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vegashacker

1,421 karma · joined March 31, 2008

Email me at rob.hunter at Google's popular email domain.

I'm one of the two people at Focused Apps. We make Emoji Me and Hit Tennis for iOS.

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vegashacker··on A Research Preview of Codex
Whoops, definitely read that as China until your comment.
vegashacker··on What Does "With Continuation" Mean? (2020)
Same! (CS 61A Fall Semester 1996) And I agree!
vegashacker··on Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel
I see $10 on the random location I clicked on: https://www.planetfitness.com/gyms/oakland-ca/offers
vegashacker··on Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight
This has been my experience exactly (I’ve tried it in American and international markets, but don’t recall specific cities). I try them like once every 6 months and am always disappointed. You go thru the whole flow to find that there’s a Hotel Tonight fee and therefore the rate is more expensive (or at least isn’t cheaper) than you’d get by simply searching various other travel sites, and they don’t give you a guaranteed room type. Maybe if you don’t care about finding the best deal it’s a nice experience for people? (I most certainly do like to get the best deal though.)
vegashacker··on Ride-Sharing Congests City Traffic
And you don't have to explain the driver where you want to go. Other than being an extremely nice feature, I could see that decreasing lane blockage time as well.
vegashacker··on Apple’s Struggle to Get the iPhone X to Market on Time
Yep. This happens to me all the time, and is not an edge case at all. Cooking in particular I think will be a much better experience with FaceId. I'm constantly washing my hands, and (at least on my iPhone 6) this means I'm constantly entering in my ~10 character lock code to have a look at the recipe.
vegashacker··on A guide to the things Silicon Valley ‘invented’ that already existed
I'm a huge fan of buses, and public transportation in general. I like riding buses and subways. I think it's semi-magical that you can get such a far distance on a fixed cost. But can they be improved? I would sure hope so.

I think you do have to be careful with excluding the poor from a new "invention" that is designed to make better the thing that a lot of poor people use. But I don't think poor people not using this initially is a good enough reason not to try.

vegashacker··on A guide to the things Silicon Valley ‘invented’ that already existed
This so called "guide" only has four things on it?

There are so many examples of this. What about Lyft itself? Isn't that just a "taxi"? By the (low) standards of this article, sure. Obviously though, that characterization would miss something since the entire taxi industry has been upended by the ride-sharing companies.

I think what the author did was think of four companies that were obviously silly in her mind, and characterized them as not wholly original inventions. Which of course they aren't. The thing is, it's rare to find the company that is. Sure it's easy to make fun of Soylent (not saying they're bad or good--just easy to make fun of), but I'm surprised by the author's shortsightedness on something like Lyft Shuttle. I don't know a single person who's said, "Buses? They're great as they are. That's a solved problem."

vegashacker··on Launch HN: UpKeep (YC W17) – Basecamp for Facility Maintenance Teams
I'm not an actual potential customer, but my 2¢ is that I was impressed when I saw Hilton and Chick-Fil-A. (Came to report the same issue, but on Safari.)
vegashacker··on Apple Watch sales to consumers set record in holiday week, says Apple's Cook
Anecdotally, I've noticed more Apple watches on random wrists in the last few months. And I saw my first Apple Watch boarding pass swipe two days ago.
vegashacker··on How HotelTonight Scaled Their Stack [audio]
I check it occasionally when doing a same-day hotel booking and I have never found a good deal. (I've only tried it for US hotels.) Very often the best price I have already found for a hotel will be matched on Hotel Tonight, but then they add their fee on top of it, making it a worse deal. And I don't like that they don't tell you about this fee till late in the purchase flow. Plus (and my info could be out of date on this point), HT doesn't tell you the bed situation in the room. Whereas on other booking sites, I know it's going to be two queens or whatever.
vegashacker··on A Denver Suburb Experiments with Free Lyft Rides to Light Rail
It's a fair point about the dilly-dallying (although I believe there are rules like you can't be more than 3 min late, tho I don't know how strict they are.) I've definitely had rough lyft lines where I seem like I'm really being taken out of my way. But most of the time it's awesome, and kind of fun.

But the important difference that pavel was identifying was that you don't have to decide ahead of time that you are heading to the bus station. That's huge! You decide to head downtown or whereever, pull out the app, bam someone's coming to pick you up. To me this feels very different than, e.g., "casual carpool" in the Bay Area.

vegashacker··on Flightcar (the airport car parking/rental option) is shutting down
This is too bad. I used the service probably five or six times. They were always my go to for renting a car from the airport. (Never used them to lend out my own car, however.)

Interesting to note, PG said this about FlightCar in 2013: "They went from what seemed like one of the least promising startups in the batch to one of the most promising in the batch." (http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/03/27/smaller-c...)

