gaelenh

It shows me 17 bus stops, but not the 3 subway stations/lines I am equidistant from. I already went through and favorited all my stations to make it useful again, but the main screen prioritizing every bus stop over any subway stations is not helpful. It takes several clicks to get to what I need now (times of trains at nearest stations). I used the previous app everyday day.

I have the T-Mobile version of the LTE dumbphone (Alcatel Go Flip). It can be used as a hotspot, wifi calling, and HD voice (much clearer than previous dumbphones). KaiOS is really laggy unfortunately.

I haven't used that phone in 6 months or so because I switched to an Apple Watch series 3. I've never had a smartphone as my actual phone. I synced it to my SIM on my wife's phone with my Apple ID, then reset her phone back to her stuff.

The watch works great as my only phone. Eats batter power, about 15 hours per charge, less if I talk or listen to music more than a couple hours per day. Looking forward to watchOS 5 because it will the phone self-manage wifi settings, which should fix a lot of the battery issues. Right now I can only connect to one wifi network (since I don't have a phone to sync to that manages it). Once I can connect to my home and office wifi, battery life will improve.

Not having a phone in my pocket ever again is a great feeling. Just the default apps on it. Wish I could stream podcasts. I still keep the dumbphone around the house in case I need to take an SMS (Apple Watch apparently doesn't handle those either, just Apple Messages).

Curious: I just got a series 3 last week and use it as my sole phone (hate smartphone form factor, flip phone user since forever). All I use it for is heart rate, phone, messaging, and music (very happy with it).

I've had to charge my series 3 every night. I guess not having it paired with a phone somehow uses more battery power? Technically, I reset my wife's phone with my sim+apple id, paired, reset back to wife's backup and sim. So it has no real phone to pair with, though I guess maybe that causes it to use cellular a lot more than most.

My parents shrewdly and pre-emptively reorganized their "estate" (feels silly calling their meager savings that) with a lawyer that specializes in this. In Central Florida, their are enough retires that many know what's at stake (RE: OP article, plus other money grabs when elderly required assisted living), and lawyers have setup to attempt to prevent it.

While listening to my dad explain it all, I wrote down "Stripe Atlas for old people's estates" in my idea notebook. Another poster mentioned setting up nested LLC's, just a service to scale and productize it. Not just for the elderly either, I can think of a lot of people that would want the protection and power of obscuring money that real estate developers and politicians have benefited from for years. It would be a real game changer.

I don't understand the subsidies at all. In 2015, ACA gave people waivers (no penalty!) if the minimum insurance was more than 8.05% of household income. The minimum plan for a family in NYC on the NY Healthcare Exchange is $12,500/year. Self-employed families making less than $147,000 and more than $60,000 (I think that's where subsidies cut off) are overlooked and left without a safety net.

I run a bootstrapped non-profit in NYC with two employees (myself and my wife). A bronze plan for my family on the NY marketplace is about $1,200+ month with an $8k-14k deductible. I was hoping to get something through JustWorks, but since it's really just one household in our company, we can't apply for that (requires at least 3 separate insurees).

Our combined family income makes us ineligible for subsidies, so I guess my option is to pay $14k a year for an $8k deductible with little coverage. I guess now all plans are HDHP, but with 3-5x the premium.

Canopy - http://canopyapps.com - NYC - ONSITE

Web Developer and Android Engineer

We’re seeking a full-time Web / Full Stack Developer (front + backend) and an Android Engineer to join our small, collaborative team

You'll be responsible for developing key features that help 30+ million non-English speakers in the US gain access to better healthcare by enabling clinicians to communicate instantly and accurately across different languages.

If you're interested in joining a sharp, motivated team, send your info to gaelen@canopyapps.com

Our products: Canopy's technology helps healthcare providers and patients communicate across language barriers.

