mrmekon

I spent a truly obnoxious amount of time importing my music library into beets. It took a couple of weeks to get to 95% imported, and got so bogged down in the last 5% that I never completed the import and never switched over.

This isn't necessarily a fault with beets, really, but a model mismatch. The model of beets is very, very strongly tied to associating each imported item to one well-known, commercial release. While it's possible to stray from that, it takes tons of time and experimentation to cram some things into its model.

Purchased, popular albums are a breeze; they import nicely and make sense. I struggled differing amounts with:

* brand new indie label releases (bandcamp)

* commercial albums variants missing from musicbrainz/discogs

* non-commercial albums (self-released CDRs)

* fan-recorded concerts

* fan-recorded festivals (a special case, a true nightmare)

* fan edits/remixes of commercial releases

* playlists & mix tapes

* mixed media releases

Each was eventually possible, but sometimes it took hours to figure out how to import a specific folder. Worse, after doing one festival it didn't necessarily make it easier to do the next festival. Even if I get to 100% imported, additional imports will still take thought.

This isn't an argument against it, I still think it's a fantastic tool. Just understand that the farther you stray from collecting commercial releases, the more of a struggle it is.

I'm sure it has increased over time as people imitate their heroes, but first-person journalism is certainly not at all unique to "this generation"; it was already a big element of New Journalism in the 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Journalism

Is it surprising that journalists who grow up reading Hunter Thompson go on to write like Hunter Thompson? I think that's a pretty natural progression, without needing to blame generational narcissism. If anything, it seems like World War II was the major turning point for involving the author into the story.

I wrote something remarkably similar a few years ago, for similar reasons. I was pretty baffled that nothing similar already existed. Auto-wake with the RTC timer was what I really wanted.

Link, in case you care: https://github.com/mrmekon/circadian

I have a "NAS", which is really an enormous desktop tower crammed full of hard drives. It auto-wakes once per day, pulls backups from my various servers all over the place, then returns to sleep.

I've been tracking my costs for ~13 years. The cost here includes all equipment and ingredients over that time, including all of the unnecessary stuff that I bought for fun, like pH meters and titration gear.

  |-----------------+-------------------------------+--------|                                                                                                                                      
  |           Years |                               |  12.92 |                                                                                                                                      
  |          Liters |                               |  831.5 |                                                                                                                                      
  |         Bottles |                               |   2494 |                                                                                                                                      
  |      Cost (SEK) |                               |  35373 |                                                                                                                                      
  | Cost/year (SEK) |                               |   2738 |                                                                                                                                      
  |       SEK/liter |                               |  42.54 |                                                                                                                                      
  |      SEK/bottle |                               |  14.18 |                                                                                                                                      
  |      USD/bottle |                               |   1.38 |                                                                                                                                      
  |-----------------+-------------------------------+--------| 

Huh, that's interesting. The Android team was absolutely hounding me for an interview back in ~2009, to the degree of finding my parents' home phone number and asking them to convince me to take an interview.

I reluctantly obliged, and had a couple of phone screenings where they said they were looking for experienced embedded systems developers for low-level hardware development. I was specializing in 8-bit microcontroller firmware and Linux kernel drivers, and the recruiter said it was exactly what they wanted.

When I took the first technical interview, they grilled me on MapReduce and cluster storage, and then asked me to design a collaborative text editor for the web. The interviewer didn't have a copy of my resume, hadn't seen it, didn't know what position he was interviewing for, and didn't know anything about hardware. We had a really awkward moment when I explicitly said, "there must be some mistake, I'm supposed to be interviewing for an embedded role." I bombed the hell out of that interview, and never heard back from them again.

If my experience was typical, then no wonder the Android team had trouble with staffing.

Just to back that up, it had a clear meaning because -less is a valid suffix to append to English words. When grandma runs out of cookies she is cookieless (when a website doesn't use cookies it is also cookieless). It doesn't have to be "in the dictionary" to make sense in conversation.

A quick search of usenet shows "serverless" being used in 1994. It wasn't a term or a buzzword, it wasn't common, it was just English: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.linux.misc/r76oNl98C...

