jsperson

I was wondering about MS quality control as my son hung over my shoulder waiting to join a Minecraft session with his buddies. I was fighting yet another bad update that made the game unplayable. There’s no rollback option. The broken functionality was fundamental to actually playing so they obviously did not test.

To really rub it in they combine not testing with treating their customers like garbage. Their support actually tried repeatedly blaming my ISP as if somehow connectivity would impact user account specific issues. I eventually sent them URLs of articles pointing out the problem. Then - crickets.

For the orgs where I've worked the important thing isn't availability of compute it's security. Using what we have on our local network is much easier from a governance and approval standpoint than whatever is available on the internet.

I’m still sore about reader. Gap has never been filled for me.

I tried it. First kit was speced with cheap parts that didn’t really work. Got a replacement kit - same thing. Overall a really disappointing experience. I cancelled and bought a 3D printer, which has been great fun.

Edit - fixed autocorrect

This is why I originally learned vi. Working on DoD machines as well as this of other consulting customers. I had a notebook of short scripts and commands that would make my life easier. I couldn't use any media or even reference the internet in many of the data centers and labs.

If applied correctly this is good advice. Let your employer know that you want to learn. I'd much rather have the folks on my team learn OJT than try to hire that skill.

I just had to go through the firing process for a contractor like this guy. It was miserable for everyone. Don't be like this guy.

I’ve had good success using lambda and functions for analytics data pipelines. It allows a team of python developers to focus on the business logic instead of the infrastructure. On my current project we’ve been struggling with K8 for months (not our decision) and I intend to push for a refactor to functions as soon as we get to MVP.

Oh the pains of Minecraft administration! I could write a book about cross platform incompatibility, Microsoft account dysfunction, billing issues, and upgrade blocking execution. We’ve spent $100s and it does nothing but get worse.

However if you are not in a tech city, and don't want to move to one, then online is great. Here is what you can do.

I live 40 miles north of Wichita Kansas USA. There's no tech - there's no city even.

Here's what I did: I got to know a recruiter in Wichita. Turns out she's a rock star - one of the leaders in the region at recruting tech. Met a guy on an flight from Atlanta to Wichita. We got together and talked geek a few times. The three of us started a Meetup in Wichita where we talk geek every other month or so. We generally get 15-50 folks depending on the time of year and topic. Last meeting I got two off handed job offers (I'm not looking). I've gotten a previous position the same way.

Tech is everywhere. The typical attendee to our Meetup is a developer or analyst at a regional bank, an airplane manufacturer, or farm credit agency. Nothing fancy, but great jobs for this area.

I'm not a very social person, but I do like to talk geek. There are lots of folks like me everywhere. Folks want to learn. Get together and teach each other.

Could be worse. They used to ship you an individual physical decoder card.

Takes a day - it will update.

My previous company posted several openings for our team. All specifically excluded Colorado.

Central KS USA here. Moved here five years ago after 20 years in DC. Paid off my house in four years.

Day to day it’s not all that different. With kids you cook, clean, watch movies, read books, and exercise. COVID lockdown didn’t really happen here. Kids missed a total of a month of in person school. We do have to drive 40 miles for sushi, but that takes a reliable 35 min - no traffic and speeds to the city are 80 MPH. My internet is 200 Mb and could easily double that if needed.

There are things I miss but nothing I can’t get with a drive or some travel. Cities are now enjoyable for me to visit.

I’m a consultant data engineer and am on my third engagement in a row where devops has been the hardest part of my job. Every org has their pet stack with their own poorly documented process. Having devops as developer support is critical to getting solutions out the door.

I guess the question is why can't you (AWS) fix the problem of the status page not reflecting an outage? Maybe acceptable if the console has a hiccup, but when www.amazon.com isn't working right, there should be some yellow and red dots out there.

With the size of your customer base there were man years spent confirming the outage after checking the status.

I’ve got a T460 with 16GB. Didn’t even know about potential ram incompatibility. Just ordered some from crucial and put it in.

