HN user
I've wanted to build this myself for a long time but couldn't figure out how to overcome the spicy pillow problem.
Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree, but I thought it was risky to leave a phone plugged in all the time. Does it need to be a modern version of Android OS that has the smart charging that stops at like 85%?
I just released a new update to mine yesterday with ranges and the ability to make a story of multiple saved scenes. Then they can be played back at a presentation later.
I'm volunteering to help build out a nonprofit EMS authority that will tax residents and businesses in our local six boroughs to spread out the costs for ambulance transports.
We hope to set the rates such that folks won't have to pay at all if they have insurance or will only have to pay the gap amount insurance would have covered.
I'm collecting the data to figure out how many residents, how many businesses, and how many college students there are in the region and match that to the call volume for those same categories so that each group pays a fair share.
We're basing the legal structure in the MESA group from Lancaster PA. Public fee hearings with residents hopefully start this Fall, and then we're hoping to go live Jan 2027.
I will say I've been surprised how extremely expensive it is to run EMS. Even with 25% of our responders being volunteers, the costs are staggering. Insurance, equipment, medicines, payroll, billing, fuel, building maintenance, heating and cooling.
The vehicle maintenance would turn your hair grey. We have a vehicle in the shop almost every single day. And we have two volunteer mechanics trying to do fixes in house. But these ambulances just are absolutely beat to hell 24 hours a day. My partner is one of the mechanics, and she sometimes gets a half dozen vehicle maintenance reports a day! And we only have 7 vehicles!
And then you have to factor in deprecation on an asset that effectively drops to $0 after 5 years. And costs $300k to replace.
We pinch every penny we can think of, but the end effect is that we're trying to provide a service that's extremely expensive and so we hope this model will diffuse those costs across the whole population (which we expect will turn out to be something like $100/year per family).
Cross your fingers because this feels like our best option
After reading this comment I also wanted the same thing and found this https://www.up2stream.net/products/up2stream-mini-receiver-b...
It's easy to point to high profile nepotites but I've known plenty of folks from all classes who have self-destructed. It's hardly limited to those with lives of leisure.
It's behind a paywall, what's the recommendation?
I read somewhere that the average developer only has 7 years of experience. This should be a fairly sobering warning to anyone getting into tech that you should be saving every penny and planning your next career move. I know so many people who have burned out, gotten so stale they can't find work, or both. I've been in the industry for 19 years now and so few of my former coworkers are still in the field. I never planned I'd make it this far, so I'm making hay while the sun shines.
From 2024-2025 I worked as a firefighter instructor while running my own tech business, and after two years I decided I was done instructing. I could not handle working on my feet in the pouring rain, getting endlessly hassled for doing a task by the book but not the way the lead instructor likes it done, and then having to spend my lunch break listening to sexist and racist "humor" from my coworkers. Also getting exposed to seriously toxic materials at a radioactive building. Coworkers who all had the thinnest skin and most sensitive egos I've ever seen. All to get paid less in an 8 hour day than I make an hour at my business. It just wasn't worth it, even though I loved being there for the students and helping them grow. When I realized I could make more growing organic veggies in my yard than I could at the training center, I made the call to quit.
If anyone wants to see where the ClusterGate-2 server is in orbit:
https://spacebook.com/explorer?scene=8451c006-9e1a-4943-8202...
You're missing: "Climate is warming, but this is a good thing because it means Jesus will come back sooner and I'll live in endless bliss and not have to go to work anymore, so I'm going to do my part by driving a huge truck and pretend like it's fake."
The results seem pretty clear that CBT can be quite effective in helping with ADHD.
Unlike insulin, which cannot be produced with any sort of therapy, it does seem that ADHD can be significantly improved.
I'm sorry though that the facts seem to bother you so much.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22480189/
I don't really care about long term implications of the OS for my standalone gaming rig in my living room. If it works, it works.
