jaredandrews

The other day I was idly wondering what are the strangest combinations of items people buy at grocery stores. The kind of shopping cart that makes the cashier snicker and later tell his friends, "Dude, can you believe this guy came in and only bought condoms and apples?"

When you are a cashier, customers make comments like this all the time, preemptively defending themselves to you for their "eccentric" purchases. Truthfully, as a cashier you are on auto pilot and scanning things as quickly as possible and trying to not make mistakes. We are a store that sells these items and I do not find it surprising or strange that you are buying any of them. The fact that you can buy condoms and apples here is what makes this market "super". It's my job, I'm here to sell it to you. Paper or plastic?

SEEKING FREELANCER - USA - Remote

I'm an experienced mobile developer who is trying to learn more about web dev with React. I recently built a small web app with React, Typescript, Tailwind and a Supabase backend.

I'm seeking a developer with experience in all 4 of those technologies to do a code review with me over a screen share session. This would be fairly high level, as I would like to talk thru a handful of decisions I made and see if I made any mistakes, especially with my relatively simple Supabase setup.

I expect this would only be an hour or two of work. If anyone is interested shoot me an email, showing some experience with these four technologies, to "jared at jaredandrews dot com"

Thanks!

I had no idea Monster sold anything other than over priced guitar cables... About 15 yeard ago, I knew a guy who exclusively bought Monster... well he had two of them, one from the guitar to the pedal board and another from the board to the amp.

But it wasn't because of their alleged improved sound quality or whatever, it was because they had a lifetime warranty. Dude had bought two monster 1/4inch cables and gotten them replaced "for free" like 5 times.

From what I can tell they got rid of the lifetime warranty around 2018 and have mostly transitioned to licensing their name.

This is what I used when I was 11. Been 15 years since I last used it, so no idea how much it's changed. The thing that was nice about Game Maker for young me, was that it had a drag and drop and programming language interface and you could switch between the two pretty seamlessly. This really helped me learn how to code early on.

Thanks!!!

This looks pretty cool, I am someone who gets annoyed by excel, sheets, numbers for not just letting you code it in a nice language like python and then visualize/query after that.

But then I see "AI-driven", which I should note is the _third_ line of text on the web page. I assume it is an important feature for the author of the page.

I control-f, "ai-driven", it is only used one other time on the page:

"Perform easy AI-driven visualization with Matplotlib"

There is no further elaboration on the home page and I have been unable to find additional docs. (Someone please post a snarky RTFM response with a link to the manual, cuz like I said I am very interested in this. I did google "pysheets docs" which uhh linked to a python library with the same name...)

Last week, for the first time ever, I used noted "AI" ChatGPT to review a resume I had written. I wouldn't normally do this, but the company I was applying for heavily emphasized that they use chatgpt to generate code and review things.

Ever the skeptic, I decided to try it myself. I have to say I was impressed with the results. EXCEPT, ChatGPT, pointed out a grammar error in my resume which literally did not exist. Like the sentence it was critiquing in it's feedback was not found anywhere in my resume nor was there anything similar (from my perspective, I'm sure 1000 layers deep in it's network there was some similarity to something that had the error and wouldn't it be cool if we could effectively debug that).

ANYWAY, when I see ai-driven without elaboration in a spreadsheet program, I am very concerned that my data might be "hallucinated" and I would encourage the author to explain what exactly this means. Will my charts be correct 99% of the time but sometimes a hallucination? What's going on here? I would probably be signing up for the beta right now if I had any idea. Thanks.

(final snark: funny that one of the authors is named Kurt Vile, what are the odds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uAXMl-Bfiw)

Yes thank you. This is my "actually it's GNU + Linux" tic, please fellow Americans (and I would be interested in learning if this problem exists in other countries) do not accept the framing that a bank giving a loan to someone they thought was you is _your problem_! It's their problem! We should not be normalizing this phrase or practice.

If that is the case, then the job is not one that our hypothetical job hopper wants, so it all works out.

While I personally didn't go down this path and wouldn't necessarily recommend it... if you are going to, the answer has almost nothing to do with any particular tech stack.

NETWORK NETWORK NETWORK, hop jobs every one to two years and make sure each of those jobs comes with a salary increase greater than what you could get via the promotion ladder at company you are leaving. Be a good enough software developer that you can switch tech stacks at will. Learn the software engineering (design patterns, how to communicate with stakeholders, etc) and language design / compiler / networking fundamentals (so you can easily switch programming languages / stacks).

Beyond that, certain subsections of the tech industry have higher salaries so network with people in those subsections.

Also just to be clear, the point of networking is so when you hop jobs you aren't applying to random jobs, you are being referred by employees at other companies.

