Hacker News Reader

beeftimeon My app charted on the App Store, and that sucked

Frankly, I'm surprised that you got four downloads!

I'm not saying your app is bad, I'm sure it's perfectly fine and does what it purports to do. The UI looks nice. I just find it incredibly difficult to believe that any sort of market exists for the product you've produced: people who are expecting a child, and want that child to have a Danish name, and are unwilling to Google search (or ask ChatGPT etc) for eg "Danish boy names" AND are willing to pay $4.99 (mostly) sight unseen for a premium experience with baffling features ("Names you have favorited can easily be shared with your loved ones directly from the app"? Surely I could just, like... tell them the name?)

The conclusion you seemed to reach ("no one is buying paid apps") doesn't make a lot of sense. Plenty of people are buying paid apps. What you have discovered is that the Dutch Lifestyle section of the app store gets very little traffic and that an extraordinarily niche app can rank with a user base you can count on one hand.

beeftimeon Show HN: Fermi – A Wordle-style game for order-of-magnitude thinking

Why do I have to pick the factors first? Do I have to use all of them? Why shouldn't I use all of them? If I do, why aren't they already picked?

Why are all of these sliders? Why don't they start at zero? Why do all of them at the default setting result in me winning?

Speaking of, am I winning? Failure and success give me the same feedback. I can play this game over and over until I win? That's not really in the Wordle style.

imo you should be picking from a palette of maybe-relevant factors and increasing/decreasing their order of magnitude and order/operation, then when you submit you're locked into a win/loss state like wordle. This would be much more of a game than what you've got here.

beeftimeon Twitter’s Rebrand to X Could Be a Trademark Nightmare Thanks to Microsoft

I don't think other governments are stupid enough to let their taxpayers float poorly made cars that keep exploding because the guy in charge keeps talking about self-driving functionality that will never arrive

beeftimeon Twitter’s Rebrand to X Could Be a Trademark Nightmare Thanks to Microsoft

I will give him credit in as much that he is an exceptional con man uniquely skilled at fleecing investors and moneyed nerds. Still, though, that hype machine couldn't have been built without his gobs of money and utter lack of scruples.

beeftimeon Twitter’s Rebrand to X Could Be a Trademark Nightmare Thanks to Microsoft

The reason is that no one was in a position to exploit the EV credit system because it didn't exist yet. Right place, right time, only made possible by having a bunch of money and zero qualms about exploiting that program.

beeftimeon Twitter’s Rebrand to X Could Be a Trademark Nightmare Thanks to Microsoft

Musk's apparent thinking was that it would have been easier to wriggle his way out of the Twitter purchase than the fines (around 1bn, if I recall correctly)

turned out not to be the case!

beeftimeon Twitter’s Rebrand to X Could Be a Trademark Nightmare Thanks to Microsoft

if twitter were very strongly moderated it might have helped, but as it stands now it's a $8 fee for scammers to push their scams to the top of any thread. Even if they get banned every so often it's a great value proposition. Can't tell you the number of verified 𝕏 crypto scams I've seen since the rebrand, most of which seem to still be up.

beeftimeon Twitter’s Rebrand to X Could Be a Trademark Nightmare Thanks to Microsoft

famously, no one with a lot of money has ever made a bad business decision

beeftimeon Twitter’s Rebrand to X Could Be a Trademark Nightmare Thanks to Microsoft

Both Tesla and SpaceX are successful almost entirely in buying out the work of other people and exploiting government programs. If you already had a bunch of money (thanks to being in the right place at the right time w/r/t PayPal) you too could have done it if you didn't care about anything other than your own aggrandizement

beeftimeon Twitter’s Rebrand to X Could Be a Trademark Nightmare Thanks to Microsoft

I didn't get conned personally, no, because I am enough of an engineer to see through his garbage, unworkable ideas. A lot of investors (and municipalities!) haven't been so lucky.

beeftimeon Twitter’s Rebrand to X Could Be a Trademark Nightmare Thanks to Microsoft

blowing up one of the single most recognizable brands in the entire world so you can indulge your puerile obsession you have with the letter "x" and drive the 44bn albatross you were forced to buy because of your inability to watch your mouth even deeper into unprofitability is world-historic business genius mindset. you guys wouldn't understand.

beeftimeon Twitter’s Rebrand to X Could Be a Trademark Nightmare Thanks to Microsoft

correct, the term he should have used is "con man"

beeftimeon Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

they can't "code", they can't "explain a joke", they can output cached human data in such a way that it seems like they're generating these things themselves.

beeftimeon Sanders calls for minimum salary of $60000 for public school teachers

good

beeftimeon The dictatorship of the articulate

we're still doing this in 2022? How much of this warmed-over libetrarian claptrap do we still need to sit through? Things are bad because the got dang gubbermint won't let me dump industrial waste into the river! We're failing to innovate because I can't work my employees to death! These dang snowflakes are killing America!

Give me a break.

beeftimeon Iowa Caucuses, the Blob, and the Democratic Party Cartel

The idea that the delay(s) hurt Buttigieg in any way is a profound misreading of the situation. Iowa has a small number of delegates, and it's only important in as much as it creates momentum for the winner going into the next three states.