Years ago I used Linux as my daily driver. That was before kids and a real house and all the other things that go with being a father and husband. Now, I ain't got time for that. I need something that works and doesn't require a lot of fiddling. I also support four other machines for various family members (total of eight including mine). I encouraged everyone to buy Macs. That lowered my support effort by 80%. I use one Windows machine for work. No Linux anymore (except WSL2) and I wouldn't even consider it.

And once again HN becomes the escalation end point for Google support. I wish they’d throw the internet a bone and put 1% of revenue into support.

Edit: I do t actually know how much they invest in support. It may be a lot higher than 1%. Regardless, the number of “Google screwed me and won’t answer the phone.” articles we see is scary.

Maybe this will lead to more standardization in clothing sizes. If I could accurately size myself in a particular company's goods then I'd probably not return anything. Note, in practice I'm already there, but my wife and daughter not even close...

Citing several small countries with many significant differences from the U.S. isn’t solid logic. All of those countries are much smaller, much less diverse, and enjoy the geopolitical shelter of the U.S.

They’ll have to be able to figure out where it will run first. Amazing to me that this is still in question.

I’m surprised no one has mentioned Snowflake. The biggest feature here is no worries. It scales in every dimension, is quite stable, and has few knobs to turn. I’m on a Redshift project now, and the differences are significant. It’s not hard to overload the cluster with a complex query. With Snowflake I would just create my own cluster with the same data shared on the back end. While it’s possible to do something similar with redshift, in practice the configuration and DBA culture make it much more difficult.

Edit - reread the question and it mentions OLTP workloads. Snowflake and Redshift are specialized analytics DBs so they don’t meet that criteria.

For anyone looking for a weight machine recommendation...this one: https://www.costco.com/inspire-fitness-ftx-functional-traine...

Gym quality delivered to your house. Weighs A LOT so only buy if you're pretty committed to your current domicile. It is solid and smooth. With Cosco, you get a bench included in the price that is less than other retailers for the exact same machine.

This is spot on - and the pedals. OMG the f-ing pedals. I've never used the Peloton ones (went straight to SPDs as are on our MTBs), but the Facebook groups are full of pedal complaints. It's the butterfly keyboard of Peloton.

Edit: Regarding shoe/pedal combinations. Sidi shoes if they will fit you otherwise I'd go with Specialized. The BOA fasteners are really good - crazy durable, easy, they stay, can be replaced etc. no downside except upfront cost maybe. I really like SPD pedals - Shimano XT in particular. The lower models have a plastic part that will wear and the bearings go sooner. XTR pedals cost a fortune for no durability gain and it's a spin bike so not going anywhere.

I've had the bike for four years. Cost both one time and recurring is pretty high, but the product is of high quality. I've taken thousands of spin classes IRL and several hundred on the Peloton. Peloton is superior both in the hardware/software and instruction. Classes are taught by extremely well compensated instructors (I've heard $300K) so they are the best available. The best part for me is the library. There are thousands of archived classes starting with classes that ended ten minutes ago back several years. And not just cycling or running. The full body warmup classes have transformed my lifting routine and the yoga classes are now integral to my fitness program.

It's about $40 a month, which covers our family. My wife and I are fitness enthusiasts and this is more than offset by not having a gym membership or having to drive to exercise. We do have about $5K total in our home gym (rubber flooring, cable machine, dumbbells and benches etc.) For us being able to get quality classes and workout on our schedule offsets any added cost.

Do you think that you spending 0% of your time managing iOS devices has something to do with apps not being able to use their own payment system?

Indirectly sure - it pays for the app store and all of the curation that goes on there. Admittedly there's a crazy healthy profit for Apple, but I believe you are arguing principles so the amount shouldn't be relevant.

On the other hand, I spend 0% of my time managing iOS devices for my parents and am constantly bombarded with issues from my in-laws with Android phones. I agree that some of Apple's behavior is monopolistic and has some unfortunate, possibly unforeseen consequences, but the end result is pretty nice for the consumers who are willing to accept the compromise.

Only if you're selfish. I'd say Bill Gates has made an art out of enjoying too much money.

This has a significant consequence - the military is an almost foolproof path out of the lower and well into the middle class. You can basically do nothing but be mediocre or even marginal and still be financially secure and earn a solid retirement.

All that is lost if you can’t even join up.