HN user
Yes but what do you expect from the people who brought the world Google+? Google prints money in so many ways they should just stop trying to get into the social media game at this point. Stick to search, ads, email, cloud services, hardware, etc etc etc...
Yes! They're the computer equivalent of buying a water filter for your kitchen sink or a dimmer switch for your bedroom. No point in redoing the plumbing or rewiring the entire house but you can throw one tiny cheap appliance in there and solve a single discrete problem pretty quickly.
They acknowledge that piping to bash is controversial in their install guide and they provide other options for installation. I think they were intending for it to be as accessible as possible to non-technical users and piping to bash was the easiest way to make installation a one-line command that requires zero additional knowledge and still works on the tiny raspberry pi zero w. I can't say I agree with it as a general practice but it wasn't enough to turn me off since their software takes like 15 minutes to set up, provides a nice monitoring dashboard, and runs on the raspberry pi I'd relegated to my junk drawer. Your route may be saner to you but it certainly isn't for a lot of people who tinker with raspberry pi and want something like pi-hole but don't have extensive technical knowledge (I am not one of those people I am just a lazy engineer so it works for me too).
Hah, what a strange dystopia we live in where it's impossible to stop your LIGHTBULBS from tracking you via the internet!! I'm a total curmudgeon about smart home stuff, I don't want any of it beyond a TV in my house if I can help it. It freaks me out seeing people with no technical knowledge outfit their entire home with Nest/Ring/Google Home/Echo/Phillips Hue and even smart refrigerators, while they know virtually nothing about how much privacy they've just relinquished to these companies and they don't have the technical skills to even attempt to mitigate it. I feel like a paranoid doctor who's starting to notice the damage done by cigarettes while the general public is still blissfully puffing away...
You can set up DNS over https with pi-hole btw, I did that for mine. It's definitely not the only way to achieve this kind of ad blocking but if you're like me and have several old raspberry pi's laying around from abandoned projects then it's a nice way to put one to good use.
Yes!! I was so grossed out by all the logs from my Smart TV. I'm embarrassed to say that I worked in ad tech (as an engineer) for years but I still didn't fully comprehend how pervasive that kind of tracking is in literally every environment.
Setting up a pi-hole DNS server for my wifi network was one of the best decisions I've ever made. Horrifying to see what percentage of traffic is on the ad server blacklist though...
Obviously this isn't an ideal solution but I wonder if this might be an opportunity for the people with means to pay for a babysitter (but not necessarily a private teacher) to hire some of the 2020 college grads who aren't going to find a job any time soon as daily tutors/online school facilitators for their kids? There are going to be tons of educated young adults out of work in the coming year and given their lack of experience they'll be less expensive than hiring an actual teacher, but they may be able to provide enough feedback and structure to give the kids a better quality online education. I don't have kids though so I don't really have a dog in this fight, just an idea. I used to enjoy babysitting back in the day and I would have loved an "academic babysitting" job like this when I first graduated.
I used to work in a client facing role for enterprise software before I got into programming. The ability to stay cool and override nerves with sheer adrenaline that I developed by attending high pressure client meetings is 1000x more helpful to me in technical interviews than any leetcode practice problems. If you have the basic technical knowledge and problem solving skills then 99% of the interview is just staying calm enough to use them properly without coming off like a nervous mess. Much easier said than done, I know.
What do you mean? They should be judged on whether or not they have something that they should not necessarily be judged for NOT having? That doesn't make any sense. But yes I'm in favor of take home challenges as well. I know a lot of people hate them but it's the best way to get an idea of how someone will work under normal constraints (i.e. not during a timed hackerrank exercise).
Also, a principal engineer is more likely to be older and have a family and other commitments outside of work. They're therefore less likely to be able to spend all their free time working on side projects or contributing to open source. If you have a robust github profile with lots of contributions that's great, especially for a junior, but I dislike this expectation that candidates should be judged on whether or not they spend their free time coding outside of work. When I get home I want to log off and spend time with my friends and family, get outdoors, exercise, cook, read, participate in other hobbies etc etc. Not all of us are 22-year-old startup kids whose lifestyle consists of work-party-code 24/7 - and that's okay (no shade to those kids, I used to be one but I'm old and boring now...and a much better engineer). Nobody judges lawyers on how many case briefs they read in their free time or asks doctors to spend the weekends treating their friends and family for minor ailments. It's silly.