Bazzite works, so I'm happily using it. If it stops working, I'll just install another distro. Easy as
I agree, while I love older music, generally I find I can only hear a song so many times before my enjoyment starts to fade. It takes considerable time away to recover a song from that point.
I love this writing, it really captures the author's depression from losing a loved one.
Also made me think about how much the technologists have become almost a cult of money and power. If only we could devise gadgets that bring us together and build community.
I generally agree with you.
Which is why this Jesse Welles's stuff hits me like a freight train
One thing that I almost never see counted in studies of weight loss is the energy acquired from breathing.
We extract out oxygen from the air constantly. I tried to guestimate it once and came up with the rough number that it's possible as much as half of our total energy comes from the air.
So it's not always a violation of the laws of physics, but rather an equation where we're only counting half the variables.
Because too many bad interviews are all about ensuring that the candidate knows the exact same 1% of CS/SWE knowledge as the interviewer.
Don't worry, karma dictates when the interviewer goes looking they'll get rejected for not knowing some similarly esoteric graph theory equation or the internal workings of a NIC card.
Too much of our interviewing is reading the interviewer's mind or already knowing the answer to a trick question.
The field is way too vast for anyone to even know a majority, and realistically it's extremely difficult to assess if someone is an expert in a different 1%.
Sometimes I feel like we need a system for just paying folks to see if they can do the job. Or an actually trusted credentialing system where folks can show what they've earned with badges and such.
A better interview question about this subject doesn't assume they have it memorized, but if they can find the answer in a short time with the internet or get paralyzed and give up. It's a very important skill to be able to recognize you are missing information and researching it on the Internet.
For example, one of my most talented engineers didn't really know that much about CS/SWE. However, he had some very talented buddies on a big discord server who could help him figure out anything. I kid you not, this kid with no degree and no experience other than making a small hobby video game would regularly tackle the most challenging projects we had. He'd just ask his buddies when he got stuck and they'd point him to the right blog posts and books. It was like he had a real life TRRPG Contacts stat. He was that hungry and smart enough to listen to his buddies, and then actually clever enough to learn on the job to figure it out. He got done more in a week than the next three engineers of his cohort combined (and this was before LLMs).
So maybe what we should test isn't data stored in the brain but ability to solve a problem given internet access.
If you've ever been to a dialysis center when a patient accidentally pulls out the line you can imagine why. They are thick lines that will rapidly make a huge mess.
I guess though a backpack version probably could be more like an always attached glucose device with just a tiny line.
This is so true, from 2018-2021 my internal banking product was able to use blockchain hype to clean up a lot of our database schema. Our CTO was rubber stamping everything with the words blockchain and our customers were beating down the door to throw money at it.
The human brain doesn't stop maturing until 25. You can't rent a car until that age in the US.
I would have gotten much more if I'd attended university starting at 25. However, it would have set me much farther behind in my career, by 25 I was already deep into my career. That would not have happened if I'd been still in school.
Funny the last two months Teams has been the most buggy software I use. Nearly every day it drops a call, loses microphone connection, simply refuses to load, and chats disappear. It's nearly unusable. My teammate had it drop him out of a call roughly every ten minutes the entire day last week.
I've yet to see the solarpunk argument: buying a house lets you generate value with the land/building.
For example, perennial fruit and veggie gardens in your backyard let you invest a small amount of time and energy building a long term yield of high value food. This year I spent about 25 hours growing $800 of clean organic veggies. I also prepped areas to plant fruit trees and bushes that I expect will increase my yields in a few years.
Solar on the roof / yard can reduce electricity costs for decades.
Rainwater capture and filtration can reduce water costs.
Renting out a bedroom can produce dollars.
Building a climate battery into a yard can reduce heating and cooling costs.
I ran some numbers and figure I can shave several hundred dollars a month off at a 30% ROI.
And it's not just about dollars, there's something very powerful about knowing my property is supporting my life with these investments.
I wrote up some exercises to help build the muscle memory of advanced vim commands: https://github.com/steveshogren/10-minute-vim-exercises/blob...
