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kagenekoon How to Level the College Playing Field

My wife was a teacher for ~10 years. She made a nice salary, but she also spent a pretty good amount on supplies for her classroom since her school was routinely overenrolled and underfunded. She also had to spend money on classes and certifications every few years in order to maintain her license.

Georgia (at the time) gave bonuses and increased salary for additional degrees and specializations, so there was some incentive to improve. When she left (mostly because she was tired of dealing with parents...) there was talk about removing the higher education/specialization bonuses, but I don't know if that came about. There's also no union. There are a few professional organizations, but they don't have bargaining power.

I think in the United States, it's really hard to talk about teacher experience as a whole, given the different laws and situations.

kagenekoon Walmart in Early-Stage Acquisition Talks with Humana

Their LEDs have been great for me, but their CFLs were terrible. I have CFLs from Home Depot that are still going after 10 years. My Walmart versions often died in less than a year. Clothing is another thing -- I've gotten really good at supergluing their shoes back.

That said, I still buy from Walmart, but I'm much more careful about what I get. I've gotten good use out of kitchen ware, household goods, LEDs, etc.

kagenekoon The next billion users are the future of the internet

Our Echo is basically a glorified alarm clock/weather checker/music player. If you just give it a number, it'll ask you to clarify if you mean morning or afternoon.

"Set alarm for 7"

"Do you mean 7 in the morning or 7 in the afternoon?"

"AM"

"Setting alarm for 7 AM."

kagenekoon The House That Spied on Me

I seem to recall a paper about using the noise in the electrical system of a home to determine what appliances were plugged in and turned on at any point in time.

Sidhant Gupta, Matthew S. Reynolds, and Shwetak N. Patel. 2010. ElectriSense: single-point sensing using EMI for electrical event detection and classification in the home. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM international conference on Ubiquitous computing (UbiComp '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 139-148. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1864349.1864375

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1864375

That said: I used to work for a smart meter manufacturer and (AFAIK) we didn't do anything like that. Granular readings were the most important part. Our meters could report in 15 minute buckets, which was useful for tiered billing. Most of the push back against these meters were because they use radios to report readings back and there was concern about radiation. There were people who were building faraday cages around the meters.

kagenekoon Intel made smart glasses that look normal

Yeah. I was working on some search-and-rescue stuff using Google Glass. My eventual prototype had a "coarse" mode and a "fine" mode.

In fine mode, it would give you a fairly detailed readout of the bearing and distance to your target (marked with GPS). It required doing that thing where you're looking up-and-to-the-right in order to see what was going on.

In coarse mode, the entire Glass display was changed to a single color. I found that it showed up well even in someone's peripheral vision and the colors were distinct enough that you could navigate pretty well without having to watch the display.

I tried using symbols (giant triangles to indicate direction and such) but none of them worked as well as the color blocks.

kagenekoon Intel made smart glasses that look normal

Speaking of ring interfaces, Ring [0] was a Kickstarter project that happened. I seem to recall that it did ship but didn't actually work too well. I suspect that your simpler interface would have been a lot more successful.

I think some of it depends on which finger you're targeting, too. Wearing it on the index finger makes it easier to tap/push buttons using the thumb.

In my HCI class, we went over this paper [1] (2010). It has a wide variety of always-available input and output and many of them would work well with these glasses. My hardware crush is a Myo [2], although I don't know how well it works. The videos of it look neat, at least :).

Also, I had the exact same idea for a hand interface as a project for my Ubicomp class, but I didn't have the skills to do it. I ended up doing research for "smart jewelry" instead :|

[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1761670738/ring-shortcu...

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

[2] https://www.myo.com/

kagenekoon Driving a Car in Manhattan Could Cost $11 Under Congestion Plan

Oh, we needed the money. :( I live on the OTP on the east side, so GA400 toll didn't hit me. There was a political promise to end the toll when the improvements on 400 were finished. Initially, the DOT wanted to keep the toll booths open to pay for additional improvements (GA400-I285 interchange, expansion of GA400, etc.) but the cries of broken promises ended that plan.

