> That's really not even close to true. Loading random websites frequently costs multiple seconds worth of local processing time
Unless we’re talking about specific compute-intensive websites, this is almost certainly network loading latency.
Modern web browsers are very fast. Moderns CPUs are very fast. Common, random websites aren’t churning through “multiple seconds” of CPU time just to render.
Audio CDs and data CD-ROMs use different encoding modes.
Data CDs have an extra layer of error correction. Audio CDs have less error correction because small bit errors are not a big deal for your listening experience. Most CD players quietly interpolate over small errors in a way that you probably don't even notice.
> After 30+ years, I have found the non-amphetamine medications work a lot more consistently and helpfully than the amphetamine ones.
I've watched a lot of friends go through the same cycle: Initial excitement from an Adderall prescription which gradually gives way to tolerance and a mismatch between reality and their perceptions of Adderall as a miracle pill.
The non-stimulant medications have worked wonders for a lot of people I know.
The catch (and it's a big one) is that they generally don't work immediately. In fact, they can be kind of unenjoyable for the first weeks or months while they begin to work. This is the exact opposite timeline of stimulants, which puts a lot of people off. If you can gradually titrate up and you're willing to give it a multi-month trial before ruling it out, the non-stimulant medications can actually be quite good. Some times better than the stimulants at controlling impulses and improving cognition, even. First-time stimulant users can easily get sidetracked by focusing too much on distractions.
The other catch is that it's hard to objectively evaluate the positive changes when they happen gradually over the course of a month. A lot of Straterra (Atomoxetine) users will think the medication isn't working, but when you ask them to objectively walk through their daily routines and work performance they realize they've improved tremendously. For others, they don't realize the benefits until the quit the medication and lose the positives, at which point they're back for round 2 of titration.
I've been on the other side: Dealing with returns and warranty claims at scale, albeit at a much larger company.
You're not alone. A lot of people will invest a lot of time into lying, playing dumb, making threats (think people with a lot of Twitter followers threatening to broadcast how terrible your company is unless you give them exactly what they want) and other manipulative tactics to abuse warranty claims.
Ultimately this is why we had to become more strict about warranty claims. When half of your warranty claims are coming from people angling for free upgrades or demanding full-price refunds after many years of service (some of whom tried to demand to keep the hardware and get a refund), you quickly become numb to it. I guess companies like Apple can absorb the lies for a while, but eventually you have to make a choice between padding your margins to cater to the warranty abusers or becoming more strict on warranty claims.
This feels like an attempt at victim blaming. If you have to read an entire spec from top to bottom to avoid a pitfall in a relatively common operation, maybe something is wrong.
FWIW, I couldn't even find the relevant section in that spec from a quick glance. I probably would have to read a significant portion of that spec just to figure out where it went wrong.
> Yes, they did. Have you read the article ? That's how npm works: it always pulls the latest version.
No, it pulls the specified version.
The affected packages fixed it by removing the leading carpet in the version specifier, which was designed to allow patch version bumps for things like security fixes.
He literally abused the versioning system designed to allow security fixes by introducing a breakage and disguising it as a non-breaking change.
He intentionally abused semver to disguise it as a safe update, when it was not.
I know it's popular in programming/infosec to blame the victim for trusting anyone, but you can't deny that this it's common behavior among many (though not all) projects to use the caret prefix when specifying dependencies because you trust the package maintainer to honor the semver agreement.
> Getting a lawyer involved will straighten things out fast. Upwork should eat the loss, no question. It'll easily cost Upwork more than 12k in time and resources if they try to defend it.
This may work with smaller companies that don’t want to have in-house counsel to engage in lengthy legal debates, but it’s not actually very effective against big companies with corporate counsel and clear-cut contracts.
Unless you think you have an angle to show the upwork contracts
1) Don’t have any provisions covering this situation (extremely unlikely)
2) Are unenforceable due to specific laws
Then it’s a dead-end to sue Upwork. You have to sue Robin, not Upwork.
> It'll cost you a few hundred USD at minimum but it'll be worth it.
Nope. Suing corporations with corporate counsel and well-tested contracts is not cheap. You might get a letter from a lawyer for a couple hundred, but then you’re just going to get a letter back from their lawyers. They will likely also threaten to collect on the reversed charges to raise the stakes.
