HN user

mileszs

1,097 karma

Partner at Fretless (http://getfretless.com)

Also, I organize Indy.rb (http://indyrb.org), run Indy Hackers (http://indyhackers.org), and write sometimes (http://mileszs.com).

Posts29
Comments153
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github.com 13y ago

Heroku Surrogate: Use production environment variables locally

mileszs
2pts1
mileszs.com 13y ago

Remember Why You Are Here

mileszs
1pts0
swanson.github.com 13y ago

I Don't Have Time

mileszs
178pts33
www.theverge.com 14y ago

How a video game fan site led to a marriage and a career

mileszs
1pts0
respondto.it 14y ago

Respondto.it: debug and stub webhooks like a pro.

mileszs
2pts0
www.kiplinger.com 14y ago

Kiplinger: "Only SF and Seattle boast more VC than Indianapolis"

mileszs
2pts3
indyhackersholidaysocial.eventbrite.com 14y ago

Indy Hackers Holiday Social

mileszs
1pts0
www.fastcompany.com 14y ago

UFlavor Refresh The Beverage Business With Billions Of Tastes, On Demand

mileszs
4pts0
community.6sync.com 15y ago

6sync Gives a Month of Free Service if You Migrate from Slicehost, Linode, etc.

mileszs
1pts0
status.heroku.com 15y ago

Heroku's AWS outage post-mortem

mileszs
202pts80
edgerails.info 15y ago

ActiveRecord Gets Identity Maps in Rails 3.1

mileszs
3pts1
rdoc.info 15y ago

Pry: A better Ruby REPL

mileszs
131pts23
macournoyer.com 15y ago

Announcing Dresssed.com: Premium Rails Themes

mileszs
11pts9
sethgodin.typepad.com 15y ago

Seth's Blog: Sadly stuck with the status quo

mileszs
3pts0
manindyarena.com 15y ago

Where to See Indy’s Startup Scene

mileszs
1pts0
techcrunch.com 15y ago

ChaCha Says They’ll Bail On T-Mobile

mileszs
1pts0
manindyarena.com 15y ago

Failure is a Decision. Own it.

mileszs
1pts0
www.techdarkside.com 16y ago

Noodling on Contributor Agreements

mileszs
1pts0
www.engineyard.com 16y ago

Ruby Scales, AND It’s Fast – If You Do It Right

mileszs
5pts0
www.engineyard.com 16y ago

Rails and Merb Merge: Rack

mileszs
3pts0
blog.heroku.com 17y ago

Background Jobs on Heroku with DJ

mileszs
3pts0
sports.espn.go.com 17y ago

St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa sues Twitter over fake page

mileszs
2pts0
sketches.rubyforge.org 17y ago

Sketches: Auto-reload your ruby code between your editor and irb

mileszs
1pts0
tellmypolitician.com 17y ago

Ask HN: Please review our web app - TellMyPolitician.com

mileszs
22pts22
ikaisays.com 17y ago

Twitter, Ruby on Rails, Scala and people who don’t RTFA

mileszs
85pts64
shoutnow.com 17y ago

ShoutNow: Rapid Voice Messaging (Indy Startup Weekend company)

mileszs
2pts0
www.sunlightlabs.com 17y ago

Taking a Look at the GOP Anywhere API

mileszs
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 17y ago

Indy HN BarMeet: Tues. Nov. 18th, 7PM

mileszs
8pts12
github.com 17y ago

Choosing a Background Job Processor for GitHub

mileszs
2pts0

Or, perhaps he simply finds it amusing to post his ever-odd thoughts and watch the reaction. Does that have to be cocky?

Or, perhaps I give him a pass for whatever he does, because I enjoy his personality. In any case, it doesn't seem to me that such vitriol is necessary toward another human being, and fellow hacker. If you find him so annoying, why are you paying so much attention?

Vim Git Gutter 13 years ago

No. You you do your thing. I'll do this. I don't want to have to run another command to see what lines have changed in my file. I want small, non-intrusive icons in the gutter without doing a damned thing.

Vim Git Gutter 13 years ago

I use both. If I need a full diff, fugitive is great. Sometimes I just want to scan to see what lines I changed in a a file. In other words, it is impractical to use this plugin to find out what _files_ you've changed. It is great for finding out what lines in whatever file you've opened have changed.

It's actually a lot easier, unless you have next-to-zero traffic, to ask _them_ to take an action that puts the info in your inbox, rather than dig in logs, which could have that specific user's information buried amongst hundreds of other entries. It's a time-saver.

