cattlefarmer

Here in Japan, you can hire people to resign your job for you.

https://www.npr.org/2018/08/28/642597968/for-450-this-japane...

You want something even weirder?

There's also a service where you can hire somewhere to apologise for you/your company's fuck ups. I actually had a roommate that ran such a business. His clients will even issue him official name cards and an email address so he looks like a real employee, which they'll promptly burn once the case is over. Then they get to say that the guy that caused the issue has been fired and everythings all good now. Amazing guy, extremely resourceful, probably would've been running a successful start up if he ever found a way into SV.

https://www.tokyoweekender.com/2018/11/never-say-youre-sorry...

I don't mean this as a joke, but I thought people generally hated car salesmen?

Here in Japan, the manufacturers do actually set a recommended retail price that is slightly higher that what dealers often sell at. Example using the Subaru Outback mentioned up top, shows three available grades sold starting at 3,410,000yen. Roughly us$30k.

https://members.subaru.jp/estimate_simulation/index.html?car...

I used to be of the opinion that it doesn't affect me directly so I don't care. But as more of us don't care, it becomes more common place, and then our (more gullible) relatives start taking in this information and will not listen to you because everyones knows it works! Whatever "it" is.

So no, I believe that we must actively fight false information. Not "we" in an individual sense, but "we" as a society, and that means regulation.

Yes, emoji is literally Japanese. 絵文字 meaning 'picture as words'. Invented for use in Japanese pagers, later proliferating to mobile phones long before smartphones even existed [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji

Likely something not backed by a corporation with big bags of money.

Yes, the worst thing is the huge amount of decision making even over very minor details that has to be done all the time. Coding and maintaining the servers isn't even that difficult. It's all the little stuff like scheduling with clients/vendors suppliers, wondering when is a good time to chase that invoice, which words to change in your proposal for this client, and so all. If you have employees, how to manage them, how to review their work, how to mentor them. It really is death by a thousand paper cuts.

This is well-known now.

Please avoid this.

Let me preface this by saying that I have no idea who Epstein is except that he's some rich, white guy that got caught up in some kind of sex scandal, was arrested and is now dead. I'm not belittling his acts nor ignoring his accusers, I'm saying that I did not know. Now let me explain why.

Over the past couple of years, there have been non-stop stories of one powerful white man after another being revealed doing heinous sexual things to women. The reports are non-stop and it has come to the point that I have tuned them out. A good number of us here are in the tech industry, we're busy enough as it is. Whatever free time we have is focused on things that are more immediate. A large number of people in my immediate bubble have no idea who Epstein is. I'm not even sure if his first name is Jeff or James, except that it starts with J.

I'm likely not the only one.

So according to the HN guidelines, please assume good faith when people ask why.

The world stood around and did nothing as China put Uighurs into concentration camps. Why would this be any different?

A pragmatist would lay down and take it, while preparing to emigrate out of HK as soon as possible.

That link is blocked outside the US.

here's a mirror.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oljxEb3H0Ic

Jeremy Clarkson's surprisingly positive review[0] of the i8 made me want to take a second look at it, which I did. It was just as nice and pleasant as JC said it'd be, but there were two problems.

It was twice the price of an M3/M4. 20 million yen for the i8 versus 10million for a top of the line M3 or M4. Prices in Japan for foreign makes are already marked up, because they're perceived as a luxury good. The i8 was marked up even more. At that price, I'd rather get an Aston.

Next one is a subjective thing, it's looks are a bit too flashy doesn't it? Nice thing about the M cars (and Teslas), they blend in.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk8p2R6trfE

In Japan during the 3/11 earthquake, the only way people were able to stay in touch was via Twitter and other online chat apps (LINE, Viber, etc). The phone lines couldn't handle the load.

Maybe the proliferation of more 5G towers could make the internet more resistant?

I'm not even complaining about the ads. Where's the content?

Apple is recommending developers switch out bash to zsh in anticipation of this change.

That's it? Not even a 'Here's a Bash to ZSH migration' tutorial or anything?

Those background checks don't seem to be working. Lots of 'yankees' running around in pimped up centuries.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%E3%83%A4%E3%83%B3%E3%82%AD%...

It's not often one can claim to have saved the company tens of thousands of dollars in operating costs each month just by tweaking a few AWS settings.

I definitely miss being able to work on such a large volume of data but at least I don't have to worry about PagerDuty anymore.

One more datapoint here if you care.

The industry is filled with hugely interesting technical challenges even if you're not at FAANG scale. Trivial things like building a cost efficient delivery infrastructure to reducing the number of steps between receiving that first page load to ad delivery and then on to analytics. A lot of it is just math and it's fun when you structure your challenges that way. It's like inverse Pinky and the Brain everyday. We're not scheming to erode everyone's privacy, we're just lab rats looking for the shortest route from one end of the maze to the other.

I also left after a few years because all that maze running got boring eventually and I decided I'd like something with a little bit more meaning. Or, from another point of view, those years eroding everyone's privacy has enabled me to climb high enough up on Maslow's pyramid such that I now have the comfort to worry about self actualisation.

edit:

There were a few people that totally drank the kool aid, and believed that what we were doing was enabling people to gain a livelihood by running a popular website. Usually the really young ones or those at management level.

