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atmz

67 karma · joined September 27, 2011

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atmz··on Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut
Some of both; people do care, but not everyone loves every feature.

I feel that small business owners tend to be less tech savvy and more open to conspiratorial thinking, which leads to a lot of attention to anything Yelp does. If you read the comments even here on hn, many are not about the actual thing in question and many make accusations of unfair practises which have neve been accompanied by evidence.

In this particular case, we redirect calls about delivery just for restaurants who have signed a contract with GrubHub (which presumably included language allowing GrubHub to do this), so that GrubHub can attribute orders as coming "from Yelp" and charge for them the same way as they do online orders. I think there's some interesting things to discuss there, but it's not an obvious "this is wrong" feature to me.

(and the delivery market as a whole is a little messy -- see the Doordash tipping controversy for an example of something that I do feel is wrong and I would not be happy working on)

atmz··on Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut
I worked on it from the Yelp side during the intitial partnership/integration. So, I can't comment on the NoWait perspective, but I will say that almost all of the NoWait software team is still working at Yelp 2+ years post-aquisition.
atmz··on Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut
Disclaimer: I worked on this feature.

If you walk in to the restaurant, you don't need to install the app. The app will let you view your live place in line, but you can leave the line/get notified when your table is ready vis SMS.

If you want to get in line before you show up the restaurant, you can do that via the app, or the www site, or the mobile site.

atmz··on Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut
Disclaimer: I worked on this feature.

Yelp has a texting option; the app is required to view your 'live' place in line. The app (or website, or mobile site) also allows you to get in line without having to physically arrive at the restaurant and talk to the host.

atmz··on Cinemark announces $8.99/mo. subscription to fill more seats, take on MoviePass
Reminder about Cinemark: - they sued Aurora victims for legal costs - their founder is a donor to Roy Moore's campaign
atmz··on How Uber's Hard-Charging Corporate Culture Left Employees Drained
https://www.yelp.com/careers/home (let me know if you want to chat)

And yeah, especially as you gain more experience/skills/system knowledge, moving on gets hard. Culture especially is interesting, as often there's tradeoffs between culture and role and interesting problems to solve.

atmz··on How Uber's Hard-Charging Corporate Culture Left Employees Drained
It's not this way everywhere! At my (mid-sized, public, SF-based) workplace, I work 8 hours/day, good postmortems, and understanding at all levels of the importance of work-life balance and how oncall (a sad inevitability) should work.

If your employer doesn't do this, move on - that's how things change.

atmz··on The Flaw that May Bring Down Bitcoin or Change it Forever
Seriously? This is analogous to writing information of the plates used to print currency/every bill in the country, not scribbling a note onto a twenty. You're either a troll or you haven't read the post.
atmz··on Infographic: the cost of bugs
Yes, because between 1970 and 2001 we were all blindly following the waterfall model of software development until Agile came down from the heavens and showed us the error of our ways. (Disclaimer: I like Agile; it's just not a panacea)

Also, $60 billion is not much in the grand scheme of things.

atmz··on Apple will invest $100 million to bring Mac production back to the US next year
Stop arguing with everyone, long-term marketable securities doesn't mean what you think it means.

You're right in that it's not cash, and in some cases it's illiquid. However, you seem to think the 'long-term' in 'long-term marketable securities' means 'will take a long time to sell for fair value'. This is wrong; long-term just refers to the maturity of the instruments. Again, these long-term instruments are more likely to be illiquid, but they're not illiquid by definition. 10-year Treasury notes are 'long-term' but highly liquid.

So, in conclusion, it depends on what these "long-term marketable securities" are, which is what most of the other replies are trying to say. If you want to argue, argue that Apple owns a bunch of RIMM stock or something, don't accuse others of misunderstanding the term.

atmz··on The Humble THQ Bundle
I thought the point of these bundles was to support indie game studios? Still, money goes to charity, decent set of games.. it just feels a bit incongruous.
atmz··on Einstein's list of conditions for staying together with his wife
He never mentions money when talking about their pre-seperation life. The post you're replying to is clearly a discussion of time, not money, and you've somehow twisted it into "The amount of chores one does is inversely proportional to the amount of money brought home?". Stop trolling.
atmz··on Shut up and play nice: How the Western world is limiting free speech
This. Making trolling/writing offensive comments on other people's walls a crime is arguable (I disagree, but I understand the rationale. Writing things on your own wall, however, with no intention to offend or troll, and then getting arrested is ridiculous. The same logic applies to wearing an offensive shirt as opposed to shouting abuse.

