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JOfferijns

784 karma · joined February 21, 2012

my public key: https://keybase.io/offerijns; my proof: https://keybase.io/offerijns/sigs/sAnS1bmE4k-x66H6tgbsR1RZ_Lkman0ZWXdxBN6qKdM
submissionscomments
JOfferijns··on HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris
Hi Michael, Aaron, I'm a co-founder of an educational games platform based in the Netherlands. At the moment, games on the market that are targeted at K-6 students are not that much fun, they are not thoroughly aligned to school curriculums (just to CCSS goals in the US), and they're not connected in terms of content + analytics.

We've built 4 games, generate content for math questions (and soon starting work on literacy), and have a dashboard for teachers/parents. Early pilot results are quite positive (most importantly, children want to play the games at home).

I've been thinking about the next step in 3-6 months: should we expand to a neighbouring country (e.g. France, UK) or start looking at the US. The latter seems to be the first choice for most startups originating from Europe, but our improvement over existing competitors is much more in non-English speaking countries than it would be in the US (as 90% of educational apps are English). Any thoughts on this?

Also: what is YC's view on EdTech startups? It seems there haven't been many in recent batches.

JOfferijns··on Seed (YC W15) Wants to Reinvent Business Banking
On the bottom of the page it says "Powered by readme" and links here: https://readme.io/
JOfferijns··on Ask HN: What do I use in place of Microsoft Clip Art now that it is dead?
You should look at Art4Apps: http://www.art4apps.org/

It's a library of images in the same dimensions and a uniform style, licensed under Creative Commons.

They created it for developers of educational apps, but it could work just as well for worksheets!

JOfferijns··on An open competition to build a smaller power inverter, with a $1M prize
There are quite a lot of these contests, namely the various X PRIZE competitions: http://www.xprize.org/

They aren't taking the IP and are also giving the cash as a pure incentive, meant to inspire new innovations in a certain sector.

JOfferijns··on Getting a PhD in Norway is nearly free--even if you're not a citizen
Well in the Netherlands it's 1800 euros a year for Dutch students, so that's not free but still very inexpensive.

(note that it's significantly more expensive for foreign students though)

JOfferijns··on Ask HN: Who is Co-Founding?
At Unfilled, we are trying to rethink and improve the way people learn how to read, write and code and we are currently looking for a Designer to be part of our co-founding team.

You will find yourself designing the wireframes for the mobile app, newsletters, presentations about the product and more. You will also be working with other teammates sharing knowledge and learning from each other.

Furthermore, you can play a role in changing the world, as the platform we're creating could potentially impact millions of lives.

If you are interested in being part of our team, take a look at the key points we are looking for: http://unfilled.org/get-involved/

If you think this position fits to you, just send an email to jeroen[at]unfilled.org and we'll get back to you!

http://unfilled.org/

JOfferijns··on If a Drone Strike Hit an American Wedding We'd Ground Our Fleet
This is simply not true, the US has both signed and ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention [1], though it still has to destroy some of their stockpile [2].

[1] http://www.opcw.org/about-opcw/member-states/

[2] http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/11/us/u-s-chemical-weapons/

JOfferijns··on To Persuade People, Tell Them a Story
This is very evident when you start watching TED Talks.

Nearly every single one starts with a personal story, which probably means they are trained to use this technique.

JOfferijns··on Show HN: TextBlob, Natural language processing made simple in Python
Sent you an invite!
JOfferijns··on Difference between Startup Weekend and a Startup
Definitely agree that networking is one of the best parts.

I was at the same Startup Weekend the author of the post started Party With a Local at (swAMS '12) and one of the people I met there is now my co-founder!

(and I recently had a reunion with my team)

JOfferijns··on The Woman Who Can't Recognize Her Face
"The researchers, led by Ken Nakayama and Richard Russell at Harvard and Bradley Duchaine at University College London, have found evidence that prosopagnosia, once thought to be exceedingly rare, may affect up to 2 percent of the population – suggesting that millions of people may be face-blind."

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2006/06/face-blindness...

"Recently, a hereditary sub-type of congenital prosopagnosia with a very high prevalence rate of 2.5% has been identified."

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1348/174866407X231001/...

JOfferijns··on Rumor: Google negotiating $1 billion acquisition of WhatsApp
I can definitely confirm this, at least in The Netherlands literally everybody uses Whatsapp and it has slowly become a verb - "I'll whatsapp you the details!".

It's far from the best messaging app, but definitely the most popular (in Europe).

JOfferijns··on Language Learning is Broken
There are actually quite a few startups doing this already, e.g. Verbling: https://www.verbling.com/
JOfferijns··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2013)
I noticed you had vacancies for Marketing and Social Media interships, would you be interested in Engineering interns as well?
JOfferijns··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2013)
Any chance you might be interested in summer interns?
JOfferijns··on Ask HN: Is there a way to do this layout in HTML 5?
You should probably ask this question on StackOverflow.com
JOfferijns··on Here’s to the PHP Misfits
Accessible != Simple
JOfferijns··on Declaration of Internet Freedom
The form on that page is meant for organizations, read what it says:

"Individuals: Go to the action pages at Access, CREDO, EFF and Free Press to add your name."

JOfferijns··on Chrome now the most popular browser
It might be noteworthy that Google said so as well on Google I/O.

Of course, they are not the most objective source, but they do have the whole Google Analytics dataset.

(GA runs on about 55% of all websites: http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/traffic_analysis/al...)

JOfferijns··on Read your pile of books twice as fast
I'd like to start learning to read faster as well; however, I don't have an iPad, but an Android phone.

I found a few apps (https://play.google.com/store/search?q=speed+reading&c=a...), but I was wondering if someone has already tested some of these and can offer a recommendation?

JOfferijns··on Leaked Nexus 7 specs and price
"Nexus 7: This Is Google’s New Nexus Tablet"

It's marketed as a small tablet, not a big phone (similar to Amazons Kindle Fire).

JOfferijns··on Scaling PHP Book: I will teach you to scale PHP to millions of users
Great, I posted it: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10903458/how-to-scale-php...
JOfferijns··on Scaling PHP Book: I will teach you to scale PHP to millions of users
Could you post this on StackOverflow or would you allow me to? It's very useful, way more people could benefit from this!
JOfferijns··on Scaling PHP Book: I will teach you to scale PHP to millions of users
I'm very interested what differences microptimizations (like using while(list() = each()) instead of foreach) make when scaling.

Also, I noticed that when I clicked the return to website after clicking on the subscribe button your website, it went to google.com instead, and when I clicked continue to our website button after clicking the email confirmation link, it went to http://www.phpscalingbook.com/ (404 error).

And if you need any proofreaders, I'd be more than happy to help!

JOfferijns··on DNS tools for developers
Very useful!

It seems this was posted by the developer of this site himself, so I've got a feature request: combining these tools. For example, you enter a domain name or IP address and you get the following information:

- DNS report

- Reverse IP

- Port scan

- Chinese/Iran Firewall test

- DNSSEC

- IP location (maybe of nameserver IPs as well?)

- PageRank check

- Traceroute

- Ping

- DNS records

- HTTP headers

- Spam DB lookup

- ASN

Adding this would make things a whole lot easier, I hope you will consider it!

JOfferijns··on Show HN: Beatbar - Media player that beats in the browser address bar
I noticed it as well - I am using Chrome 20 (dev build) on Windows
JOfferijns··on Collaborate and edit anywhere with the updated Google Docs for Android
Finally, Google Docs like it should have been right from the start, without the web-version of the editing screen!