woebtz

I have a friend who used to start every meeting with writing down how much the meeting will cost the company (pp person/hour, etc.) on a whiteboard.

They worked for a university's budget controller, so large meetings were regular, but, fortunately infrequent!

You could create a subreddit or something similar instead of a website.

You'd still face traction and backlash issues, but it seems like a lot less effort and commitment to get started.

Honda LaneWatch (blind spot camera) is easily my favorite car safety feature.

Unfortunately, it's more expensive to manufacture, compared to standard blind spot warning systems, and the average customer does not appreciate it (by sales). Instead, Honda has received many angry complaints that the radio/media console is unavailable when changing lanes or when the user has left the blinker on.

Also consider non-Western languages (CJK, Russian, Arabic). My team got bit by this when we discovered we couldn't render emoji's client-side.

Photopea appears to do it properly with feature testing (no UA checks): https://www.photopea.com/willitwork/test.js

FYI, Modernizr is a fantastic library for browser feature testing. You can just "add to cart" the tests you want to perform. No hand rolling necessary: https://modernizr.com/

The Demon Hunter and Blademaster is each player's respective hero/champion and essentially a free powerful unit.

The DH player has the advantage during the early game, so is scouting around the map (the Fountain of Health being a likely location) to find an easy fight.

Semi-related, it's hard to imagine being defrauded out of cremation remains, but it's apparently quite likely to happen during pet cremations (due to the cost to run the machines, multiple smaller pets are processed at the same time and you won't necessarily get back what you sent).

This Freakonomics episode goes into more detail: http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/14/the-troubled-cremation-of...

It took a stressful few months for me to make this similar realization. I don't know why it felt so profound at the time, but I imagine a lot of developers (myself included) get their start wanting to create stuff that people want [to use] or that will help their company [be more successful].

Unfortunately, the developer's primary job isn't to make business decisions/ideas and fighting that battle for life and death is many times a lost cause. Fortunately, a good attitude to takeaway is to always have pride in doing good work and believing that a good idea is still a good idea even if you can't convince anyone else (today). Tomorrow, you can wake up and try again.

A catchy name, with fewer syllables, or fun acronym has some value does it not?

That's an incredibly empathetic approach to interviewing, I'll try to keep that method in mind. I tend to be overly critical to a fault.

How do you phrase or bring up your praise/concerns?

Is using Mailchimp (or related services) the issue or link tracking in general?

One of my favorite Mac (anti-)games was a zen-like, music space platformer called Tranquility[1]. The relaxing "floating" gameplay was interesting enough, but the generated ambient music was the best part. I'd leave that running on the background like some rain loops I use nowadays. It was an online game, despite being single-player, and I paid $10 out of my allowance for a lifetime membership. I was pretty sad when it abruptly shut down some years afterward.

I've always hoped someone would remake it for mobile or VR. The music/synth engine alone would make a pretty neat app.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tranquility_(video_game)

Flat design looks nice, but provides less affordances.

In practice, flat designs have less detail, so convey less information. This leads to uncertainty/doubt/cognitive load where there was none before.

Compare flat to skeumorphic designs:

* What gestures can I perform on this UI element?

* Where is the button/what can I click on?

-or better yet-

* What state is the iOS keyboard's shift key in (activated, deactivated, capslocked)?

Apple isn't the only culprit, Android/Material design is similarly flat and less usable.

What do you mean by microphone?

Is audio analysis of keyboard chatter a thing or are we leaking passwords when we verbally communicate them to a co-worker?

I don't think this is related, but I found this keylogging technique combining microphone, camera, accelerometer data to approximate finger/thumb positions for PIN numbers: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/pinskimmer_spsm13.pdf

Hi HN,

I built this tool to help me bootstrap various work environments using iTerm2. Profiles never quite clicked for me and so I chose juggling a few .applescripts for my least hassle solution.

This is a WIP and I'd love your suggestions and feedback for improvements.

Thanks! Ben

Thanks, Sam!

Q: I was curious what types of tools or applications YC uses to operate (manage applications, track feedback, or schedule meetings, etc.)? Can you share your stack?

KeePassX (Mac) + cloud storage and unique "low security" derived passwords for each service1.

I made a clone (lazypass.com) of passwordtable.com, so I could use a custom no-look-alike's character set (sans-"iILl1...o0O", etc.) and to improve lookups -- but the improvement, in practice, seems to be somewhat negligible.

I feel that important passwords should to be stored on paper or encrypted for a close friend/parent/spouse to recover should you get dead... is that kind of a similar concern?

1 Until they tell me to make a new one that can't be the same as the previous. :(

Beautiful tool!

