mgas

If anyone is interested in seeing bald eagles, there is a nesting pair in Big Bear, CA with three eggs being monitored via live webcam: https://www.friendsofbigbearvalley.org/eagles/

Anyone who wants to go into p5 for games or visualizations would be well advised to either read Dan Shiffman's book (as another poster mentioned) or check out his YouTube channel, and code along to his 10 minute challenges: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17WoOqgXsRM&list=PLRqwX-V7Uu...

Also, there is Disney World, and EuroDisney, and hundreds of other non-Disney theme parks throughout the US and worldwide. Disney is setting a price that keeps them at the upper echelon of theme parks, whether the experience itself is deserving or not.

My personal take on this is that the idea of adjusting for inflation over time based on macroeconomic rates of inflation is useless (apart from showing that even though we make more money now, we can afford less). National inflation does not correlate with cost of living on a 1:1 scale.

The lesson is similar to the adage "the stock market is not the economy". Typical things that are presented to us as the proverbial market forces (jobs creation, stock market indices, currency valuations, national debt) are more often used as excuses by price-setters to increase costs for consumers, whether or not manufacturers and service providers (at any level) actually incur increased costs.

We as consumers are typically blind to this, and just accept that things get more expensive. Remember the oil issues in the early 2000s after the Deep Horizon leak and Hurricane Katrina? Gas prices went from ~$1/gal to over $3/gal for a while, then settled back in at around $2.50. And everyone was relieved and just ate that crap because they could finally fill up their suburban tanks without waiting in line. It's going to happen again here soon, when gas comes back down to around ~$4/gal (or $5.50 in CA).

Also, in what world does a stadium beer at a Padres game cost $5? Even a disgusting Bud Lite will run you north of $10. The reality of MLB is that you can probably get tickets for next to nothing, not need to pay to park (if your stadium is in an urban area and you are willing to walk a bit), but you will absolutely get gouged on food and drink. The movie theater model is in full effect.

Facebook already has a subscription system. They sell hundreds of millions of ad slots per day to willing buyers so they can put messages in front of your eyes. Advertisers subscribe to the FB publishing space based on all your data points gathered on FB and nearly every other place on the Internet...data they gather for free. You willingly go on the site with zero impediments; other site owners willingly put the FB pixel on their sites which track your movements there.

It is as if FB owns a large piece of land which stray cattle randomly enter, FB gladly allows them to graze, then slaughters them and sells the meat piecemeal to the highest bidder. Why would FB want to put up a fence to keep out unwilling livestock?

Excuse the dystopian metaphor, but I think it illustrates how FB actually operates. They put an enormous amount of money and manpower into developing the infrastructure that keeps users on its platform and in its web of tracking pixels, but they don't make any money from keeping the experience a high-quality one. Their main interest is gathering an enormous, aggregated dataset they can sell subscription access to.

They would have to charge an exorbitant account subscription fee to surpass the amount they make from selling access to users' data.

You only need to see who the author of this post is to know that the methodology is crap, the numbers are likely made up (19.42% is WAY too specific), and the post is just a grab for media attention on the coattails of some other internet meme garbage.

This guy (Rand Fishkin) has been selling SEO as a religion for the better part of this century, and is in no small part responsible for all the search-result-garbage style websites everyone is complaining about elsewhere on HN today and every other day.

He's a third-rate market-bro hack that's been taking advantage of web professionals who get thrown into SEO/Marketing jobs and have no idea what they're doing by relentlessly shoving half-assed corporate strategies through moz.com and now his new sparktoro.com, and calling himself the great SEO redeemer.

Wanna question his methodology? There is none. Wanna question his science? Totally devoid.

Totally agree on jr vs sr. Another point that is conveniently overlooked in the article so the author can have his holier-than-thou moment. It seems he's hiring seniors, and only wants stars.

Too many people here are crowing about the GitHub thing, and not enough about:

Above all, I try to hire people who I'd want to pair with tomorrow. People who are better than me, and people who I can learn from.

It seems the only way to get hired period is to have all the experience in the world, at least from the author's perspective. This mentality is far more dangerous since it disallows the idea that someone can get better at a job over time.

Also I feel like this conclusion is just a longform version of "we only hire ninjas and rockstars". The author openly disdains applicants who are so "full of themselves" that they send in overly detailed resumes, but conveniently omits the fact (which everyone here knows) that resumes have to be catered to the filters of your HR software to even land on a hiring manager's desk.

His conclusion is that stuffed resumes are for losers, and only he, the hiring manager with the Midas touch, can see the true value of an individual by glancing over their code and preparing some pitfall questions. This smacks of self-centered egotism and coder bro mentality.

Also as others have pointed out, good coding jobs exist in fintech, government, and 1000s of other industries that this guy sneeringly looks down his nose at.

