Hacker News Reader

bckygldstnon Coinbase warns that bankruptcy could wipe out user funds

This depends very much on the subreddit. There are still some fantastic communities with top-notch discourse! On the other hand, I don't remember discourse being worthwhile on large subreddits even in the good old days of 2015.

bckygldstnon My journey through the American immigration system as a computer engineer

One more story. When applying for an Amex card they had my name as "Andre" instead of Andrew (this one is probably a typo on my end).

Before approving the application, the Amex agent did a 3-way conference call with me and an agent from my bank to confirm the details in my application.

Amex: "Can you confirm the customer's name is André?"

Bank: "Yes, I confirm the customer's name is Andrew."

Amex: "Thank you for confirming, André your application has been approved"

bckygldstnon My journey through the American immigration system as a computer engineer

My green card had my name correct but someone else's face printed on it! Unfortunately they didn't look at all like me, it took ages to get fixed. I wonder if someone else got my face on their card, or if they use a grumpy bald man as a placeholder in their card template.

My name is also misspelt on my social security card. I didn't bother to have that corrected and so far there have been zero repercussions.

bckygldstnon Ask HN: Why do carpool apps always fail?

BlaBlaCar is extremely popular, though doesn't operate in the US.

Trust seems like a tough chicken-egg problem for a new app to bootstrap. I wonder if someone like facebook could successfully launch a carpool service piggybacking off their identity profiles, like they've done with Marketplace.

bckygldstnon Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq

There's more details on https://github-wiki-see.page/ and https://github.com/github/feedback/discussions/4992#discussi...

> we have also introduced an x-robots-tag: none in the http response header of Wiki pages

> Abusive behavior in Wikis had a negative impact on our search engine ranking

> GitHub is currently permitting a select criteria of GitHub Wikis to be indexed

bckygldstnon Ride a Bird scooter. Have an accident. Pay a mighty price

There's plenty to be up in arms about over forced arbitration and indemnity between well-funded corporations and customers just trying to get home safely after a night out.

Bird in particular likely knows 90% of their customers are violating their terms and conditions in some way. Between lack of enforcement from the government and legal indemnity from their customers, they have no incentive to improve the safety of their service.

Taken to extreme, why even have a legal system when you have to opt out of it to do anything?

bckygldstnon Acquisition Blog Post Generator

Oh hey I built this!

It's inspired by Our Incredible Journey [1], which collects announcement posts from startups that have been acquired by mega tech companies. In each post the founders struggle to contain their excitement and express endless gratitude to their users.

But, inevitably stuffed into the last paragraph of the blog post is the announcement that the service is being shut down in like a week even though the founders are millionaires now on the back of their users’ loyalty.

The tone is totally inappropriate for the message, the posts are so formulaic and impersonal that they may as well be generated.

I wrote about how I built it here [2].

[1] https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

[2] https://www.ajnisbet.com/blog/this-startup-acquisition-annou...

bckygldstnon Amazon to close all of its physical bookstores and '4-star' shops

Amazon also owns bookdepository.com (and goodreads.com)

bckygldstnon Peloton replaces CEO and lays off 2,800 people

Without installing or rooting anything, if you tap the correct part of the about screen it pulls up a browser and you can go to netflix.com (there's instructions floating around for this, I can't remember the exact incantation)

bckygldstnon Ask HN: Do you consider Hacker News to be a positive/useful use of your time?

https://www.teamblind.com

You sign up with your work email, and if enough (~30?) of your coworkers have done the same you get a chatroom/forum for people that are anonymous but verified to work at the company.

bckygldstnon Statistical Rethinking (2022 Edition)

Yep thanks, you can tell I use a "guess and check" approach to writing sql and pandas...

bckygldstnon Statistical Rethinking (2022 Edition)

The syntax isn't self-describing and uses lots of abbreviations; it relies on some R magic that I found confusing when learning (unquoted column names and special builtin variables); and data.table is just a different approach to SQL and other dataframe libraries.

