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rodh257on Stripe Billing

I'd love something like this that handled in-app purchased subscriptions. There's a bunch of annoying parts of dealing with the app store SDK's & verifying transactions, handling refunds etc. We have a combination of online credit card purchases and in-app ones, it seems like there's an opening for some tool to handle the in-app part as well.

rodh257on Ask HN: Why do people have a hatred for Scala?

I've written C# for most of my career, and have in the last couple of years been exploring functional programming. I started learning Scala, and getting involved in the community and I found it to be quite interesting.

Something I find different is that most C# developers like writing C#, they may dislike many other parts of the ecosystem, but they generally enjoy the language. However with Scala developers, I find that many of them seem to dislike the language.

To cast a broad stereotypical brush, it seems like there are 2 main groups of Scala developers. There's those who are really into FP, and would love to be getting paid to write Haskell all day, but unfortunately Scala is the only option they can convince their employer to adopt. So they begrudgingly choose it because it has some of what they want, but they are forever wishing it was better & making their frustrations known.

Then there's the other side, which are developers coming from Java (or other OO languages) after hearing about the benefits of FP/Scala. They're either not using Scala professionally, but want to learn, or are just starting to use it at work. They are much more enthusiastic about the language.

Unfortunately, the first group are often more vocal, and it puts off newcomers.

rodh257on Google I/O 2015

Are there usually any other tech events on during the week of IO? ie smaller conferences/meetups etc?

rodh257on Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)

Ah man, I've been working on http://sploria.com/ for a while, leading up to launching an MVP soon and hadn't heard of TourstEye. Had a look at the app and the 'experiences' part is almost exactly what we've been building, damn :(

Congrats on your success with the product though, it's really beautiful!

rodh257on AltBeacon

So how do I deal with supporting both Android and iOS from a single Beacon?

rodh257on Parrot Bebop

It all looks very cool, but that 12 minute battery life :(

rodh257on Why I killed my standing desk

2 weeks doesn't seem like that long to persist with a major change like swapping from sitting all day to standing. Would be interesting to hear from someone who persisted with it for longer to see if they were able to adjust fully. I have a desk that is adjustable from sitting to standing and enjoy it as it lets me work longer without my back annoying me.

In regards to the 135 degree suggestion, I've found this doesn't work well for me, my lower back hurts, and also it encourages me to stick my chin forward which puts pressure on your neck. Could be a result of body shape or specifics of my setup though.

rodh257on Introducing StandDesk [video]

Cheaper than $399 which is what the video says this will start from?

rodh257on Microsoft and Xamarin partner

I was hoping to sign up to their training program using our Microsoft Partner Network MSDN but alas that is also excluded :(

rodh257on Technology Change: .Net to Scala

Really interesting article, thanks for writing it. I'd like to hear a bit more about the reasoning for the whole company swap, what problems you were having with C#/Microsoft stack. The impression I got was that you tried out something new for a small project, liked it and liked the idea of OSS in general and then started doing everything in that way, is that all there was to it? What other factors came into the decision on a whole?

rodh257on AngularJS Tutorial: Learn to Build Modern Web Apps

Signing in with Twitter wants to post as me and read my tweets, how come?

rodh257on Stephen Wolfram on Personal Analytics

I use Fitocracy to track my fitness, MyFitnessPal to log every bit of food I eat and http://askmeevery.com/ to email me once a day reminding me to rate things between 1 and 10, like health, happiness, productivity. These all don't take much effort really, and they give me some interesting history. I'm hoping to do things like correlate what I eat with how well my workouts go, or how healthy I feel in the future.

rodh257on Why SICP Matters

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/reading-s...

is a reading group just starting up now if anyone is interested

rodh257on The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature

I do this, however I feel my 16:9 monitor is just a touch too thin, whereas 16:10 gives a perfect width.

rodh257on No bullshit guide to math and physics

For reference have a look at the % price difference for other book sellers, like O'Reilly: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596802363.do

I'd be selling it for $24 for Ebook (and make it available in PDF/Epub/Mobi to cover all readers), $29 for print, $32 for Print + Ebook.

rodh257on Chrome Canary for Developers

I recently discovered a good reason to be running Canary/dev channel. Chrome version 22 introduced a bug with heavy JSON pages, where navigating away from them would lock up the browser. Our page had been working great on all browsers, then literally on the morning we went live, Chrome 22 was pushed out to auto-update, which broke this page for our users. If we had of been running Canary, we'd have seen the issue earlier in the development process.

(this is the issue by the way - http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=155270)

rodh257on Facebook explains what's wrong with the mobile web

Lots of people are quick to jump on Facebook and claim that their well paid developers are just poor at their job. What I'd like to see is a list of html5 mobile apps that are as interactive as Facebook is, so that we can see the best practices in action. I'm struggling to come up with many that aren't simple blog/news sites. Is anyone able to point me towards some good ones?

rodh257on Apple is bigger by market cap than Microsoft, Google, Amazon & Facebook combined

Am I the only one who is tired of being updated what Apples market cap is now bigger than?

