Hacker News Reader

tholmeson Canada seeks to end Uber's tax advantage over taxi companies

That's not a problem. The point in the tax code is to prevent offloading the tax liability by classifying people who are rightfully employees as contractors instead.

I'm reasonably certain the tax code has no regulation that says you must be classed a contractor if you meet certain criteria.

tholmeson Ultimate Linux on the Desktop

It rebooted on my the other night while I was actively using it :(

Granted I was up later than normal (~2:30 AM) but that's pretty bad.

tholmeson How to find size of an array in C without sizeof

One in a million happens quite often if you're processing something like ~100k requests a second.

tholmeson Uber drivers win employee rights case

Usually in this case the developer is an employee of another company (this company can tell them what to do) and the first business is paying the second for this developers time.

tholmeson The college debt crisis is worse than it seems

He was using the english word demand. In that these college graduates will demand (require, insist upon, refuse to work unless given) more money to accept given position. Applying jargon to an english sentence is a pointless and frustrating exercise.

tholmeson D'Oh My Zsh – How I unexpectedly built a monster of an open source project

I actually never looked inside! I deleted all of those files without looking in them. Only after my performance improved did I check my scrollback and notice it was huge :(

tholmeson Instacart Is Generating Profits?

Last time I did the math you have to order pretty regularly for the subscription to break even. I use instacart about once a month and just pay the delivery fee.

tholmeson D'Oh My Zsh – How I unexpectedly built a monster of an open source project

Regarding fish startup time I had a problem with fish taking forever before. Turned out my ~/.config/fish/fishd.<hostname> file had erroneously ballooned to many megabytes. This caused a very long startup time. It should typically be a few kilobytes.

tholmeson Cash: a cross-platform implementation of Unix shell commands in JavaScript

This works:

  #!/usr/bin/node

  console.log("hello");

mark it executable and enjoy.

Unless that's not really what you were getting at with your comment. If I misunderstood, sorry!

tholmeson Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but Is Still in the Game

Companies like that don't usually hire 600 people in 12 months, though.

Buuut I guess they could. I guess it just kind of looks like the explosive hiring you see sometimes when a company has projected huge growth but then falls flat and realizes it has way too many employees :(

tholmeson Cops are asking Ancestry.com and 23andMe for their customers’ DNA

This argument is directly analogous to legal targeted wire-taps vs bulk surveilance.

tholmeson TSA failure: Investigators able to smuggle weapons past checks in 95% of tests

“[Testers] know exactly what our protocols are. They can create and devise and conceal items that … not even the best terrorists would be able to do,” Pistole told lawmakers at a House hearing.

You know, like taping a bomb to your body. How would you ever think that up without the playbook.

tholmeson How AeroPress Fans Are Hacking Their Way to a Better Cup of Coffee

The inverted method essentially involves waiting for 45-90 seconds and then pressing. It's not going to leak or anything when you flip it unless you go absolutely wild. It's no harder than making a non-inverted aeropress or a pourover.

Or if you accidentally put the plunger in the wrong side and don't notice before you fill it up. I did that once :)

tholmeson LINQ Ruined My Favorite Interview Question

Don't forget about Memoize(). Often it can be a better choice than ToList().

tholmeson What Everybody Should Know About Contracting Developers

I think you missed the part where he was talking about the "Good Enough" developers.

tholmeson Writing Open Source Software? Make Sure You Know Your Copyright Rights

You have the right idea about pull but you're mixing up pull and pull request. Pull is a git verb that means to get code from another location. A pull request is asking someone else to get my changes.

So for an example, if you found a bug in some open source software you used you could make a change in the code that fixed it and then file a pull request with the original author of the software. This asks them to incorporate your changes.

tholmeson Last.fm Radio to be killed off in most countries next month

It doesn't look like you tried very hard. I'm in the US so I cannot verify but there are mentions of Deezer accounts on the page. Either click the link to login with your Deezer account (there will be probably be a signup link nearby) or close the facebook box in front and click the signup link in the top right.

tholmeson "Magic" color pics for kids done with canvas + jquery

It starts to lag up really badly if you go over the top edge.