jonasvp

Jonas & der Wolf - https://www.jonasundderwolf.de | Berlin, Germany | Django/Python Developer | ONSITE

We're a development team of about 20 working on applications for small and big companies such as the Deutsche Bahn. We develop using Django and React, striving for a clean API between backend and frontend. On the backend, we've been using Django exclusively since starting out in 2007. Needless to say, we know our way around Django...

Currently we're looking for a backend developer at an intermediate level. See the jobs description here: https://www.jonasundderwolf.de/jobs/) or send me an email directly at "jvp" on our domain.

One note, however: our language around the office is German so you would need basic fluency or a willingness to learn.

Don’t say anything about someone in email you would not be comfortable saying to them directly, because eventually they will read it.

Absolutely - I've learned this the hard way and it's giving me new appreciation for phone calls.

It's amazing how many people do _not_ remember that an email chain of several hundred pages _will_ contain something incriminating or embassaring if forwarded to someone outside the original circle of recipients.

For understanding the world we're living in and expanding your horizons (substantially): https://www.ecosophia.net

Check out https://fairtransport.eu/, they've been doing that for over 10 years. The story of Captain Gustaf Erikson is also instructive in that regard: https://postcarbonlogistics.org/2019/06/28/captain-eriksons-...

Not to forget that WWII was a war won by oil. Whoever was able to mobilize the most energy (in the form of oil) could win (a great book about that: Oil, Power and War[0]). Retooling in the face of declining energy availability will be a different matter.

[0] https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/oil-power-and-war/

Totally. This was a one-time gift of fifty million years of sunshine and we burned it all off over a time span of about 300 years.

Diesel, fuel oil and coal. Admittedly, the latter mostly goes through a power plant to turn into electricity first - with the concomitant losses on the way.

You're making a big assumption that simply doesn't hold: it's not a matter of "let's switch to renewables and keep everything else the same". Fossil fues have an energy density that's unparalleled anywhere else in nature and most renewables are simply riding off of that (the machines, factories, trucks and ships producing and transporting wind towers and solar cells are not and won't be running on electricity). Read up on EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) if you're interested in the topic.

I just read a calculation how automatic milking machines will turn a tidy profit on milk into a loss with energy costs per kwh just 10 cents higher. Milking by hand will be _more_ profitable with that small a difference.

So it's controversial because doing something about climate change involves massive changes to our way of life. Not simply switching your SUV for a Tesla, we're talking up to and including economic collapse and deindustrialization.

[citation needed]

Cars are a net negative for societies (see e.g. https://tu-dresden.de/bu/verkehr/ivs/voeko/ressourcen/dateie...). Just imagine having most (80%+) of goods transported by cargo bike: lots of (local!) employment, lots of new technology needed, etc.

I distinctly remember the first time I looked at a overly long and complicated model class and thought: "OMG, this is a state machine!" - a shortish refactor later and it was much simpler to read and debug.

However, now I'm at a loss on how to teach the junior programmers at my company how to recognize which patterns scream "turn me into a state machine!" Several booleans triggering certain code paths in several methods is a pretty sure sign. Are there more?

Judging from context I would guess he/she meant: "I took _the watch_ off when _the company_ was bought"

This is exactly what I need - but I signed up, closed the window and now I get an endless redirect loop after clicking on "Login" on the main page. Please fix so I can try it out!

EDIT: It works when accessing https://app.monicahq.com/people - the endless redirect only affects https://app.monicahq.com/

so you need to wait until they leave until you can move into your own property.

That's simply false. You can cancel a lease with a renter because of "Eigenbedarf" (personal need) if you want to move into your own property. There's some limitations around it when you buy a property with a renter in it but in general that's how it works.

In Germany, the "basic law" (rougly: constitution) says:

(2) Property entails obligations. Its use shall also serve the public good.

The state protects your property but this obliges you to also use it for the public good. It's not an absolute right.

Interesting! I actually love using the whiteboard to sketch solutions and architectural decisions. I believe the hate comes from having to code on a whiteboard - which is justified, since no one ever coded on a whiteboard except in an interview.

Good point. When I notice that people are struggling with finding something, I usually just pick one thing from the resume and try to go more in depth about that.

It's like they don't trust their own judgement enough to be able to tell apart those who know what they're talking about from those who just talk a good game.

Which is usually the case in larger companies, I assume. The person doing the hiring in that case is far removed from the people and work actually connected with the candidate.

