yarcob

I think the best, most reliable way to get a software engineering job is to get a software engineering degree.

If you want a shortcut, I would look for ways to complete your degree faster. Do more courses at a time, and make sure to finish them in the shortest time possible. It should be possible to complete a bachelors degree in 3 years.

I don't think there is anything you can do in a few weekends that will make your Github profile appealing. I also don't think you need an impressive Github profile to get a job as a developer. Most devs I know have boring Github repos.

much of my job satisfaction came from the sense of comradery of working on a team

I think this is a seriously undervalued factor and something I was completely unaware of.

I used to always judge job opportunities either by how well they pay, or how interesting the work is. But in reality, the social factor is just as important.

So some time ago, I was trying to hire my first employee. I paid a lot of money for job ads, and got very little applications. I offered the same salary as the other tech companies in my city, and I really tried my best to attract people.

I couldn't understand why people instead only applied to work for boring consultancies or even for an online gambling company -- why would people prefer such mind numbing or even morally questionable jobs?

I realized that the social situation at work is really important. When I met people who worked at the online gambling website, they weren't talking about the actual work; they just told me about their awesome boss, and how they had fun with their team mates, etc. It didn't matter how interesting my project was, nobody wanted to sit all day in an office just alone with me.

I first learned that someone cracked my app from a company that offered to help me fight cracked downloads of my app. I was immediately suspicious.

Too be honest I've never heard of "baltic birch" before so I can't comment on how different it is from the normal birch plywood we get here in EU.

I just googled it and saw that it looks exactly like the birch plywood I have been using, so I assumed that it has similar properties.

I consider birch to be "good" plywood, it's very easy to work with, strong, and seems somewhat resilient to warping. However, because the layers are so thin you often end up breaking bits off when working on it with a router, and the surface somehow doesn't get as smooth when sanding.

The 3-layer boards (not sure what they are called in English) seem to be easier to sand smooth, easier to finish with oil, and are not as finicky when routing.

Just from looking at pictures, I'd assume the bamboo boards are closer to the 3 layer stuff rather than the 13 layer stuff.

It took many years before dating platforms became viable. I remember trying some dating websites early on, and there just weren't any people in my area at all. It was fun looking at the profiles, but it wasn't actually useful for meeting people yet.

I would assume that a cofounder matching platform with 16000 profiles has a similar problem, it's just too few people to bother looking for local matches.

I've met (and worked with) people who built something, and were looking for someone to sell it.

The unfortunate truth is that this usually doesn't work because of two reasons:

1) If you can't convince anybody to buy your product, you also won't be able to convince anybody to sell your product. You need to be able to at least sell your idea to the cofounder.

2) If you've never tried selling your product, and have never interacted with your customers, chances are that what you built doesn't solve anybodys problem. I've never seen a successful product that was a hit right away without any user testing and iteration based on user feedback, but some people are convinced their product is different.

I’m surprised so few people care about where there cofounder lives.

If I wanted to find someone in my city, a global website would be the last place I'd look. Maybe the people who use a global matching platform are more interested in finding someone with specific skills / interests rather than someone who lives nearby.

I'm not saying it's bad, I've used birch plywood myself and I like it.

But you can't compare the 13 layer plywood made from peeled wood with the stuff made from 3 layers of sawed wood. They are completely different types of product, and the cost is also very different.

Apart from mechanical properties, the 3 layer stuff is also much nicer optically usually (eg. they use camera sorted boards to achieve nice and even patterns). That's why it is more expensive.

I've never worked with bamboo plywood, but the product on the website looks like it should be compared with 20mm 3 ply wood panels made from cut hard wood instead of the cheap ply wood made from peeled wood.

So a better comparison would be something like [1], which is a lot more expensive than standard birch plywood.

[1] https://www.arbeitsplatten-shop.de/epages/61566463.sf/de_DE/...

I assume they just mean that they get too heavy for practical use. They stated that they offer boards with a thickness of 30-40mm, they just don't offer panels of that thickness.

At a density of 1200kg/m2 it's almost twice as dense as some other hard woods like walnut (~650kg/m2) or particle board (~700kg/m2).

I guess for a kitchen countertop it wouldn't matter (stone countertops are popular and even heavier), but for most furniture it would probably be just way too heavy to be practical. Someone needs to be able to carry your furniture :)

Germany has a lot of high end car manufacturers and other industry, which means that there are a lot of experienced engineers in the country that they can hire. Most people also speak English well enough, which makes it easier to collaborate with US engineers (compared to eg. Spain, where many people really struggle with English).

unless the whole of MacOS is redesigned to be used with fingers

People use a lot of web apps that were designed mobile first, and using them without a touch screen sucks.

You wouldn't use the touch screen as primary input, but it would make a lot of things much easier.

Touchscreens are the big missing feature on macOS.

It's not useful as a primary input method, but after using a Windows Surface computer for some time I'm surprised how often the touch display is useful.

Lots of websites are optimized for touch / mobile first. Wether you are filling a form or watching Netflix or Disney plus, touching the screen is just much more convenient. Keyboard navigation is increasingly an afterthought on many websites.

Macs now support running iOS apps. Using them without a touch screen is going to be a very poor experience.

And finally, some things like annotating PDFs are things that are really cumbersome without a touch display -- when I need to do that on a Mac, I just print out the page because using the track pad or mouse for annotations is just not an option for me.

Instead of having to replace the mag safe power brick for 85€ you can now just replace the cable for 55€.

However, it my personal experience, I've never had the cable fail, but I've had 2 mag safe power supplies fail (they started getting very hot while charging and at some point stopped working alltogether).

