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flickenon OpenTrafficMap

The night bus service only runs the nights "before" Saturday and Sunday[1]. It's a small university city with 300k population (600k greater metropolitan area).

[1] https://www.verbundlinie.at/en/customer-service/arriving-in-...

flickenon How to live on $432 a month in America

The Free State Project[1] had 20k libertarians pledge to move to New Hampshire, talking 15 years to reach the total number.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_State_Project

flickenon How to avoid losing items? Holding pens

For that, you can use "spike filing". Place everything incoming you might need on top of a spike (or on top of a pile or in the front of a folder). The automatically sorts by traverse chronological order, making it easy to both retrieve old documents and to know the age so you can discard older ones.

https://www.enotesnepal.com/class-11/notes/business-studies/...

flickenon Airlines are running out of 4-digit flight numbers

The "AAA" is a typo, they probably mean "AA777" for American Airlines 777[1].

A far as why the number 777 is amusing, it's gambling. The combination 777 is a jackpot on a slot machine, Additionally AA777 is a great hand (full house) in poker.

[1] https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/AAL777

flickenon Federal Reserve to increase interest rates by 50 basis points

The key phrase here is "target range"---it's not an exact number, but a range.

The previous statement[1] was .50% lower on both ends of the range:

> the Committee decided to raise the target range for the federal funds rate to 3-3/4 to 4 percent

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/mone...

flickenon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2022)

From their linked job description, there are a few countries that are excluded:

> We are currently unable to hire from the following regions: China, France, Iran, Egypt, Russia

flickenon Ask HN: Anyone working 4 day week here, as an employee?

It's an unintended consequence of the reduced (5-15% flat) taxes available via "regime forfettario"[1] which only applies to businesses with <65k income. Otherwise you have to pay much more (23%-43%) via the regular progressive tax brackets.

Somewhat similarly, in the USA there is a "welfare trap"[2] where earning more income would reduce other benefits (eg housing, food) enough to result in an effective >100% tax on income.

[1] https://publicnewstime.com/travel/explained-the-pros-and-con...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap

flickenon Stringbike: Benefits (2020)

What prices are you seeing? For me in Europe, the single speed is only €240 cheaper than the cheapest Aluminum bike.

€3990-€5200 Carbon €1590-€1990 Designer €1490-€1990 Aluminum €1250 single speed

flickenon Gitlab and remote work

37signals hires outside the US, see their HN ad from June, 2022[1]:

> The salary for candidates matched as Programmer is $165,410. The salary for candidates matched as Senior Programmer is $197,819. Irrespective of where in the world you live.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31583175

flickenon Gitlab and remote work

> Ok now I am more curious. I looked at another company "Expensify" [1]. They actually want you to ideally relocate to one of their office locations :). So again, not fully remote anywhere in the world. I think employers say it casually but in practice, it is extremely difficult.

Out of curiosity, what makes you think Expensify wants you to relocate?

Relocation was not required or suggested when I interviewed with them last year. Their current job ad shows that they support working from anywhere: "Our employees work from all over the world" and "we spend a month abroad working from a remote location as a team".

I hypothesize that the part about visa sponsorship / relocation assistance might give the wrong impression:

> if you're looking for a change of scene we offer visa sponsorship and relocation assistance to join us at one of our rad locations...

flickenon Ask HN: What are modern architecture patterns for desktop applications?

SQLite does support multiple writers, they take turns:

> SQLite only supports one writer at a time per database file. But in most cases, a write transaction only takes milliseconds and so multiple writers can simply take turns. SQLite will handle more write concurrency than many people suspect. Nevertheless, client/server database systems, because they have a long-running server process at hand to coordinate access, can usually handle far more write concurrency than SQLite ever will.

Source: https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html#:~:text=multiple%20wri...

flickenon Show HN: A game that tests how well you know your local area

Similarly, I got a "Zugang Steig B" (Entranceway B).

Maybe adding a button to skip the question: "not really a street".

flickenon Ask HN: EU devs who moved to the States for work, has it been worth it?

America has low car ownership rates compared to western Europe, possibly due to income inequality. See this 2012 article.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/it...

> The U.S. is ranked 25th in world by number of passenger cars per person...The Carnegie paper explains that car ownership rates are closely tied to the size of the middle class.

flickenon Ask HN: What are you working on?

https://standup.flicken.net/

After trying[1] multiple[2] alternatives[3][4], I built this to keep track of who speaks when and for how long at a daily standup. The question of "who's next?" is no longer asked.

Team members are saved to local storage so you can re-use for the next standup.

[1] https://standuptimer.app/ [2] https://dailytoast.io/ [3] https://github.com/nemtsov/scrum-standup-timer [4] https://kirk.is/tools/standuptimer/

flickenon Computer Science Curriculum in 1000 YouTube Videos

Try this:

  lynx -dump -hiddenlinks=listonly https://laconicml.com/computer-science-curriculum-youtube-videos/ | grep youtube.com | perl -pe 's/.*http/http/' | youtube-dl --batch-file -

flickenon Ask HN: OCR framework for extracting formatted text?

Although https://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/ is meant for reformatting PDFs to view on e-readers, it does do a reasonable job of extracting text via OCR and storing as a PDF layer. The underlying engine can be either https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract or http://jocr.sourceforge.net/

flickenon What The Economist doesn't tell you

The article seems to summarize, but doesn't name, Alexander Zevin's book, Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52105758-liberalism-at-l... ).

flickenon Ask HN: What projects are you working on now?

Working on a better way to edit calendar events: finding conflicts, grouping series of events together, etc.

flickenon No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit

Yes, the intersection is alive and well without traffic signals. That's my favorite intersection in Graz, the five-way intersection of Zinzendorfgasse, Halbärthgasse, Schubertstrasse, Leechgasse, and Beethovenstrasse. The Google Maps street view has a nice view of pedestrians, bikes, and cars sharing the intersection. Buses also use the intersection, but I couldn't find any in the Google Maps view.

https://www.google.com/maps/@47.0761111,15.4503833,3a,75y,31...

My second favorite intersection is on the left side of Erzherzog-Johann-Brücke, where pedestrians, bikes, trams, and cars intersect with only one traffic sign (northwards on Neutorgasse).

https://www.google.com/maps/@47.0710439,15.4355343,3a,75y,20...

flickenon A map of publicly available fruit trees, mostly in Slovakia

Some coverage of Austria as well.

flickenon A map of publicly available fruit trees, mostly in Slovakia

Austrian version: http://fruitmap.at/

flickenon Duolingo podcast: The kiddnapping of Luis von Ahn's aunt

https://slowgerman.com/

flickenon Why Germany Educates International Students for Free

Plus one for CBYX. The first two months are an intensive German course, so you don't technically need to have prior Germany experience (although it helps in order to be accepted). The last five months are for interning.

If you take parent post's suggestion to do two semesters of college in the US first, consider going to a community college. Much cheaper and comparable education to a state school.

Happy to answer questions if you're interested in hearing more about my experiences in the CBYX program (1999-2000) and/or community college.

flickenon PySolFC – A collection of Solitaire games for Python

+1 If there were a list of tasks that needed to be done, it would be much easier to pick up something in my spare time. The closest I can find to a task list is here: https://github.com/shlomif/PySolFC/issues/11#issuecomment-28...

flickenon They Used To Last 50 Years

Some of the control boards can be repaired, see https://youfixit.eu/en/ I did this after an electrical surge blew out a component.