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Showing posts from February 21, 2021

Safe and Secure Restroom Access Helps Muni Run On Time

Safe and Secure Restroom Access Helps Muni Run On Time By Adrienne Heim For those working in the field and delivering transit service, restroom access is not as easy as you may think. Bathroom breaks are a human necessity and require advanced planning for our thousands of transit operators. This is particularly true during the pandemic, as the shelter in place guidelines closed many restaurants and offices that were previously available to our transit staff. Muni operators provide essential transit service in San Francisco As the city looks forward to reopening, the SFMTA wants to ensure that all San Franciscans will be able get around the city safely and quickly. This means continuing to invest in maintaining the infrastructure that makes it possible for transit operations to be carried out. And that includes ensuring our Muni bus operators have safe and secure restroom access at the beginning and end of their routes. Seven years ago, SFMTA’s Operator Restroom Taskforce was form

Show HN: Browser Extension to make a language test out of any website https://ift.tt/2ZQ0v5e

Show HN: Browser Extension to make a language test out of any website I was preparing to German C1 recently and my vocabulary was the bottleneck. I didn't want to read boring materials and do boring exercises. Instead I noticed that there are sites in German, which I naturally enjoy. So I just made an extension to make language tests out of them. The approach is the following: 1) Open an interesting webpage in your target language. 2) Select text. 3) The extension replaces some words with gaps. 4) Read the text, fill in the gaps. Obviously just typing random words out of the blue can be overwhelming, so there is a mode to drag&drop words from a list into the correct places. I personally see this as active reading. My brain not only consumes information, but always try to guess the word from the context. I suspect that this helps with active vocabulary (i.e. to actually use the new words in writing). In the end I passed C1 exam (obviously I did other preparations too, not only t

Gene Henderson: Honoring Muni’s First Black Division Manager

Gene Henderson: Honoring Muni’s First Black Division Manager By Jeremy Menzies In recognition of Black History Month, we bring you the story of Gene Henderson, the first Black man to become the head of a Muni bus division, Muni’s Kirkland Division. Henderson’s Background Gene Henderson was born in Houston, Texas, in 1916. He married his wife Naomi in 1939 and then served in the U.S. Army during World War II. Following the war, Gene and his family moved to San Francisco where he began his career at the San Francisco Municipal Railway. Early Career On February 1, 1946, Henderson was hired as a streetcar motorman out of Sutro Division, which was located on the corner of 32nd Ave. and Clement St. He was hired just five years after Muni’s first Black transit operator, Audley Cole, had successfully fought to integrate the carmen’s union in 1941. In his early days at Muni, Gene worked one of the three lines running out of Sutro Division from the Ferry Building to the Richmond District o

Show HN: Summarize IPs (bulk geo, asn, privacy report for IP addresses) https://ift.tt/3pQaOk8

Show HN: Summarize IPs (bulk geo, asn, privacy report for IP addresses) We recently launched a free tool that shows a summary of the top cities, countries, asns, routes and much of the other context that we (IPinfo) have for any IP addresses you paste into it. Sample results: https://ift.tt/3dGPH1p You can paste any arbitrary text into the tool at https://ift.tt/3snYnxQ and we'll extract the IPs. It can be useful for getting a quick summary of a set of IPs (eg. click on first google result for "public proxies", copy and paste the results into the tool, and see where the proxies are located, and the networks they're on), for investigating issues (eg. your website gets a large spike of traffic, paste the recent IPs from your access log into the tool and see if there's a specific network that stands out), threat investigation, debugging and more. We're planning to add more functionality and data points in the near future, and any feedback or suggestions are very

Youth Voices for Vision Zero SF

Youth Voices for Vision Zero SF By Christine Osorio Starting in the month of February, Muni buses and transit shelters will feature youth artwork illustrating Vision Zero traffic safety messages. The students are part of Youth Art Exchange (YAX), an arts-education non-profit based whose mission is to support San Francisco’s public high school students in becoming leaders, thinkers, and artists by sharing creative practices with professional artists. As part of Supervisor Norman Yee’s District 7 participatory budget process, YAX students consulted with SFMTA staff to develop traffic safety messages and artwork that reflect their experiences around traffic safety. Themes highlighted through Youth Voices for Vision Zero SF include general traffic safety such as: Yielding to pedestrians in the crosswalk. Slowing down. Understanding that traffic deaths are preventable. Watching for people biking. Not blocking the sidewalk with a scooter. The student artwork also included Covid-

Launch HN: GreaseBoss (YC W21) – Real-time system to manage industrial greasing https://ift.tt/2NolF7X

Launch HN: GreaseBoss (YC W21) – Real-time system to manage industrial greasing We are Steve, Tim and Pete, the cofounders of GreaseBoss ( https://ift.tt/37CHvva ). GreaseBoss is a hardware and software system that verifies that the greasing of industrial equipment is completed on time and according to specification. Greasing, you say? Yup, you heard that right. Incorrect greasing is the number one cause for machinery failure on industrial sites. Industrial machinery failure costs the global economy $21B a year. Greasing is a big deal! We know this is an unsexy part of the economy, so we won’t judge you if you have never heard of a zerk (grease point) before. Some of our favourite places you can find zerks include super yachts - 200 zerks, private planes - 80 zerks, breweries - 2000 zerks, theme parks - 1500 zerks. Other places with lots of zerks include factories, mines, utilities, farm equipment, trucks and military vehicles. The idea for GreaseBoss came when Steve and Tim saw freque

