jonaf

We own an HP printer. The other day my wife told me the printer refused to print unless she renewed her subscription. I told her no way in disbelief. That can't be legal. She renewed the subscription and was able to print again. I'm hoping there's some kind of confusion, but waiting for the subscription to lapse to see if it happens again.

I purchased the ThinkPad P1 mobile workstation in 2018. It's a great machine but it's about as loud as a vacuum cleaner.

Agree with this 100%, as a father of 5. I have 2 sped kiddos that are aseverely handicapped and even at 7 and 8 years of age they cant do many so-called mundane tasks. Also no one can or wants to watch them, including family. Also if you think child care is a difficult and expensive problem, try hiring one through an agency for sped kids. Also the prognosis is that they will be permanently dependent, so there's no light at the end of the tunnel. The only solution is to get acquainted with the idea that your life will never be what you wanted, and to stop comparing yourself and your career to others. If you can do that, you can talk yourself into committing to tomorrow. Not that tomorrow will be better for YOU, but your commitment to it affords a future for your family, or at least, 1 more day of future.

I purchased new construction once. They were putting up a thousand cookie cutter houses like ours in that neighborhood. And even that estimate missed the mark by more than 3 months. Even estimating building the same floor plan the hundredth time is hard!

Now imagine, you are tasked with building a house with no floor plan. You have to procure some materials last minute, and at least two of the materials you must create from raw materials. Occasionally, you have to remove structural parts of the house to account for changes to the requirements. Someone built their own power tool instead of using the out of the box nail gun, which injured a fellow worker and required replacement of drywall. The crew had a holiday, then it rained, then a shipment of materials was delayed. After your electrician recovered from the stomach flu, he was unable to wire the house for ceiling fans -- a late stage increase in scope from the customer -- because one of the workers wanted to learn a new technique for framing for the block and wire, which he read about on hacker news. When the construction is 95% complete, the boss asks the crew to go ahead and start on another build. Another month elapses, and the home is nearly done. Your office contacts the customer to schedule closing, only to discover that the customer changed their mind and got an apartment 6 months ago. All is not lost, however: your boss receives a bonus for a job well done, which he thanks you for. Good job! A few months later the home is found to be in violation of a recently ratified law making smart homes illegal in the county, but no one involved in its construction works there anymore so they'll each likely repeat the mistake at least once more.

I have never looked this up, but anytime I'm checking out at a brick and mortar store, I'm asked, casually, "Phone number?" Or "Zip code?" As if thats information that is necessary to check out. My response is always, politely, "you don't need that information." It annoys my wife because she thinks I'm being rude, but frankly the question I'm being asked is uncouth. Would you ask a stranger how many children they have or what time they get off work? Not unless you had some intention to use that information!

Parent of 4 here, ages 6, 5, 2, and 8 months. My oldest two are special needs. Some thoughts from my POV...

My oldest wasnt trained until about 4.5 years. It took around 6 months to a year for him to pick it up consistently. Hes still not trained for overnight though. It makes me feel like a failure as a father. We have always used disposable diapers with him.

My second (5) has been out of diapers during the day for nearly 2 years. She consistently uses the toilet for bowel movements but fails to urinate in the toilet every time, except when I take her on a timer/regular interval. We aren't sure why she has this problem or how to remediate it. We are very concerned as she begins kindergarten this year. We always used disposable diapers with her, and I feel like a failure as a father on this, too.

We just began potty training with my 2 year old. We are 3 or 4 days into it, and he is already independently going to the restroom and following all the rehearsed steps when he needs to urinate. We are having occasional accidents, and he is catching on to the idea that urinating on himself is undesirable. We offer him praise when he is successful, and no praise when he fails (we just walk him through the process of washing off, replacing his clothing, etc so he understands the outcome). He was cloth diapered exclusively until about 6 months ago when his younger brother started using up all the cloth diapers! He hasn't had enough encounters with BMs to catch on to going to the restroom at the appropriate time yet, but I'm confident we will get there soon.

My youngest is 8 months and we haven't started any such exercises yet, but it sounds like it may be a good idea.

To echo the article's suggestion, possibly one of the most frustrating things is potty training. Or maybe more frustrating, the lack of potty training. I still awake to change diapers for four children every morning, and on average theres at least one guaranteed BM for me to handle. (And let's be real, a 6 year old doesn't poop like a baby.) Although its nice not changing diapers of my 5 year old anymore during the day, it comes at the cost of regular urine cleanup / permanently stained furniture and HEAVY use of our washing machine.

If anyone knows any resources for training special needs children overnight (or in the case of my 5 year old...anytime!), I would be super grateful. We had a period of 2 years where both of my older children were in therapy sessions between 20-40 hours/week, and sadly potty training efforts even by trained therapists has been met with limited success. My current plan is to stay the course, just practicing and hoping it all sinks in, especially before my 5 year old starts school, as I don't want her to suffer this embarrassment (and I certainly worry about the way she will be treated/educated as its understandably difficult and even frustrating to deal with this particular kind of problem; for example, we enrolled my then-4 year old in a private kindergarten program last year, but after 2 days the school informed us that unfortunately they cannot manage her and she would not be allowed to attend).

