Hacker News Reader

robbykingon How Bad Are Zillow “Zestimates”?

In the late 90's I worked for an online mortgage broker, and 9 times out of 10 when we ordered an appraisal, the appraiser would ask us what the selling price was and return an identical figure for their estimate.

robbykingon Microsoft Teams, the new chat-based workspace in Office 365

FWIW, Slack offers Giphy integration.

robbykingon Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone

My first thought was to comment and say how sad I'd be if Instapaper shut down (I'ma premium subscriber), but in all honesty, my Instapaper queue feels more like of a burden than something I look forward to.

robbykingon Instapaper is joining Pinterest

The press release does specifically say:

> For you, the Instapaper end user and customer, nothing changes. The Instapaper team will be moving from betaworks in New York City to Pinterest’s headquarters in San Francisco, and we’ll continue to make Instapaper a great place to save and read articles.

robbykingon Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart

It's not; there are literally tens of thousands of new units currently under construction[1] in the City. The issue people have is most proposals for new construction in San Francisco consist almost exclusively of luxury housing.

There's no shortage of housing in San Francisco, only a shortage of affordable housing.

[1] http://paragon-re.com/San_Francisco_Housing_Development_Repo...

robbykingon 100 Days of Swift: The Tutorials

FWIW, I'm a professional iOS Engineer and I took the Stanford iOS Dev course as soon as it was available, and I loved it.

robbykingon Apple announces iOS 10

That was my first thought, too, but you'll most likely be able to toggle what information is visible when the the device is locked, the same way you can now with Messages, Mail, etc.

robbykingon devRant

Are you using Ghostery, uBlock, or something similar? One of those may be blocking sideloading of content.

robbykingon We Only Hire the Best

I worked at a company who almost passed on a candidate because the company thought the offer was too low, and they were worried he'd get frustrated and move on.

robbykingon Steve Miller: The Whole Music Industry Is Fuckin' Gangsters and Crooks

The labels that didn't come out ahead don't exist any more.

Just one point of clarification, when I wrote “the labels,” I meant the big three major labels and their subsidiaries. As both a life long musician and avid music fan, I don't count truly independent labels as part of the "industry."

robbykingon Steve Miller: The Whole Music Industry Is Fuckin' Gangsters and Crooks

Steve Albini's essay really illustrates how labels blaming streaming for declining album revenue is akin to the top 1% of income earnings blaming the poor for the middle class's economic problems. The labels always come out ahead, and streaming has become an easy way for the labels to refocus musicians' attention away from the actual source of the problem.

robbykingon Have I Been Pwned? Data breach master list with API

And test@example.com.

robbykingon Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

That's not the issue; the issue is the hiring gap in tech jobs and reasons behind it.

The film "Code: Debugging the Gender Gap" does an excellent job of documenting the phenomenon. Nationally, young women taking high school placement tests score as well or better than their male classmates, but are placed in advanced math and science classes at a much, much lower rate. Because of this, the number of female high school graduates who meet academic requirements for university STEM programs is much lower, and so on though graduate school until the number of qualified female candidates for jobs in STEM fields has dwindled to nearly nothing.

robbykingon Show HN: Plain Email – An app for one-touch email processing

FWiW, it doesn't only run in full screen, it just launches in full screen.

robbykingon San Francisco Bubble

A couple quick notes from a longtime (20 year) San Franciscan:

Everything is too expensive

Things are expensive, yes, but more so in neighborhoods with high concentrations of new residents, namely SOMA and most of the Mission. You can get an IPA at nearly any of the bars in my neighborhood for $4, and coffee for $2.

There are thousands of dumb startups

I agree 100%. I've had the (figurative) banana hammock recruiter call me, too, and it's shocking to me how many people are repeating the mistakes of the 90's boom.

People are spoiled

Don't confuse a small yet vocal minority with the City as a whole. There are still plenty of starving artists, passionate musicians and dedicated activists; they just live in different neighborhoods than they did 5 or 10 years ago.

There cannot be these many quality engineers

Again, I agree 100%. During the 90's dotcom boom I worked with a web developer who literally didn't know how to write HTML; all his code was copied from other parts of the project. It's not surprising that it's happening again this time around, but as mbesto wrote, they'll eventually leave too when the system weeds them out.

All in all, most of these are things long-time San Franciscans dislike about our city, too. What's left to be seen is whether or not enough of the people who made San Francisco a desirable place to live can afford to live here once the tech market cools off.

robbykingon 90% of the billion dollar unicorn startups are in trouble

I was a Web Developer during the first dot-com boom, and now that I work as an iOS engineer during this boom, I'm shocked at how many of the same mistakes are being repeated.

