JustARandomGuy

Cost. I run a small Chicago area “private” meetup (in the sense that one needs to be invited, it’s not publicly advertised) for small business owners. We do workshops on how to advertise using Google ads, do basic web analytics, etc. The skyrocketing cost of meeting rooms and basic catering have gone through the roof. I’m not talking about catering as in lobster and steak; even just getting Panera Bread level food has been ridiculously expensive.

Oh my goodness, thank you! I have been searching for a source of the small icons as an example to show the computing classes I lecture, and I finally found my rotating favorite one! https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/msntbciis.gif

Thank you so much - on the flip side, my students may dislike you because they're going to get a lecture on how the web used to be!

+1, I would be interested.

I think you should check out the Light Table kickstarter[0] which originally had a similar premise to yours, and raised several hundred thousand dollars. I personally put in $50 to be in the beta, and that was almost 15 years ago.

I think you would get a lot of takers if you could make a convincing demo.

[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table

Unread RSS Reader. Godawful poll timing. 6103 requests in 52 days is about one poll every 736 seconds _on average_, but they're hugely spread out. WTF? Put it this way: the list of unique intervals (nn seconds, nn minutes, ...) is four pages tall on my web browser.

Not entirely sure what the criticism here is other than polling on average every 12 minutes seems a little excessive at best. Why does in matter it the intervals are a bit wonky? I could think of many reasons why: maybe the poll intervals are smaller during the daytime and more spread out over the night to optimize for reading conditions, etc

Surprised nobody has mentioned it, but my favorite movie of his was Pride and Prejudice 2005 edition. He plays the father role extremely well - you can feel the emotion in the room.

Going to have to rewatch it this weekend in his honor.

If you understand that this is primarily an exercise in marketing and not tech, then you'll be on your way

A solid gold insight right there. I graduated into a bad economy as well (Millennial into the 08 recession) and what got me hired was not my honors GPA or dual major or any other academic achievement. I got hired because of my side project hosting a JSON API that offered some very simple data. I was able to talk about it during an interview and pretty much my passion for it got me hired.

Another alternative is to get into an open source project and offer to do some "developer evangelism" type work. Code up examples, documentation, write up blog posts - great way to get your name out there.

It is what happened to each of the wives of King Henry the 8th. It's a famous rhyme intended to make it easy to remember the order of what happened to them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wives_of_Henry_VIII

I don’t necessarily know if the famous graph is accurate - I don’t think the divergence in beliefs is so extreme as that graph indicates, but it is undeniably true that on a worldwide scale there is a growing rift between men and women. Articles like the following are frequently written about the gender gap in South Korea: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna59747

And obviously there are the redpill and other gender-centric movements in the US.

Here is my fundamental question: why is society suddenly producing so many people that have ill will to the opposite gender? There have always been discussions about the differences between genders - the famous “men are from mars, women are from Venus” was published 30+ years ago - but what is making todays discussions so vile and toxic?

This article strongly reminded me of the "helicrane" system developed by NASA for the last Mars probe, which oriented itself by recognizing the terrain below it and using that to orient itself toward the right drop location: https://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/what-we-do/flight-projects...

Fun stuff. Wonder if there is any requirements for how "bumpy" the terrain needs to be to get recognized properly by the system.

Glad to see someone else had that problem too - I spent hours reading through the Twilio documentation to try to figure out if transactional sms was allowed because all I kept seeing was campaign registration, campaign fees, and etc all about campaign sms. And if we had to pay the campaign monthly fees even if we sent transactional sms, not campaign.

I understand that it's not Twilio's fault, but they desperately need to hire some developer evangelists to write some documentation.

A pretty insightful look at how Google thinks about its ads - I was surprised by the System Challenges slide - it looks as if they’re having hardware concerns about the Ads fleet? I wonder if the Ads software inflicts more “stress” on its machines than a regular workload such as gmail, search, etc.

There is one thing you should always remember: Never accept responsibility, without the authority to change things.

You are being given the responsibility to manage all of this, without the authority to do so. So here is what I would do:

1. Ask for a title bump. Technology/Project/Services/etc Manager - frame it as other people need to know that you are the person in charge of technology, therefore you need a title to signal that you are the point person for decisions.

2. Insist on being in all high level planning, budget, etc meetings. Frame this request as saying that they are setting less-than-100%-completely-informed deadlines, therefore you need to be in planning meetings so that you can temper expectations and give technology's input.

3. Ask for a department budget so you can purchase what you need. Contractor expertise/books/courses/etc.

4. In the event that you don't get any of these - and I fully expect you won't - start interviewing. You sound like a smart individual who's outgrowing their position and need new challenges, and if they won't give them to you, you need to find another position that will.

Argonne is a highly regarded national lab; results from there would be highly credible. Also an Argonne staffer has gone on record[0] saying that they're attempting to replicate, while other labs have not said whether they're trying or not.

Personally I'm waiting for the Argonne results which should be done by the end of the week.

[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/spectacular-supercon...

Would you live in an apartment 15 feet wide and 50 feet deep?

