HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

WillyF

1,122 karma · joined February 23, 2010

Just wrapped up One Day One Job. Figuring out what's next.
submissionscomments
WillyF··on Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent
My grocery store's app requires me to "clip" coupons if I want to use them. Instead of clipping just the ones that I need, I would just take 2-3 minutes to tap the clip button repeatedly (as you clip the next coupon moves up into the same spot). Very tedious, but the best way to make sure you don't miss any savings. Today I asked Muse to do it. It was very slow compared to my repetitive tapping, but it clipped every coupon for me after getting my login credentials for the grocery store's website.
WillyF··on A very Chicago gamble
Have done this twice recently. Did not own shares in either company outside of likely ownership in 401ks or index funds. They don’t check. Ridiculously effective.
WillyF··on Wait Until 8th
I’d like to see something for this for travel sports.
WillyF··on Parasites are everywhere. Why do so few researchers study them?
I asked a French friend who comes from a long line of hunters. He'd never heard of it either. There are quite a few French woodcock preparations that include eating the guts, but I've never heard anything about tapeworms. I've also cleaned quite a few American woodcock, and I have never seen a tapeworm in the innards.
WillyF··on U.S. agency declares 21 species now extinct
“Destroyed” forest are perfect Warbler habitat—at least for the Kirtland’s Warbler which requires dense areas of young jack pine. That means either fires or logging are essential to their survival. So if you mean don’t pave over forests, then yes. But logging done properly is essential for a lot of species.
WillyF··on Lobster and snow crab fisheries search for alternative baits
There’s a TikTok account that shows up in my feed from a lobster fisherman with a series called “Will It Fish?” where he tests Baird suggested by his audience. I find it quite enjoyable.
WillyF··on What hacking AOL taught a generation of programmers
An IM with repeating <h1><br> tags until you hit the character limit was good for about 30 seconds of lag/freezing on the Mac client. 10 of those in fast succession would pretty much make you have to restart your computer.
WillyF··on Cocaine Paraphernalia Ads in the 70s
What about antibiotics?
WillyF··on YouTube Kids a “vapid wasteland” say US lawmakers
The YouTube Kids AppleTV app is also horrible. It freezes and needs to be restarted constantly immediately after opening.

But even worse is that there is no way to quickly rewind or fast forward. You can only use the skip 10 seconds buttons. So if my son watches half of a show and wants to watch it again a week later, the show starts where he left off. I end up having to click the remote about 200 times to get back to the start. I upgraded to get rid of ads, which has made the experience much better, but the UI is really infuriating.

WillyF··on “The Far Side” Returns to a Weird World
In 7th grade my English teacher had us each put together a book on grammar. I used "The Far Side" cartoons to illustrate all of the rules that I had learned. I wish I could link to it, but the only copy, a hard copy, is somewhere in my parents' basement or attic.
WillyF··on The big little lie of the TV kitchen island
I stopped at the same exact point.
WillyF··on DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
One thing thing that I love about Apple Maps is that they have the name of every river, stream, creek, and ditch if you zoom in far enough. I can't find this information in Google Maps (maybe there's a way to find it, but zooming in doesn't do it). This was exceptionally helpful on my recent trip to Corsica, where I was searching for a specific stream with a genetically significant population of native trout. Apple Maps made finding it a breeze, and even had the name of all the tributaries that flow into it, which were essentially just trickles.

I subscribe to OnX Maps for most of my fishing and hunting research in the United States, but Apple Maps is a pretty great free option.

WillyF··on Most Wasabi Is Fake [video]
Even "real" truffle oil (or butter or some other fat) need not contain real truffles. It's quite easy to infuse fats with truffle aroma. If you put truffles and a fat (with sufficient surface area in contact with the air) in an enclosed place like under a bowl in a refrigerator, you will get a very significant truffle aroma/flavor in the fat.

I've done this with Oregon white truffles (tuber oregonense) that I harvested with the help of my dog. Kept the butter frozen for over a year, and it still had the truffle aroma when I pulled it out of the freezer.

I actually think the infusion method adds a lot more flavor/aroma than adding pieces of truffle, but the pieces are clear evidence that what you bought actually came in contact with real truffles--it's pretty much just marketing.

WillyF··on Does Kit Kat’s Shape Deserve a Trademark? E.U. Adds a Hurdle
One of my favorite cooking videos is "Pastry Chef Attempts to Make Gourmet Kit Kats" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nqJiBRNQuw

It's a perfect example of hacking without a computer. There is a whole series of these videos trying to recreate mass produced junk food in a test kitchen, and it's incredible how difficult it can be for even a very experienced chef. It makes you wonder how these products were ever created.

