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columbo

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columbo (at sign) engineer [dot] com <-- I usually check it once a week or so

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Ask HN: What have you achieved in 2016? 10 years ago

I deadlifted 425 ... ... ... yup that's about it

[edit] actually in hindsight I've spent a lot more time with my 9yr old daughter than I have since the birth of our son. Pokemon Go turned out to be a pretty big player in us spending time together.

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Amazon Bought Me for $100 a Year 11 years ago

When I signed for prime 3-4 years ago there was also a lot online retailers jerking around on shipping prices. "Oh that CD is $0.01 but it is $11.99 shipping, so if you don't like it then you'll be refunded the purchase price." Shipping prices in general seemed to be where quite a bit of profit was being made.

I don't know if that is still the case but it was a major reason for me to move to prime back then.

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Defending the Right to Be Forgotten 11 years ago

I have a newspaper clipping from when a car hit me when I was 5 years old... the dark truth of the matter was I hit the car by bolting across the road and smacking my head into the passenger side door as it was trying to drive through an intersection. This little page 6c clipping is all that exists of that moment. No cameras, videos, blog or twitter posts.

If that happened today the driver's name might be permanently searchable and could even cause problems when looking for a job "They hit a 5 year old, that doesn't sound like the type of person we'd want to hire as a delivery driver."

Maybe we can't fix this problem, or maybe it isn't a problem at all but just something we should accept. One thing is certain, we've never been in a situation where everything was recorded so thoroughly before. Can we adapt?

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Fist-sized 11M-to-1 gearbox 11 years ago

If it had enough torque (which seems to be a problem given the plastic nature) I could see it breaking loose rusted or stubborn bolts. Maybe? In a scenario like that you wouldn't really care about precision or sound. Though 11 million turns still seems like a lot of cranking... maybe if it had a 9v attachment it could be a portable bolt breaker. Feels like a stretch though, would be fun to play with.

Though now that I think about it the holder of the bolt breaker would probably start slowly turning before the bolt does... weeeee

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How Adobe keeps key employees from quitting 11 years ago

Adobe’s stock price has increased from about $30 to over $80 since Check In began.

I don't want to be overly negative but COME ON. Changing their goals program didn't nearly triple their stock price. I'm surprised Fortune included that at the end. If it truly had that much of an impact that should be the title of the article.

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What is Flask-Admin? 11 years ago

Getting the admin-interface correct is one of those holy grails. The problem I typically run into is adding complex wizards or features outside of the standard crud stack.

When I'm investigating an out of the box admin interface I'm _less concerned_ about how they handle CRUD; that's the easy part. Really I need to know how they handle things that go well beyond their stack.

For example, in one application we need to create events for people (like google calendar). You need to be able to search for people, show the system what they already have assigned at that time and allow you to choose times that are best for everyone in the list. This has been designed as a multi-step wizard and it works great but it was a ton of custom code. Looking at the online documentation of flask I'm not sure how I would go about integrating something like this.

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The Curse of the Black Lotus – How MtG Avoided Becoming Beanie Babies 11 years ago

I can only speak to MtG when it first came out, I've been out of the loop since eh since when 4th edition started or so. MtG exploded because it was (and I hate to use this term): hackable. You could build creative exploits into the game, at our local shop there was a no CoP rule (no circle of protection) because they were considered too unfair; in hindsight this was a ridiculous rule.

Very few games embrace the unknown dynamic nature as well as MtG did. They would introduce cards that could be mixed with past-future cards almost on a whim, creating moments of pure frenzy as people managed to build systems that seemed indestructible.

It's crazy to think how much some of these cards are worth now: http://www.mtgprice.com/sets/Beta/Savannah

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7GUIs – A Notational Usability Benchmark for GUI Programming 11 years ago

Great idea! I understand there are only seven options (hence the name) but I'd suggest adding a music playlist as an item. It's easy to describe and would cover multiple GUI elements: button groups (forward,back,start,pause), display list (what is in the playlist, what is currently playing) and interactivity (drag and drop to re-order).