Let us not forget the congestion pricing for the express lanes on I85. The price kept going down and down during the first few months it was around. I seem to recall plans to use congestion pricing for further I75 and GA400 expansions.

kagenekoon Chrome breaks the Web

https://meet.google.com/

Although, it's not very good in Chrome either :)

kagenekoon Waze error leaves São Paulo traffic (even more) congested

I stopped using Waze last year after it started consistently giving me bad directions that would add 30-60 minutes to my commute. After a few weeks of that, I just gave up. Before that, it would periodically give me bad directions and I assumed that it was sending me on crazy routes because it didn't have any recent data and it needed a victim to check the traffic.

The time it sent me along a street with 2 school zones during bus time was the worst, tho.

kagenekoon Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

After my dad had a stroke, he needed a new phone that he could use easily. We ended up with a Nokia using Windows Phone because the large tiles and keyboard buttons were something he could handle. The iOS and Android interfaces required more precision than he was able to do.

To be fair, this was 5 or so years ago and I didn't delve very far into accessibility settings for anything. WP worked fine out of the box, though.

kagenekoon Ask HN: What was your first computer?

Heathkit H89

kagenekoon The Real Reason the U.S. Has Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance

I don't think there's been a serious effort yet. I seem to recall proposals floating around in the past 6 months, though. One thing I remember is making employer healthcare be taxable income.

kagenekoon Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?

Oh man... I don't know. There's so many.

I'll need to go with

Gilbert, E., & Karahalios, K. (2009, April). Predicting tie strength with social media. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 211-220). ACM.

In grad school, it was the paper that kept on giving. I think I cited it every semester for a paper or project. There's a lot of other papers and books that really inspired me, but this one was magic.

kagenekoon Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

In my experience, growing older, I've found both of these generalizations to be true in myself. There are plenty of times that I've watched junior developers make literally the exact same mistakes I made 10 years ago. At the same time, I've learned that technology has continued to move on and things that were wrong 10 years ago may not be wrong today.

I remember when I started out that I'd scour every line of code for memory leaks and optimize the hell out of it. Today we've got more memory, faster machines, and the code doesn't need to be quite as tight.

Mentorship goes both ways. I help newer devs about processes and patterns. They help me with new technology and trends. I think it works well but it requires patience on everyone's parts.

kagenekoon Ask HN: What Podcasts are you listening right now and why?

I listen to a lot of horror fiction podcasts like Darkest Night, the No Sleep Podcast, some other fiction stuff like Rabbits and Alice Isn't Dead, and then some other stuff.

Planet Money -- my favorite

99% Invisible

Marketplace with Kai Ryssdal

History Honeys

Six Feats Under

My wife is more into Sunday School Dropouts than I am, but I listen to it occasionally. She also listens to some other history podcasts but I don't recall what they are.

kagenekoon Chrome 59 has cross-platform headless support

I've run into some problems with some of the more ... creative jasmine tests I've done. Mostly, it's been around object mocks. I've found places where I can do things with Object.defineProperty() in Chrome that throw exceptions in PhantomJS :(

kagenekoon Ask HN: What books fundamentally changed the way you think about the world?

"Only Yesterday" by Frederick Lewis Allen.

I first read it in history class in high school and have gone back and reread a few times since then, when society and politics began making me nervous. It's really fascinating to read about day-to-day things from a hundred years ago and find out just how little things have really changed.

https://www.amazon.com/Only-Yesterday-Informal-History-1920s...

kagenekoon CloudPets teddy bears leaked and ransomed, exposing kids' voice messages

Yeah, I'm not worried about my kid saying things that will get him in trouble. However... he repeats literally everything that he hears, sometimes verbatim. Sometimes hours or days layer. To be honest, it's really creepy at times. Plus, he doesn't really have a filter, so he'll talk about everything he sees at school or on the playground, just chattering about all day to himself.

So I'm worried about my kid saying things that could get other people into trouble.

kagenekoon Using Neutrino to jump-start modern JavaScript development

The inability to customize webpack was sometimes a pain point for me. There were a few things I wanted to do that would have been much easier if I could just play around with it. Fortunately, they've added the ability to get yourself a webpack config!

https://github.com/angular/angular-cli/commit/7ac0d05

http://www.dzurico.com/angular-cli-with-the-super-powers/

kagenekoon Ask HN: Do you carry a backpack? Which one?