Not all of these are currently active but here are the distinct Pi's in my house.

- PiHole

- Home Automation controller

- Camera / temp / humidity monitor for grow closet and at time 3d printer

- A 3d printer I used to have had a raspberry pi as it's board (I think, maybe it was a clone).

- I'm pretty sure my CNC machine uses a pi

- As another commenter mentioned, I used to have a Pi built into a NES for emulator purposes.

Wow, I experienced this yesterday while I was absentmindedly using my computer.... I assumed I had clicked something without realizing it. The idea that it was an intentional pop up didn't even enter my head.

I've been meaning to write a blog post about this but the code is so messy I keep telling myself "I'll clean it up first and then show it off"...

Growing up I had an alarm clock that you put a CD into and it would fade in the CD instead of an alarm noise. I really loved this, though having to wake up super early for school everyday, I will admit that I developed negative associations with the first track on many albums.

I created an improvised version of this a few years ago: a timer switch hooked up to a light, a cassette player and a water heater. When the timer went off all three would turn on. This worked but wasn't great cause nothing faded in.

I remodeled my bedroom last summer and wanted to replace this alarm with something more sophisticated.

I used a Raspberry Pi to do the following: - At the set alarm time, access my media server and generate a playlist of 10 random songs. Start this playlist and slowly increase the volume. - I bought a separate module to hook up to a lamp that points at where I sleep. This module lets me slowly turn up the brightness of the lamp as the music volume increases.

The water heater is hooked up to a timer in my kitchen now. But I just finished building an arduino based wifi switch, so once I get it integrated, that switch will get turned on 5-10 minutes before the alarm is set to go off and heat my water for coffee.

I built a dashboard for all of this using HTMX. It lets you set the alarm time, snooze, play arbitrary playlists, adjust the light etc. I also added a weather widget and I have a JSON file of all important birthdays in my life, so it tells me whos birthday it is when I go to review the weather.

Something that HN may appreciate, I have it setup so when I ssh into the Pi, I get dropped into a tmux session where an instance of emacs is running with the actual alarm code being executed inside of it. This makes editing and trying the new functions sort of like a lisp machine. You get dropped into emacs and can tweak all the scripts and test them in a sort of live environment (you have to restart the server to update the dashboard but everything else is 'live'). I have a dream of rewriting this so it really is a lisp machine and everything can be `c-x c-e`'d to run but I doubt I'll ever get around to that.

I would also like to integrate motorized blinds and open them up when I wake. I'm still researching this, if anyone has recommendations.

Yup!

I have used imgur numerous times thru the years when posting Stack Overflow questions, new feature pull requests on open source apps, troubleshooting reddit posts etc. Very sad to think all that visual context will be lost.

Hell, just this youtuber is a good example of what you are saying. This guy, 'DistroTube', has a ton of entry level videos about seemingly niche linux topics. Even the video you posted has a little command line tutorial embedded into it.

I come across him whenever I am trying to figure out what a specific distro or tool _looks and feels_ like. If you search any distro name plus "distrotube" there is probably a video of him setting it up and playing around with it.

I have wondered about this guys background before and finally looked it up tonight.

Despite the geekiness of my content, I have never actually worked in IT or a computer-related industry. Although Linux and technology have always been my hobby, I worked in the retail industry until recently. In 2020, with the pandemic and the subsequent shutdown, I lost the job that I had at the time. The retailer that I worked for went bankrupt and cut most of their supervisory positions (including mine). Thankfully, I already had a side job of sorts—making YouTube videos! So since the pandemic started, my full-time job has been making video content.

I have been strictly a Linux user since 2008. The distro that I currently run is ArcoLinux with the xmonad window manager. Some of the software that I use daily includes GIMP (for graphics), Kdenlive (video editing), Audacity (audio editing), and OBS (for recording/streaming video). I also use a distribution of Emacs called Doom Emacs. It is my preferred text editor, although I often use Vim as well, especially if I am already in a terminal.

from https://people.zsa.io/derek-taylor/

Which still leaves a lot of mystery to the "how did he get into this" question.

Thank you for sharing :) Will probably impulse buy this in the next 24 hours. Also wow, this reminds me a lot of the key one.

I had the "blackberry key one" from 2017 to 2018 and I really loved it. Like the Titan it had a keyboard, but it was an otherwise normal sized phone with a passable camera. Unfortunately it broke after one year, basically it split in half. I was hoping Blackberry would continue iterating on the design and I looked forward to buying a future, sturdier version but from what I can tell they abandoned that.

