stevejohnson

I am a former Yelp engineer. I think the thing this story describes is dumb and bad and they should stop doing it. Inserting yourself as a useless middleman is a classic shitty startup move.

Here are some great reasons for current and former Yelp engineers not to engage in internet debates about accusations of nefariousness in other areas such as the review filter or sorting algorithm:

1. Being in internet debates mostly sucks in general, especially with people who by default hate you.

2. Yelp has a blanket policy that you shouldn't engage in these debates.

3. Yelp has been sued some number of times and might be again. I would be paranoid that something I said here would be used in another bullshit lawsuit, especially if I were truly in a position to know things.

4. It's pretty clear that the PR battle was lost long ago, regardless of the truth. Leaving a comment on a thread like this changes literally nothing and is a waste of time. Yes, that means I think I'm wasting my time right now. :-)

Every Yelp engineer I've met has intentions at least as good as, say, the average Google engineer. Sites like Yelp can have negative effects on small businesses the same way e.g. Spotify might have an effect on independent music or Airbnb has an effect on the apartment rental market in a city, and engineers aren't always good at recognizing those effects as problematic, but Yelp engineers are certainly no worse than your standard Silicon Valley type.

I still trust Yelp reviews more than I trust local business reviews on any other platform.

I found Nim to have a small but active and supportive community. The library ecosystem, while a little thin, has a lot of activity, and I was able to find what I needed or create wrappers for C libraries.

One difference between the Swift and Nim communities is that where Swift's is full of noobs answering each other's questions, Nim's is full of experts who are just as eager to help.

Nim also has pretty good, fairly complete docs and a decent book.

Because I'm on a Mac and wouldn't be able to test it. :-D

Patches accepted here: https://github.com/irskep/keplverse

I also blogged about the algorithm, if that's of interest: https://blog.steveasleep.com/using-data-from-the-kepler-miss...

I really like the commitment to retro aesthetics. Last weekend I made an "imaginary astronomy" web app with nearly pixel-perfect Windows 95 theming. :-) http://steveasleep.com/keplverse/

Forth still seems like a language worth learning, not for practical reasons, but for technohistorical context. Maybe my first project should be a sqlite library?

At a startup that folded, $0. (Failing is an exit!) At a startup acquired by a larger company, about $20k. Neither made up for the delta vs market rate salary.

http://steveasleep.com still going strong!

I got the same itch and ran with it for a game jam a while back. It's fun! http://steveasleep.com/jumbogrove/

Cool! This is a superset of some things people misuse Literally Canvas[1] for. I look forward to pointing people toward it when they ask about these kinds of features.

[1]http://literallycanvas.com

The default sans-serif font in Firefox for Mac is Helvetica, but the default font for macOS is San Francisco. If you want to have your page use a system-looking font, particularly if you're building an Electron app like Slack, you might want to get past the browser defaults and instead use the system defaults.

I used macOS fonts in my example, but this applies to every platform.

We switched to Slack the day Hipchat went down for several hours.

As an experienced hobbyist game developer, I find Unity to be an incomprehensible airplane cockpit of bad UI.

For the kind of game presented in the article, Gamemaker Studio would be more reasonable. Unity has a lot you don't need, which obscures the path to making something simpler like this.

I'm sure there are other good options too. I think there's a JS-based platformer-oriented engine out there.

Having done a lot of work using both the old os.path library and new pathlib, the ergonomics of pathlib are much, much better. The behavior of the overloaded operator is well-defined, unsurprising, and otherwise intuitive.

If the project is maintained in someone's spare time, then the cost to monetize it, in time and effort, might exceed what they are willing to put into it.

In my own case, I have a silly JS library with 4,000 hits per month to the docs, but "monetizing" that just sounds like work, whereas working on the library itself is fun.

Well, assuming the small coffee shops are well-managed, then we still have to ask ourselves which is more important, the cheap good coffee or a living wage for the workers?

Speaking as someone working in a large Redux codebase, I agree with you 100%. The amount of boilerplate required to do almost anything is staggering.

