Hacker News: willu

New comment by willu in "Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters"

willu — Mon, 06 Jun 2016 03:19:29 +0000

I guess there are a lot of weirdos in Chicago by your estimation. Virtually every decent north-side neighborhood in Chicago (including Jefferson Park) has a median sales price above your $250k point and that includes all types and sizes of homes:

http://www.trulia.com/home_prices/Illinois/Chicago-heat_map/

New comment by willu in "Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters"

willu — Mon, 06 Jun 2016 02:57:34 +0000

I guess I should have specified that I'm thinking of 3+ bedroom homes. Here's what Zillow looks like for a wide drawing of north-side Chicago SFHs under $250k.

http://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/house_type/3-_beds/0-25...

This is dominated by auctions and homes in very rough west-side neighborhoods. Yes, there are a small handful of exceptions which are typically very old homes that have not been updated in decades, but to act like above $250k is "weird" or out of the norm is just not in line with reality.

New comment by willu in "Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters"

willu — Sun, 05 Jun 2016 16:55:30 +0000

>>I paid nothing close to 500k in Oak Park...

Congratulations! I'm aware Oak Park has some affordable homes (but higher taxes) since much of my family lives there. But Oak Park is not Chicago and I was talking about Chicago. If I were going to live in one of the more remote Chicago neighborhoods that had $200k houses, I'd probably opt to live in Oak Park or Evanston since you'd get more for your money (sane school systems, etc.) without much more commute to the city center.

New comment by willu in "Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters"

willu — Sun, 05 Jun 2016 16:37:41 +0000

Less lawn care. :-) That said, there are large pockets on the northwest side that have lot sizes comparable with some near suburbs.

New comment by willu in "Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters"

willu — Sun, 05 Jun 2016 16:36:09 +0000

That might be realistic for a condo, but a single family home at that price would have to be a serious fixer-upper or have some other significant flaw (near gang areas, etc.). The types of homes most urban professionals would consider suitable are hard to find under $500k in Chicago. And if you're targeting one of the few decent public school districts, even that number is a stretch.

New comment by willu in "Ketamine and Depression: A Breakthrough?"

willu — Sun, 08 May 2016 13:22:17 +0000

You mean the Jack Kerouac who ended up drinking himself to death? Perhaps the road trips did not cure all ails.

New comment by willu in "Tell HN: Winners of Apply HN for YC Fellowship 3"

willu — Thu, 05 May 2016 02:27:41 +0000

There are probably ways he could have conveyed that better. Judging by the outcome, smarter people than me came to that same conclusion.

New comment by willu in "Tell HN: Winners of Apply HN for YC Fellowship 3"

willu — Thu, 05 May 2016 02:09:35 +0000

Right about what exactly? The deal was not "we'll give $20k to whoever gets the most upvotes." It was about participating in a YC program, which this person doesn't seem to have any interest in, or at least wants to feign complete disinterest. I'm glad a spot was not wasted on him based on his attitude alone.

New comment by willu in "Developing for the Amazon Echo"

willu — Wed, 13 Apr 2016 14:35:16 +0000

I'm actually impressed by the level of detail provided in the rejections. There's nothing worse than getting a rejection that does not clearly state the reason for the rejection and a path to resolution. Apple and especially Google are notoriously bad about this.

New comment by willu in "The Deadly Consequences of Solitary with a Cellmate"

willu — Sat, 26 Mar 2016 14:35:40 +0000

"The only way to alert a guard was to bang on the door and hope the sound could be heard above the din."

Do cells not have cameras? I would think it'd be feasible to detect fights with basic motion detection.

New comment by willu in "Twitter shut down Emojitracker's access"

willu — Wed, 16 Mar 2016 18:39:38 +0000

I have no love for Twitter, Gnip, or the way they've treated API devs over the years but this particular use case (ranking emojis by frequency of use) seems like it could be just as well served by the free sampled stream. I can't imagine anyone needing the exact usage counts vs. the relative popularity. Also, the author's stated goal of making it open and immediately usable by other developers would be better served by using the access level that is freely available to everyone.

