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avalaunchon Apple – OS X – Photos

I think his complaint is that the paid version only stops the person paying from seeing ads. A subscriber, for example, can't share their photos with a family member without them being interrupted by ads while viewing them.

avalaunchon Silicon Valley: Perks for Some Workers, Struggles for Parents

Employers may not fire even at-will employees for illegal reasons, and firing someone because they are pregnant is illegal.

avalaunchon Gas Valet will pick up your car and fill your tank

That would only be ironic if your goal was to save gas. But your goal in using such a service would be to save time, which you would be.

avalaunchon Messaging apps shouldn't make money – Pavel Durov and Telegram

It wasn't left out. You must have missed it.

Will he continue to bankroll the business -- or does he see revenue opportunities? "We will become financially sustainable at some point," he says. "It will most likely involve third-party paid apps built on the Telegram platform."

avalaunchon Periscope by Twitter

The live part would be really useful if the police decide to confiscate your phone before you have a chance to edit and upload anything.

avalaunchon Hacker School is now the Recurse Center

I still see "Hacker School" in three different places on the apply page.

avalaunchon We know where you’ve been: Ars acquires 4.6M license plate scans

So you're mailing a bunch of flyers to people you know don't recycle? The project is cool but that struck me as particularly ironic, assuming your intention is to help minimize waste.

avalaunchon Ask HN: How is it fair that companies ask candidates to spend hours on a task?

If asking the company to respect the value of your time is going to cost you the opportunity of working for said company than I wouldn't consider it a big loss. Chances are if they don't respect the value of your time now they won't later either, pushing you to work long hours, weekend hours, guilting you away from taking vacation days, and so on.

avalaunchon Show HN: Whimsical – Get anything done, via SMS

I don't think that means it's fundamentally unprofitable. It's a pretty standard strategy to grow the market by subsidizing early adopters. They can try to raise prices over time or benefit from economics of scale. Perhaps, for example, when they get to a certain size, they'll have enough clout to get discounts on the various services they utilize.

avalaunchon Show HN: Whimsical – Get anything done, via SMS

Was Magic a Jarvis clone?

avalaunchon Ask HN: Idea Sunday

Your employees probably aren't passionate about it either, unless they have significant skin in the game (equity).

If the calls being outsourced are sales calls, you could pay a commission. That would lead to more motivated sellers at least, although perhaps too motivated and too short sighted.

avalaunchon Ask HN: Idea Sunday

Would there be enough incentive for customers to pay?

In a word, no. Companies will often pay a lot to survey their customers. Getting the customers to pay to be surveyed sounds like a very tall request. And any incentive of value the company could add would run counter to the value proposition you've outlined for the company.

avalaunchon The Hiring Post

The same kind of process works for pure dev jobs. So, you’re a Rails shop? Take a Rails application you’ve actually built and deployed. Carve out some functional areas from the application: remove the search feature, or the customer order updater. Bundle up the app with all its assets, so that a single “vagrant up” gives a candidate an app that runs. Have them add back the feature you removed.

How would you compensate for candidates that are great developers but are new to Rails, or whatever specific language/framework your company uses?

avalaunchon Forget the ‘To-Do’ List, You Need a ‘Stop Doing’ List

This is very true. The article also didn't take into account that some people need different amounts of sleep each night to function properly. There's a big difference between needing 6 hours and needing 10 hours.

avalaunchon Texas Hold'em Hand Strength, Visualized

It's still pretty standard to mine hands that you didn't personally participate in. Lots of players mine nonstop. You're right that you're probably crossing the line when you buy/share other people's datasets, as you'll get information that your opponent can't possibly get without also sharing/buying datasets. That being said, of the nose-bleed players I personally knew it was still the norm to share data with your friends. I think at that level you just have to assume that all of your previously played hands are visible to all your opponents and adjust accordingly.

avalaunchon Texas Hold'em Hand Strength, Visualized

I think I played a little over a million hands online and probably have a dataset with millions more on top of that. If you want it, I can probably find it and send it to you. Email is in my profile.

avalaunchon Texas Hold'em Hand Strength, Visualized

Unless I've misunderstood you, it's really not considered bad form at all. It's considered pretty standard amongst professional poker players that most everyone (at least the professionals) are all using some form of HUD (heads-up display) that will overlay stats next to each opponent's name, detailing all sorts of useful information about the player's tendencies. It's almost mandatory to use a HUD if you like to multi-table more than 4 tables at once.

avalaunchon Our first building block in tech for tykes: YouTube Kids

I don't watch much on YouTube so they may already do some of this but it seems to me like this would be an easy problem to solve if they so desired. Add a rating system where the content creators rate themselves and an easy way for viewers to flag them as incorrectly rated. Add to that a confidence rating of how likely a video is correctly rated (based on number of views without flagging) and you could confidently let your kids view appropriately rated material.

avalaunchon Hackers Cut in Line at the Burning Man Ticket Sale–And Get Caught

The title seems off. They haven't been caught yet. Burning man officials simply said they will find and cancel the tickets. That seems like something they might say regardless of whether they actually could do so.

