josephwegner

But this isn't an iOS app...

Dude, Snipline looks _awesome_. This would be mega useful for me, and pretty much everyone on my team.

The only thing holding me back from committing is the recurring subscription... $9/yr isn't really a lot, but I'm always hesitant to sign up for recurring things because of the likely chance I stop using it but forget the subscription. I much prefer Alfred/Dash style pricing, where I pay approximately once per year for a new "version". Two questions to that point:

1. Are you open to letting people pay once, without setting up a subscription? More of a year-long license model?

2. Do you have any infrastructure setup for teams? I could much easier justify putting this on my AMEX and allowing my entire team access.

IMO this seems like an absolutely insane move. Now is not the time to take on piles of risk. Just stay safe and look around again when the world normalizes.

This.

I lead a technical support team - we have very well written macro responses for a variety of topics, some technical and some not, but almost always we modify the boilerplate with ticket-specific context. There's no reason why I should type the description of a Request Timeout error 15 times per day, but it's certainly worth the effort to include that pre-written information with some relevant context.

I can start my Nissan (not EV) from an app.

Fun fact: Nissan Connect, which allows you to track, start, stop, lock, unlock, trigger horn, and toggle headlights is also massively insecure. In order to gain control of a Nissan Connect-enabled car, you need to know the VIN of the car and the name of the person to whom it is registered.

Most of the time those details can be found on the internet, but if you're reasonably motivated you can find the VIN visible on a car's dashboard and probably find the owner's name in their mailbox.

If you own a Nissan, register your car in Connect, or someone else will!

This is a real "Dropbox is just rsync" sort of comment, but I personally use a small CLI util for this[1]. It automatically creates a new text file for each day that I use it and stores it in a dated folder/file. I can look at notes by day, or grep around in that directory fairly easily. And it syncs to wherever, so I can also just search within my file storage service.

I use this for both regular "diary" sort of journaling as well as notes around what I was doing on a particular day. It's wildly useful keeping daily notes on things, for questions like "Hey, do you remember that bug we dealt with last year...?"

[1] https://gist.github.com/josephwegner/677ce82556fcbde6ae626a8...

I recently did a book club at work, reading the book Being Wrong. At one point the book shared some research that supported the notion that children largely engage in play as a method of flirting with error and mistake making. Mistakes made in play are easily forgiven and quickly learned from. Adults play progressively less because there are fewer safe areas in which we can regularly err.

Whether that line of logic is accurate or not, it did help me to realize that in my own life I have very few opportunities to test my (mis)understandings of the world around me and find where I'm wrong. I desperately hide in my safe zones.

I've recently found reading books a good way to create fresh safe zones where I can view the world from different perspectives and test my beliefs. People of all different sorts in all different cultures from nearly all time periods have written books, and often written them well enough to transport the reader into their reality. It may not be "play", but I'm greatly enjoying the diverse worlds I have recently been reading myself into.

I don't find many internet writings to have this level of depth that allows me to rethink myself as I read.

Literally just did this last week. Needed some more RAM for my laptop, and figured a quick drop into Fry's would work. It was pitiful and absolutely shocking. I have to say 70% of the store was empty, with multiple departments worth of shelving completely empty. They didn't have the RAM I needed, and the options they did have were poorly price... and hard to find... and the sales associate in the area seemed to not know what customers were for and completely ignored me.

Left, drove to Microcenter, and had to fight my way through the crowds to get to the RAM. They had multiple options, happy associates, and I even poked around with fun 3d printing stuff because the store was so well stocked. It's wild that their situation is so different.

I guess I'll post this here, on the off chance that someone shares my plight and has found success.

I, like the author, have found that most traditional excercise is just... boring. And exhausting. And not enjoyable. I did biking for awhile, and it was fine until life happened and I fell off the wagon. Same with lifting. Same with running. The only thing I've truly enjoyed was rock climbing, but the nearest gym is 45mim away in low traffic - it's a 3 hour commitment to get a good session.

