Hacker News Reader

planetjoneson In-Ear Device That Translates Foreign Languages in Real Time

I just don't see this working very well. The current language translation tools just are not good enough to support a proper conversation. Translating languages via technology is a hard problem and it's far from solved. Coupled with this fundamental problem is identifying speech accurately; something Siri fails to do regularly with my voice. If this thing gets built I am guessing it will be a novelty product.

planetjoneson 'Boaty McBoatface' polar ship named after David Attenborough

I think the name chosen is a good one and like David Attenborough himself, the boat's name will endure for a long time.

However, what did the organisation (NERC) expect when they gave a free choice for the names of the boat. They would have been far better having a poll of say 5 names which had been pre-selected.

planetjoneson Do you pay the right rent? Compare all rents, all over Europe

It seems to disable form input if you enter a CHF rent in the four figures. Not many people are paying less than 1000 CHF here. Also the interface - having to click through the 'wizard' is absolutely awful IMO. Am I sure I want to know!? Actually I'm not. Because I have no faith the answer will be sensible.

planetjoneson After Netflix crackdown on border-hopping, Canadians ready to return to piracy

I am an English person living in Switzerland. Netflix Switzerland is useless to me (no House of Cards, not enough focus on UK and USA content, etc.).

Therefore I had a Netflix USA account, which I accessed via unblock-us. The clampdown by Netflix has been "successful" and I now can't access Netflix USA using unblock-us.

This happened halfway through watching House of Cards. So my choice was either stop watching or download the remaining episodes...

I am tired of companies talking about borderless trade, global economy, etc. when the distribution of movies and tv shows is stuck in the sad world of geo-restrictions. I also legally get access to UK TV channels through my cable subscription, but I don't get access to iPlayer as that's only for UK residents... so again the only option to catch-up on TV that I forgot to record, is to use an unblocker.

planetjoneson I Don't Want to Hire You If You Can't Reverse a Binary Tree

Bad article IMO and no idea how it's front page. Yes a database may rely on b trees under the hood, but thankfully someone else has implemented that complexity so my web developer can concentrate on higher level interactions with it.

His herpes analogy is ridiculous. And I've used brew since getting a Mac and no I'm not suffering now.

planetjoneson Mysterious mutants: 13 masked people should have devastating diseases but don’t

While interesting the 13 people could have a mosaicism or a mistake could have been made. There is no way to tell as the study was anonymised. So until another study is done which offers traceability back to the 'mutants' we'll never know if there is anything useful here or not.

planetjoneson Apple's Push to Flood India with Used iPhones Ignites Backlash

"We shall not entertain foreign direct investment in multibrand retail. There is no ambiguity or confusion on this. The same applies to e-commerce," the minister said in a news conference.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/india-wont-allow-foreign-investm...

planetjoneson Apple's Push to Flood India with Used iPhones Ignites Backlash

There's something deeply contradictory in India's attitude. For imports (including setting up supermarkets in India) there are levys, laws and regulations to make it almost impossible for foreign companies. But then India is able to export its IT professionals and outsourcing across the whole world. Is this really a level playing field?

Why is no one calling this out as foul play? India seems to want one rule for when it is abroad and another when it's at home.

planetjoneson The Way of the Gopher: Making the Switch from Node.js to Golang

> for each request, Octo typically fetches somewhere between 10–100 keys from S3

I'm really curious as to why this is neccessary - what are the 10-100 keys you are fetching per request ? Just reading the high level article it sounds like there is some issue with what this service is doing, irrespective of the language it's doing it in.

planetjoneson Ask HN: How do you integrate remote developers?

I'm quite happy with SnagIt - just take a screenshot of my starting position and start to annotate it. Or start with a blank image in SnagIt and start to draw my boxes and arrows.

planetjoneson Ask HN: How do you integrate remote developers?

With difficulty:

1) Use as many visual techniques as possible e.g. Screen sharing and drawing pictures and sketching examples of what you're talking about.

2) open chat channels all day

3) ability to build rapport e.g. During standup calls look at what the weather is like in their country or share something about what's happening in your area at the weekend. Ice breakers if you will

4) if possible get them to visit you so they understand the culture in your office and understand the people. the most success we've had is when people visit the local team soon after joining

planetjoneson Show HN: Tumbless, a Tumblr-like blogging platform running on Amazon S3

Have you tested this on mobile safari? It jumped around a lot before sort of displaying ok, but then the jumping issues returned. I query it because your page makes a point of mentioning the fully responsive layout - but personally if I visited a page which displayed the behaviour on mobile like yours did, I would immediately leave and not come back.

planetjoneson Domino's trials pizza delivery by robot

>can currently reach speeds of up to 20 kilometres an hour.

That's quite impressive. I guess Domino's will indeed have to choose the neighbourhoods they deploy this to carefully, as at best some would graffiti it and at worst they would steal or destroy it.

>customers will be required to complete their orders on the kerb.

Bit of a deal breaker there - I don't want to have to put on proper shoes and clothes, navigate rain, wind and snow to negotiate with a machine! On a positive perhaps it won't expect a tip.

The original lifehacker article has more details:

http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2016/03/dominos-is-launching-an...

planetjoneson Fitbit Blaze

I received the e-mail too, but can't say I'm excited. Fitbit stock is down from a 52 week high of $51, to just $14 at the moment. Low of $11 on the year. Their market cap is still $3.2 billion, which from where I'm sitting still seems high. I don't see the Fitbit blaze fixing any of their problems...

planetjoneson Stand to Work If You Like, but Don't Brag About the Benefits

For someone who has a herniated disc in the lumbar spine a stand-up desk has been life changing.

