owlglass

Hopefully without the latency, it's slow to respond on a 2022 M2 Macbook Air (tried Firefox and Safari)

The 'Status' in the product name has two meanings, with the second being the standing conveyed by being able to shell out $189 for a pomodoro timer.

I wrote some PowerQuery functions and VBA macros to facilitate client invoicing that cut down ~2 hours of work to ~10 minutes (and shrinking, as I toy around with the scripts to delegate more of the work to the machine each time).

The billing data is pulled from an external vendor's portal. The contact data is pulled from our internal CRM. Both sets of data are then cleaned up and merged with PowerQuery, and then VBA is used to send emails out to clients.

I probably spent in the range of 3-4 hours getting a working version going and ~20 hours optimizing during downtime at work. I genuinely find it enjoyable to work on—there is something immensely satisfying about automating rote work away.

I use this once per month (a billing cycle). It will probably never see the light of day for anyone else, at least in its current state, because I work in a low-tech, nonprofit environment and using this kind of tool would be daunting for my co-workers (for reference, mail merging is sometimes intimidating at my workplace).

I am assuming that GP was not specific about Chinese investors' money due to national security concerns or sinophobia. More pressing, especially to anyone hoping to live anywhere near Vancouver, is the fact that Chinese investors account for 1/3 of the total sales volume of property (2016 figures). [1]

[1] https://vancouversun.com/business/local-business/chinese-inv...

Why make it about race? It's about her being wealthy and connected; rich, well-connected minorities get away with things all the time

At least the well-off folks won't have their lives ruined if they fail to get tenure

So the downtrodden shouldn't ever attempt anything. Also why is this a binary between tenure and financial ruin?

What indicates that Google is "too scared" as opposed to merely lagging behind?

Does VSCode have anything like Emacs' zones mentioned in the article?

While loyalty to the craft can have the side effect of generating more value to an employer, I don't think the two notions are antagonists. Get better at your craft and you'll have more opportunity to operate as a mercenary.

From the GitHub repo:

* A community fork of a language named after a plant fungus. All of the memory-safe features you love, now with 100% less bureaucracy! *

I assumed with the 'oxide' and 'ferrous' references that Rust's etymology had to do with corrosion, and while that's part of the explanation, it's mostly about fungi [1]

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16494822/why-is-it-calle...

Why should someone's respect for (presumably) achievements as a technologist or entrepreneur extend to opinions about events like these (or really any event outside of business/technology?)

Bio says "middle-aged software developer," so likely just hoping it's far enough that they'll be retired when it doesn't matter to them

[This analysis] notes that the criminal justice system is more lenient toward white-collar offenders than nonviolent property offenders and that affluent offenders are less likely to serve prison sentences than poor offenders even when they have committed the same offense.

Even the US DOJ is aware of it.[1]

[1] https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/rich-get...

You're right, we should just let inequality fester and wealth disparity grow.

I'm glad that early doctors and engineers working on difficult problems didn't just shrug their shoulders while saying "what can you do?"

Money. Where else are likely to make hundreds of thousands of dollars with a PhD in comparative literature?

Per Wikipedia, he's the President of YC, he's essentially a politician (without the ostensible duty to the public)

They're asking to "be made whole," but are "not asking for a bailout." What exactly do they want, then?

Coming to a city near you, WaaS

Even if English is the lingua franca of the world, people master it to varying degrees. Also, it seems like 'quitted' was the more common form up until the ~late 1930s [1], so it's not entirely unreasonable to assume that, if this person learned with some vintage material or they read classics, they've seen 'quitted' more often.

[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=had+quitted%2C...

As far as I understand, universities' reasoning for differential tuition varies from demand for a particular major, projected earning potential, and the cost of providing the major itself (for example, a civil engineering student requires all the material and facilities for their labs and field courses).

In Canada, this differential pricing between engineering and other majors is applied to all engineering disciplines, which is why software ends up with a higher cost than computer science, despite there being very few tangible differences in the curricula.

In my opinion, a model like that of your school's is much more reasonable, given that many of the core classes are the same.

I'd like to add my experience. I did a year of English in university, then switched to a software engineering major after internalizing all the "an English degree is useless" rhetoric.

While I am glad I didn't spend the ~$32,000 CAD it would have cost to get an English degree, I do wish I'd enrolled in a CS/English double major to get the benefits of technical studies and a humanities education. I have realized that, while I like software, a corporate job is just a means to an end to what I really enjoy: shared experience and art.

On another note, I did make the mistake of paying $15,000 CAD/year for a software engineering degree compared to $8,000/year for a CS degree. Now, in my final year, I'm taking many of the same classes CS students take. I would warn anyone in the same position in Canada (or the US) to seriously compare the two curricula when making a decision.

While I do agree that a mid/low-level employee is very unlikely to be the cause (why risk a reasonably high salary at Uber and possibly being blackballed from the industry if detected?), I think Hanlon's Razor [1] could be used here to infer that it was more likely a breach of Uber's systems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

What of his endeavor has been miserable? He's still a billionaire who exercises his power as he wishes

It's an approach to reasoning and thinking used in philosophy and science [1]. It could be applied to any concept. The author's articles and those by Bartosz Ciechanowski [2] are good examples of first-principles explanations of various concepts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_principle [2] https://ciechanow.ski/

TIL Roustem Karimov is Canadian

It'd be worthwhile for recreation, but software is kind of unique in eschewing credentials in favor of experience and ability. Civil engineers must be accredited to practice. While I don't think the requirements are as rigid for mechanical engineers, I expect a greater proportion of mechanical engineering jobs have a degree as a hard requirement than in software. This probably leads to less interest in things like teachyourselfmeche.com

Looks to be an MIT PhD in AI [1]

[1] https://meaningness.com/about-my-sites

Not research backed, but to add one data point, I bought into the whole "I need a three-step skincare routine" trend (which I think is positive, people should care for their skin as they should any other organ). However, after trying ~5 different cleansers (varying in ingredients, lathering vs non-lathering, and oil cleansing), I realized my acne is best when I cleanse twice daily with water.

On the other hand, moisturizing and sunscreen has helped with dryness and post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation from acne.

I think I might be able to close it here)

I found Sandspiel and its creator's blog a while back, and it was really humbling and inspiring. Max is clearly very talented and dedicated, and his projects served as a reminder to me, as a jaded person tired of seeking the profitability or usefulness of software projects, that at the end of the day, programming (and, by extension, one's use of their time) can just be about fun and creative exploration.