HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

alexmr

967 karma · joined February 2, 2010

figurer outerer.
submissionscomments
alexmr··on Tesla remotely converts battery pack, cutting 1/3 of range
Tesla buying experience is way better but the ETAs are famously off. Mine has been pushed back 4-5 times and always about 3-4 weeks before it's due to get delivered, so it's impossible to plan around.
alexmr··on Immediate skin-to-skin contact with unstable newborns improves survival chances
We had a preemie baby at 26 weeks in December and feel fortunate our hospital (UCSF) practiced this recommendation. I was surprised they could do kangaroo care that fast (was a few hours after birth), but we did it then and everyday our daughter was in the ICN for 4 months. I'm convinced it made a difference and am sad when I hear about parents who can't do this.

I hope this research helps this become more standard practice.

alexmr··on Ask HN: Do you wear ear protection or noise cancelling headphones while working?
Check out extreme isolation headphones: http://www.extremeheadphones.com/

My co-worker has them and likes them. They're basically earmuffs + audio

alexmr··on Show HN: San Francisco MUNI Transit Delays, Visualized
Well done. This would be extremely useful in one of the mobile muni apps. I look at Transporter in the morning to know when to leave for the N, but if it had an indicator of delays, I'd know that it's time to walk/bike/uber instead.
alexmr··on Twitter Reports Second Quarter 2014 Results
It may be a little less, but the volume is high enough (35M+) to be fairly indicative of tomorrow's opening price.
alexmr··on YC Portfolio Stats
Looks like they'll get a 4th billion dollar company with machine zone if this round closes: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/07/16/newest-hit-game-maker...
alexmr··on Zynga Buys NaturalMotion For $527M
They've been around for a while. Even before getting into mobile they did high end 3D platform stuff for console games like grand theft auto.
alexmr··on Ask HN: What position should a generalist apply for?
With a technical + business background like that, I agree that product management might be a great fit, assuming you're interesting in getting away from code and focusing more on project management, specs, design, etc.

I'd also say you sound pretty ideal as a co-founder for a general web or mobile product. That's a position where a wide range of skills are useful and I'm sure there's lots of people out here who would love to talk to you.

alexmr··on iPad from T-Mobile with free monthly 200MB data for life
No
alexmr··on Show HN: govuptime.com
Most enterprise apps have an SLA of at least 99.9%. If the government was an email server for example, for the month of October they'd like have to give a partial refund to their customers for the downtime.
alexmr··on Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome
Very useful. It'd be nice to be able to exclude certain tabs from ever being closed (like gmail) that I want to keep open.
alexmr··on The Best
I like the loosely follow this philosophy without it taking over my life. finding a person/source you trust a ton and buying what they say is helpful, for example thewirecutter.com
alexmr··on Nate Silver correctly called 50 out of 50 states
I'd like to see the comparison for -90,-60,-30,-15 days from election too.
alexmr··on Disney to Acquire Lucasfilm Ltd.
Does anyone know what the largest modern transaction for a sole-owned company is?
alexmr··on Heroku makes sharing SQL data as easy as URL
anyone know of an open source tool that approximates this? i'd love to build something like it at my company. would be used a ton.
alexmr··on Ask HN: Why did GoDaddy support SOPA?
Did not realize they were exempt. That explains it.
alexmr··on Zynga to employees: Give back our stock or you'll be fired
I read that as one employee left after the threat was made, and the other stayed.
alexmr··on Maxing out your Dropbox referrals (how I got 16GB for less than $10)
http://db.tt/eh2TcIj thanks!
alexmr··on How Wesleyan’s Counter Culture Came To Rule New York’s Tech Scene
[Disclosure: I went to wes and didn't major in CS (though wish I had taken more classes in it)]

I think the main point from this article is that the type of thought wesleyan teaches has proven itself well-suited to the creative, innovative thinking valued in the tech and startups especially. While this isn't necessarily programming focused, there are other roles in the industry Wesleyan is showing it has done really well in.

Also, while more grads move to NYC than anywhere else, I will say there's plenty of wesleyan tech talent out here in the bay area (CEO of rdio, a bunch of folks at google, and startups).

The school would definitely be well served by beefing up it's CS department and trying to attract more talent. With a solid programming community on campus, I bet we'd see some awesome projects emerge especially as tech mixes more with the strong arts and music scenes.

alexmr··on If this then that
What I like about this is the potential to become a platform for little useful scripts (recipes). I know there are a hundred ways I could send twitter favorited links to instapaper, but this made it dirt simple and easy enough that my parents could do it. Any single recipe may not be that amazing, but the combination of a bunch of little useful ones could be.
alexmr··on Steve Jobs Resigns as Apple CEO (Official Letter)
The true test of Steve's legacy will be whether Apple can continue in the image he molded for it well beyond his departure. Great CEO's are felt for a long time after they leave.
alexmr··on ZeroCater (YC W11) Raises $1.5 Million For No-Hassle Office Lunches
I can second this. The person who orders food at my company reports it's a huge time sink. We're 50 people and it was taking her hours a day with everything that can go wrong.
alexmr··on College Students Can Now Rent Textbooks Electronically From Amazon
This seems like a great program. One friction point for e-textbooks seemed to be the inability to sell them back at the end of the semester like normal books. The reduced cost of a rental should help assuage that.
alexmr··on Erlang creator on how to get started and learning to program
I agree with this. As a newbie, it's easy to get caught up in finding the perfect tools and waste a lot of cycles with that. I do use textmate because the syntax highlighting makes it easier for me to read, but anything more complex than that seems pointless (at least at my stage).
alexmr··on Why I read Hacker News even though I understand very little of it
reading this one and I think it's super clear: http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/
alexmr··on Why I read Hacker News even though I understand very little of it
Totally. Figuring out what to spend time on is definitely one of the hardest parts since there's so much out there. But reading and hacking on 4 chapters of the django book in a day taught me more than reading for a year.
alexmr··on A preview of Gmail’s new look
On my Gmail, it's a dark grey which I like, but in Calendar it's pure black. I think the pure black is pretty jarring but the grey nicely transitions from the browser bar.
alexmr··on Rate our newb project: Twordsie (your top tweeted words)
I'm also not seeing anything at http://twitter.com/thomaschaaf. Is that a real handle?
alexmr··on Rate our newb project: Twordsie (your top tweeted words)
Seems like a good idea. We just started with an easy use case and would want to expand further.

Your surprising results might be due to the fact that we only take most recent 200 tweets. We've had trouble with the Twitter API beyond that.

alexmr··on Offer HN: I will review and critique your CV.
I've heard good things theladders.com's resume service: http://resume.theladders.com/

I don't think it's cheap though.