j-m-o's comments

j-m-o | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: A Cryptocurrency in 4K Lines of Scala Code

That Curve25519 implementation is by Moxie Marlinspike, and that RipeMD160 algorithm is built into BouncyCastle.

There may still be attack vectors on them, but that's about as close to "reviewed by professional cryptographers" as you're likely to get at this point.

j-m-o | 12 years ago | on: Show HN: Phoenix – an ultra-fast SQL layer on top of Hbase

I actually just got a prototype working that loads up HBase data through Phoenix into Spark for analytics.

So far the results look very promising. Across millions of rows, we're getting queries back in the orders of single seconds.

I'm also able to get millions of rows back on specific, unindexed queries (e.g. "SELECT * FROM EVENTS WHERE TYPE = 'some_type'"), and can run analytics across that data in under a minute per run.

The previous comparison to CQL for Cassandra is apt, though I've found the builtin functions and grammar to be a lot more powerful.

j-m-o | 12 years ago | on: I Bought An Apartment To Rent Out On Airbnb

I really like the mention of Lockitron, the whole 'keyless entry' idea really is going to be the future of AirBnB rentals.

I have several customers who are AirBnB hosts who use my service, Ringo [1], which lets their guests into the units via the apartment buzzer. That combined with Lockitron, and you never need to worry about key transfer again. You can effectively live on a different continent than your AirBnB property.

[1] https://www.tryringo.com

j-m-o | 12 years ago | on: Show HN: Manage access to Basecamp, GitHub, Heroku, and more

If you plan on targeting mid-size companies and up to enterprise, you're going to need to have some sort of AD/LDAP integration.

The onboarding/offboarding process is generally initiated from there, and internal apps and services tend to use that as the canonical user store.

Good luck with your project, I hope it works out well for you!

j-m-o | 12 years ago | on: Burner Phone

Congratulations on the launch, I hope everything goes well.

A list of carriers I think would be useful, or a way to verify that the phone will work in your area (e.g. zip code or phone number lookup).

Also, is it US only? Any support for Canadian carriers?

j-m-o | 12 years ago | on: Seriously.js

Works great for me, using Chrome on Ubuntu 12.04 on a Dell Inspiron 15R (Radeon 7700M) with the latest fglrx drivers.

j-m-o | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: worth monetizing?

Have you thought of throwing up an email-collection landing page, and putting a few bucks into Adwords to gauge demand? If there's nothing else in this space, you may be on to something, but you'll have to do some legwork to generate interest.

This looks like something that could work well as SaaS, I'm not sure you'd get enough traffic for ads to work out for you.

BTW, the graphing library is beautiful, but you might want to outsource some logo and design work.

Good luck!

j-m-o | 12 years ago | on: ANTHYMN by String Theory Entertainment — teach music through MMORPG

I'll agree that lacking models or in-game content, it's pretty unlikely they've made any headway at all into this thing, but isn't that the point of the Kickstarter?

Take a look at the Creative Team and check out their pedigree. In my opinion, it looks like they might just have the talent they need to get this thing off the ground.

j-m-o | 13 years ago | on: Show HN: my 1st web app, a p2p rental marketplace. Thoughts?

I have no idea whether your business case is sound or not - it looks cool, so best of luck.

Your call to action button is hidden in the bottom right, well below the fold. I'd recommend hiding the main form completely on the landing page and replacing it with that. Use A/B testing to see for sure, but in general, 1 easy button = conversions.

The layout and design flow look great, though I'd drop the 'PlaceIt Screenshot' byline with something else, even though they're super useful ;). Ideally if you can get a video in there, that'd be excellent, but I know that gets pricey...

I'm also in the 1st webapp startup boat, and as a fellow Canadian, I wish you best of luck! You can check out my startup at http://wwww.tryringo.com

Good luck!

j-m-o | 13 years ago | on: The 21st century skill students really lack

I suppose I fall into the category of a 21st century student, although I finished my CS degree in the early 'noughts.

I think the thesis of the article is generally accurate, that students are capable, but less inclined, to pay attention to things not deemed worthy of the effort. However, I think the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff of stimulus is also an important lesson.

I look back to most of my courses fondly, but there were definitely periods where the professor was rehashing previously covered material, or pushing their own research agendas well beyond the course curriculum. As a student with limited hours (and in my case limited again with several part-time jobs), does it make sense to pay perfect attention to the lectures at hand, or maybe put the finishing touches on that assignment for another class?

That said, coming back to the author's example of art history, that was one of the most rewarding classes I took in university. Albeit a 3-hour examination of one work seems excessive, there's a lot to gain from the appreciation of fine works outside of algorithms and data structures.

j-m-o | 13 years ago | on: Paid for Stripe

Also, I'm getting a consistent crash when I go to my customers list and click directly on the 'Last' payment. 'Next' payment works fine.

iOS 6.1.4, iPhone 5.

j-m-o | 13 years ago | on: Paid for Stripe

Great work, just bought a copy as well. I was looking for something like this recently, saw it wasn't there, and was considering going ahead and building it.

I'm only a little disappointed you beat me to the punch, the level of polish here is outstanding. Just a quick note that I tried to rush the login while 'authorizing' spinner was going, and got an app crash. I had no problem after that.

j-m-o | 13 years ago | on: Idempotent Web APIs: What benefit do I get?

Some of the EIPs suffer from the same 'head-in-the-sky' issues as the GoF design patterns, but there's a few that have come in handy (like the idempotent receiver!).

The link to Apache Camel is a bit more informative with actual examples with code snippets.

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