Here's an example from the docs

  flights[carrier == "AA",
    lapply(.SD, mean),
    by = .(origin, dest, month),
    .SDcols = c("arr_delay", "dep_delay")]

that's clearly less clear than SQL

  SELECT
    origin, dest, month,
    MEAN(arr_delay), MEAN(dep_delay)
  FROM flights
  WHERE carrier == "AA"
  GROUP BY arr_delay, dep_delay

or pandas

  flights[filghts.carrier == 'AA'].groupby(['arr_delay', 'dep_delay']).mean()

But once you get used to it data.table makes a lot of sense: every operation can be broken down to filtering/selecting, aggregating/transforming, and grouping/windowing. Taking the first two rows per group is a mess in SQL or pandas, but is super simple in data.table

  flights[, head(.SD, 2), by = month]

That data.table has significantly better performance than any other dataframe library in any language is a nice bonus!

bckygldstnon How to start a successful freelance business as a software developer (2017)

The interview process is onerous more than difficult: mostly leetcode style questions that need lots of practice for, plus a basic but time-consuming take-home task.

And for me the scheduling was super difficult: the whole process took weeks, with the only times available at odd hours West Coast US time, and my recruiter flaking and rescheduling once.

Beyond some basic level of coding, it's more a test of patience and time.

bckygldstnon How to start a successful freelance business as a software developer (2017)

Not OP, but I do about 50% of my freelancing though Toptal (the rest through my network). I see them as having 2 advantages over other sites:

1. Unlike smaller sites and job boards, they have lots of work available. Every couple of days something is posted that aligns perfectly with my skills.

2. Unlike odesk/fiverr/elance they pay market rates. Not FAANG or CTO or IPO rates, but I charge more on Toptal than I ever earned working for Bay Area startups. Plus you get paid net 20; they're on the hook for getting paid from the client.

Everything else about Toptal is frustrating: the byzantine interview process that's irrelevant to the actual work you perform, constant pressure to decrease your rates, the big cut they take, legal restrictions on forming relationships with clients outside Toptal, staff who won't leave you alone during the application process but vanish the second the contract is signed.

I wouldn't want to rely solely on them for freelancing. But they're great when I have a gap in my schedule: I can fill out minimal online applications on Monday, start work by the end of the week, money in the bank by the end of the month.

bckygldstnon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (January 2022)

SEEKING WORK | SF Bay Area | Remote OK | Geospatial development and data science

I help companies manage and extract value from their geospatial data.

A typical project for me might involve

• Frontend development (webmaps, interactive visualization)

• Backend development (static websites, APIs)

• Satellite imagery (land-use classification, object identification)

• Routing (supply chain optimization, logistics, retail planning)

• Dataset building (DEM coregistration, web scraping)

• Data engineering (setting up a geospatial datastore, ML pipelines)

I run https://gpxz.io (SaaS) and https://opentopodata.org (Open Source). Feel free to reach out if you think I could help with something, or just to chat about your project.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajnisbet/

Website: https://ajnisbet.com

Email: andrew@ajnisbet.com

bckygldstnon Ask HN: Is there a good reason why I can't set my oven below 200F?

I just started making my own yogurt, it's fun, cheap, and really tasty!

The basic process is the same between recipes (eg https://www.seriouseats.com/homemade-yogurt) but it might take a couple of failures and tweaking (take notes) until you have something that works for you:

* Buy a food thermometer (also super useful for baking and cooking meat!)

* Heat milk to 85C

* Hold between 85C and 90C for 5 mins

* Cool to 50C

* Add a spoon of yogurt (make a new batch before the old one runs out!)

* Keep above 35C for 3-12 hours. You can use the oven with the light on, wrap the yogurt in a blanket and put it in the hot water cupboard, or I like to put it in a cooler alongside 2x as much boiling water in another jar.

bckygldstnon NY Man Pleads Guilty in $20M SIM Swap Theft

New Zealand Post does this: https://www.realme.govt.nz/

bckygldstnon Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start

I can't find a good reference for the German market specifically, but in some countries/regions most milk is ultra-pasteurised and unrefridgerated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-temperature_process...

bckygldstnon Rclone: Rsync for cloud storage – CLI to sync between cloud storage providers

Rclone is fantastic. It's much easier to use that most of the cloud storage APIs themselves.

