HN user
Also missing solar heating from diodes:
This topic seems to be broadly misunderstood. It is 100% verified fact by both myself and others (including university researchers) that diode strings can produce more heat (or watt-hours, BTU) from a given solar panel than a bare resistance element.
That is me right here... Plus I have some younger kids who have had fun playing with old Nintendo DSes for now. But their friends often have the Switch and I want the updated graphics plus group play (Mario Kart) so we'll buy at least one of these when it comes out. I've been holding off because the original hardware just seemed a bit wimpy when reading the experiences of people playing Breath of the Wild on it. I'm hoping the new model will have enough power to do full justice to BotW.
If you deposit checks, make sure SVB doesn't make it too much of a hassle. I don't know why but a prior employer banks at SVB and they have a real hard time getting my COBRA checks deposited. Sometimes, I'll have 4-5 months of COBRA checks deposited at once. I have a business account with plain old Chase and as long as the funds are in USD, I can deposit via a mobile app. Nobody really wants to deal with checks of course but if you do have to...
If my 61 year old dad asked me how to get into programming, I'd recommend they go to a company that was involved in the Software Craftsmanship model that had a long apprenticeship period. I'd recommend this because I've had prior experience working in such a company (8th Light -- Chicago office) and I think that such an environment would set them up for success because while the learning is very self-directed, there is a lot of oversight and involvement in a constructive way by other developers who want to see the apprentice succeed. That isn't to say you couldn't find the same thing at another company but the Software Craftsmanship approach, if done well, would not be as random as the ad hoc experience you might get on the job at another company. A further benefit of working at a consulting company like 8th Light as, if you progress past the apprenticeship, you would be working on a variety of projects in an environment that is focused on doing the job well so the exposure would be a to a wider breadth of the industry (more languages/stacks/team dynamics/etc).
I think Ubuntu server is a fine choice for your needs. I tend to use it on small VPSes as it's easy to setup and get running, relatively up to date and in wide usage.
But how do you translate that into (short term) OKRs and work that engineers can build a career upon as an achievement (for promotion)? I think there is a cultural mismatch between how engineers grow and what they work on at Google versus the quality of the search results. There seems to be very limit upside and huge potential downside to working on this at Google.
That said, I don't work for Google and my conjecture is based on the hand wavy details (from engineers that do/have) posted online.
So here is how it works: The program runs on each computer. You plug your USB devices (presumably, a keyboard and a mouse) into a USB switch and then plug that into each computer. Then you plug each computer into each monitor (so you're limited by the minimum total number of inputs on the monitor(s) for how many computers you can switch).
When you press the button on the USB switch to go to another PC, the software detects this and sends data commands over the monitor connection (using DDC standard) to trigger the monitors to switch inputs. You can use this same data communications standard to do things like adjust the brightness of your display. For example, I have these setup on my Mac to adjust the brightness of my two attached displays (complexity increased with multiple displays and desire for each to change at same time, simpler commands with a single display):
alias day="seq 3 | xargs -n 1 -P 3 sh -c 'ddcctl -d \$1 -b 80' sh" alias evening="seq 3 | xargs -n 1 -P 3 sh -c 'ddcctl -d \$1 -b 32' sh" alias night="seq 3 | xargs -n 1 -P 3 sh -c 'ddcctl -d \$1 -b 10' sh"
Does that make sense? As mentioned earlier, you're limited by the minimum number of inputs on the monitor(s) and/or the minimum number of computers the USB switch can be connected to. The simplicity of this system is that the display connections do not go through any switching layer and are instead directly connected to the computers (which avoids a number of compatibility issues).
I should be clear that I haven't used this yet but I'm going to try it. The Acer monitors I'm using have two HDMI ports and 1 DisplayPort so I can in practice attach 3 computers assuming I buy a USB switch which can connect to 3 or more computers.
I experienced dilution as a former employee of a startup. Teespring did a 13:1 down round a year or so after I left (2015?). If you weren't an accredited investor that could afford to invest in the round, you had 1/13 of your original shares after the round finished. I experienced both being pushed into AMT when exercising the options (they didn't offer early exercise) along with having 1/13 of my shares later on. No idea if I'll ever see any money out of the deal so I've chalked it up being a lesson learned -- many say to value stock options as $0 but they can have negative value.
It does depend on what you mean by CPUs but the Ryzen G 5000 series are able to play video games at 720p (sometimes 1080p) with the graphics integrated on the CPU.
One option is to do some contract work either direct if you have the connections or through an agency. I've been working through Facet at facet.net for a couple of years and I've found them reputable, they put their fee on top of the rate you set and are transparent about that to the clients, you pick what to work on, etc. I'm sure you could find direct employment (there are monthly "who is hiring" and "who is looking" threads here for starters) but if you want to get your feet back in more gradually, contracting is nice in many ways.
