jkestner

4,653 karma · joined April 19, 2012

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/supermechanical/pickup-is-a-sensor-power-tool https://johnkestner.com

submissions comments

jkestner··on Pebble Time 2 Design Reveal [video]

You can change your preorder without losing your place in line.

jkestner··on Trump Orders National Guard to Washington and Takeover of Capital’s Police

“I said no immediately because it’s like signing up for the Gestapo,” the Guard source said.

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/leak-trumps-dc-deployment-...

jkestner··on AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

Now that’s a recipe I would read. We can fold in the failing publishing industry and have authors presented by King Biscuit Flour.

jkestner··on Show HN: Tinder but it's only pictures of my wife and I can only swipe right

Monetize by supplying captchas with images of your wife. Bonus is you can train the self-driving cars not to hit her.

jkestner··on Show HN: Tinder but it's only pictures of my wife and I can only swipe right

This is why we have the day phone and the night phone, people.

jkestner··on Peep Show is the most realistic portrayal of evil I have seen (2020)

Yeah, I never empathized with Mark and Jez so his thesis falls apart for me. Maybe he’s the baddie?

jkestner··on How Tesla is proving doubters right on why its robotaxi service cannot scale

You’re making a guess. Who can say? There are many people who have a car and don’t want to pay Uber prices when they don’t want to drive, and there are many cities where public transportation is convenient.

jkestner··on How Tesla is proving doubters right on why its robotaxi service cannot scale

11,000 dead Americans a year disagree. (Alcohol is a drug too.)

jkestner··on Beyond Meat fights for survival

https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-da...

Subsidies go mostly to corn and soybeans. Think those are multipurpose but corn is used to feed livestock, of course. 10 or 15% may be a lot in a low-margin industry, and I don't know how it's split among crops.

No all subsidies are direct. For example, water costs too little in Arizona so foreign companies grow feed stock there to ship home.

jkestner··on Britain is lowering the voting age to 16. It's getting a mixed reaction

Good point, thank you. Maybe youth skews towards breaking the wheel. In any case, younger voters are not going to destroy democracy. They’re just another group to be swayed to Pokémon Go to the polls.

jkestner··on Britain is lowering the voting age to 16. It's getting a mixed reaction

It’s not like most 16yos will vote. Getting them engaged is a good thing.

Who among them will? I’d guess the most engaged and the most based (for lack of a better word), so probably not much difference from the current electorate, except that youth skews left.

jkestner··on Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

A note-taking app.

jkestner··on Ask HN: What Pocket alternatives did you move to?

I don’t use Instapaper as much as I used to when I had an iPod touch on the subway, but I’m a subscriber. Happy to support the indie effort.

jkestner··on My Family and the Flood

Not for the neighbors. The courts are 10x the impermeable cover of the house they’re also trying to build. There should be nothing on that land.

jkestner··on My Family and the Flood

At a (central Texas) city council hearing today on granting someone a variance to build tennis courts on a meadow next to a creek, a longtime resident said, “I think I’ve lived through five 500-year floods here.”

jkestner··on IKEA ditches Zigbee for Thread going all in on Matter smart homes

“[Matter in its current version] doesn’t really help resolve the key issue of the smart home, namely that most companies view smart homes as a way to sell more individual devices and generate recurring revenue.”

https://staceyoniot.com/matter-only-solves-about-one-of-the-...

jkestner··on Local-first software (2019)

Using Couch/Pouch on our current app for this reason. Great to work with. Though we’re not supporting offline-first right away (depends on external services), it’s going to help with resilience and a future escape valve.

jkestner··on ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral

Oh yeah, those guys who came up with qualified immunity.

jkestner··on Don’t use “click here” as link text (2001)

Scannability is one of the reasons my formula is to link a complete descriptive phrase, like “Read more about hrefs,” or “take a survey on meeting times.” Links can be long, and probably doesn’t hurt SEO.

jkestner··on Don’t use “click here” as link text (2001)

And Nielsen had plenty to say about that too.

jkestner··on The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

Because there aren’t jobs there?

jkestner··on The Great Illusion: When We Believed BeOS Would Save the World

If they’re just targeting HN, they can save those pennies too. You can’t make me RTFA!

jkestner··on US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law

To be precise, "more than one-third of which is sexual material harmful to minors." What exactly does that mean? Anything that "promotes" a non-heterosexual, non-binary lifestyle? Anything that discusses safe sex?

Texas certainly could've written the law more narrowly, and chose not to. Small government for me, big brother for thee.

jkestner··on Brad Lander detained by masked federal agents inside immigration court

I suppose it’s a feature. We don’t care if someone else gets you, as long as you’re scared and compliant.

jkestner··on Now might be the best time to learn software development

Using natural language discussion to probe for an answer is more draining for me than scanning a large volume of text (much like watching a video instead of the transcript is). I didn’t start coding for more humanish interaction!

jkestner··on Brad Lander detained by masked federal agents inside immigration court

Even more insane that the lack of accountability means that common criminals and vigilantes pose as federal agents to kidnap or rob people. https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/04/us/ice-impersonators-on-the-r...

jkestner··on Brad Lander detained by masked federal agents inside immigration court

Sustained protests are merely a part of what's necessary.

Sure would help if the media would cover them to the extent that they did for George Floyd/Women's March/etc.

jkestner··on My first attempt at iOS app development

Yeah, I hate the code rot that the push for the latest SDKs brings. I’ve kept old Xcode versions around, and don’t jump for every OS update so _those_ don’t rot. Kept an app (useful to dedicate old devices to) running on iOS 9 until last year. Probably could’ve gone longer with containers.

jkestner··on Bill Atkinson has died

Word. This is the Papert philosophy of constructionism, learning to think by making that so many of us still carry. I’m still trying to build software-building software. We do live in that timeline; it’s just unevenly distributed.

jkestner··on The Cure for Disposable Plastic Crap Is Here–and It's Loony

What I liked about this article was the case it made for recycling/reuse systems (run privately) backed by regulations. Things like having packaging design standards that make automated collection easier.

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