Hacker News: gills

New comment by gills in "Poll: Apply HN Runoff – Which two startups should YCF fund?"

gills — Tue, 03 May 2016 02:22:49 +0000

WedWell has promise, but it is a difficult space. I began building on a very similar concept 8 years ago and quickly ended up pivoting off into a subproblem, because [at the time] this ultimately boiled down to quite a lot of manual human coordination which I couldn't scale. Running solo, I decided it was infeasible. If you can scale vendor coordination in the wedding space, and avoid the temptation to build the technically interesting parts yourself right away, I think there is a decent addressable market that can benefit from the technology.

New comment by gills in "Can a city really ban cars from its streets? (2014)"

gills — Tue, 17 Mar 2015 00:34:41 +0000

My neighborhood has possibly one of the more generous plantable right-of-ways in the city; the sum of plantable ROW is wider than the paved surface. But most places it seems to be 4-6 feet plantable, and denser areas completely paved.

New comment by gills in "Duke Engines' compact, lightweight valveless axial engine"

gills — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 21:18:10 +0000

Wow. That looks inspired by a helicoptor's swashplate driven from the rotor side. Always fun to see an alternative engine design.

New comment by gills in "On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs"

gills — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 19:13:16 +0000

Also, in the US, people are willing to work full time at whatever job will provide health insurance.

New comment by gills in "Holdout"

gills — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 18:32:27 +0000

TO loop this back around to the posted article, Seattle has a long and proud history of holdouts. Search for images of 'denny regrade' - long ago Seattle removed an entire hill, leaving quite a few of those "nail houses" (well, temporarily).

New comment by gills in "C++ Grandmaster Certification"

gills — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 04:46:04 +0000

I've got to agree with some of the comments here that this is insane. Sounds fun, but insane. There are probably 3 or 4 programming-intensive undergrad courses wound together here, with a more difficult substrate than your average compilers course.

Then I remember that this is the Internet, and if it's 'free' you're usually not looking at the product; but you can see it in the mirror.

New comment by gills in "Google Revenues Sheltered in No-Tax Bermuda Soar to $10 Billion"

gills — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 17:32:45 +0000

> Fiber networks? Their employees security by funding Police and the Military? Health care for their employees and customers?

Since the post complains largely about behavior in the United States, it seems a fair reminder that from this list Police and Military are paid through taxes, while the others are (for the majority) constitute private transactions for services which individuals have no inherent right to consume.

> No one wants to pay taxes but avoiding them is unethical

I am sure many here would be interested in how you would support this assertion.

New comment by gills in "A Few New Things Coming To JavaScript"

gills — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 18:23:28 +0000

The module syntax and local relabeling reminds me of module syntax in PLT/Racket a couple years back. Given JavaScript's heavy scheme influence to begin with, it seems like a good thing to me.

New comment by gills in "The Best"

gills — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 06:21:09 +0000

Passport. Credit Card. The rest is gravy.

New comment by gills in "Poll: Do you have a Facebook account?"

gills — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:46:07 +0000

I also find it disturbing. This sort of thing is exactly why I disabled my account; the family and friends who use Facebook heavily have forgotten how to communicate directly, they rely entirely on shouting into the hurricane and expecting everyone to pay attention. Good luck with that.

New comment by gills in "Vint Cerf: Internet Access Is Not a Human Right"

gills — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 06:23:17 +0000

The piece does not address the fundamental point that you cannot with intellectual honesty claim as a right that which, to be satisfied, requires another human being to perform work.

New comment by gills in "Are jobs obsolete?"

gills — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 19:28:43 +0000

We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do -- the value we create -- is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful.

So...nobody creates value (or performs work, for that matter) growing the food or building the shelters, right? Riiiiight...

Magical thinking at it's best.

New comment by gills in "Are jobs obsolete?"

gills — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 19:20:23 +0000

As you commented to someone else in an earlier branch, carry that out a few steps; why might healthcare costs rise so much faster than any reasonable measure of the output which funds both education and healthcare?. I don't know the answer. I think the point is that "health care" cannot be pointed out as the root cause, much as "markets" cannot be pointed out as the only solution.

New comment by gills in "Marc Andreessen on Why Software is Eating the World"

gills — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 05:22:59 +0000

This seems inevitable, and positive. There are some friends of mine who dislike the resulting job shedding and concentration of wealth; I am not quite sure how that will shake out.

It will be interesting to see if today's 'software' disruptors will themselves disrupted by software. Today's revolution seems to me, a changing of the guard from the massive inefficient people-driven gatekeeper to the massive and lean software-driven gatekeeper. I wonder if the evolution of this will lead to decentralization and eventual diminution of today's usurpers?

New comment by gills in "Free icons for any object in the world"

gills — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 01:06:28 +0000

An impressive suite of icons in a nice minimalist format. But...I guess looking at a large number of these, linguistic expressions seem to be less complex per concept than the iconographic equivalents.

New comment by gills in "Maybe Americans aren't dumb enough to keep buying houses?"

gills — Sat, 14 May 2011 16:37:01 +0000

By definition, as a renter, you pay those same costs plus a small proft margin plus a premium to cover the times it's not occupied. Unless your landlord is a moron.

New comment by gills in "Mark Suster on Seattle and how a few key people can transform a community"

gills — Fri, 06 May 2011 15:11:15 +0000

Indeed. Most of my friends I have met through work or church or other friends; some sort of pre-existing common cause. Cultivating friendships "from scratch", so to speak, is admittedly much more difficult.

On topic, that feature of Seattle may have some bearing on entrepreneurs in search of capital or employees or a support network. But it seems orthogonal to actually taking the plunge; you're either going to do it, or keep talking about it.

(Also, I think we may have been in some classes together at WSU! We must know some of the same people, you're 3 degrees away on LinkedIn.)

New comment by gills in "Mark Suster on Seattle and how a few key people can transform a community"

gills — Thu, 05 May 2011 22:44:15 +0000

In my 31 years of Seattle I guess I've found that friendships here are made and kept by doing active stuff together. Like camping, or boating, or cycling. There's not a lot of interest in "hey, want to loaf around together for a couple hours?" A lot of folks I know seem to tolerate the Seattle weather only because the summers and activities are great; killing time as bumps on a log is kind of silly.

Or maybe I'm just a poster-child for Pemco ads. I am wearing sandals and gore-tex and typing this from a Starbucks...

Phantom Ray UAV First Flight

gills — Wed, 04 May 2011 16:43:45 +0000

Article URL: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-boeing-drone-20110504,0,7318106.story

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2514374

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by gills in "Quadrocopters juggle balls cooperatively"

gills — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 22:52:25 +0000

Sorry about the late reply. That's a creative idea. At first blush a defense of these seems equivalent in the sense that both are somewhat "stochastic" defense mechanisms - throw up a wall of obstructions and hope something collides.