aeflash's comments

aeflash | 10 years ago | on: Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits

It likely will. You revealed an unconscious bias you have. You think that focusing on diversity is lowering the hiring bar. This is a fundamentally biased position -- it assumes minorities are worse tech workers. You're the top comment on a popular HN thread, many people are rebutting you, and are getting linked from many external sources.

All it takes is one hiring manager to read this thread, realize their unconscious bias, and then realize that focusing on diversity does not compromise employee standards. Then a black person gets hired.

aeflash | 10 years ago | on: Typed Arrays in ECMAScript 6

Are typed arrays stored outside of the JS heap? For example, in node.js you can use Buffers to get around V8's 1.8GB JS heap limit -- are typed arrays similar? Does the ES6 spec specify whether typed arrays should be stored separately from the JS heap, or is that an implementation detail?

aeflash | 10 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2015)

Fluid, Inc. | http://fluid.com | San Francisco, CA (but remote friendly)

Senior Full Stack Engineer

Fluid's main product offering is Fluid Configure, a flexible and powerful platform for mass customization and configuration of consumer products. Fluid Configure is being successfully used by The North Face, Reebok, Oakley, and Vans, among many others. We are looking for engineers with well-rounded experience to help us build out the next generation of Fluid Configure, and help us solve problems in building flexible and performant web UIs, 3D rendering, image processing, scalability, server APIs, and administration tools.

Senior Software Engineer - AI / Machine Learning

Fluid's next product (currently in the alpha phase) is Expert Personal Shopper (XPS) - an AI / ML-driven product recommendation engine. XPS uses a variety of AI technologies such as IBM's Watson, Named Entity Recognition, Natural Language Classifiers, and Sentiment Analysis to produce its results. We are looking for smart, creative, skilled engineers to advance our intelligent XPS platform. Experience with AI or machine learning technologies is a huge plus (but not required).

Fluid is a company of about 100 people, with offices in SF and NY, as well as many remote employees spread across the globe. Fluid started as a digital agency, but within the last 5 years has seen strong growth in its SaaS business. On the Software R&D team, we value technical skills as well as creative and intrapersonal skills. We have flexible working schedules, great benefits, and consider our 40-hour work weeks sacred. If any of these positions interest you, send me your resume or something that showcases your skills at [email protected] (I am Alex Early). You can also apply online[1]. We also have a variety of other non-engineering positions open.

[1] http://www.fluid.com/careers#resumator-job-job_2015031617135...

Keyword Soup: React, Flux, Node.js, Javascript, Functional Programming, FP, RWD, HTML5 Canvas, Browserify, Express.js, REST, AWS, EC2, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, Bitbucket, Git, CI, Atlassian, Hipchat, reaction GIFs, emoji, Redis, Chef, Java, Groovy, Neo4j, NER, NLP, Machine Learning, your favorite tech that would help us effectively solve problems

aeflash | 10 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2015)

Fluid, Inc. | http://fluid.com | San Francisco, CA (but remote friendly)

☛ Full Stack Engineer

Fluid's main product offering is Fluid Configure, a flexible and powerful platform for mass customization and configuration of consumer products. Fluid Configure is being successfully used by The North Face, Reebok, Oakley, and Vans, among many others. We are looking for engineers with well-rounded experience to help us build out the next generation of Fluid Configure, and help us solve problems in building flexible and performant web UIs, 3D rendering, image processing, scalability, server APIs, and administration tools.

☛ Full Stack Engineer - AI / Machine Learning

Fluid's next product (currently in the alpha phase) is Expert Personal Shopper (XPS) - an AI / ML-driven product recommendation engine. XPS uses a variety of AI technologies such as IBM's Watson, Named Entity Recognition, Natural Language Classifiers, and Sentiment Analysis to produce its results. We are looking for smart, creative, skilled engineers to advance our intelligent XPS platform. Experience with AI or machine learning technologies is a huge plus (but not required).

Fluid is a company of about 100 people, with offices in SF and NY, as well as many remote employees spread across the globe. Fluid started as a digital agency, but within the last 5 years has seen strong growth in its SaaS business. On the Software R&D team, we value technical skills as well as creative and intrapersonal skills. We have flexible working schedules, great benefits, and consider our 40-hour work weeks sacred.

If any of these positions interest you, send me your resume or something that showcases your skills at [email protected] (I am Alex Early). You can also apply online[1]. We also have a variety of other non-engineering positions open.

[1] http://www.fluid.com/careers#resumator-job-job_2015031617135...