If they released the vote totals on time and Bernie won, that would have given his campaign momentum, which could have lead (still might) to a NH blowout.

Instead, Pete got to "declare victory" twice -- night-of, and again after the 60% release. Now it really doesn't matter if they release the results and Bernie is shown to have won, because we're already multiple news cycles away from caucus night and most people aren't really paying attention, so it's going to be hard for Sanders to capture any momentum, if it's shown he has won. Pete, on the other hand, got a significant NH bump from the IA results in the latest polls.

I think the only way it's hurt Pete is through IDP incompetence, where to most Americans (who hate a cheater and love a conspiracy theory) it looks, for lack of a better term, extremely shady. It's also fired up Bernie's base of die-hards, who are now on the warpath (or even more so) for the early states

beeftimeon A Fan’s Notes: Unsolicited Praise for Sportswriter Jon Bois

Bois is undoubtedly one of (if not the) best sportswriter alive today. Not only is he wildly funny and profoundly sincere, but he's able to elevate the subject matter above the bookkeeping and political insider drama his peers only ever seem to write about

Do yourself a favor and put some time aside to watch Chart Party: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUXSZMIiUfFSe4gpc8PLD... and Pretty Good: https://www.sbnation.com/pretty-good

absolutely phenomenal work. I don't know of anyone else doing anything even approaching this.

beeftimeon Chase did a bad thing, so we did a good thing

Good point, a bank will never, ever screw you over.

oh wait

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/every-wells-fargo-consumer-sc...

beeftimeon David Byrne Curates a Playlist of Great Protest Songs

No The Coup? Atrocious. "The Guillotine" is the best protest song ever written.

beeftimeon Ask HN: Codebase at my work is a complete mess, what should I do?

this was me a few years ago, here's some stuff I learned about diving in to a codebase like this:

- don't be rude but make it clear you think the code is messy and you can clean it up. Explain it to non-programmers in terms of time needed to add new features and the much greater chance of bugs and side effects

- get a few style rules going (do A and not B, group regions/routes/modules -- with only comments at first, if needed) to apply ONLY to new code going in.

- every time you have to touch old code, bring it up to style, even if your changes don't directly address spaghettiness

- slowly (and more confidently now that you're more familiar with the code) refactor parts of the code

- get at least some sort of test structure in there

It'll take a long time but it'll mostly work and you'll probably find it very satisfying. I know I do. Be polite but firm. Believe me that everyone knows the code is a mess and if someone is willing to put in the legwork, every developer worth their salt will respect you for it. You'll have the authority you need to enforce your stylistic choices and the future structure of the code.

Remember above all else, though, that your job is to write working code, not pretty code that developers like. Your goal should be to infect it with order, not tear it out and rebuild it.

beeftimeon Fan death

Fan death is ridiculous but it's often used as a face-saving measure for families that have to deal with a suicide or an alcohol poisoning related death.

beeftimeon Ask HN: What’s wrong with me

you must, must, MUST talk to a health professional. Even if you just walk to the nearest hospital or clinic and describe your symptoms and ask for a referral. This is not due to your life choices, or your personality, or your individual philosophy. This is not a healthy way to feel, but you cannot feel any differently because of this illness. This illness CAN be treated. You do not need to feel this way. There is no truth in the way you feel now, and this weight CAN be lifted off your shoulders.

Please, please, talk to a doctor.

beeftimeon Both in rich and poor countries, universal health care brings huge benefits

Good point. Totally remove the profit motive from healthcare. Establish a monopsony on medicine through the US government.

Hang the ghouls that enrich themselves by throwing families into lifetimes of debt only to further enrich themselves.

beeftimeon Jeff Bezos' advice: Don't aim for work-life balance; it's a circle

"I love to come into the office with tremendous energy", says world's richest man as he devises even crueler ways to exploit his employees.

beeftimeon Conservatives Are Now Getting Angry About Google's Fact-Checking Module

James Damore please log off

beeftimeon Vigilantes are working hard to infect IoT devices with the Hajime botnet

Good. I'd rather someone brick your wifi lightbulbs and discount guangdong webcams than hold the door open for ever-worse DDoS attacks.

beeftimeon Why My Handwriting Sucks: A Typographical Analysis

Weird, random bolding and italicizing? Spaces on both side of every parenthesis? A space before punctuation... sometimes?

This guy's typing sucks too.

beeftimeon Ask HN: Has anyone considered forking TempleOS and making a modern OS out of it?

Hello, Terry!

beeftimeon Ask HN: Is S3 down?

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/isitdownrightnow.com

RIP

beeftimeon 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus

A great deal of that is probably the tension between the two countries - Koreans tend to feel it far more personally (they were the ones invaded, after all). Having lived in Seoul for the same amount of time I'd say the same thing, only about Japanese. I'd say you're on the money about Chinese folks, though. Chinese people bring the party with them, for sure.

Koreans have a saying about their neighbors: "The Chinese love you rudely. The Japanese hate you politely."