Show HN: Recollec – Faster and Easier Remote Employee Onboardings https://ift.tt/2ZK3M5S

Show HN: Recollec – Faster and Easier Remote Employee Onboardings Hey Everyone, My name is Firat, I’m the co-founder of Recollec [https://recollec.com]. It’s a collaborative workspace for employee onboarding and upskilling. More and more companies announcing that they are going all remote. Given the conditions, we realized how hard it is to make employee onboarding training. It usually happens in the endless zoom calls, back and forth... Yet, most of these calls can be archived for another onboarding. Also, there are thousands of free content out there which you can redirect your employees to learn by themselves. So we build Recollec which is a collaborative workspace where every employee can share most useful content from various resources in one feed, and turn them into learning paths to create interactive onboarding experiences. To be honest, I was hoping to find some folks who have a problem with the employee onboarding process at their work. I really could use some help and feedba

Show HN: A coding coach to help you write better code faster https://ift.tt/2ZOZYQJ

Show HN: A coding coach to help you write better code faster Hey HN! I’m Julien, the founder of Code Inspector, a platform that helps developers and managers produce better code and reduce technical debt. We would love to get some feedback from the Hacker News community. Our platform inspects code, looks for defects (security, vulnerability, design, performance, lack of documentation), automates code reviews and reports on team activity. You can customize violation alerts to reduce false positives. We currently support GitHub, Bitbucket and Gitlab. I’d love to hear your thoughts on what you would expect from such a platform (what you like, dislike) and what could help developers produce better code. Thanks for reading thus far and hope to hear from the HN community. - Code Inspector: https://ift.tt/3h6dtnj - GitHub App: https://ift.tt/2MgR0IX - Bitbucket App: https://ift.tt/2Nz3zzV February 23, 2021 at 11:31PM

Launch HN: Abacum (YC W21) – Easy collaboration and reporting for finance teams https://ift.tt/3pKswpd

Launch HN: Abacum (YC W21) – Easy collaboration and reporting for finance teams Hi HN! We're Jorge and Julio, cofounders of Abacum ( https://www.abacum.io/ ). We're not sure how many fintech geeks like us are on HN but we're very excited to launch to you guys anyway! Abacum makes it easier for Finance teams to access real-time data, collaborate and generate reports. Think of having all the operational and financial data modeled in one place, and of the Finance team easily sharing and collecting information for other teams to make faster, better decisions. Scale ups have unique finance needs. First, they have spent the last years growing unnaturally fast, held together by a mixture of google sheets, csv files, a disconnected tech stack and a lot of copy paste. Second, growing 4x a year means that historical data is out of date within 3 months. Finally, with so many channels to stay connected, it's impossible to find where the Tech Lead shared that key assumption for the

Launch HN: Wyndly (YC W21) – Allergy relief through at-home oral drops https://ift.tt/3aGtONC

Launch HN: Wyndly (YC W21) – Allergy relief through at-home oral drops Hi HN, I’m Aakash, and I’m a long time HN reader. My cousin Manan and I are excited to share our startup Wyndly ( https://www.wyndly.com ) with HN today. Wyndly is focused on making long-term allergy relief convenient through at-home allergy immunotherapy drops and telemedicine. These personalized oral drops train your immune systems to stop reacting to allergy triggers like pollen, pets, or dust. Manan is an ear-nose-and-throat surgeon and allergy doctor, and in his physical practice, he’s treated thousands of patients with at-home allergy drops, a form of allergy immunotherapy. During allergy immunotherapy, you gradually introduce your immune system to your allergy triggers. Over time, your immune system learns to tolerate these allergy triggers and stops reacting to them. For patients, this means greatly reduced allergy symptoms and long-term relief [1] without any other medicine for years after patients finish t

Launch HN: H3X (YC W21) – High power density electric aircraft motors https://ift.tt/3qERuaO

Launch HN: H3X (YC W21) – High power density electric aircraft motors Hey HN! I’m Jason, one of the co-founders at H3X ( https://www.h3x.tech ). We are building the lightest electric propulsion systems in the world. Our first product is a 250kW (330HP) integrated motor drive in a 18kg (40lb) package. It combines the electric motor, inverter, and gearbox into a single unit, resulting in an ultra-high-power density solution for electric aircraft (and other mass sensitive applications). In terms of electrification, we believe the aircraft industry is where automotive was ten years ago. There are many companies working on eVTOL and single-seaters, but very few are working on large commercial single-aisle electric aircraft such as a 737. This class of aircraft is absolutely critical to electrify as it accounts for the most passenger-miles [1] and is the biggest slice of the pie in terms of aviation emissions. Beyond the environmental impact, there are huge potential cost savings from both f