acrooks

I wrote this a couple of years ago [1]. I think we need to remove subjectivity on ratings by asking more specific questions and only allowing a binary answer.

1. Is the food good? 2. Is the service good? 3. Is the atmosphere good?

That's a pretty simple answer. Often when I see 1 star reviews it's because of a single element of the experience but not the overall experience.

It's easier to leave a review because there's less cognitive load. It's easier to search for what you want: if I have my foodie hat on, I don't particularly care about the service. If it's a night out with a customer, that becomes more important all of a sudden.

And then you can generate some sort of average score based on the answers to these questions to calculate the 5 star rating.

[1] https://medium.com/@acrooksie/no-more-5-star-rating-systems-...

I think that the companies delivering the most raw value to the world are the ones that fly under the radar. The 100 person software company that builds a properly meaningful product isn't making the news because it isn't sexy, or because it isn't generating huge cash (like we see in fintech or advertising or social media). And 100 person companies aren't hiring a ton, so you don't always see them on job boards. So I think it is partly a matter of looking really hard, jumping on the perfect opportunity, and staying a while.

The company I work for today builds software for the marine shipping industry that makes people better at their jobs, and cargo ships more fuel efficient. I feel like the work that I do has a legitimate positive impact on the world. Purely because of the work I have done on one of our products, I will forever be carbon positive. I deeply care about the environment so that means a lot to me. Send me an email (profile) if that interests you.

>A teacher lost ~60lbs on a McDonalds-only diet.

He was my Uber driver once and spent the 45 minute ride from Des Moines to Ames trying to sell me his book :) Nice guy.

I am a heavy car2go user, and have been for several years.

The previous generation fortwo was certainly a very unpleasant ride. Shifting would take literally seconds, uncomfortable suspension, and a not good entertainment system which would freeze up regularly.

car2go however has been replacing their legacy fleet with the new generation fortwo which is an amazing change. I find that the new cars are quite good to drive - all of my gripes from the last model are solved. I cringe on the days that I have to drive the old model, but the current one is great.

Even better are the Mercedes CLA and GLA that car2go now offers but sometimes the nimbleness and size of the fortwo is hard to pass up :)

Overall though I can say that the current fortwo model is an order of magnitude better than the last and it's certainly worth trying out if you were put off by the last.

I subscribe to this website (I am based out of Vancouver): http://www.yvrdeals.com I'm sure most cities with large airports have something like this sort of website - of course this strategy only works for people

Whenever a good deal comes up to somewhere that seems cool, I just book it. There is a chance I won't be able to make the trip work, but in the long term, the cost of periodically missing a $300 round trip to Europe or a $500 round trip to Asia is far lower than always paying $1000, and for me the spontaneity of going to new and exciting places sometimes last minute is absolutely worth it.

This can be very difficult to coordinate with my job, especially when the deals come up last minute, but we usually find a way to make it work.

Sometimes friends and I will want to go somewhere specific. Our usual strategy in this case is to not book anything because always one of us cannot 100% commit, or one of us has a hope in the back of our minds that a deal might come up. We almost always end up committing in the end, and a deal almost never comes up, so we normally end up paying the highest prices at the last minute. Though we do get lucky sometimes :)

As for choosing destinations: we're an outdoorsy friend group, so the combination of all of us reading nature and travel blogs / magazines, following Instagram feeds, etc. is enough to give us a bucket list. Usually travelling inspires me to visit more places. Whenever there's a really good deal on YVR Deals, I'll use that as inspiration to go somewhere new.

Email me

Stage 3 Systems is hiring in London!: https://stage3systems.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=5

Some highlights:

- You ideally have 4+ years of full-time experience and a salary expectation of $90-110k

- You have worked with or are interested in Unix, functional programming, Elixir, Elm, JavaScript, PostgreSQL

- We build cloud software for the marine shipping industry; thousands of people at companies like BC Ferries, Seaspan and many others use our products to build ships, reduce fuel consumption and manage their day-to-day operations

- We have a disparate stack with technologies like Rails, Meteor, Angular and React in production, but are standardizing our product line on Elixir/Elm

- We have group benefits, flexible time off, flexible work hours, working from home, and will buy you the tools you need to do your job well

http://www.sleepyti.me - a calculator to let you know when to set your alarm in the morning to maximize your chances of waking up feeling refreshed / not breaking a REM cycle

Their guidelines page (https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/) has some pretty curt language.