I know an animation/media rendering company that buys every model of Mac Pro in bulk. They'll buy dozens of these things. I assume that many similar companies do the same.

HN really shows a lot of ignorance whenever Mac Pros are discussed. HN readers, for the most part, are not the market for these devices. The market is non-tech companies, with little or no IT staff, that have extremely resource-intensive tasks. They buy Macs because non-IT people can figure out how to use Macs on their own. They buy the top of the line because it makes their jobs easier. They don't care about the price tag because it's still cheaper than staffing an IT department.

The price of a Mac Pro isn't the price of a good computer. It's the price of a good computer that is guaranteed to work, under warranty, and comes with basic IT service from at the local mall. That's useless to someone who knows how to build and administer their own machine, but easily worth $50k to a profitable business.

Might as well plug my similar project here: https://github.com/mrmekon/connectr

A minimal Spotify controller for the menubar/systray. I mostly play on speakers, though sometimes librespot on my desktop to avoid running the hog of the Spotify app. The main feature for me, though, is the alarm clock; I set a raspberry pi to push a new release playlist to one of my speakers every morning.

Huh, I thought the original was a sarcastic question. In that case, let me explain:

I keep a browser window open at all times. It is never full screen, because if it were full screen I wouldn't be able to see multiple windows at the same time.

I keep my browsing window as close to 1024x768 as possible. In 2019, a lot of websites can't handle a browser window using a mere 75% of the laptop screen, so they either render incorrectly or, worse, switch to a mobile view. When that happens, I either blacklist the website forever in a contemptuous fervor, or just resize the window. Apparently, this resizing action is trackable.

When I say "as close to 1024x768" as possible, I mean exactly 1024x768 unless I have resized it and forgotten. I use a little AppleScript thing to resize it to 1024x768, precisely for browser fingerprinting reasons. When you resize the window by hand, you typically end up with a VERY unique window dimension.

Since maternity and paternity leave are frequently more than 6 months long, employees temporarily leaving for a big chunk of the year is just a fact of doing business here.

Granting unpaid leave to go try your own thing for a while is, from the employer's perspective, not any different. Some people never come back, most people do. The same is true for parental leave (many quit their jobs towards the end of their leave, if they had already been thinking about it).

Even when they aren't required to grant it, larger Swedish companies will often give you unpaid leave if you just ask. The fear is that otherwise you will quit. Hiring is hard here, so it's better to have a promise of someone coming back in 6 months than a job opening that can take 12 months to fill.

Sweden has an enormous market of consultancies compared to the U.S. for filling these temporary gaps. Obviously consultants are expensive and not trained on your projects, so it's not the same as a long-time employee, but it gives options to "control the bleeding."

It's all still up in the air, and the wording is vague. GDPR's wording is also vague, as EU laws are. When we read between the lines, GDPR's vagueness sounds promising (hard to over-reach, easy to understand intentions), and the Copyright Directive's vagueness sounds terrifying (easy to over-reach, hard to understand intentions).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_...

A big difference is in the boundaries. GDPR is bounded by your customer records. One customer, one collection of personal data. There's a hard upper limit: about 7 billion. Companies tend to scale with customers, so generally bigger companies will have bigger customer bases and bigger employee bases to handle protecting the records.

The Copyright Directive's bounds is user content. One customer, any number of potential infringements. A single person can run a company with 100 customers who upload 10,000 images each per year. Managing the customer base is pretty easy, managing the data storage is pretty easy, GDPR-protecting 100 people's data is pretty easy. But 1 million potential copyright infringements per year, each one of which could even be claimed by multiple rights holders. Your risk exposure grows with data, not with people. That one-man show probably can't handle tens of thousands of take-down requests, nor build an AI Machine Learning Cloud Native Copyright ID Blockchain System to automate it.

In my network of friends, which is within the EU and comprised entirely of EU citizens and spans multiple EU tech companies from dinky startups to Giant Unicorn, GDPR has been almost universally approved. We had to implement it, and generally feel better for having done so. The Giant Unicorn employees were dismayed by how little time they were given for such a giant task, but were in support of the law.

Everybody is completely and 100% against the copyright law.

