schlowmo

At least we also have LLMs to generate our status updates during outages of our SaaS products while groping around in the dark.

I know it's mainly a joke but...

If I stop working at my desk to go out for some drinks and return to my desk afterwards, this hopefully also means that I stopped thinking about desk-problems for a while.

I found solutions to problems which we're blocking me when I left my desk countless times on my way back.

So there might be some kind of Ballmer Peak which isn't directly caused by alcohol consumption, but by a break from thinking about a problem.

And it's kind of obvious that I stop caring if I'm past "some drinks" and just go straight to bed. So there's definitely some upper BAC threshold to the peak ;).

Thanks, today I learned about "ersetzendes Scannen". I just checked and it's exactly a decade (2013) since it's allowed which coincidetally is the year when I started working as a freelancer (and I have to care about such rules).

I admit that my last paragraph was kind of hyperbole, but I never heard (at least from other freelancers) of a tax inspector which wasn't happy with either everything printed or everything digital. I guess they really start to care if they suspect something fishy.

Definitely, Germany strongly believes that a document that hasn't been a physical piece of paper at least once can't be real.

I'm sorry to tell you that is a an oversimplification and especially for documenting expenses as a company/freelancer it's kind of worse.

Last time I checked if you want to follow the tax law to the word you're not allowed to change the medium:

If an invoice came as a paper copy (e.g. by snail mail), this paper copy is the original. If you scan it the digital version isn't.

If an invoice came as a digital document (e.g. a PDF by email), this digital document is the original - a printed version of that digital document isn't.

So if a tax inspector asks for "originals" it's technically almost impossible to provide them in the sense of the law. If even a tax inspector would care is another question.

TIL bedbug sniffing dogs are a thing. I would never dare to train one, spilling the training material at the wrong place would be a very unpleasant experience.

After reading just the bedbug headline I couldn't imagine any non-shady use of living bedbugs besides science. I know some people which worked for or owned hostels - it's kind of a don't ask don't tell arrangement. This is why I would always take reasons which hostels give why you have to switch a room (pipe burst, issue with the electricity that needs immediate fixing...) with a grain of salt. You probably won't hear the word bedbug until you're the one reporting them to the hostel.

Don’t use flowery prose.

I find this advice kind of ironic. The most people I know don't use flowery prose in their cover letters because they consider themselves some kind of overachieving artists, but because it appears to be expected. Writing cover letters is bullshitting time, although this is probably country/culture dependent. Fortunately I didn't have to write an applciation for a long time, but reading my own old applications gives me the chills, even though I got invited to an interview almost every single time.

If you don't want flowery prose, you have to set the expectation when writing the job posting. If your job posting appears to be written by your PR department you get cover letters written by your applicants personal PR departments. Or in other words: bullshit me in the job description and I will bullshit you in my cover letter.

This behavior is reinforced if you don't make it clear who will gonna read my application first. If I get the impression that my application will land on a desk of a hiring manager who doesn't know much about the job I might turn the BS to 11. If you communicate clearly that the person reading the application first knows what you are really looking for, I'll dial down.

There is also the temporal_tables extension [0], which was already discussed in HN. [1]

[0] https://github.com/arkhipov/temporal_tables [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26748096

“The city teams only know how to use Excel, just make it like Excel.”

“Why can you see the formulas?”

“You said to make it just like Excel.”

I can't keep up with the espionage story that followed but I had this conversation more than once in my professional career.

The first time I sat as a junior dev on a multi-month project replacing a excel spreadsheet for financial controlling of data centers that only one person who was going to retire understood with a web-based solution.

They were quite proud that they were going to get a "modern" solution.

Then they wanted me to make it like excel. What followed was evaluating every fricking excel JavaScript library out there at this time, going for one and started duct taping all the missing pieces.

They were pleased but the look was off. It wasn't excel. I slapped some styles on it coming quite close.

I was not prepared for what happened during the next presentation: They hated it because they wanted a modern web based solution (their words, not mine) and what they got was a poor excel knockoff running in their Internet Explorers. Tables are so 90s.

I remember the pain so vividly that I regard "just make it like excel" as some kind of forming meme for my career till today.

PDF is such a weird format. Not so long ago I had to write some Java code for manipulating PDFs: find a string, remove it and place an image at the former string position. I should have known better as I thought "Well, how hard can that be?”

