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kungfooeyon Ask HN: What are you reading?

Good lord, I nearly died at “horsepunk.” It’s a western, yo. I agree that it’s a great read.

kungfooeyon The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life

Yes, he was in Europe at the time. Chernow's biography of Clemens, while ridiculously long (audiobook was > 40 hours) was also very good and spent quite a bit of time on this.

I do suspect financial losses were a big contributor -- but part of it wasn't just that he lost _his_ money, but also his wife's inheritance. Of course, even aside from this money-losing invention, they were quite the profligate spenders.

kungfooeyon Plunging Pickup Truck Sales Threaten Detroit's Profit Engine

This guy ties grill height directly to fatalities. They really are a menace, but it's by design. Quoth one designer, "I want it to look like a fist coming through the air."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpuX-5E7xoU

kungfooeyon Plunging Pickup Truck Sales Threaten Detroit's Profit Engine

I hope those trucks become white elephants.

I haul a lot of dirt, hay, etc for gardening and drive a 1993 Ford Ranger. Even the new Rangers are twice as large (sits higher, taller, and wider) and the bed is 1-2 feet smaller. I just really don't understand the appeal from a usefulness perspective.

kungfooeyon Show HN: Tech Founder Community – Open Coffee but for tech founders/co-founders

I wrote about why I created this here: https://dailey.page/p/tech-founder-community-nashville/

kungfooeyon Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills

I live about a half mile from my kid's school and we walk most days, or I bike.

However, it has been... eye opening. We live in a fairly urban area of Nashville, but my street doesn't have sidewalks. We've been yelled at multiple times (me, my wife, and our kindergartner) by drivers to "Get out of the road!" (This is on a 25 mph street.) There are ditches and uneven ground on both sides of the road.

Even the sidewalks we _do_ have on our route are paltry... about 3 feet wide and immediately adjacent to a busy 30 mph road. We sometimes walk in the grass next to the sidewalk, and I actually had one neighbor yell at us to "Get out of the yard, get on the sidewalk." That one took the cake for me.

So, yeah. There's a lot of reasons people don't walk to work, but one of them might be that everyone and everything assumes you're supposed to drive in a car and idle in the parking lot for 20 minutes rather than walking. Walking can be _stressful_, especially if you're doing it with multiple kids (which I often do).

kungfooeyon Taking Flight Without a Smart Phone

There is a shockingly large group of us trying to figure this one out. See reddit.com/r/dumbphones community as an example.

kungfooeyon How to parent more predictably (2018)

This is the whole thesis of the (very good) book by Bryan Caplan, "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids."

kungfooeyon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2019)

(Noting that this is US-only.)

kungfooeyon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2019)

Stratasan | Web Operations Engineer (Devops-ish) | Remote or Nashville, TN | https://stratasan.com/about/careers/

The Ops Engineer role at Stratasan has three primary functions: (1) Ensure the security and stability of the Stratasan application (2) Monitoring and metrics (3) Aiding the dev team with automated tests and continuous integration.

We’re always looking for ways to improve our stack, but we do already have a fairly sophisticated operations stack that uses Python 3, Docker, AWS, Terraform, ChatOps (via Slack), and Jenkins.

Full job description and apply: https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=e4fd366e447b71b7&tk=1d07or...

kungfooeyon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2016)

Stratasan | Nashville | Full-time, on-site or partial remote

Stratasan is a small but growing Nashville-based company that provides intelligence on healthcare markets to hospital strategists, physician offices, community care experts, and others. We aggregate healthcare data, curate it, and provide reports and tools that aid healthcare decision-making. As an example, we give guidance to our clients looking to place a new acute care clinic.

Our dev team is small (3 people) and we are looking to add the following:

- Web Operations Engineer (AWS, HIPAA, config mgmt, etc)

- Front End Dev (Webpack, React, Redux)

- Python Dev (Django, Django Rest Framework, AWS)

Full details on the first two jobs are at http://stratasan.com/about/careers/ . The Python position description can be found here: https://gist.github.com/briandailey/1028734

kungfooeyon Bad cops: A new database collects information about cop misconduct

While I'm glad to see this, it appears this article is from February. I guess this hasn't gotten much press?

kungfooeyon TSA Master Keys

There was a talk about this by Deviant Ollam at The Last HOPE in NYC in 2008. Mp3 Link: http://www.thelasthope.org/media/audio/64kbps/Packing_and_th...

More info: http://deviating.net/firearms/packing/

kungfooeyon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2015)

Nashville, TN -- Stratasan -- Lead Front-end Developer -- Onsite

Stratasan is a Nashville-based company that provides intelligence on healthcare markets to hospital strategists, physician offices, community care experts, and others. We're looking for an experienced developer that has worked on the front-end (CSS/JS/HTML) for several projects.

More details: https://gist.github.com/briandailey/1aa176ad24281ab9a859

kungfooeyon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2015)

waves at former neighbors

While you're checking out Nashville, if you're not into UX but you're into Python...

Stratasan - Local (Nashville, TN) - Senior Software Developer (Python)

Stratasan is a Nashville-based company that provides intelligence on healthcare markets to hospital strategists, physician offices, community care experts, and others. We aggregate healthcare data, curate it, and provide reports and tools that aid healthcare decision-making. As an example, we give guidance to our clients looking to place a new acute care clinic.

