JustARandomGuy

il y a 11 moisdiscuss

Cost. I run a small Chicago area “private” meetup (in the sense that one needs to be invited, it’s not publicly advertised) for small business owners. We do workshops on how to advertise using Google ads, do basic web analytics, etc. The skyrocketing cost of meeting rooms and basic catering have gone through the roof. I’m not talking about catering as in lobster and steak; even just getting Panera Bread level food has been ridiculously expensive.

JustARandomGuy

l’année dernièrediscuss

Oh my goodness, thank you! I have been searching for a source of the small icons as an example to show the computing classes I lecture, and I finally found my rotating favorite one! https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/msntbciis.gif

Thank you so much - on the flip side, my students may dislike you because they're going to get a lecture on how the web used to be!

JustARandomGuy

l’année dernièrediscuss

+1, I would be interested.

I think you should check out the Light Table kickstarter[0] which originally had a similar premise to yours, and raised several hundred thousand dollars. I personally put in $50 to be in the beta, and that was almost 15 years ago.

I think you would get a lot of takers if you could make a convincing demo.

[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table

JustARandomGuy

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

Unread RSS Reader. Godawful poll timing. 6103 requests in 52 days is about one poll every 736 seconds _on average_, but they're hugely spread out. WTF? Put it this way: the list of unique intervals (nn seconds, nn minutes, ...) is four pages tall on my web browser.

Not entirely sure what the criticism here is other than polling on average every 12 minutes seems a little excessive at best. Why does in matter it the intervals are a bit wonky? I could think of many reasons why: maybe the poll intervals are smaller during the daytime and more spread out over the night to optimize for reading conditions, etc

JustARandomGuy

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

Surprised nobody has mentioned it, but my favorite movie of his was Pride and Prejudice 2005 edition. He plays the father role extremely well - you can feel the emotion in the room.

Going to have to rewatch it this weekend in his honor.

JustARandomGuy

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

> If you understand that this is primarily an exercise in marketing and not tech, then you'll be on your way

A solid gold insight right there. I graduated into a bad economy as well (Millennial into the 08 recession) and what got me hired was not my honors GPA or dual major or any other academic achievement. I got hired because of my side project hosting a JSON API that offered some very simple data. I was able to talk about it during an interview and pretty much my passion for it got me hired.

Another alternative is to get into an open source project and offer to do some "developer evangelism" type work. Code up examples, documentation, write up blog posts - great way to get your name out there.

JustARandomGuy

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

It is what happened to each of the wives of King Henry the 8th. It's a famous rhyme intended to make it easy to remember the order of what happened to them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wives_of_Henry_VIII

JustARandomGuy

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

I don’t necessarily know if the famous graph is accurate - I don’t think the divergence in beliefs is so extreme as that graph indicates, but it is undeniably true that on a worldwide scale there is a growing rift between men and women. Articles like the following are frequently written about the gender gap in South Korea: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna59747

And obviously there are the redpill and other gender-centric movements in the US.

Here is my fundamental question: why is society suddenly producing so many people that have ill will to the opposite gender? There have always been discussions about the differences between genders - the famous “men are from mars, women are from Venus” was published 30+ years ago - but what is making todays discussions so vile and toxic?

JustARandomGuy

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

This article strongly reminded me of the "helicrane" system developed by NASA for the last Mars probe, which oriented itself by recognizing the terrain below it and using that to orient itself toward the right drop location: https://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/what-we-do/flight-projects...

Fun stuff. Wonder if there is any requirements for how "bumpy" the terrain needs to be to get recognized properly by the system.

JustARandomGuy

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

Glad to see someone else had that problem too - I spent hours reading through the Twilio documentation to try to figure out if transactional sms was allowed because all I kept seeing was campaign registration, campaign fees, and etc all about campaign sms. And if we had to pay the campaign monthly fees even if we sent transactional sms, not campaign.

I understand that it's not Twilio's fault, but they desperately need to hire some developer evangelists to write some documentation.

JustARandomGuy

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

A pretty insightful look at how Google thinks about its ads - I was surprised by the System Challenges slide - it looks as if they’re having hardware concerns about the Ads fleet? I wonder if the Ads software inflicts more “stress” on its machines than a regular workload such as gmail, search, etc.

JustARandomGuy

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

There is one thing you should always remember: Never accept responsibility, without the authority to change things.

You are being given the responsibility to manage all of this, without the authority to do so. So here is what I would do:

1. Ask for a title bump. Technology/Project/Services/etc Manager - frame it as other people need to know that you are the person in charge of technology, therefore you need a title to signal that you are the point person for decisions.

