ereyes01

Funny enough, instant coffee has less caffeine than fresh brewed coffee.

In 2014, I built some tools to make it easier to automate AWS and Google Cloud deployments. I did the following:

- Applied to devops jobs on Angelfish, target companies with 10-20 employees

- Passed their phone screen, learned about the particular automation problems they had

- Offered them a SaaS subscription with a promise to set up a working solution in my product for their problems.

- Explained that subscribing to my service would be much cheaper than hiring me.

Most declined, a few were offended at my bait and switch, but 3 of them became my early customers and used my service for years, eventually taking over and maintaining their own solutions.

I think identifying the right customers- other startups with VC cash that were too small to have too much red tape and had big problems without tools and staff- made this work in the early days. It was a blast working on this stuff back then.

Really cool. Several jobs ago, I used cffi to create bindings to a library that controlled a camera's pan/tilt/zoom motors. Those were used to implement a test suite that validates the cameras in the manufacturing facility before shipping. The embedded developers also found being able to use the cffi bindings in the REPL really useful when prototyping changes. Python is a really useful tool for these kinds of interfaces.

There's been dozens of HN threads about this article, and it taught me much about the mechanics of making something that grows out of essentially nothing http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

I think you've perfectly characterized why I love listening to Dan Carlin. He's masterful at personalizing history (even ancient history) and challenging you to ponder how you would act under the same circumstances.

I think this form of thinking, when approached with an open mind and a little imagination, is a wonderful antidote to the knee-jerk group-think that dominates today's discourse.

Go comes with thread sanitizer, which you can enable with go test -race ... If your unit test exercises a race condition, this will blow up your test with stack traces of the data race.

It sounds a bit like Coyote, which also looks very useful for C# applications.

I grew up in South Florida and when I visit my parents, they are horrified when I insist on walking the quarter mile to the Starbucks in the corner. It's definitely a part of the culture here.

Another way to look at it is that you'll be a new CS graduate with some good practical experience under your belt (many CS graduates can't say the same). I guess you would be in a similar category as other peers that do internships, though IMHO if your company does as well as you expect it to, your experience is much stronger. Maybe you don't even need the job after all?

That being said, focus on getting your degree. That piece of paper has a good deal of intrinsic value.

At the beginning of a startup, there are no "big tech decisions" per se, only a whittling down of your problem space and target market. If that can be done with zero technology, all the better.

What gets to be called a "startup" is highly debatable, as some billion-dollar companies have still been called "startups". However, you will only get to be faux-CTO if you get in really early, or start one yourself. Best of luck!

Another early assumption about the internet and computers in general is that users were going to exert large amounts of control over the software and systems they use. This assumption has thus far been apparently invalidated, as people by far prefer to be mere consumers of software that are designed to make its designers money. Even OSS is largely driven by companies who need to run monetized infrastructure, though perhaps you don't pay for it directly.

Given that users are generally not interested in exerting a high level of sophisticated control over software they use, how then is the concept of a user agent AI/filter any different at a fundamental level? It probably won't be created and maintained as a public benefit in any meaningful way, and users will not be programming and tuning the AI as needed to deliver the needed accuracy. I don't think AI has yet reached a level of sophistication where content as broad a range as what's found on the internet (or even just Facebook) can be curated to engage the human intellect beyond measuring addictive engagement, without significant user intervention.

Hopefully I'm wrong, as I do wish I could engage with something like Facebook without having to deal with ads or with content curated to get my blood boiling. Sometimes I do wonder how much it is Facebook vs. human tendency under the guise of an online persona, as both are clearly involved here.

I drew an alien demon grabbing his penis, but alas, it was not recognized :(

upspin.io seemed like a strong decentralized alternative from the same people who maintain the Go language, but unfortunately it seems defunct, judging by it's GitHub activity. Anyone know if it has been forked and maintained elsewhere?

I'm assuming you are a developer / engineer with what follows, but you are likely not a decision maker with purchasing authority in the type of company they are targeting with these posts. I also don't think it's in Google's interests to market this in clear engineering speak because they are after consulting dollars as well.

Being an developer myself however, yeah it's difficult to to get at the technical substance of what any of this means, as there is certainly lots of vaporware out there <cough>... <watson>... <cough>..

I can see immutable infrastructure and this concept working in a copy-on-write model. For instance, if a service is up and running, a modification can consist of duplicating the infrastructure so you have your own copy and then making the modifications. It localizes the change, and in theory keeps the original unmutated.

I have no idea how this would work in practice. This manifesto seems to go against the grain in other ways, as I'm not sure how it can coexist the economic model of SaaS that has emerged. Also, as others have said, the security and UX implications are big concerns that threaten the feasibility of this idea.

What does the "Programming Languages" section mean? Blogs that discuss the languages? Use the languages in snippets within posts?

Works for me on Linux, after signing in (I'm using a paid plan).

I preheat the dutch oven in a 475f oven, but I put the dough on a piece of parchment paper, grab the corners, and safely drop it into the blazing hot pot. As a bonus, this also makes it easy to pull out. Works great.

I couldn't find yeast easily, but I nabbed a couple bags of unbleached flour, so I've started making a sourdough starter.