At first they were interesting stats, but in reality it isn't overly useful information.

rodh257on Show HN: remote access to your Android phone with Shynk

Nice job, seems to work well. I love airdroid but it annoys me that I am constantly having to reconnect after I walk out of wifi range. If this gets around that issue then I'd swap.

One comment I had is that if I was to download this app on my device, the initial experience could be improved somewhat. The first screen is a login one and it says to go to your website, sign up and come back to the app. I did this on my mobile browser (chrome) and it was a bit clunky to sign up (I had the feedback/need help button hover over the form a bit). Perhaps instead of that, you could have a registration function right in the app? even if it was just a web view with a mobile optimized signup web page loaded. That way I don't have to leave the app.

Not a major thing but thought I'd offer you some feedback.

rodh257on Hangouts now available in Gmail, Google+ account not required

Disappointing that this doesn't include screen sharing. Our team have been using Google Hangouts for remote code reviews as it seems to be one of the better free options for screen sharing at a 30" monitor resolution (MeetingBurner is probably slightly better though). I'd much rather just use our Google apps gmail interface, rather than having to create a second Google+ account.

rodh257on Raspberry Pi Myths and Truths

I think the tech media built these devices up a bit too much to the general consumer public. They are really a learning tool that you can tinker with, not a 'cheap pc' like they were built up to be. So many people got theirs after the pre-order wait and immediately complained about the performance. Think of them as a beefed up Arduino style device and you'll love it, think of it as a cheap computer for consumer use and you'll obviously be unhappy.

rodh257on Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet

I'm not sure his shareholders would have loved it if he had of said that he thinks the MacBook Air is amazing and would love one of his own...

rodh257on Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet

The RT version is 'HD' and the Pro is 'Full HD' so I'm guessing 720 and 1080.

rodh257on Apple now requires user permission in iOS 6 before apps can access private data

there are a lot more permissions in Android than there are in iOS http://developer.android.com/reference/android/Manifest.perm...

rodh257on You half assed it. That is why your PhoneGap application sucks.

I recently made a very small jquery mobile web app. It still feels like alpha software, I was on an extremely tight deadline so I persevered with it, the end result worked out ok. I would be interested in other javascript framework recommendations that perform better, however from my research they all seemed to be at a similar stage to Jquery Mobile, either that or they were abandoned. If I was spending a lot of time on a mobile web app I'd probably invest the time into writing it without the layer of abstraction.

Two big tips: 1. Turn off the transitions, they perform poorly and look out of place on most devices. 2. Don't use the navbar, it just doesn't work properly on all devices, I wasted so much time trying to work out the issues with it before changing my navigation scheme.

rodh257on Google Engineer on Australia's slow growing Silicon Valley

Many Australian universities have a 'Bachelor of Information Technology' instead of of a 'Bachelor of Computer Science'. The one I did was a 3 year degree, it still did most of the CS subjects that I've seen elsewhere, though it didn't have any compulsory Maths (I think an extra semester of Maths should be added).

I did the degree part time whilst working full time and once I was done I started the interview process for a position at Google. I was told that they don't usually hire anyone unless they have a bachelor of computer science, but that they'd make an exception seeing as I've been working (effectively had 4 years experience at that time). I ended up getting a non-grad job elsewhere even before my second phone interview, but it seems to me that if they only hire BSc students, the university system is not setup to suit them.

I've never met anyone from Queensland (my home state) that has done a BSc, its either called Bachelor of IT or Software Engineering. That doesn't mean they aren't capable of being great employees for Google.

rodh257on Space Station grabs SpaceX Dragon ship

Amazing stuff, also amazing is being able to watch the live feed from space on my phone!

rodh257on SpaceX Falcon 9/Dragon Launch Webcast (starts at 12:00am PDT)

What's the next thing we can watch live? The docking with ISS? when will that be on?

rodh257on Nick Bradbury: Android Apps Shouldn't Be Crappy Clones of iPhone Apps

Google released App Inventor for this purpose, don't know how good it is though. Now maintained by MIT: http://www.appinventor.mit.edu/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_App_Inventor

rodh257on Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore

The reason we still use these old icons is because every single icon requires people to think about and learn what it represents. The only icons that don't require the user to think are ones they see all the time. If you've never seen an icon before you can only really guess what it means, the shorter the time it takes to guess, the better the icon is. It's for this reason that I don't like icon-only user interfaces, they require too much thinking and guessing from the user.

Take a look at these ones that show up when you select text in Android ICS: http://asset3.cbsistatic.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2011/10/18/ICS_co...

What on earth do they mean? I've been using ICS since January and I still don't know what they do except for the cut one. Because there's no way for them to show tooltips on hovering the only way to learn is to press it and try and work out what it just did.