There is a huge difference between the two from my point of view:

GDPR is not a law about "The Internet", it is a law about company records. It applies to Google, but it also applies to the Pakistani food stand on the corner. It affects Google a lot more, sure. I support the concept that a company does not have some inherent right to be a steward of my personal data without my explicit consent. GDPR is also easy enough for even tiny startups to comply with, and is significantly easier for small companies than large ones. It does not create a large barrier to entry for new startups or a rift between the existing small and large companies.

The copyright law, however, is a law about The Internet. It controls how businesses interact with the internet. It sets _technical_ restrictions on how they can do so. It sets technical restrictions that are probably not even feasible, at that. It absolutely does create a huge barrier to entry for small companies, and could possibly enshrine the existing tech giants into de-facto monopolies (I mean, if they aren't already...)

The copyright directive is horrible enough on its own. I don't see why everyone is in a rush to pull in mentions of GDPR to make it seem "worse". For a lot of us, it weakens the argument instead of strengthening it. Not everyone likes GDPR, obviously, but we can _all_ agree that the copyright law is garbage.

completely block all gTLDs. Screw 'em, they are 99.9999% spam

That's for _my_ e-mail. Your experience may differ. Perhaps you communicate often with people on .loan domains.

E-mailing Microsoft accounts is just not an option. They have no process for fixing incorrectly blocked IPs. I take the same approach with Microsoft as with gTLDs...

Never had a problem with any other mail provider. Google has never blocked or spam-holed me.

In my experience, spam blacklists have significantly decreased in efficiency over the last 10 years. I think the biggest e-mail providers stopped contributing to them, so the user-reported lists are almost unused. The honeypot lists lag behind the spammers by a few days, so plenty slip through. They do trim out 85% of my incoming spam, but that last 15% is still a lot. Back in ~2013 they cut out more like 99%.

Today, the single most effective thing you can do if you run your own mail server is to completely block all gTLDs. Screw 'em, they are 99.9999% spam.

Plenty of spam has valid SPF and DKIM records. They are sent through legit services, either through cracked credentials of real users or rotating through new accounts.

It also doesn't seem like anybody cares about abuse@/spam@ reports anymore...

Well, TechCrunch says "made in each EU country where a service is provided"... but every single other report about this, including the Variety article that TechCrunch linked to and is simply repeating, says differently.

https://advanced-television.com/2018/04/27/svods-set-for-eu-... > at least 30 per cent share of European content.

https://www.neweurope.eu/article/eu-council-raises-eu-conten... > to buy European content for the European market

https://www.digitaltveurope.com/2018/04/27/eu-bodies-agree-3... > a quota of 30% for European works on their platforms

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/26/eu-third-... > will have to dedicate 30% of their output to TV shows and films made in Europe

etc, etc.

Unless TechCrunch has some new inside information, this article is wrong. And given that it's TechCrunch... it's probably wrong.

Apparently, according to this thread, WebDAV is alive and thriving.

CalDAV and CardDAV are certainly alive, but I think they're in a pretty horrible place.

I run a Radicale server, which seems very nice, but configuring clients is a nightmare. Every client seems to require different settings, and work to differing degrees.

The native Contacts/Calendar apps on OS X were the worst. They connect, work for a few hours or days, and then permanently break. I have to delete and re-add the accounts over and over again until eventually the same settings suddenly work, and they work for some hours or days, and then break again.

Thunderbird consistently works, as does Android's DAVdroid, but other clients I've tried have been almost-hit-or-completely-miss.

emacs –– EMACS –– has terrible support. This might not sounds like much, what with it being a text editor and all, but this is exactly the sort of place where it usually has 15 different implementations, 2 or 3 of which are really nice. Instead, it's riddled with XML parsing errors, the biggest CalDAV client deletes all of your TODO entries, and there doesn't seem to be a single CardDAV library. I take this as a sign that those protocols are not being widely embraced.

That said, when they work they are truly fantastic. I don't particularly care about the underlying protocol, but I pray that CalDAV and CardDAV support gets more consistent and more popular.

My comment doesn't make a statement about how things should be. It's a statement about the complexities of a technical implementation:

_If_ it is true that the GDPR covers an EU person's data held by any company worldwide, regardless of how or whether it should, an IP block might not be accepted as compliance. Or it might, if the EU regulators decide that best-effort is enough.

