Hacker News Reader

8_hours_agoon Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mountain of books?

Don’t forget about the Dewey decimal system. For the books with ISBNs, you can sort them into boxes by their Dewey decimal. If you don’t have time manually categorize the books without ISBNs, they can be put into “other” boxes and left unsorted

8_hours_agoon California Dispatches Goats to Eat Brush, Prevent Wildfires

This article seems to resurface every few years. It even mentions that it isn’t new, but I think you are right, this has been going on for much longer than 5 years in other places

> The concept’s not unique to Ventura County, which has been using goats to trim vegetation for about five years.

8_hours_agoon Coffee Cups Are Next

I feel like dirty dishes have been a problem in every place I have worked. Have any companies wised up and installed a dishwasher in each kitchen, and have someone assigned to run them every night? Or even just pay someone to wash the dishes by hand?

8_hours_agoon Firefox 64 Released

Here's a description of the spec, if you are interested: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/OpenSearch

Firefox uses it to populate the search bar drop down menu with the available search engines for a site, but it does not add them automatically like Chrome does.

8_hours_agoon Firefox 64 Released

Chrome automatically adds sites if they have an OpenSearch description document: https://www.chromium.org/tab-to-search

Firefox requires the user to add the search engine manually: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-or-remove-search-en...

8_hours_agoon TSA’s Roadmap for Airport Surveillance Moves in a Dangerous Direction

I assume that’s because they see them all day long so they are pretty good at spotting them in an X-ray. They don’t see weapons or actually threatening objects very often, or ever except for training.

8_hours_agoon Leave Gmail in 10 steps

Huh. I haven't had that issue with Outlook Web App. I have "Mark the item as read when the selection changes" selected in my options and I haven't noticed it failing.

8_hours_agoon Proof That iOS Still Hasn’t Gotten Undo Right

Nope, it also works for static text

8_hours_agoon Booting a physical Windows 10 disk on Linux using VirtualBox

I bet that if you tried to boot the disk naitively then Windows would want to be activated.

8_hours_agoon Booting a physical Windows 10 disk on Linux using VirtualBox

I did this many years ago with a dual boot computer and Windows (7 iirc) kept complaining about needing to be reactivated when I’d switch between running natively and virtualized. Has that been fixed on Windows 10?

8_hours_agoon Microsoft Releases a Linux Version of the ProcDump Sysinternals Tool

Yes. I was able to delete it from my iPhone.

8_hours_agoon The Conspiratorial Hate We See Online Is Increasingly Appearing in Real Life

I agree that BuzzFeed isn't the poster child of wholesome online content, but they don't advocate hate speech or blatant conspiracy theories, to the best of my knowledge.

8_hours_agoon Running a Wall of Sheep in the Wild

> would you initiate a hostile work environment claim

I most definitely would. And if that didn’t work, I might post to Twitter about it.

8_hours_agoon L.A.'s Most Derided Piece of Public Art Is About to Light Up Again

Wow! Seeing those pictures makes it obvious why they decided to add new electronics and lights instead of reusing the existing ones. Even with documentation that looks like it would be a real pain to interface with.

8_hours_agoon YC Top Companies List

Justin Kan and Kyle Vogt are both on that list twice. That's impressive!

8_hours_agoon GitHub's game jam returns next month

That is really fun! It plays very smoothly on my iPhone.

8_hours_agoon How not to say the wrong thing (2013)

? What are you talking about? Did you read the same article I did? It was nothing about gender.

8_hours_agoon Ubuntu Linux Performance Over the Past Six Years on an Intel Xeon Server

The right side of the images are cropped for me on iOS

8_hours_agoon Abstract of the NTSB Report on Air Canada flight 759's taxiway overflight at SFO [pdf]

I was just about to post that link! VASAviation has a really good youtube channel with ATC radio recordings and high quality visualizations of all kinds of interesting events: https://www.youtube.com/user/victor981994

8_hours_agoon Mmm, Pi-hole

I use AdBlock https://www.adblockios.com on iOS which runs a local DNS server that can blackhole domains. It doesn't work well on very large host files so I gave up trying to import https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts, but it does work well for smaller lists.

