Hacker News Reader

xavion Six years of Planning Poker Online: from a 2020 Hacker News post to 147K users

i wonder...

if you now recommend to use brand name for the domain, how it is that you've chosen https://retrospectiveonline.com/ domain for your new product?

xavion Designing Price Charts for a Portfolio Tracking App

I recently added price charts to my mobile portfolio tracker app, FINARKY, and wanted to share some of the design decisions behind them, like focusing on percent changes instead of raw prices or handling interaction.

Feedback welcome!

xavion Stocketa – An app I designed, built and never launched

There’s a lot of work there! I’ve also developed a portfolio tracker as a side project ( https://finarky.com/ ). It’s much simpler, minimalistic (that’s how I like it), and at the same time provides the Personal Rate of Return, which I miss in other more-featured and cluttered apps (with features that i don’t need).

xavion Show HN: Finarky – Portfolio Tracker with Personal Rate of Return

I don't know, but this Morningstar article from 2013 says...

"Even though personal rates of return are crucial numbers for any investor trying to reach a goal, few fund families provide these returns on investors' account statements. Why not? Many fund companies brush off any suggestions for improved disclosure by arguing that providing more information would only confuse investors, or by pointing to surveys showing that shareholders are satisfied with the status quo." https://www.morningstar.co.uk/uk/news/65362/understanding-yo...

In any case, for me, the PRR is the best measure I know to understand how my portfolio is performing. I don't think it's confusing... if my PRR is 10%, it means that a fixed-rate account with a 10% APY would have provided the same returns when applying to it the same cash inflows and outflows as my investments. I think that effectively communicates the performance of the portfolio (and lets me compare it with other portfolios, or particular investments).

xavion India, Jio, and the Four Internets

I think European regulations like GDPR or cookie laws have made the Internet worse, not better. They're not effective and make things more complicated for everyone.

I think that people in government should design rules to provide equal opportunities to everyone. I think that will benefit you even if you see yourself only as a consumer. I agree with what the article says, the European regulations only benefit the bigger companies, which have the resources to handle the red tape.

xavion Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2020)

  Location: Barcelona
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Maybe
  Technologies: Clojure(Script), SQL, JavaScript, React, React Native
  Résumé/CV: https://xavi.caballe.pro
  Email: xavi@caballe.pro

xavion Everything Is Getting Louder

I think that when there's regulation, the problem is that sometimes filing a complaint may take too much time, and same for the police to check anything. It should be automated.

I submitted this to Hacker News some months ago, and seems relevant here...

Tell HN: Steal idea for product to automate reporting of barking dogs complaints https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19436807

(although I was thinking of dog barking when I wrote it, it's actually applicable for any kind of noise pollution)

xavion The beauty of functional languages in deep learning – Clojure and Haskell

I didn't like the adoption of Slack either.

I think https://clojureverse.org/ is a much better place for discussion.

xavion How we grew from 0 to 4M women on our app, with vertical machine learning

Is all the tagging manual?

I assume that in order to find images of relevant outfits for the expressed "needs", the images have to be tagged with colors, brands, garment types... If that tagging is manual, I wonder if it could be automated using the object detection feature of an image analysis service like Amazon Rekognition or Google Cloud Vision.

Maybe automated tagging would allow richer tagging, and that could be key to find the best results for each user's taste.

xavion Tesla details how it’ll charge new owners to use Superchargers

To solve that problem Tesla recently introduced a Supercharger idle fee https://www.tesla.com/blog/improving-supercharger-availabili...

xavion NewLisp

I don't agree. Planck (https://github.com/mfikes/planck) is quick and great for command line utilities written in ClojureScript. It runs on macOS' built-in JavaScriptCore. There's also an alpha version that runs on Ubuntu.

Please check the Planck User Guide's section on Scripts http://planck-repl.org/scripts.html

xavion All New Amazon Echo Dot

there are rumors about spoken push notifications http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/9/8/12848586/ama...

xavion Ask HN: Is there any US bank with a sandbox or API?

You may want to check out https://github.com/bankbotsbank/bankbotsbank

xavion Programming Language Rankings: June 2016

And for those of us who prefer editors (vs IDEs), Proto REPL for Atom (https://github.com/jasongilman/proto-repl) is a great option to work with Clojure. I think it deserves more attention, as it can help a lot with Clojure adoption.

xavion Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

Bounce rate for past June was 18.75%.

As for SEO, I just got a couple of backlinks by posting about Omnimemory on some websites. I considered content marketing but I haven't actually written anything yet.

xavion Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

I started https://omnimemory.com nearly 1 year ago. It's a spaced repetition flashcard system with a minimalist UI designed for both desktop and mobile.

