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2,734 karma · joined April 2, 2008

Developer in San Francisco. https://www.mattcrampton.com

Co-Founder - Gigwalk Co-Founder - Headnote

Email: matt@mattcrampton.com

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revicon··on The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal (2017)
A while back I fell out of love with Evernote and migrated all my years of notes out to txt files which are synced to Dropbox. Huge nested folder structures but easily searched via grep or whatever. And then I have a folder called “Captains Log” and I make txt files for as many things as I can during the day. Code snippets, reminders to buy eggs at the store, urls to some dumb thing I want to remember to read later on but can’t bother with right now. Often the only content of the txt file is the title and no content if it was just a quick jot. And now you can use the Dropbox app edit txt files directly inside it which makes for easy note taking when mobile. Been using this method for years now, still going strong.
revicon··on Millions to be made in Unbundling Reddit
I guess the trick here is how do you make a site that is so much better than a subreddit that anyone is willing to manually click over to your site instead of consuming the subreddit’s content along with the rest of their reddit feed.
revicon··on U.S. looking at banning Chinese social media apps, including TikTok
Which law are you referring to? To my knowledge there isn't a "Just do what I tell you to" law on the books. Apple and Google could decide willingly to ban the apps from their app stores but outside of that I'm curious what law could be brought to bear that would force them.
revicon··on Photo Requests from Solitary
I wonder if the "Patrick" that signed that request is also the Patrick interviewed in this article also in the the Pelican Bay SHU:

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2013/07/17/california-pri...

revicon··on Twitter Engineering:We’re starting with a set of words we want to move away from
As a white guy who has never experienced racism before, I don’t feel comfortable judging weather any of these changes make sense. I would hope that they’ve sat down with groups of people they believe they are offending with these words and figured out if these changes actually make a difference to them. If the have, then more power to them.
revicon··on Twitter Engineering:We’re starting with a set of words we want to move away from
I believe the thinking is they are insensitive to people with mental illnesses.
revicon··on In the body, the coronavirus is even more sinister than scientists realized
It’s not really that this virus is strange, it’s more that we’ve never really dug into the subtler effects of a lot of viruses that humans suffer infections from.

Herpes is another virus that when’re just now finding far removed links to, alzheimer's disease being one.

revicon··on Never-before-seen “black nitrogen” plugs puzzle in periodic table
Here's what a BX90-type diamond anvil cell looks like...

https://aip.scitation.org/action/showOpenGraphArticleImage?d...

revicon··on Show HN: Bear – Minimal blogging platform
I'm going to go start a new shoe company named Puma. Hey, it's a common animal name, no problem.
revicon··on With remote work plan, Facebook dashes hopes of paycheck arbitrage
I doubt middle america is going to benefit much from this. Once a company has bitten the remote workers bullet there are far cheaper alternatives that hiring a SWE in Ohio. There are huge numbers of highly capable devs right across the border in college towns in Mexico and farther south in multiple South American countries. All on US time zones and working at a fraction of the price of a US developer regardless of their location.
revicon··on With remote work plan, Facebook dashes hopes of paycheck arbitrage
I read somewhere that they were talking about using the Facebook app itself to track remote employees whereabouts. Having trouble finding the reference right now though.
revicon··on Show HN: How many miles do you think you've scrolled today?
Try this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-extension-s...

Views the source code straight from the google store

revicon··on Show HN: How many miles do you think you've scrolled today?
One thing I always do is use the Chrome Extension Source Viewer (also an extension)

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-extension-s...

Which lets me view the source code of any chrome extension right from the chrome store install page, lets me see for myself if the extension is going to try to make any covert external web requests or whatever.

revicon··on Amazon locks down internal employee communications amid organizing efforts
What makes you think this is a futile cause? Union protections are at an all time low right now, it's likely they can continue suppressing employee organization if they kill lines of communication. Especially with the historic high unemployment rates hitting middle america right now.
revicon··on Coronavirus will change airlines and the way we fly
You can already purchase two seats today to achieve this result if you wanted to.
revicon··on Biggest Oil ETF Could Go ‘Lights Out,’ Warns Wall Street Strategist
A 100% return in a year is an amazing return on investment in my book (if you can stomach investing in fossil fuels)
revicon··on Whole Foods is tracking and scoring stores it deems at risk of unionizing
> Is there a good reason why we allow capital to organise itself and not labour

Capital is liquid, labor is not. Labor is emotional, gets sick, wants days off, doesn't want to work under undesirable conditions, etc. Capital doesn't have opinions, doesn't need to have elections and votes.

revicon··on Ask HN: Programs that wasted you 100 hours?
Wordpress. After banging on it over and over with themes and templates etc etc I realized I should have just stuck with a static hosted Jekyll site, so thats what I did.
revicon··on Ask HN: Any sites like oursignal.com?
Do we know how they decided how to size the various stories?
revicon··on Cyberpunk: Then and Now
I've never heard of Solarpunk before, but I'm going to go read/watch everything in this genre now.