The worst part about this is the media coverage almost universally treating this as normal and expected -- which, in a sense, is even worse than explicitly arguing for it -- and neglecting to go into specifics about whether someone posted something on their own wall or not, which is really relevant.

atmz··on Why I Two-Space
This is a pointless rant; the Slate article is clearly about presentation, and he's basically agreeing with it. He's right in that double-spacing what amounts to source code might be a good idea, but that doesn't change the fact that two-spacing in Word is Bad and lots of people still do it.

This is an example of a typical geek habit of jumping on the edge case and trying to use it to disprove a well-meaning article. That Slate article isn't for you; nobody cares or judges your Latex/HTML formatting.

atmz··on 6-8 Weeks Until Bitcoin Debit/Credit Card, says BitInstant
Seconded; not sure how easy it is to get one if you don't already have a brokerage account, but no annual fee, no foreign transaction fee, and no ATM fees is great. It's a debit card, but that's better for international travel, as you'll need to take out cash, and I don't think you can get credit cards that won't charge a fee for a cash advance.

(As an aside - never never change cash for travelling abroad, the commissions/spreads are ridiculous)

As for bitcoin, I feel that the volatility with respect to regular currency make a debit card not that useful unless you're an ideologue or want to speculate/easily get cash out

atmz··on Show HN: Hide Messages in Images with Steganography
I wrote an essay/slides a while back which may be of interest to people wanting to know a bit more about basic steganographic image creation and detection: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/0910/R08/work/slides-at443-... http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/0910/R08/work/essay-at443-s...

Quick improvement to the LSB method: Use JPEG and embed the data in the LSB of the DCT coefficients (still detectable, but not as trivially)

Cool demo though - I'd add a disclaimer though. It's easy to think that it's obvious that people shouldn't use this to store their password in, say, their Facebook profile photo, but..

atmz··on QRCodesDoneRight.com - let's teach people how to use QR codes right
Licencing - you've misspelled 'patented' Readability - "its", not "it's"

There's a bunch of other grammar/style issues - get someone to proofread it.

atmz··on Privilege escalation vulnerability on 64-bit Intel CPU hardware
The issue seems to be present in Xen, Windows, and Linuxes -- this suggests that, regardless of technicalities, Intel did something unwise. (Or at least didn't communicate effectively with software vendors)
atmz··on Tapose (Microsoft Courier squashed onto iPad screen) is released
I'm not sure how this will work, given a) Apple's restrictions and b) the lack of a second screen. Looks interesting though, and if done right it could be a good alternative to Evernote etc.

There's a lack of reviews so far, so I'm going to wait and see before I buy. (as an aside, mobile apps seem to rarely get proper reviews; they may be cheap, but I'd rather not waste my time with underwhelming apps)

atmz··on Mobile ‘Rootkit’ Maker Tries to Silence Critical Android Dev
Ok, devil's advocate here - Carrier IQ are bad, and are making themselves look worse, and the carriers are complicit in all of this, but... Sharing the manuals is still copyright violation, and Eckhart can have the same effect, while being legally protected, by writing about them and using (clearly) fair use quotes from the manuals.
atmz··on Stanford class on Information Theory
While we're on the subject, I found this a very good source of material on the topic, if you don't want to wait 'til March: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/0910/InfoTheory/

No video lectures, though..

atmz··on The Original Siri App Gets Pulled From The App Store, Servers Killed
The article makes no mention of the fact that the Siri app was free. What possible obligation does Apple have to continue to provide a service to "customers", when these users have not bought any product or service, and Apple itself didn't even own the app when the service began.