An entertaining and very informative series of videos on sourdough, including recipes and some basic info: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLURsDaOr8hWWSiMZBLGP2...

The medium of in-person communication is very different from the tools of remote communication. You're trying to force in-person protocols and expectations in a situation that isn't well suited to this medium. This just adds to stress and friction in your team.

Have a look at Gitlab's remote working guide for lots more insight on how they address this situation: https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/guide/

This is also a good chart: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594...

It shows global trend lines, and per-country + per-region data.

That said, nice job to OP.

The Fifth Amendment gives witnesses a right not to testify against themselves. Rawls argued that producing a password for the hard drives would amount to an admission that he owned the hard drives. But the 3rd Circuit rejected that argument. It held that the government already had ample evidence that Rawls owned the hard drives and knew the passwords required to decrypt them. So ordering Rawls to decrypt the drives wouldn't give the government any information it didn't already have. Of course, the contents of the hard drive might incriminate Rawls, but the contents of the hard drive are not considered testimony for Fifth Amendment purposes.

It sounds like this ruling is more against indefinite detention than a ruling that allows you to invoke the 5th before handing over your passwords. The quoted text above [1] tells me that the courts have thus far not recognized any right to keep your data encrypted against the wishes of law enforcement. Maybe it means they can only lock you up for 18 months, but I don't see how this changes things appreciably. I guess if the crime you're accused of carries a sentence worse than 18 months, it might be worthwhile, but who knows...

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/man-who-refused-...

My first performance review came 6 months after I started at IBM. I was basically told that I did everything perfectly but I still got what amounted to a middling "satisfactory" rating. My manager told me that I will get a better score next year if I change nothing about my performance, and the "satisfactory" rating was due to company policy and my not having worked there a full year yet. I later learned that managers have a budget of how many good/medium/bad ratings they can hand out, and the choice of who gets what is 100% arbitrary and up to the manager. Big company politics I guess <shrug>. I proceeded to have many much better years after that, fortunately.

I think this phenomenon is evidence of the value ceiling of IC work. What is the point of diminishing returns on paying an IC more money to do what they already do well vs hiring an additional younger and less expensive person to do the same thing, though not as well? Of course, an experienced IC can transition to mentorship, and different companies value this differently, but that may have a value ceiling as well.

Personally, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing when IC's who max out their value writing code transition to other things. I agree not everyone makes the transition successfully, but it's a great opportunity for personal growth, and the potential for upside is high, since an organization can gain a leader with very nuanced and deep insights into product + market.

I don't live in CA, and have been to many places both in and out of the US. I 100% agree with the statement that San Francisco is in a uniquely beautiful natural setting. Yes I saw the encampments, the people shooting up in the street, and some of the negative stuff you hear about, but I also saw the bridges on the bay, Twin Peaks, Lincoln Park, Golden Gate Park, Hawk Hill, and I could go on.

On the other hand, I kind of understand the sentiment of not appreciating a place if you grew up there. I'm originally from Miami, FL, and it took moving away + a few years to be able to appreciate the beauty of that place for what it is.

IMO this article betrays a bit about why and how the author has come to be a fast talker. It has to do with how he distills the information and presents it to the reader.

The article explains a really cool application he put together to automatically transcribe his conference talks and measure the words per minute that he speaks. The problem I see is that he feels it necessary to describe his whole thought process and all his dead ends to arrive at his solution... i.e. he started with ffmpeg, pydub, and SpeechRecognition, then later turns out he didn't need pydub, then later he discovers he misconfigured SpeechRecognition because it was sending a ton of data to an external API, etc.

While this might be mildly interesting, I think the writing would be much more effective without all the dead ends and the spurious details that don't contribute to the thesis.

I am often guilty of not communicating in a simple and effective manner (rambling too much), and thus I tend to speak much faster than I need to due to the sheer amount of content my rambling introduces. This usually works against the goal of communicating effectively with my audience.

I realize I'm trying to project my own perspective onto the author, but I think there is a good chance that a great first step for him might be to simplify and distill his content before he speaks somewhere. This requires more preparation, but it greatly improves the end product (the public speaking).

Trivia

My cofounder is in the Bay area, and we're looking for help in this area. How do we get in touch with you?

You may call them "slaves" using a more modern lens, sure, but of course different times and places require a relativistic shift in order to understand things as a local living in the time would have understood them. You are right that we can't ask someone living in that time/place if they thought themselves a slave, or whether they thought it was good or bad to be one. However, we do know enough about ancient Egypt to at least fill in some context that minimally casts doubt on the notion that they saw themselves as unwilling slave laborers.

A good thought exercise is to consider: What are some things you are compelled to do today by your own government or economic limitations? How many of those things could you imagine a different and presumably more wealthy/capable future society would consider abhorrent enough to think you a "slave" or something like one?

For loops and their map/filter/reduce functional equivalents to me are just that: equivalent constructs, two styles/paradigms of doing the same thing. Can you elaborate on why one is poorer and the other much more productive in absolute terms?

This is nice that they aren't selling/boosting political ads (though apparently there's no solution for buying bot armies). However I feel that the root of the problem remains unaddressed- a small group of private companies with their own whims and interests is becoming the sole arbiter of speech and public discourse.