap opera news as of late?
I think there are too many stories, it's like a firehose. We should concentrate on killing more bad stores so the amount of stuff on Hacker News is a reasonable amount for someone to read.

Quality, not quantity.

nhooey··on Why Diaspora will fail
Well, at least when it all comes crashing down, we can call it "Disaspora".
nhooey··on Orwell - Improve your speed reading
This thing needs to move pixels at a time, rather than words at a time. It's really hard to calibrate your eyes to the next word when the length of the next word is unknown.

You lose the spatial cues of where each word's position is each time a new word is shifted on to the screen. Something like a smooth stock ticker would be much better.

Although, Spreeder looks much better.

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