Full job description here: https://gist.github.com/briandailey/1028734

kungfooeyon The days are long but the decades are short

> There's nothing wrong with the list.

Pretty high bar you have for lists there!

kungfooeyon The days are long but the decades are short

Clarification: I'm not saying that no 30 year old can offer sage advice. I don't think Altman is on the same level as Kirkegaard here. As others have pointed out, the list is not terribly revolutionary.

It simply struck me as odd that this (not particularly revelatory list) could be passed off as worthy of note. What, other than his work with YC, makes Sam's musings worthy of our time?

kungfooeyon The days are long but the decades are short

Are we really at the point where a 30 year old can offer sage advice on living life? Wow.

As a counterpoint to "be the best you can be in your profession": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIJdFxYlEKE [PyCon keynote by Jacob Kaplan-Moss on 'mediocre developers'].

kungfooeyon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2015)

Stratasan - Nashville, TN - http://www.stratasan.com/

Web Developer - full desc at https://gist.github.com/briandailey/483be5117d1afe4dd0e5

No remote, alas.

kungfooeyon Movie rental page on YouTube

Purchasable movies have started showing up in search results lately (ex: search for 'shaun the sheep' or 'earnest and celeste'). That's fine, but it's rather disappointing (inconvenient?) that there doesn't appear to be a filter that limits the search to "free" content.

kungfooeyon How the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition (2010)

If you find this interesting, I highly recommend the book "Last Call: Rise and Fall of the Prohibition" by Daniel Okrent. There is a PBS documentary as well, but I found it difficult to watch (narration with lots of panning over still photos).

The prohibition is a really great example of the unintended consequences of (mostly well-intentioned) morality-by-legislation.

kungfooeyon Honeywell Lyric thermostat

As usual, the pricing is opaque. Click "Get Lyric" and it directs me to a list of "certified contractors."

> The Lyric Thermostat is currently available exclusively through Honeywell certified contractors.

It does say it will be available for self-installation "soon." However, so far this continues the long-standing tradition with HVAC companies.

kungfooeyon How I Feel as Young Father Involved in Early-stage Startup

Nope. Nope. Nope. She won't wait for you, mate. Time doesn't wait. If you want to be with your family, they have to be your priority before any fame, glory, and wealth from your ability to churn out ideas or sling some code.

Don't live a life of regret. Make do with less. Maybe get there slower, but be a happier person.

I'm in a similar situation in that I have two young children (under 5) and I am the co-founder of a small-ish startup in healthcare. I make sure to leave every day at 5pm so I can be with my kids for a few hours. If I have a busy week, I'll get up earlier (5 or 6am) and get my work done earlier in the day.

If additional work needs to get done, it gets done after they go to bed.

Importantly, my co-founders also have families and value them as I do. If that were not the case, I would not be involved in this company.

kungfooeyon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired?

Nashville, TN, Local & Remote, Contract or Part Time

Stack: Python, PostgreSQL, Amazon Redshift, Redis

Resume: http://dailytechnology.net/projects/

Contact: hn@dailytechnology.net

Web application developer, past experience with Jave, PHP & Ruby. Familiar with jargon of healthcare. Love working with data (particularly with Amazon Redshift). More interested in moonlighting projects than anything else, but always open to talk.

kungfooeyon Ask HN: What source code is worth studying?

Yes! I couldn't agree more on this one. Such a beautifully written library.

kungfooeyon A list of vendors at the PyCon job fair that hire remotely

If I had to do it again I would have asked "Does your company embrace a remote work culture?" That's more what I was looking for. Oh well. It was still interesting to talk to 45 different companies and get their take on it.

I did ask a few details about how they accommodated remote work (most had teams on IRC, Slack, or Hipchat and only one said they used Jabber) but I didn't standardize as much so I didn't write down all that data. I only had about 2 hours to collect all this so I had to make some sacrifices somewhere. As it was I missed a couple of companies that folded their tables up before I could get to them.

kungfooeyon Data on PyCon 2014 job fair participants and their positions on remote work.

Thanks for posting!

kungfooeyon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (April 2014)

Just a note from experience: when devs see someone talk about an app that is "eighty percent complete" that throws up all kinds of red flags. The first 80% is the easy part. Why does it need to be "taken over"? Did you have a falling out with other freelancers? Lots of questions on that, might be good to address them.

(Note, I'm not looking for work, just thought I'd point out the thought process here.)

kungfooeyon White House urges 'geeks' to get healthcare coverage, launch startups

In NY, it was illegal to discriminate based on pre-existing conditions, which meant it was higher there than other states in which it was legal. I used to live in NYC and was under Freelancers Union insurance, which ran about $400 a month with a $10k deductible and 30% coinsurance. Moved to Nashville and was able to get better insurance for about $200 a month. (I'm insured through an employer now, so I have no idea what it looks like post-ACA).

kungfooeyon In Tennessee, four bills seek to reverse restrictions on public broadband

This is good news. As I understand, there is city-owned fiber in Nashville (from NES?) that is currently unused. Not sure if that's related to the current legality of municipal broadband or not.

If you're in the Nashville (mid-state) area be sure to check out the variety of channels on Freenode (#nashjs, #pynash #nashfp #nashvillephp nashvillevim and many others). Would love to have you join us.