Jormundir

  Location: Portland, OR
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: AWS, Go, Typescript, React, Node, SQL, NoSQL
  Résumé/CV: Available on request
  Email: jormundir@gmail.com

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_recovery_ventilation

This already exists and is starting to gain popularity for new builds. It’s also not that expensive to retrofit, but is most effective when a home is sealed well.

It's raining on the launch pad right now. We'll be lucky if the launch happens, but likely postponed to tomorrow's launch window.

I went down this road towards the beginning of my career. I tried split keyboards, ergo mice, keyboard tray, new chair, etc. There are a couple things that matter in ergonomics, mainly that your chair is at a height where you can set your feet flat on the floor comfortably, and that your forearms are the same height as the desk.

All the products made around ergonomics are total BS, full stop. Your body is not built to sit at a desk all day, and you can't fix that with an overpriced keyboard. Take breaks from time to time and go walk around a bit.

Get yourself setup so there's no pressure on your arms and legs and call it good. Don't waste your money on ergo BS.

This statement is not even close to true. At a particular point in time, different CDNs can have very different performance even for the same ISP in the same region.

That has got to be one of the most poorly designed websites I've ever seen. I'm on a wired desktop and it's barely loading. Why are there like 5-10 physical inch gaps between sections? Why is there a full page picture at the top with no text or anything?

I'm genuinely curious why they bothered publishing this in its current state. They don't make tax calculations, so they assume you're paying rent with untaxed income, which makes the comparison all but meaningless.

Are you trying to bury your head in the sand?

My situation is probably drastically determined by some stranger 200 years ago who decided hopping in a pile of potatoes on barge headed for the US was a good idea. Thank you distant relative, that was a genius idea!

The point isn't to act like people aren't responsible for their own actions, of course they are. The point is to be realistic about how much of our situations are attributable to our personal decision making. People don't exist in small vacuums where they control everything.

The problem with pinning responsibility on that parent is, the original decision that led to this situation may predate the parent. Maybe they were raised by a single mom with many siblings and not enough resources too. Maybe they live somewhere deeply conservative where contraception isn't taught about. To act like the parent is wholly responsible is unrealistic and naive.

People tend to forget information that is not useful to them. The age old problem with school curriculum is so much of it doesn't apply to day to day or even professional know-how. Getting students to retain more information is pointless if there is no value in retaining the information beyond final exams.

The better pursuit is for schools to work on constantly realigning their curriculum towards what is necessary for modern life and employment. Drop the overpriced, poorly executed general education classes and stop hindering students from learning more about what they're interested in.

In real estate, you are correct. A buyer's market in real estate means a good time to buy a house. A seller's market is a good time to sell a house. A renter's market is a good time to rent. I've heard different terms for landlords, usually an investor's market or a landlord's market when rents are high.

Saying the market is turning to the buyer in real estate, implies it's a good time to buy a house, and renting is comparatively expensive to a mortgage.

I wish there was a technical name for this cycle! The pattern seems to happen in every industry over time.

1. Someone sets out to change the world and make a lot of money by building a business around a new technology.

2. In order to grow the business, they build barriers around their technology / market. This takes the form of closed platforms, patents, safety regulations, etc. (This is a neutral point, I'm not trying to call anyone evil for doing this).

3. Once the entrepreneurs are prosperous, with good intentions, they lobby for the public to pay for essentially remaking their businesses in a more open way. There's the obvious irony in this stage, as they have to fight the very barriers they erected, and I think some people get mad here, because those barriers end up costing the public more.

I actually think this is a healthy cycle. There are a lot of entrepreneurs who are satisfied with 1 and 2, and never put the effort into 3. I think applauding the people who have the strength and drive to get to 3 is going to help the world become better, faster. I don't think there's a reason to hold malice against entrepreneurs for building those barriers, if we did, we will just have less people lobbying for the good things in the world.

I was an early user of Coursera. I really enjoyed and completed three classes and thought it was the future of education. Since then, they've tried to monetize and in the process thrown quality out the window and ignored their users. I think Koller leaving is just another sign that coursera is run by its investors, in it for money instead of making a great education platform. The site no longer has any value to me, and I haven't even browsed the course list in over a year. I'm sure Koller is making a good decision, moving on from it to something she can be passionate about again. Best of luck.

And your argument degenerated to stupidity. Do you think there's no difference in effort it takes to do well for your employees when you have to argue with an employee unfriendly person on your board, rather than having employee neutral or employee friendly people on your board? What you said is not grounded in reality, and this topic is super important for people considering different employers.

These results aren't very surprising because this is about interviewing performance. The goal of bootcamps is "teach you enough to get a job"; they're basically gaming the interview process by teaching to the test. University programs on the other hand are "teach you CS theory"; learning to interview well is up to the student and the specific school's offering of interview training.

I think there's a strong argument to make that university programs are too focused on theory, when the vast majority of their students are going to go out and get practical engineering jobs. I don't want the pendulum to swing too far to the practical side, though, because then you lose the long-term benefits of getting a CS degree. Although, schools can certainly buff up their practical material.

Anecdotally; when I participate in hiring, I tend to discount the bootcamp grads. Maybe it's unfair, but my experience hiring them has been that they know how to interview well, and know their tools well, but when you compare them a year in, they're pretty far behind their university counterparts. I see a plateau, where it's hard for a lot of bootcamp grads to move from doing generic web development to designing more challenging systems. Obviously it depends on the individual, but this seems to be a categorical struggle for bootcamp grads with little technical background. A lot of companies really just need more people doing web development, so being open to the bootcamp pool is essential, and ruling out bootcamp grads is silly.