A Whiteboard coding challenge is the exact thing you describe. But instead of interviewers looking over your shoulder, they look at the whiteboard as you stand in front of them and write code on the whiteboard.

Agree on all accounts, except for paper working when wet. :P

100000% agree. I would have loved to get more practical stuff in high school, and less fluff. Woodworking is a lifetime skill, and contributed to my understanding of spatial organization, practical math, fractions, and precision. Plus now I can make stuff.

Cooking as well. I worked in kitchens for 7 years during and after college, and wouldn't trade that knowledge for the world.

I only mentioned woodworking and home ec since they were gender-assigned by the school, not because they were less useful.

I just bought a house, and signing all the mortgage docs, they told me I had to sign my name exactly as it appears on the document: First Middle Last. My signature, the one that is most personal, recognizable, and ubiquitous to me, is a quick scribble that kind of includes the first letter of my first name, then some flairs of loops and things. Having to laboriously write out my full name in script was a giant pain in the ass. I could not repeat the same signature twice. In many cases I couldn't remember how to write the capital cursive letter for my middle and last name.

TL;DR: I am 38 and completely sympathize with your nephew. I can't sign my name either.

I was arguing that, in Europe, and France specifically, it's a way to see whether or not a potential candidate is "French" enough. It's expounded as a psychological tool (orthographists and graphologists are paid to psychoanalyze you based on written documents that you MUST submit), but in the end, it leads to a gray area of racism and classism.

That's cool. This type of thing just sparks something in my brain. I learned cursive because it was beat into me. As soon as I could abandon it I did, and for good reason too. My cursive was terrible and dyslexic, and block text was much easier to write and to read.

The other stuff I wrote is secondary to your post, and just a hot take. Thanks for the stimulating article though!

Here's my take:

The author was born in the 90s, and was in elementary and middle school in the 2000s, when keyboarding was already seen as a primary skill. His take that "nobody writes cursive anymore" is true, given that for him, "everyone" is under the age of 30. Those of us who grew up prior to personal computers and phone touchscreens being ubiquitous can scream all we want "I learned cursive and I still write it!", but it doesn't change all that much. Some of us learned and it and can't do it any longer. Some of learned it and still do it, for whatever personal or professional reason.

Here's the hotter take:

Skills like handwriting are (hold on to your hankerchiefs graphologists!) pseudo-sciences. They are vestiges of elitist education systems, whereby a bunch of rich, but likely average-intelligence, students who paid for elite education, hired private instructors to help them become members of the "learned class". It doesn't take any special intelligence to teach or to learn, and can be used as a signal to others that you "belong" to the upper class.

Fast forward to the 90s, in rural North Carolina, to a grossly underfunded school system that can't afford specialized training for teachers or students. What do we get? Over insistence on out-dated markers of education: cursive, Cotillion, woodshop for boys and home ec for girls. What don't we get? Computer science, math beyond algebra and geometry, science beyond basic earth science, and US history that stops at WWII! 1600 students with excellent penmanship, who know how to waltz, but none of us is even aware that computers can be programmed or that people get paid money to do it.

And to the commenters claiming graphology is a thing or that it is in any way useful in sorting candidates for job opportunities (I'm looking at you France), you are just as wrong as the author who claims "I don't use cursive, so nobody uses it either".

NB: This is not an attack on the hobbyists, or on the aesthetics of cursive in general. Well-written cursive is marvelous. I just think we had too much emphasis on it it school, and likely it was due to our schools not having the wherewithall to teach us anything else of value.

If this question is serious, then it's a terrible way to think. What is "making" a million dollars? Revenue? Profit? Are you just leveraging $10k into loans? Is it investment money? Are you starting a company? Any of those things should lead to a long-term strategy of growth, not to a random, big-sounding target dollar-amount.

If this question is merely facetious, then the only appropriate answer is spend $10k on counterfeiting. The only sure-fire way to get 10,000% growth in a year is fraud.

I guess nothing is gripe-free these days. Sheesh.

Not OP, but I have experience with the layers they describe. These are not separate Google Analytics products, but levels of implementation of the Google Analytics code.

The first level they mention is out-of-the-box, no setup Google Analytics. You install the site code and you get metrics. You don't need to be a developer or have any real skills to accomplish this. It is essentially low-effort, low-return.

The 2nd and 3rd layers do not require an investment in Google, but they do require an investment in people. You'll need someone who understands the Google Analytics API, the Measurement Protocol, how the script collects and sorts data, who can install, configure and implement Google Tag Manager, and who has at least an intermediate understanding of HTML/CSS/JS.