How does anybody tolerate that kind of work environment? Maybe I'm weak but no amount of money could compensate for that kind of stress and misery IMO. I work for a well-known company that's below FAANG tier but is basically the anti-Netflix. It's just so freaking NICE that I never want to leave even though my salary is slightly below market. I never feel guilty taking time off, employees are encouraged to take sick days which are unlimited and don't count towards PTO, people are out of the office at 6 on the dot, benefits are some of the most generous I've ever seen, and almost everyone is just straight up kind and supportive to one another. Even for things like on call schedules it's understood that it's universally unpleasant but everyone handles it with a positive "we're all in this together" attitude. It sounds corny but these things really do make a great workplace. There are a few people who seem to be institutional dead weight because it's not easy to get fired, but dealing with a few underperformers is a small price to pay to feel happy and relaxed at work every day and live life without perpetual fear of the hammer. Thanks for this reminder that the money is always greener on the other side!
Do you find that you tend to get sucked into to ANYTHING in your life? Content, substances, activities? I find that I have a very addictive personality across the board - once something feels good it's very hard to stop even when I consciously want to or it's making me feel bad. This happens to me with social media, TV, alcohol, drugs, and occasionally even reading or a new hobby I'm really into. Rather than the ability to delay gratification, I'd imagine social media consumption is correlated to whatever it is about the brain's dopamine pathways that leads some people to get addicted to things more easily than others.
At this point I consider both reading and TV, and especially movies because they don't encourage bingeing, more worthwhile than internet use of any kind - mainly because they require sustained concentration and don't encourage the tab-jumping, notification-checking, infinite-scrolling content addiction that I feel myself falling into when I'm on the internet. There's something to be said for sustained focus on one piece of content, even if that content is Love Island.
Very true. Based on personal experience I'm convinced that the female/female divorce rate is so much higher not because women have worse relationships with other women but because women have a tendency to rush into "serious" relationships that ultimately don't last. This would certainly lead to a different dynamic than you see on Grindr. The lesbian dating style is very much:
1. meet girl you like
2. almost immediately become exclusive
3. date "seriously" for several months, effectively skipping the early phase of the relationship where straight couples tend to play mind games or continue casually dating other people
4. break up
5. repeat
My gay male friends tend to casually sleep around a TON until eventually settling into a very serious long-term relationship, while straight couples are somewhere in the middle and have a much longer casual dating phase before making relationships official (at which point the relationship is more likely to last). When you take men out of the dating equation, the vast majority of women become serial daters who hop from one semi-serious semi-long-term relationship to another. It makes sense that a number of those couples would get married and then quickly get divorced before an equivalent straight or gay male couple would even get married in the first place.
It's actually quite interesting to observe these dynamics IRL; makes me feel a bit like a dating anthropologist.
It has always amazed me how well Grindr works, and yet every dating app catering to lesbians is a complete trainwreck. No hetero power dynamics on Her either but everyone on there seems more than a bit unhinged (as compared to the crowd on Tinder/Bumble) and the entire user experience is terrible. But on apps that allow hetero dating there are sooooo many men posing as lesbians by changing their gender settings or "bicurious" women who aren't actually looking to date women but changed their settings to show their profile to women just for fun because they like swiping and there's such a low barrier to entry. In case anyone reading this works there: I know I'm not the only one who really wishes Grindr would create a women-only clone of their app!
Tech is has one of the best combinations of (lucrative + meritocratic) I've seen. Fields that pay similarly or better (law, medicine, investment banking) require either significant time-consuming credentials or significant time investment as an underlying (like IB analyst).
You mean ENGINEERING, not tech. The people who need these unions are not the engineers, they're the "disposable" soft skills jobs like community and customer support. These are the tech jobs that pay poorly and are mistreated while engineers are fought for with absurd compensation packages (see: Away).
This isn't just about electronics though, or about big ticket items being sold at ridiculously low prices that seem too good to be true. It happens all the time with products a normal person would never assume to be the target of counterfeiters. As I stated in another post, I've personally had it happen with cotton pillow cases and light bulbs. If the fake costs $0.10 to make in China and the real version costs $5 to make in Ohio then there's still a lot of money to be made substituting cheap Chinese junk for a name brand product that should only cost $10 to begin with. Because of how Amazon bundles listings for "the same product" this is extremely easy to get away with.
What kind of items are you buying? I've received counterfeits for super random items like pillow shams (completely different color and material than advertised) and light bulbs (burned out after just a few days of use). It's also a well-known fact that you should never buy beauty products on Amazon because almost all of them are counterfeits. They arrive with a totally different color/texture/smell to the original product and have been found to contain known carcinogens and even animal waste.