I recently interviewed with Asana, and unfortunately would review their process as the opposite of what they're going for.

The first sentence is not far off from what their process is. My interviews with them were composed of one helpful database problem, after which they explained how they designed their production database, followed by a bunch of frivolous algorithms problems.

I did not receive an offer from them, so take what I say with a grain of salt. Asana seemed like a company that has some great engineers, and runs well in general. I would, however, like to provide some constructive criticism for their interview process.

1. Their engineers can use some training on how to interview. Several of them came into the room noticeably anxious. Hearing what the problems were was easy, but communication was very difficult when it came to figuring out what kind of answer they were actually looking for.

2. The questions they use are very academic, which to me means they are mental exercises lacking practical grounding. As an interviewer, it's very uninspiring to have to solve academic problems without getting a peak into the business' real problems.

3. The whole process wasted way too much time. Obviously I wouldn't have cared as much if they had given an offer, but I think it's important to be conscious of this nonetheless. My suggestion would be to pick topics for interviewers to cover, and cut out the repetition of the problems. Plan a process that will lead to a decision with one shorter visit, be respectful of peoples' time.

I hope that helps. I received more offers I'm excited about, and I hope to see the company succeed from the outside.

I agree with how you want to conduct the PR or RFC process, where it's annoying if people are being negative without providing an alternative. I do however agree with the parent where there are plenty of times when a simple yes/no vote is what you really want. The comments are there for people to provide alternatives still, removing the -1 would just be removing flexibility for a very common case.

I think your analysis is spot on. Improving is a slightly more complex cycle. Improvement looks something like this:

Do -> analyze strengths and weaknesses -> try to do better.

That middle part is way more successful with the help of a good coach. Really quick learners ("talent") can fill in that middle step on their own, but would ultimately benefit from a coach.

When your work cycle is:

do -> do again -> do again -> do again

you'll improve a bit, but pretty quickly plateau.

Beautiful arguments. What's the solution put forward? Being critical is easy, but what's something better we can build with the internet?

They're using a legal loophole, charging the property with being complicit in a crime, not the person. So the piles of money they seize aren't protected by the constitution. This is obviously absurd, corrupt, ridiculous, etc. We have a very corrupt justice system.

Why?

Your "shoulds" sound like arbitrary rules to make some people comfortable at other peoples' expense.

Their contract with Starbucks is ending soon. Going forward their reader fees will be profitable to the company.

This is an interesting topic to brew on. There would certainly be a lot of problems that would be tough to address using apprenticeship, but it's not like our current education system is lacking in problems.

I wonder, though, how apprentices would fair in competition with people having general education and degree focus. Fields require skills to change over time, and quite quickly now. I wonder if an apprentice would be stronger in the short-term and outpaced in the long-term.

Also, where does the wage subsidy you talk about come from? Would people be paying for their own apprenticeships? The government paying for some like public institutions?

Apprenticeships aren't a good answer either, though. They create too much of a caste system, and are very restricting. What if at 18 I don't actually know what I want to do? If I join an apprenticeship I'm learning one thing. What if I don't like that one thing? What if I get 5 years into an apprenticeship and realize I can't get to the level I want to be at? I have to start over from zero in another field?

I don't like the college system we have now, but switching to the extreme of apprenticeship is definitely not a good answer. Right now I'm an engineer, but with my rounded education, if I don't like it, I can go and switch to a myriad of other fields that I'm educated enough for.

The world already had apprenticeship systems, and it's not some magical system we forgot about. Apprenticeships lead to weird power dynamics that aren't very good for the individual, such as being indentured to your employer for providing the training.

The main problem I see with our education system is that it's inefficient, and growing too large and slow to keep up with modern needs. This doesn't mean a well-rounded education is a problem though.

You're right about the outcomes, but ignoring the laws would disproportionately hurt small businesses and the open sourcers and hackers you talk about.

Laws are tools paid for and created by large entities to cement their positions. Ignoring laws means giving ridiculously powerful legal tools to big companies and governments to prosecute the smaller groups who can't defend themselves.

How would you do it?

Bringing those dependencies in under one roof doesn't eliminate their risk. Though it does increase the chance that an error in one of these small dependencies brings down the whole system.

With microservices if one of the services runs into trouble, you can ignore it and still serve the other 90-99% of your site without it. You can also deploy updates to services without having to deploy your entire site.

Isn't it unilateral in the direction that hurts the employee? If your startup signs a no poaching agreement with Google. Now Google can't give you a higher salary offer.

I don't think I see how this would not hurt the employees. Seems like a classic startup management move that screws over the employees who are already taking pay cuts and huge life risks to make the startup successful.

This looks awesome. Finally a piece of tech I actually want, and by Intel of all companies.

The bigger consumer companies have been shuffling their feet, releasing arbitrary, very closed off pieces of tech that I don't really need. I really applaud Intel for making the tiny little PC I've been wanting for media and linux tomfoolery. The Chromecast was a no-go, and now with an apple tv, I'm feeling a little too enclosed; they don't have enough apps to satisfy all my media needs.

I've been watching the mini-pc market, chronically unsatisfied with what's been released up to this point. The Intel compute stick finally looks like the thing I've been looking for, mainly because they balance the size and low price, with just enough power for what I need. To top it off they're offering a Linux version, so I don't have to be worried about buying into a closed off platform.