Keyword Soup: React, Flux, Node.js, Javascript, Functional Programming, FP, RWD, HTML5 Canvas, Browserify, Express.js, REST, AWS, EC2, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, Bitbucket, Git, CI, Atlassian, Hipchat, reaction GIFs, emoji, Redis, Chef, Java, Groovy, Neo4j, NER, NLP, Machine Learning, your favorite tech that would help us effectively solve problems

aeflash | 11 years ago | on: Our company has a therapist

I think this is a great idea. While I think the execution could be improved (maybe a person wants to see an different therapist, or one outside the office), but attempting to remove the stigma surrounding mental health, and giving low friction access is huge. There is also the acknowledgement of the fact that most people aren't perfect, and nearly everyone could benefit from some sort of counseling. If everyone at your company is in perfect mental health you're either incredibly lucky, or kidding yourself.

I think Shanley Kane put it best[1]: "People are broken, and people work at companies."

[1] https://modelviewculture.com/news/the-eternal-and-toxic-opti...

aeflash | 11 years ago | on: Carnival Cash: The Cult of Seniority

I think the author makes a couple flawed assumptions. First: that all people are motivated primarily by money, and second: things that have no direct monetary value have no value.

Some people value the work they do, or the work their company does. Some people value their teams and the people they work with on a daily basis. Some people value working in a nice space, or their own spaces. Some people would like to look back at 65 at what they have built, rather than what they have earned, not really caring that they may have earned 20% less.

I do agree that chasing seniority for title only can be a fools errand. A higher title can be a substitute for self-esteem issues, but on the other hand, it can also lead to higher pay scales.

Also, I've known companies to reward those "corporate idealists" with more than just carnival tickets.... If your company doesn't reward putting in the occasional extra hour and seeing things through to completion, it's a bad company to work for.

aeflash | 11 years ago | on: React Tips and Best Practices

That's only true if you're following the canonical Flux architecture to the letter. There's little difference between having your store trigger setState() on a root component and having your store trigger React.render(<RootComponent/>) with new props.

aeflash | 11 years ago | on: React Tips and Best Practices

My point was that the state of the dropdown is something that perfectly fine to manage directly in the component (nothing else needs to know about it). Things like the selected value would not be something to manage using component state.

aeflash | 11 years ago | on: DSLR – Damn Small Linux Remake

Too bad nearly every page is broken on it (CSS wise). The only error it detected on my site was that newfangled <doctype html> declaration... The entire layout was jumbled.

aeflash | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: What are the essential components of your front-end workflow?

My team decided to just forget about Windows, and only use Linux or OSX. It is so much more convenient when you can rely on Bash, Make, and Unix conventions. (It is interesting discovering the slight incompatibilities between GNU core utils and OSX core utils, though, but usually the GNU versions just have extra features.)

Make plays nicely with npm once you set the PATH to include ./node_modules/.bin . Watching is the only thing Make can't do, so I usually set up a very simple Gruntfile that watches the source files, launches a livereload server, and just calls `make` when anything changes.

aeflash | 11 years ago | on: Hermit: a font for programmers, by a programmer

Individual characters can be made out, but words are hard to read. Not enough separation between letters and symbols, so constructs like "(pred=%i)\t" are harder to visually parse. I'm also not a fan of aliased pixel fonts -- it really exacerbates the picket-fence effect while reading.

Here's what your code sample looks like in Source Code Pro:

http://i.imgur.com/uAknyGB.png

Smaller font:

http://i.imgur.com/m0p17tm.png

Notice how all letters take up the full horizontal width so words clump together. It's easy to see that a space is a space, and not just an "i" next to an "l"

It's also worth noting that I had to try 3 separate OCR processors with your sample before I got one that didn't output complete garbage.

aeflash | 11 years ago | on: Requiring vs. Browserifying Angular

Sprockets is incredibly primitive compared to something like RequireJS or Browserify -- all it does is concat.

One might argue that Browserify is that JS bundler for Node. The issue is that using it with Angular seems superfluous because Angular has its own module system that works well when you just concat everything.

aeflash | 11 years ago | on: Dijkstra’s algorithm and the Fibonacci heap

I came across a similar solution when creating graphs with immutable data structures. Just store your nodes in an array, and describe the links between them as pairs of indexes. It does require that extra level of indirection, as hinted at in the "Dual Index Problem" article he links to. It is a bit odd, since you're basically reimplementing mutable pointers, where each operation returns a new set of memory.

I will add as a disclaimer that I'm somewhat new to the world of immutable data, and am still experimenting with this graph structure -- seeing how it scales with complicated data and relations.

aeflash | 11 years ago | on: The Economics of Star Trek (2013)

> On a more microeconomic level, what happens when Bashir and O'Brien order a couple rounds at Quark's? Who picks up their tab?

It is mentioned in the article that the Federation would likely hold reserves of foreign currency (like latnium) for trading with peripheral civilizations. It's likely that being stationed on an alien space station would give the DS9 officers some stipend of latinum for trading with the locals.

It could also be that Sisko worked out a deal with Quark that rent and maintenance is free, so Starfleet officers drink for free.

Or like he also said in the article, drinks are just a loss-leader for the Dabo table and holosuites.

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