- For Patients: Better understanding of care

- For Healthcare Providers: Enhanced productivity and ability to deliver care

- For Health Systems: Reduce cost, enhance legal compliance and improve quality of care for underserved communities

Canopy is the winner of innovation awards from the National Institutes of Health, and is a winner of the 2014 PILOT Health Tech NYC award. Our products are used by 100,000+ doctors, nurses and other clinicians across the country.

Why us? We're a small tight knit team located in the heart of NYC, working to solve the language barrier problem in healthcare and improve the health of millions.

They all successfully transitioned into industrial factory jobs, where they received living wages and benefits and weren't at all abused by the factory owners and lived happily ever after? I honestly don't know. This is where that history repeating itself quote comes into play.

EDIT to say I was being facetious.

I have strong doubts too. Tech luminaries and the media that feed off them seem pretty constant with their predictions, so I think for worst case scenarios (at least in terms of the families / demo I serve, not in society as a whole).

Last week in my robotics classes, the 4th grade students built and programmed simple "self-driving" cars with LEGO EV3's. My students are mostly 1st generation immigrants in Brooklyn. Many of their families' main source of income is through driving for a car service.

Looking at one of the charts from OP, these kids' parents are horses. What will they do when those jobs don't exist anymore? Will the new "horse" population be reduced? How will they fit into the new economy?

Other than providing childcare for upper middle class families (subsidized by sending their own kids to substandard preschools), most of their jobs will be replaced through automation in less than 10 years. Most of these families are working 40+ hour weeks on minimum wages and still need WIC and other benefits to get groceries and low end govt/city childcare for their kids. I know basic income is an (the?) answer, however I don't see the US getting on board with that idea in the next 10 years.

Canopy - http://canopyapps.com - NYC - ONSITE

Android Engineer

We’re seeking a full-time Android Engineer to join our small, collaborative team and own the end-to-end development of our Android applications.

You'll be responsible for building, launching and maintaining the next generation of our Android apps that help 30+ million non-English speakers in the US gain access to better healthcare by enabling clinicians to communicate instantly and accurately across different languages.

If you're interested in joining a sharp, motivated team as the 4th developer and 8th employee -- send your info to mcullinan@canopyapps.com

Our products: Canopy's technology helps healthcare providers and patients communicate across language barriers.

- For Patients: Better understanding of care

- For Healthcare Providers: Enhanced productivity and ability to deliver care

- For Health Systems: Reduce cost, enhance legal compliance and improve quality of care for underserved communities

Canopy is the winner of innovation awards from the National Institutes of Health, and is a winner of the 2014 PILOT Health Tech NYC award. Our products are used by 100,000+ doctors, nurses and other clinicians across the country.

Why us? We're a small tight knit team located in the heart of NYC, working to solve the language barrier problem in healthcare and improve the health of millions.

Their new school seems to follow the community school model. Community schools provide classes for parents, wrap around services, dental, medical, social workers, etc. They are fairly popular in urban school districts, though their efficacy hasn't really been proven (though nothing truly ever is in K-12 edu).

So much truth to this. Hang out with enough Mexican immigrants in the US and you realize the danger there is real for civilians in MX and not much of an exaggeration. Members of my wife's family have been drugged and robbed. Last month a friend told me her nephew was kidnapped and they were gathering ransom money for his release stateside (he is safe now). Not that these were cartel related, but the situation in Mexico is much worse and real than say, the scare stories about "bad" neighborhoods in NYC.

I use Brackets for my middle school game programming class (using Phaser). Cross platform, free, and works great for beginners out of the box. Testing out html + js is as simple as hitting a button, no extensions or server or any other hoops necessary.

The article is wrong to call it "Common Core online testing". Common Core is short for Common Core State Standards [CCSS], and thus are a standard, not curriculum or tests. Tests and curricula can be Common Core-aligned, but the standards do not outline any specific test.

With that in mind, there are different CCSS tests out there from the usual corporations that produce school tests. States/school boards adopting CCSS are free to buy into any test that is CCSS aligned. Some are online, others are traditional.