On almost a daily basis I get recruiters contacting me with interview offers from companies who have no chance of surviving past the end of the year. Their messages are often accompanied with bravado about their company's VC backers' other, more successful projects, which only makes me more skeptical.

robbykingon Fun with Swift

Swift is a multi-paradigm language. In that Ray Wenderlich article you linked, he writes "This tutorial focuses on just one of these methodologies, FP (Functional Programming)"

robbykingon Focus by Firefox, a Content Blocker for iOS

That's interesting, I've had almost the opposite experience. The team I work on is slowing migrating over (new classes and classes that need refactoring are done in Swift), and most of my friends who are iOS developers have told me they're doing the same.

FWIW, I work at a medium sized company (~300 employees) who is owned by a larger company (15k employees).

robbykingon Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

> I still bounce around email clients every couple months

Between two-factor authentication, application specific passwords and the notification center, configuring a new mail client can be a lot of work to have to redo every couple months. I did this for years before finally settling on the default clients for both iOS and OS X, and I've noticed a lot of my coworkers have done the same.

robbykingon Vine mistakenly ships iOS app with debug mode enabled

I'm really curious as to how this happened. In the app I work on, all of our debug features are wrapped in Preprocessor Macros so they'll only run in debug mode.

robbykingon How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

> I am always cursing after swiping in some direction by mistake.

Spotify is the same way. If you swipe the wrong way when trying to queue a song it removes the song from your library without the (shake) option to undo. It's infuriating.

robbykingon Condé Nast Buys Pitchfork Media

I'm also a huge fan of Pitchfork. Even if I dislike the bands they designate at "best new music," I can never argue with the quality of their selections. No matter how esoteric or obscure a genre, Pitchfork always does an amazing job of finding bands before they crossover to the mainstream (if they crossover at all).

Because of that, it's quotes like this that worry me:

It brings 'a very passionate audience of millennial males into our roster,' said Fred Santarpia, the company’s chief digital officer, who led the acquisition

Very similar things were said by major label executives when their companies were snatching up alternative bands after Nirvana's Nevermind came out.

robbykingon Why Airbnb is dead to me

I'm an American, and I used AirBNB a number of times in Italy this past spring. I only booked rooms with 4.5/5.0 ratings, and only from hosts who have hundreds -- or at least dozens -- of positive reviews. My experience could not have been better.

robbykingon The most American thing there is: eating alone

I am an extremely social person, but nearly every weekday I eat lunch alone.

My main motivation is it's literally the only time during the week when I can be alone, so I take advantage of that time. Most days I go for a 45 minute walk and listen to a podcast, then grab a sandwich or a salad and eat it back at my desk while browsing the web.

It really makes a huge difference in my day.

robbykingon Does Music Help You Become More Productive?

This was the source cited the last time this quote was posted here:

http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-S...

robbykingon About the OS X Yosemite v10.10.4 Update

Odd, I ran into a completely different display bug with Yosemite: when I upgraded, my MBP stopped outputting video above 1024x640 to the 27" Dell display I had been previously using at work. I looked around online and found that it was a fairly common (and unresolved) problem, so I ended up switching to two smaller monitors instead.

robbykingon Ask HN: When did Firefox become so broken?

In my opinion, both. Chrome's new tab screen looks very out of date to me, and both the UI and page loading feels faster on Firefox.

robbykingon Ask HN: When did Firefox become so broken?

I recently switched back to Firefox, too, after almost 6 years with Chrome. In that time it felt like the two browsers switched roles, and now Firefox is lightweight and privacy minded, while Chrome is bloated and invasive.

I recently launched Chrome to see if an issue a website I was visiting was experiencing was Firefox specific (they weren't), and I was really taken back by how old Chrome felt†. It lacked the "crisp" feeling Firefox has††, and the UI (new tab screen especially) just felt stale. It was actually really surprising.

† I was updated to the current version.

†† I understand how caching works.

robbykingon When will we stop using Facebook?

For me Facebook works best as a calendar. Nearly everyone I know has a Fb account (one they check every day, at that), so it makes planning group trips/parties/events easier than trying to sync large groups of people across platforms and devices. It allows me to update my event details without having to worry that one of my friends won't get they update because they synced an out of date .ics file or added the event to their work calendar by mistake.

robbykingon Soaring housing costs forces talent to flee Silicon Valley

Almost to the penny. That said, the median income in Athens is next to nothing, but the housing market is dirt cheap, too.

Truth be told, it's actually a fantastic place to live, I just missed living in the city.