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cool-RRon Japanese firemen’s coats from the 19th century

These are nice, thank you!

cool-RRon Japanese firemen’s coats from the 19th century

Damn, I'd wear a replica of this. Just make it machine-washable.

cool-RRon Monobloc chair

Is it cool? Yes. Will it get scorching hot when left in the sunlight? Absolutely ;)

cool-RRon GitHub CLI is now in beta

Yes, they were building an amazing product with top-of-the-line UX that any other company could only dream of building.

cool-RRon My Business Card Runs Linux

This is a very cool project. I know very little about embedded engineering. I have a question: Why would MicroPython be needed? I thought it was useful only for simple chips, and this chip runs a full Linux, so couldn't you run CPython on it?

cool-RRon Ask HN: How do I understand the results of my job search?

The problem was apparent on the second line of your post: "applications submitted". Submitting your CV is a loser's game.

If you're a good developer you likely have developer friends who work for different companies. These can also be people you've collaborated on open-source projects with, or met at conferences. If you've made a good impression on them, tell them that you're looking for a job. Either they'll be interested in getting you hired to their company and getting a reference bonus, or they could hook you up with friends of them who are looking for developers.

cool-RRon Amazon is sending me packages I didn't buy

Aside: I bet the people who use these avantgarde fonts on their blogs feel so classy, but they make the text so hard to read on mobile, even with text size enlarged. I wish there was an instant "turn all fonts to your favorite font" button on mobile browsers.

cool-RRon Writing userspace USB drivers for abandoned devices

ReactOS is the answer.

cool-RRon Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?

And drop the 1, too

cool-RRon Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)

I understand that we're mostly agreeing, and I think that we both have an intuition for what it means for something to be a profit center.

Still, I'd like to show a gap in what you said: You talk about what kind of increase in revenue you'd have if such and such people did a better job, and what kind of ROI you'd get from each department.

But the question is, an increase relative to what, or an ROI relative to what?

Let's take the billing department. If you made sales for $10 million, and your billing department works okay, then you would have a revenue of $10 million. If you hired the best billing experts on earth, you still would get just $10 million. So that might make you look at the billing department as a cost center rather than a profit center.

But maybe if the billing department fucked up royally, either by not charging a customer, or overcharging them and hurting the relationship, or breaking obscure laws and getting the company in legal trouble. Then you could be out a lot more than $10 million.

So in effect, you could view the billing department's ROI as "how big a disaster they can prevent, and how good they are at preventing it." That kind of thinking makes sense for any department in the company.

That's the reason why I don't see the logic behind branding some departments as profit centers and some as cost centers.

cool-RRon Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)

The bullshit is hidden in the word "directly". You can define this word to mean whatever you'd like to mean. You can say a salesperson directly adds revenue to the company, but it's not really directly, the billing department is much closer to the actual money. You allow yourself to take the billing department for granted, but that's just because you don't work for the billing department. In the same way you could view the developers as the profit center, and take the sales department for granted.

I'll say it again, I'll be happy to see an objective definition of profit centers and cost centers.

cool-RRon Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)

My best conclusion is that there is no definition of "cost center" and "profit center" that makes sense. I challenge anyone to give me such a definition.

This is as good a place as any to put this:

Peter Drucker originally coined the term "profit center" around 1945. He later recanted, calling it "One of the biggest mistakes I have made". He later asserted that there are only cost centers within a business, and "the only profit center is a customer whose cheque hasn’t bounced."

cool-RRon Counterfeit books “shipped and sold by Amazon”?

I don't understand, why wouldn't you sue Amazon for an exorbitant amount? Seems to me they'd be vulnerable and want to settle.

cool-RRon Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible

I wonder whether there's a tool that could make websites tactile. Like, a pad with pins that can be programmatically raised and touched, and are used for drawing the website's layout. You could put your hands on it, touch it and feel the layout of the website, scroll around, and eventually click your selection. It can substitute braille font for the font used on the website.

cool-RRon Dog-walking startup Wag raised $300M, then things got messy

If they define themselves as a real estate company that has a website, sure, use a PHP framework.

If they define themselves as a technology company, which I believe they do, and they want lots of complex features for their services, and set an exorbitant valuation on that basis, then they better have the right infrastructure for that.

cool-RRon PySnooper: Never use print for debugging again

Haha. I don't know if this is satire or not, but in case it's not: You can pass any writable stream as the first argument and PySnooper will use it. So it should be easy to integrate with Slack or anything else.

cool-RRon PySnooper: Never use print for debugging again

I confirmed it worked with Django before releasing :)

cool-RRon PySnooper: Never use print for debugging again

No, feel free to add it as feature request on GitHub.

cool-RRon PySnooper: Never use print for debugging again

PuDB is amazing. Best command-line debugger ever, plus you get feelings of nostalgia for the Borland days.

cool-RRon PySnooper: Never use print for debugging again

I wrote a lot of shitty, sprawling enterprise code over the years, and I feel there's no shame in admitting that's what it is :)

cool-RRon PySnooper: Never use print for debugging again

Good question.

If the function is launched in a spawned process, it'll work, though you might have trouble getting the stderr, so you better include a log file as the first argument, like this `@snoop('/var/log/snoop.log')`

If the function launches new processes internally... I'm not sure.

If you try it and it doesn't work, open an issue: https://github.com/cool-RR/PySnooper/issues

cool-RRon PySnooper: Never use print for debugging again

(i)pdb is built in and is simple to use

pdb and its variants (my favorite is PuDB) are generally difficult to use in complex, corporate projects. If you've got a multi-process, multi-thread Python project running on a remote host, you'll need a really full-featured debugger to work with it effectively. I recommend Wing IDE or PyCharm for that.

cool-RRon PySnooper: Never use print for debugging again

No, because by default it only logs what's happening directly in your function, not what happens deeper in the stack. (i.e. functions that your function calls.)

You can set depth=2 or depth=3 and then you'll get a huge chunk of log. The deeper levels will be indented.

cool-RRon On Shutting Down

The author writes about the founder in an idealist way, i.e. searching for the most effective and honest way to manage a shutdown.

I'm interested in the moral dilemma, especially regarding employees.

Aaron writes: "The biggest emotional investment that founders make – especially early on – is convincing great people to take a leap of faith and accept an offer to work their butts off on a long shot. This dynamic is why transparency around the decision to shutdown and the timeline of it is so important."

Imagine you're a founder and your company is on its last legs. You can make a last-ditch effort to pivot and save the company, but that means that if you fail, which is likely, your employees will get shafted. Can you really communicate this transparently to your employees, and risk having them start searching for a way out, dooming your chances to succeed in turning around the company?

cool-RRon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (October 2018)

SEEKING WORK - Remote only. (Based in Tel-Aviv.)

Hi, I'm Ram, a freelance web developer with six years of experience building web applications for startups.

My expertise is in taking your idea and building it from scratch to the point where it's a fully-functional web app that serves paying users.

Technologies used: Python, Django, Heroku, Git.

More information: https://chipmunkdev.com/

cool-RRon An Innovative Phishing Style

You can just disable grouping taskbar items, which is convenient for me regardless of this issue. Then it's clear that 1 window is not 2 windows.

cool-RRon The rise and rise of JSON (2017)

"JSON’s dominance is surprising when you consider that as recently as 2005 the web world was salivating over the potential of “Asynchronous JavaScript and XML” and not “Asynchronous JavaScript and JSON.”"

"As recently as 2005," heh. In the frontend world, you might as well say "as recently as the Paleolithic age."

cool-RRon PepsiCo Is Acquiring SodaStream for $3.2B

Yes, and the flat soda bottles don't sell well at all.

cool-RRon People start hating their jobs at 35

> They have figured out that its much more about connections and office politics than hard work.

Maintaining relationships with different kinds of people is work. It's hard and meaningful work.

> They have figured out that there is really no job security, and they could be one layoff wave away from unemployment.

There most definitely is job security. Some people have lots of it, some have very little. There is no 100% job security, if that's what you were hoping for.

> They have figured out that its much more about face time and spending long hours at work rather than actually being productive.

Again, spending time with people in a social environment is a meaningful thing to do with one's life.

> They have figured out that the majority of their work, to their surprise is not actually that important or necessary.

It's not surprising that the majority of the product / code is not that important or necessary. If you are a good teammate, you might be an important or necessary part in your teammates daily lives.

> They have figured out that its important not to take too much vacations, because its an opportunity to loose the little work they have to someone else.

"many", "lose", "it's". I'm pretty close with my teammates, and I've never heard of any of them giving up any of their vacation time to get respect from our boss.

> They have figured out that they are never going to get payed the true value of their work, and that is almost the definition of being an employee.

I think that you if you'll try to give a definition of what you call "true value", it could be reduced to an absurdity.

> They have figured out that its all a system of serventry not too different from the medieval relation between master and servant.

I wish every person that said that would get to spend a couple of weeks as an actual slave, and would then report on their impressions.

> They have figured out that its a system that they are being grinded through and discarded, and that they are condemned for life to making someone else rich, never getting a chance to trully fulfill their dreams and ambitions.

Anyone wants to take on this one?

cool-RRon Digital Exile: How I Got Banned for Life from AirBnB

"It all feels very 1984. Or Black Mirror."

Really? A private company deciding not to do business with you feels like your basic human rights were taken away?

"After emailing AirBnB support and its founders multiple times, I’ve finally given up."

I've had a problem in Windows on my computer the other day and emailed Bill Gates, could you believe he had other things to do except respond to my problem?