There is no nomenclature apart from the aspects of Google Analytics I described above, but you can read more about them here: https://developers.google.com/analytics/

You can still play the actual Wordle (and access all past, and apparently future, games) here, ad-free, monetization-free, gripe-free: https://timewarple.com/

This, and only this. He literally states "Fast forward two years and several pivots, and my slightly-less-early-stage business is doing $900 per month in revenue... from ads."

I used to hate ads, until I started making money from ads. Now I am writing this fluff piece where I try to use rhetoric to re-frame the paradigm where I was once a disgruntled user, but now I am a profitable pusher.

Particularly distasteful is the notion that "attention is a form of micropayment with low friction". If in the Library of Babel, all combinations of words are possible, I do not believe a more loathsome or self-serving bit of drivel could be found.

So, we have to hope that those in power will effectively regulate themselves? Like Apple and Microsoft and Google and FaceBook, etc can effectively regulate themselves? The point is there is simply no accountability for those in power because there is no sacrifice needed in order to gain that power. Gaining political power is 100% a financial move these days, and has nothing to do with passing legislation that is "by the People, of the People and for the People".

The only solution to any of this is if attaining political office comes with some sort of life-altering consequence. You get a seat in Congress? You have to live as a hermit and abandon all your wealth for good. Political action becomes the ultimate sacrifice, like Italo Calvino positied: http://www.ruanyifeng.com/calvino/2008/12/beheading_the_head...

(This was really just a comment to post this story)

If someone invites you out to a sushi dinner, you are free to decline simply because you do not eat sushi; but you should also consider your audience when communicating your rejection of their offer.

I feel like this article does a much better job of reviewing Don't Look Up than the article that passed through here last week. As an allegorical reading, it calls out the major plot points of the film and hits on the ulterior motivations of both those using heuristics to naysay experts, and the experts who inevitably fall out of grace because of them.

Game Play: maybe you want it this way, but the animations are an impediment to gameplay. I like to type the words, and in a timed situation, typing quickly should be an asset to the player. The animations make good players worse, even on first guesses before you slow the animations. I like slowing the player after multiple bad guesses, but don't hamstring us from the start.

Word Lists: far too many plurals. Especially in the games you rate as more challenging, plurals render the game dull. There are plenty of interesting and difficult 5-letter patterns in English that make this type of game better.

Stars: this seems like an afterthought. I had done four or five of these puzzles before I realized what the mechanism for the stars was. Even when the summary screen showed that I finished with x number of stars, I really only cared about how quickly I was able to complete the puzzle. It is good that time is the overall measure in your game, but I found that I cared very little about stars in the end.

Overall a nice iteration on the Scrabble/Boggle/Wordle paradigm.

Maybe you used to be a pre-school teacher, and you'll be the go-to person for communicating the engineering team's needs to the marketing team in a way that makes sense to them.

I usually don't go in for piling onto defenseless groups of people, but having worked in marketing and development, I applaud this (likely unintended) sick burn.

I agree with concerns about recyclability. I would also raise concerns about the renewability and/or toxicity of the base materials. If they are petroleum-based, this feels like a losing proposition.

Drupal was, and still is, a clunking monster, unfriendly to developers and editors alike

I feel like this is an unnecessary and inflammatory swipe, typical of coder-bro culture. Both Drupal and Wordpress are open source tools that have survived for years, are built on tested and long-lasting languages, and serve the people who both build and use them.

Everyone is always crying about how nothing ever stays the same, and and the same time, how the-next-new-thing-ism is ruining the web. And then there is this comment thread with every other response trying to push some ostensibly better and easier thing that stands no chance of surviving more than a couple of years, because CMSs need communities to keep them alive.

I am a proud member of the Drupal community. I struggle with it sometimes, but it is still amazing at how much you can accomplish with core and contrib modules. And don't forget, some organizations need a giant, clunky CMS. We're not all building websites for cutting edge, VC-backed, brochure-based unicorns. My clients need a framework that has legs to stand on for the next decade to come.

I did this in 2010, and it changed my life forever. But likely not in the way you might think, and definitely not like most other people on here.

I don't have a tech background. In 2009, I was a BA holder (Philosophy) working 3 jobs (retail/hospitality/merchandising) with no real prospects. I had always had the bug to get out of the country, but had no specific plan. I took a year to go back to school to study foreign languages (French, Italian, Portuguese) with the plan to find some way to transition to another country.

One of my French professors pointed me to TAPIF (Teaching Assistant Program in France), that gives you a 6 month contract to teach English in French public schools. So, in 2010, I was placed in Lille, France where I "taught" English in primary school. In reality, I got around 900 euros a month (with full benefits) to work around 10 hours a week. I did this for two years, and was able to afford a modest room and a few trips to Barcelona, Amsterdam, London, etc. I also met the woman I would eventually marry.