What if you have insufficient logging (Heroku sans a decent logging plugin, for instance)? What if you built the thing, but it's hosted by a third-party that limits log access? What if you want some non-technical or not-that-technical person to handle the issue?

As hackers, we tend toward "do-it-yourself", but there are a lot of cases where that isn't practical or economical.

I think, essentially, he is saying that you end up spending time maintaining your template, losing much of the benefit of the template, depending on how often you start new apps. I have found this to be true at a certain threshold of complication in the app template. However, if you are indeed starting a brand new Rails app every month, as you said, you likely don't have the same cost, as maintenance to the app template happens on a more regular basis. Even as a consultant, I don't start new Rails apps that often, and side projects tend to involve experimentation outside of what I might consider my "stable" stack.

If he is near Indianapolis, it could help to get involved in the local hacker scene. We have a pretty decent number of meetings and the like he could attend. See the calendar at http://indyhackers.org.

I like to think we're pretty merit-based here, but it is a largely conservative state (though this city can be pretty "blue" compared to its surroundings), so I could be wrong. Knowing people is a significant portion of the battle, and just showing up to events can go a long way.

What I took away from this, which, reading the other comments, is not at all what everyone got out of it, is that a bunch of graphs can be a great, but a system that automatically makes recommendations based on those graphs (taking some of the decision-making out of the equation) is closer to ideal.

I might be projecting, though. I talk regularly with the people behind Pirate Metrics (http://piratemetrics), which does that sort of thing. (Records, displays, but makes suggestions as well.) S, that sort of idea has been on my mind.

I don't see it as a "huge Ruby bug". Could you elaborate, please?

I would understand "huge Ruby on Rails bug", though, by convention, it is still a fairly unlikely case.

Edit: I think your edit answers my "Could you elaborate" question somewhat, as you relate a Python library issue to this issue.

They're both good. My open source repos are on Github. My private (thus client-related) repos are on BitBucket. I've been pretty happy with this configuration.

Perhaps it helps that I know a few other companies and developers locally using BitBucket for private repos.

Incidentally, reliability and price are both valid reasons to "use an also-ran copycat", in my personal opinion, if that also-ran copycat is pretty damn good.

I don't think "mentioning Github" is the only piece people are using when deciding to question your communication skills. The word "microcontroller", except in certain extremely specialized situations, should probably not be used with a client. I understand it's a hard pill to swallow. I mean, you're both speaking English. Why does it seem like you're not speaking the same language?

In a way, you're not speaking the same language. Try assuming your clients have no concept of not just programming, but any of the process of building an application or solution to a problem that uses technology. Don't discuss details. They are probably paying you so that they don't have to worry about the details.

By way of example: I have the reverse problem with my wife. She is a nurse. When telling me about her day, she used to fly through a great deal of technical details using an amazing number of acronyms and abbreviations that I found not just unintuitive, but completely incomprehensible. I genuinely care about how her day was, but I found myself exclaiming in exasperation, "I have a clue what any of that means!" She now explains only what is necessary to get the point across, and defines acronyms as she goes along, if necessary. That works, but, in your situation, I'd abstract my communication at least one more level than that.

Though it'll be interesting to see where this goes, it ultimately doesn't make me think better of TNW. It can only affect how I view Mr. Gross. Even then, it won't affect me much; the TNW author was a lesser character in the post, where the TNW CEO was the star.

It could've been nice. I don't have links to back this up, but I seem to remember getting patches accepted for it was difficult. I am assuming that is because there wasn't anyone on core that really cared about keeping it up to do with the rest of the Active(.*) universe.

I have been thinking the same thing while reading the article and comments. I haven't been to any of the larger conferences, so I thought I'd keep my mouth shut in case I'm simply missing something. There are a couple monthly tech meetings in Indy that either are at a bar, or go to a bar afterward. I don't recall having seen a single intoxicated person at one of the local events, let alone a majority of the attendees.

Unsubstantiated, un-sourced theory: football players are helmeted, and that helment makes them feel as if 1) they are risking no head damage to themselves, and 2) there is no risk of head damage to others. Thus, lots and lots of targeting of the head and/or usage of the head as a lead component in making or breaking tackles.

On top of that being probable, players try to hide concussions (resulting in compounded head injuries the next time), and players rebel against the NFL's attempts to legislate fewer dangerous head-related hits and tackles. Actually, even fans and the media have the tendency to pine for skull-crushing, cringe-inducing hits at high-velocity.

