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337 karma · joined September 22, 2011

twitter @_timbur
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tfb··on Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?
The best kinds of side projects are the fun ones. When you really enjoy working on something, you really don't need to "stay motivated".

I love to code and I love to build things, and I would lose my sanity if there was only one thing I ever worked on. Plus, one of the best things about side projects is that there's usually no pressure to really get it done, so when I load my workspace for a side project, I'm always excited to get started, because I know nothing really important depends on it. And unsurprisingly, I've learned so much from random fun stuff on the side that I would never have learned otherwise.

tfb··on Merry Christmas to HN
Merry Christmas, everyone. I tend to lurk a lot, but this is one of the few programming communities where I don't expect to be met with negativity and condescension every time I post something. And beyond that, just reading everyone's discussions has easily helped shape me into the person I am today. Thanks for the past few years and many more to come!
tfb··on Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor
> There's also the fact that it won't lose its data on power loss.

Does this mean that for software to take full advantage of this, the software will need to be updated to account for it? For instance, Redis loads data into memory from disk upon starting, but if something like this 400GB SSD is available as memory (and say for instance, 300GB is in use by Redis), wouldn't it make sense for Redis, upon starting, to just "remember" the state of the memory rather than reloading it from disk?

tfb··on Firebase is Joining Google
https://www.loggur.com is like Firebase on steroids, though only launched a few weeks ago. There is a lot to come: first thing being proper documentation for the REST API behind Loggur (should developers prefer to talk directly to it), and then hopefully huge strides in usability. But we need tons of feedback for the latter!
tfb··on Firebase is Joining Google
https://www.loggur.com is like Firebase on steroids, though only launched a few weeks ago. There is a lot to come: first thing being proper documentation for the REST API behind Loggur (should developers prefer to talk directly to it), and then hopefully huge strides in usability. But we need tons of feedback for the latter!
tfb··on Stamplay: IFTTT for developers
Loggur (https://www.loggur.com) launched a few days ago. It's still pretty rough around the edges but the core concept is to be able to use interchangeable parts to build web apps in real-time with other developers. It of course has the added benefit of being able to easily build real-time apps for users. It also eliminates the need for most backend work.
tfb··on Show HN: Build real-time web apps with other people... in real-time!
What do you think could be done to improve the UI? And did you check out the tutorials? https://www.loggur.com/tutorials
tfb··on Show HN: Build real-time web apps with other people... in real-time!
Tim here. I figure HN is the best place to post first about Loggur, given that without HN, I would not have made it this far. I also hope you all see the usefulness of Loggur as clearly as I do.

Loggur honestly took entirely too long to build, and I can't take any of that time back now, but I've always felt in my gut since the beginning that this is one of those cases that requires it to work well from the beginning. Otherwise, it stands no chance of succeeding.

I imagine many of you will disagree with my approach, so don't hold back. Any and all constructive criticism is welcome. That's the only way it can improve.

I also apologize for the lack of documentation and how unintuitive it probably is to most people. After working on it for so long, the primary goal over the past few months was getting it out the door. As I mention in my first blog post, the next goal is to help developers see how easy Loggur really is, but I will of course need feedback to make that happen.

I'm also interested to see how everything holds up under real world load, so if by some chance this hits the front page and the server buckles, I'll make a typical technical blog post explaining the ins and outs of what I do to fix it. The server's only purpose is to act as a RESTful (probably debatable by many) API using only Node and Redis with Primus + SockJS, nothing else. Everything else is handled on the client. I also haven't yet really done any real optimization, as that would probably fall under premature optimization, so yeah it should be interesting.

Last thing: Please check the "Suggestions" link in the footer to see what all I'm currently planning on working on. And feel free to add your own.

tfb··on Ask HN: Key-Value Store Database with Historical Lookup?
My startup www.loggur.com is essentially a really advanced service that does this. Please pardon the text for now. I recently replaced the old landing page with it to prevent any confusion, as things have taken a bit of a turn (for the best). There are roughly only 3 things left to do before launching!
tfb··on With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things
> The next step in open and free software will be making coding, forking and deploying apps as easy as editing Wikipedia.

I've been working on something along these lines for quite a while now. I've temporarily taken down the landing page while I get all the ducks in a row and put up the new one, but if you send an email to contact@loggur.com, I'll make sure to contact you when Loggur launches.

