Hacker News Reader

spalton Tell HN: John Friel my father, internet pioneer and creator of QModem, has died

how many hours did i stare at the ZMODEM BATCH download screen waiting for my warez to finish at 4800 baud? innumerable! RIP.

spalton Author Clock: a novel way to tell time

I kickstarted this long ago and when I got it a few months ago gave it to my wife as a gift, who is an author. She immediately rejected it because she found the eink transitions where it flashes a dark color briefly very distracting.

spalton Ask HN: How to deal with regret of not having kids

I have 3 kids, two twins. They're annoying. Do you want a couple of mine?

spalton Nasal vaccine against Covid-19 prevents infection in mice

i want to see the tiny nasal sprayer they used on these mice, must be adorably cute!

spalton Ask HN: Is YouTube Working Properly?

youtube is fucking down!

spalton Ask HN: Do you still code in BASIC?

We still do some development in .NET 3.5 VB (huge health care company). It rules and I love it. We do angular, node, c#, yadda yadda, also, but I will always return to my #1 (and first) love, BASIC.

spalton How to Read a Schematic

"I understand how to read a schematic!" - John Hammond

spalton COI – Chat Over IMAP

I mean all this really is is two people sending email really quickly to each other....

spalton Android vendors, don’t kill my app

"Doze" is a nightmare for apps that need reliable GPS readings.. the only real solution is a service that polls continually to get the GPS when the screen is on so that when the screen is off it can use it to do various background tasks (and of course, it ends up not being super accurate as when the screen is off the user is typically moving, which is when you'd want the GPS to be accurate). This ends up using more energy than would have been saved if the GPS wasn't available periodically when the screen is off! It's totally ridiculous..

spalton Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

yes!!!!!!! hate hate hate quicken with a burning passion.

spalton Farewell, Google Maps

Check out Azure Maps: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/azure-maps/ I believe they have an autocomplete component....

I was investigating the Google Traffic API for an app I was working on just as they were making this change. They went from something like 10,000 free requests a day (which would have been plenty for my purposes) to 0 free requests a day. "Don't be evil" my ass. Anyway, the Azure Maps (which uses TomTom data) is much more generous.

spalton CBS “60 Minutes” piece on Google’s abuse of dominance

i thought it was pretty funny during their demonstration of how bad google was, they googled "san francisco restaurants" (or something like that), and there on the auto-complete was "san francisco restaurants YELP", like, dude, this website that is so evil is advertising for you, right there, in the box where you're typing!

spalton Magic Leap One

i don't want something beaming light into my eye at close range. just doesn't seem appealing to me.

also, how is this different than castAR?

spalton The best laptop ever made

Correct

spalton Ask HN: Why are credit card chip readers so slow?

One reason Aldi checkers can scan so fast: multiple, huge bar codes! http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/06/aldi-has-very-...

spalton Agile is Dead

hurray!