"If Cyberpunk rebelled against post-war optimism, Solarpunk rebels against today’s structural pessimism. Only around since 2015, Solarpunk creates bright, beautiful worlds with rich atmospheres. Solarpunk’s aesthetic draws inspiration from Art Noveau and artists like Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki. If Hayao Miyazaki’s Future Boy Conan is Solarpunk’s Alphaville, Beasts of The Southern Wild is Solarpunk’s Shockwave Rider."

revicon··on Torture prevalent, effective in popular movies, study finds
24 premiered on November 6, 2001, 56 days after the 9/11 attacks. My un-informed opinion is torture got a whole lot more popular because of that than the show
revicon··on Ask HN: What are some deep, mentality changing books?
Here's my three...

Be Here Now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Here_Now_(book)

The Tao of Pooh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tao_of_Pooh

Tao Te Ching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_Te_Ching

revicon··on Show HN: IMAP API – Self-hosted access to IMAP over REST
Google spreads a lot of FUD (right or wrong) about anything that doesn’t use their oAuth.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-were-banning-these-inse...

revicon··on Privacy-focused messenger Signal is ready to go mainstream and take on WhatsApp
Started a HackerNews group chat on Signal to test it out. Ping me your signal phone # to hngroupchat@mattcrampton.com and I'll invite you to the group.
revicon··on Never Use Floats for Money (2016)
I’ve built two different payment platforms in the past, I’m curious why floating point is the correct and only choice for financial modeling.
revicon··on In 1986 Microsoft advertised Windows was available “except in Nebraska”. Why?
Save you a click...

“Windows was available in Nebraska. This commercial is a parody of other commercials that, for legal reasons, had to exclude Nebraska. That line in this commercial is a wink and a nod to that.

So what was up with those commercials being parodied?

Prior to 1991, all 800 numbers were carrier-specific. Because of the mixed-up telephone system the US had after breakup of Bell, this meant that to call from one side of the country to another (such as on an 800 call), you may have to cross several carriers. This could get expensive.

To limit this, companies with 800 numbers got wise and centralized in the middle of the US. Due to its central location, Nebraska ended up the destination of many call centers for the, on average, cheaper 800 call rates. So companies moved their call centers to Nebraska for financial reasons.

But why did that make offers void? Because this 800 system could not successfully route in-state and out-of-state calls until 1981, when AT&T developed the tech to do so.

So throughout the 60s, 70s, and early 80s, the offers were void to Nebraska callers because they literally could not make the phone call.

As dumb as this sounds, remember: until the government stepped in in 1983, phone companies wouldn’t even allow consumers to own their own phone!

As an aside, there are still a lot of call centers in Nebraska, but the restirctions on 800 numbers being loosened has created a long, slow exodus of such jobs.

Refs: https://www.ringcentral.com/blog/the-history-of-800-numbers/...

revicon··on Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday?
exactly that actually, we posted a flyer in a computer store, I think it was called "Cybertech" and had a couple ppl show up the first night, then a few more, then a few more. We started having a table at computer shows helping people install linux on their desktops, and finally we ended up taking over a cybercafe and converted all of the desktops to linux. You could run a web browser, play doom, it was fun.
revicon··on Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday?
3 of us started the Kalamazoo Linux User's Group (KLUG) back in 1998 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Still going strong today: https://kalamazoolinux.org/
revicon··on My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
A stranger's computer meaning Dropbox? No, I've worked in similar companies and know the kinds of rigor they put on limiting access to private user data. The number of audits they have to go through for the certifications they have to maintain means they actually take that stuff fairly seriously. At least enough for me to not feel worried about them stealing my recipe for tuna noodle casserole
revicon··on My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
One thing I want to try is having a cron job that exports all my Linux command line commands that I ran that day and dumps them into a txt file for historical purposes.
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