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SandersAKon Unnecessariat

I think it's worth noting that it is very hard to understand or see the world of the disempowered. Having actual empathy for their situation becomes increasingly harder the further away from the situation you are.

If you start from that vantage point, you can try and operate from a opinion of "help me now today" which almost always comes back to "tax me less now."

In the same way that most uber drivers don't understand that buying a new car to drive uber is simply trading away future profit for cash today, many of the disempowered do not have the tools to think about money, voting, or political movements in terms of a long term future.

SandersAKon Sunrise is shutting down

the biggest thing is just simply hotkeying fantastical to "f" in Alfred and burning out reminders and events from the keyboard.

you can also pull up fantastical and scroll through your events but I find most of the time I'm reviewing events from my phone.

here are some more tweaks: https://www.alfredapp.com/blog/productivity/dont-miss-a-date...

SandersAKon Sunrise is shutting down

i tried using Sunrise but was already a devout Fantastical user. i'm just too into the Alfred / Fantastical macro life now. Glad I stuck with them.

SandersAKon Show HN: Security Training for Developers

Awesome! This is great!

SandersAKon Is group chat making you sweat?

Yep, I get that there are a lot of emerging edge cases that need to have the UI and experience tweaked, but at the same time, it's on us to understand the ability of the tool and how best to use it.

Don't get me wrong, Slack needs to improve and adapt just like any other tool that has a growing user-base. But the SVN hand waving about culture isn't actually about Slack at all, it's just about teams not being well set up with clear goals and methods. You could sub out "Slack" with "email" and come up with similar issues.

SandersAKon Is group chat making you sweat?

Yes I did read the article. But until someone can show me how slack exacerbates behavior any better/worse than what email did when it first came out, or texting, or even typed memos and letters, I'd love to see it.

SandersAKon Is group chat making you sweat?

No.

Just like every other communication tool, it's not the tool it's how you use it.

SandersAKon Dsxyliea

Pretty interesting stuff.

What was strange for me is that I had no problem reading 90% of that at the same pace as I usually read except for word I have never seen before.

I tend to speed read contextually skipping over words entirely. Maybe a bad thing now that i think of it...

SandersAKon Why YC

Also, the best damn lemonade ever at dinner!

SandersAKon Trying to interview Larry Page

There is that: http://beaconreader.com

caveat: i'm one of the founders.

SandersAKon Magic+

OOOOOH YEAH, CAN DO!

SandersAKon The Rise and Fall of Venture-Backed News Readers in One Chart

Even a cursory Google search will show this data is inaccurate. See circa total raised. Here it says 1.7m but googling "circa investments" Angel list shows several rounds and closer to 5m raised.

Makes the insights hard to believe.

SandersAKon You are your phone

If you think that what defines you is a series of recorded or remembered events, worrying about this makes a lot of sense.

Loan providers using this instead of their predatory bullshit system now seems ok to me.

SandersAKon Zenefits launches free payroll software for small businesses

with benefits, it's like a one-pager. you sign an authorization form and they take it to the med provider who then recognizes the switch. it's like a one day thing.

SandersAKon Zenefits launches free payroll software for small businesses

Gusto

SandersAKon Zenefits launches free payroll software for small businesses

fwiw, we've had less than a great time with Zenefits, whereas with Zenpayroll, we've been amazed at how good they were. They helped get through some tricky payroll business, and were always quick to make sure everything was in order.

I'm happy to pay the money and get the faster response times, better website, and stronger relationship with ZP (errr Gusto).

We'll probably move off of Zenefits entirely soon.

SandersAKon What happens when a culture is driven by the need for money to make more money

maybe in the last few decades, but increasingly unemployment is rising in Europe.

SandersAKon The future of UI is text

Makes argument for text. Uses images to illustrate point.

SandersAKon Show HN: Wriber – Idea Generator

dang, some of those are deep...

SandersAKon Show HN: Wriber – Idea Generator

I did Donkey Friend Time and got:

- Discuss what sorts of organizations donkey Kong, Diddy, and Cranky are?

- Did Diddy Kong refuse to hand over the banana hoard after what?

- What did the more someone know about miniature donkeys before someone buys?

SandersAKon Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

People really seem to downplay this, but Atlassian's partner network of integrators and consultants is actually really powerful.

SandersAKon The prisoners fighting wildfires in California

Uh, what? The forest service had a ton of ex-cons who came through the prison program. Two of my bosses were ex-cons.

SandersAKon America in flames

Def agree that it's more complicated but PNWhas record dryness and heat last five years. An the level tho you're right and it warrants more inspection than my cursory gut check.

SandersAKon America in flames

The biggest problem has been reducing the ladder fuel (underbrush etc). The fuels dept is notoriously understaffed and underfunded for national forest service. On top of his, it's difficult to convince locals to deal with lots of controlled burns in winter and spring.

Logging practices have gotten better, especially with dispersed thinning, but my gut is hat climate change is the real culprit.

Also, lodge pole pine is becoming more dominant in the PNW, and we're losing more fire resistant (and dependent) trees like ponderosa. Lodge pole grows like a weed and burns like hay.

Couple this with an antiquated federal service entirely dependent on chain of command that fights every year to preserve operations and their career posts and you get one of the most wasteful inefficient services in U.S. Govt.

Source: I was a forest firefighter and left after being fed up w the bureaucracy. So take my cynicism w a grain of salt.

SandersAKon Ask HN: Do you use a tablet?

I use my iPad exclusively at home. I now never take my work laptop home and it had dramatically made my life better. iPad forces me to be much more switched off but I can still email if need be. It's honestly one of the best things for my work-life balance that's ever happened to me.

SandersAKon YC Stats

Happy to buy any shares you have in any of the YC unicorns.

SandersAKon The Post-YC Slump

I think a lot of your replies and central argument is very thoughtful, but the one thing to consider is that successful startups are the result of unreasonable exertions of will, unreasonable amounts of luck, and an unreasonable amount of risk.

If it were reasonable, I don't think the value created would be so great.

While I don't disagree with your points on a macro, startups are very specific entities, and their success is contingent upon founders (and team members) who are willing to do unreasonable things. And also be extremely lucky.

SandersAKon Google's Toughest Search Is for a Business Model (2002)

Yeah maybe part of it is hindsight on my end. I agree that the FUD is because of the crash.

SandersAKon Google's Toughest Search Is for a Business Model (2002)

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/22/technology/22ECOM.html?pag...

It's mostly the tone of articles - a sense that this internet thing isn't quite there yet and there are consumer expectations that internet simply can't account for (which in the case of the article cited, we know is false because of things like pinterest etc).

The stuff I'm thinking about now is when articles talk about Snapchat, memes, gifs etc, the angle is coming from a very dismissive place.

Mostly talking about mainstream media though.

SandersAKon Google's Toughest Search Is for a Business Model (2002)

I think what's most telling about this article is how little people outside of tech understood about the internet. I guess the dot com crash helped with the FUD, but the takeaway for me is that usually news orgs are behind when trying to understand where tech is going, and their insight can be stunted because of this.