HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

andyjdavis

608 karma · joined October 4, 2008

I'm one third of http://magictravelblog.com and a developer
submissionscomments
andyjdavis··on Innovative container ship features hemispherical bow
I said "try to sink it" not that they would necessarily succeed. That said if they are on board and have unlimited access to the entire ship it may be possible to sink it without any explosives. Not all ships even require explosives to be scuttled.

>They can't offload the containers

I never suggested that they would. Rather I suggested that they would ransack the ship and cargo looking for valuable components or equipment that is transportable.

andyjdavis··on Ask HN: What makes a company worth staying with as engineer?
I used to work at a place that was able to hold onto a sizable proportion of its technical talent for many years at least in part by allowing remote work.

In the minority of cases this was an in-office employee who went for remote either indefinitely or for a period of a year or two so they could go live somewhere else.

In the majority of cases it was someone in another location who was hired. They had the option to move to where the office was (including help with the visa system if necessary) or just staying where they were and working remotely. If a person is particularly attached to where they currently live and that area happens to have relatively modest employment options for technical people then chances are you will retain that person for a very long time.

I would note that whether retaining staff for 5+ years for reasons like the lack of similarly well paying options elsewhere is somewhat debatable. Holding onto staff for a long time is not in and of itself always a good thing.

andyjdavis··on Innovative container ship features hemispherical bow
I suspect there would be enough of value that could be stripped off the ship and removed to make it worth the pirate's time. Bear in mind that it doesn't matter to pirates if they cause millions of dollars of damage to extract a small fraction of that for themselves.

Cripple a hugely valuable ship and destroy much of its equipment and cargo to extract a few hundred thousand dollars worth of stuff that you can take with you? Sounds like a reasonable deal for a group of pirates. Hell, they might as well try and sink the ship once they are done with it to make it hard to gather evidence and determine exactly what was stolen.

It would take some time for people to do the math to determine what components of ships and common cargo have the highest value Vs their portability but someone would figure it out eventually.

andyjdavis··on [dead]
Google wants to provide people with the best quality content. If you happen to have the best quality content around a topic then your search engine rankings will improve over time.
andyjdavis··on Citigroup fined $7m after legit transactions mistaken for test data for 15 years
There is mention of trading data which suggests to me that it might be to do with traders employed by Citigroup ie staff members whose job it is to use a block of the bank's money or outside investor's money to buy and sell shares, commodities and pretty much anything where they believe they can buy and sell to turn a profit.
andyjdavis··on Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left
Do you know if they publicly release analytics about humans Vs bots? I would be interested to know the proportion of tweets from actual humans.
andyjdavis··on Ask HN: Do companies ever request test solutions to build solution benchmarks?
>what steps should a candidate take to avoid completing such tests and investing personal time that results only in giving the company free performance data?

Probably nothing different. I suspect that investing additional time and energy is not going to be a net win for you.

>The revised ad also made it sound like the position was far more junior than when I initially interviewed.

It is possible that there was discussion internally and they decided against paying whatever it would cost to hire someone like you. "We're not paying that, get a new grad" is not an uncommon refrain in some circles. If it helps, places that like are usually not nice places to work.

andyjdavis··on Seagate Technology to cut about 6,500 jobs; stock jumps 22%
I read somewhere that Thailand is currently the world's largest hard drive manufacturer. It is therefore entirely possible that a substantial number of these job cuts with be in Thailand which definitely has dramatically lower salaries than the Bay Area.

source on the Thailand and HDs for those that are interested. This article from 2011 claims that 25% of global HD assembly is in Thailand. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/f0f9a234-fb33-11e0-8756-00144feab4...

andyjdavis··on Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left
>it is just a jumble of collective stream of consciousness

Much of it isn't even that. A huge proportion are not even real humans but are instead accounts being operated by one of the myriad of pieces of software that enable automatic posting on behalf of a human.

Perhaps my view is skewed as we have a travel blog and know many other travel bloggers but a vanishingly small percentage are real humans actually typing their own tweets in real time.

andyjdavis··on NASA Camera Shows Moon Crossing Face of Earth for 2nd Time in a Year
Although how awesome would that have been.

"Ok, the photos are coming through now. Which, lol, should provide conclusive proof that no one is operating on the dark side of the.... what the hell is that?"

andyjdavis··on Pokemon Go is a huge security risk
>Dollars to doughnuts they tried to use some internal-only API

Not at all necessary for this situation to occur. I just finished implementing a system (nothing to do with Pokemon) that also requests permission from external sites in a similar way. The mechanics for doing this are fiddly and checking this is actually set up correctly is likely well down the priority list provided things at least appear to work.

It is entirely possible that someone who had never done it before set it up in a hurry then everyone in the dev team just blindly clicked through without ever properly reading what was being requested because they were all in a rush to finish their stuff.

andyjdavis··on Pokemon Go is a huge security risk
I actually just finished wrangling social log in for a system that is waaaay less popular than Pokemon GO. Rather amusing to see an organization operating at a vastly bigger scale still hitting the same sorts of speed bumps.
andyjdavis··on What Solo Traveling Taught Me About Life
Although I am not a big fan of philosophizing around travel I will say that traveling alone is a very different experience that I suggest more people try, even if only once.

