Hacker News Reader

diiaannon Apps for Bicycle Directions

Not sure what you mean by "real" but I use Strava to plan the route. I try to look up real routes that people have done or use their popularity feature. It then syncs automatically to my Garmin bike computer. Wahoo bike computers are popular too.

diiaannon Amazon to pay $1B+ for Zoox

https://www.axios.com/zoox-fired-ceo-tim-kentley-klay-fe6f06...

His previous experience was running an animation studio in Australia...so there's that too...

diiaannon How Reliable Are University Rankings?

I was talking to a few European friends (1 Dutch, 1 French) and what they described was that even the most bright students typically go to their regional universities which are all "equally good". Here in the US, the rankings are almost a proxy for admissions rate. Since "top schools" are exclusive, the student population tends to be at least one the following: talented, precocious, or well-connected/rich. I attended a "top 25" university, which is a ways from the Stanford, Harvard, Yales of the world but the environment was very special. Hard to describe, but you are surrounded by passionate, ambitious people, you can't help but feel energized. Is this a fair system? That's a whole another conversation.

diiaannon SF restaurants are suffocating

A bar closed in my neighborhood and and when I was chatting with them they too blamed the spending habits of the tech crowd. I think if anything, people spend more money on eating out and drinking than the average person. So I don't think it's that people are unwilling to spend it.

I'm not sure it is technology folks or millennials, but I find there are increasing amounts of people who want the "best of" everything...shoes, falafel you name it. People aren't okay with just a "good experience", they want the best experience. As a result, I think there are plenty of people who aren't very forgiving. Especially if you eat out regularly and have a lot of things to compare it to.

Oh yeah and the housing situation is broken.

diiaannon Chariot is shutting down

I know some people are very critical. I'm a big transit enthusiast but I still see how some work routes are long to walk, but not well served via transit, i.e. NoPa to Brannan St (Airbnb, Pinterest). Friends that were faced with trickier public transit options didn't seem enticed by Chariot. They seem to settle on biking/scootering, long walk, or choosing to take rideshare everyday.

diiaannon Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?

I think there are plenty of good looking open source fonts, but there aren't that many super solid ones.

Glyph wise, I would love to have both tabular and proportional numbers. I also want great hinting so it looks good on Windows devices. I also prefer something that isn't strongly tied to another brand like Roboto is to Android.

Once you take those into account, there isn't actually a ton of options left. And if you want something that compares to the quality you get Hoefler & Co, you end up with close to zero.

diiaannon New Logo and Identity for Library of Congress

Paula Scher, you can't win them all.

diiaannon Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

Koopman has a talk here on his blog that has more details about how ETCS (Electronic Throttle Control System) is safety critical. "If a driver pumps brakes, loses vacuum power assist...WOT requires an average of 175 lbs of force on brake pedal"

And what was particularly negligent about Toyota's software practices that "more likely than not" caused issues with ETCS.

https://betterembsw.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-case-study-of-toy...

diiaannon Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes

Mitra congrats!

I'm dismayed by the folks harping on the sodium content (for health reasons not taste). I think it warrants a deeper look because sodium intake is controversial. But there's lot of evidence that people can have more than 2.3g and still be healthy if you have normal kidney function, etc. Shrug, maybe they just wanted to find something to hate on.

New England Journal of Medicine: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1311889

Summary: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-t...

diiaannon Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade Indian Food in 5 Minutes

Seems like a perfectly fine amount of sodium to me. "An estimated sodium intake between 3 g per day and 6 g per day was associated with a lower risk of death and cardiovascular events than either a higher or lower estimated level of sodium intake." https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1311889

diiaannon Stripe Press

Yeah, this seems like a very indulgent project. It seems more of a labor of love for those who worked on it than something that moves the business forward. It's the same feeling I get when I look at the Airbnb service fee and get irritated... knowing that they have a very expensive office.

diiaannon With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster

“A 4.0 does signal something significant, that that student is good,” said Stuart Rojstaczer, a former Duke University professor who has studied grade inflation for years. “ A 3.7, however, doesn’t. That’s just a run-of-the-mill student at any of these schools.”

