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simonista

376 karma · joined March 26, 2008

Engineer @ Lumio

Say hello@simonista.com, I'd love to hear from you.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/simonista; my proof: https://keybase.io/simonista/sigs/XO78UMtFJIZT-k_Nqb8ERwhSGUNYpQrjIq6z6Uz-Gc8 ]

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simonista··on Detangle: AI-generated summaries of legal docs
I'm excited to see where this goes because I think it is a cool application of AI. That said, two of the first three paragraph summaries are wrong in this example:

> [Investor Name] gave [Company Name] the right to certain shares of its Capital Stock in exchange for [Amount] on [Date].

This is backwards

> The Post-Money Valuation Cap is a number that is written in Section 2.

This isn't true, the number is here, "additional defined terms" are later.

simonista··on AirPods don't “just work”
Two suggestions that might help OP with some of these annoyances:

- See the "Turn off automatic switching" section of https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212204, to take manual control of when they switch devices

- In System Preferences -> Notifications & Focus you can switch any apps notifications from "Alerts" to "Banners" which will make them go away automatically when ignored.

simonista··on Show HN: Rb – Turns Ruby into a command line utility
It's feeding stdin to ruby code you specify on the command line, either as an array of lines, or repeated strings. So in:

  docker ps | rb drop 1 | rb -l split[1]
The output of docker ps is passed as an array of lines to ruby, and the first line is dropped, and then that output is fed to ruby again, but line by line, so each line is split (which defaults to split on whitespace), and returns the second element. With parentheses for function calls it would be:

  docker ps | rb drop(1) | rb -l split()[1]
simonista··on Time-series histograms with Rothko – metrics collection for large deployments
Looks very cool, thanks for posting!

Can you give some examples of actionable insights you've gained from having these graphs? Are you using them in acute problem solving or in longer term prioritization of where to spend effort improving? What does your pipeline look like for trying to drill into more detail for a potentially concerning metric?

simonista··on Vivint's Game of Codes week long programming challenge ($20k in prizes)
Super excited for this, the last one (hackthe.computer) was really well done!
simonista··on Getting Hacked, Lessons Learned
This seems to have changed recently. You can now remove the phone as soon as you add authenticator as an option.
simonista··on Investing for Geeks
Does anyone have suggested reading on what the estimates of 8% (or 7% or 5% or whatever gets used) are based on? Is there any data to support that the next 30 years will see those types of returns from the total market on average?
simonista··on Holding On and Letting Go
How sad. I got to hear him talk in person about functional reactive programing for musical interfaces, and it's a wonderful talk and really neat ideas. If you're interested, I believe this is the talk: https://vimeo.com/96744621. Rest in peace.
simonista··on Ember Testing Guide v2.0
Lots of work has gone into making a sane testing story for ember, props to all the people who have worked so hard on this!
simonista··on Pairing vs. Code Review: Comparing Developer Cultures
Sure, but my question was in the context of the OP definition of "pair programming culture" as "a team that does nearly 100% pairing ... The day-to-day experience of programming is that of a day-long conversation with your pair"

I'm curious how other things that are intrinsically non-pair activities fit in.

simonista··on Pairing vs. Code Review: Comparing Developer Cultures
Great post!

In the pairing paradigm (say that 5 times fast), how much of a typical day is spent actually pairing? How do you manage email or other company wide communication? What happens when a server crashes or another emergency comes up? Or when another pair has a question that you can answer? Or when one member of the pair is also responsible for a deploying something? Or one member has a meeting?

Disclaimer: I've mostly been exposed to the code review paradigm (I work with Paul at `current_job`)

simonista··on Mathematicians Team Up on Twin Primes Conjecture
Wow, this is a great story. First of all, props to the writer for weaving a bunch of different threads together in a way that made sense and was understandable to non-mathematicians without dumbing it down too much. And this is why I love math. There are so many great characters and themes in this story.

I love problems that can be stated so simply and yet are so fiendishly difficult to prove.

I love the idea that there is room for everybody in mathematics, from the lone genius outside of academia, to the young post-doc, to the unlikely collaborators.

Most of all, I love the idea that it's okay to fail, to throw out dumb ideas along with brilliant ones and that everyone makes mistakes, even Ph.D.'s in mathematics. We need more of that in education and academia generally.

simonista··on Tetra for iOS - my new Letterpress-inspired board game app
Does this app share any code with Letterpress or did you re-create the UI elements/interactions?
simonista··on Github turns five
Wow, I had no idea Github had 158 employees. I guess I mostly hear about their engineering team here on HN, and didn't realize the rest of the team was that big. Congrats on 5 years guys, it's a great service!
simonista··on Gmail was down
calendar as well
simonista··on Step by step from jQuery to Backbone
Thank you so much for writing this. I've always felt like I was missing something with Backbone -- I knew that it was mostly infrastructure and assumptions that helped organize and clean up client-side code, but coming from mostly a backend/rails background, I never quite understood the assumptions that were being made and the "magic" that has happening behind the scenes. This step-by-step process is really helpful.
simonista··on Cost breakdown for Stripe, Braintree, Chargify, Recurly and Saasy
I asked stripe about all this in their campfire chatroom last night, and I was hoping they would chime in on this thread, but let me pass along some of what they said.

