Hacker News Reader

TWAndrewson After beating cable lobby, Colorado city moves ahead with muni broadband

I grew up in Fort Collins, and live here now after an itinerant period, and I'll say that overall the city government has always been far-sighted, a good steward of the tax money they get, and provided good public services.

I'm pretty confident that they'll do this well.

TWAndrewson After beating cable lobby, Colorado city moves ahead with muni broadband

I live in Fort Collins and can confirm that we were absolutely inundated with mailers, and other forms of ads.

TWAndrewson Children prefer to read books on paper rather than screens

This is definitely true for my 7 year old daughter. She's an avid reader, but even when I buy a book she is very interested in reading (typically the next in a current series) on a Kindle rather than getting her a hard copy, she'll end up reading something else.

TWAndrewson How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations

You can mostly trust Swiss people to be that honest. It doesn't work like that everywhere.

TWAndrewson Alexa: Amazon's Operating System

True, but it's plausible enough that 7 year-olds can connect the dots from existing or close-to-existing technologies.

TWAndrewson Alexa: Amazon's Operating System

We got an Echo over the holidays, and watching my 7, 5 and 3 year old daughters interact with it has given me a glimpse of what bringing home a black-and-white TV in the 50s must have been like: Objectively it's pretty limited, but it (voice-driven interaction, rather than the Echo specifically) is so obviously the future it's striking.

Separately, I've told my daughters that they probably won't ever need to learn to drive--cars will probably do it for them by the time they are driving age.

They've put two and two together, and the other day I overheard them saying "Someday we'll be able to call an Alexa car and have it take us where ever we want."

TWAndrewson The British are Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it

Swiss culture is very small-c conservative, with heavy value on making rational, pragmatic decisions. It is no surprise that they have a system which reflects that, and performs well for that population.

TWAndrewson The British are Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it

Right, but all those are inherent to the people of Switzerland. The same system in, say, Italy wouldn't get those results.

TWAndrewson More Than 40% of Student Borrowers Aren’t Making Payments

Yes. My nephew is a Junior and starting to look at schools and my main message to him is "wherever you can minimize your debt."

TWAndrewson Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can’t Hack

The NSA cracking the Secure Enclave is not the same as the FBI cracking the Secure Enclave.

TWAndrewson Records: Python library for making raw SQL queries to Postgres databases

If you've already got the SQL handy, this is pretty useful.

TWAndrewson Tableau stock down almost 50%

or very little of it for a lot of money. Website design suggests the latter

In the BI market, Tableau is very much one of the low-cost, high volume players. They've done a great job getting into lots of people's hands, the question has always been whether or not they can roll the volume of cheap(ish) single user licenses into large enterprise-type deals.

TWAndrewson How Schools Are Handling an 'Overparenting' Crisis

If you'd ever tasted poverty, you might think better about the pursuit of money.

TWAndrewson The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked

Then you're really unfamiliar with the dynamics of domestic abuse. I'd be more surprised if violence was not the result of this.

TWAndrewson United Airlines System-Wide Computer Problem

I was able to get checked in via the United android App around 9am ET.

TWAndrewson Amazon Dash Button

This would be great until one of my kids pushed it like 50 times.

TWAndrewson Building my own email app to reach Inbox Zero

Very lucid description of the technical reasons that email is a PITA.

TWAndrewson Colorado communities secure the right to build their own broadband

Loveland, Longmong and Niwot are all relatively close, and have similar quality of life properties, but are quite a lot cheaper--they don't have the university, which can be a bug or a feature depending on your perspective.

Fort Collins is another university town but with a lower national profile than Boulder, which again can be a good or bad thing.

TWAndrewson Colorado communities secure the right to build their own broadband

It's definitely not a suburb of Denver. It's relatively close, but it's a different place. It's a lot like Ann Arbor, Madison, or other cities of about 100k which have a large university in town.

It's actually got a fair bit of tech activity--nothing like top tier cities like SF, NYC, Boston, or even Austin, but for it's size the tech scene is significant.

TWAndrewson All Our Patent Are Belong To You

I interpret this as a signal that Tesla will be willing to enter into no-cost license agreements for companies wishing to use their technology, and won't pursue cases against companies who make technology that is related, and where infringement might be plausible, and could go either way when put to trial.

TWAndrewson How not to respond to Heartbleed – CBA, an Australian bank (read the comments)

It seems like there's a bot who's replying to comments with a handful of canned responses. I'd be interested if you could get the same responses from the CBA twitter/facebook accounts.

TWAndrewson Your Path to a $16B exit? Build a J2ME App

And most of the most appealing-to-business sub-populations in a lot of these countries read english well enough that an English-language product captures a lot of them.

TWAndrewson Ask HN: Should I quit my job if I am not learning?

Yeah. My baseline assumption is that people need 1-3 years after graduation before just getting their heads screwed on straight--there are definitely exceptions to this, but not as often as the average 24 year-old would have you believe.

Spending less than a year in the first job would be a red-flag for me, and it would take the candidate offering some very persuasive reasons for having left for me to give the serious consideration.

TWAndrewson Ask HN: Should I quit my job if I am not learning?

When you say you aren't learning, are you referring only to your development as a software engineer, or are you also referring to your skills as an employee?

Learning how to operate in a moderately large company is a skill, and requires you to understand how to assess the value of projects you're working on, how to make them more valuable, and how to find things which would be valuable that you can work on of your own volition.

In general, you'll be asked to demonstrate competence on risk-free projects before you're given the keys to bigger things. Demonstrate excellence on those and then ask for more challenging work.

TWAndrewson Tell HN: My Brother Died Last Week. His Death Will Not Be In Vain

Really sorry for your loss.

TWAndrewson iOS holding my phone number hostage = the worst bug I’ve ever experienced

That's odd. I made the same switch, but when I turned off iMessage on my old phone, texts from contacts with iPhones are sent correctly to my new android device.

TWAndrewson iOS holding my phone number hostage = the worst bug I’ve ever experienced

I recently made exactly ths same switch, and unsurprisingly had exactly this issue. I resolved it by turning on my iPhone, putting it in airplane mode, and turning on wireless.

I then went into Settings >> Messages and turned off iMessage. All the iPhones that had previously been trying to send me messages via iMessage then started routing messages to me via text.

TWAndrewson Do The Work. Write Before You Die.

Interesting, though I'm not sure I'm up to a year's worth of daily meditation on my death.

TWAndrewson Reform Government Surveillance

It's also the stark differences in the consequences of misuse. Google can use my information to serve me diabolically targeted ads. The government can put me in jail. It's not that I trust Google more, it's that they have vastly less power to harm me even if their intentions are bad.

TWAndrewson About the Penny Arcade Job Posting

Ultimately they'll have to, but not because of any outrage about under compensation. This is only possible for Mr. Kuan because he built the systems he maintains. The next person is going to have to maintain systems someone else built. That will be a lot harder, and my guess is ultimately impossible for one person.