Hacker News Reader

colinbartletton Amazon’s Grocery Push Keeps Stumbling After Whole Foods Purchase

Here in New York, FreshDirect has been the grocery delivery king[1] for a while but they had some missteps last year. I took the opportunity to try Amazon Prime Fresh.

I placed my first order and several hours past the end of my scheduled delivery time, my groceries still hadn't arrived. So I canceled the order, canceled Prime Fresh and that was that. Not a good way to win over business from the competition in what is a pretty competitive business in New York.

If my story is representative at all, it's unsurprising that their marketshare has declined, even after a very expensive acquisition.

1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-11/inside-ne...

colinbartletton MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

My experience is similar since its with Amazon support and separate from AWS. My account, encompassing everything covered my Amazon credentials, was put on hold for "address verification" two weeks ago and handed to the "Accounts Team". This means, no buying anything on Amazon for the holidays and zero access to my AWS account, Lambdas, S3 buckets, etc. Just a mind-numbing cycle of phone trees and "we are looking into this".

I cannot even sign into my Washington Post subscription. Thanks, Bezos!

colinbartletton MailChimp deleted my account with no warning

There could also be some selection bias here. I always wonder how many other attempts at public shaming never make it anywhere.

I've been locked out of my Amazon and AWS account for more than two weeks despite numerous phone calls to Amazon support and desperate pleading on social media. "We are still looking into this matter for you." I could post some nasty blog post but I have really little faith it would get me anywhere.

colinbartletton Uber Joins Lyft in Race to Tap Investors

$8,100 per minute apparently: https://www.google.com/search?q=1.07+billion+dollars+per+3+m...

colinbartletton Quora User Data Compromised

I’ve oftened wondered if I am helped by my practice of using [servicename]@[mydomain.com] for each service I sign up for. I used to do it to help control and track spam, then I stopped when spam stopped becoming an issue. But now I feel like no longer having a single unique key to correlate my data across different leaked data sets might also be a benefit.

colinbartletton Ask HN: Online banks where I can open account worldwide?

Check out NomadCapitalist.com or specifically his YouTube channel where he has numerous videos about this exact topic. I know he recommends Georgia a lot for banking, but you might still need to open in person.

https://youtube.com/user/nomadcapitalist

colinbartletton Show HN: Visualize Your Rails App to ER Diagram Automatically

Looks neat! I was unable to use it on my more recent Rails projects which all have schema version that contain underscores. Example: `ActiveRecord::Schema.define(version: 2018_10_23_121007)`.

colinbartletton Robinhood Gets Almost Half Its Revenue from Bargain with High-Speed Traders

Does this apply to an ordinary low-level retirement investor like me? If I am buying, let's say $500 a week, in some fund as part of my IRA, what does a LIMIT/STOP order do for me? I'm buying it no matter what, the share price is meaningless to me, I will just get more or less shares.

colinbartletton Ask HN: As a technical founder what is the best business book you've read?

Although not a technical book and sometimes maligned, I found How to Win Friends and Influence People very helpful to my career and to my life.

colinbartletton Commons Clause

If this clause comes to Redis Core, will it mean Heroku and others cannot offer me the simple hosted Redis they do today? Thesd cloud providers are exactly what makes Redis attractive to me, dramatically reducing the cost of spinning up new infrastructure for projects.

colinbartletton California Wildfires: Inmates Are Risking Their Lives for $2 a Day

I used to be a volunteer firefighter and really enjoyed the work. I was not an inmate, nor do I see a distinction here. Thousands of civilians risk their lives every day for $0/day fighting fires.

colinbartletton Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown

If the problem they are trying to solve is "too many vehicles" then we need a congestion tax. They should certainly not be limiting vehicles that are more likely to take multiple people with a Pool option.

If the problem they are trying to solve is "drivers aren't making enough" then they should impose a minimum wage on drivers or force an actual employee relationship.

If the problem they are trying to solve is a bail out of the failed and corrupt taxi medallion system, then maybe this will succeed. The real issue here is the cab drivers who are hurting because they provide an inferior service to a clientele who now have better options. I avoid cabs for all but the shortest trips because of the large percentage of bad driving experiences. Some solutions to improve yellow cabs like having a simple feedback mechanism for drivers could go a long way to leveling the playing field between Uber and Taxi.

colinbartletton Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown

Green cabs have definitely helped with added supply though I can't speak to how they have addressed marginalized groups.