It has a freemium model. It only has 35 signed-up users and nobody is paying. I only did some "marketing" for a couple of weekends (this is a side project), posting about it in some blogs, forums, Hacker News... I quickly got tired of this marketing work and moved on to other projects.

xavion Email Apps Suck

On the other hand iOS doesn't really support the use of alternatives to the built-in Mail app. I was trying Google Inbox in a new iPad where I didn't configure the built-in Mail, but then I wanted to mail a link to a web page from Safari and I couldn't. It seems is not possible to tell iOS or Safari that I want my emails to be sent through Inbox :(

xavion Show HN: New calendar app idea

Reminds me of DateLens http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/datelens/

xavion Scala Native

That's one of the things I like about Clojure too, i.e. that is a good tool for many jobs, in part because it runs on the JVM, the browser (ClojureScript), and can also be used to build React Native apps (http://cljsrn.org/).

xavion Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Please include URL

My idea is to keep it simple: just a collection of bots that accept any required credentials and return accounts data in a common JSON format. Storing credentials and aggregated data is not in the scope of this project. If that's needed (not all applications may need it), it has to be handled by the client app.

xavion Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Please include URL

I'm working on BankBotsBank (https://github.com/bankbotsbank/bankbotsbank), an open effort to develop a collection of open-source bots that provide API access to accounts on any bank.

I developed the first bot, which can be used as a sample, with JavaScript (ES6, and ES7's async/await) and Nightmare (based on Electron, so on Chromium).

It's awesome because free API access to this data for any bank in the world may enable new and interesting fintech apps (actually, for me this project is a stepping stone towards another project that I plan to build on top of it), and I think that the open-source approach is the most effective way to achieve that (i.e. free and comprehensive API access to accounts data on any bank of the world).

xavion Show HN: BankBotsBank – Open-source bots for API access to bank accounts

Thanks!

Stevie Graham did that in Teller (http://teller.io/), i.e. he reverse engineered the mobile apps (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11077362). But I think that controlling a browser programmatically and scraping pages is an easier approach. Sometimes it may even be the only possible one (ex. if encryption is used at the app level).

xavion SolarCity Will Eliminate Over 550 Job Due to State’s Anti-Rooftop Solar Decision

To fund roads use tolls. That's fair for all.

The money collected from the punishments can be used wherever is needed. Maybe to partially fund the roads, thus benefiting users of roads with lower tolls. Maybe to support free health and education, thus benefiting everyone.

xavion SolarCity Will Eliminate Over 550 Job Due to State’s Anti-Rooftop Solar Decision

Instead of subsidizing green power, I think it would make more sense that producers of non-green power would pay for the real cost of their power, including the environmental cost, through a carbon tax for example (also suggested by others, https://twitter.com/paultoo/status/672568359033040896). Because, it's not that we have to do a favor to green producers, but we should make non-green producers pay for the possibly irreversible damage to our planet, and so to us. Ideally we shouldn't allow it, but if we do, let's punish it.

xavion Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

Anki has many features but I found it too complicated and I didn't like the UI, nor having to sync across devices. So I decided to develop a basic, simpler alternative, a web app that can also be installed in the home screen of an iOS or Android device, https://omnimemory.com

xavion Show HN: MissPlete – Misspelling-tolerant autocomplete in 200 lines of ES6

I just pushed a new version that uses the Jaro–Winkler algorithm instead of Levenshtein, which gets much better completions with very few keystrokes, while retaining misspelling tolerance. Check it out!

xavion Show HN: MissPlete – Misspelling-tolerant autocomplete in 200 lines of ES6

Yes, I realize that Levenshtein, the scoring algorithm used by default, can actually be worse than a simple `startsWith` if there are no misspellings. In the case of United States, if typed without misspellings, with Levenshtein, it only shows as the first option after typing "united s", or " us" (because ISO 3166-1 codes are configured as synonyms).

The default scoring algorithm can be replaced via the `scoreFn` param.

Probably a variant of Levenshtein, or something else that gives more weight to matches at the beginning should be used as the default, in order to get the best results in all cases.

xavion Show HN: Omnimemory – Simple multi-device flashcards

ClojureScript with Enfocus (https://github.com/ckirkendall/enfocus/) in the front-end, and Clojure with Enlive (https://github.com/cgrand/enlive) in the backend. It's not a SPA. I started it a while ago, before React/Om. If it were now I would write it as a SPA and use some React wrapper, probably Rum (https://github.com/tonsky/rum).

As for HTML/CSS, no framework at all. I'm interested in simple, minimalistic, innovative design, and I don't think frameworks help to achieve that.

xavion Fleex, of "Learn English with videos", now lets you learn surfing the web

I get an error when trying to sign up.

xavion Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult

The government could serve as the temporal bridge between a selling owner and the future buyer. At the least it could simply stop collecting the tax once the owner stops using it even if a buyer hasn't been found yet. The government could even guarantee the immediate purchase of the land. I don't think this would be risky for the goverment because this taxation system, I think, would help to keep a fair value on the land.

It would still be possible to continue renting land once developed, but people that want to do that should think about ways to provide an added value that they can charge for. The real-estate business would certainly change with this new taxation.

I agree that there may be small changes that could help to create a better distribution of health, but I don't think they would be so effective. Besides, things like what you suggest, even if helpful, they complicate the government even more, with more laws, more incentives (which I think distort the reality, sometimes causing more problems than solving them), and another aspect that I like of Georgism is that it simplifies things a lot (there would be only a single tax).