The important point is that many Europeans are browsing the net through non-EU IP addresses without the knowledge that they are doing so. Most people do not pay attention to what their corporate public IP address is. They may use "non-EU" services entirely unintentionally, and EU regulators may or may not take that into account in the unlikely case that they investigate one of these companies.

I'm in the EU, and a couple of the corporate VPNs I have used here have had their exit IP in the U.S. or Canada. Which means that when I'm at work, I appear to be in Seattle, and these sites are not blocked.

Based just on that, I'd argue that "Blocking 500M Users Easier Than Complying with GDPR" is probably not even a true statement.

I doubt EU regulators will go after these sites because they really aren't that consequential, but I wonder if setting up an IP block isn't just painting a target on yourself. It's basically a statement that the company was and still is violating GDPR.

*according to a poll of 500-1000 people per country

Well, true, that's somewhat better. But it's the principle of a privately-owned monopoly or oligopoly skimming profits off of a nation's economy that bothers me, not the absolute amount.

As the other response to my comment said, cash itself has an overhead cost, too. But that cost is paid to our government at break-even cost, instead of to a private company for profit.

If Visa and Mastercard had plenty of competition, it wouldn't be so bad. Swish is nice to have, despite its problems. Maybe we'll get there.

The second sentence corrects the sensational headline: "the small but growing number of Swedes anxious about their country’s rush to embrace a cash-free society."

It must be very small. The only person I've ever heard complain about it is... myself. Not for the reasons this article gives, though. I'm more upset about Visa and Mastercard skimming 1% of profit off of the entire country's retail commerce. Maybe if they weren't simultaneously terrible, but they also have unimaginably bad fraud detection, and push their own fraud problems onto local businesses.

Yes, it's an employer-paid pension that is very similar to the U.S. 401(K). Depending on how you slice it, Swedish pensions are divided into 3 or 4 layers:

1) Income pension - equivalent to U.S. social security. Taken out of everyone's taxes, and you have no control over it.

2) Premium pension - it's considered part of Income pension (1), but when you earn above some amount it goes into this bucket and you can tell the government a bit about how you want it to be invested.

3) Occupational pension (tjänstepension) - An "optional" employer-paid pension that you have some direct control over. Depending on the management company, you can either choose between a few fixed investment schemes, or you can have full control over it and invest in stocks/mutual funds. It is "optional", but mandated by the unions, so not really optional.

4) Private pension - your own personal account, like an IRA

There were a bunch of deportations over tjänstepension problems. Companies that were not in unions paid employees that were not in unions and didn't offer the same tjänstepension as the union agreement. Migrationsverket decided (also in 2015) that the exact terms of the union agreements are required for all non-EU citizens, even if they aren't involved with the unions. (If you are Swedish or from the EU, there is no legal requirement.)

I got in trouble because the union requires a 4.5% tjänstepension contribution from your employer. My employer paid 8% to mine, but it was structured in a different way... which we later found out was unacceptable.

Hah, I just noticed that you consult to a tjänstepension company!

My experience with MV on the phone is that they won't answer any specific questions about the rules. According to some migration attorneys I spoke with, many of the rules are undefined and they make them up as they go. Did you see the one about the guy who was deported for not taking _unpaid_ vacation? Try to find _that_ requirement on lagen.nu ;)

Everywhere I've worked and everywhere I've interviewed with in the last 2 years has had employees get deported. In all cases, they (the companies) claim that the information that they got from the big HR consultancies and from Migrationsverket was faulty, and they're paying the price now. I'm not saying that it's okay to break the rules, but I will say that if breaking them accidentally is so common, something is wrong with the system.

Every job offer I've ever received in Sweden (5) has been illegal on the first pass, violating various requirements of work visas. Violations are typically things like tjänstepension not starting until after the 6 month trial period. The most common is that the job ad was only posted on LinkedIn and Indeed, but not on Arbetsförmedlingen.

Two of my friends got hit because their employer insurance plans didn't become "active" until their second day at work. You know, those plans that your employer takes out on your behalf and you can't even see if they exist, let alone when they started? So it goes.

