_nato_ | 3 years ago | on: A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of Y-intercept (2012)
I always thought this was a paul-grahamism...
_nato_'s comments
_nato_ | 5 years ago | on: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them
There was an event when a startup I was at asked Basho (they were the company behind Riak db) about backing up our data. Backing was a little side-feature that was possible to rig up, but I recall they looked at this inquiry as if I had two heads -- as if to say, it's replicated, why jump the shark? There was a bug with one of the Riak releases, and all the data was lost. (When we scaled up with this buggy Riak release, the empty node assumed master roll, and all the child nodes went, ah... the new state has no data, let's all delete records 0..k. Fun times.)
_nato_ | 6 years ago | on: Ambassador who testified against Trump is 'as radical as oatmeal'
The Control Revolution book goes into some great detail about Quaker Oats. Fascinating stuff regarding hacking the minds of the masses.
A very brief overview of it: http://blog.snailtext.com/posts/quaker-oats.html
_nato_ | 6 years ago | on: Inkscape 1.0 Beta 1
Glad to read this. Never used inkscape beyond the CLI tools. I hope they continue to keep this chunk of their software mature and growing, too.
Here's my all-time favorite thing to do... transform font types to paths inside svgs (so one doesn't need to hold that font asset in CDN, ...) :
inkscape -T -A tmp-hack.pdf orig-w-custom-fonts.svg
inkscape -l final.svg tmp-hack.pdf
_nato_ | 8 years ago | on: The last day of linotype at the NYT (1978) [video]
As someone who spent the weekend figuring out `flexbox' to align copy around a webpage, after years of floating divs and pulling my hair out, I can appreciate this video. Creative destruction is an awe-inspiring, yet wistful force of nature.
_nato_ | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your notes at work?
Without too much effort, I keep a NOTES file in each project directory. I keep it out of source-control. Anything that is worth preserving (backed up and checked in) goes in README. I also use a file called SCRAP for ephemeral matters, again, in each project root, not checked in. A great pattern that has served me well.
_nato_ | 9 years ago | on: YouTube to stop 30-second unskippable ads
I wish fixyt.com was still working, but a quick /watch?v=SLUG_ID appending to it still saves the day on videos-with-ads I just cannot bare.
_nato_ | 9 years ago | on: Elixir deployments on AWS
In using cowboy directly, it would be a mistake (at least from personal experience) to rely of cowboy for anything other than your api endpoints and/or dynamic templates. Static assets, including html, are best served via nginx, with cowboy serving requests to your application. I've never had a cowboy + OTP project not lean on nginx in some way (yet).
_nato_ | 9 years ago | on: Vim's 25th anniversary and the release of Vim 8
Long-time vi[m] user, and always learning/amazement. This very morning I learned about the `-c` flag. So, `vim -c "set spell" my-misspelled-file.txt` starts up vim with a given setting.
_nato_ | 9 years ago | on: Hackers Have Stolen Millions of Dollars in Bitcoin Using Only Phone Numbers
The word hacker is giving me an identity crisis every time a headline like this comes out.
_nato_ | 9 years ago | on: Writing a cron job microservice with Serverless and AWS Lambda
A slight variation I'd like to plug for random scheduled jobs (3rd party) : http://ikura.co
_nato_ | 9 years ago | on: Nintendo signals end for Wii U
Never bought one, but if Nintendo's 20/20 hindsight claim that the ~Wii U confused consumers~ was the reason for its relative miss, then that's an incredible lesson learned.
_nato_ | 9 years ago | on: Building Better Interfaces with SVG (2015)
For anyone who is a web hacker rather than a designer, I highly suggest trying out SVG here and there in your web projects. SVG is a fantastic bridge for anyone who wants to put some graphics (dynamic or otherwise) in place, is used to just having copy as content, and/or is a bit afraid of opening PS/Gimp.
_nato_ | 9 years ago | on: Elixir Design Goals (2013)
From an Erlang/OTP vantage point, what Elixir ended up being famed for is its relatively good tooling.
_nato_ | 9 years ago | on: Mr. Robot Killed the Hollywood Hacker
David Mamet once lamented that the computer has taken over the horse, in films. Where once the hero would jump onto their ride to go fight justice, now we have her pulling out the keyboard.
_nato_ | 9 years ago | on: Save Firefox
Can someone clarify what is meant by `publisher' in this piece?
_nato_ | 9 years ago | on: Cron best practices
In the same-ish vein, may I suggest http://ikura.co for anyone wishing to link timely jobs w/ their web applications.
_nato_ | 10 years ago | on: The Greatest Violin No One’s Ever Heard
Just wanted to share a sentiment from a living luthier that I like.
Samuel Zygmuntowicz (a modern maker) has remarked, Strad made new violins. It's a reminder that age has little to do with the quality in some fine antique instruments. Strad's craft to fabricate brand-spanking-new violins made him quite a wealthy man (because they were fine instruments then, as they are now).
_nato_ | 10 years ago | on: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?
I use Erlang/OTP as my go-to language. The flack about its ugly syntax certainly puts Erlang in the unfashionable camp. But unjustly. I use it because I like single assignment of variables, pattern-matching, and I also think FP is pretty swell. Someone said recently that the Erlang community could be as small as one-thousand serious hackers. Now that's relatively small!
_nato_ | 10 years ago | on: Yet another blog post about how parallelism is not concurrency
For me, these drawings made it quite clear what the differences were:
http://joearms.github.io/2013/04/05/concurrent-and-parallel-...
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