Whether the substance of this is true or not, it seems unwise to have posted it. It probably felt good to write, but now there's a real risk that future employers will perceive it as a negative signal. ("If we hire this guy, will he air all our dirty laundry in public if it doesn't work out?")

I have thoughts about whether his perceptions are accurate, but I mostly just want to say: kids, if you're thinking of writing something like this, probably don't. Go out for drinks with a friend and vent one on one instead.

Summertunes, a usable web interface for playing a beets music library: https://github.com/irskep/summertunes

This year I switched from streaming to MP3s for at-home listening, and I got fed up messing with 3.5mm audio cables, bluetooth, and switching between devices in general. So now I just run Summertunes and Spotify on an old Mac laptop hooked up to the speakers, and I'm happy as a monkey in a monkey tree.

Hipmunk | San Francisco | ONSITE Looking for Site Reliability, Full-Stack, and Machine Learning engineers.

http://www.hipmunk.com/jobs

Travel is a huge industry and we're shaking it up. We consistently lead the pack in every measure of customer love (net promoter scores, app store ratings, etc) because delightful customer experiences in travel are why we exist. We value the same high standards in our code and people. We value learning and growth (and not having bored people) and invest regular time in doing so. For example, every quarter we have one week of open time for you to spend becoming a better engineer. Our stack is built on PostgreSQL, Redis, Python, nginx, HBase, Coffeescript, React/Redux, ES6, Swift, and a few more things.

We hire diverse, well-rounded, communicative people we can envision being friends with and trusting. Our projects tend to be 1-2 engineers max so trust and accountability is required for us to work. Also helps us keep processes & overhead low. We appreciate that we've built a reasonably-sized, high-powered team so far (55 employees incl. 30 engineers) and are always striving to be the best place to work for them. We're looking for folks that love all of the above and will help us keep our standards high.

You can go to www.hipmunk.com/jobs if you're interested!

Unfortunately it breaks command-click to open links in a new tab, and instead navigates within the same page.

I believe this person is referring to the Republican-controlled US federal government and Trump presidency.

(I'm just explaining, not making any value judgements.)

This would make an excellent character set for a roguelike.

Missed opportunity to call the platform forum the "GitHub PlatForum."

I wrote MSPaint-as-JavaScript library, Literally Canvas (http://literallycanvas.com). People sometimes want to pay good rates for work done on it. I'm always looking for someone to take over most of those requests, since I no longer have time for it.

It looks like I was incorrect, and ChristianBach is right. I'm sorry for spreading misinformation. I misread their pricing info.

For you folks keeping track at home, Netlify is $108/yr for the lowest tier that lets you use a custom domain, while grandparent's advice is about $7/yr ($6/yr for Route 53 + "negligible" hosting and bandwidth).

Not to dump on Netlify, just reacting to those sly little not-really-equivalent promotions.

If you want a custom domain don't bother with the pro account go business when you sign up.

I have the Enhanced plan (not business) and a custom domain. Works great.

In my case, I wrote a JavaScript library that was just good enough to be useful, and well-documented, but not incredibly full-featured. People need changes and additions from time to time.

Since I have a full time job, I turn down a lot of gigs (like "integrate your library into our code," rather than working on the library itself), but I think the strategy in general is good if you chase down all the leads.

If this looks appealing to you, I'd be open to forwarding leads to others if you can make me confident that you can do the job. Send me an email if so.

http://literallycanvas.com/

One issue here is there's no exact test case. As a result, all variants seem to use slightly different timing curves. Maybe that's irrelevant, but it's at least annoying to look at.

(Not to say I don't appreciate this page.)

While you're here, I should say: first, thanks for your work, and second, it would be nice if the compiler could log the timing data in a consolidated form so my script wouldn't be necessary. :-) Regex-parsing and aggregating a bunch of log lines seems dicey.

I recently wrote a tool to report Swift block compile times, since this kind of thing can be unpredictable. At Hipmunk we run it every night to find out how we can make our builds faster.

Another common culprit of slow compile times is usage of lazy var.

https://github.com/irskep/swift_compile_times_parser