We should launch within the next week or two!

tfb··on Show HN: Impulse – Dynamic JS Animations for the Mobile Web
> It also doesn't rely on jquery animate, which has a lot of extra cruft to run on older browsers and support legacy code. Writing the rendering in pure javascript helps a ton.

Quick question for anyone passing by: Do the latest versions of jQuery still have this issue? I know 2.x dropped legacy support, so it would be interesting to see how much efficiency with things like animations has increased.

tfb··on Holographic universe experiment begins
That actually makes a lot of sense. For quite a while, I've been trying to imagine some rules for how some parent system might guide the laws of physics behind our universe, and your comment seems to have lit a bulb in my head. I haven't yet read the source link and I wish I could offer more input on it right now, but I'll have to check it out later.
tfb··on Autistics in the Silicon Valley
> Increasingly, I've seen it being used as a pejorative against software developers (as this profession does indeed require extreme dedication), usually by the types of people who have zero ambition of their own. Most likely as self-validation that their apathy is normal, and it's others who have the problem.

I see this on almost a weekly basis. It is really disheartening and almost infuriating. I feel like this outlook only serves to reduce diversity by alienating anyone who would rather spend their time building things than "shooting the shit" with other people for the majority of their days. It also seems like it might be a relatively new phenomenon? Maybe in the future the masses will be more accepting of different approaches to social interaction (or lack thereof) and living life in general.

> I think this really does a disservice to the people who are genuinely suffering from an actual disorder. And it also pushes people toward the lighter end of the spectrum to play up how autism is really just a different mindset and not a disorder at all.

> Let's leave the "disorder" label for people who really are disabled in a significant, life-impairing way.

Very well said!

tfb··on Competition vs. Community
> You sure as hell deserve it.

Without a doubt. I've spent countless hours myself developing a mod for an old gaming community with some of the most unappreciative manchildren (trolls) in existence, and I saw it through to the end because I felt I had an obligation to finish it. And to this day, there are a handful of people from a subset of that community who blame me for the demise of said subset, even though I did everything they asked.

I learned a lot from it though, and not just about coding and development, but about communities in general. The entitlement that some people feel they have of your time can be astounding. Apparently when you do things for people for free out kindness or out of passion for something, it only leads some (many?) of them to expect you to continue to do it all, until they've sucked every bit out of you that they can. I'm sure this is especially worse in online communities, because to them, you're just text on their screen who provides them with something fun or useful, not a human being.

So yeah. Take a break. A week may not even be long enough. Work on other things, completely unrelated things. It'll give you a fresh perspective and help with realizing exactly how much time and energy of your life you're devoting towards something and how much of it is really worth it.

tfb··on Multiline strings in JavaScript
Weird... I just just randomly looking at this a few days ago upon a search for "js multiline" when wondering about the common way to spell multiline (multi line vs multi-line vs multiline). I was intrigued by his code though, ultimately in awe of the cleverness and conciseness of it. Very cool hack! Crazy coincidence to see the very code on HN only a few days later.
tfb··on Double Pendulum in fewer than 100 lines of JavaScript
Whoa. This is blowing my mind. It is seriously amazing that this exists.
tfb··on Technical Debt 101
Very well said. It's a shame so many project managers (and coders!) don't understand that any sufficiently sized project is a million times better off when investing more time at the beginning to lay a solid foundation. I like that more and more people are beginning to understand nowadays.
tfb··on The future of Unreal Tournament begins today
Whatever assets Epic releases, we're aiming to adjust them to match UT99 as closely as possible over at www.uTournament.net. We're also going to integrate the game into the web browser!
tfb··on Value is created by doing
It almost sounds to me like if the product we end up with isn't what was envisioned, then it wasn't executed properly. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, since how it ends up is usually due to the market guiding the product's development; and if the market is holding your hand, you're probably making some money, which is the goal of most startups.

But I would bet that if you let the market dictate too much too soon, it will be harder to truly innovate, which is usually what the original vision was about. I'm obviously making some pretty big assumptions here but people know only what they know, and sometimes it takes carefully timed and constructed execution to snap them out of it to create a new paradigm and take things to the next level.

tfb··on ClanBase is no more – we are sorry
UT99 is still alive and well! Check out www.globalunreal.com!
tfb··on Letter From A Psychopath
Thanks for that explanation. That's a really effective way to look at it, I think.
tfb··on Letter From A Psychopath
I've known a few psychopaths myself. It is interesting how they react when you make it clear you know all about their deception. I personally find it hilarious that they think they're able to dupe everyone they meet, but I also feel sad that it still works on so many.

