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mmorrison My newsletter is making $2k per month with 7k subscribers – AMA

If you're still selling out at $250, have you considered raising prices again?

Thanks for sharing this, it’s great to see people making money off of something they love.

mmorrison Show HN: I made a site that crowdsources the top productivity hacks

Love it, Marc. Simple is great, and a lot of these are quite helpful!

I can see why you got a lot of visitors.

mmorrison FAA Releases Data Showing Trends in Dangerous Laser Strikes

Clearly this calls for AR goggles for pilots, with built-in filters for high-intensity light.

mmorrison AirPods as a Platform

I think sub-vocalization-driven interfaces could be amazing, I was super excited when I saw this research (posted it elsewhere in this thread too): https://news.mit.edu/2018/computer-system-transcribes-words-...

mmorrison AirPods as a Platform

Chaining works on Google Home (and, I believe, Alexa?). I use it all the time, e.g., "Cancel the 5 minute timer and set a timer for 6 minutes" or your example of setting multiple timers.

mmorrison AirPods as a Platform

There's been a fair amount of research into this, eg: https://news.mit.edu/2018/computer-system-transcribes-words-...

mmorrison Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?

Get out of the habit of watching TV.

Some downtime is important and healthy, but it is too easy to waste hours and stay up late staring at a television.

Not a developer tip specifically, but not wasting time and sleeping well is the best way to improve your efficiency at everything.

mmorrison New 13-inch MacBook Pro

> I did add the "Do Not Disturb" key to the touchbar; it's nice to have one-button access

Not quite one button, but option- clicking the notifications icon at the far right of the menu bar will also enable do not disturb

mmorrison Problems with TypeScript

It's used with Terraform, amongst other things. So you might not have heard of it if you're not doing devops/infrastructure work.

mmorrison Tooltips: Secret weapon for improving feature discovery

Good article on "The problems with tooltips and what to do instead": https://adamsilver.io/articles/the-problem-with-tooltips-and...

mmorrison Relearn CSS layout

I've never loved CSS-in-JS, but I do love CSS modules, which allows you to use proper CSS, while solving the biggest flaw in CSS - its global nature.

We import shared styles for typography, color, and some layout basics, but each component gets its own CSS file.

Used to be a hardcore Sass lover, and CSS modules took a small amount of getting used to, but worth it in the long run.

mmorrison Carrier Group in Recent UFO Encounters Had New Air Defense Tech

Probably meant the U-2.

mmorrison Facebook is an attack on the open web

Time does fly, but 1995 was only 22 years ago!

mmorrison What Comes After SaaS?

If acidity is a concern, you might want to try cold brew. It's considerably less acidic.

mmorrison Switching from macOS: The Basics

> Times are changing

Times are always changing. Markets grow rapidly, and then they mature and growth gets flatter.

Specifically looking at Apple, while I agree that their focus has shifted away from the Mac platform somewhat and towards iOS, wasn't that to be expected with the huge growth in mobile and tablets over the last 10 years? Now, mobile growth is slowing[0] and tablet sales are flat/dropping[1].

Laptops aren't going anywhere... the vast majority of white collar workers use a laptop or desktop everyday. And while I can't predict what Apple is going to do (who can?), it seems unlikely that they'd completely drop a market that generated $5.7B in revenue in Q4 of 2016 [2].

[0]: http://www.businessinsider.com/smartphone-growth-is-slowing-... [1]: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/tablet-decline-q2-2016/ [2]: http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/apple/apple-q4-2016-financial...

ETA: Btw, macOS Server is over here: http://www.apple.com/macos/server/

mmorrison Designing and Producing 2FA tokens to Sell on Amazon

I'm by no means an entrepreneur but I'd like to keep trying to be one.

Your imposter syndrome is showing! Designing and building a tool like this and selling it qualifies you as an entrepreneur.

Get a low-cost marketing channel going (or improve your margins to make other marketing options feasible) and see how far you can run with this.

Thanks for the interesting read.

mmorrison The Western diet has nearly killed our ancestral microbiome

I think it's the specific phrasing that becomes problematic. The GP said "can equally be found in China and Indonesia", which means that there are individuals with said diets in the those countries. This is categorically either true or false.

The parent discussed the diet of these huge countries as if they were consistent across all (or even most) individuals. In my opinion, this becomes highly subjective very fast.

Granted, this argument is pretty pedantic, and the threshold which determines when a group is too large to discuss as a single unit is squishy and highly contextual.

mmorrison The Western diet has nearly killed our ancestral microbiome

>> The normal diet in China and Indonesia is plant based.

Speaking of a group of about 1.6 billion people as if they were a monolith is not particularly productive.

Just looking at China itself, there is huge variation in the "average" diets between different provinces (e.g., Shanghainese dishes tend to be sweeter, Sichuanese dryer and spicier, etc.). And even at that provincial level it's kind of silly to lump everyone into a single average.

mmorrison Declassified documents offer a new perspective on Yuri Gagarin’s flight

Not the gp, but here is additional info:

- China: Intelsat 708 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelsat_708

- Russia: 1980 (not 1960s) Vostok Accident: http://www.nytimes.com/1989/09/28/world/1980-soviet-rocket-a...

mmorrison Scientists Replicated 100 Psychology Studies,Fewer Than 50% Got the Same Results

Do you ever listen to On The Media[0]? It's also an NPR show, so perhaps it runs into similar issues, but I think they tend to be fairly skeptical and ask questions about these kind of issues (media bias, etc.).