WillyF··on Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
This is my frustration. I'd prefer to shop elsewhere, but the convenience of walking to Whole Food and grabbing whatever I need (or at least trying to) is hard to pass up when the alternative likely requires getting in the car. My strong preference would be to go to multiple shops (butcher, fishmonger, produce store, etc.), but the convenience of Whole Foods usually wins out.
WillyF··on Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
I live less than a five minute walk from a Whole Foods (Chicago - North Ave), so I shop there quite a bit even though I'm not a huge fan of the store. While I haven't seen empty shelves like the photos from the article, I have become frustrated by how often they are out of the items that I'm looking for. Four or five straight trips they didn't have rosemary, and it took a third trip and asking someone who was stocking vegetables to get parsnips (requests from previous trips resulted in "Sorry, we're out"). The last time that I shopped there, they were out of maybe 5 of the 6 things that I was looking for. My wife and I agreed that this was one of the more useful Business Insider articles that we've read. It's not a great article, but it answered a mystery that had been bugging us over the past few months.

I seem to remember that the Whole Foods employees who would check us out used to always ask, "Did you find everything that you were looking for?" I haven't heard that in a while. Maybe that's related to the changes in stocking?

WillyF··on Hundreds ‘Rickrolled’ in Campus Prank at Cornell
When I was at Cornell in the mid 2000s, one of the frats did a prank similar to this--though all it took was a roll of quarters. They loaded up the jukebox in the Ivy Room with quarters and set it to play Chumbawumba's "Tubthumping" on repeat. The brilliance was that the song faded out for about 30 seconds and with all of the noise in the dining hall, it sounded like the madness had finally ended. And then it would start again...
WillyF··on I bought HitTail (a SaaS app) in 2011, grew it, and sold it last week
There's also a tax benefit in the U.S. Taking the capital gain can be far more favorable than taking the profits of the business as regular income.
WillyF··on What Politicians Believe About Their Constituents: Asymmetric Misperceptions [pdf]
Make it pay really well and people won't try to get out of it.
WillyF··on Renting in America Has Never Been This Expensive
My 9 roommates and I paid $60k a year for one of those decrepit old houses--and this was 10 years ago. At $500 per month each, it didn't seem that bad, but we really got ripped off. The density of college living (for instance I had to walk through a roommates room to get to mine) allows landlords in Ithaca to get a level of rent that they'd never get from families or older individuals.
WillyF··on Why Your Dog Can Get Vaccinated Against Lyme Disease and You Can’t (2012)
A family friend was one of the people who helped develop the Lyme vaccine. He invited my Dad to be part of the trial because my Dad spends a lot of time outdoors. It turned out that my Dad got the placebo during the trial, but they let him get the vaccine after the trial was completed. That was a long time ago. The vaccine has certainly worn off at this point.
WillyF··on Harvard engineering students devise BBQ smoker
One thing that they don't talk about at all is meat quality. Whom you buy your brisket from can be much more important than optimizing every detail of the smoking process.
WillyF··on Ask HN: How much traffic does a job board site need for paid listings?
I wrote the company profiles myself. I found all kinds of companies with jobs that weren't posted on any other job boards. Growing an initial audience was the easy part for me because my site was very different from other job sites. Monetizing while continuing to grow the site was what killed me. I relied too much on SEO, and one of Google's whims essentially put me out of business. Most of the startups in the space that I saw fail couldn't even get an initial user base.
WillyF··on Ask HN: How much traffic does a job board site need for paid listings?
Yes, that's true. I was actually surprised that they didn't exit for more. Ask question 1 again and replace Indeed with Google.
WillyF··on Ask HN: How much traffic does a job board site need for paid listings?
I ran a company in the college employment space for 7+ years. I recently shut it down. At our peak we had 150-200k unique visits per month and an email list around 10k. I was scraping by and making a living, but we weren't selling job postings directly for the most part. I've watched many dozens of startups in the space die. Although I learned a lot and helped a lot of people find jobs, I realize now that it's an exceptionally difficult space.
WillyF··on Free Startup Ideas
It also drastically increases a recruiter/hiring manager's time spent looking at résumés if they can't skim them.
WillyF··on Nest introduces their Smoke Detector
I wonder if they could use the motion sensor to alert people of a low battery. I'd much rather hear a chirp every time that I walk by than while I'm half way through a good night's sleep.
WillyF··on Nest introduces their Smoke Detector
Because the alarms are so annoying, people often end up disabling the alarms and never replacing them. That's dangerous in the long run. In the short run it's dangerous to try to disable an alarm in the middle of the night. I wonder if anyone has ever died from a fall while attempting to stop the chirping in a sleep-deprived state.
WillyF··on Nest introduces their Smoke Detector
My wife lost just as much sleep, and she makes more than I do.
WillyF··on Nest introduces their Smoke Detector
I was going to agree with you, and then I remembered the night that the smoke detector in my rental started chirping every few minutes. It was around 3 AM. We had really high ceilings, so if I stood on a chair, I could almost reach the smoke detector to disable it. It took a solid 15 minutes of my standing on my tippy toes trying to figure out what would make the chirping stop. I don't remember exactly how I did it, but I was mere minutes away from using a baseball bat.

It turns out it was the smoke detector's "self-destruct" chirp. A new battery wouldn't even do the job. Had to buy a new smoke detector because the old one had reached its age limit.

That night if you had asked me to pay $100 so that I could go back to sleep and not have to worry about THAT CHIRP, I would have whipped out my wallet so fast.

Page 1 of 10Next →