Hacker News Reader

jvvlimmeon Ask HN: Are Wise and Revolut good?

I’ve used Wise a few times and cant complain. Process was fast and straightforward.

jvvlimmeon Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

There are more efficient ways to achieve the same and get a bunch of other positive side effects in one go: Land Value Taxation. Henry George proposed it already in 1879 in his book "Progress and Poverty".

jvvlimmeon Ask HN: Starting a Company on a B1/B2 Visa

IANAL If you already have a company in your home country but you might want to check EB-1 visa's.

jvvlimmeon Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?

Seems like a lot of people say they want to pay per article but in reality don’t.

There was such a service in The Netherlands but they pivoted to a subscription model (still p*ssed about it)

https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/micropayments-for-news-pio...

jvvlimmeon Why Jira Sucks

No, it’s not. From a Product Owner point of view, it’s a piece of shit. Hard to set priorities, hard to follow progress. I’ll take jira any day.

jvvlimmeon Why a land-value tax is inevitable

Only that doesn’t happen in real life. People on the brink of poverty don’t inherit property. And if they do, they can always sell it and put that money to better use.

jvvlimmeon Why a land-value tax is inevitable

If the value goes up when all else stays the same, it is actually the land value that goes up.

If you completely renovate the house, a property tax would go up but the lvt stays the same.

jvvlimmeon Why a land-value tax is inevitable

You most certainly should be paying the equivalent of 10 households. You deny 9 others the ability to use the land.

If you have real use for the land, paying the lvt won’t be an issue. If you can’t use it efficiently, an lvt will incentivise you to sell what you don’t use.

jvvlimmeon I sold Baremetrics

Become a contractor, you'll be in the 100 to 200k/year. (ok yes, that's before taxes)

jvvlimmeon Ask HN: Is it safe to update to macOS Catalina (10.15.3)?

Yep, runs just fine. Except for some security settings I haven't noticed much difference with the older versions.

jvvlimmeon Ask HN: Personal Database Tool?

Notion.so?

jvvlimmeon Ask HN: How are you dealing with meetings and meeting creep?

1/ Don't attend meetings that have no or vague agenda 2/ Law of two feet: If you feel the meeting isn't for you, leave. 3/ No developer should endure recurring meetings (except for things like scrum ceremony or whatever methodology you practice requires), that's for management.

jvvlimmeon Is this any way to shut down an API?

You're mainly talking about the progressive shutdown?

I think it makes perfect sense. It makes teams that didn't get the shutdown notice aware of it in an acute way and encourages them to take action without putting them on the spot.

jvvlimmeon Finland freezes arms export permits to Saudi Arabia and UAE over Yemen

https://www.amazon.com/Proof-Collusion-Trump-Betrayed-Americ...

No affiliation.

jvvlimmeon Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

SimCity up until SC4.

EA really dropped the ball there, completely destroying a classic. No one ever asked for a multiplayer version. And most just want to build a big city, not the tiny shthles it only lets you build now.

jvvlimmeon Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

This. I still have the CS6 installed and use it often.

jvvlimmeon Ask HN: Why is there no netflix for news?

Blendle became available in the US recently. You pay per article you read, prices varying per source and I believe article length. If after reading an article you found the quality lacking or it wasn't about what you believed it would be, you can get an instant refund with the click of a button.

jvvlimmeon Ask HN: What do you think about the current education system?

There is very little good about the current education system:

1/ Dividing kids in age based groups is very poor. They only learn negative behaviour from each other. Skill based would be more interesting as the younger kids would learn from the older students and the older ones learn some responsibility towards the older students

2/ Scientific research has proven teacher based education to be sub-optimal. You take away the inquisitive nature of the kids. They will take what the adult says as true and fail to look for different ways to reach the same goal.

3/ School just isn't fun. Information is pumped into children which they forget once it has been tested. Let them discover things in a playful way and they will remember it much longer.

4/ Exams really only test how well one can game exams and tests, not how well one understood the matter. Test should be used as a personal measure to check if you understood everything and if you are ready to move on to more complex issues, not as a benchmark compared to others.

