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jbi

30 karma · joined October 30, 2014

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jbi··on Let’s not demonize driving, just stop subsidizing it
I can't say a lot about Leipzig but many german cities were rebuild far more car-centric then they were before. Public transportation, small streets and biking seemed outdated back then. A lot of medieval building were destroyed after 1945 to make room for cars. There's a good german (not subtitled) documentation about this topic [1].

The Nazis had the same attitude before. Cities had to be car-centric, that's why they moved on with the Autobahn and created Volkswagen. The obligation to use bike lanes (Radwegebenutzungspflicht) was issued under the Nazi regime. It was part of the fascist mindset that cities are made of concrete (instead of children playing in parks).

[1] http://www.ardmediathek.de/tv/Reportage-Dokumentation/Unsere...

jbi··on Make America Hate Again
Could you bring up a source for your first statement?

Obama stopped the refugee programm for Iraqi citizens for 6 months - it never affected people with valid green cards or dual passports.

jbi··on KeepassXC – A cross-platform community fork of KeepassX
As KeePass uses a single (encrypted) file, you can use any hosting service that you want. Just make sure you save the new version back into your storage when you edit entries. You can use Owncloud, Google Drive, OneDrive, ...
jbi··on Show HN: A travel tool to discover destinations based on your budget
Don't assume that everyone owns a car. Especially people who are looking for cheap trips might not have one or prefer travelling by train (which works well in western europe).
jbi··on Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M
Had to do the same thing but had a different experience. It was hard to dive in and took some time but now I understand and appreciate the core concepts. There are many abstraction layers ("[...] schemes") and IMO that is a good thing. When you customize workflows etc. you can do that without leaving supported areas. Creating and changing a workflow is very easy. Plus, JIRA has a good pricing.

With ~350 employees and many mixed teams using only Trello would be chaos. In key areas we need fixed workflows (-> JIRA).

Right now we are planning to add Wekan (FOSS trello clone) to our toolchain for workflows which are more dynamic (less "C follows B follow A" + smaller teams - e.g. innovation and some planning).

jbi··on Fitbit is reportedly buying Pebble for around $40M
Have to agree. I'm wearing a Pebble Time Steele and a lot of people like it but don't notice it to be a smartwatch at first sight (depending on the watch face of course).

However, it did not receive good reviews. I guess in part because it is widely accepted that smartwatches do not last more than a day or two and are not well readable outside. Customers and reviewers are blinded by super-high-resolution displays - although you won't watch YouTube on your wrist.

Pebble is functional, the world wants bling-bling.

jbi··on Show HN: Zenkit – Productivity app of List, Kanban, Spreadsheet and Calendar
use.fontawesome.com blocks loading of your website if it's not reachable. Can you move it from <head> to the end of <body>?

And TOS and privacy policy should not require a login ;)

jbi··on Nokia to demonstrate a technique for terabit-speed data over optical-fiber
Too bad, Deutsche Telekom is blocking fiber built-up for customers in Germany by pushing VDSL vectoring.
jbi··on “CPUs are optimized for video games”
>when there's transience and anonymity, there's a high incentive for people to behave poorly

Sometimes people tend to behave even more poorly if there is no anonymity. This happens when they think that they are morally right in an important area although they are totally wrong. Many racist "this needs to be said" comments are written using real names.

jbi··on Amazon Picking Challenge
Right now western societies could easily go on with 30 hour workweeks. It would reduce unemployment and people who are working would have more time for their families or to do voluntary stuff. Another idea is a basic income which allows a simple and good life. White old men in suits are part of the problem why there's no real progress on these ideas and education is part of the solution.
jbi··on Show HN: Nativefier – Wrap any web page natively
This could be great for office users who are mostly using desktop applications. Acceptance for web apps is sometimes still hard to get.

However, I haven't seen anything electron-based with proxy support. Any ideas on that?

jbi··on Germany May Offer Model for Reining in Fossil Fuel Use
> China and India, which rank among the top greenhouse gas emitters globally

Gosh.

They rank top in absolute numbers. Germany ranks top per citizen. The western model is not a model for the world.

Source: Matthews et. al, national contributions to observed global warming https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/9/1/014...

jbi··on Facebook allows Google to crawl and index its mobile app
How is the public web content different from the public app content?
jbi··on The Offshore Game of Online Sports Betting
It's nearly the same in Europe / Germany. However, sports betting isn't really under control here.

The reasoning is like this: Participation in the progress of playing makes a difference. In one case you are just placing money on things other people are doing. In the other case you are placing money on your own actions. For the risk of gambling addiction this is relevant. And it has a lesser (indirect) potential for fraud.

jbi··on Heim – A real-time community platform
I like that you can host it yourself. I'ld like to guide my company away from email+phone but it is a long way to go. And in Europe there are still a lot of concerns if you can't host something in your own environment.

I don't see any FOSS / paid modern solutions similar to slack, flowdock, scrollback, .. ready to be hosted in your environment. HipChat seems to be the only solution with a standalone server available. There are some open source competitors but they are far from production-ready. Am I missing something?

jbi··on Heim – A real-time community platform
How does Matrix compare to xmpp? I do not see a lot of differences (however, xmpp is kind of mature)
jbi··on De-duplicating Hacker News
The problems mentioned can get real. Other simple solutions could be:

- Allow to merge threads using special comments. Once a comment with a merge request gets 'a lot' upvotes / more than the corresponding thread, it gets merged.

- Add an 'also on HN'-block with all threads linked inside the comments.

- Allow to create compositions in submit-function. This could also create a potential for meta-HN-content, e.g. 'links with great discussions'.

IMHO: HN is nice because it does not have a lot on functionality. It just works. Complicating things isn't a solution. It's human-driven in contrast to an automatic news aggregator and it should stay human-driven.

jbi··on 50 hospitals charge uninsured more than 10 times cost of care
There is a regulation like this in Germany. It leads to a behaviour where hospitals try to have as many well-paid treatments as possible. 'Surgery 1' does not pay well by list so they add 'Unnecessary Treatment 2'.

My point: such a list would have failures and they would be exploited.

jbi··on 50 hospitals charge uninsured more than 10 times cost of care
Uhm.. Sometimes there is a need to go to a hospital ;)