My girlfriend bought 100€ worth of adaptors for her Macbook Air and can never find them when she needs them.

For a desktop it doesn't matter, but for a portable device that you need to carry around every extra thing that you need to carry around is just something you are going to misplace.

Both 14" and 16" have 254 PPI, up from ~220.

That is a very welcome improvement! I like scaling my display a bit so I have more real estate, but then the fonts get a bit blurry. 10% more resolution sounds great!

My girlfriend also loved her 11" Macbook Air and was disappointed that the smallest option is now a 13" Air.

Who do you think is responsible for the new iMacs?

They took a very versatile all-in-one, removed almost all of the ports and added an external power brick -- just to make it a bit thinner. Which is even more ridiculous considering it's a desktop.

They recently introduced a new standard that allows up to 240W

It will of course work with other monitors, but there aren't that many high res monitors out there. The Apple display is the only 6k monitor I know of. There are a few 5k monitors and lots of 4k monitors.

There's one 8k monitor from Dell, but I don't think it's supported by macOS yet.

The new "feature" is that the function keys are full height. Apple laptops had half height function keys for as long as I can remember.

What happens if someone's creating a script that will shell out simultaneously to multiple Go programs? Do they all inherit the parent's environment variables?

By default, every process inherits the environment of its parent process. So if you set an environment variable (eg. with the EXPORT command in bash), then every process you launch from the shell will have the same value for the environment variable.

However, you can set environment variables for each command that you execute.

So for example in a shell script you could do something like this:

    # set the environment variables value to 4
    # valid for all subsequently executed commands
    export GOMAXPROCS=4
    
    # run syncthing but limit it to 2 processors
    # defining the variable like this it will only affect this command
    GOMAXPROCS=2 /usr/local/bin/syncthing

    # run some other go program
    # the environment var will be set to the value 4 again
    /usr/local/bin/other-go-program

For example, assume I execute a script from someone else, who did not set GOMAXPROCS. Then I could just set the GOMAXPROCS variable and then execute the script. I could change the config without needing to edit the script!

HP accidentally revoked a code signing certificate recently. Since certificates are regularly checked for revocation by macOS, suddenly all HP printers stopped working on macOS.

It took a few weeks until everything was fixed again for me, I had to reinstall drivers from Apple and HP multiple times. But my mom still hasn't gotten her HP inkjet to work since then.

Add to that the fact that they sent firmware updates that caused printers to stop working with 3rd party ink -- I'm never buying anything from HP again.

I'm reminded of another story I read (probably on HN), where they showed architectural plans / designs from either 19th or early 20th century, from a time when houses where decorated with intricate stucco. The plans showed none of the beautiful stucco. The plans just showed the layout, and left the detailed design of the decoration to the craftsmen.

I think we often have it the wrong way around, nowadays. The project outline may specify to use Twitter bootstrap or Google material design (are those still a thing? It's been a while since I've done client work) but the important design, like UI flow etc is often left the implementor.

Then you end up with a crappy app that looks nice on screenshots, and people wonder why nobody lkkes it.

If you would use that variable, you wouldn't set it globally. You would set it only for the syncthing process.

For example, when you use systemd to run syncthing, you can configure the environment for syncthing in the unit file.

Other Go programs on your machine won't be affected.

VAT and invoices are part of GDPR?

No they are not. VAT and invoices is just something else that's also easier with EU vendors.

But if a company invoices you with bad invoices then you can just refuse them and ask the correct and resubmit - even in the USA

That only works well if you hire an individual contractor or a very small company who depends on your payment.

SaaS companies don't give a fuck if you are happy with their invoice. High profile example: Github won't even tell you if the invoice is with VAT or not -- it just says "price includes VAT if applicable" on their invoice. Support won't tell you what it means. How is my accountant supposed to book that? Fortunately my Github bill isn't big, so I probably won't get in trouble over incorrectly declared VAT for the Github invoice.

If there's a EU vendor, it's always going to be my first pick, because I just don't want to waste time accounting for funny US invoices.

any US company can implement a more stringent data policy beyond the scope of legal remit within the country of operations

Theoretically, yes, you are right. But some companies are just going to say, oh, you are based in the US, let's look for a different vendor.

It's not even necessarily about the GDPR. For example, US companies tend to send really shitty invoices. There's barely any info on the invoice, some don't even include the full legal name and address of the invoicer. That really sucks when the tax authorities audit you and want proof for where all your money went.

If I buy services from the EU, I can assume that they comply with the GDPR, and I know that I'll get a proper invoice with VAT, and I won't have trouble with the tax authorities.

Google, Apple and Microsoft have been making a lot of security-related changes in the OSes in the last few years. The result is that a lot of apps need updating or just no longer work.

It's not an issue for apps that are actively developed -- but it's devastating for side projects or open source apps that rely on volunteers.

Some changes (like new code signing requirements) might be possible to implement in a few days, but if you need to make bigger changes you are quickly looking at weeks of development time -- which is kinda hard sell for people who develop software in their free time.

I guess silicone is a good material to make a seamless mould of a smooth object. Since it's flexible you can remove it from the original object without cutting it.

Why would you not just print a negative directly - as indeed she later does? Is it because she considers the concave surface difficult to sand smooth?

I think the problem with sanding a mold is that it would be very hard to sand both halves equally, so you'd end up with a step where the two halves meet.

Using the wax to smooth the mold when the two halves are already stuck together is quite ingenious, as the wax will also smooth the part where the halves meet.