Hacker News Reader

aberkowitzon Establishing Twitter's Presence in Africa

From what I hear, Microsoft has been extremely active in hiring tech and skilled workers in Kenya this year. Really hoping they keep it up!

aberkowitzon Establishing Twitter's Presence in Africa

You could honestly spend a month in any of those countries, and barely scratch the surface of all the cultures, people, and ecosystems. I would highly recommend Ghana as a base, due to its stability, infrastructure, and low corruption. If you send me an email (link in profile), I'd be happy to connect you with interesting people in most of the countries you listed as well as Kenya.

aberkowitzon Establishing Twitter's Presence in Africa

I spent a year in Ghana in 2017, and I had the pleasure of meeting numerous software engineers and tech entrepreneurs who were doing extremely high quality work for 1-2k USD / month (if they were lucky). Having companies like twitter on the African continent will provide massive economic opportunity, and social mobility.

aberkowitzon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2018)

Hi Jeff - I applied for the full-stack position last month. Is the hiring cycle particularly long, or did I just drop out of the funnel?

aberkowitzon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2018)

  Location: Boston, MA, US
  Remote: Flexible
  Willing to relocate: Yes (If the work is interesting)
  Technologies:
  * Web backend (Flask, Django, Rails)
  * Frontend (CSS, HTML5, JS)
  * Mobile (Android / Java)
  * Desktop (Qt, GTK, JavaFX)
  * Programming Languages over the last 10 years:
    C, C++, Java, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, PHP (please, no), lua, SQL (Postgres, MySQL)
  Résumé/CV: http://berkowitz.org/resume.pdf
  Email: HireMe@berkowitz.org


  Jobs interests: Smart Devices / IoT for businesses. High efficiency farming. Ability to work with both hw+sw (ESP8266, STM32, etc).
  Locations interests: China, South+Central America, East+West Africa
  Languages: English, Spanish (WIP), Hebrew (poor)

aberkowitzon Once mocked, Facebook’s $1B acquisition of Instagram was a good move

> Surprising that Google has never repeated that trick

What about Waze?

aberkowitzon WordPress.com turns on HTTPS encryption for all websites

My go to is http://google.org.

Along with the 100 million in grants they write yearly, they provide a valuable social service for those more fortunate.

aberkowitzon Startups That Launched at YC S15 Demo Day 1

I do all my Venmo-ing on a computer. I'd be curious to know if I was just an isolated case.

aberkowitzon Nokia 215

I certainly hope that 2G doesn't get phased out for a long time. It is a cheap network that is perfect for IoT devices.

aberkowitzon Inside a Tesla Model S Battery Pack

I'm pretty sure the casings are there for fire isolation

aberkowitzon Gitbucket – The easily installable Github clone powered by Scala

This blog post has some screenshots: http://takezoe.blogspot.com/2013/09/gitbucket-15-released.ht...

aberkowitzon Introducing our smart contact lens project (for diabetics)

The blog post you are talking about can be found here[0]. Despite an active push by Scott for a standardized data format and communication protocol, little has been done in almost 5 years.

As a person with diabetes for 14 years, I feel frustrated about the roadblocks to accessing my data. I am currently investigating reverse engineering the one touch verioiq.

[0] http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/SweetSpot-The-B...

aberkowitzon Crunchbase admits it may need to learn more about Creative Commons

I've caught Crunchbase employees blatantly copying and pasting content from AngelList - which is not Creative Commons as far as I'm aware. I'm surprised they're up in arms over this.

aberkowitzon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2013)

Sproutel - Providence RI and Greater Boston Area

We build interactive games for children with chronic illnesses. Our first product, Jerry the Bear[0] is a teddy bear that teaches children with Type I Diabetes their medical procedures.

We are seeking a developer proficient in Android Development. Past experience with OpenGL or LibGDX[1] are a plus, but not necessary.

Email me if you are interested: andrew@sproutel.com

[0] http://jerrythebear.com/

[1] http://libgdx.badlogicgames.com/index.html

aberkowitzon Espruino -- a JavaScript Arduino

The "-uino" suffix is pretty blatantly associated with the arduino platform. To go out there and claim you're using it for the "hobby electronics association" is pretty disingenuous.

aberkowitzon Apple's Boston-Area Team: Working on Speech in Nuance’s Backyard

I think Apple is a little too big for Nuance to acqui-sue. Things might end very differently this time.

aberkowitzon Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts

You should check out some of the newer pumps in the past few years - specifically the Tandem t-slim and the OmniPod. A lot more functionality, and a lot less pager like.

aberkowitzon Refund.me: making you cash from your flight delays

I think the service you're thinking of is called PackageFox.

aberkowitzon Show HN: Tempo, a simple way to visualize how much email you get

Along with a call to action, this would serve as a better homepage than the current one.

aberkowitzon Commit Logs From Last Night

I'm baffled by this admiration of commit messages that do nothing to explain the code committed.

aberkowitzon Boston Bar Buzz-Kill

1. Keep The T open until three or four, so busy entrepreneurs can get home for a few hours of sleep.

2. Get nonlocal VCs and Angels to come to Boston to make deals, and show the locals how it's done.

3. Encourage school to offer indefinite stop out programs. Too many students stash their ideas and suspend their leave of absence lest they lose financial aide or have to reapply to college.

aberkowitzon Boston Bar Buzz-Kill

Extending bar and club hours doesn't even make my list of things Boston could do to improve the entrepreneurial environment.

aberkowitzon Canonical reveals Ubuntu for Android

Canonical has done many questionable things recently, but innovation like this is why they are going to succeed commercially.

aberkowitzon Show HN: Hoodsup, meet those you should meet

You're missing the point. The proper way to handle an allegedly unsupported browser is to degrade gracefully:

"I'm sorry, your browser may not be supported [Continue Anyway] [I'll Comeback Later]"

Otherwise, you permanently lose a lot of potentially users who have modern browsers.

aberkowitzon Barnes & Noble pummels Microsoft patents with prior art

B&N sure is acting like the Nook is their last great hope.

My local store is renovating about 1/4 of their floor space to be occupied by Nook products. When you walk in to the store, your are greeted by a salesperson who asks if you are buying a Nook.

aberkowitzon Facebook's "Problem"

Last month facebook announced, and subsequently enacted a significant reduction in emails sent to their users:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/20/facebook-s

aberkowitzon Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)

I have been using flock.fm for the past week, and I really like it.

You should consider moving the search box from the "custom" stream tab to be prominently be featured on the homepage. Additionally, it should be more clear that tags are actually streams.

As a feature request, it would be great if I could add songs to a queue, instead of having to listen to them immediately.

aberkowitzon Running a startup on Haskell

> but then again who actually pays for Linux apps?

Despite this oft repeated statement, I have seen no evidence that Linux users don't pay for apps. The only thing saying it does is scare developers away from a perfectly good source of income.

aberkowitzon The post-Jobs era: Tim Cook brings philanthropy back to Apple

I fail to see a correlation between an internal Apple policy, and the price of their products.

aberkowitzon $25 PC alpha board successfully runs Linux

In my mind Raspberry Pi is a base device, leaving room for people to expand upon with USB, GPIO, etc. Once you start adding on, your $25 dollar generic device will be neither $25 nor generic.

For something fancier you want a Panda Board, Beagle Board, or Gumstix which are priced from $120 - $250.