Lots of people seem to think that we have a right to continued access to free web apps/services just because once something is given it can't be taken away; this obviously isn't true. This particular case is just Apple being a business and isn't even particularly egregious.

atmz··on HTML5 Web apps vs Native Apps
I understand why this is happening; application developers want to regain control of the stack and of content sales - Facebook especially wants to bring its app infrastructure with micropayments to iPhone without giving Apple its cut.

However, web apps were tried before - the original iPhone, for example - and were overwhelmingly underused and rejected by users. Has that changed? Possibly, but until we see the next crop of webapps we may not know. Personally, I feel that there is a certain irrational preference for having an app installed on your device, where it won't change or update automatically and will be accessible offline (even if you can't do anything useful with it).

Having said that, web apps have expanded and done quite well in the PC world - the idea of a native Facebook desktop client is laughable, and I'd guess that most average users use a web app for email.

It'll be interesting to see how this battle goes.

atmz··on This Sure Looks A Lot Like Facebook’s Project Spartan
When this is done, do you think Facebook will stop supporting/remove their native apps from the Apple/Android app stores?

It's the logical thing to do, but the user outcry will be incredible; they'll probably just stop releasing and wait for people to slowly leave. (and will this ever see the light of day - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3040225 ? Doubtful)

atmz··on Amazon Unveils $199 Kindle Fire Tablet
I love how Bloomberg released an article describing the press conference in the past tense half an hour before it started; Amazon hasn't caught up with Apple's secrecy yet.

Amazon is doing the right thing, which wouldn't be that surprising except that every other Android vendor has done the wrong thing. Amazon is presenting a unified, controlled environment to users (which most of them want), provides both content and app delivery services, and is selling tablets cheap enough to as not to compete directly with Apple. It will do well.

atmz··on Ask HN: How to fake a quiet work environment to oneself?
In-ear earbuds are basically earplugs, without the social stigma; of course, you may feel like a bit of a tool for wearing headphones to avoid the shame of earplugs.

Classical or instrumental music might be also worth a try if you haven't tried it already; post-rock works well for me.

As for phasing it out, unfortunately conversation is much harder to tune out than thing like engine noise. Our brains are designed to pay attention to talking, and the intensity and tone are constantly changing.

atmz··on Five Myths About Millionaires
My biggest issue with the current discussion about taxing 'millionaires' is that the media and politicians seem to define millionaire as 'earns over $1 million a year' - while a millionaire isn't that rich, somebody who earns over a million a year definitely is.

This article is a perfect example of this, and is even worse in that it first points out that a million dollars in saving isn't much, then segues into a bunch of points for which definition of millionaire has suddenly changed.

atmz··on Data on Beijing Cabs Reveals the Cause of Traffic Jams
The research itself could be interesting, but the article is terribly written and ridiculously dumbed down; I imagine the interesting parts have to do with the identification and partitioning of areas and routes. Shame about the article.
atmz··on Facebook’s iPad App Has Been Done Since May, But They Won’t Release It
The lack of a Facebook app for the iPhone hurts Apple more than it hurts Facebook, in my opinion. Facebook has a near-monopoly in feature-rich social networks (yes, the specifier was inserted to discount Twitter, but I believe Twitter has a very different market/userbase from Facebook and isn't in direct competition; I'd be happy to argue about it) and its most threatening competitor, Google+, probably isn't going to have a native app for iOS anytime soon.

In addition, a native app will make it actually harder for users to run Facebook apps; apps that require micropayments will be especially problematic within Apple's framework.

Is the user goodwill from releasing an iPad app worth potentially driving users away from Facebook apps? Probably not. Apple, on the other hand, lives and dies by user experience.

atmz··on DroidSheep - Simple OpenSource Session hijacking on Android devices
Now, Firesheep was an important, and arguably justified, experiment in that it brought the perils of not using SSL over public wifi (a problem that's been around for years) to public attention by making it quick and simple to demonstrate. However, I fail to see a real justification for this. Of course, people have the right to make and distribute this software, but it feels a bit irresponsible; the source link seems to only superficially warn against illegal use, and the capability to hijack any cookie (instead of just the well-known services) doesn't seem to serve a useful non-illegal purpose.