Hacker News Reader

slayed0on McDonald's CEO promises better food

It's hard not to be apathetic when your job description has become so stigmatized that it is synonymous with failure ("go get a job at McDonald's"). A math teacher at my old highschool used to hand back McDonald's applications for employment with failed tests.

slayed0on Take me as an Intern – 19yo student seeking internship

While we're at it, under 'Upload.it' you wrote:

App to make uploading and downloading exam results more easier.

Just need to take out "more"

slayed0on The Apple Watch does not play nicely with some tattoos

Ya you're probably right. At least downvotes deal with the problem pretty succinctly. After 2 years, this place is still the best online community I visit so I'll stop complaining :)

slayed0on The Apple Watch does not play nicely with some tattoos

Anecdotal at best, but I have noticed a slow decline in % of quality posts per comment thread over the last 3 or 4 months. This problem is also much more apparent when the article is about something that is easy to comment on (non-technical discussion) and one that has large groups of cult fans and detractors that will blindly support or badmouth any newly released information (apple products are probably #1).

sorry for the OT. apple sux!1

slayed0on Texas college professor tries to flunk his whole class

At least one of Horwitz’s students, senior John Shaw, disagreed with the professor.

“Just ridiculous. I had never had a problem in the class. I thought I had done pretty well, done pretty well on the first test, and then I get an e-mail saying I am going to get an F in the class. It was overwhelming,” Shaw told KPRC.

I don't blame you for not finishing the article but they did get a comment from at least one student.

slayed0on Is There Enough Meat for Everyone?

"A complete protein (or whole protein) is a source of protein that contains an adequate proportion of all nine of the essential amino acids necessary for the dietary needs of humans or other animals"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_protein

Many plants have "complete" amino acid profiles but one or more amino acids are too low to be completely adequate for humans. In this case, another protein source with a supplemental amino acid profile is required in order to balance out the deficiency in the first.

slayed0on Is There Enough Meat for Everyone?

His/her point is that the strawman is self inflicted. There is a silent majority that inherits the stigma of the crazed minority. Of course not all vegetarians are like this, but the few who are give a bad name to the rest.

slayed0on Is There Enough Meat for Everyone?

Yes, (most) protein on this planet was created by plants, but not all protein is equal. Most proteins from plants are not complete proteins and cannot sustain a human being. This is not true of animal protein. Yes you can combine various plant proteins together to form complete proteins, but the answer is not as simple as: just eat plants.

slayed0on Million Dollar Cat Billboard

That gave me horrible flashbacks

slayed0on Elixir – The next big language for the web

I think the issue is that many CTO's don't take all of these factors into account when they do decide to switch to or add a new language to the companies codebase. It seems many are shortsighted and simply see A > B without evaluating all of the costs of switching from B to A.

slayed0on You Drink, Uber Drives – For Free

They already do that by providing flat rates to/from many major airports to their corresponding downtown zones.

slayed0on You Drink, Uber Drives – For Free

Way to sneak in "(although not to others)". That's the whole argument. When you drive drunk you endanger others who did not make the same irresponsible choices you did. If drunk driving only injured drunk drivers, we, as a society, would not care nearly as much as we do.

Who cares if some drunk guy kills himself behind the wheel because he's too selfish to make the right choice? It's when he kills a family with a couple kids in the backseat that we have a problem.

slayed0on Game of Thrones leak and watermark: a stupid tracking system

Yes this has now happened one time. It doesn't happen every season. If you allowed early release of episodes to customers who were willing to pay more, you can pretty much guarantee that those will be leaked early every single time.

slayed0on Game of Thrones leak and watermark: a stupid tracking system

Those episodes would immediately be leaked to everyone after becoming available and HBO would lose a ton of viewership on its own platform.

slayed0on Game of Thrones leak and watermark: a stupid tracking system

This assumes you know the method they are using. As the post mentioned, a few milliseconds + or - at the end of a scene would not be noticeable and the overall timestamp would still be constant if "self-compensating offsets" were used.

slayed0on Lyft allowed unauthorised access to my account

I guess it's a semantic disagreement but I would still call this a bug. If they considered this use-case when they designed the system and then decided it was not worth designing for then I suppose it is not a bug, but I find it hard to believe that is the case.