It's hard though to differentiate true psychopaths from those who simply share a few traits. When I read about psychopaths, I tend to find common traits within myself. I can't tell if I'm a psychopath or not. Are those who desire power, control, and inflated egos always psychopaths? Or do psychopaths just happen to always have that in common? Regarding myself for example, I may dream big and make promises that take time to meet, but I'm not a liar and I don't actively manipulate people for selfish gain; and I do crave power, control, and prestige, but not for the sake of it; I just know that those three characteristics are required to make some kind of real impact on the world that truly improves lives; and I've come to realize that if I want something to be done, I can't always rely on others to do it, so being in a respectable position of power and control is almost certainly required. Does that make me a psychopath?

tfb··on Bitcoins: The Second Biggest Ponzi Scheme in History
It serves as evidence that he is an uneducated idiot who lacks common sense.
tfb··on Why GNU grep is fast (2010)
I agree. It helps to have something tangible and to refactor later. I think the main issue that some people (myself included of course) have with that is refactoring too late. You never want to build something big on top of sketchy code. I've done this a few times myself to try to meet a deadline, and it's really bit me in the ass. We're talking weeks maybe months down the drain.

"Sketching in code" is a great analogy. Similar to how you'd trim off the rough edges in a sketched drawing, I've found myself cutting a lot of cruft when refactoring.

tfb··on Why GNU grep is fast (2010)
I've found that taking a considerable amount of time (days even) to determine the very best solution to a problem always results in less effort and less time spent coding overall. It's also no coincidence that the code becomes incredibly simple, more readable, more efficient, more flexible, easier to build on top of, and fewer issues down the road. Plus, in the end, depending on the magnitude of the project, less time is spent on overall development.

It is never a good idea to rush any large coding project. By rush, I mean just sit down and start churning out code just so you can have something tangible within a day or two. And by large, I mean anything requiring at least a few thousand LOC. Anything less can be okay to rush though; i.e., small projects where maintainability and scalability aren't as important; e.g., some MVP to test some market.

tfb··on Walmart Node.js Memory Leak
It loads instantly for me. I'm using Chrome 31.0.1650.57 on Windows 7.
tfb··on HTML5 game written in 0 lines of JS
This is pretty cool. Although, I'm having trouble clicking on the bonuses and don't see my score. I must be overlooking something and cba to decipher how this works at this hour.

Edit: Managed to make it the whole way through by leaving the ship in the bottom left. And then when the bonuses kept flying by uncontested because the game was "over", I was able to click on them after a few tries. The issue must have been that the cursor wasn't where I thought it was. Still very cool!

tfb··on Why Silicon Valley Funds Instagrams, Not Hyperloops
This might be one of the best articles I've read on HN in a long time.

One point that really hit home with me is that we need to innovate innovation. I'm willing to bet that a huge part of our stagnation is a result of our creative outlets not being diverse enough. We seem to have become limited to our screens and our virtual worlds. And it isn't by accident. We're social creatures and social media has sucked us in. And of course the internet plus the various kinds of screens (devices) used for viewing it are very effective means of communication, advertising, etc. And we love to be entertained.

So I think the key to a wider range of innovation is to somehow reveal to the masses that there are many tangible concepts just waiting to become part of our physical world, concepts that will provide the same social, commercial, and entertaining functions as those in the virtual world. Somehow our collective focus will need to shift from virtual to physical. 3D printing is probably a good step in the right direction, but I think it will need to be combined with some kind of commodified robotics to be truly useful.

tfb··on Our Most Important Technology Project Yet
So how does generating a graph actually solve the problem in the real world? Or am I misunderstanding what the problem is? I was assuming the problem was with some real world application, most likely regarding the implementation of some complex networking algorithm for Heroku's system. But if it's just some abstract math problem, of course it would make sense to use something like Mathematica, MATLAB, etc.
tfb··on Our Most Important Technology Project Yet
In a single line I can get solutions to complex problems that would take days in Ruby, Lisp or Haskell. It is the same distance again as Lisp is from C.

In fact, many of the failures you see write-ups on HN I've been able to model and solve in a few minutes with MMA. In particular the rap genius Heroku queue issue.

Can you elaborate and/or provide a thorough example of this? I'm curious.

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