Something seems unfinished with the column-to-position associations. Maybe they need some more style to communicate the purpose a bit clearer? (e.g. representing the columns-to-positions in a table style, or more vertical padding separation, or referencing positions by letter (A, B, C, etc.) instead of by #).

1) Setup VM with OSX, 2) Sign-in iTunes account created with a gift card, 3) Download/purchase app in iTunes (OSX), 4) Rate app in iTunes (OSX).

Step 3 might require a physical device, but 1, 2, and 4 do not.

I don't know either, but it looks like the transcripts are initially generated from speech recognition (text dump + timing meta data?) and then hand-edited/annotated by a producer.

They'd add punctuation, sound cues, fix spelling, annotate the speakers (e.g. name + host, subject, or interviewer). Then that data's got to go somewhere...

It looks pretty labor intensive. I sure hope they have great tools!

Assuming these numbers are fact, has there been any extensive research on how taxi / private car / shuttle services' revenues have been affected by Uber and the like?

Pre-Uber, I probably spent $100/year on taxis / shuttles (Los Angeles). Post-Uber... I'm hesitant to look at my bank statements.

Workflowy (https://workflowy.com/) is my goto for keeping lists, planning, and tracking my work/project logs.

For work, I have a section structured as such: Work > {CLIENT} > {YEAR} > {MONTH} > {DAY, HOURS, SUMMARY}

e.g. A day's entry might look like:

8/13/2014, 6.75h, One-liner summary of the big ticket accomplishments today * 11 - 12,30, 1 - 6,15 * [x] #ASAP Task 1 description * [x] Task 2 description * [x] Task 3 description * [x] Meeting with @client @coworker1 * Notes from meeting... * More notes...

I track my hours worked in shorthand and format {DAY, HOURS, SUMMARY} because I dump and parse the data at the end of the month to generate my invoices.

SQL, Markdown, or code snippets is a little trickier, but you can hang multi-line text as a sub-node using SHIFT+ENTER. In general, Workflowy offers a ton of great keyboard shortcuts and pretty decent search capability. Media attachments would need to be as URLs AFAIK.

I've been using it for 2-3 years and if they ever decided to close shop, I would seriously try spinning up a similar service.

Saving $2500/year @ 10% compounded annually over 18 years is a little over $120K.

Not qualifying for financial aid, the total cost (tuition, room, books) per year @ Stanford will run you $50-60K--easily $200K+ for four years.

If this tuition history chart (http://www.collegecalc.org/colleges/california/stanford-univ...) is any indication of the future, four years at Stanford or any prestigious college in 2032 will set you back a ~half million USD!

I suppose the parents can bet on the smarter of the two kids...

My bank only allows email addresses less than 31 characters in length. I filed a bug report and received a, "thanks, we know..." Fortunately, their password policy isn't as ridiculous.

How about Star Wars-style escape pods or parachutes for each passenger row?

Thanks for sharing this.

Will you be planning a gameplay video? I think it's particularly difficult for viewers to extract value from non-gameplay trailers/teasers involving new IP.

Can you explain an embargoed press release?

Is it:

a) giving your "favorite" journalist(s) an exclusive time period to make announcements,

b) a heads up of when you will be submitting the press release,

c) a firm "time" when you'd like all press/media to hold stories before publishing?

If you're heading to GDC, good luck! It sounds like an exciting conference.

How would you interpret: "Lunch is good, take a lunch break," vs. "Take a lunch break or you will be fired."

Absolutely, an unsolicited SMS would drive anyone mad, but they're also incredibly low-friction and useful for appointment reminders.

Case in point, Ramit Sethi regularly holds one-off sales webinars and ends all (?) of the RSVP ("give me your name and email") funnels with an optional, "Would you like to receive an SMS reminder before the webinar begins?"

There's enough of a B2C trust relationship that I don't mind giving up my phone # for a one-time reminder to join the webinars when they begin. It's way simpler than putting a low-priority event like that on my calendar and probably quite effective at converting more people to join the webcast.

Compare that to some O'reilly webcasts that advertise via an initial email, have you RSVP by filling out a 7 or 8 field survey, and then still forget to send an email reminder that the webcast is starting. I'm mentally exhausted and I also miss the event.

Ouch. Does that imply that finishing in the top 80% of your class then put you somewhere near the bottom 33% of developers?

Hey phest! Great looking game! It has got a really unique style.

Is the music/sound procedurally generated too?

What is the process like for creating the soundtrack for the trailer or effects for the game?

What's the squiggly black icon for/go to in the options list (Settings, Leaderboards, About, goes to a black screen???)?