brandonwamboldt's comments

brandonwamboldt | 2 years ago | on: Top AIs still fail IQ tests

We may be unable to provide a concrete definition of what intelligence is, but we can certainly provide definitions for what it isn't. E.g. we don't need a concrete definition of intelligence to say that a rock isn't intelligent. A pencil isn't intelligent. A calculator isn't intelligence

brandonwamboldt | 6 years ago | on: Thunderbird 68.0

Obligatory comment that Gmail has a basic HTML view that is substantially faster and less resource intensive, but not as pleasant to use:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/

It loads almost instantly for me, and is quite quick to navigate.

brandonwamboldt | 6 years ago | on: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019

Ignoring your insults, I think there are many valid use cases for smart home devices.

For example, automatically turning lights on and off on a schedule, changing light color to red at night, being able to casually set reminders without bothering with a phone, controlling your TV without needing your phone (e.g. for netflix), being able to change temperature on a schedule, all kinds of things.

Just because they occasionally have bugs for some people doesn't mean they are entirely useless. Many people (myself included) have few to no problems with their smart home devices.

brandonwamboldt | 7 years ago | on: Paul Allen has died

Paul was among the top philanthropists in America, and has contributed so much to society. Truly a sad day

brandonwamboldt | 7 years ago | on: GitLab raises $100M from Iconiq, GV, and Khosla, at $1.1B valuation

My company uses GitLab and I think the CI is fantastic, especially compared to Jenkins, Travis, Circle, etc. It's very easy to setup, incorporated into the rest of our workflows, intuitive, reliable, powerful. I have a few complaints but i see they are on the upcoming roadmap.

Overall, all my devs are quite happy with GitLab!

brandonwamboldt | 7 years ago | on: Python in Visual Studio Code

Something to consider, VS Code being free means it will eat into IntelliJ's marketshare, even without all the features of IntelliJ. They'll be the people who need the advanced features who will continue buying it, but many people may not need the full suite, and will use VS Code to save money.

brandonwamboldt | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2018)

Maplewave (maplewave.com) | Halifax, Canada | Onsite | Full-Time

Join us and help build the next generation in telecommunication retail software, such as electronic document signing software, point of sales, inventory management, and business intelligence. We have customers in over 40 countries around the globe, and we're looking to expand our team as we build our next generation of products. We currently have 75 employees, and a very relaxed and fun culture. This is no startup, we value work life balance.

We're currently hiring for:

* Full-Stack Developer - TypeScript, JavaScript, Ruby, C#, Scala, Java, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, etc

* Back-end Developer - C# or Java beneficial, experience with building public APIs

* Front-end Developer - JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Redux, SASS, Material Design

* Product Manager - Previous product manager experience in an agile environment

If you wanna grab a coffee to discuss any of the above, please get in touch (hr.developer [at] maplewave [dot] com)

brandonwamboldt | 7 years ago | on: GitLab Direction

1. They only have four tiers (four equivalent tiers for hosted and on-premise technically). This is quite reasonable, as they need to provide flexibility for their customers. They are quite clear about which tiers provide which features.

2. This is purely subjective. I quite like the design, both more than GitHub and Bitbucket. They do have a UX team, and they conduct regular user tests. They've also made a lot of improvements and continue to make improvements, but design will always be subjective. You CANNOT please everyone

3. I suggest putting a thumbs up for https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/18596, but ultimately it does create additional work for the UX team so I don't know if they'll end up doing it or not. You could try a user style, e.g. https://userstyles.org/styles/125366/gitlab-simple-dark

4. GitLab is a company and needs to make money to continue employing developers to continue developing their product. Open source devs volunteer their time on GitLab CE, not any of the closed source features, and GitLab has open sourced enterprise features in the past if the demand is high. Also, there is nothing wrong with comparing them to Microsoft, as Microsoft has thousands of open source projects and is quite the open source contributor.