8_hours_agoon Apple, Firefox tools aim to thwart Facebook, Google tracking

Firefox containers attempts to solve this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

8_hours_agoon Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

As a programmer I have the ability to be selective with the jobs that I take. The first 7 interviewers did not convince me that Apple was a good place to work. The last interviewer convinced me that I didn't want to work with them or people like them.

Of course, things change. It would be difficult for Apple to change my mind about working there, but it is not impossible. Ask me again in 10 years :)

8_hours_agoon Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

Your jerk tolerance is higher than mine. I really really don't like to work with people like that.

There were other reasons why I decided that Apple was not for me, but the jerk interviewer definitely tilted the scale from "yes, I could see myself working there" to "no, I will never work there".

8_hours_agoon Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

I recently interviewed at Apple and one interviewer caused me to decide to never work there. I was put into a conference room and had 8 people over 6 hours come in and interview me one after another. Each person asked me about my background and then jumped into a whiteboard coding problem. Most of the interviewers were understanding of the fact that writing code on a whiteboard is nothing like writing code on a computer, and were helpful in pointing out simple mistakes that a compiler would have caught.

While writing code for the last interviewer I had to do some simple division. I came up with the wrong answer and told the interviewer that I wasn't sure if that was correct, and to let me know if it was incorrect. He blankly stared at me and said he wouldn't help me. Usually I would be able to do the division in my head, but after 6 hours of constant interviewing my brain was starting to turn into mush. I went on and finished the solution and he said that there was an issue but wouldn't tell me where. I asked if it was an issue with the division and he said yes. He still wouldn't tell me the answer, so I floundered for a bit while trying to remember how to do long division.

At one point I turned to him and said "I'm sorry this is taking me so long, it's been a very long day" and he replied "sometimes you will have to fix your code on the spot". It seemed like he was trying to see if I would crack under the pressure. Eventually I came up with the correct answer and was able to finish the problem, but it completely drained me.

I decided then that I never wanted to work with that person, or with other people like them.

Some jobs require performance under pressure, but programming is not one of them. The only thing that the interviewer was evaluating was my ability to do math problems in my head after being interviewed for 6 hours. Don't they have calculators at Apple? Or phones, perhaps?

8_hours_agoon Ask HN: What is your preferred weather website?

https://weather.gov

I live in a coastal area with highly localized weather, and weather.gov gives me by far the best forecast. Sites which only have city-level granularity don't work well when the temperature can be 5-10F different less than a mile away.

8_hours_agoon More Companies That No Longer Require a Degree

Not all mechanical engineering work requires a Professional Engineer

8_hours_agoon More than a quarter of Americans say they’ve deleted Facebook from their phones

I can upload photos from my camera to Facebook using Safari on iOS. I deleted the Facebook app from my phone 6 months ago and haven’t missed it at all. The only inconvenience is that you can’t access Messenger from Facebook’s default mobile website, but you can from https://mbasic.facebook.com/messages

8_hours_agoon GIMP receives a $100K donation

It looks like the GIMP developers would rather that new feature requests be made on their mailing list before making a new bug:

"An enhancement request should never be filed without prior discussion on the gimp-developer mailing list[0]. This is to make sure that the enhancement requests that are filed are well-specified and aligned with the overall goals the developers have for GIMP."

But please don't let that stop you! The more feedback that the developers get, the better GIMP will be for everyone.

[0]: https://www.gimp.org/mail_lists.html

8_hours_agoon Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator

That sounds interesting! Out of curiosity, what is your use case for those features?

8_hours_agoon I've mostly given up on making Ubuntu bug reports

Bugs can be triaged into deficiencies and new feature requests. Usually new feature requests are handled differently than actual bugs. For hard-to-fix bugs that don’t affect many people, sometimes documenting it as a known issue along with a workaround is good enough.