HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

JoelSutherland

4,942 karma · joined May 4, 2008

My Company (Web Design and Development) http://www.newmediacampaigns.com

Twitter http://www.twitter.com/JoelSutherland

submissionscomments
JoelSutherland··on Tesla Model S Autopilot Reliability – Why Americans Should Love Tesla
Fatalities per 100 million miles driven is not a great metric for measuring the reliability of Autopilot.

That number is influenced not just by Autopilot avoiding accidents, but also by the overall safety of the car. Teslas are incredibly safe in accidents. The current 25% lead that Autopilot has over the average is probably not attributable to Autopilot at all, and instead to the overall safety of the vehicle.

* Fatality rates vary by make/model quite a bit (up to 8x). Some of this is surely attributable to the relative driving skill of purchasers, but most is probably the safety of the cars themselves. Given the spread seen in this IIHS report I would guess that Autopilot performs worse than the average human. http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/driver-death-rates

JoelSutherland··on ZenPayroll is now Gusto
Zenefits does not do payroll, they "integrate" with other Payroll providers. Of the providers I've been most impressed with ZenPayroll so this is a very exciting announcement.
JoelSutherland··on How to Ace a Phone Screen
This is not really the attitude a company should have when they manage benefits:

On the flip side, with so many people contributing code mistakes are bound to happen. That’s normal – after all we’re all just people, and people make mistakes. One thing that I’ve found particularly admirable about our team here is that people own up right away, and strive to fix things as fast as possible. No one wants to ship buggy code, but it happens. The nice thing about working with so many smart and friendly devs though is that you can trust that someone will be there to catch you if you fall and help you fix things.

We've caught and reported 4-5 bugs in production to Zenefits on really basic features. Three of our employees have now been asked to send a screenshot of the dashboard with the JS console open...

JoelSutherland··on A new Stephen Hawking presentation about black holes
And here are the two discussing it today: https://twitter.com/ChancellorFolt/status/636306368861966341
JoelSutherland··on Why Web Pages Suck
The link I added has a filmstrip view where you can verify that this isn't the case. Alternatively visit the two sites yourself! The multi-second difference is perceptible to a human being.
JoelSutherland··on Why Web Pages Suck
This linked article that talks about web pages sucking is 1.3mb and is first visible/readable after 4.9 seconds:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150715_SE_YM1/

An article from the site it complains about sure uses a lot more bandwidth (2.9mb) but at least it's visible/readable in 2.2 seconds:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150715_KC_YQK/

The bandwidth/resource waste sure sucks but having ads load asynchronously isn't as bad as a blank screen for 5 seconds.

JoelSutherland··on Tota11y
If zooming is disabled, the browser can respond to clicks without a 300ms delay since it doesn't have to wait for a double-click zoom. It seems like the best solution to this problem would be to make a global toggle in settings.
JoelSutherland··on The average American woman now weighs 166 pounds – as much as a 1960s man
About an inch, but actually less than an inch and even less so for women. So women are ~1% taller and 18.5% heavier. I don't think height is a factor.
JoelSutherland··on ADP Sues Zenefits for Defamation
I too run a small company and am a Zenefits customer. We've now done ~15 payroll runs with Zenefits and only 3 have worked without my manual intervention to fix a problem at the last minute. I don't think this will be the only lawsuit in their future.
JoelSutherland··on Your guide to selling against Zenefits [pdf]
I can second this. We've been with Zenefits for over a year now and the issues don't stop. Many of their "integations" occur in meatspace: when a change is made on the Zenefits dashboard, a Zenefits employee then manually updates the related service(s). This has resulted in a number of errors over the course of a year.

Additionally their are still issues with validation on their dashboard. We had a problem where the dashboard allowed an invalid value to be entered for a monthly 401k contribution that was a big pain to unwind.