And so much more.

jvvlimmeon Is It Cheaper to Stay in an Airbnb ‘Entire Home’ Rental or a Hotel?

> From the user's point of view, Booking.com is a horrible cluttered web site with 1990'ish approaches to design, usability and online marketing.

Strange because they A/B test literally everything. The site looks the way it does because it sells better that way. You could actually say the same for Amazon then.

jvvlimmeon Micropayment platform Blendle will launch a US beta in early 2016

Yep, I can agree with this.

They also send out a mail twice a day with headlining stories. There's almost always at least on story that interests me.

Blendle really is the ideal tool for me. I don't have a problem paying for quality content, but don't make me take out an XX$ subscription just to read one article every now and then.

jvvlimmeon I gave my students iPads – then wished I could take them back

A while back I attended a presentation and the speaker summed it up nicely: "We live in the 21st century, we go to work in the 20th and our kids go to school in the 19th."

And the main hurdle here is not the tech but the teachers. With a few exceptions, teachers are technophobes and they don't have the mindset to support tech in the classroom.

jvvlimmeon Elasticsearch Configuration and Test Results

Write Heavy is when you are mainly using your ES cluster to log data while your searches are minimal in comparison. Logging is a typical example of this (you save a lot of data but only sporadically do you do searches or aggregates on this).

You might find this an interesting page to read: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/...

jvvlimmeon Elasticsearch Configuration and Test Results

This looks like a good basic configuration.

You should add a note that this is for a read-heavy ES cluster.

If you have a write-heavy cluster (thinking ELK), you'll want a different config with more focus on bulk and index.

jvvlimmeon Ask HN: What would you tell your 20 something years old self?

- Don't go straight to college, take a year off or you'll bore out and drop out.

- Try not to avoid what you're actually good at, you'll end up in IT anyway.

- Stop wasting money, it'll get you into trouble several times down the road.

- Stop wasting time.

- Work out more, it's easier to lose pounds in your twenties then it is now in your thirties.

You'll do just fine regardless.

jvvlimmeon Cure for cancer one step closer after 'spectacular' breakthrough

Don't believe everything they say. Tufts is financed by the pharmaceutical industry AND is based on data provided by the industry.

jvvlimmeon The school that hates rules

I've read extensively about the Sudbury model and education in general when I wanted to find out why I didn't fare well in the classical educational system although I am of above average intelligence.

While I don't think the Sudbury model is generally applicable (they have had their share of failed schools), it contains a lot more postives than classical education.

The classical education system is the way it is for organisational reasons, not for any pedagogic reason:

* There is sufficient scientific research that proves that teacher based education is highly inefficient.

* The age based grouping of children is just plain stupid and has no merit whatsoever. A better way to group them, if you must group them, is on skill level. Grouping children of different ages has advantages for all of them: the younger ones get an attainable role model, the older ones learn a sense of responsibility.

* Sitting still and being required to concentrate for an hour is something you cannot ask a child to do, especially the younger ones. They should be allowed to play and explore. They will learn a lot more than what a teacher can offer.

* It’s a fantasy to believe that you learn much in school. The only thing you learn is to game the system: You learn to remember something long enough for a test or exam, and afterwards, you forget most.

And I could go on and on about it.

jvvlimmeon Ask HN: Recommend a recommendation system

Predictionio is the glue between, amongst other things, mahout and elasticsearch if I'm not mistaking.

jvvlimmeon Bulk Email Solution?

http://www.mandrill.com

It's a spinoff of Mailchimp targeted at transactional e-mail although you can use it for marketing mails too.

jvvlimmeon Show HN: SendGlide – Beautiful email marketing for small businesses

Deliverability is going to be substantially better. IPs from commercial providers are trusted among ISPs and have a better chance not being flagged as spam.

jvvlimmeon IPv6 Adoption Statistics

We have only 2 ISPs that completely dominate the market. Both have rolled out IPv6. Technically everyone can be on IPv6 but there are stil a lot of old routers in circulation.