I've seen the advice from this thread before, to find excercise you enjoy or excercise you can integrate into your life (ie: run to work). I work from home. Everything out of the house is inconvenient, and everything in the house is boring.

I make plenty of money and would be exceptionally happy if I could just throw money at this problem. There's not really a price I wouldn't pay for a more durable and comfortable body.

Mostly in the past Ive been told I need to... just do it. Have the willpower to do it. But that's crappy advice and doesn't work. Has anyone had success with particular workouts or strategies to keep motivated?

They're around. They cluster, as you might expect. I worked at one a16z-funded startup where probably 1/3 of the engineering department were big spenders. I expect the cluster was a result of the CTO being an extremely big spender, and very loud at broadcasting that fact.

But the opportunity cost is not tiny. This is literally a twitter thread asking for financial support.

And I do recognize that the thousands of petabytes will likely be chump change to store in a decade... but necessarily the economies of storage will keep pace with the rate of content production. It will always be expensive to store everything.

The question is, do we gain back this investment from future uses of these archives? I dunno. I’d be interested to hear what value archivists have gotten out of the archives, given it is decently old already.

I have very high confidence that every application on my computer has some gaping undiscovered vulnerability in it. It is the nature of software to be accidentally insecure.

Dropping Zoom based on their security mistake would make sense if one of two things was true:

1. The vulnerability was introduced intentionally 2. The vulnerability was introduced due to a persistent culture of negligence

I have seen no evidence that either of those are the case. Someone at Zoom made a mistake. Granted, it was a big mistake. I've made a few of those in my career too.

But this isn't documentation.

This is a tutorial, in which progression and transitioning between steps is a fundamental part of the content. Representing that transition via animations is not inappropriate.

I'm a late-20s American. I do have some basic understanding of metric units, although it is relative (a centimeter is about half an inch, a meter is a bit more than a yard, a kilometer is slightly more than half a mile.). That all goes out the window when you add a second unit, though - kilometers _per second_ means absolutely nothing to me.

Pardon me, the ignorant American... but this is who I am :D

Everytime I see these threads I end up feeling inadequate. For the rest of the folks like me, I will share a small tidbit of wisdom:

Starting a business is really hard and it's totally OK to just go work for Salesforce. You do you.

Dang, well done.

I spent three solid semesters wasting my "Computer Science" electives on breaking into the Novell system... I found tons of these encrypted passwords, and it never occurred to me to just crack one. I did find plenty of other ways to get in, though :)

Nexus is my favorite in this genre... and in fact one of my favorite books ever. I had some trippy dreams while reading it :)

I think you're spot on, and this is part of the reason I will have "no phones* after dinner/school/whatever" when my kids become smartphone age. I expect I will have similar rules about headphones in cars, or tablets at restaurant tables.

If my relationship with my kid's is falling apart, I want to have some sort of signal that alerts me to it happening. I want it to feel awkward, so that I know to fix it. If the damage is masked behind a screen, I might miss it and never know to repair it.

* or whatever the new distracting device is in ~10 years.

Heroku did this about a year ago. They have a list of known pwned passwords (probably haveibeenpwned, but honestly I'm not sure), and disallow accounts to use those passwords. When that change was implemented, any account using a pwned password had that password expired.

https://status.heroku.com/incidents/1625

(source: I work for Heroku Support)

I read this article with a bit of hunger and nostalgia to return to my former life as a startup engineer... but I think upon further thought I'm leaning against it again.

As a bit of history, I worked as an engineer at startups for most of my early career. Mostly frontend work, all SaaS businesses. I enjoyed it. I wore many hats, and got to think about the customer a lot. I didn't like always worrying about my paycheck and job security. 2 years ago I transitioned to a Platform Support Engineer at Heroku. Now I manage folks on that team.