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Sprout 12 years ago

I think it's an interesting approach. There are some things you can do with a projector that you couldn't do with another screen (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9JXtTj0mzE)

I could see some applications taking advantage of this when it comes to working with physical items

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Codefights 12 years ago

I think you should show the comments first without a time-limit and then allow the user to play. For example:

        /*
         * @Input1: an integer
         * @Input2: an integer (@Input1 <= @Input2)
         * @Input3: an integer (@Input3 !== 0)
         * @Output: maximal integer from @Input1 to @Input2 inclusive
         * which is divisible by @Input3
         * or -1 if there in no such number
         */
<insert click to play button>

Right now it takes me 20-30 seconds just to read and understand the comments.

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Show HN: Dump receipts as you get them through the year, recall them at tax time 12 years ago

I don't know how relevant this is, but I have a similar pain but it's not associated with tax time.

If I'm going to be at a client location for a few weeks I need to save every receipt I get then I need to invoice the entire lump. It's a mind-numbing process.

On my last trip I had 97 receipts, it was an absolute pain, luckily I had a 10 hour flight to do it over.

In a perfect world I'd take a photo and it would OCR what it can and then voice prompt me for notes. That way I could just snap a photo and speak into my phone something like "£37 for pints... I mean dinner at the Old Flaming Hen".

When it comes time to actually use these receipts then I could download the lot of them and send them off as part of my invoice.

A small but VERY nice feature would be giving the file names something relevant as normally I have to upload them one at a time. Instead of DCR0299.jpeg if they could be "01-17-2014 23:11 £37 for pints... I mean dinner at the Old Flaming Hen.jpeg" then they'd be much easier to find when accounting asks me questions.

I haven't seen much in this space, maybe I'm not looking in the right places or there isn't a very big market.

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An API wrapper to Clarifai's image recognition demo 12 years ago

Wow! This is really neat, I tried to find images that I didn't think it could process, the results are interesting.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/Blown_up_...

["piranha", "fish", "food", "water", "gold", "dish", "crab", "kitchen", "glass", "silver"]

https://www.flippers.com/images/See-SHFA1_Caps&Mods-PCB.JPG

["panel", "retro", "wine", "background", "design", "old", "tool", "letter", "art", "robot"]

http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11_lpi_trvrsmap.gif

["background", "metal", "water", "man", "wall", "old", "abstract", "paper", "hand", "paint"]

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Prints 12 years ago

> If the images exist only as a digital image file, the answer is almost certainly, "No".

Hrm I don't quite understand. Right now just about every important element of modern history is being saved in raw formats, as well as jpegs, pngs, psds and the like.

Are we assuming that a hundred years from now we'll have completely lost the ability to view these images and videos?

London 1970s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPIaG644jsI

London 1990s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c84k4Tkj6wc

London 2000s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSTh80Aybjs

In a hundred years we'll lose the ability to view all of this and only physical copies will survive? How are we even supposed to store video then? You can't print it out, and if you burn it to a CD it's just as useless.

Not being able to plug your 40 year old USB memory stick into whatever-magic-future-technology exists is one thing, but there's no reason whatever-magic-future-technology wont be able to run a little virtualized system that can display it for you.

I'd say the opposite. In a hundred years 3d printers would have gotten to the point where they could just make some sort of peripheral on the fly to view old CDs, records, and even tape drives. In the future if you're browsing the thrift store and you come across a pristine CD of Silpheed I bet you could walk into your local 'maker' shop and they'll print you out a Sega CD to play it on.

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Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice 12 years ago

This is very interesting. This is one of the few actual disruptions that I've seen in the interviewing/hiring space.

One small issue: I don't know what I'm getting into when I join the waiting list. I understand what the site is about, if I join will I suddenly be asked to take an interview next Friday? It would be nice to know a little more about the process.

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Human JavaScript 12 years ago

Yea I agree, since it's online for free I think it'd be better if they went the HumbleBundle route and allowed users to enter in a price.

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