Their response was similar to what the grandparent articulated: that by using Stripe.js, you're avoiding the storage requirements and thus don't have to do anything extra for PCI. However, you can also interact with their API without stripe.js, which is where you would need PCIDSS and thus the language in the terms.

Now, all that aside, I think you bring up a great point about the gray area and the risk that a security breach would cause. One major difference is that with Stripe.js, a security breach would not put at risk all cards used in the PAST, the way storing them yourself would.

simonista··on Unix is digital clay - Matt Might
Matt, for irc you should check out Limechat. I just switched from Colloquy and am loving to so far. I set it up with the three panel view, and was at first confused about the lower window (which is like a "everything you can't see in the main room window" view), but i've found myself using it a lot just to glance at conversations in other rooms.
simonista··on Webfaction app memory quota increased to 256MB for everyone
This is such perfect timing for me. I've been bumping into their 80MB memory limit a lot over the past few weeks after launching a new site (they were actually letting me get up to about 120 before killing nginx). I was figuring it was finally time to migrate over to linode and then this! Thank you so much webfaction!

To anyone thinking about jumping in, webfaction has been the best shared hosting provider I've ever dealt with. Lots of preset options, SSH, ability to install stuff from source in your home dir, great email hosting.

simonista··on I swapped my MacBook for an iPad+Linode
Just went and checked it out, the specifically list screen as something they'd like to support soon, but that doesn't work (I think because "Multiple processes with hierarchy" doesn't work yet).

So... maybe someday, but not yet.

simonista··on The Humble Voxatron Debut
Sorry for the hash tag in the url, it's not necessary but I figured we wanted a separate thread to discuss the new bundle. A mod can strip it off if desired.
simonista··on Codecademy (YC S11) Raises $2.5 Million To Teach You How To Code
Congrats to the team! I've run through the exercises they've posted and I think they're really on to a cool learning format here. I'm excited to see where they go from here.
simonista··on Codecademy Surges To 200,000 Users, 2.1 Million Lessons Completed In 72 Hours
I can see this fitting really well with Khan Academy. I wonder if the two have talked at all.

Congrats on the success guys, the site is awesome.

simonista··on Can’t Wait (YC S11) is a mobile social network for movie trailers
Weren't you working on Convore a few months ago? Is this from the same team?
simonista··on How I Made $350 In Two Days With Three Pages and Some Payment Code
I'm curious how you got into the stripe beta? Had you used them before with other projects?
simonista··on JSON users: Avoid CSRFs by not using top-level arrays
Does anyone know how to rectify this if you're using the Rails 3 respond_with pattern?
simonista··on [dead]
I don't see anything stopping you from doing that with the current messaging app, and GroupMe seems to be doing just fine currently. People are mentioning "group messaging" as part of the potential of the new iMessage and I'm wondering if people have seen or played with this feature yet, because I didn't see it anywhere in the keynote.

Another question I have: does this app make the difference between sending SMS messages and sending iMessages completely transparent for me as an end user? I hope so, but it seems like there are some interesting use cases to work out. And how do you "address" a message to an ipad user? Email address, like FaceTime?

Sorry for rambling a bit, I'm just really interested in how some of the implementation details are fleshed out.

simonista··on [dead]
Has anyone actually seen or played with the group messaging feature? Do GroupMe et. al. have legitimate cause for concern?
simonista··on A Guide to Stocks & Options for the Startup Entrepreneur (or Employee)
Awesome writeup. Thanks so much for doing it.

There's an error in the third paragraph of the equity financing section. The last sentences trails off without ending.

I also have two suggestions for things to add. 1. Are there similar tax issues to watch out for as a founder who owns a large percentage of common stock from the beginning of the company. 2. I think it would be helpful in the convertible note section to have an example of how debt converts to stock like you have an example of how debt converts to cash in a sale.

Thanks again!

simonista··on Apple Planning Major Product Launch For Retail 10th Anniversary?
It seems strange to think that if it were specifically for the anniversary that it would be happening 2-3 days AFTER said anniversary (Saturday night and Sunday instead of thursday). Also, Sunday seems like a strange day for a new product launch.
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