This looks like a great case-study. Basically, it seems that if the licensing isn't in Amazon's favor (take the OSS project, put it into operation, sell it as a service), then Amazon is likely to simply build their own implementation that is API-compatible. It remains unclear whether the ROI for this exists, especially for larger/more complex projects, but the precedent is very discouraging for my idea.

New business model idea: write open source software with a license that requires, well, a license to _operate_. It's free in all the typical APL2 senses, except that you can't sell it "as a service" without signing, effectively, a "lease." Now, supposing the project gains sufficient popularity / community / traction, all you have to do is wait for Amazon to take note of the project and contact you for a lease. You ask for 30% and retire. And if they invent a competing project that is at all API-compatible, they have to prove in court that they haven't plagiarized any of your open source code; but, that wouldn't happen anyway, since by their own admission, they're not focused on writing software, they're focused on operating it.

Someone with experience/knowledge in this area tell me if I'm off my rocker. I know it sounds too simple. But why wouldn't this work?

Yeah, I am a fan of Arch on the desktop, but the P1 runs Nvidia's P1000 chip and Arch doesn't seem to like that, so I went with Ubuntu+i3 for now. Updating the firmware first is definitely critical, as you could brick the machine otherwise.

I'll echo my disappointment in battery life, although admittedly i3 and xfce defaults are probably not doing me any favors here...

Thanks, this makes me feel better about my decision a couple months ago to switch to Lenovo's ThinkPad P1 Mobile Workstation. I don't have any regrets switching from Apple hardware, and frankly Linux is so much more superior (especially when using i3[0]), I'm quite pleased with it.

(The only complaint I have with the ThinkPad is the fan is super aggressive and very loud. It usually doesn't run for long, but it spins up with a whirring noise pretty often for 1-5 seconds before slowing down.)

[0]: https://i3wm.org/

Ha, I like this one! Actually these algorithms may approximate one another when generalized. Pirsig explores the philosophy more deeply, though; for example, generating a hypothesis: where does it come from, and is it possible to run out of hypotheses? Pirsig argues no, you practically can’t.

This was the one, a facetious version of Pirsig’s algorithm: https://xkcd.com/627/

I have also experienced this phenomenon. Why do you suppose we come to these surprises, and why do you suppose we experience them?

Is it because we are confident? Or because we lack sedulity? Or because our analysis was incomplete?

Is the surprise time consuming because we want/expect it to be easy? Or because we are focused on a different problem really. Or because our focus was interrupted.

This is a very interesting philosophy. A few years ago, a former coworker and good friend of mine introduced me to an algorithm for solving problems. This is a slightly different purpose than doing something hard, but there are some interesting similarities. In my experience as an engineer in software and operations, this algorithm has never come in reach of failing me, and until I was introduced to it, my own system was seriously lacking even though I didn’t know it! You can be successful without it. But you can be so confident and efficient with it! The algorithm and it’s philosophy are described in none other than Zen and the Art of Motorcyle maintenance. I think there’s also an XKCD of it, Flowchart maybe is the name.

I have been in search of what you’ve put together. My wife and I have tried unsuccessfully various strategies along these lines that were more lofi, but always come back to the spreadsheet. Another vote for open sourcing! I would be willing to contribute in my spare time to something like this. It’s a big gap for many, and all these beautiful iOS apps fall short in every way (but mainly I can’t bring myself to put my bank info on any of them!!).

PSA: if you take TripleByte's online quiz, they don't have the capability of giving you the results of the quiz. At least, that's what I was told when I took the online quiz -- they couldn't share the results with me because the quiz is "adaptive" and scores and questions vary each time the quiz is taken. (I have no idea how they're able to do anything useful with the quiz results if they don't record them and the scores vary so greatly.)

I have no faith in TripleByte or their process at this point, especially since I feel I was somewhat taken advantage of (I did the online quiz expecting to get some feedback -- isn't that the point?). I'm certain they will use the collected data from my quiz to build their product, though.

I couldn't find this on your product page, but does Hazelcast Jet support "global windows"? I've found 90% of stream processing systems I've come across only work within a window, but if I need to perform a computation "for all time," I'm SOL.

It's interesting to me that, before I learned about databases (circa 2004), I built 3 distinct software products based on flat files (no database). They were all written in PHP (the only backend language I knew at the time). This was before the days of GitHub, so I don't have links to the software anymore, but I may still have the (horrendous) source code. The products were: a forum (!) system called "DatForum"; a chat app called "Chategory"[1] (this one still apparently exists on SourceForge); and a flat-file backed bookmark manager that synchronized with del.icio.us called "LinkDex." I did also build a blog/CMS based on flat files, which I used personally, but it was hardly productized (practically server-side includes). Obviously, using flat file databases is very different from static site generation, but since all of these were written using flat file databases, it would have been easy to optimize their (often poor) performance by statically regenerating the site periodically, instead of reading the flat file database at render time.

