Hacker News Reader

smbulleton Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019

Not all of us live in safe neighborhoods like yourself.

Thanks!

smbulleton Show HN: Ethical Resources – 300 ethical alternatives to mainstream stuff

Hmm, Chrome doesn't appear to be on the list of ethically approved browsers :P

smbulleton Finland’s Basic Income Experiment Shows Recipients Are Happier and More Secure

Maybe because it's hard to control? I could imagine if enough people work within the jurisdiction of a local government but live outside it then the experiment could get skewed.

smbulleton Don't Pay to Acquire Your First Users

I'm an idiot. I wasn't even thinking about the sharing aspect.

smbulleton Don't Pay to Acquire Your First Users

Sure but is it really all that different from a free trial or a limited free version?

smbulleton Former IBM exec says company told her to hide layoff age data from government

I don't think omeid was talking about time spent in the office but rather cognitive ability.

smbulleton Boards – A tool for collaboratively organizing notes

I fight with this at work all the time. Just because it's old doesn't mean it can't be stable. We freeze our versions anyways so if it works who cares?

smbulleton Courier Prime: It’s Courier, Just Better

John August also talks about it in episode 74 of his podcast with Craig Mazin called Scriptnotes: http://johnaugust.com/2013/three-hole-punchdrunk

Although you need to pay to access archived podcasts they have all of them transcribed: http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-ep-74-three-hole-punc...

I highly recommend the podcast to anyone even remotely interested in the movie industry. I've been listening for around 6 months now and can't stop.

smbulleton When Too Cute Is Too Much, the Brain Can Get Aggressive

How are first hand accounts of a psychological phenomenon in an article describing said psychological phenomenon unnecessary?

smbulleton CSS grid garden

I would be very interested in this as well. Especially as someone who makes silly browser extensions they never intend to publish.

smbulleton CSS grid garden

Well yeah, they basically said that in their original comment. Is it not possible for all major browsers to be walled gardens?

smbulleton The Rise of Microsoft Visual Studio Code

Agreed, it's sort of surreal that nobody in any of the issue threads admitted that was a good solution.

smbulleton Errors in Go: From denial to acceptance

Yeah, I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. We also use Python at work and reviewing code is an absolute nightmare because you end up needing to dive deep into each function call to see if there are any exceptions being ignored. We're trying to enforce adding all possible exceptions in the docstrings but it's difficult because third party libraries (and even the standard library!) sometimes don't document them. Typically we have a catch-all Exception in our main loop and recover from there in case there's something we missed in dev and staging. I'd much prefer being able to know which functions have the ability to fail and why.

smbulleton “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming

I don't think they're saying the wrong choice is a particular candidate. The wrong choice is mistakenly voting for someone who doesn't actually represent you because you were ignorant of the candidate's stances or history.

smbulleton What is the revenue generation model for DuckDuckGo?

Same. I use Firefox for Android which is helpful if you have searches you know for a fact DDG won't be able to figure because Firefox let's you select a different search engine instead from the bottom. I do this for sports and location specific searches.

smbulleton Messenger systems compared by security, privacy, compatibility, and features

Oops, I guess I missed that comment. Thanks!

smbulleton Messenger systems compared by security, privacy, compatibility, and features

The apps listed in the spreadsheet are clearly sorted by number of features supported (with weights). I don't think OP is necessarily claiming IRC is more secure than Signal.

smbulleton Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users

No need for the anti-anonymity here. Politely asking for a source is fine.

smbulleton The Bhikkhu Diet (2003)

I feel like "eat less" is the most important part. I have no evidence to back this up but I doubt you'll ever outrun the surplus calories you eat. It's much easier to just not eat that muffin.

smbulleton Detailed guide to mouse sensors

Excellent write up! Wish I saw saw this before I bought my mouse :)

smbulleton Who lost the most marks when cheating was stopped?

The most likely culprit, it emerged, was that the "collective" and "petty" forms of corruption, as witnessed by Dr Borcan herself, had a curious effect: they might be paid for chiefly by well-off students bribing invigilators, but everyone benefited. It gave the poorer students "a free ride" to higher marks.

It's poorly worded but they seem to hypothesise that poorer students were sort of piggy backing off of those who paid for the cheats. So they were cheating too.

smbulleton First introduction to LaTeX

I would find someone's homework template and just copy it. Then when you go to copy your work to LaTeX just replace their content without touching the formatting if that makes sense. I too tried to learn LaTeX in college but decided the learning curve wasn't worth overcoming and what I wanted really wasn't that unique.

Eventually you're going to come up with your own formatting ideas that you can tweak over time but it's much less stressful than drinking out of the firehose when your homework is due in four hours.

smbulleton The Boring Company [video]

Wait, there are actually people who think the Earth will be roasted in 50 years?

smbulleton Thanks for Submitting Your Résumé to This Black Hole

Facebook "black holed" me after two phone interviews. Had to email them them a couple weeks later to see what was up. Never seen that before.

Edit: I guess "black holed" isn't the right term since I did get an interview but you know what I mean

smbulleton Upgrade your jail cell for a price

Don't you think you could better promote change by working for the system rather than being a dissident outside the system? Everytime I see threads that talk about "bad apples" I find it strange that I never see comments that encourage getting "good apples" to apply.

smbulleton SpaceX is livestreaming a hyperloop pod competition

Almost no pods have any kind of self propulsion. IIRC the whitepaper states the use of linear accelerators on the tube I-beams to propel the pod. That hasn't been integrated in the competition so the teams just coast at the pusher's 94km/h

smbulleton SpaceX is livestreaming a hyperloop pod competition

It definitely doesn't scale linearly. They had a section of the tube only several meters long for vacuum testing pods and that took 15 minutes to depressurize. It's likely bigger/more pumps would be used.

smbulleton SpaceX is livestreaming a hyperloop pod competition

It's not by their own power, there's a pusher vehicle bringing them up to speed.