What followed was a deep dive down the rabbit hole, a lot of fiddling with the same tools the author of this gist is using trying to make sense of it all.

The final solution worked better than I thought while at the same time felt incredibly wrong.

I'm very thankful for all the (probably painful) work that went into those open source PDF tools.

I'm not quite sure what happened in my brain when I read the title (probably some kind of lost in translation, translating between my mother tongue and back again), but I didn't expect a spinning device.

But when I saw the first picture I immediately understood were this is going. Actually it's quite clever - as is the subliminal self-irony of the authors. The Swivel Chair Attack made me laugh harder than it should (someone here in the comments already rightfully called for an ig nobel price for that). And still this idea might be a unconventional but working solution.

It's kind of a refreshing read.

Normal English: “Commuting to work”

Death Metal English: “TRANSPORTATION OF THE WAGEBOUND UNTO THE NEXUS OF PERPETUAL QUOTIDIAN ENSLAVEMENT”

I can see that one play out very well in a job interview after realising that the job isn't as remote as promised.

What’s also important is not trusting a chiropractor

While I totally agree I would extend this recommendation to not trust anyone who does spinal manipulation without proper knowledge, since practioners of quackery use a lot of job titles.

This especially includes osteopathy (maybe with the exception of the US variant "Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine", I only know the european kind) - damaging the spinal cord or big blood vessels with slow motions doesn't make it less damaging.

As a rule of thumb: If it looks like a quack, swims like a quack, and quacks like a quack, then it probably is a quack.

There may be anecdotal evidence for it being some kind of miracle cure, but I can also tell anecdotes of people getting bonus stays at the local hospitals stroke unit after visting an ostheopath.

This is no powerplant-level story, but sometimes there are high startup currents were you didn't expect them:

On one of my first IT jobs at a big manufacturing company my team was tasked to find out why there are regular power outages in some printer rooms (there were rooms with shared printers on each floor of the office building). There were always some tripped circuit breakers and the facility management had to dispatch someone to put them back on. Between those incidents were always some weeks were nothing happened, but when it happened it affected a lot of printer rooms.

In the end we found a monthly cronjob on a central printing server which triggered a testpage print on all connected printers. Took us quite some time since no one ever saw those test pages. Never underestimate the needed current for a room full of colour laser printers coming to live all at once.

I guess that people who never hit a deer think you're just joking, but I know what you mean. It's not just that they blend so well in their surrounding, but if they're moving very fast they can jump quite some distances.

I hit my first deer during a night-time driving lesson. It just manifested itself in a turn right in front of the car. It happened so freaking fast that even my driving instructor didn't get right away what happened. (To be fair this was his first deer accident too). There were just something flying in front of the car, getting hit and flying away to the side of the road.

It was very different from my imagination which formed during my childhood hearing adults talking about split second decisions in case of a deer appearing in front of the car.

Not so long ago I had to deal with the Austrian version of a Social Security Number and it turns out that using birthdates inside such a number isn't a good idea, since

* Some people doesn't have a birthdate with which the Austrian state agrees

* For those people the Austrian state at least assumes a birthyear with a birthday at January 1st or July 1st

* This leads to overflowing the available numbers for those two dates

* If a date overflows, they get SSN with month "13“. The 13th month can have as many days as needed (so > 31 is possible).

* Now you have SSNs with a month part of e.g 2023-13-32.

Why even bother with birthdates then?

OAuth is a standard protocol. Right? And there are client libraries for OAuth 2.0 available in basically every programming language you can imagine.

Here lies another pain point of integrating OAuth flows: In my experience those client libraries are a lot better in following the RFCs than the authorization server implementations.

It can cause a great deal of pain using such client library with a botched authorization server. If you take a look at the issue trackers of some client libraries you see a lot of "Please make this library work with auth provider XYZ" reports to which the maintainers (rightfully but painfully) respond: "Won't fix! We're following the RFCs here, we can't deal with every crooked authorization server implementation. Get it fixed at the other side."

And then you have to take the decision if you want to patch the client library youself to make it work (with the risk that this patches break on updates of the client library) or if you roll your own client for that particular auth provider. This decision gets even more complex if you have to support multiple authorization servers. If it's only one auth provider the third option would be using a vendor specific client library, which may be as botched as the authorization server, but at least they can talk with each other.

