jkoschei's comments

jkoschei | 7 years ago | on: Why Read the Classics? (1986)

This makes me happy — sounds like some top-notch parenting, and I'm heartened to hear your kids got so into it. I may steal the "exeunt" remark to exit a boring situation...

jkoschei | 7 years ago | on: Museum of ZZT

I loved ZZT! I can't remember which was first for me, that or QBasic, but I have many fond memories of being 8 years old and hacking away on little games. I think I started with both at about the same time, and they instilled a love of code. The idea that you could just type in a few words and make the computer do what you wanted was pure magic to my young brain.

In hindsight, the limitations of ZZT were very freeing — with such a limited palette of options, you couldn't bite off too much more than you could chew, and you had to get creative to make anything work as intended.

My palette has increased since then, but the principles are still the same. I haven't touched ZZT in years, but in a way my career has been built on it.

jkoschei | 8 years ago | on: Introducing the new Snapchat

> The new Friends page to the left of the camera...

> The new Discover page to the right of the camera...

This reads like the manual to an early-90s text adventure.

jkoschei | 8 years ago | on: How to shoot on iPhone 7

Sounds like instrumental hip-hop. If you're on Spotify, check out the "Lush Vibes" mood playlist for similar.

jkoschei | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: Where do you go to read or watch neutral and unbiased news?

No such thing as news without bias — all content reflects the biases of its creators. Even if somehow there were no bias reflected in the article/video itself, there's always bias in which news is presented.

I think the best thing to do is to get news from multiple sources (at least 3). The truth is somewhere in between.

jkoschei | 10 years ago | on: Artificial intelligence: Ten things you need to understand

Okay, I'll bite. I'm not particularly well-versed in AI issues, but this article is of the end-is-nigh variety and HN tends to be a technologically optimistic community, so I'm hoping someone can debunk this and give us reason to be optimistic rather than terrified of our future as human batteries in The Matrix.

Anyone?

jkoschei | 10 years ago | on: Twitter is Getting Killed

One of their 10 reasons that Twitter is "dying" is: "Still no CEO. Dick Costello [sic] forced out in June 2015. Jack Dorsey is Interim CEO. No update on CEO search."

It's July. Did you really expect to have news on the new CEO less than two months after the outgoing CEO stepped down?

Also, misspelling Dick Costolo's name severely damages the credibility of this piece.

jkoschei | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: Spot the Drowning Child

Lifeguards and programmers have something in common – though it looks like both spend their day sitting and staring at a rectangle, there's a lot going on mentally, and the risk of cognitive and visual fatigue is high.

I was a lifeguard for five summers, Water Safety Instructor, and American Red Cross lifeguard instructor for several years. The training to be a lifeguard is surprisingly intensive -- it includes sections on attentiveness and observation strategy in addition to the actual rescue stuff.

Many pools have their guards rotate positions on a regular basis to combat fatigue and zoning out. At the pool where I worked, we'd have numerous lifeguards on duty at a time, rotating between the lifeguard chairs at fifteen-minute intervals. After a full rotation (usually about 45 minutes or a hour, depending on how crowded the pool was) we'd have some significant downtime to recharge.

We didn't have this at my pool, but there are some computer-aided monitoring systems on the market: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pool_safety_camera

jkoschei | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: FiveFootShelf – Curated reading lists for great literature

Hey HN!

This is a Meteor app I've been building for the past six weeks. It's definitely a "scratch your own itch" project -- I've wanted a source for well-curated, topical reading lists, but haven't found anything that quite fit the bill. Rather than complaining or waiting for somebody else to build it, I went ahead and did it myself.

This is very much an MVP — it has some rough edges, the design isn't exactly drool-worthy, and there are several much-needed features on the way. But I'd rather have the thing launched and be a little embarrassed than to stash it in the Graveyard of Dead Projects (my Dropbox folder).

Any and all feedback is welcome... just please keep in mind that (1) it's an MVP and (2) it's not for everybody. I value the HN community's thoughts — take a look and let me know what you think!

jkoschei | 11 years ago | on: Ghost Acquires Roon.io

This is a match made in heaven. Crazy how fast it happened, too - it's only been a few weeks since Sam Soffes announced on Twitter that he was trying to figure out what to do with Roon.
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