Hacker News Reader

polytapon Negativland, Culture Jamming, and the Art of Making Something New

I accidentally got New Coke, I poured it down the drain.

polytapon Paw – Advanced API tool for Mac

I couldn't upvote this enough. The lack of objective comparison in comments is astounding, and it fits a pattern.

polytapon I got arrested in Kazakhstan and represented myself in court

This story reflects most poorly on the author himself.

polytapon What are “actual pictures” of atoms actually pictures of?

The strange barb at music synthesizers was uncalled for.

polytapon Obama Forgives Student Debt Of 400,000 Americans

Compared to many other institutions, Stanford does a good job of dealing with that issue. 85% of students receive some form of financial aid. There is no family financial burden for incomes $60k/year and lower.

polytapon San Francisco Tech Firms See Workers Flee from $4,500 Rents

Taller, flexible buildings are much better at distributing shock waves.

polytapon Show HN: CuriosityStream – Netflix for non-fiction

You might want to consider naming your pricing plans differently.

There is a plan offering standard definition streaming called "Basic", and a plan offering high definition streaming called "Standard".

Those two words are often synonymous.

polytapon TurboTax Takes Aim at Smaller Rival in Fight for Filers

Yeah, they really seem to have taken it up a notch this year.

I was presented with a refund that was only possible if I purchased a small business plan. When I declined, the UI reduced my refund by $2k and also said I'd have to re-enter my personal information it had saved from last year, basically penalizing me.

Curious, I went to H&R Block and began to file my current-year taxes from scratch. Lo and behold, HRB's basic service level calculated my full refund.

polytapon Why Engineers Can’t Stop Los Angeles' Enormous Methane Leak

Here's a little taste of how things have turned out since SCE and SDGE decided to give up fixing and maintaining San Onofre:

http://www.kpbs.org/news/2015/aug/03/counting-customer-costs...

polytapon One in Three Farms Is Using FarmLogs

There are more than 2 million "farms" in the U.S. Snag "One in Three" of those as paying customers (at nearly $1k/year) and it's very unlikely you'd need to use TechCrunch as a marketing and PR platform.

polytapon Welcome Amy, Susan, Colleen, and Steven

You have a strange way of congratulating someone who achieved what they consider to be happiness.

polytapon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2015)

If search optimization is what you're after, why not just use "local"

polytapon Offer HN: Free Use of Agricultural Land 30 miles Northwest of Chicago

Great idea and gesture to the community.

Does any of your land receive irrigation?

I'd like to send you several surface and subsoil sensors to deploy that will communicate back to me via GPRS. Just a couple of minutes is needed to deploy each sensor.

And it would be very helpful if you could send back a soil sample at my expense.

Does this sound practical?

polytapon Garduino Rotary Phone: Saving my garden using Twilio, Arduino and Sinatra

SoCal.

The professional/industrial environmental sensor market sucks.

Pretty much any sensor offering high precision is sold exclusively through authorized resellers that in turn hold the logged data captive and liberate it manually through what amount to expensive professional services contracts.

I'd like to smash that.

polytapon Garduino Rotary Phone: Saving my garden using Twilio, Arduino and Sinatra

There are not, though I am building such a thing.

RF-equipped sensors (315 or 433 Mhz) transmitting to a GPRS or WiFi enabled hub would be best.

A fairly affordable foundation for that in Arduino-land would be the Fio or the LilyPad USB -- both of which have the LiPo charger.