scottostler's comments

Alta | Lead Front End Engineer | REMOTE (US) | Full time | www.alta.so

We're hiring a Lead Frontend Engineer at Alta, an AI-powered no-code tool to build mobile apps.

* You’ll be joining a fast-growing early-stage startup based in the Bay Area and reporting directly to the CTO/Co-founder

* You ideally have 5+ years of experience and have mentored/managed junior engineers

* Tech stack: Typescript, Next.js, React, PostgreSQL

Learn more and apply here: https://angel.co/l/2xNjeU

Yes of course, but companies will prefer to work with middlemen rather than directly employing individual contractors because it makes legal and accounting easier. There’s often a lot of hurdles to employ an individual directly, like requiring the contractor to have a million dollar insurance policy say

Seems like a lot of money for that, but companies are willing to pay it

That is a lot of trees, but a decade’s worth is a lot of emissions

I’ve been told the answer is interchange fees: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee

I use Swift professionally and have written some Rust for fun, and like both languages a lot. I find Swift to be faster to write, not least because it's easier to manually prevent retain cycles than to write borrow-checker approved code. It's also much easier to leak memory and write unsafe threaded code in Swift, so there's a trade-off there.

I'm sure if I wrote more Rust I'd get faster at it, though I do think it has a fundamentally more complicated programming model.

I liked this quote from the article: "People don't choose between things, they choose between descriptions of things."

I can't claim to know what BI would look like if widely implemented, but I think it's preferable to mass un/under-employment, which seems like a clear possibility.

This looks really useful. Thanks for sharing

There was a missed opportunity to name the app 'Shirk', though

The reason companies don't loudly proclaim this kind of thing seems pretty simple to me. Companies must simultaneously communicate with many different parties: employees, customers, investors, the board, governments, etc. An effective message for one constituency is often horribly inappropriate for another – layoffs are a great example of this.

So when companies do decide that cutting costs is more important than keeping employees, they message that in one way to employees, and in another way to analysts and investors. Employees and the general public who sympathizes with them might call that duplicitous and slimy, but it's a response to the balancing act the companies have to perform.

Really liked this article. I'm curious about the professional QA – how did you find the tester, and what sort of things did you ask him to test?

Yes, and also DCIntrospect. They're encouraging, but don't currently compare to what you can do with, say, live-editing css or with a Javascript console.

Not that I've used it, but RubyMotion is making progress on a related front. A live REPL, styling apps with CSS, etc. Maybe we're not far off.

Awesome, will definitely give this a shot. It's great to see iOS development tools pick up tricks from the web world.

Personally, I can't wait for a Firebug-like tool for live debugging and tweaking of UIView hierarchies.

Nice! And that's an awesome logo.

By this point, isn't HTTP a pretty standard acronym in the web-dev scene? :)

If you take a look at the benchmarks further down the page, the real improvement seems to be that mongo does a better job of yielding during page faults. That provides an improvement even with a single database.

FWIW, heroku does. The first heroku slice for a project is free, with the caveat that it'll be spun down during periods of inactivity.

I imagine that most hobby users of heroku (say for a weekend hackathon) aren't paying anything.

As an app developer, I'd love to not write custom code for each photo sharing service. This seems to require using the chute hosted platform, though. Can the library be used without the service?

I don't disagree, but when I watched for about 15 seconds he was inserting printlns, trying to debug something related to sprite collisions. So I'd guess he still does some of that.

But the better answer is probably that he's been making games for two decades, according to wikipedia. Presumably he's long since worked through much of what you or I would need to think about when putting together a 2d tile game.

I'm curious about this as well.

Presumably it writes to a transaction log, and is memory-resident in the same sense that Redis is. Which is to say that the dataset is kept entirely in memory, but also has a persistent representation on disk.

We're using Scalatra for our company's http service, and it's been great. Simple, good documentation, works exactly as promised, and the irc room (thanks Ross Baker!) has been extremely helpful.

If you use Scalatra for a major project, though, be ready to learn at least a bit about Jetty (or Tomcat or...). Scalatra is a great tool for writing Java servlets, but you're ultimately running those servlets in a much more complicated servlet container.