FlightCar anecdote from the early days: I rented a car from BOS and drove it to a wedding about 4 hours away. Got a call from FlightCar that they actually needed the car back (don't know if the owner returned early, or it was a scheduling screw-up.) So someone drove the 4 hours to me in a different car, met me in my hotel parking lot 30 minutes before the wedding, and we swapped cars. :)

vegashacker··on iPad Pro – 9.7-inch
Does anyone think XCode (or some version on it) could be available on iPad Pro someday soon? That would make me very interested in this thing.
vegashacker··on Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software
As for FaceTime I think you're SOL. As for iMessage, you can just SMS/MMS text and it's well integrated into the Messages app on both my phone and Mac. My messages to you just appear green instead of blue.
vegashacker··on Microsoft Buys German To-Do List Startup 6Wunderkinder
It would be nice if this results in the Pro features becoming free.
vegashacker··on Jon Ronson: How a Tweet Can Ruin Your Life
I wasn't bothered by this inaccuracy. It's close enough to the truth so that the joke makes sense. (Well, as much as the joke can be considered to make sense.)
vegashacker··on A Eulogy for RadioShack
If my memory serves, two decades ago they were doing the zip code thing.
vegashacker··on The iPhone 6 Review
Any chance of Apple covering the bending issue free of charge? I'd actually expect them to if you took it into an Apple Store.
vegashacker··on NYC taxi visualization
From what I've heard, Lyft is just testing this sort of heatmap with Android drivers, and that it isn't yet available for iOS drivers.
vegashacker··on Pinboard Turns Five
Pinterest is social bookmarking and is (obviously) incredibly popular. Delicious pushed "tags" as its killer feature. But if it had dumped putting tags front and center, and instead focused on beautiful photos of the items bookmarked, maybe it would have taken off more.
vegashacker··on Go back in time with Street View
I happen to agree that the new interface is incredibly difficult to use, UI-wise. In fact, I switched back to old maps for this reason. Unfortunately, I don't recall the specifics which got me frustrated. I do recall that I would very often be wandering with my mouse trying to figure out what to click next.

Haven't noticed the performance problems though. I'm on a Macbook Pro, using Chrome.

vegashacker··on How to make $10 on the App Store
Your link to your app at the beginning of the article is broken. (I figured it out, but just fyi.)
vegashacker··on Pres. Obama Remarks on Intelligence Programs [video]
Probably impossible to verify one way or the other. May be more true to say "...have led to little evidence of stopping...". See, e.g., Schneier's article on this (https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/01/how_the_nsa_t...), which references a summary article on what may be true about the effectiveness of the surveillance in stopping plots/attacks (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/23/nsa-attacks-thwarte...).
vegashacker··on Female Founders
I read this a few times and couldn't understand what pg meant here:

If your numbers go up steeply enough for long enough, you could have eyeballs on stalks and investors will fund you.

What are these "stalks"?

vegashacker··on FOBO (YC S11) Launches in SF to Become The Fastest Way to Sell Your Electronics
Is there a particular Facebook app you use, or is it more a status update kind of thing: "Hey, any takers for my old iPhone 4" ? I guess that would work for a one off thing. But selling stuff to my friends I feel that I have to give them an exceptional deal. And I wouldn't want to pollute everyone's feed with a bunch of items.
vegashacker··on Why indie developers can't win on the App Store
I doubt it. What would be the point of paying your way into the top grossing? I'd bet that almost all "normal" users go only to Top Paid (cause that's the default) and Top Free (cause it's free).
vegashacker··on Tap your iPhone to unlock your Mac
You can get your money refunded by contacting Apple. http://www.labnol.org/software/itunes-app-store-refunds/
vegashacker··on Ask HN: Burning idea for a story you've always wanted written?
My old apartment's super old elevator used to have a tiny window in the elevator door. You could catch split-second views of the other floors as the elevator moved by. I wanted to read a story about someone who sees something through the elevator window on one of the floors--really just an image. What the main character sees, seems unimportant at the time, but they happen to remember it fairly vividly. As the day proceeds and the character keeps flashing back to that image and over time they realize that brief flash has all of the clues to solve whatever the main crisis of the book is. The character only realizes this in stages. So perhaps first, they realize that someone was knocking on the door 601, and that fact later on becomes interesting/surprising. Then maybe later on they somehow see a person on the street who was the person knocking on the door. And the story starts to come together. etc.
vegashacker··on IFTTT goes Mobile
I also have recipes for my instagrams (and the instagrams of a few friends) to be put in a special folder in my Dropbox. Then (so I don't waste space on my Dropbox) I have a cron that periodically moves them into a local folder on my Mac. And I then occasionally load up that folder as the screen saver photos on my Apple TV. Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how to make that last step automatic.
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