Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from August 15, 2021

Then and Now: Keeping the Cable Cars on the Move

Then and Now: Keeping the Cable Cars on the Move By Jeremy Menzies When Andrew Hallidie’s first cable car climbed Nob Hill on Clay Street in August 1873, the cars were a brand-new technology to replace the horse-drawn streetcars used at the time. Little did he know that 148 years later, cable cars would still be scaling the steep slopes of Nob Hill. Many of the methods used to maintain and operate the cars to this day harken back to the golden era of cable cars in the late 1800s. As we ramp up for the return of revenue service on San Francisco’s beloved cable cars, check out the images below for a look at just some of the behind-the-scenes work keeping the system running, both then and now. Keeping up the Cars Maintaining the cars on a regular basis is vital to keeping them safe, operable and looking good for the tens of thousands of people who ride them. At the Cable Car Division shops, mechanics, carpenters and painters perform routine maintenance, make repairs and brighten up w

Show HN: FreeBoardGames.org – FOSS platform for publishing boardgame.io games https://ift.tt/2W92N0z

Show HN: FreeBoardGames.org – FOSS platform for publishing boardgame.io games Hello HN, I have started FBG some years ago when I moved to the Bay Area and could not find a simple, cross-platform, no-registration way to play board games with my friends back in my home country. I also wanted to make it simple to create multiplayer board games online for developers in their free time. Shortly after, I found out about boardgame.io with similar goals and decided to join forces with them. It became the engine of our board games, and we focused on publishing/serving them. To be fair with everyone and inspired by Wikipedia, we made the project a non-profit with GPLv3 Affero license. Since then, the project has gotten many amazing contributors that developed really cool board games, added translations, helped with infra, etc (see https://ift.tt/3glVHNr ...). My focus has been on the infrastructure (scaling, adding text chat, etc). During the pandemic, we saw a large 30x increase in usage, and i

Show HN: Cassyni – Relaunching Academic Seminars https://ift.tt/3y5b3fh

Show HN: Cassyni – Relaunching Academic Seminars Hi, this is Andrew (arhpreston) and Ben (benjyk) from Cassyni ( https://cassyni.com ). We both completed PhDs in physics before going on to found Publons and Kopernio, companies that were acquired by -- and became a part of -- Web of Science, a product researchers on HN may be familiar with. It is well known how important academic seminars are for networking, promoting your research, and keeping up with latest developments. But the scale is under-appreciated: by our estimates more than 1 million academic seminars were happening every year. And then Covid came along... As a result many seminar series are now online and recorded using solutions that cobble together tools like Zoom, Google Sites and Sheets. This all more or less works but is painful and time consuming to operate. Our co-founders, researchers at Imperial College London and Texas A&M, experienced this firsthand. With their input we set out to build a tool to take the pain

Thanks for Keeping Your Mask On

Thanks for Keeping Your Mask On By Jonathan Streeter Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Muni customers have consistently demonstrated a strong willingness to comply with health safety mandates, in particular with wearing masks .  As a reminder, the Federal requirement to wear a mask while riding, boarding and waiting for Muni vehicles remains in place, and has been extended until January 18, 2022 . Everyone over the age of two is required to wear a mask, regardless of vaccination status. We are grateful for the cooperation of everyone involved, as it lowers the risks associated with the spread of the virus, not only for Muni customers, but also for vehicle operators, maintenance crews and others.  If you haven’t already received a vaccination, we encourage you to explore the resources available in San Francisco as well as in other locations . Thanks for helping to keep your transportation system as safe as we can for everyone. Published August 19, 2021 at 10:13PM https://ift.

Show HN: BrainTool – Beyond Bookmarks, a Topic Manager for your online life https://ift.tt/3k2pV9r

Show HN: BrainTool – Beyond Bookmarks, a Topic Manager for your online life Long time looker, first time Show-er here! I built the initial BrainTool to scratch a personal itch - to unify my bookmarks and online resources with text-based notes. I've spent the last several months iterating on it with feedback from early adopters and UX volunteers. It's finally at the point where I feel confident enough to seek this communities feedback. BrainTool is a browser extension that makes it easy to save pages of interest into a personal 'topic' hierarchy, along with associated notes. Your topics are shown in an editable side panel which can also control the browser - opening and closing tabs, tab groups and windows by topic. There's a 90 sec intro video here: https://youtu.be/7zvyvATpoVM The above by itself makes BrainTool one of the handiest bookmarks/tabs/browser managers around, but the kicker is that all your data is stored in a separately editable org-mode[1] format plai