I have a Trager backpack. I've had it for about 14 years -- originally purchased it to carry all of the pages I was photocopying for my psychology classes. It has outlasted a number of other backpacks that I've picked up over the years.

kagenekoon Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

Since early in college, my 2nd choice has always been psychology -- so much that I went back to school to finish up a BA in Psychology. I would focus on either cognitive or industrial/organizational psychology. With cognitive, I'd focus on motivation. With two children, I'm always wondering what motivates them to do the things they do. In I/O, I'm looking at workplace optimization and comfort -- mostly comfort.

kagenekoon Ask HN: When did you feel to resign/leave your last job?

It was a combination of things. I didn't enjoy the work environment very much and I thought some of the policies were rather dumb. The product itself was ~8 years old and had just been hacked on since then.

The Big Thing was when, after I had been there 2 months, they announced benefits cuts for my subsidiary -- and no bonuses. These benefits were very important to me and I had stressed this during my interview. So that turned me into a motivated job seeker.

I kept my resignation as professional as possible. Worked out my time, did a proper knowledge transfer, wished everyone luck.

kagenekoon “Design Patterns” Aren't (2002)

I was at that talk. YAPC in St. Louis. (WUSTL?) At the time, I didn't know much about the Gang of Four and I had never heard of Christopher Alexander. Even many many years later, this talk has stuck with my and I spent time looking up Christopher Alexander and reading about some of his ideas. Also, I told everyone I knew about him :D

kagenekoon Sebastian Thrun Steps Down as Udacity's CEO

I was accepted to the program the year that the online masters was announced. At first, I was not amused.

However, I really really enjoyed my time actually being on campus. There were a few classes I took that would have been very difficult to do online, such as mobile & ubiq computing, where I got to spend quite a bit of time in the prototyping lab. I also had the chance to socialize a bit with professors and do some research with them. And personally, I don't do as well with online classes. I think it's really useful to have both kinds of programs. They're different experiences and they appeal to different people. Having both campus and online programs gives more opportunities to innovate in education.

kagenekoon Squash your commits

I can't trust git stash anymore. I mistyped something and it blew away a lot lot lot of work. So now I just commit stuff. If I want to get rid of the commit, I can follow it up with a reset.

kagenekoon Disney CEO asks employees to chip in to pay copyright lobbyists

When I worked at AT&T, we (annually) had presentations by a PAC and if you wanted to have a payroll deduction done, you would stay behind after. They took attendance for these presentations (and for other things like United Way).

kagenekoon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2016)

I enjoy full stack stuff because I like to know how it all works together and enjoy UI stuff because I think user experience is a critical thing. Looking for something full time. I'd like to get into machine learning, natural language processing, and intelligent agents.

Location: Atlanta, GA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: java, javascript, typescript, perl, angular, jquery, ionic, cordova, sql, c, some node and mongo and a lot more

Résumé/CV: https://github.com/herrevilkitten/resume/blob/master/Resume....

Github: https://github.com/herrevilkitten/

Email: eric@kidderberg.us

kagenekoon How Tasteless Suburbs Become Beloved Urban Neighborhoods

A recent Marketplace podcast discussed this as well. Affordability was a large factor in why the suburbs are still popular.

  “There has been an increase in college-educated young adults living in very dense
  urban neighborhoods — smart young things living in Brooklyn, in downtown
  San Francisco,” said housing analyst Jed Kolko at U.C. Berkeley’s
  Terner Center for Housing Innovation. “But it’s not true of that generation
  overall. Only about one third of 25-to-34-year-olds have a college degree.
  Today they are actually less likely to be living in urban neighborhoods,
  as opposed to suburban areas, than that same age group was in 2000.”

1. http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/young-buyers-want-...

kagenekoon The MUD Connector

Probably :) I played on quite a few muds back then. Lost Realms and Moment in Tyme were the biggest and then I played on some WoD MUSHes. I recall WoTmud. I sometimes go back to my old haunts and see what's up.

kagenekoon The MUD Connector

Oh man. A couple of times each year, I think about starting up a mud again. Back in the Day, I ran a Wheel of Time MUD called the Weave, and sometimes I think about porting it to Java or something. My C code base has some creative memory leaks in it, but running a MUD taught me a lot about coding and development and even some interpersonal stuff. (and almost kicked out of school...) I'm not sure what the equivalent entry point into networking/games/writing would be today. Engines like Unity certainly take a lot of the work out of it, but when you downloaded ROM or DikuMUD, you got a full game that you could just tweak as needed to learn things.