Inevitably, schools will go with online tests because they will appear less expensive in terms of administering and grading. The efficacy of administering computerized tests and how that affects the outcome (particularly for writing and math) will be the new cultural bias for tests.

I've volunteered almost every week for the last 6 years running free STEM programs in local schools in Brooklyn. The robotics program I started runs entirely off of volunteers, most of whom I've never met before their first day and certainly aren't robotic specialists. About 40 4th graders from 3 schools get ~40 hours of free robotics classes every year. Not bad for a bunch of unpaid volunteers. To be clear, the robotics program wouldn't exist without us, and everyone--the kids, parents, school--are all very happy we do it.

New York Cares is a non-profit that organizes volunteers for all sorts of community organizations. Knitting at senior centers, arts and crafts at transitional housing centers, cooking programs at rec centers. Again, the programs wouldn't exist without the volunteers, and the intended recipients definitely enjoy them and benefit.

The robotics program was recently written about in a Brooklyn local paper: http://www.homereporternews.com/news/school_news/sunset-spar...

That's certainly one version of what can happen. Another version is that none of the equity transfers to the new company. The acquiring company will offer you a modest boost in salary and similar new stock options. If you don't take the offer because they're low balling you or you don't like the new company, your old company will terminate you at the end of the week without any severance. Or the new company will offer everyone on the team 3 months consulting contracts. Either way, better start familiarizing yourself with COBRA.

Employees in the acquired company are put under heavy pressure to take whatever deal is offered. Who wouldn't want to keep working with their friends? The CEO's/senior team will keep the employees out of the loop so that rank-and-file don't move first and take any negotiating power away from the CEO.

Not every acqui-hire is a payoff for the employees in the acquired company. It can also be a face-saving gesture when money runs out to make a shutdown look semi-successful for the founders.

Tip to engineers new to the startup world: If the startup you work for has any success or traction, but runs out of money, you will be sold off as a team like cattle. When startups shutdown, all assets -- servers, client contracts, software, furniture, and teams -- will be sold off to recoup losses. You won't have much say in it and it kind of sucks.

In fairness to the CEO's that broker these deals, they are probably trying to make sure that their workers land on their feet. But it still sucks to realize you and your friends are considered saleable assets.

I always feel like I get the most done, both in terms of what I'm paid to do and what I have to offer, on my weekly volunteer day. I slam through as much programming and meetings/conversations as possible in 5 hours, then head out of the office and teach robotics to kids for an hour or so. Time typically spent dorking around on the internet is reallocated to doing better things in the real world.

Short version: We had direct access to all the large news image providers and analyzed the images for topic and story identification. We used this data to dynamically generate hundreds of thousands of pages. Way too much data to cache to file (our storage cluster was many many terabytes). We used a CDN to cache the images. When a bot would scrape, it would hit all the old pages that fell out of the cache. Perhaps our fault for having such a large sitemap.xml.

Not running (probably). We were acquired by a competitor. Last I heard, they upgrade their image server code with the bare essential features to migrate over our clients. A lot of good software was buried in that acquisition.

I wrote a similar image service (resize, crop, border, color analysis, format, and other fun features) a few years ago. It served about 6M image requests a day from 4 servers, plus a whole lot more from the CDN.

If you're using a CDN, just make sure they cache on query string parameters. Our resize controls were part of the URI, but the other commands were part of the QS. Our CDN stripped queries, so the first image would be cached and any calls with different QS would return the first hit.

A possible alternative that I never implemented was using the request header instead of the query string for additional commands.

Edit to add: Also, if you have lots of resized images on a page, be careful when Google or Bing scraped you. Your CPU and IO will go through the roof as your servers go crazy trying to dynamically generate all the images.

I follow a similar strategy when I'm interviewing for a job. I play it a little loose and speak freely. If they don't have the good sense to realize that questions about my resume or github code are more important than white boarding and programming riddles, then I don't want work for or with them. When I'm interviewing to hire someone, I reverse the situation and try to get them to loosen up. The interview process is a window into company culture.