So... When I saw the kickstarter for the Titan I was excited. I have one in my desk but have never used it as my daily driver. I think the author really undersells how bad the out of the box experience is with this phone, sure Instagram stories look bad, I expected that. What I didn't expect is that almost all of the "optimized" apps that came pre-installed on the phone are poorly integrated with the screensize and keyboard. Furthermore, the keyboard is hard to type on! I mean physically, the keys are difficult to press down. I assume if I used this phone more frequently, this problem would resolve itself.

At the end of the day I don't regret buying the phone though. I have been an Android developer for around a decade and it's depressing how little experimentation is done with the hardware these days.

Learn thru experience and consider mentoring a FIRST robotics team in your area.

If enough people hated tipping, restaurants that don't have tipping would eventually out-compete those that do.

What makes you say this? As another comment points out, minimum wage is lower for restaurant workers in most (all?) states. How would a restaurant without tips outcompete in this system?

Any former software developers here who transitioned to plumbing/electrician/etc? If so, what did the steps look like?

Oh they are planning...

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prep...

True but there are exceptions. At a previous job of mine, layoffs were happening and my manager was tasked with laying off one member of my team. He sat us in a room and told us about it and the severance package and basically asked for a volunteer. A more senior engineer volunteered and went on his way with a good chunk of cash.

Oh how I wish I had volunteered cuz a year later basically everyone including me had quit anyway.

I am reading this story about 6 hours after it was posted here.

Immediately after reading I went to amazon.com and search "male to male e" at which point I was provided several autocompletes:

- male to male extension cord 3 prong - male to male extension cord adapter - male to male extension cord 10 ft - male to male extension cord black

and so on. BUT when I actually completed the search ("male to male extension cord 3 prong", the first autocomplete for me), I did not get any actual "suicide cords" in the results.

Thus I am forced to conclude that Amazon reacted in real time to this story. Curious if people in other areas are seeing the same thing?

The very term "digital nomad" was coined by a specific subset of "digital nomads" who are uniquely focused on glorifying/marketing the concept of the "digital nomad" lifecycle. Thus focusing on exotic and foreign locations. It needs to be exciting, glamorous, etc because it is a marketing asset to sell some product or service.

That being said, as a former "digital nomad" who did it america[0][1] I definitely recommend it. Our country is as vast and beautiful as it is mundane and ugly.

Is it mostly because of the appeal to live more cheaply in many other countries?

It helps to have friends and stay with them but if you are remote working for an average tech company that shouldn't be a factor. The digital nomad lifestyle blogger is selling to an audience beyond that, thus the emphasis on cheapness. Sure, you can't stay at an airbnb in NYC for months at a time, but Richmond, VA you can. Lots of cheap[2], weird towns in America with things to do.

[0] https://jaredandrews.com/pages/travel-log.html

[1] https://jaredandrews.com/whats-in-my-bags.html

[2] For someone who makes > 70K a year and has no dependents or significant financial obligations.

The Amazon workers should form a new union if they want representation.

They did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Labor_Union

do you think lawyers work on Jira tickets?

LOL, a lawyer in my family does. He actually meets with a whole group of lawyers every month or so and they all do a retrospective to figure out how well applying agile/lean/whatever principles to their firms has been working. He actually feels it gives them a real edge.

Shyu worked at Google as a tech lead on the YouTube app

"Coding is a brutal 24/7 job, mutually exclusive with motherhood," Shyu said, saying that mothers would come back "obsolete and outdated" after maternity leave.

???

I mean the YouTube app is fine. But it's hard to believe that working on the _YouTube App_ of all things is a brutal 24/7 hour job which is so cutting edge that taking leave for a few months would make someone unable to work on it.

Possibly a regional thing, but among Massholes it is considered rude to "watch" people you don't know for a sustained period of time. It wouldn't be considered rude or "harassment" to call someone out for doing this.

And then everyone clapped...

I grew up "free range" and looking around where I live this is still the predominant approach to parenting. So I really can't relate to the vibe in this whole thread. (all in Massachusetts and Maine btw)

That being said, the last thing my "free range" friends and I wanted growing up was some weirdo adult observing our "unstructured freeplay". As soon as we determined this lady wasn't a cop we would have created a lot of reasons for her to leave. Kids aren't monkeys in a zoo for you to observe lady, move along or get some feces in your face.

I remember seeing meme pages doing this on IG when they introduced the covid warnings. Sometimes, when you would screenshot the seemingly innocuous image and mess with it's contrast etc, you could see they hid words like "covid" or whatever in the image that could only be seen by the image scanners.

I don't see anything in this image. I supposeeee, the picture of 4 teletubbies vaguely looks like the meme featured in this article: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden-jerome-powell/

So maybe it's because of that. I have no idea how you would reverse engineer that the teletubbies would trigger the warning tho.

Nah.