In 2014 I would have agreed strongly with "among the simplest, most transparent and least arbitrary in the world", but in 2018 I would add the caveat "but worse than most of Europe."

It's easier to get it wrong than you might think. Sweden doesn't publish a specific "rules for work visas" document. That website is it, and it is not all inclusive. The only way to know all the rules of the visa are to read the actual laws (in Swedish, and in Swedish "legalese", so good luck to foreigners... the people who would need to know), and to read all of the relevant case law around it. On your first days in a country, you probably aren't perusing the rulings of their high courts.

In this guy's case, there is very relevant case law. Before March 2015 Migrationsverket applied the rules based on the average of your work visa period, 2 years. They would take your last 2 year's salary, divide by 24, and see if it's over 13,000 kr per month. After March 2015, following new case law, they started looking at each month individually and deporting if any specific month violated the rules.

Depending on when he did this, it is possible that if he asked a migration attorney for guidance they would have approved, and they would have been correct. The rules retroactively changed that year. It still would be just as likely to make the wrong decision after the court ruling, since migration court rulings aren't a particularly big topic of conversation for most people. Nobody really learned about it until deportations started skyrocketing in 2016.

I wrote a bit about the topic here: http://dontdeportthedog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Failu...

It's almost certainly against the Terms of Service agreement. Presumably, you click-through agreed to a ToS for each one, and you have no right to transfer that agreement to someone else. The agreement is obviously tied to the human who "read" it, not whoever happens to control the account credentials.

Not that the ToS for your light bulb dimmer matters much in practice, but technically it's probably forbidden.

Tumblr was the easiest way to setup a simple stream-of-photos blog, so I used it often.

I recently moved all of my "blogs" off of it because visiting one slowed desktop browsers to a crawl, and literally crashed mobile browsers. Dev tools showed a minimum of 20MB transferred when visiting my site, and it quickly ran up to 60+MB if you touched the scrollbar.

That is a lot of prefetching.

Just visiting tumblr.com while not logged in currently transfers 8MB, and displays a content-less landing page.

If bubbles were predictable, they wouldn't be bubbles. Everyone claims they're in a housing bubble when prices rise for years on end. They often aren't. Even when they are, literally nobody knows when they will break, or by how much.

Here's an article predicting the Stockholm "bubble" would pop in 2009: https://arbetet.se/2009/06/26/har-alla-glomt-90-talets-bosta...

And here's one predicting it in 2003: https://www.svd.se/prispress-okar-risk-for-bostadsbubbla

And here's what it did: https://www.globalpropertyguide.com/template/assets/img/swed...

So, if you followed internet advice, you would have pulled out of the market 15 years ago and still be waiting.

I guess it depends on your definition of "ordinary people", but if you're going abroad for long-term work in any "middle class" industry, you're eventually going to have extremely complicated taxes.

Retirement savings, stock options, real estate, and any sort of investment account makes your U.S. tax return go from "a 1040" to a towering mountain of special forms. A lot of them also lose you the right to e-file, for some reason. And many aren't supported by tax software, or are handled incorrectly.

A lot of "foreign" banks – i.e. your _local_ banks – won't even talk to you. They tell you to make your investments in the U.S. instead, so you get to pay international wire transfer fees and foreign currency exchange fees on every investment. And if you want to move it back, you get to pay them again.

You won't necessarily owe any tax in the U.S., but you sure pay for it in either filing time (10s to 100s of hours) or expat tax accountant fees.

Featurewise, I haven't noticed anything that I can't use Gitlab for that I wanted to do.

I've only noticed one: the ability to do less. Along with its excellent improvements over the years, it also gained some staggering RAM usage.

It used to be really nice for self-hosting your own private GitHub alternative on a little VPS or RasPi, but those days are apparently behind us.

This was pretty much my experience with getting a project posted in HN. A bunch of bugs reported in the HN comments, and not a single issue opened on GitHub.

Since I wasn't the one who posted it, the only reason I found the bug reports is because a friend recognized my username on GitHub, and sent me a message about it. I would have preferred bad tickets to total silence...