I genuinely think if I'd had such a desk before and stood for say 20 minutes in the hour I wouldn't have got into the mess I did with my back.

While some of the benefits may be over-stated I am convinced variety during the day (sitting and standing) significantly benefits the spine.

planetjoneson Facebook is the new Excel

Unfortunately especially with restaurants i am seeing more and more have only a Facebook page. I really don't like this trend. For example the format is stale and the information is often poor - many whom only have a Facebook site don't even publish a menu!

planetjoneson Twitter shut down Emojitracker's access

Are you serious? He provided the email Twitter sent. There was no indication of a negotiation or clarification there. Maybe you need to work on how you communicate.

planetjoneson Firing People

The two most striking points to me were a company where the employer can call the employee an asshole in front of HR. And a company where one employee hugs other employees, including those who just fired him. It sounds like a very difficult place to set or maintain boundaries.

planetjoneson New Photoshop UI has become a major problem on the official feedback forum

> After about eight hours in Photoshop and Illustrator I feel pretty confident in describing the 2015.1 GUI changes as a bizarre gaffe.

It's hard to imagine that Adobe don't follow a UAT and beta test roll out model of their software, so is this just a case of a few users shouting the loudest or is there genuinely an issue with the UI. The comments on the article span a period of 3 months ago to 1 week ago.

> And yet, this subject does not have any response from Adobe. This is getting surreal. HELLO ADOBE-- ANYONE HOME? How many posts before this gets on your radar screen?

That is slightly infuriating, as the subscriptions to Creative Cloud are far from cheap, so you would expect there to be a feedback channel to Adobe themselves.

Personally, I use Lightroom infrequently and always get confused by the user interface - but I always attribute that to the fact I don't use it daily.

planetjoneson Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

> how do you think it's possible that you can easily get a $15/month dedicated server?

Sorry makes no sense to me.

planetjoneson Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

Sorry I think you misunderstand me. Technically it sounds like a great achievement. Well done! Ending badly I mean that in 5 years time Dropbox will be left with a load of servers and a business model in tatters. It's the economics I think will end badly

Also I am sure the in house data centre looks cheaper to Dropbox - but now they have their own hardware on the balance sheet. But I meant cheaper from a consumer point of view - I get unlimited storage at Amazon for $60 a year.

planetjoneson Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

Oh dear I didn't realise Dropbox had invested all of that time and money moving into their own data centre. From my perspective the future of Dropbox looks bleak. Mass storage with Amazon is much cheaper [edit: from a consumer perspective]. I know Dropbox has superior software that works (as opposed to the poor apps by Amazon and Google) but I imagine a lot of people are like me i.e. Store most of the stuff at the cheapest location and use Dropbox just for docs that you want to sync on multiple devices. Total income from consumers like me equals 0.

Dropbox also had that email app didn't they that they recently announced was closing down - mailbox if I recall correctly.

Can anyone convince me that this move by Dropbox isn't going to end very badly for them?

EDIT: downvoters - is HN unable to have a debate about whether this was a smart move or not.

planetjoneson Microsoft Store doesn't accept Bitcoin anymore

My understanding was that companies accepting bitcoin like Microsoft just liquidated the BTC straight to USD anyhow. I don't blame them because of the fluctuation risk.

However, I am not sure they were really helping bitcoin's long term viability - other than allowing the Bitcoin millionaires to spend their coins. I suspect not enough of these people who got rich by holding bitcoins were using their bitcoins to justify having it as a payment method in the Microsoft store.

planetjoneson Marissa Mayer Wants Three More Years to Turn Around Yahoo

Yahoo mail has got much worse under her leadership. Flickr has become unreliable and buggy under her leadership. Personally I wouldn't pay her another dime.

planetjoneson What the IBM Layoffs Look Like

Some companies e.g. banks have no choice but to keep using IBM products as their whole infrastructure relies on IBM mainframes and tools. Companies like IBM just want to milk cash cows like this and 'maximise shareholder value'. So they try and get everything done as cheap as possible. On a PowerPoint and in an investment prospectus it looks great.

Truly a race to the bottom.

planetjoneson What the IBM Layoffs Look Like

Sad, but it's happening everywhere. I have nothing against the best people being employed irrespective of their country of origin. But I really feel ill at ease when companies like IBM say quality does not matter at all and let's just cut costs as recklessly as possible.

planetjoneson If you invested $1 a day, starting when you were born

Does this take into account commission fees ? If I am charged $7 per trade and I invest 1$ per day I am losing 6$ per day to commission. Or are you assuming this is commission free ?

planetjoneson Inside Medium

I like the layout and stuff of Medium. I just hate the idea of one website being the place where everyone writes on the web. That's not the web I love. The web I love is full of home made websites and blogs. The aims of medium I can neither relate to or agree with.

planetjoneson Using Free SSL/TLS Certificates from Let’s Encrypt for Nginx

The letscrypt auto thing.

planetjoneson Using Free SSL/TLS Certificates from Let’s Encrypt for Nginx

I tried using the official encrypt client on my low spec VPS this weekend (cent os 6). It wouldn't install as when compiling it runs out of memory. Why so heavyweight. Luckily I found a python script which uses the acme tools stuff and that worked fine. Maybe providing binaries would be another option so I don't have to compile everything myself.