Don’t sue Upwork with a bargain lawyer. Sue Robin, the client, to collect payment.
Allowing credit card payments through a 3rd party intermediary makes this situation very messy.
Non-payment is actually a surprisingly common problem in the world of freelancing. You won’t see it if you have a handful of established, trusted clients. However, it crops up a lot if you deal with individuals, entrepreneurs, or startups.
As an individual, you can simply refuse credit card payments completely. You can also stop work completely until the client is caught up on payments.
With Upwork, can you even choose to reject credit card payments? Or are you forced to take the risk of credit card chargebacks?
As for recourse: The amount is high enough to get a lawyer involved. Go after Robin, demonstrate non-payment, get a judgment. I’m guessing Upwork’s legalese and corporate counsel aren’t worth going after.
> I hadn't seen the ELT stuff before, and a quick and lazy google didn't turn up a good debunking. Anyone have anything about ELTs being picked up @ 8:44 AM and ~8:59 AM?
> In 2009, the international COSPAS-SARSAT satellite system discontinued satellite-based monitoring of the 121.5/243 MHz frequencies, in part because of a high number of false signals attributed with these frequencies.
Apparently the earliest 121.5MHz ELTs had a ridiculously high false trigger rate of 97 percent, which explains why they were deprecated:
> Historically, these ELT’s have experienced an activation rate of less than 25 percent in actual crashes and a 97 percent false-alarm rate.
So if false triggers were a known issue and the ELT signal was only seen extremely briefly, it's more likely someone taking a common occurrence out of context.
> I'm not sure how those things discredit the janitor.
He claims there was a massive explosion that shook the walls, caused part of the ceiling to cave in, and other significant effects. The obvious source is the plane impact. If there were multiple explosions of the magnitude he claims, surely other people would have noted them.
And of course, the standard conspiracy theory caveats apply: Do you really believe that their was a massive conspiracy perpetrated by experts who can coordinate such things at scale, yet are also simultaneously so incompetent that they forgot to wait until the plane impact to start demolishing the building?
It's nonsense. I highlighted the speaking tour to explain how he has perverse incentives to be continue spreading the conspiracy theory.
EDIT: I removed a comment about common sense because it seems to be distracting people from the actual comment
This site is interesting, but I was surprised to see some 9/11 conspiracy theory elements in the News Ticker.
Specifically, the "Janitor Hears Explosion from WTC Basement" in the news ticker includes claims that an explosion occurred in the basement 40 seconds before the first plane impact. Some quick Googling shows that this janitor and another associate went on to try to build a careers on top of these conspiracy theories. One of them even tried to sue President Bush and 155 others over 9/11 with a rambling lawsuit that alleges everything from controlled demolition of the towers to sex trafficking by the defendents.
Not a credible source, to say the least. I have no idea why this site thought to include his claims, but I suspect they're trying to seed doubt about the official timelines.
Cool site, but take some of the editorialized content with a huge grain of salt.
Great point. I like to compare work capacity to exercise capacity. Too much exercise will actually harm your fitness rather than improve it. However, reasonable exertions, combined with appropriate rest, will improve your fitness over time.
Like exercise capacity, one's ability to work hard can also be improved through practice. This doesn't mean pulling all-nighters and chugging caffeine to override the sleepiness, though. It means setting incremental goals to try a little bit harder and then following up with proper rest and recovery.
For example, if you install time tracking software and measure that you spend 3 hours in your code editor every day (a reasonable amount for someone working an 8-hour day, due to time spent reading documentation, in meetings, and other activities), it would be a mistake to set a goal to spend 6 hours in your code editor. You'll get burned out and hate it.
However, if you set a goal to spend 3.5 hours in your code editor every day, you can likely find low-impact ways to make that happen. Maybe you're more efficient with transitioning from meetings back to coding. Or maybe you cut down time spent reading articles on HN or Twitter by 30 minutes and apply it to coding instead.
Over the course of a 5-day work week, that extra 30 minutes per day adds up to almost 3 hours extra work. If your starting point was 3 hours per day, you've basically added an extra work day to your week without giving up much.
