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nilobject

74 karma · joined February 26, 2008

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nilobject··on Who's hiring interns?
Core-apps.com is hiring paid interns with the ability to telecommute. Our primary web stack is Ruby (Sinatra) backed by a blend of CouchDB, Redis, and PostgreSQL. We also have native iPhone and Android clients, but we're only looking for iPhone interns at the moment.

Small startup, self funded, fast moving. Feel free to email me at jon at the domain above for more info!

nilobject··on How to Hack Boingo WiFi
Detroit (IIRC) made me do that. I was fine with it.
nilobject··on Found! An actual Amazon Kindle user
I have one, and I love it as well. I have a hard time committing to read long things on my computer -- I now just put it on my kindle, and when I'm away from my computer, I can focus and really read the articles.
nilobject··on Calculus in 20 Minutes
Exactly, if my professor was like this, I probably would have gone past Calc II.
nilobject··on Ask YC: What are the downsides of open source?
But portions can be open source, as long as you keep what makes you as a business closed initially, you can retain control over your bloodline, while either open sourcing chunks or utilizing other open source projects.
nilobject··on Dave Winer: "Twitter is a ghost town"
I've jumped on Plurk, and I like it a lot.
nilobject··on Using vectorization to speed up UTF-8 character counting
I thought the title meant it was using Altivec or SSE, but it's merely operating on a chunk of 4 bytes at a time dealing with misaligned data up front. Still a good article, despite my initial disappointment.

A similar article which originally taught me these tenants is:

http://rentzsch.com/papers/straightenUpAndFlyRight

nilobject··on Command Line Tools in Python
Oh Scribd, why must you ignore my scroll wheel?

Original PDF:

http://code.noahgift.com/pycon2008/pycon2008_cli_noahgift.pd...

nilobject··on SQL Injecting PhpMyAdmin
I have my phpMyAdmin installed only on my secure site, behind HTTP authentication as well.
nilobject··on Scalabe Funding - Money as you need it?
But at the same time, it could provide an "in" to people who normally wouldn't take funding for fear of the way VCs normally operate.
nilobject··on One-line web server in Ruby
Cute, but throw some %20's at it.
nilobject··on Post your Friendfeed ID here
http://friendfeed.com/nilobject
nilobject··on Ask YC: Who do you use to print your business cards?
I used illbuzz.com. They are great, fast, and have high quality paper. I opted for the rounded corners, making it 1000 cards for $45. Excellent service.
nilobject··on Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
I second this. I have this option turned on in reddit, and it keeps me from accidentally navigating away from reddit. I keep clicking on links here and by the time I read the article, I forget to press back instead of close, causing some frustration.
nilobject··on Google clones 37sig: "Borrowing ideas is fair game, but copying an entire app is wrong."
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
nilobject··on Nasty Bug: Safari doesn’t cache stuff.
Nasty? It just reloads it? I fail to see failure to cache as a nasty bug.
nilobject··on Free is Killing Us. Blame The VCs
I forgot an obvious one that I pay for: SmugMug.
nilobject··on Free is Killing Us. Blame The VCs
I don't know if it's true that free is killing us. I can point to several counterexamples, such as 37Signals and FogBugz that charge for their applications, and are apparently healthy. I think that no matter what, there will be people who want quality service without the advertisements.

The author compares launching big and launching small, but really they're apples and oranges. Yes, to launch big, you need to make a big splash and either be free or very low priced. But the alternative is still there: get the niche market, and launch slowly and by word of mouth of your users.

I don't think we're in a situation where you can't launch small and make a living.

nilobject··on Growing a Language by Guy Steele
Here's an audio version:

http://www.podbean.com/podcast-detail-episode/342059/episode...

And the direct link to the MP3 to avoid signing up:

http://www.oopsla.org/oopsla2007/podcasts/invited-talks/keyn...

nilobject··on Growing a Language by Guy Steele
I loved it. Stick with it for the first... 15 minutes or so, and you'll realize how clever his talk is.
nilobject··on Ask YC: Easter eggs for web apps?
I tend to think that Easter Eggs are a sign of creativity in and of themselves. In one of my unreleased desktop applications, we poured way more time into an Easter egg than we should have (and uncovered a very interesting way to DOS a mac). It's a fun creative outlet.
nilobject··on Ask YC: What are you working on right now?
A cup of coffee.
nilobject··on 10 Guerilla Airline Travel Tips for the Geek-Minded Person
Which means that on a smaller plane on a full flight, you may have to gate check your bag, leaving you lined up on the gateway when unboarding.

I agree with you -- lining up sucks. What I tend to do is review my seats when I check in electronically, and if there is a decent number of open seats, I can count on the overhead space being available. If there's only a few open seats, it might be worthwhile to line up to avoid gate checking.

nilobject··on Ask YC: Which companies/products have the best UI/UX?
At first glance it looks nice, but it doesn't work in Safari :-/
nilobject··on Ask YC: Which companies/products have the best UI/UX?
User Experience
nilobject··on Ask YC: Which companies/products have the best UI/UX?
Depends on your definition of best. The sites that tend to be flashy without purpose I don't like.

Some common sites that I tend to use frequently that the UI never seems to get in my way: News.YC, Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter.

To me, simplicity is bliss.

nilobject··on Activation emails
I generally get annoyed at sites that keep emailing me about new features. I always unsubscribe or opt-out at sign in, but some people don't offer that feature.
nilobject··on Competitor Attempts to Steal Product Descriptions.. Gets RickRoll'd
Who cares? It's fun.

Same with pranks at the office. Total waste of time, but huge morale boosters.

nilobject··on The MacBook Air has no clothes
I should have qualified extremely fast: From what I hear, it can make compiling go faster than the MBP, despite the slower processor, solely because disk reading is so much faster. With a large project and lots of small files, disk access adds up.
nilobject··on The MacBook Air has no clothes
Add the Solid State disk though, and from what I hear, compiling code is extremely fast.

Of course, I could never justify the cost of the SSD today.

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