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nikatworkon The Anti-Helicopter Parent’s Plea: Let Kids Play

Never underestimate the nosiness of curtain-twitching busybody neighbors.

nikatworkon The Anti-Helicopter Parent’s Plea: Let Kids Play

Tell that to my boss.

XML is still huge in corp land. In Healthcare, HL7 is gradually moving to an XML version. SOAP is everywhere, JSON is not. Horses for courses.

nikatworkon Ask HN: What's your favorite HN post?

A vocal percentage of the HN crowd assumes you are working on a personal machine with full admin rights, not behind any firewall, and that you have the expertise, spare time and patience to setup and maintain a system.

Ironically these criticisms are largely thrown at consumer apps, while server apps (eg third party monitoring and reporting) rarely cop it at the same level.

A recent example that comes to mind - I'm not affiliated and tbf plenty of comments point out valid use cases - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10289673

nikatworkon Australian traffic button pushes beautiful design

As another commenter pointed out they could have made that surface not look like a button, then you would not have to discover that UX function, which is superior design. Good design is intuitive.

nikatworkon Australian traffic button pushes beautiful design

> Have you never even been so curious as to touch it?

The correct design is to create it such that it serves the unsighted without enticing the sighted to mistake it for a button and touch it for a function it does not perform.

nikatworkon Australian traffic button pushes beautiful design

I have tried traffic buttons in many different countries (there's a sentence I never thought I'd type) and none have made me as egregiously furious as the Australian ones.

They're an abomination on the level of CSS and the iTunes interface.

nikatworkon Australian traffic button pushes beautiful design

These buttons are horrible from a UX perspective. The old design had a light that would activate after you pressed to acknowledge your request. Many of these new ones don't, so pedestrians will stand there mashing over and over as there's no feedback.

Not to mention the smaller metal lozenge at the top which looks like a button but does nothing, so people press both surfaces in confusion.

Oh and people are so Pavlovian trained to start walking at the "cross" sound that when you have these buttons side by side at an intersection people will literally start walking into traffic when the adjacent button triggers.

The design is pants on head idiotic.

nikatworkon Airbnb Adopts Rules in Effort to Fight Discrimination by Its Hosts

It's parents all the way down.

nikatworkon How to Test Drive Your Business Idea Before Quitting Your Job

> Yelp for people?

What a truly heinous product. I've known a number of people who have been stalked, I can't begin to imagine the harm a stalker could cause with this kind of app.

nikatworkon Willpower and cognitive processing draw from the same pool of resources (2013)

And if I push myself to give more fucks per day I find it easier to maintain that level over time... I think of it as building momentum, others think of it as exercising the willpower muscle.

Ego depletion could be a "just so" story but I still think it's an interesting/useful model.

nikatworkon Canadian surgeons urge people to throw out bristle BBQ brushes

Just go drinking with some nurses, they always have good foreign object stories. My fave was about a morbidly obese person who got a whole BBQ chicken lodged in their throat. They called in half the department to "observe" that one.

nikatworkon Canadian surgeons urge people to throw out bristle BBQ brushes

> old newspapers... which of course we know today it's not such a great idea, heh

Why is it a bad idea? The newspaper thing is common in Oz, and a quick Google turned up nothing.

nikatworkon In Texas, a man who didn’t kill anybody is about to be executed for murder

> you are, on net, supporting it.

I haven't donated to any anti Boko Haram orgs. Does that mean I support murdering children?

nikatworkon Mapping the World of Music Using Machine Learning: Part 1

I've always wanted a "mood" button to separate the signals I'm sending the algo. So I don't get chamber music in the middle of my death metal.

nikatworkon Hampton Creek Ran Undercover Project to Buy Up Its Own Vegan Mayo

Eggs in commercial products either come from free-range, barn, or cage chickens. The vast majority are from caged chickens, although this is slowly changing. Caged chickens are locked in a tiny cramped cage, sometimes strapped down with their beaks removed, and are usually pumped full of chemicals.

That's pretty fucked up, the only way this could not reasonably be considered cruelty is if you assert animals have no emotions and science seems to disagree with that notion. Free range is much better, the chooks can roam around in the open doing chicken stuff. I eat free range eggs.

Environmental damage from increased farming is only a major factor where specific habitats are being destroyed, eg Palm Oil in Indonesia. Even then, it's a lesser evil than directly harming individual creatures.

nikatworkon Hampton Creek Ran Undercover Project to Buy Up Its Own Vegan Mayo

> The misleading marketing (trumpeting health benefits or - like our parent post - less animal cruelty)

If the product truly is free of animal products, then it is most certainly reducing animal cruelty compared with mass-farmed chicken egg mayo. Ethics aside, that is an objective fact.

nikatworkon Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

...except if all the competitors ask how much the employee was paid at their last gig, so bid $12.

Price fixing is an actual thing, that's why we have labor laws. Also see: non-compete agreements.

nikatworkon Learning how to program in Oman in the 90’s

Depends on your hardware. Some games required extensive noodling with CONFIG.SYS and memory flags to run. This was essentially pre-internet so it sucked unless you had some local help.

nikatworkon Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years

There's an active hobbyist lockpicking community out there with plenty of instructional videos. One could nefariously apply these skills, doesn't make the video producers liable.

nikatworkon Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (2015)

smart != saleable skills

nikatworkon Microsoft offloads Nokia feature phone business to Foxconn for $350M

China claims sovereignty over Taiwan. Some publications toe the party line.

nikatworkon Apple invests $1B in Chinese ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing

China uses soft power and regulations to hamper foreign products, especially software. This investment will put Apple in good standing with the govt and could result in an easing of restrictions on Apple's other activities.

nikatworkon Sunrise is shutting down

Would Apple allow an app that's ad-free for 30 days then chock full of nagware?

nikatworkon Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source

Github sucks for corporate version control, it's just not designed for the kind of strict role-based change control that enterprise needs. Great support though.

I haven't checked out Bitbucket because last time I evaluated (2+ years ago) they didn't have good on-prem options.

nikatworkon BMW, Audi and Toyota cars can be unlocked and started with hacked radios

In most first world countries that sticker would just get your bike taken by the police instead of a thief.

nikatworkon BMW, Audi and Toyota cars can be unlocked and started with hacked radios

I've always wanted to build a spring loaded 30cm titanium spike that would shoot from the seat pole through the seat if not disarmed. Obviously completely illegal, but a satisfying mental exercise.

nikatworkon LSD: My Life-Saving Drug

This is fine if you are feeling young, edgy and indestructible but I would not recommend it to most newbies. Warm dark room with lots of pillows and a good friend is safest.

nikatworkon Chemicals linked with severe respiratory disease found in e-cigarette flavors

Well, this has prompted me to make sure any brand I buy is free from Diacetyl etc. It's not the vaping that's bad per se, it's the chemicals some brands are using in the flavoring.

nikatworkon Show HN: Don't Name the Shooter

This Mother Jones article sums up the argument cogently: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/10/media-inspires-m...

It's not just murders. Australian media will often not report suicides to prevent triggering copycats.