Plus rclone makes it easy to migrate between providers. I just moved a backup process from Gcloud to B2 now my side business is growing up: you can start with whatever storage is free/convenient then switch to something more mature later with minimal effort.

bckygldstnon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (December 2021)

SEEKING WORK | SF Bay Area | Remote OK | Geospatial development and data science

I help companies manage and extract value from their geospatial data.

A typical project for me might involve

• Frontend development (webmaps, interactive visualization)

• Backend development (static websites, APIs)

• Satellite imagery (land-use classification, object identification)

• Routing (supply chain optimization, logistics, retail planning)

• Dataset building (DEM coregistration, web scraping)

• Data engineering (setting up a geospatial datastore, ML pipelines)

I run https://gpxz.io (SaaS) and https://opentopodata.org (Open Source). Feel free to reach out if you think I could help with something, or just to chat about your project.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajnisbet/

Website: https://ajnisbet.com

Email: andrew@ajnisbet.com

bckygldstnon Microsoft Edge’s new ‘Buy now, pay later’ feature is the definition of bloatware

The USPS inserts vast amounts of advertising into my letterbox, and (unlike in most countries) there's no way to opt out.

Getting those last drops of profit margin require you to squeeze the consumer the hardest.

bckygldstnon Chocolate from Bean to Bar

Wow, it is beautiful! [1]

In the US it might be most commonly encountered as a primary constituent of Pumpkin Spice.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/63/Nu...

bckygldstnon Chocolate from Bean to Bar

Farmers markets very occasionally will have interesting fruit, often I suspect as a side project for the farmer, sitting at the back of their stall for a couple of weeks only.

In Californian farmers markets and fruit stalls I've been able to get some relatively uncommon fruit with unique flavours: feijoa, persimmon, passionfruit, pomegranate.

Travel is another way to be exposed to new fruit via alternate supply chains. Most Americans have never heard of feijoa but New Zealand in autumn is awash with them! You don't even need to buy them cause everyone has a friend, relative or neighbour with a tree trying to git rid of theirs before they go off!

https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/04-04-2017/in-praise-of-the...

bckygldstnon Ask HN: How to Best Invest Windfall?

Hiring an accountant for your first two things will avoid a lot of tax headaches, plus save you more than enough money to cover their fee.

Get a few recommendations for an accountant from work slack / nextdoor / blind. If you're in a tech area, there'll be lots of accountants around used to dealing with single millions in net worth, sudden windfalls, and cryptocurrency.

bckygldstnon The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

Run vector [1] on each host to collect logs and send them to New Relic's free tier.

No need to manage extra infrastructure for logging, New Relic works pretty well and also has alerts, and Vector makes it easy to move to a new provider or self-hosted solution without reinstalling agents: just add a new sink to your config file.

[1] https://github.com/vectordotdev/vector

bckygldstnon Financial innovations brought by technology

The difference is it just uses bank accounts, instantly. You don't have to wait 3 days to get the money, or remember to regularly withdraw money from the app (then wait 3 days for it to arrive).

bckygldstnon The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription

Yeah, I mean EU as in EUrope, not EU as in The European Union.

bckygldstnon The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription

Interesting, I thought I had bought glasses in a CA Warby Parker store without a prescription.

Maybe it's a Tesla-style showroom thing where you look at the frames in store but technically buy the glasses online.

bckygldstnon The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription

I usually just search for "contact lenses EU", check they ship to US (most will list this in their FAQ) and pick the cheapest.

Looking through my email receipts, I've used:

lenstore.co.uk

visiondirect.co.uk

contactsexpress.ca

specsavers.co.nz

bckygldstnon The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription

Sites like Warby Parker will send you a bunch of frames to try on for free so you can see how they look.

And I find sites like Zenni are so cheap that it's worth taking the risk: an ugly pair can go in the car /gym bag / work desk for if I lose a contact lens.