Dropbox always feels like it peaked early and has steadily gotten worse as they try to add more and more features to it.
> I feel like they are missing the mark when it comes to marketing to consumers here.
I get the impression they're relying on name recognition and first mover advantage to keep the simple users flowing in, while all of the extra features and GUI fluff are built out to attract some other audience that makes decisions by counting up how many different features are listed on each product page.
These days, I'm just happy that I haven't had to force-kill the Dropbox client in many months. I wish there was some way to go back to the days where they just synced my files for me, let me share a few things, and I didn't have to fight with their GUI all the time.
> If construction costs are cheaper than ever (are they really?) why can't I buy a box to live in without spending $300,000?
They're not cheaper than ever. Materials are expensive and in short supply. Labor is expensive because demand is high and few people want to do manual construction work.
But you're not literally buying just a structure. You have to buy a property for the house. In many locations, the valuation of the land a house sits on is higher than the value of the structure itself. My house could burn to the ground and my property would lose less than half its value, and I'm not even in a very high cost of living area.
You can buy a house for $300,000 if you're not picky about where it is. One of my family members had a new construction house built in the 2500 sq. ft. range for under $300,000 recently. The trick was that they live in a small town where property can be purchased for around $10K.
> See also: trying to renovate or buy a home in Arizona.
A quick search on Zillow shows over 1,500 listings for freestanding single family homes (not apartments, condos, townhomes, or other properties) for $300,000 or less. Many of them are even recently renovated, have 2-car garages, and frankly look quite nice.
Usually when someone is talking about starter houses being exorbitantly expensive, they're actually referring to the property being expensive. Loosen your requirements for location and it becomes much easier to find affordable housing. In most states you don't even need to move that far out of city centers. There are hundreds of properties within Phoenix and Tuscon that are $300K or less.
As a parent, I've been watching this play out in real time among other peoples' children.
Most parents I know are deliberate about limiting screen time and ensuring their children don't substitute screen time for other activities. It's actually not that difficult to do so as kids are really good at finding entertainment in their environment even without electronics.
However, some parents give their kids all the tablet, TV, and phone time they want. As they grow up I can see them failing to learn how to play with others their own age because they'd rather reach for a screen than make an effort to do something. They can be frighteningly grumpy when separated from their electronic devices and can even throw tantrums until their parents cave in and give them more screen time.
FWIW, I've also watched parents reverse this trend by slowing weaning their kids off of screen time and substituting other entertaining activities. It doesn't take a whole lot to nudge people in the right direction, but putting that phone down and doing literally anything other than stare at a screen can be a difficult first step to take.
> I wish we as a culture/society, acknowledged the luck and timing factor more as a factor in career development.
I've been mentoring young people and college students on and off for years. The influence of luck on their success is a constant topic. Definitely not ignored.
If anything, they tend to overestimate the role of luck and external factors in career development. Each year it seems like I talk to more students who have been convinced that success can only be the result of pure chance. I watch a lot of them lose motivation because they think they need luck and nepotism and connections and wealthy parents to be successful.
For example: All of them have heard the phrase "It's not what you know, it's who you know." Some of them take it so literally that they lose motivation to learn things, instead assuming that their career success is going to come down to whoever their parents or friends can introduce them to. This leads to a lot of frustration come internship time when they see a couple of their less-knowledgeable friends land great internships at their parents' or friends' parents' companies.
I feel like I spend a lot of time convincing some of these students that they do, indeed, have a lot of influence over their career trajectory. Their outlooks tend to change quickly when they arrive at a job and realize that what they know really does matter a lot more than who their parents are when it comes to getting anything done. I also have to emphasize that "who you know" isn't some fixed quantity, and that they will meet a lot of people in their career. The more they deliver good results, the better the impression they leave on the "who you know" and the more valuable their reputation becomes. You're never going to expand your network without putting yourself out there.
It's tough to compete with the constant onslaught of cynicism they consume on TikTok, Reddit, and other websites every single day, though.
What a weird claim. If the new apps aren’t doing anything more, then just use the old apps.
Except you’ll quickly find that the old apps are quite simple and limited relative to what we have today.