Interesting how terse and forward they are here as compared to other Apple docs. Reads as if a jaded reviewer wrote it :)

Nah, they do case insensitive matching: https://github.com/jezen/is-thirteen/blob/master/index.js#L1...

A lot of fresh grads (from UBC) in Vancouver are living around Kitsilano where you can get a one bedroom place for <$1000/month. Right now I live in a two bedroom flat in the heart of Kits where I'm paying $825 and my flatmate $725.

Previously to that in Vancouver I lived in the heart of Yaletown in a 550sqft studio costing about $1300/month, and started living there on a salary of about $62k.

I've never had financial struggles living in Vancouver with salaries ranging from $42-85k, and have generally had enough disposable income to afford to travel quite a bit, ski at Whistler every weekend, and eat out and go out regularly.

That said, it's totally a renter's market. It's unaffordable for me to buy anything that I'd want to live in for the longer term, unless I go to Surrey or somewhere else in greater Vancouver, which would completely take away or hinder a lot of the benefits I see to living in Vancouver.

For the last six months I have been working remotely from Europe for a North American company I have been at for about three years with an otherwise in-office presence.

I worked at a company for just over two years based in the office and then moved to live in Europe for six months, just returning recently to Canada.

The total company size was around 20 staff & execs at the time. My CEO was ok with it, as I had demonstrated over the past couple years that I was able to work independently and responsibly.

The company itself did not need to make several changes as we already had remote employees, so most of the meetings already had somebody dialling in. We use Slack as well which contains a lot of information. I joined a lot more channels when leaving to try best to keep up with all of the information.

My biggest struggle was feeling disconnected from the company and from my coworkers. I missed out on a lot of information that was informally discussed in the office and felt a lot of anxiety related to my performance, even though I was still producing work at a consistent rate. This started to solve itself partially after getting over some of the general growing pains being in the new environment, and I started having regular fifteen minute Skype chats with a handful of different members of the company so we could better keep in contact.

Another struggle was working from home. I found it easy to get distracted and found myself adopting weird work hours. It was especially difficult having most of the meetings happening in North America and needing to make them from a European timezone. I solved this mostly with co-working spaces and other places outside of home to get work done. I got pretty good at working out of coffee shops but it's not easy. An added bonus of the co-working spaces that discovered was making friends and having some sort of social contact during the workdays.

If you have any other questions feel free to email anytime at the address in my profile.

I'm a software developer from & living in Vancouver, so if you need any tips check my profile for my email.

His website (1) says he works at IBM.

(1) psuter.net

I used to be a free user of LastPass and wanted a vault on-the-go. With LastPass the only option was an annual subscription, for an app that I didn't find particularly impressive.

Switching to 1Password was extremely easy. It offered simple instructions on how to import from LastPass and the pricing model (pay once for the piece of software) was a lot more compelling to me. As an added bonus, the app is super well developed and designed. It _just_ works, and works the way you expect it to. 100% satisfied.

That seems a bit high to me. I pay £650/month all-in for a room in a three-bed just around the corner from Stockwell station.

Granted, my room is small, and the only real common area is the kitchen. But the only thing I need in London is a bed and a shower, I'm spending most of my time not-at-the-flat. So it feels like the inflection point between location and price.

I would consider that you add a step before making a phone call or going and tapping somebody on the shoulder.

The thing that most threatens my zone is when the headphones need to come out. The _only_ exception is a simple yes/no, such as, "hey, want a coffee from Starbucks?" Anything bigger, whether a phone call or tap on the shoulder can really kill my session or workday. I'm talking your five minute conversation costing an hour or more of wasted time.

What do I recommend? Message me first and say "hey are you free to chat?"

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

No, you're right, but I think branchless' comment was referring to the Queen in the context of her role, not the person herself. Her role is that of, among others, a high-profile figurehead for the upper class. And the prominence and cultural importance of the role is certainly a factor in the oppression.

They need a dot com, so strike out the .io [1]

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html

The infrastructure for cycling in London sucks, but I find it remarkably easy to get around.

My first or second day riding here I was unfamiliar with the territory so spent a lot of time paying attention to signs, markings on the road, laws. It made for a confusing and difficult ride.