Same goes when I'm setting up partnerships for STEAM classes with schools. Schools can be strict with their staff and their students. I don't ever want to put forward a persona that suggest I will also be strict or by the book because that will never work out. No one will be happy.

I suppose if I can't ever find a job and no one will let me teach, it's time to re-examine my personality. Until then, no reason to keep my disregard for bureaucratic norms and fake corporate civility a secret.

I used to get results from the Getty Images API when I'd call it with future time ranges. Most of the photos were from the next week, but there were always a few handfuls from months and years in the future. Just a bug and bad metadata, not time travel. It did allow me to surface photos before they showed up on Getty though.

OP here. I've taught STEAM for about five years now on a completely voluntary basis at a low SES, high ELL school in Brooklyn.

I went looking for a job a few months ago in NYC. When potential bosses asked me what I was looking for in a work place, I say a company that lets me take time off to teach in schools. This caught them all off guard, and not in a good way. I don't care about your beer fridges and ping pong tables. More developers should be demanding this in their perks and benefits.

Kids need teachers real experience to see the power of programming and STEM, and they won't find that in most traditional teachers. It's up to developers to pick up the slack.

Current STEM policy conversations are around future job availability. Great, just what every 10-year-old wants to hear, "one day you'll be able to help Google sell more ads or work 60-hour weeks for a VC." Programming is so much more than that, but kids will never hear it without talking with real developers.

Last weekend I decided to move my non-profit email off of gmail. Running my own mail server always seemed silly or negligent (everyone I know who runs their own has had mail bounce back at me at least once).

It took me the weekend to setup and secure Kolab. It's GPL, built on top of postfix, has a nice webmail client through Roundcube, and it's actively developed. The current version (3.0) doesn't have CalDav support, but it is on the roadmap for 3.1 in a couple months.

Learned a lot of about anti-spam techniques while setting it up. The config file settings were a little lax for Roundcube, but all-in-all I'm happier with the setup than with Gmail. This CalDav problem was just a random outage, but how long till they make another change that users can't opt out of?

There was a relatively recent article in Time about the socratic method not being so great: http://ideas.time.com/2011/12/14/why-asking-questions-might-...

Basically, they recreated one of Socrates' lessons. The students gave similar answers to the 50 questions, but only half figured out the task at the end of the lesson. The students didn't understand the importance or goals of the questions and answers.

That's not to say the socratic method doesn't work. If you read enough research and anecdotal stories about education, you'll come to realize that everything works and nothing works. For every idea in education, research will eventually show that it is ineffective and a waste of time and resources.

In NYC I would say that it's still a mixed. The comment section on gothamschools.org (great local edu news site) is full of Angry Teachers waiting in the wing to jump on editorials and commenters with vitriolic language.

I loathe passing around links about education to anyone in the profession. The comments almost immediately go negative. The first comment on this post was calling teachers babysitters. Everyone immediately turns against each other (parents, teachers, armchair educators, politicians).

Most good school teachers don't have time to read sites like hacker news for even an hour a day. They're in the weeds --running after school programs, early morning programs, writing IEPs, planning upcoming lessons, and whole slew of other stuff most people don't even think about.

People in the tech field all have the luxury to stop working to check out a few articles on the internet. We even pretend like this is making us better at our job. Teachers do not have this kind of time. They are on the moment they walk in to the moment they walk out (and them some more before they go to sleep).

Good teachers are like full stack engineers. They have to worry about everything and carry all the wait. They're thrown into a 50+ year system that almost never changes. Their version of a startup is creating a new school, and that's still a derisive, hot topic (chart schools). Instead most of them work for the education equivalent of IBM.

But still, Academic Recess sounds like a good idea. I just signed up. Hit me up at gaelenh at gmail dot com if you want any help.

I read a story a couple years ago about a couple who had there home raided over 50 times over a 4-5 year period by NYPD. Turns out there address was used as test data in the system, and it was leaking into the police's forms/database. So, if using fake data, make sure it can't be mistaken with an actual address/phone number/dna sequence.