I have traveled a great deal, at one point travel full-time for several years, but I have only once traveled alone and not for very long. It was a profoundly different experience.

andyjdavis··on The Tragedy of Pokémon Go: What it takes for good ideas to attract money
Personally I have no problem with stuff being corporate branded and/or juvenile but I am surprised that the cock-fighting element isn't mentioned more often in relation to Pokemon. Maybe it is because I have seen a little real life cock-fighting (and its horrifying) but I find that aspect quite repellent.
andyjdavis··on Pokémon GO: The Data Behind America’s Latest Obsession
>Tindr is the poster boy for lowest common denominator

Why yes, it does have very broad appeal.

andyjdavis··on Hedge Fund Wants to Use Atomic Clocks to Beat High-Speed Traders
If nothing else, it could just be to stop anyone else from patenting something similar then trying to use that patent against them.
andyjdavis··on Ask HN: Raise money in the US and get a visa
>Can I get funds from US angel investors and build my company in my home country?

That is entirely up to the angel in question. I do however suspect that many people would like the reassurance of being able to see you face to face occasionally. Handing a check to someone about to fly out of the country would understandably make a lot of people nervous.

andyjdavis··on China’s tyranny of characters
I actually have not come across Cangjie before and it looks really interesting. Thank you for the link :)
andyjdavis··on China’s tyranny of characters
Keep an eye out for either Pinyin or Zhuyin. I believe they are somewhat common for texting purposes. You input this stuff and your device starts displaying characters for you to pick from avoiding the slower process of actually drawing characters.

Links for those unfamiliar with those two things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo

andyjdavis··on TSA, American Airlines jointly testing innovative airport security technology
>Cameras that capture photos of the outside of the bag, which is linked to the X-ray image of the bag’s contents.

Curious where all of that data goes. A giant catalog of x-rays of bag contents could be interesting. To get a little bit tin foil hat-ish, it becomes especially interesting if they system provides some way to tie a bag to a person's identity which would seem to be possible given the context.

andyjdavis··on City workers destroy 'Holy Grail' for earthquake scientists
Curious how you could solve that. I guess you would need to time stamp the coordinates. Then if you had data on how each region has moved you could calculate new coordinates over time. Sounds painful.
andyjdavis··on Second Careers of the Healthy Elderly
Kind of surprised it is more money AND more time off. I am an Australian in my mid 30s and most of my social circle is mid 30s through mid 40s. There is a bit of a trend to specifically request less money but more time off ie for a new job "that is a generous offer. I propose we reduce the salary by X dollars and increase my annual leave by Y days/weeks" or for an existing job "keep your raise, give me an extra week of annual leave instead."

Perhaps it is something related to this specific stage of life but lots of people have young children. Also, the appeal of their career has really worn thin after 10-15 years of full-time work.

andyjdavis··on The Price of a Child (2013)
>since women generally are infertile when nursing

Fertility may be reduced but they are absolutely not infertile.

Source: a friend of my wife who got pregnant while breastfeeding and various doctors and midwives who repeated "you can get pregnant while breastfeeding" like some sort of chant in the weeks following the birth of our child.

andyjdavis··on Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable
Although if I encountered that as a customer I would be suspicious that the free support is being made deliberately bad to artificially drive revenue of the premium support team.
andyjdavis··on Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable
>the talented people cycle in and back out for the most part, and the less-talented people remain.

This is known as the dead sea effect http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...

andyjdavis··on Facebook's Filter Bubble Is Getting Worse
I suspect it does matter what their motivations were, at least a little. It is about not distorting the truth Vs distorting the truth in two opposite ways that hopefully cancel out. It is still distortion.
andyjdavis··on Researchers use light to coax stem cells to repair teeth (2014)
Out of curiosity, how do you define success Vs other fields of medicine? It seems like something almost impossible to compare.
andyjdavis··on Facebook's Filter Bubble Is Getting Worse
>The old news networks at least made an effort to present both sides of most issues

I am not sure whether they did that because they wanted to present both sides or if they just wanted to provide confirmation for what everyone wants to believe and they lacked the ability to segment their audience. If both sides of an argument watches the one news program that news program is incentivized to provide fodder for both sides to avoid losing part of their audience.

andyjdavis··on Secrets of the London Library
>I don't think Europeans realise how lucky they're to be so connected to there past.

It is a double edged sword. Its great they have that connection but that can lead people to glamorize the past and to focus on trying to hold onto the past while neglecting the future.

When I spend time in the UK I am always surprised how frequently history comes up in conversation, how positively it is spoken about and how gloomy everyone's descriptions of the present and future are. Apparently the past was great and the future is bleak (even years pre-Brexit). There is one notable exception, the Margaret Thatcher years get brought up at least once a week by family/friends/strangers on the bus and described very negatively

In Australia where I am from the past bright/future gloomy logic is reversed. The past rarely comes up and discussions about the present and future tends towards optimism.

andyjdavis··on Secrets of the London Library
Watching that video I was surprised how familiar it looks. There are similarities to muay Thai (Thai boxing). There are of course big differences. In muay thai the low kicks are primarily aimed at the thigh rather than the shins and punches, knees and elbows are also allowed HOWEVER two people in a clinch hacking at each others legs brought back memories.
Page 1 of 8Next →