Hacker News: bilch

New comment by bilch in "Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?"

bilch — Tue, 28 Mar 2017 06:23:46 +0000

By this line of reasoning, shouldn't there be a lot of unattractive women flocking to tech?

New comment by bilch in "Like startups, most intentional communities fail. Why?"

bilch — Thu, 02 Mar 2017 21:20:44 +0000

"Activism Or Escapism: Making Sense of 21st Century Communes" by M. Jade Aguilar has a lot of references. Text seems to be paywalled, but maybe you can find what you need via Google Books' snippets ...

New comment by bilch in "Netherlands parliament makes open standards mandatory"

bilch — Thu, 13 Oct 2016 15:41:16 +0000

> there is no way to get your documents for backup/archival purposes

https://myaccount.google.com/privacy#takeout

New comment by bilch in "Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?"

bilch — Sat, 24 Sep 2016 18:04:32 +0000

Ok, so it's your first time in, say, Anchorage. How would you use Facebook to find interesting app-guided walks or tours, or a story told using RL locations?

New comment by bilch in "Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?"

bilch — Sat, 24 Sep 2016 10:17:19 +0000

A platform to connect information / stories / images / video / audio to locations. There are thousands of small, mostly subsidized one-off projects but no general platform for everyone to upload material connected to places and create, say, a personal guided tour of their hometown.

New comment by bilch in "How Duolingo got 110M users"

bilch — Thu, 03 Mar 2016 20:41:23 +0000

a) You don't have to type Russian characters. There's a little switch that lets you input everything in English transliteration. b) There's an explanation right at the beginning on how to install a Russian keyboard layout: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/11449014

New comment by bilch in "Netflix to block proxy access to content not available locally"

bilch — Thu, 14 Jan 2016 23:16:45 +0000

You can switch your country settings from Amazon US to Amazon DE and back with no ill effects. I did it several times. You get to keep all Kindle books you bought in both countries. Just follow the link at Amazon DE where the buy button should be and instead it says "Have you moved recently? You may change your country on the Manage Your Content and Devices page."

New comment by bilch in "Coding academies are nonsense"

bilch — Sat, 24 Oct 2015 09:00:35 +0000

More like the last 50 or 60 years: "the programming occupation will become extinct (through the further development of self-programming techniques)" (Herbert A. Simon, 1961, and the notion seems to be even older, cf. Janet Abbate's "Re-Coding Gender", page 74-75)

From the same book (p. 84): "Stephanie Shirley, who started a contract programming company in the early 1960s, later recalled: 'When COBOL was introduced, we thought that would be the end of the company, that nobody would be buying software anymore – programming – because it was just so easy.'"

New comment by bilch in "Why have digital books stopped evolving?"

bilch — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 06:05:15 +0000

To save you time: Print books offer a superior tactile and typographical experience. You can view them more easily in a bookshelf. DRM is bad. All of which has been said over and over in much shorter articles.

New comment by bilch in "European roaming charges will end in 2014"

bilch — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 07:19:17 +0000

Germany is an exception because there is an actual law that says you're liable if someone else uses your wifi for shady purposes. That's why our routers are password protected out of the box and almost no one will offer open, let alone free wifi. I heard from a hotel owner that this is not just a theoretical danger; he'd paid a high fine once and decided not to offer free wifi any longer.

New comment by bilch in "NYT Review of ‘The 4-Hour Body’"

bilch — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 01:09:26 +0000

How exactly is that different from the usual publishers' practice of sending early copies of the book to a ton of reviewers and ask them to, well, review it in newspapers and magazines?

New comment by bilch in "The Surprising Usefulness of Sloppy Arithmetic"

bilch — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 13:15:23 +0000

"smart people", noun phrase: People who work in computer science or mathematics.

New comment by bilch in "Who Can Name the Bigger Number?"

bilch — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 05:48:50 +0000

A variation that actually works as a game: Name the bigger number, but if your number >= double your opponent's number, you lose. 0 and 1 are off limits.

New comment by bilch in "How We're Wrecking Our Feet With Every Step We Take"

bilch — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 11:08:47 +0000

The Flow is as far from waterproof as it gets. It's Neoprene, which means you won't mind getting wet, in fact you'll probably enjoy it. But you'll definitely get wet.

New comment by bilch in "Why Germans have higher productivity and longer vacations"

bilch — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 07:13:16 +0000

Doesn't a three bedroom apartment actually have four rooms, three of them bedrooms? In Berlin "Dreizimmerwohnung" means that there are three rooms, period. So maybe your calculation is off by one.

New comment by bilch in "The Four Levels of Social Entrapment"

bilch — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 14:57:41 +0000

Is there a word for letting the world know how great you are by not-so-cleverly disguising your greatness as a shortcoming? There should be. I need it every day.

(Sorry to bother you with this, I actually am quite verbally adept, but English is my twenty-sixth foreign language and even after weeks of practice sometimes the correct word escapes me.)

New comment by bilch in "Ask HN: Interesting (Non software) books?"

bilch — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 07:57:10 +0000

Snow Crash was published in 1992, not in 1975. Still, this dude got it already.

Edit: Sorry, it's probably just a formatting problem and you were referring to The Shockwave Rider.

New comment by bilch in "Wikileaks: Something is up"

bilch — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 05:01:02 +0000

From what I understand, mustard gas isn't hard to make at all. ("There are several routes to this compound, none of which require sophisticated technology and/or special materials.", Federation of American Scientists: Chemical Weapons Production and Storage) The process is more or less described in Wikipedia.

New comment by bilch in "Depression’s Upside"

bilch — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 10:25:09 +0000

This seems rather untrue. "In Nederland worden steeds vaker antidepressiva voorgeschreven. In 2007 kregen 937.000 mensen in totaal 6,7 miljoen recepten tegen depressie voorgeschreven. Het aantal mensen dat antidepressiva gebruikt is sinds 1999 elk jaar met 6 procent gegroeid." (Wikipedia) 937.000 people out of 16 million (5.8%) isn't quite the "11% of women and 5% of men in the non-institutionalized population" Wikipedia has for the US, but it's certainly not "quite the reverse", either.

New comment by bilch in "Why Do I Need Facebook When I Have Twitter"

bilch — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 06:29:20 +0000

I run several twitterbots. The ones that autofollow back used to attract large numbers of spammers (until I fixed that). The others don't. I guess the usual spam strategy is "follow - wait a few days for reciprocation - leave if it doesn't happen". So the amount of Twitter spam you see probably depends on your willingness to follow back anyone and everyone just because they follow you.