Since then I have been paying less attention to the infrastructure and more to the situation. Keep your head up and don't be afraid to break the rules a bit, and you'll have a fun and quick ride. Just be wary that your decisions don't impact drivers because we need as many good graces as we can get :)

(Crosspost from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9803815)

The problem with these sorts of legislature as I've experienced is that while the theory seems quite appealing it never really works as you would expect.

Canada did a similar thing a couple years ago. The CRTC imposed a law where an individual could only incur a maximum of $50 in data overage charges locally, and $100 when roaming. I was ecstatic when this was announced. And then one month I went over on data by $50. And then my data was cut off until I bought a "pack".

So yes, your phone bill will be unsurprising at the end of the month, but now your carrier will expect you to purchase a bucket of "roaming data" in the form of an add-on or package to your regular phone plan so that you can post your selfies with the Eiffel Tower in real time.

The problem with these sorts of legislature as I've experienced is that while the theory seems quite appealing it never really works as you would expect.

Canada did a similar thing a couple years ago. The CRTC imposed a law where an individual could only incur a maximum of $50 in data overage charges locally, and $100 when roaming.

I was ecstatic when this was announced. And then one month I went over on data by $50. And then my data was cut off until I bought a "pack".

So yes, your phone bill will be unsurprising at the end of the month, but now your carrier will expect you to purchase a bucket of "roaming data" in the form of an add-on or package to your regular phone plan so that you can post your selfies with the Eiffel Tower in real time.

https://auth0.com/ provides some pretty incredible documentation (they also provide a great product; we use it to support authentication for our suite of corporate/enterprise-facing apps)

We use https://www.gandi.net/ for all domains and SSL certs and have no complaints.

I do attend UBC, but I live in the city, so I do not suffer from the poor transit out in Coquitlam or Surrey. Building the UBC subway would certainly help the usage in the suburbs though. It would completely replace the 99, and reduce demand on some of the other east-west routes, likely freeing up more than 100 articulated buses and their drivers.

Go Transit has a good system but it's comes at a cost. For example - Langley to UBC is the same distance as Hamilton to Toronto. If you're a student, doing that roundtrip on Translink is $35 a month (U-Pass), whereas the Go Bus is $300 (PRESTO card). (If you're not a student it's $200 / $400).

I agree with you that the Compass card project has been a failure, but I don't think it is fair to fault their ability to execute a transportation project based on their inability to execute a software project. Translink has a proven successful track record in building roads and bridges and SkyTrains and bus routes.

The Compass card project is undoubtably a failure, and Translink chose the wrong contractor (the same company is responsible for another failed project in Chicago). Software is hard, and I would say to a certain extent this is a transportation company diving a little too deeply in a field for which they have no expertise.

To the property tax argument - in general, the people that own property in Vancouver probably also own cars. The largest users of public transit are obviously those who do not have cars, so then raising property taxes would largely affect people who do not directly benefit from a successful vote, no?

It's fair that you don't trust the government to spend money properly, but if the government has no money to spend then this problem is left unsolved.

Here is a document outlining the plan and budget: http://mayorscouncil.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Mayors-Co...

I live in Vancouver and will be voting Yes; but I am pretty confident that the No-side will win this battle.

The group(s) that have been promoting the No vote seem to be using big numbers and mostly baseless arguments. Statements like "Translink spent $30,000 on a statue of a poodle", "The last CEO made $500,000 a year", "Voting Yes tells Translink you are happy with their service" are among their key points.

It's unfortunate that the general public struggles to think in relative terms, or to be forward thinking. $500k/year is a pretty low CEO salary for that size of organization; $30,000 on public art for an organization with an annual budget of almost $1.5 billion is all of a sudden not so outrageous.

"Voting Yes tells Translink you are happy with their service" is the ultimate irony in it all. The reason this plebiscite exists is because the population is _unhappy_ with the service and they want to make it better.

Of all of the large Canadian transit systems I've used - Calgary, Vancouver, Montréal, Toronto - Vancouver's is without a doubt the best and most efficient of them all, and Translink has developed a very good plan for what they would do if the Yes side prevailed.

Oh well.

(the proposed transit plan given a successful Yes vote: http://mayorscouncil.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Mayors-Co...)

Sure, feel free to email -> alex@alexcrooks.com