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davidroetzel

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"JavaScript: The Good Parts" was a great and a very important book back in the day. I am sure it inspired many of the improvements JavaScript has seen since then. But as it has seen these improvements, and as they were many indeed, I am not sure the book is still as relevant as it once was. Or to put it differently: There are many more good parts to JS these days compared to when the book was released :)

reMarkable 2 4 years ago

FWIW, there is a tiny webapp on the device that you access when you follow the instructions above. You do not need to install anything and it worked perfectly fine for me so far.

Also, you can ssh into the device and even get root access. I have not tried it yet but I guess scp would work as well.

Last but not least: They recently changed their subscription service in a big way, opening up a lot of features that were subscription-only before to all device owners: https://remarkable.com/blog/big-changes-are-coming-to-the-re...

It is so nice to see this on here. I started frab way back for FrOSCon, a german free and open source software conference (which you should totally attend if you can make it!).

I stopped contributing when I stopped organizing FrOSCon, but thankfully Mario, the current maintainer, has picked it up and he does a tremendous job ever since. Also a big thank you to all contributors.

Also, the 5.1 series will not receive any future security fixes now that 6.0 is out.

So you could consider upgrading to 5.2 instead of 6.0. This is just one minor version step so should be less daunting. And 5.2 will receive security updates for a while yet.

Please note that asciidoctor already is an alternative implementation. The original asciidoc tool (http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/index.html) is written in python.

Both, the original and asciidoctor, offer a CLI tool to convert asciidoc to different formats (and there is always pandoc). Additionally, asciidoctor aims to integrate with JVM languages courtesy of JRuby. So you have multiple implementations callable (in one way or another) from any language imaginable.

Thanks! This is really nice. I find it frustrating to browse remote job ads only to find out at the end, that they mean "remote, but US only".

(Of course I can understand why US companies make this restriction, I just wish other job boards would help them make this more clear up front.)

I remember being very intrigued by the article back in the day and I revisited it at least twice to find out if steve ever confirmed what language he was writing about.

Today people seem to take for granted that the NBL was in fact javascript, but I still cannot find any source for this.

Does anyone know more and can point me in the right direction?

Ruby on Guix 11 years ago

I'm not sure how you feel, dear reader, but my Ruby environments feel like one giant, brittle hack

Of course things are not perfect (and guix may have a few cool ideas), but I think we should keep in mind that both rvm and bundler have been huge improvements.

The hacks people needed to come up with before rvm and bundler existed were an order of a magnitude more brittle.

I am also pro-retainer. I look at it this way: If under this agreement you realistically need to spend some time every day (or every other day, or even one day a week) for this client you need to plan ahead for this. And that means you cannot offer full-time work to other clients. So if you turn down other clients and then only sit around waiting for a call that never comes, you are losing money.

A retainer that guarantees your availability and a fixed amount of hours seems to benefit both sides and is not at all unusual in my experience.

One problem with dual-licensing though is that open source contribution becomes unnecessarily hard. Every contributor will have to sign a Contributor License Agreement, that at the very least allows you to dual-license their code. Many CLAs even have the contributor sign over her copyright to you.

Not everyone will be happy to sign something like that. And integrating a pull request on github suddenly becomes a tedious excercise in international copyright law :)

So dual-licensing gives you all the publicity-related and try-before-you-buy advantages of open source. But you will probably miss out on other great aspects, especially community-wise.

I always wanted to try and test this approach, as I am convinced that a lot (most?) of the value in SaaS is in hosting. Operating your own servers is a huge hassle, and many people will gladly pay someone to do it for them.

Also if you open source your code and offer customers a full export of their data you have two advantages over closed source SaaS: Customers do not need to worry about vendor lock-in. And they can depend on being able to continue using your software even in case you ever go out of business.

This is certainly true. Content management systems are a dime a dozen. Locomotive is nice, but others have more developers, features, mindshare, exposure etc. Hard to compete with that.