I disagree with this statement, at Carnegie Melllon I noticed that a lot of 4.0's were engineered. Students avoid taking hard classes, avoid difficult requirement classes by taking at an easier university, avoid challenging themselves outside of their major.

diiaannon Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

This. I think people forget that majors are also an operational consideration.

diiaannon Smartphone cradle used to cheat “10k steps/day” health insurance discounts

My uncle in China had a seat belt chime defeater that also doubled as a bottle opener.

diiaannon Tesla's Autopilot Chief Keller Steps Down After Two Years

Lattner was fired.

diiaannon Agatha Christie’s life rivaled the mysteries she created

I think I've read every single Poirot, my favorites are:

Murder on the Orient Express

Death on the Nile

Appointment with Death

Cat Among Pigeons

diiaannon Bill Ackman Surrenders in His Five-Year War Against Herbalife

This makes me sad. I don't care about Bill Ackman being right or wrong about Herbalife's business.

What I care about is that I truly believe that the world would be better off without MLM. If you have ever read sites like Pink Truth, it is gut wrenching how these business prey on people.

I had hoped that this would be a turning point...

diiaannon Who Killed the Junior Developer?

I liken the bootcamp business to the mortgage lending business before the subprime crisis.

In the beginning, there were plenty of candidates that were suited for careers in software engineering. Now we are at the point where each school has fewer great candidates so they market to a bigger audience.

diiaannon Optimizely’s decision to ditch its free plan

We are using VWO now! :D

diiaannon Optimizely’s decision to ditch its free plan

We were using Optimizely until we didn't qualify for the lowest tier paid plan. Not enough impressions?

We knew at our traffic tier, Optimizely experiment analysis was not going to be statically robust. We were going to have our data person do the analysis with different techniques to deal with the smaller sample size. What we really wanted was the interface for a non-technical person to create the variation and Optimizely to manage which variation people saw.

Instead of letting us continue, our account was canceled. In the next months, when we do have the traffic, we are not going to consider them. Not impressed.

diiaannon Why I Still Use Vim

I find that I actually use both vim and GUI editors.

If I'm writing a lot of fresh code or exploring a new codebase, I like to use GUI based editors.

Anything quick or repetitive, I tend to open up vim because its speedy to open and edit.

diiaannon Implementing Malloc: Students and Systems Programming [pdf]

I also put it off to the last minute. I had a pernicious bug in my coalescing code that was hard to debug. After one failed rewrite and only a few hours left, I resorted to taking the book's array version and optimizing it for utilization. My throughput was shit but I was able squeeze past their minimum score and squeak a C. My semester, the grading was pretty tough, only 6 or so people over 90. In other semesters, I know at least that many get 100.

diiaannon Hell is a stylish shared office space

We have a "private" office in a WeWork. For me the worst part is the desk itself, it's totally substandard as a task desk. Same with the chairs, people joke about the college analogy but I had better desking as a college student. Secondly, a lot of the interior decisions are questionable, such as the pendant light that casts glare on my monitor.

Also the music in the common areas is irritating and I even like some of the songs they play.

diiaannon My offer numbers from big companies

These seem in line with what I've seen from friends and acquaintances. I've also heard 100K signing bonuses to new grads at FB. https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-rationale-behind-Facebooks-1...

diiaannon How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

Most people I talk to assume that marriage is a boon for taxes. It is not. Our current tax policy can penalize both low-income and high-income earners.

https://taxfoundation.org/understanding-marriage-penalty-and...

diiaannon A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry

There is another meal planning serving called Cooksmarts without the raw ingredients.

diiaannon Companies Should Pay for Their Employees to Attend Conferences

I feel similarly. I find that conferences are kind of wasteful, from the signage, materials to the travel to get everyone into the same place. I can see greater value if a company is remote and you want to engage with a community that way. I feel like at least in the Bay Area there is a plethora of local events so no need to travel high and low for events.

diiaannon Carnegie Mellon Offers New Master's Degree in Product Management

Getting that first bit of experience seems hard for a product manager. Most places will only hire people with experience as a product manager, and for those who will hire someone without prior experience, they seem to prefer MBAs. This at least seems like a path to product management that isn't a MBA.

diiaannon New Etsy.com CEO breaks CAN-SPAM law on first email. Great

Though a stretch...announcing the leadership change could fall under:

"gives information about a change in terms or features or account balance information regarding a membership, subscription, account, loan or other ongoing commercial relationship" from https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can...

But it also mixes in commercial bits, which makes it less acceptable...

diiaannon Which Airline Kicks Off the Most Passengers?

I got $500 from United for being bumped on a SFO -> BOS flight. My resulting flight was only 1.5 hours later and I got moved to #1 on the upgrade standby list. From what it sounded like, it was a computer system that decided the amount, not a human.