Hacker News Reader

They are also known for not paying their writers.

https://nwu.org/nwu-and-nautilus-magazine-settle-60000-non-p...

nrookon A solar power researcher discusses the “duck curve” he helped discover

I dunno, this so-called expert sounds like a quack.

nrookon Urbanism and Standards of Respectability

https://www.rentcafe.com/blog/rental-market/apartment-rent-r...

According to this site, rental prices in Houston were less than a third of prices in San Francisco in June 2017 ($1046 vs $3441).

That sort of difference is certainly going to drive away less affluent people.

nrookon Is there a winning strategy in Tetris?

I think your disagreement comes from a problem of definition. This paper (linked in the mathoverflow thread) appears to demonstrate playing Tetris optimally is NP-hard, even in a turn-based environment; that's because playing Tetris optimally involves getting lots of Tetrises, not just surviving indefinitely.

http://publications.csail.mit.edu/lcs/pubs/pdf/MIT-LCS-TR-86...

In contrast, it's not clear to me that playing Tetris indefinitely with the piece randomizers used in current Tetris games is NP-hard.

nrookon Introducing Increment

The question of compensation is relevant to the topic of a sustainable on-call rotation, described by Katherine Daniels in this article:

https://increment.com/on-call/crafting-sustainable-on-call-r...

Intuitively, I suspect that a generous oncall compensation plan would mitigate a harsh rotation to a certain extent, but that engineers would still burn out eventually. But that's just my intuition, and I have only personal experience to back it up: I wanted to hear what other companies were doing, and was disappointed the topic wasn't covered in this otherwise comprehensive issue.

nrookon Introducing Increment

I was surprised to see no discussion of an oncall bonus or compensation in the first issue of Increment. This is a practice which is uncommon but not rare in the industry; Google, for instance, offers generous compensation to developers with a serious oncall shift.

It would be interesting to see a discussion of this topic, but I suppose this is expected if a publication is published by a company rather than by laborers directly.

nrookon PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

Is there any way to donate to the PhantomJS project? This seems like a good time to throw some money their way, in thanks for what the maintainers (mostly Vitaly over the past few months, at least, it looks like) have done.

nrookon LastPass release fix for DOM manipulation vulnerability

Surely you mean "pretty good"?

nrookon How to Be a Stoic

The Book of Job is understood by most Christians to be a literary and theological work, rather than being literally true. I highly recommend reading it to anyone who is curious about how Judaism or Christianity views the problem of evil, but you have to be reading it from the right mindset; it's not supposed to be something God actually did, even in the minds of believers.

nrookon Freenom World – A fast and anonymous Public DNS resolver

That's surprising: With that IP address, you'd expect it to be ten times as slow.

nrookon Launching Our Crowdfunding Campaign

Could you elaborate on why wildcard certs are a bad idea? I've heard this from several sources, but I haven't read a breakdown of why people think this.

If I'm running a web application, and want to provide an interface where separate teams sign up and access their version of the app at team-name.your-app.com, what's the alternative? Or is it that this is considered unwise, and I should just put team-name in the URL path instead?