I am in agreement however I suspect many developers have never seen the usage of "git bisect" to track down a bug and fix it. Once you see the power of that, I think one can come to appreciate more the granular git history that is present when not using squash commits.
Of course, git bisect still works with squash commits it just makes your job as the bug fixer much harder because typically squashed commits are quite large so you have to figure out what in the N lines of code introduced the defect.
What tooling are you using that is slow? Sometimes it's all down to configuration and "you could do it that way but it takes eons..."
For example, on a recent project I added prettier to eslint and tried eslint-plugin-prettier however it was very very slow (like multiple minutes for an eslint run). I discovered it's basically a deprecated package and the right way to use it is eslint on it's own (with ruleset for prettier so it ignores what prettier should do) and prettier on it's own. Then each command runs lightning fast and there is no slowdown. Their docs even go into this issue under Notes on this page:
https://prettier.io/docs/en/integrating-with-linters.html
No doubt tooling can be slow but looking for configuration issues or bad practices is a good place to start if things are slow.
This is my experience too. I was audited and they do send you a "shock" letter or at least they did in my case claiming I owed roughly $15,000 USD. After fixing my mistakes (and submitting an updated filing), they sent me a check for a bit more than $1,500 USD. Plus I learned about my mistakes so it was a win-win (as I learned with just enough time to not repeat the same mistake for the next year's taxes).
I had an A+ experience being audited after my initial shock. They even have a secure message system where you can communicate via a website with the IRS including uploading files instead of having to mail letters back and forth. Definitely some clunkiness but overall it was solid and worked.
Not sure I'd recommend the experience but I definitely found it nothing to fear. I also found I didn't need professional assistance with being audited (I did seek it out but due to the time of year being so close to the next year's tax due date, I couldn't find someone right then so I decided to try fixing it myself).
Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Maybe we (myself and the other contractors involved) have been unlucky but we haven't been able to get anything done the lawyer route. I'm happy to try again but I've realized which lawyer is important and would love a referral if you have one (my email is in my profile).
Can happen to highly paid employees too. Since 2018, I've been owed over $20,000 USD by Surf Air (the LA-based startup in the airline business) that has failed to pay. Some of the other contractors were based out of California and even going the government complaint route has still not paid off for them. At one point, they setup a payment plan and made the initial 1 of 6 monthly payments and then failed to make the rest of them.
As a contractor, I've chalked it up as yet another possible cost of doing business however it is frustrating and there seems to be very little one can do that actually results in getting paid without eating up the majority of the payment. Lawyers? See eating up the payment. Collection agencies? My experience was they were out for a quick buck but it was basically no protection from not getting paid a lesser amount (revised terms that ate into the payment). Government? See the other contractors experience -- probably will pay off but company might go bust before it happens. Going public? I think this might be the best route because at least it warns others (although typically it'll be too late).
Stepping back, I'm doing just fine and I'd be far more annoyed for those who have to work off the clock at minimum wage.
Archive.org URL:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200604154641/http://blog.nucle...
Same exact thing happened to me (Namecheap, PositiveSSL, renewed roughly a month ago). I went the reissue route on Namecheap and that fixed it (and I ended up with a certificate chain that is one certificate shorter).
Hi Azer! It's been a while.
I had the same problem with a Chrome extension for my side project Defero (school information system). It uses InboxSDK to integrate the Defero address book with GMail. Unfortunately, it got flagged for security review and it kept getting rejected no matter what I changed. I ended up concluding my authentication mechanism and/or my use of InboxSDK was causing problems so I'm going to try changing the authentication mechanism.
But working with the Google to try to get it fixed and finding the cryptic warnings they hide in various parts of the developer console has been extremely annoying. I don't blame you for your decision.
I went through this on a side project and just let them kill off my public listing for now. I had the same thought process in terms of what I could change however my extension made use of InboxSDK and had access to GMail and I'm still concerned it might not make it through review...
Anyone else using InboxSDK in a Chrome extension and didn't get killed off by this change?
My extension hooks up the address book from a SaaS project (school information system) to GMail so faculty/staff can quickly look up parent contact information or send to special group email addresses that broadcast out to part or all of the school. The people using it were very happy to have it but I could conceivably go back to a private chrome extension if that is still allowed.
Joplin is a local thing you can run for this. Basically, saving a snapshot of a page. Has browser extensions.
I like the ability to use tags too -- I've got various product/tech ideas and it's nice collecting information with it and not having to worry about the pages going away or changing.
Not only that but if you had an application in progress, they now have this text when you return to try to complete it (they shut it down shortly after sending out the email to complete applications):
Last Updated: April 22, 2020 10:30 a.m. ET
Message from Jennifer Roberts, CEO of Chase Business Banking It appears Congress will approve additional funding for the Paycheck Protection Program, which is encouraging news for thousands more of our small businesses.