Those from a developed country were mostly interested in the technical problems and improving their engineering skills.

Those from developing countries were most definitely in it for the money.

There's also the little problem where when your eyeballs are up for auction, the ones putting in bids don't have any relevant inventory targeting you so all the network can do nothing is default to whatever fallback ads they have, which are usually low cost brand building ones. That's where all the almost-porn and dating ones pop up because they're desperate for eyeballs of any kind.

There's one for CSS too.

https://github.com/hashanp/postcss-spiffing

I stopped paying to attention to politics about 5 years ago and am very surprised to learn that the major opposition party (DPJ?) has essentially fractured into multiple, smaller parties, all using a variation of the same name.

At this point, I'm not even sure who to vote for anymore.

But you do need a college degree if you're planning to migrate to most developed countries.

Back in uni, I wanted to be a motorcycle designer. I managed to get into Honda Japan's internship program, which was essentially a 3 day long interview process. They give you some design specs on the first day and then lock you in a room with 10 other kids to draw motorcycles non stop for three days. 4 years of effort all came down to these three days, and I couldn't draw anything on the first day. My mind went blank. I stayed up all night to catch up on the drawing. That was my first failure.

The lack of sleep meant I couldn't focus much during the second day. I pushed through and kept drawing. My next failure that night was to again forgo any sleep just to keep pushing out designs. On the third day, I was so exhausted by the lack of sleep, all the stress I piled on myself after all those years of expectations, My mind went numb during the morning's final prep. I was so tired, I didn't even know what the hell I was talking about during the final presentation, I interrupted the judges, I talked back, I argued. Naturally, I failed to progress to the next stage.

That failure was the beginning of a series of failures over the next several years.

I broke up with my fiancee to 'focus on my studies/career'.

I couldn't get a product/industrial design job because I was so focused on motorcycles during my studies that I was fairly terrible at most other products. Desperate for any job, I become a web designer for a company on the other side of the country. The job lasted six months.

I wasted money moving again to another city to search for better opportunities but found little. After another six months, I was out of savings and my family wouldn't lend me anymore money. I gave up, I contemplated suicide for a while, but finally moved back home to work for a relative.

About a year in, I got together with a couple of friends to set up our own design agency. One of them, talked the big talk but spent all his time playing games. Tried to rush work out the day before the deadline. The other worked really hard but wasn't particularly talented and decided to go back to his old job. I went back to work for my relative again.

After several years, found a small dev shop willing to take me in for not very much money. Spent two years there.

I'm in a better place now but those six years were terrible and whenever I look back at it, I've always felt that first failure at Honda just set a lot of things in motion. I was burnt out and depressed but I wouldn't admit it, so it just kept getting worst.

I have much gratitude for that relative who put up with me the whole time and gave me the opportunity, namely time to heal and a place to rest, to turn things around.

Unless there are some glaring work performance issues that need to be fixed, I talk about about hobbies and how they're spending their free time. I'm interested in their mental health and want to know if they're able to do what they want to do.

I started investing last year, mainly indexes and tech stocks. Everything is in the red except Tesla, which is exactly the reverse of what it was the entire year until recent events which I found weirdly ironic. Overall, I'm down about 10%.

I'm planning on holding everything long term so I'm not terribly troubled by it.

No, the LED and IR are in different locations which means the internal mounts are probably different too.

Absent founder.

The non-tech founder hired a typical consulting/dev-shop to build the initial prototype. When completed, he hired the engineers that worked on the project into his company and let them manage themselves. He drops in once a month to espouse where he sees the company and product going, what we should do and what the product is missing. Then he fucks off and doesn't return calls or emails.

Meanwhile, the engineers now have to take on the role of product owner, project manager, customer support and even sales.

It really is very weird talking by yourself to a camera. The first few takes have the very obvious 'I'm talking to a wall' feel to them.

It's strange but it feels more natural to have a real person behind the camera and pretend you're talking to that person instead.

I started a Wordpress consultancy with a couple of friends. The idea was to eventually transition into a proper design agency that can also code.

One friend was part-time and did only design because he didn't know how to code. The other friend never did any work at all so I ended up having to do almost everything, which wasn't really that much anyway since we only had a handful of customers.

Eventually one of those customers led to a full time gig so I shut the whole thing down.

There were many lessons but the main lesson was that you cannot rely on a person's word.

I can't tell if she's nervous or awkward or excited but it reminds me of myself when giving talks, even to small groups. I get so flustered that my mind races and then the rest of my body tries to catch up so I'm now talking really fast and moving and jumping all over and being very fidgety with things. Anyway the difference is that she managed to get her points through while mine often gets lost.

I still don't know how to fix that except to practise and memorise what I'm going to say, and then just read it. But then it just becomes very monotone-y.

They were willing to sponsor my visa.

I'm actually subscribed to the AthleanX channel and use a lot of Jeff's training videos, partly because his videos have great click-bait titles but mostly because I find most other youtube trainers annoying while Jeff sure sounds a lot more professional and convincing.

However, since we're in the 'you don't know what you don't know' thread, I really have to ask. Are Jeff's training exercises really that good?