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liamondrop's comments

liamondrop | 9 years ago | on: Former miners out to put Kentucky on the tech map

As someone who grew up in Appalachia and has since moved to NYC and built a career in tech, it hurts me to read stories like these and think about how many good people are getting left behind, due to factors largely out of their control. Sure, folks could uproot and abandon the area, but that solution is no less tragic. In terms of natural beauty, few places can rival. With a bit of enlightenment about what opportunities already exist in affordable tech education, some meaningful investment in infrastructure, and some entrepreneurs willing to get their hands dirty, we could turn this region around. Silicon Holler has a ring to it.

liamondrop | 13 years ago | on: How I automated the boring parts of life

The point was that you were doing it in an obfuscated way, (using shortened links), without disclosing. I don't think people generally mind when they are explicitly made aware.

liamondrop | 13 years ago | on: Simple steps to better typography

The point of the article is that the first problem is not so much a problem and more of an afterthought compared to the more fundamental issues of spacing, proportion, weight, characters per line, and placement on the page, which all equal readability. Once you have considered those, you can more or less drop in whatever typeface you like and then ask yourself whether it improves or detracts from readability and whether it matches the overall tone you are trying to set with your design.

liamondrop | 13 years ago | on: The World's Lightest Electric Vehicle

`The last mile of transportation is this huge problem that hasn't been solved yet`

Really? I think we've had it solved for at least several million years. Anyone that isn't capable of walking or skating a mile is certainly not going to be served by this. It looks like a cool toy, but I don't think it's going to revolutionize transportation.

liamondrop | 13 years ago | on: Get A Job: The Craigslist Experiment

I've gotten several gigs through Craigslist. Both fulltime and one-off / freelance. It rarely has taken me more than a couple days to get an interview/callback.

My single most important tip for doing this successfully is to get your app in fast. Like within 30 minutes of the job going on the site max. I'm certain that almost no one looks at more than the first 50-100 submissions. It helps to put relevant categories/searches into some kind of rss reader that updates frequently and allows you to see multiple feeds simultaneously so you can see at a glance as soon as something you're interested in pops up.

Second to speed is writing a good cover letter. The letter should be concise, active tense, probably with bullet points for easy scanning, and talk about what you have done and what you will do for them that will make their life easier. Having most of the letter drafted in advance will help you get it in fast, but you will likely want to at least touch on a few key points from their job posting.

liamondrop | 13 years ago | on: Snow Crash movie to be written and directed by Joe Cornish

What you are portraying as negatives (meandering detours into entirely unnecessary, but hilarious, trivia; absurdly unlikely plot scenarios [since when is anything about Snowcrash a likely scenario?]; etc.) are probably what loom as the largest selling points for fans of Stephenson's work from Cryptonomicon onward. I don't think we buy the books for the "plausability" factor.

Also, the books hardly take themselves seriously.

liamondrop | 13 years ago | on: Show HN: Easel, web design in the browser

One of Photoshop's virtues is, in my opinion, that it is NOT a browser and does not force one to think in terms of what browsers can do. Like all freedom, such a huge range of possibility does pose certain problems, but it also allows for very interesting, sometimes completely novel solutions.

I do both design and development and I find I use very different parts of my brain when doing one or the other. For me, it's important to stay far away from any kind of code until it's actually time to start implementing. Otherwise, I fall back to predictable habits.

liamondrop | 13 years ago | on: Gmail security warnings for suspected state-sponsored attacks

Apart from this being very empowering to the individual user, it is also a wake up call to states who have any interest in participating in an international community that they cannot act without consequences, potentially making it an effective deterrent to this kind of behavior in the future.
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