Ruby feels like a luxury manual hand saw. It fits in the hand perfectly. But it would not be my first choice for every project.
Languages like C#, Java, C++, Scala, Kotlin, and Python in 2025 feel like industrial computerized bandsaws with twenty different settings and controls. Some more complicated than others. They can be tuned to crank out a factories needs but you could spend days just fussing with a single setting that isn't right.
That being said, modern Python to me feels like the least thought out of these. It has been incrementally changed from one language to another, while being forced to keep many of the worst parts of both. To be honest, I think they should keep up the "breaking backwards compatibility" trend and make Python 4 an optionally-compiled, statically-typed language more like Go, but with more expressivity than Go.
I suppose F# is already like my ideal Python 4. It's possible to run as a script or compiled binary. It's a nice clean syntax, and the type system is a joy to use.
A valid F# program can be a single line script or dozens of configuration files. This let's the developer use it for quick and dirty work, then progressively tweak settings to run in a more industrial scale setting.
Dota Underlords came out since then, which is a brilliant game that they effectively abandoned / moved on to Deadlock.
This feels like whataboutism. "Sure, you're not doing international air travel and avoiding all the incredible waste of a modern car, but whatabout that small amount of resources needed for a bike?!"
It encourages helplessness and fatalism. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
I wonder how this relates to Sensory Processing Sensitivity? I know some folks with this who experience some of the same attributes but are otherwise very high IQ.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_processing_sensitivi...
We're heading further into a reality where there just aren't enough jobs. All the money has been hoovered into the stock market. There's just not enough floating around to pay people, it's all going into LLM electricity or graphics cards.
We should be living in a time of ease, where the whole planet is sustained with all of us only working a few hours a week. Instead most people are fighting for scraps barely able to afford rent.
It won't continue like this forever. The line doesn't always go up.
Having taken all the college level CS coursework for CS degree (I skipped the math and got minors in education and English), I think a lot of folks vastly overestimate how much they learned in a CS degree. Assuming 50 CS credits required for a degree, 1 hour a week of class time per credit, 3 hours of homework per credit, for 15 weeks, that's only 3000 hours total. So about 18 months putting in 40 hours a week. Granted, you can learn a lot in 18 months full time. But this weird obsession that a person could only learn this material if lectured by a bored and overworked TA is silly.
And that doesn't even touch on the fact that most professors have absolutely no clue how modern software engineering is done. The courses are planned by even more out of touch heads of departments. And the quality of most of these student's projects is atrocious. How could they know better? They've just got a tiny micro assignment to do, and maybe 50-100 lines of code per assignment.
I'm not trying to be too pessimistic, but let's be real here and say a modern CS degree is a terrible way to be trained to be a modern software engineer. You'd be just as likely to succeed with a degree in mech engineering, biology, chemistry, physics, math, philosophy, or accounting. Or spending a year or two working on an open source with some mentors.
Granted there's also a huge range of quality of degree programs. I regularly hire Drexel students who shock me with how good they are, but that's a 5 year degree with 18 months of on job required training. That's a degree made for turning out quality software engineers.
My coursework to finish all my classes had me write a grand total of under 4k lines of code. And I finished those courses with high marks. That's such a small amount of code, I remember graduating and still being confused what a function was. It's unbelievable I paid almost 6 figures and spent 4 years to not even learn what a function was. I think that I'm not alone in this.
Fascinating, because as a consultant almost always my clients are either the sort to build a vast mess of microservices with eventually consistent enterprise service buses for an internal tool with two dozen users OR they are trying to figure out how to update their one windows server 2016 instance without taking down production.
I'm usually trying to rein in the chaos of an over-engineered mess or explain docker containers and CI servers. Definitely makes for an interesting day switching between the two types of clients!
That being said, I prefer to work with smaller companies. I'm usually the only consultant, and I'm a freelancer not part of a larger consultancy. This probably significantly changes the types of teams I meet.