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zol

110 karma · joined October 2, 2009

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zol··on Texas Is Latest State to Pump the Brakes on Red-Light Cameras
I grew up in Australia with red light cameras and super high penalties for running red lights. Seeing drivers run red lights there is quite rare. I didn’t think much of it until I moved to the Bay Area where I seem to see someone run a red, sometimes seconds into it on what seems like a weekly basis. It’s so common that now when I’m at the front of traffic and the light turns green I inch forward and look both ways, something I never used to do. As a cyclist it terrifies me as getting hit by a driver running a red would most likely be fatal.

It’s probably an unpopular opinion here in the US but I’d like to see more red light cameras and higher penalties for what is a really dangerous traffic violation that is easily preventable with a change of drivers’ attitudes.

zol··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2019)
Chroma | Senior Web FE Engineer | Full Time | REMOTE or at our office in Oakland, CA

We're excited to be building the next generation of UI infrastructure tooling for web developers. We're maintainers of the open source Storybook component development environment and creators of Chromatic, visual testing for UI components.

You'll have our full support and the freedom to do the best work of your career.

Apply: https://hichroma.com/careers

zol··on Famo.us is now open source
We participated in the private beta and wrote up a simple (I hope) post of the basics of developing a Famo.us app here - http://blog.percolatestudio.com/engineering/the-future-of-ja...

The closed nature of their 'open source' project can be frustrating at times. Having said that and despite all the hype, famo.us is sitting in a pretty unique position in the html mobile web scene and frankly I'm more excited about it than any of the alternatives (sencha, jquery mobile, etc).

It's early days, I wouldn't write it off yet...

zol··on Ask HN: How can I do something meaningful?
I guess if you're happy building land mines and blowing people up then that's your prerogative. We are all different and for whatever reason these jobs are staffed by people willing to work them.

I can only talk about personal experience; that is, if I meet someone in need, am able to help them, and as a result they are in a better position than before, it makes me feel great.

It's a selfish proposition, by helping someone, i'm essentially helping myself. Having said that, it still feels right and I have a compulsion to extend that to my life's work.

zol··on Ask HN: How can I do something meaningful?
I've been struggling with a similar question to the author lately. For me, what it boils down to is this: I have to spend 8 hours a day working on something. It seems like better value to be working on something beneficial to humanity than something meaningless, or even detrimental.

I would answer the question of "should you?" with a resounding yes.

I've been finding it difficult to match up my skills as a software engineer to a project with meaning as a lot of them are in the hardware or humanitarian aid realm.

Your point of doing "what's fun" or "what you like" is also an important factor and almost goes without saying. The ideal job for all of us is doing something we like that pays the bills and has a tangible benefit to humanity (not a made up one).

zol··on The Largest Infrastructure Project in History: Chinese High-Speed Rail to Europe
With China's minimum wage being around US 60c an hour (http://bit.ly/6mDBYz) they are in a much better position to undertake such a labour intensive job as the West.

It is a smart move to receive payment in the form of natural resources as some of the countries involved in the network are economically poor but resource rich. It is likely the countries participating will end up paying a lot more in resources than they would have in cash.

It's my opinion that people are mistaken when viewing the proposal in terms of personal transport. It's not. It's a system designed to fuel China's growing demand for resources, which cannot be transported via air. In the other direction will come a high speed flow of manufactured goods.

zol··on Rails Idioms + Django Templates + Erlang Power = Chicago Boss
I've been a lurker for a while but this comment has prompted me to create an account.

Of course the previous poster is making a generalization. If you're in the minority of developers using IE, good for you.

Developers are usually smarter than to use a browser with appalling performance and a plethora of bugs (that never get fixed) when much better choices are just a few clicks away.

This is probably a troll, but i'm hitting reply anyway...

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