Junior engineers, I assume?

You're right, that's surely part of it. Not only, however - sometimes you get the feeling that work is something that happens to people, not something they seek out and try to get better at. Which for many positions is completely fine.

That's actually not correct. One example from Düsseldorf: http://www.rp-online.de/nrw/staedte/duesseldorf/duesseldorf-... (2/3rds of drivers in a 30km/h zone are breaking the speed limit).

30 km/h and even 50 km/h are respected pretty much nowhere except where there are stationary traffic cameras. I ran across an article recently (can't seem to find it again) where 90% of German drivers voluntarily admitted to not keeping to the speed limit.

For most people, breaking the speed limit does not seem a big deal. Then they run over a kid and say "I didn't mean to do that"! Well, they did in a way - keeping to the speed limit is not hard.

I'm responsible for hiring developers at our company based in Berlin, Germany, and found it best to have a guided interview about the candidate's work experience and interesting problems that she/he solved. I never understood the whiteboard hazing/CS trivia that are so widely discussed on HN since it seems extremely disconnected from the actual work that's being done.

That said, I'm always surprised how many candidates cannot even point to one problem they worked on they found interesting or one solution that they're proud of.

We worked with an HR consultant to develop a interview guide in the form of certain questions that we make sure to hit during the interview in order to be able to compare between candidates and make an informed decision.

However, we're small and not in the US. Anyone have experience with other companies in Germany/Europe? How does the typical interview work over here?

Well, that's a tricky argument since at what point is a population "established"?

I concur, however, since I'd prefer it to be distributed among all residents, whether born in that country or not. But that's another discussion entirely.

This has been espoused a long time ago by German economist/trader Silvio Gesell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvio_Gesell

His main work is about reducing the possibility to extract "rents" from society by closing loopholes in our current economic system:

1. Money is "better" than everything else so those holding money can extract surplus value by lending it out. This was later also found out by Keynes and others. Keynes' solution: inflation. Gesell's solution: imposing carrying costs on cash.

2. Land is required by everybody yet impossible to increase. Solution: the goverment is owner of all land yet leases it out long-term by auction. All income is distributed among all mothers, since the price of land is direct consequence of the number of children/people in a country. Now you would distribute it among all citizens and call it "basic income".

His ideas are still completely valid and deserve a wider audience.

Thanks for mentioning property tax, one issue that is sadly overlooked in practically every discussion. In Germany there's a small initiative of cities and citizens that aim to restructure property taxes to actually incentive productive use of land: http://www.grundsteuerreform.net/ (unfortunately only in German)

Basically it aims to remove all taxes on buildings and _only_ tax the property it's on, at a rate that is propertional to the value that society (the people living in the city around the property) and the city itself (through infrastructure) provide to the property.

The tax would then strongly encourage productive use of the land instead of speculating with it.

Try duply (http://duply.net). It's a nicer frontend for duplicity that makes it very usable at last.

Specifically: my Xtracycle Edgerunner. Beatiful, handles like a normal bicycle but carries my wife and kids and/or groceries like a truck. I'd marry it if I were available.

I suspect the American interpretation of "organic" is much less strict than the European one. Also, there would probably be much less regulation and control of the production process because free market.

Those shortened links take you to amazon

Just FYI: Hacker News already shortens links, no need to pass them through a 3rd party service. I personally prefer seeing a readable domain name before clicking (as I'm sure many others do as well).

Attrs (https://attrs.readthedocs.io/) replaced namedtuple for us (and many others). It's slightly more verbose but allows all class goodness such as methods, attribute validation, etc.

We actually ran into this as a problem: our tests were so DRY that it was really hard to adapt them as the behaviour of our application changed.

We've since gone more DAMP (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6453235/what-does-damp-no...): tests should be descriptive and meaningful by themselves, not abstract, concise and DRY.

It makes for more lines of test code but they are simpler to understand and adapt.

That's simply not true. Firstly, people aren't rational. See this list of "cognitive biases" as an indication: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Secondly, there are all sorts of drugs, some addicting, some not addicting, some legal in some places, some illegal in other places, some making people "irrational", some making them more "rational". There's no correllation between these attributes.

Legality depends on historical accidents more than anything. Alcohol is in fact one of the more addicting drugs out there, see the high percentage of "functioning alcoholics" out there.

The vision of http://sandstorm.io ties well into this strategy (not affiliated, I just like the idea).

This is from 2015 and has been discussed before with some very interesting comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8991025