Ugh it makes me so sad to see glassy-eyed toddlers glued to their tablets. This has to have some kind of long term cognitive impact on their attention spans. We're basically doing an experiment on an entire generation by turning them into dopamine addicts with the attention span of a goldfish. I know my attention span and ability to focus has absolutely tanked in the last decade because of the modern internet.
I get more and more frustrated by YouTube's monetization attempts every day. Educational and other serious content creators need to start moving to more quality-focused platforms like Vimeo (which unfortunately isn't free, but at least it doesn't have ads!). Leave YouTube for the teenage influencers and inane children's content.
Ugh yes that UX is atrocious!!
We don't receive subsidies from the state, unlike women who are a net tax loss.
Source for this? I've never heard this claim before and on the surface it makes no sense. I'm a woman and I don't get any kind of special tax exemptions for it...
Not totally related but being the one socially adept developer on a team of semi-autistic devs is the absolute worst. I was also the only woman but it wasn't the gender ratio that bothered me as I've been on great all-male teams in the past. But my god is it hard to enjoy your workday when you're the only person on the team with social skills and nobody ever wants to talk to you or go out for lunch occasionally!
I don't find the concept of a women in tech conference inherently patronizing, but having attended several of them I wish they had more technical talks and less focus on fluffier topics. I swear half the talks at the Grace Hopper conference (which is about women in COMPUTING, not just tech) in NYC this year were about diversity and inclusion, which is a worthy goal but not something I find particularly interesting in a conference lecture. There were probably 1/3 tech talks, 1/3 diversity and inclusion and 1/3 business-related when it's supposed to be a conference about computing. It just felt it was feeding into the negative stereotypes about women being unsuited for technical roles or not caring about tech itself but just the more social aspects. I came for the cool tech talks!
It's not that other languages don't have async code...they just do it using multiple threads or other patterns that are nicer to work with than JS.
Sadly, our culture has lost many of the (adult) social constructs that used to bring people together, leaving school as one of the only viable options for kids to be social with one another.
I think you're onto something here, especially because teenagers these days reportedly spend less time with friends than any previous generation. As a 2010 high school grad I always find these stats pretty alarming: http://theconversation.com/teens-have-less-face-time-with-th...
Feels like kids get home from school and immediately get online - they mainly interact with peers through social media and video games, which is totally different from being face to face. That has to be detrimental in some way. Most parents probably work so much they don't have time to have their own hobbies to share with their kids so unless the kids are on sports teams year round they're likely not doing a whole lot of IRL socializing outside of school. I think more kids are being socially sheltered these days, homeschooled or not.
Good point about homework, honestly I didn't even consider that angle. The only homeschooled kid I know is my cousin, whose parents homeschooled him because they considered him some kind of special genius (he's smart but no smarter than your average high achieving kid). He's in college now and a nice kid but just feels a bit off. They didn't homeschool either of his siblings and both of them are much better adjusted socially. Tiny sample size and definitely biased but all three grew up with the same parents, same level of extracurricular activities, etc and the only one who's not all there socially is the homeschooled one. Obviously I'm a bit biased though!
While I don't share your opinion on "sex, drugs and rock 'n roll," that's not really what I'm talking about here either. I'm referring to learning how to navigate complex social relationships in a low-stakes environment. It's easy to roll your eyes at high school friend or relationship drama (because it's usually stupid) but you learn a lot about how to treat other people, how not to treat other people, how to expect other people to treat you in this world etc etc. It's a crash course in the complexity of social relationships that will heavily inform how you act in adulthood, like it or not. The context goes from "Susie and Bobby kissed at the dance and I was jealous so then I kissed Bobby and now Susie won't speak to me" to "I'm jealous of Susan's relationship with Bob, but I know that hurting Susan isn't going to solve anything because the problem is my unfulfilling relationship and acting out like that will only cause me to lose a friend." Silly example but I'm tired and I hope you get the idea.
None of this is stuff you learn by spending your teenage years exclusively with siblings (homeschooled) or chilling out playing video games 24/7 with a couple other quiet kids (nerdy/sheltered). When I say "jackass" I'm specifically referring to the guys who were like this in high school, who were invariably the ones in college doing stupid things at parties to impress their new friends and also treating girls like crap because they were suddenly thrown into a social whirlwind they couldn't handle with any level of maturity.
Which, I'm guessing, just leads to cringe moments as adults? Sounds like you've turned it around nicely though! Do you feel like you caught up eventually?