bdmac97

Hi all. I'm the (actual) owner of that gem.

As already hypothesized in the comments I'm pretty sure this was a simple account hijack. The kickball user likely cracked an old password of mine from before I was using 1password that was leaked from who knows which of the various breaches that have occurred over the years.

I released that gem years ago and barely remembered even having a rubygems account since I'm not doing much OSS work these days. I simply forgot to rotate out that old password there as a result which is definitely my bad.

Since being notified and regaining ownership of the gem I've:

1. Removed the kickball gem owner. I don't know why rubygems did not do this automatically but they did not.

2. Reset to a new strong password specific to rubygems.org (haha) with 1password and secured my account with MFA.

3. Released a new version 0.0.8 of the gem so that anyone that unfortunately installed the bogus/yanked 0.0.7 version will hopefully update to the new/real version of the gem.

Sorry I meant to lump that in under the soft skills section. It was not meant to be an exhaustive list, there would be far more than 5 items :-)

There could have certainly been some of that but it didn't feel like it in the context (which I realize I didn't provide). I read the question as sincere but admit there's a chance it wasn't.

At any rate, I tried to answer him honestly with what I'd have told myself and it didn't have any bearing on the outcome one way or another.

Apologies in advance for the length (8 minutes). I've tried to whittle it down but it's a year of anguish for me. :-)

IMO, and as you mentioned, your best bet in those early days is to rely on your network and have that insanely compelling vision with which to sell them on. I think you need a certain level of trust with people for them to be willing to bet a significant chunk of their time and such an inordinate amount of energy on your vision. Conversely no matter how much the person may love you, if your vision for the company is a giant pile of "meh" then you won't (and shouldn't) have much luck convincing them either.

The two go hand in hand for your first few hires.

Absolutely agree with these points!

I got burned by this on Heroku recently as well but to a much lesser extent $$$-wise. My app typically runs on 1 dyno because it's basically not supported anymore. At some point I must have been messing around in the interface and accidently bumped my dynos. Oops.

I personally think they should have a "WTF your load is like zero, you normally have X dynos, but you're using Y dynos for no real reason... dumbass" alert email... I certainly would have appreciated it!

I'm getting the same thing. Tried redownloading/reinstalling and no love. Had to 'killall Cloud' to even get the thing out of my menubar...

And yet every other device they make (basically) has one...

No GPS???

I wonder how much of that also has to do with people that simply chose the wrong line of work? Back when I was in school it was coming towards the peak of the dot com bubble and I know there were tons of new students in CS that were there just to make money.

In the long run they are now finding out that money wasn't enough to make them happy since they don't really enjoy programming and are thus unsatisfied...

I guess from that viewpoint it's moderately interesting but as a phone it's really not much to get excited about compared to other modern Android phones like the Droid. Bah... I was expecting something huge!

I really do not understand what all the fuss was about. It's just another HTC Android phone. What does Google really even have to do with it (any more than all the other Android phones)? It seems like HTC could've just held their own press conference without involving Google but of course then there'd be no hype!

The right way is to use my site, http://www.launchly.com.

I created launchly for this specific reason as a result of not being able to get good "additional rounds" of feedback here on HackerNews.

Am I missing something or hasn't this already been done by others like Twittermass?

I used 99designs.

My site uses 960.gs but not for EVERYTHING. Also not sure how creative the use is but here ya go - http://www.launchly.com

Other options include ShrinkTheWeb (http://www.shrinktheweb.com) and PageGlimpse (http://www.pageglimpse.com)

Kinda always had a feeling that's what happens but nice to see graphical proof! I feel good now about choosing +/- rating only for launchly.

I just want to point out that saying "You're doing it wrong" (as the article does) does not necessarily imply that you could be doing it right. It doesn't have to be taken as a condemnation of your skills/ability. It simply won't work in all situations and the article does a pretty good job of pointing out blockers to pairing working.

Maybe I'm blind but I really don't see too much arrogance here. He is admitting that pair programming does NOT work for everyone and the reasons he gives are, to me, compelling and true. He's not evangelizing pair programming as a magic bullet for everyone.

The mediocrity that surrounds a good programmer at a typical enterprise level shop is astounding. It surprises me that they allow some of the people to continue working there! There are a LOT of people out there that got into programming as a way to pay the bills and for those people, pair programming would probably be like torture.

When I tried it for a week I know I didn't feel burnt out. In fact I felt more alive and less tired than I had in years doing shitty waterfall work at IBM.

The reason, for me, was that at the end of a work day I went home feeling like I had actually DONE something of value that day. I felt that way every day. It felt good. By feeling good about what I had done I felt much less like I needed to work at night. I felt that I had "earned" some relaxing time away from work.

I fail to see in that article where it advocates mandated pair programming... In fact I think it does a pretty good job of pointing out when/where pair programming does NOT work (i.e. many environments for the reasons listed). If you happen to work in an environment not conducive to pair programming and they force you to do it... well then...

Heroku!

Isn't Amazon (or Newegg) the cheapest place to buy pretty much anything like that online already?

It seems really silly that you have to CC the recipients and tell them to ignore the message and instead look for a different message from some other address... I think that's gonna be a problem. You should try to figure out another way to handle that.

The element bar guy was awesome and the negotation was fun to watch. I didn't understand the final deal though. The 4% royalty made sense when the VC was wanting to completely buy the company out from under him (100% equity) but once he talked him down to 30% equity I'm not sure what the 4% royalty was about anymore.

I've been thoroughly enjoying the show personally. There are certain parts that are obviously overdone/dramaticized for TV but I'm sure it's necessary for non-entrepreneurs to be interested.

A good sign that it's doing OK is its recent shift into a better time slot (Tuesday nights instead of Sunday nights).

The main problem I can see is that, as with most copies, you are going to lack their insight into that domain which is what makes their product so compelling. You will always be several steps behind them in usefulness and will always be trying to play catch-up by copying their new features rather than innovating. It is likely that things just won't work "smoothly" and will be integrated poorly in your clone compared to the original.

Your text on the main page needs help. You said it right above but on your site you have "Do you tweet? Sure you are." which makes no sense.

The site overall doesn't look very professional (which will make people not trust you).

I can see the use but then I already use cotweet which has this baked right in.