​​​​​​​Moving Towards San Francisco’s Transportation Future

​​​​​​​Moving Towards San Francisco’s Transportation Future By Bonnie Jean von Krogh Transportation is a vital part of a thriving and equitable community and economy. We are planning for a future transportation system to deliver the reliable and safe transit San Franciscans tell us they want, address changes in travel patterns and demographics and improve safety. We also need to address the historical wrongs of inequitable service and long delayed infrastructure repairs.  We have looked at our past and begun charting our future. Transportation in San Francisco is on an unsustainable financial path. We are $50 billion short of the transportation system our city needs over the next 30 years. But we can act now to put San Francisco on a path to success. That’s what Transportation 2050 is about.    Over the last 20 years, the demands on San Francisco’s transportation system have increased while revenues haven’t kept up. The last decade saw tremendous growth in San Francisco and its ec

Show HN: Demigod (YC S19) – Build compounding habits with a human coach https://ift.tt/3gbeqLE

Show HN: Demigod (YC S19) – Build compounding habits with a human coach Hi HackerNews! Need to get back in a rhythm for the reopening? We’re Gokul, @dhanush_rad, and @ peteturnbull from www.demigod.ai - we were inspired by atomic habits to build the system for progressing towards your goals. As founders and creators with unstructured time, ambitious goals, and an uncertain journey, we really needed a system to guarantee consistent progress and avoid random procrastinating. We found James Clear’s https://ift.tt/2DLUigB and it just clicked. With the pandemic and shutdown, everyone’s regular routines were thrown completely off. We were forced to think about what we had been doing and if it resonated with our real goals versus what addiction engineering https://twitter.com/naval/status/1084739181593559040?s=20 was prescribing. With the upcoming reopening we want to help you architect your system with intention. We’re adding the levers to make it easy to be intentional with your time and ma

Show HN: Domainy – Monitor domain names for availability https://ift.tt/3jYwlXa

Show HN: Domainy – Monitor domain names for availability Domainy is a tool to get alerted on when the domain names you like and want are about to expire and also become available. https://www.domainy.io A few use cases - I'm monitoring all the other TLD domain names for which I would like to eventually acquire to protect brand names for the domain names that I already have (e.g. I have google.com and I want to make sure that I have google.abcde, google.edfg etc etc) - I also want to know when some of the domains that I would like will expire and possibly become available, so I can quickly buy them if I can. Just because a domain is expired, it doesn't mean it's available right away. But still, I'd like to keep my eye on them. - Sometimes, it's just super interesting to see when some high profile names are available through obsecure TLDs (e.g. twitter.beauty, twitter.accountant, twitter.dealer domain names are available. What would happen if I buy them and do somethi

Show HN: Imba – I have spent 7 years creating a programming language for the web https://ift.tt/2W0Or28

Show HN: Imba – I have spent 7 years creating a programming language for the web Hey all My name is Sindre, and I am the CTO of Scrimba (YC S21). For the last 7 years, I have written all my web apps in a full-stack programming language called Imba. It compiles to JavaScript and its main goal is to make web developers more productive. I just launched a major overhaul of Imba, so I wanted to share it here on HN, in case anyone are interested in learning more about it. It is very opinionated, so some of you might not like it, but I would love to hear anyones feedback regardless. Constructive criticism appreciated! The backstory: Imba initially started in 2012 as an effort to bring the elegance and conciseness of Ruby into the browser, and also because I felt that JavaScript and the DOM should be more tightly coupled together. Over the years, I have taken inspiration from React/JSX, and also Tailwind. Since 2013, I have built several business-critical apps in Imba, so this is not a toy pro

Show HN: TweetCatcher – Twitter Bookmarks on Steroids https://ift.tt/3AKaolo

Show HN: TweetCatcher – Twitter Bookmarks on Steroids Hey Everyone! It's Firat from Fluffzy. We're a small product studio, and I'm so happy to share TweetCatcher at here. TweetCatcher is a mobile app for saving, organizing and finding Tweets you love. It's a simple app that solves a frustrating problem. Couple weeks ago my Co-founder Ege was trying to show me a funny Tweet from his bookmarks. He scroll through dozens times, try to use twitter search. At the end, he hopelessly tried Google search. We hate to go through all of our bookmarks, when we want to find a tweet we love. And It wasn't the first time we were frustrated. We have couple clients projects at hand, but we had our weekends. So, we build TweetCatcher in our weekends. It's a simple app that let you save tweets, create folders and search all your bookmarks. August 16, 2021 at 02:33AM