For laughs, I just measured the width of my home's hallways and rooms. I don't see why 15x50 feet apartment isn't doable especially for a bachelor/new couple starting out. Assume an apartment with a 3 foot wide, 50 foot length hallway, subtract another 2 feet width for walls/piping/whatever, and then you can hang 5 rooms that are 10x10 feet from the hallway. Enough for a living room/common area/kitchen/2 bedrooms. Might get a bit cramped but very usable.

I assume I'm missing something here since this doesn't seem to be too bad.

Quote from article: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman… is apparently unaware that Reddit's success is because of the posts by the users that use the service in all of its forms

If Reddit starts losing popularity due to this incident (and that is not guaranteed by far) this is going to be the money quote which sums up the entire situation. An unaware CEO unable to understand his own product nor users.

With that said I think there is a strong chance that this will end up being a tempest in a teapot - there doesn’t seem to be any immediately obvious damage to the Reddit brand because of the blackout.

Millennial: same feeling here. When I talk to people of my parents generation they always talk about how cars let them roam about and give them freedom.

I never felt the same way, and I think a large part of that is that I grew up with the Internet; I could always AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) my friends or use ICQ. I was always connected even during an era of dialup. With the always-on functionality of modern phones, I’m sure that feeing is much more magnified. This doesn’t surprise me and I hope it drives a much more efficient future.

I’ve been in and out of the Wordpress ecosystem for almost the last 20 years. Most “developers” on Wordpress/woo commerce/other popular wordpress plugins are very limited in what they can do. Most of them are limited to assembling code fragments from Stack.

I’d trust a Wordpress developer off fiver to install and configure a plugin, or adjust themes, but not to code and certainly not to understand security fundamentals.

Very inventive. Admittedly when I read the first few paragraphs, I was thinking “he’s got to have $40K of iPhones doing image processing” but you made a good point about being able to use iPhones with screen and other damage.

What was your average price per iPhone, if you don’t mind disclosing?

A good, reliable api to archive web pages in multiple formats and extract the article text. The best are very expensive - look up Diffbot, it’s the best I’ve found but at $299 a month, it’s expensive. I’d happily pay per web page extracted, but the upfront minimum is too much.

+1 Would be happy to come as well.

Not knowing anything about Italy myself, can you expand or link to something describing the problems? Would like to learn more.

+1. Would strongly encourage a gofundme for this. I know many HNers including myself would be happy to pitch in to help retire any debt you have remaining from this.

As someone who is speaking with a handful of people stuck in this situation, what direction should I guide them towards

Get experience. By any way possible. Have them build an online app - a blog system specialized for doctors, an RSS reader backend, documentation for an open source project, anything. Software is an unusual sector that experience can be earned outside of paid work.

If these "handful of people" have bachelors, have them apply for masters degrees at highly rated universities, then they get access to the University career services department to help them find a job. Note: I did not say they have to finish the masters degree, just that they enroll in a masters so they have access to the University recruiting pipeline.

I once interviewed at Northern Trust for a programmer role. Interview was 2 hours long divided into 4 - 30 minute segments each with different interviewers.

None of the interviewers asked anything about tech. Absolutely nothing. All of the questions were in the style of “if you were a (blank), what type of (blank) would you be?”. And each interviewer asked the same questions in the same order working off the same interview sheet. By the third 30min interview I was concerned that I was stuck in some sort of time paradox. By the fourth 30min interview I just wanted to get out of there.

They ended up offering me the position but I declined. Don’t know what happened but they felt very disorganized to me.

Whatever Tumblr’s political legacy turns out to be, I will always value it for the UI and how it encouraged more people to blog.

When you logged into the Tumblr dashboard, you were presented with several options to post - link post, image post, text post, etc. Other blogging platforms presented you with this huge text box to fill - with the implicit expectation that you should write a huge post. Tumblr was the first that really encouraged sharing this cool new thing you found, or to quickly write down a random thought.

It invited a lot of people to blog, including myself, and I personally consider tumblr as a huge part of the history and legacy of blogs.

Very insightful and thought-provoking.

I really appreciated this insight, that governments had (quote) an understanding that if you just leave young people to be, they will go and get married. They will have children. They will be able to have a family and there will be no problem there. You just need to let them go ahead and do that, which is a very naive way of looking at it

The next 100 years is going to be very interesting for demographics. I've heard it said that China needs to grow rich before it grows old, and that saying could apply to many Asian countries right now. Fully expect to see much more support for having a family in countries across the world.

Very kind of you. Thanks.

that shortly after this made the rounds in the marketing communities

I'd love to read more about this. Do you have any recommended "marketing communities" that I should visit?

You forgot a /s I think

I’ve been on GCP since Google App Engine was their first major product (2008ish I want to say? Maybe 2009) and that would only give me 14 years experience on GCP. Plus Go wasn’t originally supported on App Engine until much later.

Emailed a candidate at 3:00 scheduling an interview for 9:00 that morning because "the perfect candidate is always available.

I feel so bad for some of these candidates. Hiring is broken, but some of these are unreal. Can’t imagine how the manager justifies this kind of thing internally.