New comment by willu in "Project Rider – A C# IDE"

willu — Wed, 13 Jan 2016 15:58:20 +0000

VS Code is free and open source, so I'd say yes.

New comment by willu in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2015)"

willu — Mon, 02 Nov 2015 17:06:11 +0000

AddStructure - Chicago, NYC - REMOTE - Full Stack Developer

Founded in 2014, AddStructure is an angel-backed startup focused on providing state of the art natural language processing applications to large enterprises. Have you ever visited a product on Amazon or a restaurant on Yelp and wondered how they've automatically summarized those reams of reviews? We provide that same capability and many others to our Fortune 100 and Global 1000 customers. We tackle some of the hardest problems in text analytics and produce results that border on magic.

We're currently hiring multiple developers with various levels of experience. As you'll be among our earliest employees, there's a great opportunity to play a fundamental role in building a strong foundation to support future growth. Above all else, we're looking for smart, capable people with a "can do" attitude.

Our ideal candidate will possess all or most of the following attributes:

* Flexibility to work in a fast-paced startup environment * Strong understanding of modern frontend development practices * Fluency in Javascript/Node.js, HTML, and CSS/Less * Familiarity with frameworks like Backbone and Bootstrap * Experience with source control, testing, and deployment tooling - git, grunt, etc. * Competency with both relational databases (SQL Server, PostgreSQL) and NoSQL databases (MongoDB) * Interest in learning new technologies and helping with a wide array of technical tasks

Required: * At least 2 years of development experience * Located in the domestic United States * English fluency

Preferred: * Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or similar field * Experience with server-side programming in Java, C#, and/or Scala * Experience with Apache Spark, Kafka, Cassandra and related distributed computing systems * Experience with administering Amazon Web Services (EC2, EB, EMR, etc.)

Email us: jobs@addstructure.com

New comment by willu in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2015)"

willu — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 19:23:59 +0000

AddStructure - Chicago, NYC - REMOTE - Full Stack Developer

Our ideal candidate will possess all or most of the following attributes:

Required: * At least 2 years of development experience * Located in the domestic United States * English fluency

Email us: jobs@addstructure.com

New comment by willu in "Hulbee – A Safe, Smart, Innovative Search Engine"

willu — Wed, 05 Aug 2015 15:27:41 +0000

I don't get it. Because truly innovative companies don't write SQL? Is this some kind of ORM or NoSQL snobbery?

New comment by willu in "Show HN: Nearby Buzz – Take control of your online reviews"

willu — Mon, 06 Jul 2015 18:04:20 +0000

I know of at least one other Chicago startup (no affiliation) that's been doing this exact thing for a year or two. I'll refrain from name dropping them in OP's announcement thread, but I did notice that any mentions of Yelp fell off their site a while back which leads me to believe Yelp may have come knocking.

New comment by willu in "Show HN: Nearby Buzz – Take control of your online reviews"

willu — Mon, 06 Jul 2015 17:40:06 +0000

They almost certainly do not use the API given its limitations, and unfortunately the Yelp folks do have a history of suing crawlers:

https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/califo...

New comment by willu in "Killing Off Wasabi"

willu — Thu, 25 Jun 2015 19:29:56 +0000

VBScript is the language of Classic ASP. Many, many sites were written with that technology ~15 years ago and some are still around. An unpleasant language, yes, but certainly not an incompetent decision at the time.

New comment by willu in "Introducing HypoPG, hypothetical indexes for PostgreSQL"

willu — Wed, 24 Jun 2015 22:33:59 +0000

One of my major hang-ups about transitioning away from SQL Server to Postgres is the productivity that comes from tools like Profiler and Database Engine Tuning Advisor (which uses hypothetical indexes to find performance improvements). Can anyone suggest analogous tools for Postgres?

New comment by willu in "Take the Money and Run"

willu — Fri, 08 May 2015 16:21:04 +0000

Given their size and stage at the time it was likely south of 7 figures or very low 7 figures. Considering their acquirer IPO'd soon after, though, the stock portion probably grew in value significantly. (No inside knowledge of course, but people's perceptions of acquisition windfalls tend to be skewed higher than reality)