Hacker News: nateparrott

New comment by nateparrott in "NYC Subway travel time map"

nateparrott — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 04:25:27 +0000

Not sure I agree 100% with the productive/unproductive value system you're establishing, but I do think it's an interesting idea — how can we weight the various aspects of a trip we value (time spent, comfort, cost, environmental and community impact, etc)? Might be interesting to build a system that lets you specify how much you value each of those, and re-rank transit options accordingly?

New comment by nateparrott in "NYC Subway travel time map"

nateparrott — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 04:03:30 +0000

I really like the idea of building a subway map projection based on travel time, without making you select a starting station. Might play around with force-directed graphs in d3 — meanwhile, looking forward to what you folks come up with!

New comment by nateparrott in "NYC Subway travel time map"

nateparrott — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 03:22:31 +0000

Thanks! Site looks pretty cool — much more readable than mine :)

New comment by nateparrott in "NYC Subway travel time map"

nateparrott — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 02:47:05 +0000

It should! As far as I know, GTFS is pretty transport-mode-agnostic. (I imagine the bus stops are a bit more dense, though — it helps that the NYC map has a recognizable set of line colors that remain familiar when you jumble it all up)

New comment by nateparrott in "NYC Subway travel time map"

nateparrott — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 02:45:26 +0000

You need to tap a couple times — the first tap triggers the hover state (definitely not ideal for mobile). Unfortunately, it's a bit hard to hit the same stop consistently multiple times...

New comment by nateparrott in "NYC Subway travel time map"

nateparrott — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 02:23:40 +0000

Just pushed some changes to make it a (little) easier to use on a small phone. Still far from perfect, but a little better!

New comment by nateparrott in "NYC Subway travel time map"

nateparrott — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 02:10:18 +0000

The issue with using average waiting times (as opposed to picking a particular time and computing actual waiting times) is stations with multiple trains — the N, R and Q might each stop at Union Square once every 10 minutes, but if you're happy boarding any of those, then your average wait time isn't 5 minutes — it's much less.

What I might try is sampling a couple random start times (e.g. 8:00 AM, 8:03 AM, 8:22 AM) and averaging the predictions of all those.

New comment by nateparrott in "NYC Subway travel time map"

nateparrott — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 01:47:24 +0000

I'm calculating travel times by simulating a rider starting from the selected stop at a specific time (for example, "weekday late night" is 3 AM, and "rush hour" is 8 AM) and "waiting" for he next scheduled train. That's why, when you select most stops during late night, the nearest stops are pretty far (~ 10 minutes) away — because that's a typical time you'd wait for a train at that time of night. It's definitely not a perfect prediction.

And yep — I really need to put some work into the mobile experience. I'm surprised it works at all!

New comment by nateparrott in "NYC Subway travel time map"

nateparrott — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 01:23:25 +0000

Thanks! Turns out the MTA does keep a pretty detailed schedule (not that they manage to stick to it much, these days) in the GTFS format, so it's not hard to compute travel times client-side. As a plus, GTFS seems pretty-widely used, meaning it shouldn't be so hard to port this to other transit systems!

How to Build an Augmented Reality Table

nateparrott — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 09:06:08 +0000

Article URL: http://table.nateparrott.com

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10879698

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

New comment by nateparrott in "Introducing the Famous Framework"

nateparrott — Wed, 24 Jun 2015 08:09:12 +0000

This. I can't find a single example of an actual UI you'd build with famo.us on their entire site. How am I supposed to know what makes the framework worth learning if I don't see examples of what it makes possible?

New comment by nateparrott in "Flashlight – Do anything with Spotlight"

nateparrott — Sun, 14 Dec 2014 22:40:10 +0000

No particular reason. The API currently involves importing `plugin.py` files and calling functions in them, which makes it a bit simpler, but it should be possible to bridge with other languages. I've considered using Javascript for Automation, but there isn't a huge amount of documentation around it, so it hasn't been that valuable.

New comment by nateparrott in "Flashlight – Do anything with Spotlight"

nateparrott — Sun, 14 Dec 2014 22:16:49 +0000

That's embarrassing... I'll run off and debug that right now.

Edit: should be fixed in the next build of the translator plugin. Now to update the screenshot...

New comment by nateparrott in "Flashlight – Do anything with Spotlight"

nateparrott — Sun, 14 Dec 2014 21:52:44 +0000

It's primarily an API on which developers can build plugins in Python (though doing a lot of useful stuff actually requires calling out to Applescript, of all things). There's no visual workflow-builder like in Alfred, although you _can_ set up triggers for Automator workflows.

Show HN: Flashlight – Spotlight's missing plugin system

nateparrott — Thu, 06 Nov 2014 14:17:07 +0000

Article URL: http://github.com/nate-Parrott/flashlight

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8567043

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

New comment by nateparrott in "Show HN: Griddle – Android-like layout containers for iOS"

nateparrott — Sun, 19 Oct 2014 14:53:08 +0000

As a longtime iOS developer, I find the android layout system far superior for a lot of things. Before AutoLayout, things like containers that adjusted their size to fit text required reams of custom code—AutoLayout is still less intuitive and harder to reason about (though theoretically much more powerful) than Android's linear layouts, grids, etc.

AppStop – turn your App Store metadata into a landing page

nateparrott — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 20:57:24 +0000

Article URL: http://app-stop.appspot.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8455764

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by nateparrott in "Saeed Malekpour, programmer and political prisoner in Iran"

nateparrott — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 23:06:31 +0000

Is it automatic? A function of highly-downvoted comments?

Show HN: M.py: inline and minify all CSS and JavaScript references in your HTML

nateparrott — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 23:04:41 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/nate-parrott/m.py

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8410927

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

New comment by nateparrott in "Saeed Malekpour, programmer and political prisoner in Iran"

nateparrott — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 20:24:41 +0000

Not to suggest any sort of conspiracy, but why is it that this link has (as of 4:21 EDT) 103 points, 43 comments, and was posted one hour ago, and yet is ranked 33rd on the HN homepage — meanwhile, the #1 ranked link, also from an hour ago, has only 20 points? And an 11-hour-old 13-point link is #13? Does it have to do with the poster's karma or recently-joined status, or the linked site? I'm genuinely curious what goes into this ranking.