But the green cab solution is half baked. It really frustrates me as an Upper Manhattan resident that I cannot take a green cab back uptown to my home. I have often seen them lower in Manhattan and they are required to drive back empty while I try to find a yellow cab.

colinbartletton Google AMP – A 70% drop in our conversion rate

I hate AMP so much that I switched to DuckDuckGo on mobile more than a year ago and have been thrilled. Search results are as good and I haven’t seen an AMP page since.

colinbartletton Launch HN: JetLenses (YC S18) – Lowest Prices on Contact Lenses

I paid $85.69 including all taxes and fees recently and this site looks like it would be $112 so about 30% higher. I must be missing the innovation here because it seems like just another contacts retailer I’ll have to price compare with when I buy.

colinbartletton Ask HN: Migraine prophylaxis?

Exercising 45 minutes a day, 7 days a week, reduced my migraines to near zero after close to 20 years of suffering. I would recommend carefully tracking them with a diary. (I used a separate calendar in my phone.)

colinbartletton Amazon’s share of the US e-commerce market is now 49%

It seems to me that they are working to solve this in creative ways. For example, on a recent Amazon search, I noticed the results page included embedded recommendations from the Wirecutter, which is review site owned by the New York Times.

colinbartletton Grand Jury Indicts Russian Officers for Hacking Related to the 2016 Election

The indictment is a reminder of just how much data can be pieced together about a person's online activity, at least with considerable resources and seemingly proper court authorized warrants. From web searches, to emails, twitter posts, block chain transactions, all of it could be correlated together. The searching for specific phrases that then appeared in a text is particularly damning.

What I could not glean from the indictment is how they could possibly have identified these 12 people individually. The government must have some other sigint or humint for that? Will this ever make it to trial so that evidence can be revealed?

colinbartletton Cell carriers to stop sharing real-time cell phone location data

These announcements and the resulting press coverage have been very frustrating to me because it seems only that carriers committed to selling data directly to the end users, eliminating the middle man. One could argue they can (and will) control the ultimate destination this way. Or one could argue they will just take a bigger share of the pie without someone marking up the data in between.

colinbartletton Verizon, AT&T and Sprint to Limit Sales of Cellphone Location Data

That’s fair, thanks dang!

colinbartletton Ask HN: What is the first thing you implement at a new company?

In that vein, I invariably have one massive commit on every project to remove trailing whitespace first. That way when my well-behaved editor removes them with each commit, it's not littering up the diff.

colinbartletton Ask HN: What is the first thing you implement at a new company?

CodeClimate is a big one for me. Having some static analysis to track the team's progress over time is huge. It's nice to have a neutral third party robot doing the complaining about poor code.

Fortunately, CI/CD seems to be pretty prevalent these days. But if it's not in place, that's always first.

colinbartletton Verizon, AT&T and Sprint to Limit Sales of Cellphone Location Data

“Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint decide to cut out middlemen and sell directly to location data consumers.”

colinbartletton Tesla Model 3 Gets CR Recommendation After Braking Update

I'd like to think they have some kind of automated CI with a huge warehouse full of cars that automatically drives around and tests everything with each Git push.

colinbartletton Tesla Model 3 Gets CR Recommendation After Braking Update

oh, right... thank you! (edited)

colinbartletton Tesla Model 3 Gets CR Recommendation After Braking Update

  - const brakingDistance = 152;
  + const brakingDistance = 133;

colinbartletton Fuck You Startup World (2016)

It's a great scene, which many interpret as more of a love letter to the city than actual vitriol. By the end, one realizes Ed Norton's character, Monty, is mostly mad at himself.

One can arguably make a similar interpretation of this piece.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OYe3uk8Fi8

colinbartletton Ask HN: How do you reduce unsolicited phone calls?

Despite having a mobile phone and being on the do not call list, I get 10 to 20 unsolicited telemarketing calls PER DAY.

Each one requires a detailed form to fill out on the FCC site which I send off into the oblivion only to have the call volume go unchanged (or increase). Sorry, tragedy of the commons and all, but it's just not worth it to me to take the time to do this.

colinbartletton Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (May 2018)

SEEKING WORK | NYC or Remote | 12 years of Ruby/Rails experience

I have been building Rails applications full time for over 12 years. If you have a Rails application that needs help, let's chat. I'm comfortable with the entire stack but my deep Ruby experience is usually the most valuable. My full resume and contact info:

https://colinabartlett.com

colinbartletton Avocados are wreaking havoc in Mexico

Anyone have a major news source for similar information? This site has no sources, citations, no byline, nothing at all.