Well that "arrangement" isn't a marriage of convenience. It can end anytime if we drift apart. We all acknowledge that we are different people then we were before. So is the world.

I'm grateful being around people who know whom I was 10-20 years ago. Some of them know me almost half of my life. And it can sometimes help being reminded of that past-self by other people.

One aspect of this which I find myself often think about is that it takes some deliberation with whom you want to spend your time when you get older if you're not living the usual family life.

I'm in my thirties now and sometimes it feels like there's plenty of time to figure this out. But most of my closest friends are somewhat older than me. Almost none of them have started a family in the traditional sense. Most of the people they were friends with drifted of in their own little family worlds over time. Another good chunk of former friends pursued professional/academic careers which led them to move quite some distances.

And I can really understand their fear that the younger people they befriended (like me) will do the same (which I and my long-term partner are ruling out but they heard a lot of people saying that before doing it anyway).

I find it comforting that we talk about this from time to time and try to reassure each other that there will be a shared future as we get all older together.And I sometimes think this wouldn't happen if we were all the same age. It kind of helps getting the perspective of older friends which have lost track of a whole lot of people during their lifes. At my current age I can feel the impacts getting closer. It's oftentimes a really short way from "friends for life" to "acquaintances from the past".

And I wouldn't mind at all if the roomate analogy of the author would be literally that shared future:

It’s not dissimilar to a big house with lots of roommates, or even a college dorm — it’s just that the living areas are separated by a few blocks instead of a few feet.

The district court of Hamburg is so notorious that when I read "a German court ruled in favour of $some_type_of_copyright holder" I instantly assume that it was Hamburg.

Someone edits a factoid into a Wikipedia entry or posts it on a forum somewhere. [...] Then maybe the mainstream media cites it.

That kind of thing happened to the former German minister of defence Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, whose full name is

Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Buhl-Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg[0]

and not

Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Wilhelm Franz Joseph Sylvester Buhl-Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg

which the Wikipedia article claimed and the news magazine Der Spiegel cited in an article. This article then in turn became the source for the slipped-in surname Wilhelm on his Wikipedia entry.

While his real full name already sounds totally made up Der Spiegel actually published a correction regarding his name.[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Theodor_zu_Guttenberg

[1] https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/in-eigener-sache-...

(Disclaimer regarding traffic rules: I live and got my driver's license in Germany)

"[...] road safety would be improved for all if more motorists also cycled"

While this statement seems quite trivial I think there's more truth in that than one might realize straight away. I would say that even if cyclists break the law (even to save time and not only to save lives as the title suggests), they often know that they're breaking the law. On the other hand many motorists who break traffic rules regarding cyclists doesn't even know that they're breaking them.

It might seem that knowingly breaking the rules is even more morally reprehensible, but I think at the same time this leads to less entitlement - and in consequence to less road rage.

Some examples of rules a lot motorists doesn't know about (mind German traffic rules):

* it's not allowed to overtake cyclists if you can't keep at least 1.5m distance; this rules only works one way, cyclists may overtake without keeping that distance. The minimum distance even applies if the cyclist is in a marked bike lane on the road.

* there's only an obligation to use bike lanes if they're explicitly marked with a distinct sign; there's another sign which indicates that it's allowed to use e.g. a sidewalk with a bike, but not an obligation

* It's allowed to pass standing / slow moving cars on the right (this is especially usefull in front of red traffic lights); unfortunately there's no obligation to cars to leave space on the right if possible. If you know this rule as a (considerate) motorists, you can leave that space.

* There's a sign which allows cyclists to use one-way streets in both directions; if this sign is posted, cyclists have the same rights of way as cars regardless of direction

* Even if there is a obligatory bike-path, you're allowed to switch to a left-turn car-lane in front of crossings to make a left turn unless it's explicitly disallowed by signs.

I could go on and on, but motorists not knowing these rules might come to the conclusion that cyclists are breaking the rules all the time, which in turn leads to more agression against cyclists. None of the rules above were mentioned during my drivers lessons - it was more like a general 'be careful regarding cyclists because they are weaker, behave unpredictable and don't know the rules'. When it fact it's ofentimes the other way around.

