yingw787

Hey everybody!

Been working with my cofounder on a proptech play (https://gotopright.com), and we've gotten some feedback from industry experts that homeownership assistance programs could be a useful thing to expose to average borrowers.

It's pretty early but wanted to get everybody's feedback. It's live on our homepage so feel free to play around with it!

Hello everybody! I've scaled a data engineering team at my current company from just myself to 10 people over this past year. As part of that effort, I designed our internal technical interviewing loop for data engineers, and candidates who've tried it out have said it's both challenging and refreshing. I looked at interviewing solutions on the market when I looked at technical screens and didn't find anything targeting late hiring funnel that I liked, so I'm thinking there might be opportunity here for a side hustle. If you have preferences on your ideal hiring setup for data engineers, sign up and let me know!

This looks awesome, thanks for building this! I really like how it's hosted on serverless stuff and therefore we can use it for long-running personal projects and MVPs.

Makes sense; thanks so much for the explanation!

Are there material differences between wireless and wired Internet w.r.t. infrastructure? Is wired Internet easier to trace or something? I'm not too familiar with computer networks, but I thought that they would be the same.

Dan Luu has a great blog post on discontinuities and public policy: http://danluu.com/discontinuities/

I found it very interesting!

I've used HTTP/2 SSE for TinyDev (docs.tinydevcrm.com) and I've encountered the need for a reverse proxy and the unidirectional dataflow to be kinda eh, even if it is great in theory. I haven't played around too much with WebSockets though, but IMHO money + traction carries a good deal of weight.

Thanks for sharing! You might have more experience than I do in this sector, I've mostly written tests for tools/projects I've owned for a number of years and that might be why it appears more self-documenting to me. I try to write tests that are relatively clean. By contrast I've also had to maintain Confluence wikis as documentation and I've found it much more difficult, same with versioned Markdown documents and the like. Auto-generated documentation might be a sweet spot, though I don't have experience on that front yet.

I think regexes may have a steep learning curve, but IMHO it's well-worth the effort in order to learn. Pythex is pretty great at learning regexes and once you learn them you have a pretty powerful tool at your disposal for a number of matters.

After months of really bad audio in teleconferencing calls, hearing crisp keyboard playback was a refreshing experience. Highly recommend to check out the demo!

2021: The year of the Linux desktop?

But seriously, I have installed Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS on my personal Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 2, and work Dell Precision 5550, and it works fine in both cases. Stick with it for a month and macOS becomes old news. Also I think OEMs are wising up to "Linux = free" and charging for Windows on their laptops again, so you can also save some money on OS licensing going forwards.

Congratulations to the President-elect, and to the government workers and volunteers at all levels who tirelessly worked around the clock to ensure our elections were free and fair.

I think these next few weeks is a time for reflection, so that all of us can work hard to create the future we want. Wishing everyone well and to breathe in and out regularly, it's been a stressful year.

I think Vitamin D is fat-soluable, not water-soluable

I'm reminded of the CollegeHumor "If Google was a Guy skit": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxqca4RQd_M

"song that goes meow meow meow meow meow meow", can't find it at the moment for a timestamp. Wonder how many real queries of that actually happen.

Funny little tidbit: my 1940s townhouse neighborhood has no universal front desk and hands out building keys to USPS for each townhouse. The mailbox is inside, and USPS is legally obligated to access it, so I know if USPS ships a package for me it's next to my apartment door.

UPS and FedEx do not have access. You have to be there when they drop off the package, or they're tossed into this hole (like a literal hole) next to the door, or they do the "we missed you" thing and sticky a note to the outer door and you pick it up in person.

I live a ten-minute drive away from the Pentagon. It's not just remote villages in Alaska that'd be inconvenienced by USPS going away.

Are they software contractors making a couple hundred an hour, or Lyft/Uber drivers making a $25 an hour? I think the problem some people see is many Lyft/Uber drivers don't have that wealth of choice.

I've heard you can use 151-proof grain alcohol in lieu of rubbing alcohol (which has disappeared entirely from store shelves for months) in order to sanitize things. Apparently if you mix it with vegetable glycerin you can create your own ersatz hand sanitizer?

I was thinking you could create your own rubbing alcohol by mixing water, sugar, and yeast, distill it over your stove, and then combine it with aloe vera to create hand sanitizer, but that's probably less preferable than using store-bought ingredients that are more consistent.

Not sure if you can answer this, but what are some classes of security bugs you can find with Pysa? I've only worked on smaller codebases so security I've dealt with is mostly AuthN/AuthZ.

I donated some amount of money to this fund: https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/lebanon-relief

Hope it ends up helping those in need.

Fun fact, in Ancient Rome people used olive oil as soap, and scraped off the excess using a...metal thing. Sometimes they put perfumed olive oil into their bathtubs. This is for richer folk, regular people used crude soaps.

https://hubpages.com/education/The-Many-Uses-of-Olive-Oil-in...

