Hacker News Reader

amwelleson The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing

Eh, me and my friends (all adults in our 30s) have been loving this game. It’s relaxing and fun to decorate a house and island and slowly build up from nothing. It’s a lot like Minecraft or The Sims in that way, although there aren’t any bad guys to fight (a feature I tended to turn off while playing).

amwelleson A Woman Who Lives 200k Years in the Past

My guess would be that they wear and wash reusable pads. There are modern versions of these, too! Thinx is the big name brand.

Either that or they don’t use anything. Not to get too personal, but it’s not always necessary to use something aside from regular undergarments.

amwelleson When to Overcommunicate

I started communicating more by giving end of day updates to my managers after I started falling behind on projects. It didn’t just help them—it helped me. It kept me on track and I could more easily see when/if I was falling behind.

amwelleson Dealing with Loneliness

Ask your local bike shop if there are any group rides. That’s how I met a majority of my close friends. If there aren’t any group rides, ask if you can leave a flyer seeking new cycling partners.

amwelleson Discontinued Microsoft Products

I still miss Sunrise. Outlook calendar doesn’t compete last time I checked, so I’ve been using Fantastical plus some other integrations for special calendar subscriptions.

amwelleson Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm

With the right gear, cycling in winter isn’t bad at all, provided the path is clear.

amwelleson Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm

“Ban cars” is shorthand for a much bigger societal problem. It’s not an attack on a person or what they need to do to survive. These articles are about us as a whole, not the individual.

This toot explains it well: https://mspsocial.net/@t54r4n1/100699058171393417

amwelleson Ask HN: Which charities do you donate to?

https://www.kiva.org/

They help people without access to traditional loans fund businesses, farms, etc. Whatever is paid back is easy to put right back into another loan.

I also plan on donating to the local LGBTQIA+ organization this year on behalf of a friend who requested it for her birthday.

amwelleson Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

Telegram comes to mind.

amwelleson Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

I’ve been using https://gath.io to organize events. All you need is an email to create an event, and as far as I can tell, you can give it a fake email. It’s only used to send you the edit link (also displayed when you create the event). Same thing to RSVP, although it doesn’t share the link to remove yourself except by email, to my knowledge. They’ve just introduced groups, so setting up events for a group of friends is really easy. Bonus is that it’s open source and the person who maintains it has been really responsive to requests.

amwelleson Facebook is using the iPhone’s camera as users scroll their feed

I switched to Pixelfed recently. My friends aren’t on it (yet), but I can share my photos there and send the links as needed.

amwelleson I turned on every notification for a month

I prefer Cold Turkey. It’s both cheaper (one-time fee to unlock all features) and doesn’t send data anywhere.

amwelleson Alphabet in bid to buy Fitbit

For me, at least, getting a smart watch with fitness capabilities made me realize how non-active I was before. I wasn't remotely interested in fitness pre-watch, and now I make sure to hit 30 minutes of exercise per day, even if that's just walking around the neighborhood or doing some gentle yoga.

amwelleson Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

Your software is a godsend for me! I absolutely love it and attribute my focus at work to it. I bought the full version as soon as my trial ran out a few months back. It works especially well alongside Forest. Keep up the good work!

amwelleson U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

I’d like having an archive of my tweets that I control. I know they have a tool, but as far as I know, there’s no way to upload that to Mastodon. I could be wrong about that.

amwelleson U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

I’d be fine with top-level.

amwelleson U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

I would love to do that. Move all my Instagram pics to Pixelfed and all my tweets to Mastodon. Not sure I could do that with the way things are now.

amwelleson Faces of Open Source

Anecdotally, yes. When I was younger, seeing women in tech roles made it feel like an option for me.

amwelleson Georgia Guidestones

I have not. I moved out of Georgia years ago.

amwelleson Georgia Guidestones

Hey, I’ve been there! Really weird place out in the middle of nowhere. I always recommend people check it out if they’re in the area. Not much to see, but it’s a good way to kill some time.

amwelleson Young People Are Going to Save Us All from Office Life

I found semi-remote to be the best of both worlds. My office is a 35-minute commute (each way), so I work from home Monday through Thursday. I go into the office Friday mornings and leave after sharing lunch with coworkers to beat rush hour traffic. I have a membership to a coworking space if I need to get out of the house (which my company pays half of).

amwelleson Finding Your Soul Mate Online May Be Harder Than the Dating Sites Suggest

The Red Pill is notoriously sexist. I'd recommend /r/okcupid's guides, which apply to any gender or sexual orientation:

- https://www.reddit.com/r/OkCupid/wiki/dosanddontsprofile

- https://www.reddit.com/r/OkCupid/wiki/dosanddontsmessaging

amwelleson Pipe Organ desk

Reminds me of Grand Piano.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Piano_(film)

amwelleson College students are now smoking more pot than cigarettes

Have they done any long-term studies on smoking pot vs. vaping vs. edibles?

amwelleson Show HN: Flexbox.io – a free video series on learning CSS Flexbox

This is great! Ever since our company quit supporting IE9, I've had the joy of working with flexbox. What once took 10-20 lines of Sass hackery now takes only a few, and the code makes sense.

amwelleson Ask HN: How do I find a mentor?

As a very recent mentor (yay!), I usually look for feedback on how I can improve my own teachings. I've only met with my apprentice a couple of times, but she's allowed me to think about how to explain things in a more clear and concise manner for other people to understand. She's also going to bring cookies next week (a super-sweet gesture on her part), and since she's a (elementary school) teacher, she's going to give feedback on slides I'm creating for an upcoming class I'm teaching.

Every time I teach my craft to somebody new to web development, I learn something new. It gets me excited about coding again, and it's why I love teaching so much. The students with the most questions are usually the most enthusiastic, so ask any and all questions that come to you. If your mentor doesn't know the answer, even better. I like students who make me think!

amwelleson How I taught my dog to text me selfies

In addition, check out Sophia Yin's website[1]. It's chock-full of free videos and articles. She also wrote an excellent book[2], which I highly recommend to all dog owners. I train dogs as a hobby (agility with my own dog, plus I do volunteer work for puppy and obedience classes). As a warning, dog training is highly addictive for both you and the dog!

[1]: http://drsophiayin.com [2]: http://drsophiayin.com/howtobehave

amwelleson Living on Last Month: For Freelancers

I think Rule #1 is far more important: Give every dollar a job. Basically, when you get money, decide what you are going to do with it right away. If that means saving for an emergency, like a lack of inflow, then it should go there.

I've been using YNAB for a couple of years now, and it's definitely changed the way I think about money, but I would use it much differently if I had the variable income of a freelancer. YNAB actually wrote an article[1] about living on a variable income which is quite informative.

[1]: http://www.youneedabudget.com/blog/2011/slaying-the-variable...

amwelleson The Anti-hero of CSS Layout – “display:table”

I've been using this in some of my latest projects. Works like a charm!

amwelleson Ask HN: Where to find startup culture?

The Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill) also has a pretty good startup scene.