Still, I believe Locomotive already serves a niche: It is one of the few available ruby on rails cm systems. And it it possible to integrate Locomotive with an existing rails app. That is why I guess their main audience is rails developers who need some content management functionality in their apps. And those do not need hosting.

This is consistent with what they describe in the post: Many people using the open source software, many consulting gigs with developers but only a few hosting customers.

I wonder if a better business model in this case would be some kind of productized service. If access to Didier is a scarce but sought after resource, they might want to try selling support contracts that guarantee a certain amount of Didier's time.

[dead] 12 years ago

I do not know Lennart personally, but I was in the audience when he spoke at FOSDEM a few years ago. He came across as a smart and nice enough person.

It makes me sad to see the kind of attacks he has to endure. Initial reactions here on HN were all like "of course, death threats are not ok, BUT..". This sickens me. Death threats are not OK. Period.

Lennart Poettering is not pulse audio. He is not systemd. He is a human being and deserves to be treated with respect and basic human decency.

I do not know (and do not care) how much he himself contributed to his being in the position he is in. Nobody deserves to be treated this way.

Do not get me wrong, I do not disagree with his findings. That is probably very accurate and that is awful.

But originally he was not out to mine this data. He actually needed a place to live, and I wanted to point out that he might have approached this the wrong way.

Personally I prefer e-mail over phone calls. A lot. So this was not obvious to me up until my experience last year.

I do not know about the situation in Munich, but I spent lots of time looking for a place in Bonn last year and from my experience the approach from the article has one serious flaw:

While the real estate websites offer contact forms to send e-mails, many people hate dealing with e-mails. Landlords and even "professional" real estate agents often ignore e-mails. Sometimes it is because of the sheer volume they get, but I suspect often it is just that they never really adapted to the medium.

Many (most?) ads include a phone number. And I have had far better results by calling than by sending an e-mail. You should of course be one of the first people to call...

I cannot help but wonder if you actually got what the article says. Sure, forcing your 4 year old to practice some skill for hours each day might lead to her becoming a "stand-out star" in that field. But will it also lead to her becoming a confident, balanced, loving, gentle and caring person?

Will you look back to her childhood without regrets? Will she?

I have been looking for something like this a while ago. I was very dissatisfied with the existing solutions. This looks a lot nicer. I hope to find some time to play with this. Thanks for sharing!

I've realised that what I actually wanted was the freedom to make my own choices about what I work on and how.

What are ways to accomplish this without running your own business?

This kind of advice pops up on HN from time to time and while I believe it to be valuable, I guess it is at least incomplete. Here are two stories from my failed ventures to augment this advice:

1) Years ago I started a small side-business with a few colleagues. It was a web-based service for a very specific group of clients. Best of all: The idea had already been validated. We had our first paying customer before we even built the product. And we quickly found a few other customers. But after a few sign-ups things were not looking so good anymore. Even though our early adopters were well known in the industry, other companies would not follow. Everyone we talked to loved the product, but as we had to learn the hard way nobody was willing to pay for it. Some even went so far as to implement possibly illegal solutions instead of paying us a few bucks.

Lesson learned: Even if you talk to a few possible customers, question hard if those really are representative of your target audience. Also, liking a product/idea is not the same as being willing (or able) to pay for it.

2) A while back I wanted to find out if there would be any commercial interest in an app I had already built. So I set up a landing page and collected email addresses. Since I had already built the app I could easily hand out demo accounts for every interested party. I quickly collected around 60 addresses and set them all up with a demo account. Only a single person ever logged in at all! I sent out reminder emails but did not get a single response. To this day I do not fully understand what went wrong.

Lesson learned: Newsletter- or Beta-signups from your landing page is NOT the same as validation for your idea.

SEEKING WORK - Remote or onsite (Cologne/Bonn area in Germany)

I have spent the last 7 years building all kinds of applications with ruby on rails.

I love working with ruby, rails, coffeescript, but I am also eager to learn new stuff.

As a former sysadmin, I also do not mind taking care of the operations side of things. I also have limited experience with puppet.

Contact: consulting at roetzel dot de