I'd flip #4 on it's head. They aren't greedily restricting features, they are generously open sourcing features and giving them away for free. As a business, they have no obligation to do so.

brandonwamboldt | 7 years ago | on: I've spent the last two years building a new email client

I prefer VS Code over native alternatives. Don't conflate your anecdotal evidence with facts. Many users don't know much RAM a process consumes or what an Electron app is, they just care about what the app can do, how fast it is, etc.

brandonwamboldt | 7 years ago | on: I've spent the last two years building a new email client

Well that's just not accurate. With our Electron app, the main process consumes 40mb of RAM, with each window using 30mb of RAM, so if you have a windowed app, thats a minimum of under 70mb of RAM (results will differ, our app is quite large).

brandonwamboldt | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2018)

Maplewave (maplewave.com) | Halifax, Canada | Onsite | Full-Time / Remote / Visa

We build retail products like electronic document signing software, point of sales, inventory management, and business intelligence for the telecommunications market. We have customers in over 40 countries, and we're looking to expand our team as we build our next generation of products. We have around 100 employees, and a very relaxed and fun culture. This is no startup, we value work life balance.

We're currently hiring for:

* Full-Stack Developer - TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Electron, Ruby, C#, Java

* Platform Developer - C# or Java beneficial, experience with building APIs for distribution

* Product Owner - Previous product owner experience in a Scrum environment

If you wanna grab a coffee to discuss any of the above get in touch (hr.developer [at] maplewave [dot] com)

brandonwamboldt | 8 years ago | on: Making tab switching faster in Firefox with tab warming

a) you can disable it via the preference browser.tabs.remote.warmup.enabled b) some users will like this feature. they aren't cheating at making it faster, it actually is faster for all intents and purposes.

brandonwamboldt | 8 years ago | on: Things I Wish I'd Known Before Using Vagrant

We get around the shared folder performance problem using NFS. Adds one extra step to setup (mount a network share), but we've never had performance issues with it.

brandonwamboldt | 8 years ago | on: Comodo fails to check CAA records

This tends to be over-used though. Unfortunately some employees would continue making $500,000 mistakes and never learning. It really depends on the employee's attitude and response to the incident, as well as the circumstances of the incident.

brandonwamboldt | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: Have you successfully moved away from Google search?

Personally I have no interest in moving away from Google Search, as I specifically use them because Google learns from previous searches I've made and shows me more relevant results. Searching "unzip" shows me the Linux command, not unrelated materials for example.

brandonwamboldt | 8 years ago | on: CSS and JS code coverage in Chrome DevTools

It's not up to par with Chrome Dev Tools, but something to keep an eye on is https://github.com/devtools-html/debugger.html (a project run by Mozilla). This has the benefits of being open source and very accessible to developers (because of the technologies & being on GitHub).

It may one day give Chrome a run for it's money.

brandonwamboldt | 9 years ago | on: Family sues Amazon after hoverboard fire destroys $1M house

Genuinely curious, can you expand on why that power strip is bad, and who exactly would shut down the brick and mortar store?

brandonwamboldt | 10 years ago | on: Protected branches and required status checks

I kind of wish you could merge or rebase as part of the "Update Branch" feature. I don't allow merging master into the feature branches for any project I manage, I insist that developers rebase their branches before they get merged instead.

brandonwamboldt | 10 years ago | on: Unreal Engine 4.9 Released

I mean, that's kind of goes without saying, doesn't it?

No game engine will make your game magically look awesome if you don't have the budget for art assets and don't have an artist on your team.

That said, the tools make it very easy for artists with no programming experience to make fantastic looking games with in depth game mechanics without using programming, so thats a plus.

The marketplace has quite a few high quality art assets, but they are pretty expensive, with each bundle ranging from $20-80 basically. The marketplace is lacking content for sure though, especially compared to the Unity asset store. More content gets added each week though.

brandonwamboldt | 10 years ago | on: Unreal Engine 4.9 Released

They specifically publish upgrade notes at the bottom, so that helps (as many changes won't break your project).

I'm only working on a small hobby project, but I read the bulk of the notes. I mostly look through the subsystems I use most often, and skip over others that aren't super important to me.

As always, the most important notes are at the top. Also, if you follow the live streams, you're aware of some of the bigger changes far in advance (same if you use the preview builds).