I could probably have summarized the problem in one word: "culture".

Internet Explorer 6 was released in 2001. I realize this is not central to the article, but "A lot of products were made in the end 90s that only worked in Internet Explorer 6" bothered me. Perhaps it simply made me feel old, but I'd like to think its some sort of noble sense of historical correctness.

Nice! Would it be possible to add Ruby as a language example? I could likely figure out more-or-less how the code would appear using one of the other languages with which I am familiar, but it would be quite useful to see the changes to code similar to what I am most often writing.

> But I will say this, do you think this guy made up his post about using Ruby to try to write this game? If you don't think it fabricated, do you think he's alone?

I neither think his story is fabricated, nor do I think he's alone. (I didn't say I really thought your story was fabricated, either.)

> While I appreciate that none in your Ruby group would think this, I'd also ask why do they believe this?

I don't know that we would all choose C++, were we building a game, but the performance of Ruby is frequently a topic of discussion. We are lucky enough to have several members that have significant experience working with/around Ruby performance, and they share their knowledge. In other words, were you to choose one of us at random, we would more likely be able to tell you why Ruby is not a good idea, as opposed to why C++ is.

For what it's worth, I help to organize a fairly active Ruby group, and I am certain that, if not zero, nearly zero of us would make this proclamation. In fact -- and I mean not to attack you, but just to illustrate how incredulous I am -- I tried to think of a reason there might be for you to fabricate or exaggerate that story. I don't really think you did, but my mind went there.

I had this issue with indyhackers.org/.com. Start a live chat on Namecheap and a representative will get the domain transferred for you.

(I also ran into the EPP code issue with indyhackers.com, and a long delay with a few recent recent transfers. Ugh. I am under the impression the issues are on GoDaddy's end, but, regardless, I've never had issues with transferring to Namecheap in the past.)

The first quote is difficult to describe for me, but let's call it "poetic", as my brain is too fried to think of a better term for it. Basically, my interpretation of what he's saying is: if your bakery isn't tech-savvy, even at a basic level, they could be getting killed by reviewers (or some other bogeyman) online without knowing it.

The second quote is pretty easy to support with sources. Google has three _official_ languages that can be deployed into production, and Python is one of them. See [this post from a Googler](http://everythingsysadmin.com/2011/01/python-is-better-than-...), for instance. I have no idea how hard a rule this is, but many a Googler has mentioned it. I think it's worthy of being called a 'fact', and thus completely valid in the article in question.

GitHub Secrets 15 years ago

I could be wrong, but I have been under the impression Google set that as a standard of sorts years ago, starting with GMail, and continuing with their other products. Pivotal Tracker has done it for a while, too. I think there are others, but I cannot recall what they are.

I press '?' on any site that I think might/should have keyboard shortcuts!

It's easier to pirate music from a seemingly larger-than-life band than it is to pirate a book from a man who you (I, some of us?) watched grow the idea from a few blog posts a year ago. Perhaps I've got the narrative all wrong, but from my point of view, Mr. Kadavy made a couple really well-done blog posts covering "Design for Hackers", they became fairly popular on HN, he responded to comments on HN, got support for his book idea on HN, and made it happen.

Perhaps a better analogy is this: Yeah, I might pirate a Metallica song, but I'm not pirating the first album of that indie band I heard when I was passing through Louisville earlier this summer.

In order to kill someone with a baseball bat, you must aim for their heads. It's possible to incapacitate someone with a baseball bat without aiming to kill them.

You also are assuming that all of these confrontations are done face-to-face, and that both parties have plenty of time to think about what they're doing first. It's already pretty clear few of these looters are analyzing anything.

I find your comment quite disturbing. I can get behind leaving a looter (slightly) bloody and bruised, I suppose, but the nonchalance with which you proclaim these other humans "deserve to die", and state that it's "only fair" is ... well, disturbing. That's the best word. It's disturbing.

The whole damned thing is disturbing.

At the risk of incurring much wrath, I have known a teacher (a friend) who did not work very hard 9 months out of the year, and then didn't work at all the other three months. I also have a friend, a teacher, who spends significant time not merely grading papers, but improving her curricula, knowledge, and teaching skills. She does so 9 months out of the year. I am not trying to belittle the work that teachers do, but there is a significant amount of time that many teachers are not working. I would assume that is a significant reason for the dot's location on the graph.