Hacker News: tobico

New comment by tobico in "Mountain View moves forward with 9,100-unit housing option next to Google"

tobico — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 03:33:06 +0000

Good. Building up is the way to go. Here in Melbourne, >30-story apartment towers have become the norm, and it's succeeded in slowing the rise of housing prices in the inner city quite a bit. I also think it's helping to delay our transportation crisis.

New comment by tobico in "Why has the quality of brick buildings declined in the last 100 years?"

tobico — Fri, 06 Nov 2015 23:11:44 +0000

Shorter ceilings are better for climate control, though. No need to heat up a bunch of air that just floats around over your head.

New comment by tobico in "“This story is being previewed exclusively on Apple News until Tuesday”"

tobico — Mon, 21 Sep 2015 04:53:55 +0000

How do I make the dots on my "i"s into little love hearts to show how much I love the reader?

New comment by tobico in "It’s time for the Uber of air travel"

tobico — Sun, 02 Aug 2015 07:04:37 +0000

This is ridiculous, air travel is expensive because planes are giant expensive machines, consume a significant amount of rare fossil fuel to fly, and can only be safely flown by highly trained experts. No kind of app is going to solve any of those problems.

New comment by tobico in "Google’s Ad System Has Become Too Big to Control"

tobico — Thu, 09 Jul 2015 12:53:01 +0000

I use ad blockers for distracting image and popup ads, but I fairly frequently click on Google text ads in search results. When there's a product category that's very crowded, if a company is willing to pony up some money to get my attention, that's often one indicator that a particular product might be worth my time to investigate.

New comment by tobico in "We've Adapted Our Reading Habits to Fit Our Screens, but at a Cost"

tobico — Thu, 09 Jul 2015 12:35:38 +0000

Seems like this article makes quite a leap from the study results to their suggestion that everyone reads paper books. Study results:

1. People reading on a screen are more likely to skim

2. Skimming reduces comprehension of the material

3. Reading on paper correlates with better reconstruction of plot

It seems like 1 and 2 taken together are as good an explanation as any for 3. Given that, I feel like it would be at least worth an experiment to see if making a conscious effort to avoid skimming would be just as effective as switching to reading on paper. If so, I think that would be a cheaper and easier solution to the issue.

New comment by tobico in "How I’d redesign piano sheet music"

tobico — Sun, 05 Jul 2015 00:59:15 +0000

The funny thing about talking of tabs for piano, is that sheet music is already that. By representing music on a diatonic staff, with a key signature, it's shown in a perfect format to translate it to keys on the piano, at the expense of some other kinds of instruments, vocals, and general understanding of the music, where it would be more helpful to see the music on a chromatic staff.

New comment by tobico in "Fly.js: New generation build system"

tobico — Wed, 01 Jul 2015 00:49:43 +0000

"Fly is a build system for Node based in ES6 generators and promises that aims to be simple and elegant to write and extend"

If an objective is for it to be simple to write and extend, why use two shiny new features that most programmers will be unfamiliar or inexperienced with?

New comment by tobico in "Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful"

tobico — Fri, 12 Jun 2015 03:37:08 +0000

This method doesn't work well for hiring people that already have a full-time job elsewhere.

New comment by tobico in "Amazon launches same day delivery for Prime customers"

tobico — Fri, 29 May 2015 00:53:44 +0000

Now if only Australia could get same-month delivery.

New comment by tobico in "Firefox Hello"

tobico — Thu, 29 Jan 2015 00:21:37 +0000

Mozilla are clearly becoming desperate to find any distinguishing factors to market Firefox. Sadly, this feels like the beginning of the end for this browser.

New comment by tobico in "Google Nears $1 Billion Investment in SpaceX"

tobico — Tue, 20 Jan 2015 02:04:21 +0000

I like the way they've written this article as if it's an extended tweet. Short and to the point.

New comment by tobico in "The drug revolution that no one can stop"

tobico — Mon, 15 Dec 2014 11:50:21 +0000

Another good argument for focusing on harm minimization over prohibition.

New comment by tobico in "San Francisco Airport First in the U.S. to Reach Deals With Uber, Lyft"

tobico — Wed, 22 Oct 2014 00:41:47 +0000

What a scam. The airports should be providing car access as a service to their customers, not double dipping and charging drivers for the privilege of driving over their land.

New comment by tobico in "California Governor Signs Law Requiring a ‘Kill Switch’ on Smartphones"

tobico — Tue, 26 Aug 2014 03:32:42 +0000

Seems like a pretty good idea. It's kinda weird that no such technology exists for cars actually.

New comment by tobico in "Escher: A language for programming in metaphors"

tobico — Sat, 19 Jul 2014 15:46:44 +0000

I don't really know enough about the maths here to interpret the background to this project, but going on the way it's written, I'm concerned the author may be suffering from schizophrenia. I'd recommend seeking advice from a mental health professional.

New comment by tobico in "King.com, Maker of Candy Crush, files for IPO"

tobico — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 03:54:47 +0000

"The company generates revenue by selling virtual items to a small fraction of its players who wish to enhance their playing experience" should read "The company generates revenue by psychologically manipulating players into spending money in order to progress through the game"

New comment by tobico in "Why you should move that button 3px to the left"

tobico — Sun, 16 Feb 2014 21:38:21 +0000

I think this is often a problem of dividing responsibilities.

In order to turn a design into correct CSS, the size and position of each element needs to be measured precisely. If the Photoshop-using designer can't or won't do this themselves, and send through clearly specified requirements, it falls to devs who probably aren't Photoshop experts, don't know what the designer was thinking, and might not even have Photoshop.

A nice side effect of having clear requirements is that everyone in the team can easily refer back to them to spot design bugs, not just the designer.

New comment by tobico in "Show HN: Probabilistically Generating HN Post Titles"

tobico — Fri, 29 Nov 2013 02:51:22 +0000

- My boss decided to add a new syntactic feature to PHP

New comment by tobico in "Do We Live in the Matrix? "

tobico — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 06:36:14 +0000

The problem with studying metaphysics is that it's quite hard to do experiments.