Warning: it can be extremely depressing to listen to specific examples of how poor a job the media does of actually covering "The News".

[0]: http://www.onthemedia.org/

mmorrison Show HN: OptionSpace – All your OS X apps' menus, instantly made smarter

This is my latest side project. I mostly built it to scratch my own itch -- I wanted to have something like the Sublime Text Command Palette, but in all my apps.

Of course, there are a ton of features I'd like to add to it, but I've been using it for the last few weeks and I find it pretty handy (though I'm a bit biased!).

Hope someone out there finds it useful!

mmorrison You Do Not Have to Drink 8 Glasses of Water a Day

The YouTube link to Healthcare Triage didn't work for me on desktop. For convenience, here's what did work: https://www.youtube.com/user/thehealthcaretriage

mmorrison Ask: Do you still find any benefits in using handwriting?

Like others have mentioned, I still do handwriting in a notebook, mainly because it's easier to sketch a diagram with a pen and paper than it is to do it digitally.

Pros of handwriting/pen+paper:

    - Extremely high "resolution" (can fit a lot of information in a small space)
    - Flexibility
    - Direct input: tools rarely "get in the way"

Cons of handwriting/pen + paper:

    - Editing is cumbersome
    - Storage/retrieval is annoying (no search!)
    - Sharing/collaboration is not as good as digital

I'm still dreaming of something like the Microsoft Courier Concept [0]. We've gotten a lot closer since the concept came out (e.g., the MS Surface), but I think we're still not quite at the point where a digital notebook can feel just like paper + pen.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmIgNfp-MdI

mmorrison China stocks drop over 8%

I believe you're correct that the stock markets in China are less directly tied to the economy than than the stock markets in the US.

But, even in the US, I think stock markets are like a balloon tied to the wrist of a toddler on a windy day. They may very generally track where some part of the economy is, but there's too much interference and interpretation to get a precise picture. Even worse, the length of the string is unclear.

mmorrison China stocks drop over 8%

A widespread slowdown in China's economy would have major impacts on the rest of the world, but it's important to remember that the stock market is not the economy (just an imperfect measuring device). The stock markets in China have been very bubbly lately.

My (admittedly limited) understanding is that most economists are still expecting significant growth in China this year, though not as strong as previous years.

Also, the recent financial crisis in the US was partially/mostly driven by a debt crisis (housing/mortgage issues), which historically has had far larger and longer-term impacts than a stock market crash/correction.

mmorrison Show HN: Density – Anonymous People Counter and API

Since in NYC taxis are a substantial portion of road traffic, I once had the idea that NYC should have a special navigation platform (maybe based on Google Maps?) that the taxis are mandated (or, more likely, highly encouraged) to follow, which would essentially load balance the traffic.

The city could include data about road closures, police & fire incidents, etc.

This might even be used to reduce traffic along bus routes, thereby increasing efficiency for them as well.

If someone works in the T&LC and wants to implement this feel free. ;)

EDIT: Note this works particularly well in Manhattan where the grid system means there are generally many routes of equal length between any two points.

mmorrison Apple’s Share of Smartphone Industry’s Profits Soars to 92%

I believe the big difference is that Apple sells mostly their top model, whereas a lot of Samsung's business is in the lower tier/cheaper phones. Of course, those lower end phones have much lower profit margins.

Not the most objective source I realize, but here's some relevant info [0]:

Samsung said its phone shipments were "driven by mid to low-end products," adding that its Note 4 release only contributed a "marginal increase" due to being released at the very end of the quarter.

[0]:http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/01/28/samsungs-mobile-pr...

mmorrison Ask HN: Which language to learn for long-term work

I don't have an opinion on the long-term viability of JS on the backend (though I enjoy Node.js for "realtime" web serving), but it wasn't clear from your post if you were aware that IO.js and Node.js are getting back together.

http://thenextweb.com/dd/2015/06/16/node-js-and-io-js-are-se...

mmorrison Safari is the new IE

Not an expert, but hopeful that WebRTC will be a success in the end. Maybe I'm just overly optimistic?

> still not widely adopted

Certainly everyone involved with WebRTC wishes that it had the support of IE and Safari, but Chrome + Firefox + Opera is nothing to sneeze at, particularly if you're targeting a savvy audience.

> Original two are not compatible

Maybe I'm confused, are you saying that Firefox and Chrome aren't compatible via WebRTC? I've used them together and had success, but just for basic video calling.

> not adopted in a single further browser in that time

This is fair, but if Microsoft's latest moves come to fruition that will be a big change. There are hints that Edge will likely support WebRTC[0], though I don't think there has been any official word. Maybe that's just for ORTC?

[0]:http://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/05/13/announcing-med...

mmorrison Is Gravity Time’s Archer?

This reminds me a lot of one of my favorite parts in any book:

It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody good as new. When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

(Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut)