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FlyingAvatar··on Apple Music Overtakes Spotify in U.S. Subscribers
I don't think this is a completely fair analogy.

You'd have to add that it's more like you own a car that will only take you to that one store.

FlyingAvatar··on Comparing the Network Performance of AWS, Azure and GCP [pdf]
You're not likely to be able to test throughput without running into the limitation imposed by whatever instance type or service you are using to deliver it.

An individual service effectively has infinite bandwidth relative to the available bandwidth of any of the major providers.

Not that seeing test results for service-level capabilities would not be interesting, but it isn't really a test of the network itself.

FlyingAvatar··on JIRA is an antipattern
This.

JIRA has been around over 15 years and definitely supported other workflows before it supported Agile ones specifically.

To me, it has felt in need of a complete rewrite for probably half of that time.

If you've had to do administration for it, or have had to dive into more complex configurations, it definitely feels like it's more baggage than product.

FlyingAvatar··on Goldman Sachs asks: 'Is curing patients a sustainable business model?'
Trading occurs in primates. You don't even need language to do it.
FlyingAvatar··on Goldman Sachs asks: 'Is curing patients a sustainable business model?'
I don't see what is very extraordinary about this claim.

The idea of selling of goods predates any government. In their simplest form, how a market operates is determined by the agreement two people, a seller and a buyer for an exchange

When restrictions are applied, how the market operates is still determined by how people interact within those rules or by how they attempt to circumvent them to make their exchange.

FlyingAvatar··on Why Do Laptop Makers Have Such Terrible Websites
Since most laptop makers have terrible product design in general, should it be surprising that their websites are any different?

The source of this problem on their sites for me has been the sheer number of different models that many of these manufacturers are putting out. I get that they're chasing different markets, but even then it is still somewhat baffling.

Microsoft has the right idea in not just copying some of Apple's product design, but also the simplicity of their product line up. (Which I admin certainly would be easier for Microsoft, since they were starting from nothing.) But has any major laptop manufacturer simplified their lines in this way?

FlyingAvatar··on A DMT trip 'feels like dying' – and scientists now agree
I think there's a difference between dying and being OK with it and the opposite.

I would hope when I get to the point that I am actually dying, I could feel a little more like the quote than you did when you were dying, which sounds terrifying. :)

FlyingAvatar··on Ask HN: Advice when patent app pending for similar product?
> We're marketing and iterating, and we are optimistic about hitting product/market fit.

Keep worrying about this. You're almost certainly spending cycles on a non-problem, particularly if your implementation is different.

FlyingAvatar··on Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2018 – Show and tell
The cost to a company of an $80k/yr employee is well more than $40/hr.

You need to account for time not working, such as paid holidays, vacation and sick time. Also, you need to factor the amount the company pays in addition to the salary such as payroll tax, benefits, cost of the space, tools and amenities to let the employee do their job. These are all costs that will be absorbed by the freelancer.

All said and done, a company pays probably $60/hr, minimum, to hire an employee at $80k per year.

Doubling or tripling your salaried employment rate is not uncommon when freelancing in order to maintain the SAME level of income to account for non-billed time. This can be adjusted for longer term contracts.

My point is $150/hr is not too hard to justify as a consulting rate for an equivalent employee making in the salary range you specify.

The other consideration is the role you're in with the company who hires you. Are they hiring you to interface with an existing tech team, or is it a solo gig, where you also will be playing business analyst and project manager. The latter, IMO, would also justify a higher rate, assuming one is competent at it and is providing that additional value.

FlyingAvatar··on I built a private car sales search engine. Feedback appreciated
This confused me too. The site is US only. The region is for the manufacturer of the car. i.e. Wanting to look for European cars vs US-made, etc.
FlyingAvatar··on I built a private car sales search engine. Feedback appreciated
- "Man. Region" is non-intuitive, would recommend "Made In" or something similar

- Some states are big, some are small, distance from ZIP code would be more practical than just state.

- Would do some monitoring of the hit rate of some of the UI features to see if they're actually useful. (i.e Will someone really ever want to specify a filter for minimum number of miles, or do sort by the higher number of miles)

FlyingAvatar··on (Very) Basic Eliptic Curve Cryptography
> A 256 bit key in ECC offers about the same security as 3072 bit key using RSA.

> This means that in systems with limited resources such as smartphones, embedded computers, cryptocurrency networks, it uses less than 10% of the hard disk space and bandwidth required using RSA.

What?

I could possibly understand CPU usage being significantly lower for an equivalent level of security, but how could disk space and bandwidth be affected to any significant measure?

FlyingAvatar··on Subscription Hell
When I am paying by the article, I personally am much less likely to pay to see garbage stories.
FlyingAvatar··on Ask HN: What is the good time to move out of AWS?
I don't believe there to be an ideal cut-off point, as the value of the trade-offs are largely situational.

Questions you should ask:

- How does the monthly rate change as we grow? (i.e. Do you have an architecture that doesn't scale well?) Maybe what you have is fine as you will grow into it. Maybe your cost growth will out-pace your revenue/user growth. This one is really important to understand.

- How optimal is my current RDS/S3 setup? Are you using instance types above your needs? Are you retaining more data than you need? (i.e. Are you simply over paying?)

- How optimal is my application's usage of AWS? (i.e. Are you using indiscriminately?)

- How severely is the growth of my business impeded by the loss of $2k-$10k/month? Where else could it be applied to grow the business? (i.e. Is thinking about this the best use of your time, or is it just the most glaring, easy thing? Remember that saving on monthly expenses doesn't get you customers or grow your revenue.)

- What hidden costs might there be from switching away from the status quo? In addition to the monthly costs, what will the development/operational costs be? Are you making trade offs in your availability or your ability to quickly recover from technical issues by switching?

FlyingAvatar··on Ask HN: How do I explain a resume gap after taking a sabbatical?
I would put Freelance / Travel Sabbatical as a "job" and then list some highlights of your learning / experience from them if you've also done that for the other jobs you listed.
FlyingAvatar··on How GDPR Will Change The Way You Develop
1. If I am writing it down, as my analogy suggests, it is not forgotten.

2. I understand what it's about.

If you want to make tracking people and linking things together illegal, great.

However, my argument in response to the OP intended to illustrate that recording information about someones actions, particularly when it's a party who is part of the interaction creating the recording, does not seem to have some preexisting moral expectation or attached to it.

Hence, to me at least, the GDPR's directives are not objectively reasonable or obvious in some way as suggested by the OP.

I also think forbidding certain uses of the data is more reasonable than to regulate its collection and storage. But yes, that's probably riskier and harder to enforce.

FlyingAvatar··on How GDPR Will Change The Way You Develop
You knock on my door and I write down that you visited me.

Why is it somehow reasonable to compel me to forget that interaction existed?

FlyingAvatar··on Visa to Pay Restaurants to Stop Taking Cash
Yes, that is the definition of legal tender:

(n) coins or banknotes that must be accepted if offered in payment of a debt.

Debt != barter

A potential workaround would be if the menu's prices were not in dollars, but instead in credit card points or some such nonsense, but even this is probably arguable.

FlyingAvatar··on Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?
I got YouTube Red for the purpose of contributing to content providers without watching ads. I would just use an ad blocker otherwise.

Unless your content is for kids, where they probably don't have the choice to watch them or not, why not monetize?

If it's your viewer's choice whether they see ads or not, and if the money might help you provide more or better content, it could be a win-win.

FlyingAvatar··on Ohio Sues 5 Major Drug Companies For 'Fueling Opioid Epidemic'
Many wisdom teeth removals involve "digging them out" where the gums need to be cut open and stitched back together. I was put under general anesthesia and given Oxycodone for a few days, and was very glad to have it because it hurt like hell.

If the teeth have come in enough though, they can be treated like regular extractions. They are still painful, but generally much less invasive / potentially complicated.

FlyingAvatar··on GnuBee Personal Cloud 1 – A NAS specifically engineered to run FLOSS
I think it depends on your needs for performance. Most personal applications (streaming music, video or storing backups) aren't going to be affected much from having a 2 gigabit link.

At 10 watts, there is a good opportunity for some power savings. I have an Atom-based HP MicroServer and it lives in the area of 30-40 watts idle with 5 3.5" drives. Going down to 10 watts would mean saving around $40/year for me, not bad, but not enough to worry about.

The biggest failure with this in my mind not supporting 3.5" drives. Getting decent capacity in the 2.5" form factor is not really possible, and if using SSDs, in that case you'd want a more performant machine like you describe. Then again if using SSDs, why not just use an even smaller form factor.

FlyingAvatar··on An experiment to test whether nuclear fusion can be controlled to generate power
This is an idealized view of fusion energy. Doing it on Earth in a practical manner most likely has tradeoffs, if it is reasonably possible at all in a timeframe that would make it useful.

We should research multiple avenues of energy independence (including fusion, and including how to increase conservation/efficiency of use) so that we can make real progress now and not hang our hat on a single magic solution.

FlyingAvatar··on Missing $10,000 package of PAL SNES games recovered
I think the implication was that in Ireland, it's never not raining.
FlyingAvatar··on Free Lossless Image Format Publications
Do you have a reference to anyone comparing the formats?

Also, since FFV1 is a video codec, a static image container would need to be defined in order for it to be useful in the same scenarios as FLIF.

FlyingAvatar··on Nvidia stuffs desktop GTX 1080, 1070, 1060 into laptops, drops the “M”
I think his point was the screenshot was regular HD, not even UHDTV resolution.
FlyingAvatar··on Mint UI – Mobile UI Elements for Vue.js
Riot: http://riotgear.js.org/

React: There are tons of repositories for React components. http://react-toolbox.com/ might be the closest to what you are thinking. I am not familiar enough with React to make a confident recommendation.

FlyingAvatar··on The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]
> "John was setup on a date" - on some specific day John was assembled.

I read this one as: A romantic encounter was the guise by which John was framed for a crime.

FlyingAvatar··on Crypto e-mail service pays $6,000 ransom, gets taken out by DDoS anyway
It's fairly easy to obfuscate the source of coins. There are "laundering" services where you can send a bunch of coins and they will redistribute them randomly mixed with others who use the service.

Even if you could reliably follow them all, what agency would keep track of which coins are "tainted"?

For an amount of money this small, it's just not practical. Even for the many thousands of coins stolen from MtGox, tracking them is not practical.

FlyingAvatar··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2015)
InsureMyTrip | Warwick, RI | Full Stack Developer / Development Lead | ONSITE

InsureMyTrip is the industry leader in travel insurance aggregation. We pride ourselves on our forward-thinking technology, work/life balance and positive team dynamic.

We're looking for several full-stack developers and a Development Lead to join our team. We are currently in the process of renovating our core architecture, breaking up a monolithic PHP code-base into a modular service-based model written in Python / Flask on the back-end, and HTML/CSS/JS (using Aurelia) with a dab of PHP/Python glue on the front-end.

We're happy to talk to candidates who lean more towards front-end or back-end!

On the front-end, we're looking for people with deep knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Experience with JavaScript frameworks such as Angular or Aurelia is a plus.

On the back-end, we're looking for people with a strong knowledge base of network and web fundamentals, RESTful architecture and API design.

If you've got both, we're doubly interested in meeting with you!

Contact jobs@insuremytrip.com.

FlyingAvatar··on How meditation killed my creativity and made me more stressed
I think this is where learning from meditation from an experienced teacher compared to an app would probably be more likely produce a beneficial result.

It's hard to say without actually talking to this person about his experience, but it seems like he fell into a trap that many fall into (include me) about meditation in that the goal or ideal state is to clear your mind of thoughts. Forcing your mind not to follow your thoughts and interpreting the presence of extraneous thoughts as negative will not be pleasurable or helpful.

Our minds wander all of the time, and if you tell yourself doing that is bad, you're going to be feeling bad a lot of the time.

If you are trying to meditate and you notice your mind wander, you let the thoughts you have go, without any penalty. If you notice your mind hasn't wandered, you don't give yourself kudos, but you just let that thought go too. The core of meditation is the just the practice of that action.

If you're just beginning meditation, you're taking a shower, and you often spend your shower time brainstorming, you should definitely not be penalizing yourself for that. Just because your meditation app told you that the end goal is to spend your life fully in the moment does not mean you can just decide to do that today.

An experienced meditator in that situation might decide that they would be more effective focusing on showering, and then dedicating separate time to brainstorming. OR, they might decide that "brainstorming in the shower" as a whole is very beneficial experience and decide they are doing it just right for them.

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