We’ll begin submitting applications as soon as the SBA gives the green light. We never stopped working our large application queue because we know how important this money is for your business.
We’ve decided not to take any new applications now. We’ll keep monitoring the funding availability and may consider taking new applicants in the future.
I wish we could help every business through this program, but funds could run out again quickly and we have preexisting applications in our queue. We will continue to process and submit applications until funds are exhausted.
Sincerely, Jennifer Roberts
I need an end goal with actual people using what I'm making to be really motivated. And having achieved that on some open source projects (one in particular with tons of usage, now deprecated), I need some kind of personal increase in value to hold my interest. Maybe that will change once I'm financially independent but I think focusing on increasing value is a good thing and value can mean different things (doesn't always have to be money but often is -- there is some value from being one of the big contributors on an open source project but, having been there, the value is typically seems to be very low even if you have 1M+ downloads).
That said, deploy, maintenance and support can be a grind. I like the challenge but your experience may vary.
I've been contracting lately and I'm on two active contracts. One of the two is winding down. I've been billing at $155/hour via an agency (to be clear, their fee added on top of that $155). They offered me $90,000 salary to go employee. They upped that to $100,000 when I said no (I thought we were done but I said no again). Their thinking is they can take advantage of the situation to get cheap engineering staff.
If you're running a startup and thinking that now you can get cheap senior engineers, you might want to consider that it might be true for those who aren't careful with their finances. However, the talent you attract with this method is going to leave as soon as they find a better offer.
I don't think most management teams are like this one but I'm amazed by the short term thinking. Professionally, I can't really call them on this behavior but I'm glad to have been saving for financial independence (now is the time to go back to working on my own things and yes, I do have a multi-year runway).
Any ideas on how this will be implemented? I use voip.ms and I can put in my cell phone number as my caller ID so I don't need to pay for a DID (basically, rent a phone number) and calls come back to my cell.
I've thought about some potential SaaS products that would leverage a similar approach. But I would authenticate the number back to the customer before allowing it to be used to avoid spam/malicious use.
Based on this:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/at-t-comcast-successfully-test...
I'm guessing this is down a layer at the provider level. So in my case, voip.ms would verify the number I'm using as my caller ID is actually a number that comes back to me. Right now, I just tested by swapping my wife's cell number in, they do not validate this. Now I understand how people are spoofing numbers so easily.
Obvious approach is to voice call or text the number and require the confirmation code to be entered on the website. Just curious though if there are other requirements or if this is up to the provider.
I used to care about that but once the JSON gets at all complex, it's nice to switch to pretty formatting of it. At that point, a dev tool in the browser could do the same for this format so I don't think that is as pressing (for me and I suspect most people).
The "Try!" demo fails with large JSON submissions with an exception in jQuery:
Uncaught RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded
I'm curious to see the savings difference and hoped to with "Try!" but it'll have to wait.
No, a 401k is not a pension. A pension guarantees a certain amount at specified dates while a 401k is a way of purchasing securities for you to manage your own retirement and is subject to the returns of your investment choices. In other words, a pension is a guarantee of future income in which the pension offerer is on the hook to ensure they have the funds to deliver the pension while the 401k pushes all that responsibility on to you.
My wording is probably off on some of that so an article like this one is probably helpful to flesh out the details:
https://www.fool.com/retirement/2018/06/13/whats-the-differe...
I might have explained it poorly but the multitasking was with the switch from DOS to Windows (I can't recall version which but I think it was 95 or 98) along with new hardware.
One of my summer intern jobs during college was testing old DOS programs to make sure they would run on Windows. This was for a factory that could no longer deploy DOS so they had to go to Windows for support. Most were fine but some used platforms/languagues like Clipper which had a timing loop calculation on startup and of course, as you might be guessing, that loop ended up being a divide by zero. Enough old DOS games had that problem that people had come up with workarounds like having a batch file that kicked off a program that consumed as much CPU as possible, delaying a short while and then starting the problematic program. Due to the other CPU hogging program slowing things down, the timing calculation on startup would take longer and no more divide by zero. I don't know if they actually shipped our solution in the end... The Clipper programs were all in house but apparently they had lost the source code for many of them.
I love this one:
Sleep Innovations Shiloh 12-inch Memory Foam Mattress
I've had others staying in our guest bedroom love it too and go out and buy one. At this point, with a number of moves and growing family, I've bought something like 5-6 of them.
I think Costco sells the same mattress under Novaflex or a similar name but at a slightly higher price point (the Amazon price varies quite a bit on the Sleep Innovations mattresses -- check CamelCamelCamel on it if curious).