2. Insist on being in all high level planning, budget, etc meetings. Frame this request as saying that they are setting less-than-100%-completely-informed deadlines, therefore you need to be in planning meetings so that you can temper expectations and give technology's input.

3. Ask for a department budget so you can purchase what you need. Contractor expertise/books/courses/etc.

4. In the event that you don't get any of these - and I fully expect you won't - start interviewing. You sound like a smart individual who's outgrowing their position and need new challenges, and if they won't give them to you, you need to find another position that will.

JustARandomGuy

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

Argonne is a highly regarded national lab; results from there would be highly credible. Also an Argonne staffer has gone on record[0] saying that they're attempting to replicate, while other labs have not said whether they're trying or not.

Personally I'm waiting for the Argonne results which should be done by the end of the week.

[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/spectacular-supercon...

JustARandomGuy

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

>Would you live in an apartment 15 feet wide and 50 feet deep?

For laughs, I just measured the width of my home's hallways and rooms. I don't see why 15x50 feet apartment isn't doable especially for a bachelor/new couple starting out. Assume an apartment with a 3 foot wide, 50 foot length hallway, subtract another 2 feet width for walls/piping/whatever, and then you can hang 5 rooms that are 10x10 feet from the hallway. Enough for a living room/common area/kitchen/2 bedrooms. Might get a bit cramped but very usable.

I assume I'm missing something here since this doesn't seem to be too bad.

JustARandomGuy

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

Quote from article: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman… is apparently unaware that Reddit's success is because of the posts by the users that use the service in all of its forms

If Reddit starts losing popularity due to this incident (and that is not guaranteed by far) this is going to be the money quote which sums up the entire situation. An unaware CEO unable to understand his own product nor users.

With that said I think there is a strong chance that this will end up being a tempest in a teapot - there doesn’t seem to be any immediately obvious damage to the Reddit brand because of the blackout.

JustARandomGuy

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

Millennial: same feeling here. When I talk to people of my parents generation they always talk about how cars let them roam about and give them freedom.

I never felt the same way, and I think a large part of that is that I grew up with the Internet; I could always AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) my friends or use ICQ. I was always connected even during an era of dialup. With the always-on functionality of modern phones, I’m sure that feeing is much more magnified. This doesn’t surprise me and I hope it drives a much more efficient future.

JustARandomGuy

il y a 5 ansdiscuss

Just to start off with, I'm not an expert; what I know is from my undergraduate days taking way too many economics classes. If someone is more knowledgeable feel free to call me out.

You're not losing much by skipping farm workers; as I noted above farm payroll changes seasonally, so skipping farm payrolls just helps to smooth the data - I suppose you could also consider it as another way to seasonally-adjust employment figure, although that is stretching the term quite a bit.

In addition farm hands for picking/planting are poorly paid and tend to have vague residency status (not making a political point, just economic reality) and so including that data does not change related figures such as GDP too much. It wouldn't surprise me if politics encourages the reporting of non-farm data due to the issue I mentioned above of vague residency status; see the current DACA fight for how contentious discussions like this can get.

TLDR the numbers work out better and nobody of importance cares about the difference

JustARandomGuy

il y a 5 ansdiscuss

It's nothing malicious; it's a common way to express employment figures. Farm payrolls tend to swell and contract seasonally (to pick/plant and much less work in-between) so "non-farm workforce" is a way of smoothing out the numbers.

JustARandomGuy

il y a 6 ansdiscuss

I see quite a few people in this thread blaming the high cost of AWS. I don't understand, why is this a problem with AWS - isn't it a problem with freeloading? Yes, moving hosting may save you some bucks, but fundamentally isn't the problem the large number of freeloaders?

If even 5% of the 6 million users paid $20 a year, Soup would have $6 million a year - more than enough to run a small company on.

FInally, i'll point to my favorite post on the subject, Don't be a free user by idlewords: https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/

JustARandomGuy

il y a 7 ansdiscuss

Since you're reading this, a feature request: I would love it if you could put up a REST endpoint for extracting all the images (example code here [1]) on a web page, and more endpoints for extracting all the links, script addresses, etc.

I was trying to do that on Browserless but couldn't get the final file download to work (I adapted Stack Overflow code linked below to put all the web pages images into a ZIP file and download that) - presently I'm running this on a Google Cloud Function, which is working but I'd rather outsource it to you, especially since the function chokes on large web pages (possibly it needs more RAM than the 2GB limit currently available in GCF?).

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/52542490

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