I really know what you mean. It almost seems like the first epiphany never gets it right one hundred percent. But oftentimes epiphany number two is a step back and the right one after that is just number one with a small twist.

A background processing phase, this requires a sense of almost boredom.

I can relate very well to the phases of probleming solving you described. But for me it's forgetting about the problem even for a short period of time instead of boredom.

When I'm deep into the first phase I sometimes get a bit too attached to a point were the problem is the first thought that comes to my mind after waking up (well...if I'm really stuck there might be even some weird dreams about it).

In the past I started to cancel non-work-related activities until I solved the problem. But I've learned that this oftentimes just lead to frustration - when the day is over I missed out on a nice evening with friends and still haven't solved the problem.

But when I just let it go for a few hours more than once the solution came right to me when I was on my bike back home. Just when I noticed that I haven't thought about the problem for the past few hours.

Sometimes this can get a bit demanding if I then happen to be past the Ballmer Peak.

I've done this too, mainly because of the limited RAM upgrade options in the ThinkPad T series (only one free slot and one soldered).

But one must be aware that tuxedo doesn't "make" laptops in the narrower sense. They're a Schenker reseller and while I'm overall satisfied with my tuxedo the build quality isn't close to ThinkPads T or X series.

Do normal humans publish "waking hours"? Not typically.

I believe I just fell in love with that idea. If this would become a social norm people would maybe stop trying to reach me in the morning.

And I would know if it's too late to call others.

What the english version of this wikipedia article doesn't mention (the german version does) is that the usage of this tunnel shifted a lot in recent years.

Today it's a very important bike route for people living south of the river Elbe (especially in the districts Wilhelmsburg and Veddel, both experienced heavy gentrification in the last two decades).

While the english version only states yearly usage numbers for 2008 (300k cars, 63k bikes, 700k pedestrians) the german also has numbers for 2018 (52k cars, 300k bikes, > 1 million pedestrians).

In my own experience the pedestrians are mostly tourists and the cars people working at the shipyards south of the river Elbe.

I witnessed a lot of conflicts between pedestrians for which crossing the tunnel is some kind of special experience getting in the way of cyclist which just want to get from one side of the river to the other as quickly as possible. There are sidewalks on both sides of each tube but tourists don't care much.

But I guess this is kind of inevitable if such a curiosity is part of the daily used traffic infrastructure.

Maybe I'm just rationalising my own hoarding tendency but I think society needs some hoarders to enable others to live there Kondō lifestyle.

Sometimes friends who know my habit try (often successfully) to offload their stuff to me. Just to ask me years later if I happen to own exactly the item they offloaded because they need it.

If there's any silver lining to COVID, it's QR codes being normalized

I'm not sure if I would call this a "silver lining". In parts of Europe (I noticed it especially in Germany and Austria) they were normalized to a point were a lot of non-techsavvy people now think "QR codes" are kind of synonym to successful "digitalisation".

It's now even more painful to watch misguided attempts to digitalize shitty (business/administrative...) processes. QR codes just feel like the poor man's blockchain.

You're right and I agree with your proposed solution. Having no (useless) dailies at all is even better than having them midday. But I'm fighting an uphill battle here, especially as freelancer.

I'm always a bit amused when Product Owners are suprised that there's nothing to clarify at a daily since the team is constantly transparent towards each other about blockers etc.

“We have flexible working hours”, they say. Sure, but there’s also a stand-up meeting at exactly 8:30 AM to ensure everyone will be online early.

This is the thing about daily stand-ups which I hate the most. I work as a freelancer which requires me to do a dance around social expectation everytime I get on with a new project.

Oftentimes I work with full remote internal teams which are used to dailies in the morning, even when a substantial number of team members hate them. The (private) feedback I get when I'm the one who tries to reschedule them later in the day at the kick-off meeting is very astonishing.

I simply don't get why even many relaxed employers don't realize that dailies in the (early) morning can be a very good way to reduce overall productivity and sometimes even set wrong incentives.

I know a good share of employed people who only came to terms with early stand-ups because it means they can clock in early without doing any meaningful work for the first hours of the workday. But I think it's just fair that those employers with proclaimed "flexible hours" pay them for involuntary getting up before their time. Make me get up early, pay for my breakfast time. Or just stop pretending that you have flexible hours.