Hacker News Reader

tajcherton All Things Wrapped (2025)

Let's wrap all "year in review" from most popular apps. Give our prizes, and discover apps utilizing this functionality.

tajcherton The hidden cost of air quality monitoring

Airly is extremely blocking access to their data. They boast with "open data" but their API is extremely restrictive (ToS) as well limited (ex. how much data you can get and how often), terms of service are very complicated and change often without notice.

Airly is exactly a case how we should NOT monitor air quality as this company sells cheap stations to (mostly) government with then high monthly fees and with closed access to data obtained from those stations, while at the same time saying words such as "open data".

Source: I'm author of Kanarek mobile app, and had a "pleasure" to work with them. https://spidersweb.pl/2018/01/kanarek-airly-smog-w-polsce.ht...

tajcherton Libraries – how companies do not understand open spaces

With remote work, open spaces from hell are (hopefully) a thing of the past, but key learnings on proper room culture are still valid after almost 200 years. How 400 people can work in deep focus in library but cannot do the same in company open space?

tajcherton Google outage – resolved

Google Maps for sure, maybe some GCP as well (as console is down, Discord and Playstation Network as well are having issues - which seems like some GCP service)

tajcherton Amazon QuickSight Now Generally Available

What are advantages over Google BigQuery? - if somebody is not bounded by existing Amazon products (EC2, databases etc.).