JoelSutherland··on Show HN: Mockups fixed by making collaboration effortless, built with React
This works amazingly well on a Surface with pen/touch. It's the fastest app I've seen for going from idea to wireframes. So impressive that this could be done with web tech.
JoelSutherland··on How Super Angel Chris Sacca Burned Bridges and Crafted the Best Seed Portfolio
The problem with (and complaint about) the top comment isn't cynicism, it's emptiness. It really just says "there is survivorship bias" with nothing specific about the shared article. It's not interesting.
JoelSutherland··on Why Apple Will Switch to ARM-Based Macs (2014)
The Anandtech quote compares the A7 to an Atom chip, not a Core chip. That's not to say that Apple can't eventually match Core performance at higher TDPs but the distance is greater than the article suggests.
JoelSutherland··on The Expert in a Year Challenge
I've been checking in a bit too and am somewhat discouraged. I'm not exactly sure how he is counting his rounds towards his hour goal, but it seems like he is playing more and more and practicing less and less. He also seems very equipment obsessed. It could just be that what he writes about has changed.
JoelSutherland··on At Chipotle, How Many Calories Do People Really Eat?
Most that I've looked at seem to be within 5-10% which is surely within the variance for food being doled out by scoop. I just preferred the UI of the first one. Which items are way off so I know what to look out for?
JoelSutherland··on At Chipotle, How Many Calories Do People Really Eat?
Click around with this nice tool: http://www.chipotlefan.com/index.php?id=nutrition_calculator

Skip the tortilla, sour cream and chips and you've just saved 980 calories. Without those it's hard to create a meal that has a calorie issue. Aside from the sodium, Chipotle is darn healthy.

JoelSutherland··on Vivaldi – A new browser for our friends
If you were looking for screenshots (since this is a wrapper around blink) they are buried here under the Press Resources link:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ljm9h48qn2x3v33/AAAmdrTw2ISsKKQNR...

JoelSutherland··on Introducing Google Cast for audio
It's actually more like Sonos. Airplay streams from the device to the receiver. With this (and Sonos) a command is sent to the device which does the streaming on its own.
JoelSutherland··on Nashville police chief shares message, responds to questions
I love four sides as an alternative to both sides.
JoelSutherland··on CSS-only plotting
It's very redundant so it gzips to 3kb.
JoelSutherland··on Rental America: Why the poor pay $4,150 for a $1,500 sofa
The same thing that happened to the family in the article is happening to the commenters in this thread -- but in reverse!

Just as the furniture rental place likely never told the family that the weekly-payment total would be $4,150, the article doesn't clearly show the price the family was looking at: $57.64/week.

I'm much more sympathetic to their decision when looking at the two numbers they were faced with: $58 vs $1500. A bad sofa on Craigslist is $200.

It seems like a good solution to the problem would be to require the $4150 total to be made explicit on a standardized disclosure form, not unlike what you see on a home mortgage.

JoelSutherland··on Google Down?
CDN down as well.
JoelSutherland··on Rethinking What We Mean by ‘Mobile Web’
CDixon: It's bad that the mobile web is losing to mobile apps because apps are heavily controlled by the dominant app stores owners that censor things and take a 30% cut.

Gruber: Mobile apps and the Mobile web are the same thing because both use HTTP. And the walled garden thing isn't bad because Google and Apple compete and Bitcoin seems to be succeeding anyway.

JoelSutherland··on Apple Reports First Quarter Results
That would be a terrible plan. Apple stock raises on average 2.1% the day after an earnings announcement: http://www.thestreet.com/story/11505061/1/where-will-apple-t...
JoelSutherland··on The Disinformation
Not to mention their refusal to admit that they shouldn't be changing quotes in the first place.
JoelSutherland··on 300ms tap delay removed on Chrome for Android
For what it's worth, this delay was already removed for sites that had user-scalable=no set. Most mobile "apps" used this.

The change here is that if the computed viewport is smaller or equal to the device width, fast clicks will be enabled without having to disable scaling. Double clicking won't work, but pinch-to-zoom will.

Overall it's a fairly minor change for those thinking about making HTML5 apps, but it is a big positive change for users visiting existing web sites that have mobile/responsive versions that haven't disallowed scaling.

JoelSutherland··on Why have SVG images not yet replaced PNG on the web?
IE8 doesn't support SVG and still has nearly 15% marketshare in the US. This is essentially the entire reason.
JoelSutherland··on Microsoft’s Hardware, Round 2: Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2
The Haswell Airs came out in June and the Windows Haswell Ultrabooks were for sale beginning in August. The gap was only about 3-4 months.
JoelSutherland··on Color Test
It will make a difference. Your eyes can see a much wider color space than your monitor can display. By shifting colors, f.lux leaves some of the monitors color space unused, compressing the remaining colors so that some are closer together (or the same even).
JoelSutherland··on Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen
Plus encasing every component in its own plastic capsule with high quality metal interconnects won't exactly save materials.
Page 1 of 15Next →