[1] http://chategory.sourceforge.net/

Please tell me that the referenced C# dialect used in Midori is available in some form for use, research or general learning? This would really make my week!!

Cool! I authored a web based accessibility tool called Graybit some years ago. It allowed you to enter a web address and browse the web through its proxy, which converted all CSS, html and images to their grayscale equivalents. The idea was to simulate complete color blindness to raise awareness and encourage higher contrast and things like using underlines for hyperlinks.

Something else people should know: AWS ES is on the Internet. You can't deploy it to a vpc yet, and you can only lock it down using IAM, which may or may not be good enough for your use-case.

For those that prefer the ease provided by AWS ES Service, consider Elastic Cloud, which affords most of the same capabilities but is run by Elastic themselves (it was previously known as Found, which Elastic purchased a few years ago). There's also an Enterprise offering. If you're looking for a hosted Elasticsearch solution, it's probably better than what AWS is offering. Side note: they update about as often as elastic releases, whereas AWS ES is consistently behind.

Yeah, I should have clarified I was talking with my operations hat on. From a development perspective, you might call it a "deploy-time" or "scale up" dependency.

Speaking from an operations perspective, yes, it's a runtime dependency. From a development perspective, you might think of it as a "deploy-time" dependency. Think of it in contrast to compile errors. If your program has errors that your compiler can catch, then it will refuse to compile the program and you must fix the error before executing the program. A runtime dependency is one that may change after your program is compiled -- these are harder to test, especially when the program may fail depending on its environment. In the case of dependencies on services such as Github at deploy time, it's a "runtime dependency" for the operations programs. Since the operations programs are the ones with the runtime dependency, it's also in the operations team's purview (and responsibility) to revise their program(s) and eliminate the runtime dependency such that testing (and reproducibility of) deployment is deterministic and reliable.

You can speed up AMI baking by using chroot + a mounted EBS volume on a running instance. It should drastically reduce the time it takes to produce a new image. Also be sure that you're building EBS-backed AMI's, as S3-backed AMI's will require a lot of time for copy.

Your question seems to indicate that you have a runtime dependency on github. If true, this is a problem no matter where your git repo resides. You need to architect a solution wherein you do not have a runtime dependency, especially if it is a single point of failure, or accept that your reliability will never be better than the sum of your services' reli abilities (there was an article on the "calculus of availability" or something like that recently).

What I personally do in AWS is bake my artifacts or other git-sourced data into AMI's. If you want a middle ground, you can instead push your artifacts to an s3 target -- s3 has better reliability / track record than github for this purpose.

I can appreciate how holistic the GNU ecosystem seems to be. I'm a lover and user of Nix, so whenever something about Guix comes up, I draw the contrast. In this case, GuixSD is using Shepherd, which uses Guile for configuration and feels like natural continuity within the system. NixOS, on the other hand, provides systemd (and only systemd). In the case of nix, it's smart to leverage existing technologies, for velocity, yes, but also as a sort of proof that the core principles behind nix can apply even over systems and tools that are completely unaware of nix concepts; on the other hand, GNU really makes me a believer in the fact that Guix is very pure.

Thanks! I never thought of it this way before, but I suppose there's no "set it and forget it" to selling on the app store if selling on the app store is your primary source of income, since you have to keep working to ensure the product remains relevant, gains new customers, etc. (Selling on the app store is decidedly not SaaS, after all.)

That's interesting, but it sounds too simple. Surely any of the competitors could also IPO, and at that point, Blue Apron still needs to justify why the market is better off investing in their company. By contrast, prior to its acquisition by Google in October 2006, Youtube was one among many social video sites, and neither it nor any of its competitors IPO'd, ever (source: I searched for news relating to "video sharing IPO" and found nothing prior to 2010 -- I could still be wrong about this claim, though). However, the operating costs of such a massive site (65k new videos with 100MM views per day, a mere 1 year after launch[0]) are substantial. If an IPO is just a way to defeat the competition using sheer survival tactics, I would have expected Youtube (or one of its competitors) to IPO or start fielding an IPO early-on. Maybe Google just bought them too quickly, as they were acquired in October 2006?

Does it mean that Youtube competitors like Vimeo must be profitable private companies in order to stay in the market? Youtube's pockets are, at this point, effectively infinite, so my sense is that Youtube competitors are not directly competing with what Youtube offers, but similar niches peripheral to Youtube.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube#Company_history

Tangential, but what made you decide to go back to full time employment?

Also, did you just not enjoy working on a product as much as consulting work, or was it simply not as lucrative/sustainable/reliable?

I'm shocked to see an IPO for one of these delivery companies. Not because there doesn't seem to be a value proposition, but because I don't understand what sets them apart from the competition. They seem to be in a flooded market: Plated, HelloFresh, I think I've seen commercials for a few more, and they seem to barely add value on top of another flooded market, grocery delivery: instacart, uber has a service like this, probably Lyft does, and most grocers are getting in on it, too. HEB, Walmart, et al. And HEB isn't even a nationwide company. Why would the public invest in this company compared to others? Is it a strategy to put fear in the biggest competitors' minds as a setup for an acquisition?