The thing I loved most about startup life was getting to be engaged in every facet of the business - my voice carried weight in technical aspects, financial aspects, support, culture, etc. I have a natural aptitude for things beyond just programming, and think often about the larger business and customer impact. It was great being able to speak up and leverage those parts of my brain.

However, part of me thinks that perhaps the joy I found in being involved everywhere was that it made me feel smart. I felt like I could be an expert in every domain. But that's not really realistic, is it? Today I work in a very small domain with a limited breadth of responsibility... but I am _the_ expert on developer support. There is no one else in the organization (outside of my team, of course) that can challenge my thoughts on support, because I am the expert. Similarly, I would not dare challenge the expertise of our finance team. I know quite a bit about finance, but they blow me out of the water. They're specialized, and undeniably make better decisions than me.

Is it really that much better to feel smart and make average/bad decisions based on intuition? I'm not sure. I think as far as output goes, specializing is better.

Don't most VCs overvalue most startups by ~100%? This doesn't seem that crazy to me.

The same rule applies to smart locks as applies to dumb locks: A lock does no more than keep an honest man, honest.

Any monkey can buy lock picks and pick a door lock. It's not hard. Generally if you buy a decent rake, it'll open most locks quickly. It's arguably much more work to hack the _smart_ side of a lock than it is to just pick the _dumb_ part.

The caveat here is that smart locks are often "picked" en masse - once you break one in a lab, you can immediately and silently do the same to the rest globally. This is similar to software hacking.

The guidance here should be to only purchase smart locks from vendors that you can trust to patch zero-days quickly. How you qualify a vendor as such is a mystery - I don't know that there's been enough zero days on smart locks to verify.

Schlage Connect. I have the same rule in my house. Everything is Z-Wave.

As a former (pre-sale) Keen employee, this makes me sad. I'm very sorry.

You are absolutely correct, if the company is successful, equity might be worth quite a bit. It's unlikely that you will choose a startup that will be successful in a way that makes equity valuable.

Venture Capitalists are in the business of making money off successful startups. They work day in and day out on finding startups that are likely to be successful and investing in ways to help them be successful. Most of the time, they're wrong. The only way that VCs are able to be profitable is by having a diverse portfolio of companies in the hope that one is successful enough to outweigh the losses of the others.

Picking out successful startups is (probably) not your expertise, and you only get about a dozen chances (on the high end?) to choose a new employer for the duration of your career. The odds are very very against you. Given those odds, we can value startup equity at approximately $0, perhaps a bit higher.

Unfortunately, most startups offer lower salaries in trade for equity. They also are offering you _options_ instead of actual shares. Unless you stick around long enough for a liquidity event that guarantees the option's value, you will have to exercise those options prior to knowing their true value. This costs you money _twice_ for an entity that has a near-$0 value.

These are the questions (and reasons for them) that I have used in the past: https://joewegner.com/blog/startup-interview-questions

This is my same experience. Son has JIA. There is a JIA-specific website that connects you to JIA-specific support groups.... but there are none active near me, and I live in a very big city. I expressed this frustration to my wife who uses Facebook often, and she joined an active JIA community in moments.

I guess now we have two anecdotes. That makes us a statistic, I think?

The $3k doesn't have to be spent on salaries. In fact, unless Blizzard is having a retention problem (they may be... but I'd guess it's not due to salaries), there's better places to spend that money.

Some estimates say their failed game, Titan, cost about $50mil to develop. If their CEO dropped his salary to a modest $1mil/yr, he could essentially fund a new game every 2 years.

This is of course an over-simplification of the value of money... dollars don't magically turn into hit video games. But they do help.

I was literally just looking in to starting blood donations again, now that I have a flexible remote job (I stopped when I had kids, and time got expensive).

As a shot in the dark, does anyone here know how the different donation orgs (red Cross, heartland, etc.) stack up against each other? I'm having trouble finding unbiased sources, and am curious if the organizations vary greatly in ethics/profit strategies/proficiency of staff, etc.