The TAPIF program disincentivizes a transition to permanent residency, so I instead decided to do a Masters in France. This is highly preferable to doing a study abroad program, since you pay French tuition (less than a thousand euros for the ENTIRE degree...that includes tuition, books, materials, etc.), you can work 20 hours a week, and you get healthcare, housing subsidies, food subsidies, etc. So, while going to school full time and working part time, I could afford a really full life in a an apartment in the city, taking plenty of vacations, and generally not worrying about life.

Until my future wife and I realize we were never going to become French. Don't get me wrong, a lot of expats, both American and European, become French. We just couldn't. Even with above average fluency for non-native speakers, you will be constantly singled out as non-native. You may make local friends, but in France, it is a life's work to become a local yourself.

So, in 2014, we moved to Romania (wife's home town). I managed to get a job with a web marketing company, which provided a decent salary for life in Romania (~$800/month). We had enough to live comfortably in rent for a while, and enough to build a house. We had family and friends, and the ability to take trips both in the country and around Europe. However, even though I learned Romanian (a rare feat for ANY non-native speaker), people still treated me as a novelty. To this day, I will engage in conversation with native speakers in Romanian, and they will invariably respond to my wife, about me, in the third person, while I am standing there. Somehow, being an outsider never really wears off.

It wasn't all bad though, since I did manage to get into tech without having any background. This alone is an achievement, since one of the biggest differences in Europe vs the US is the importance of the subject on your diploma. European education sets you up for a career around middle school. You want to work as a SWE? You'd better take the rights middle school classes to get in to the right technical high school, so you can pass the entrance exams to the PolyTechnic college and earn the degree you'll need to even GET an interview with a European tech company. Not that it's impossible to cross over, but it is far far less common.

The biggest thing I gained was a sense of value in myself and my skills. Having worked for peanuts in tech in Romania, while counterparts in America were pulling down close to or over 6 figures for the same work, I began to lose patience with the whole system. I got extremely lucky to get a remote job with an American company in 2018. My wife decided she would like to transition to an American company as well, and in 2019 we moved to the US.

We are in San Diego now, and our life is miles ahead of where we were before. Yes, the cost of living is higher. Yes, healthcare is tied to our jobs. Yes, you need a car because public transportation is insufficient. Yes, America has a gun violence problem.

But we live 10 minutes from the beach (nice beaches too; not sure what's wrong with the water in LA...San Diego provides a far superior life to LA anyways), we have quality friends from a variety of backgrounds who treat us as equals, the population is diverse in age, ethnicity, education, etc. We will manage the cost of being here, because the benefits are superior to anything we've had in the past.

If you are considering a move to Europe from the US, you should consider these things:

- Language: you need to be ready to learn it; don't rely on other people speaking English

- Friends / peer groups: you need to be ready to abandon your current ones, and start from scratch with new ones

- Family: close family relationships in the US will be difficult to maintain; at best there will be a 5-hour time difference that will hinder communication

- Living space: unless you are taking your big American salary, you can expect to give up your big American personal space

- Cars: in a metropolis (Paris, London, Rome, etc.)? don't even try; in a suburb? think about getting a license (much harder in Europe) and a car (much more expensive than in the US)

- Food: don't be a picky eater

- Measurements: all things will be different...can you measure it? clothes, shoes, food stuffs, liquids, speeds, distances, etc. will be different and no one will care that your American sizes don't match up

- Intangibles: depending on where you choose to live, cultural differences will mean others will seem cold or mean or loud or timid, and you will appear obnoxious or rude or stupid or uncultured...and you have to be ok with that. You will always be wrong, because it's their culture, not yours.

Do I recommend it? Yes.

El Corte Inglès, Europe's Biggest Department Store Group, in case you were wondering and don't open the link.

You can rest assured that if you go into a store and get pitched on a product, if the salesperson works on commission, the product they push the hardest on is the one with the highest profit margin (and consequently the one they make the highest commission on).

Generally, stores will offer a low priced option that they are willing to sell by keeping large quantities in stock, but on which their margin is very small. They'll make money by selling those in volume, and you won't get the hard sell for that. If they sense you walking away, they'll make the low-cost argument to at least get a product in your hands.

There will be the God-level products with enormous markups that only fools will buy. Nobody really tries to sell those, but they'll happily ring you up for the commission.

Then there is the sweet spot in the middle; the products that are moderately high priced that take a value-proposition to sell. You can rest assured these are the money-makers for salespeople.

Sadly, Amazon has found out that the three-fold approach is no longer worth it. They already deal in massive volumes, so there is no need to carry the name brands and make advertising pushes to sell those products. Instead, they focus on the low-end garbage and let the third party sellers go to war each with other for your purchase. The odd God-level-priced product still exists and they'll happily sell it to you, but you'd be a schmuck to buy it from Amazon.