Nice! Not sure if you're looking for feedback, but I had two interesting observations:

1. Ctrl + back arrow (to go back to previous webpage) doesn't work, I think there's a redirect loop to the primary index.html page (easy enough to go around)

2. Zoom in/out doesn't resize the selector, instead the window stays the same size while the text changes, and some part of the previous/next page are in focus (not a big deal).

Looks really cool, thank you for sharing!

I wish Excel / Google Sheets supported Parquet export. I've worked with CSV files and Parquet files and found the latter a vast improvement. Chunking data is trivial, you have fixed-size data types, and existing types are well-supported across a multitude of frameworks.

In comparison, CSVs are pretty much unstructured text files with added suggestions.

More pipelines should natively support Parquet files, or something like it, and have a thin CSV to Parquet conversion layer on top.

P.S. I'd love to create a Parquet file visualization tool (something like https://github.com/in3rsha/sha256-animation) in the near future.

Very cool! Too bad we only have one cursor...it'd be cool to have friends join in as extra "fingers" and play melodies in a QWOP-like fashion :P

I check some sites I build in `links2` for accessibility from both a latency and capability perspective. It's rather interesting to see things from a blind person's perspective, though for many companies I'd imagine the cost not worth the revenue.

It'd be interesting to do a market research study on what the impaired population for a given vertical is, and put some data-driven arguments behind adding support for accessibility.

Honestly, doing that would probably improve the UX for people with normal eyesight as well, because it'd force you to think about document layout and component interaction carefully.

I think the wealthier you are, the fewer "real" problems you have, so sometimes you end up making up problems or creating problems for yourself to chew on.

I think the happiest rich people have a "wall" to push against and a "chair" to sit in when they're tired. Bill Gates has the health policy stuff to work on during the day, and his family to come back to in the evening. Jeff Bezos has Amazon to run, Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey have their companies and people to be around, average people have a job.

If you don't have that "thing" to chew on, if you just sit in on a board meeting and sip cocktails on a beach, it's easy to become lonely and feel like life is meaningless. You become like Notch and end up in a depressive spiral where you simultaneously have everything and nothing.

Not a psychologist or anything, just an interesting observation. No man is an island. Until he is, then he's Robinson Crusoe.

...do you have a GitHub repo for checklisting items for building a custom house like this? I'm nowhere near financially secure enough to even begin planning for something like this. But it'd be cool to look through the checklist and have people contribute things you might forget, and it might be useful for others.

CDNs are the best thing since sliced bread. Found this out both from ease of setting up frontends and the pain of setting up backends.

I wonder if there's a way to build a database on top of a CDN, or a webapp backend (might just be something like serverless, but instead of function definitions you have files+config a CDN automatically knows how to run). Something like Plan9 for the web.

Oh there's significant structural differences between cruise ships and ocean liners. Ocean liner's bow is strengthened for travel in adverse seas, and the stern is cupped rather than box-shaped to reduce roll. The superstructure is tapered for better balance, and the engines are optimized for power / speed moreso than vibration / comfort. They're more expensive than cruise ships as a result.

See: https://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-ocean-l...

I wonder if there will be a Cunard-like airline that flies older planes because people want to experience them.

I believe Cunard (part of Carnival) operates the Queen Mary 2, the last running ocean liner on Earth. It does Southampton to New York via traditional Atlantic crossing, just like the Titanic (almost) did. Not sure if it makes money, but (pre-pandemic) it was likely subsidized by other cruise ships or by QM2 cruising herself.

It'd be cool to have a flight from Heathrow to JFK (?) on one 747 for people who want to experience the same plane. I think an airline enthusiast might go several times a year, and there's a goodly number of airline enthusiasts.

I think a flying boat tour of the Pacific islands would be a wicked honeymoon!

Yeah this isn't a viable way to formulate public policy. It isn't new either, happened with the travel ban early on. Soft power, and even the viability of a country, depends on certain long-term guarantees, guarantees that the current administration has blown away completely.

I'm pessimistic that even if a change in administration occurs early next year (and that is a major if), there would be anything any administration can do before the next Donald Trump takes office 4 or 8 years from now. I'm betting that the next "Trump" will be far smarter and won't make this one's mistakes. And if the Republic falls, no place on Earth will be safe.

That's not a reason to lie down and die. It's a reason to fight back with the frenzy of despair. I hope a quarter million dead by December will be enough. Enough for folks to remember that elections have consequences.

I think this would be the first U.S. capital ship lost since WWII.

It's also interesting that China, Russia, and now the U.S. have all lost carriers while undergoing construction / maintenaince in just the past few years:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/12/europe/russian-carrier-fire-i... https://www.forbes.com/sites/hisutton/2020/04/11/brand-new-c...

Something to bond over, I guess. Dangerous work, and I hope everybody stays safe, better a carrier burns in peacetime than a life lost.