slayed0on Lyft allowed unauthorised access to my account

This is a very serious issue and you should not stop pursuing all available support channels until you get an answer. I can guarantee you that such a glaring bug will immediately get high priority in their issue tracking system. The last thing Lyft wants is for something like this to get reported on and shake confidence in the platform they are trying so hard to build.

slayed0on Working Remotely From A Tropical Island In Thailand

Because of the way financial institutions like ours are regulated, it would actually be a SEC violation to mention the name here (silly I know but it can technically be considered a form of marketing and we are very restricted in the ways we can market). I put my email address on my profile page if you would like to discuss further.

slayed0on Show HN: Where is “Who is hiring?” hiring?

How about instead of requiring a certain amount of karma to post in the thread, require a certain amount of karma just to view it?

slayed0on Working Remotely From A Tropical Island In Thailand

Well I get off work at about 2:45pm which leaves ~5 hours of daylight after work. I go to bed at about 9pm and feel much better than I ever have energy-wise. You can argue that these were not choices I got to make, and maybe I just have stocklholm syndrome, but I sure do not miss browsing the internet until late into the night and waking up groggy every day. Plus on the weekends I wake up with the sunrise, which actually is sleeping in for me, and get much more out of the day. If you have flexible working hours I highly recommend forcing a schedule like this on yourself for a few months. I think most people would find they feel much happier and energetic.

slayed0on Ask HN: Which book are you reading these days?

Regarding your critique of 1984, try Brave New World if you haven't already. I think it fits your expectations of the dystopian genre much better.

slayed0on Working Remotely From A Tropical Island In Thailand

I am a developer in SF and work in finance. We are all in the office before 6am PT to be ready for the market-open at 6:30am. No one leaves for lunch as the market is still open. These things change quite a bit industry to industry, shop to shop. It's not necessarily a developer thing, just a business culture thing.

slayed0on A man who was accidentally released from prison 88 years early

It looks like that guy actually has a blog[1]. Not sure how he has internet access in prison but it looks fairly interesting.

[1]http://mjdipentino.blogspot.com/

slayed0on How Teens Really Use Apps

Are you silently protesting the spelling of tumblr or was that just a typo?

slayed0on Smarter programming of stoplights could improve efficiency of urban traffic

That's not a terrible idea but once again you run into the issues of reliability and budget. At the end of the day you need to convince city officials to spend what little money they have remaining in their budget on your new system because it offers a greater value than all of their other proposed upgrades to the city AND that what you have is as reliable or better than the current system they have in place. This means asking them to trust a small company they've never heard of to manage the transit systems for their city and potentially drop contracts with companies that they have been working with for a very long time (remember this is politics). Also keep in mind that software or hardware failure in these systems could result in multiple fatalities. I'm not trying to be a naysayer, it's just important to recognize that getting something like this implemented is not as easy as convincing consumers to try/buy your product.

The best bet would probably be to get a forward-thinking city to experiment with this in a small area and then go from there.

slayed0on Smarter programming of stoplights could improve efficiency of urban traffic

While this sounds great on paper you have to remember that traffic signals are absolutely mission critical components to the traffic system and what you are describing pushes them to the cutting edge of what many might consider "experimental" technology. There can be no trial and error.

Also remember that traffic systems are not developed by start ups that can iterate quickly with seemingly endless funding and/or no overhead. These systems are usually under the control of municipalities that are already strapped for cash and certainly do not have elite teams of developers at their disposal.

slayed0on First look at Project Spartan, Microsoft's take on the modern browser

They sure chose a distracting snapshot of their website to showcase the minimalist UI of this new browser. all I notice at first glance is the alarming "Top Post" and all of the images. I guess this is a good thing?

slayed0on Amazon Dash Button

Someone already did... in 2013

http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1005

slayed0on The Car That Changed Rally Racing Forever

Never tell me the odds

slayed0on Meerkat is dying

Because they find a way to rapidly introduce new users into a previously stagnant market. The technology isn't revolutionary but something about their implementation is.

To cite classic example, their were plenty of smartphones before the iPhone but the iPhone was still "revolutionary".