woebtz's comments

woebtz | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: What's the biggest time waste on your workday?

I have a friend who used to start every meeting with writing down how much the meeting will cost the company (pp person/hour, etc.) on a whiteboard.

They worked for a university's budget controller, so large meetings were regular, but, fortunately infrequent!

woebtz | 8 years ago | on: There's no clear evidence Autopilot saves lives

Honda LaneWatch (blind spot camera) is easily my favorite car safety feature.

Unfortunately, it's more expensive to manufacture, compared to standard blind spot warning systems, and the average customer does not appreciate it (by sales). Instead, Honda has received many angry complaints that the radio/media console is unavailable when changing lanes or when the user has left the blinker on.

woebtz | 8 years ago | on: URL to PDF Microservice

Also consider non-Western languages (CJK, Russian, Arabic). My team got bit by this when we discovered we couldn't render emoji's client-side.

woebtz | 9 years ago | on: The traits of a proficient programmer

The Demon Hunter and Blademaster is each player's respective hero/champion and essentially a free powerful unit.

The DH player has the advantage during the early game, so is scouting around the map (the Fountain of Health being a likely location) to find an easy fight.

woebtz | 10 years ago | on: Why I quit my dream job at Ubisoft

It took a stressful few months for me to make this similar realization. I don't know why it felt so profound at the time, but I imagine a lot of developers (myself included) get their start wanting to create stuff that people want [to use] or that will help their company [be more successful].

Unfortunately, the developer's primary job isn't to make business decisions/ideas and fighting that battle for life and death is many times a lost cause. Fortunately, a good attitude to takeaway is to always have pride in doing good work and believing that a good idea is still a good idea even if you can't convince anyone else (today). Tomorrow, you can wake up and try again.

woebtz | 10 years ago | on: The Macro

Is using Mailchimp (or related services) the issue or link tracking in general?

woebtz | 10 years ago | on: Evo, the First Prescription-Strength Video Game?

One of my favorite Mac (anti-)games was a zen-like, music space platformer called Tranquility[1]. The relaxing "floating" gameplay was interesting enough, but the generated ambient music was the best part. I'd leave that running on the background like some rain loops I use nowadays. It was an online game, despite being single-player, and I paid $10 out of my allowance for a lifetime membership. I was pretty sad when it abruptly shut down some years afterward.

I've always hoped someone would remake it for mobile or VR. The music/synth engine alone would make a pretty neat app.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tranquility_(video_game)

woebtz | 10 years ago | on: Destroying Apple’s Legacy

Flat design looks nice, but provides less affordances.

In practice, flat designs have less detail, so convey less information. This leads to uncertainty/doubt/cognitive load where there was none before.

Compare flat to skeumorphic designs:

* What gestures can I perform on this UI element?

* Where is the button/what can I click on?

-or better yet-

* What state is the iOS keyboard's shift key in (activated, deactivated, capslocked)?

Apple isn't the only culprit, Android/Material design is similarly flat and less usable.

woebtz | 11 years ago | on: Show HN: iTerm2 Workspace Generator

Hi HN,

I built this tool to help me bootstrap various work environments using iTerm2. Profiles never quite clicked for me and so I chose juggling a few .applescripts for my least hassle solution.

This is a WIP and I'd love your suggestions and feedback for improvements.

Thanks! Ben

woebtz | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: How do you manage your passwords?

KeePassX (Mac) + cloud storage and unique "low security" derived passwords for each service1.

I made a clone (lazypass.com) of passwordtable.com, so I could use a custom no-look-alike's character set (sans-"iILl1...o0O", etc.) and to improve lookups -- but the improvement, in practice, seems to be somewhat negligible.

I feel that important passwords should to be stored on paper or encrypted for a close friend/parent/spouse to recover should you get dead... is that kind of a similar concern?

1 Until they tell me to make a new one that can't be the same as the previous. :(

woebtz | 11 years ago | on: Paperize – Beautiful Card Game Prototypes

Beautiful tool!

Something seems unfinished with the column-to-position associations. Maybe they need some more style to communicate the purpose a bit clearer? (e.g. representing the columns-to-positions in a table style, or more vertical padding separation, or referencing positions by letter (A, B, C, etc.) instead of by #).

woebtz | 11 years ago | on: A source for this picture?

1) Setup VM with OSX, 2) Sign-in iTunes account created with a gift card, 3) Download/purchase app in iTunes (OSX), 4) Rate app in iTunes (OSX).

Step 3 might require a physical device, but 1, 2, and 4 do not.

woebtz | 11 years ago | on: This American Life: Batman

I don't know either, but it looks like the transcripts are initially generated from speech recognition (text dump + timing meta data?) and then hand-edited/annotated by a producer.

They'd add punctuation, sound cues, fix spelling, annotate the speakers (e.g. name + host, subject, or interviewer). Then that data's got to go somewhere...

It looks pretty labor intensive. I sure hope they have great tools!

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