HN user

PeterBarrett

386 karma

Blog: https://www.peterbarrett.ie

Work: https://www.8bytes.ie

Twitter: @peadar_barrett

Posts7
Comments63
View on HN

Responding to someone actively expressing interest in your product by offering them a demo definitely doesn't qualify as "turning it into a greasy sales pitch". They've clearly built the product to be a low touch experience so offering to run through it with someone is actually very pro-active of them.

Saying a river of whiskey sounds interesting but it was more likely that they drank pure alcohol or it was simply contaminated from the journey through the city.

Hmm, fair enough, maybe it's only in large towns and cities. The pricing you got seems a bit suspect in that case because you would need 3 phase to run a 22kw charger and if you don't have easy access to 3 phase then the cost would be quite a bit higher as new wires would need to be added.

The charger alone would cost around 1000 (if not slightly more) so I can't imagine them doing the amount of required work for 300 pounds.

In the UK you have the advantage of easy access to 3 phase electricity, most houses can simply pull 2 more wires from the mains and have it. Whereas in the likes of Ireland you need a special setup and massive extra cost to get 3 phase.

Having a 22kw charger at home is amazing especially for only £1300!

I have found straight up bidding to be a much slower process. You don't have to immediately respond, if an estate agent is applying pressure you should just ignore them and respond with your bid when you're ready.

On the other side if the sellers aren't happy with the highest bid they can just keep waiting for more people to turn up.

Well put, I agree with you and I'm happy to hear someone with a more informed opinion was giving input at a level that mattered.

As with most things in life, too far to either extreme and you will have problems. How can we expect our kids to cope if we ourselves are totally addicted ourselves or totally isolated from it all.

I don't have kids yet but it is something that has been discussed about my nieces and nephews. As you say, you don't want your kids to become social pariahs but you also don't want to give them smart phones, in this day and age it looks like the two are intrinsically linked, which is disappointing.

I would like to say that we can teach kids to have a healthy relationship with the internet and social media but sites like TicTok are engineered to be as addictive as possible so that would be naïve of me to say.

In saying that, if you outright ban these sites in your house it just means that when it comes time for your kids to be more independent they could possibly have no knowledge of how to healthily use social media and then be worse off than if they had access early.

There is no easy answer here, at the end of the day it will be their decision, all you can do is teach them to navigate the digital world and then be there to help when they make mistakes.

Someone did a really funny presentation on all apps moving to the web and then eventually OS's, followed by OS's running on OS's on the web. If anyone know's where I can find it I would really appreciate a link!

It's pretty relevant to this seeing as it does seem to be where we are going.

This is so nicely written, good job.

It's a topic that captivates me every couple of months, most recently I've been interested in the power of YouTube's recommendation system. If you show interest in a topic you're slowly guided into more videos on the topic, to the point where you're more likely to buy items surrounding the topic you have become interested in. Then eventually the recommendations change, your interest in that topic weans and you're on to your next interest. It's a cycle that's easy to fall into and easy to break if you notice, but how many people don't notice?

We have found that refusing to support IE11 in healthcare environments has lost us 0 customers and given them a reason to move away from it. At this stage any company using it and the likes windows xp or windows 7 are just creating unnecessary security risks.

If the end goal is to increase your knowledge then reading faster won't necessarily get you there.

You won't process the information faster or retain it any better. Instead, learning to put down a book when it's not good rather than forcing yourself to finish it and taking good notes or writing a book review are better approaches (for the goal of processing and retaining information for longer).

This seems like a pretty flawed idea and an attempt to justify the incredible amount of electricity required by bitcoin. If bitcoin was changed to require a fraction the amount of electricity all of these ideas would suddenly fall apart.

Building renewable energy sources in the middle of nowhere to power a bitcoin farm is just completely nonsensical and does noting to help with the shift to renewables.