fluxic's comments

fluxic | 1 year ago | on: The Dumbest Trade War Fallout Begins

Canadian liquor stores have dumped all American booze. Dinner conversation up north for the past few days has been all about travel and services boycotts (Amazon, Netflix, Uber, etc.)

Haven’t heard the US anthem booed at all Canadian hockey games since the “freedom fries” days post-Iraq mobilization.

Will take a decade to recover the goodwill lost this week.

fluxic | 2 years ago | on: Show HN: Tracking bike-share movement over New Year in Zurich

I love the beautiful motion!

> We now take this file and filter the data within such that we only keep entries which fit in the Zurcih area bounding box. After this is done we obtain the road network of the city from Open Street Map. Having this information we can now estimate a shortest path between two stations and take this as a guess for the taken path. As a final step we need to estimate a timestamp for each intersection in the path. This will help us in creating a smooth animation. This process is done by linearly interpolating the time from the start location to the end location, based on the distance.

This is super clever too.

Wonderful job.

fluxic | 2 years ago | on: Ask HN: What are ethical companies like Patagonia and some digital counterparts?

I work at Transit app (https://manifesto.transitapp.com) and I think we fit the mould.

We build a navigation app that (1) helps drive down CO2 emissions and (2) encourages good urbanism, by helping people in urban areas make optimal use of their public transit and bikeshare systems.

In dense urban areas like NYC and Paris, where most of our users live, proposing a “most environmentally-friendly car trip”, like most consumer navigation apps do, is entirely beside the point. Carbon neutral transport options are just as fast or marginally slower than cars in these locales, especially when combining bikeshare and transit trips to eliminate long walks, and timing those trips with real-time transit data to eliminate waits at the stop. We believe in the compounding effects of good public transit and work with a few hundred transit agencies to make their service more accessible and accountable to riders.

Besides having a worthwhile mission, we also know that it’s only defensible in the long term with a sustainable business model, which we’ve managed by partnering with major transit agencies (like LA Metro, Muni, the MNTA, STM, OC Transpo, etc.) and having a soft paywall to encourage user subscriptions, which nullifies any incentive to monetize via impertinent ads and all those other unsavoury business practices regularly pursued by other companies in the consumer nav space.

Relatedly, we’re always on the lookout for bright, ethical, city-loving engineers — especially ones whose passions are machine learning, data compression, mapping, and mobile development. If that’s you: https://jobs.transitapp.com

fluxic | 3 years ago | on: Hachette vs. Internet Archive

Fun fact: Hachette’s CEO Michael Peitsch is also an occasional working editor, having edited David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (when he ran Hachette’s subsidiary Little, Brown) and Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch

fluxic | 5 years ago | on: DoorDash from Application to IPO

Very much agreed; while I try to avoid food delivery services as much as I can (knowing drivers are generally making sub-minimum wage after vehicle depreciation) this brazenness of DoorDash's tip garnishing is a bit of a black mark on YC. I won't even take DD up on the "free meal" promos they're running in my city.

fluxic | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Recommend books that give you insight into other professions

Editing: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg

>>> Max Perkins was the editor of Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, F Scott Fitzgerald, and other famous 20th century writers. Great, great, book.

Bartending: Cosmopolitan by Toby Cecchini

>>> Very well-written memoir of a bartender in New York in the late 1980s. He invented the Cosmo in NYC while working at the Odeon — on a lark, without thinking much of it. The drink took off, but I think he's still a working bartender in NYC.

Cooking: Kitchen Confidential by Bourdain

Painting: Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester

Music: Meet me in the Bathroom by Lizzy Goodman

Tech: Chaos Monkeys by AGM

And seconding swyx's recommendations for all things Michael Lewis, who can spin a good yarn about any profession — whether it's baseball managers, junk bond salesmen, or high frequency traders, etc.

I've also picked up lots of good recommendations from this thread https://ask.metafilter.com/243036/Recommend-a-nonfiction-aut... (I, too, like "insidery" type business books. I'm currently reading "The Emperor of Scent" about the world of perfume and it's pretty good! Also looking forward to reading "Ninety Percent of Everything" about the shipping industry.)

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