Can anyone explain to me how they could go about determining who skipped the line and who didn't? I'm curious.

avalaunchon [dead]

Usually with side projects I bite off more than I can chew and never ship them. This time I tackled something a bit smaller, but hopefully useful. This adds a management command to Django that will automatically generate views, admin, urls, forms, and templates for each model in a given app. After you add a urlpattern to your URLconf everything will be fully operational, with a ListView, DetailView, CreateView, UpdateView, and DeleteView for each model. In addition, it stubs out a bunch of commonly overridden methods to make editing a quicker process. It also tries to make smart choices here and there to get you up and running quickly. For example, in the admin, the list_display is already set to every field in the model other than ID. And each URLField is listed as a clickable link, as is each ForeignKey and OneToOneField. The list_filter and search_fields attributes are also set. I wrote some detailed documentation in the README.

Anyway, I hope this is of use to someone.

avalaunchon Show HN: JustWatch – Choose your favorite streaming providers and see what’s new

I agree with all of that. I think this site has a lot of value as an aggregator. It doesn't solve the Popcorn Time problem though because it doesn't make legally streaming movies easy. It just makes them easier to find them. That's not the same. It feels too much like they're trying to ride the wave of Popcorn time's success despite having very little in common.

My main point in writing the critique is just that if you invite a comparison between your product and another you should make sure that they're actually comparable and that yours will come out on top. Otherwise you'll turn what could have been a warm reception into a cold one.

avalaunchon Show HN: JustWatch – Choose your favorite streaming providers and see what’s new

The site looks beautiful and the load time is terrific. You probably shouldn't have invoked Popcorn Time in comparison though because the value prop is totally different. This isn't streaming - it's aggregating. This isn't free - it's very expensive. I think you lose the comparison pretty handedly.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I do think this site offers a lot of value as an aggregator. I just think inviting the comparison to Popcorn Time is a mistake because, to the limited extent that they are comparable, Popcorn Time is better.

avalaunchon Show HN: KeepUpdated – Automatically track and monitor your competitors

On the home page you have a question "How much does it cost?" and then ramble on without answering the question. That seems odd considering you do have a pricing page.

avalaunchon Show HN: Get quick feedback on landing pages

Just fyi, this is unusable on mobile (iPhone 6 plus).

avalaunchon A Designer's War on Misleading Parking Signs

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. In case you're not, here's an example, from Germany, to disprove that all calendars start on Sunday and end on Saturday.

http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/?country=8

Choose other countries from the dropdown and you'll see many, if not most, have the week starting on Monday and ending on Sunday.

avalaunchon SEO penalties of moving our blog to a subdomain

I just read the article and looked at the image and it's still really unclear. It looks like you lost all your traffic immediately prior to switching to the subdomain and nothing in the article said otherwise.

avalaunchon 132-year-old rifle found propped against a national park tree

Just because nobody alerted the authorities doesn't mean nobody else saw it.

avalaunchon The Cost of Getting My Stolen Computer Back

I think they would only be in trouble if they knowingly received stolen merchandise. It doesn't sound as if that was the case. They are obligated to release it to free to the police, as evidence. It does indeed sound like the police were waiting on her decision to investigate or not. They probably understand that it's a massive headache to be without your laptop for months, and also that there's a very low probability of catching the criminal, and thus gave the victim a reasonable alternative to having to wait so long.

avalaunchon The Cost of Getting My Stolen Computer Back

In response to your edit I think what happened is that the police officer was notified of the stolen item by the pawn shop and before filing an official report they contacted the owner of the item and offered them the choice. If she opts to pay the ransom the police officer has less paperwork, the justice system has one less case bogging it down, the pawn shop gets off the hook entirely, and she gets her laptop back quicker. Also the police officer maintains a great relationship with the pawn shop which might be beneficial in other cases. It's a win win win all the way around for everyone directly involved in the case. Unfortunately it's probably a net negative for everyone else as it makes the pawn shop less diligent in the future and makes it easier for robbers to offload their stolen merchandise making it more lucrative for them to continue their "profession".

avalaunchon The Cost of Getting My Stolen Computer Back

I wish the author would have tried negotiating with the pawn shop. The pawn shop would have been out the entire 225 had she not bought the laptop back. Realizing this she could have offered a lot less and it would have still been in their best interest to sell it to her. She just needed to bluff a bit that she would be willing to let the police confiscate it if the cost was going to be over X. I bet she could have gotten it back for $50.

Also as others mentioned it's a pretty broken system that she would need to do this at all - that her laptop would be locked up in evidence for so long. But lemonade from lemons, ect...

EDIT: Also do we even have any proof that the pawn shop actually paid 225 for the laptop? It's in their best interest (financially, not morally) to lie and state a higher price. Ie. They may have profited off of selling the laptop back to her.