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mrtromboneon Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?

The company Torchbox (creators of Wagtail CMS) are an interesting example of an employee owned company. In their case it was a matter of the founders selling/moving most of their ownership to an Employee Owned Trust (as opposed to starting as a coop from scratch) - EOT is an interesting option in the UK with tax incentives to make it work.

https://torchbox.com/careers/employee-owned-trust

https://baxendaleownership.co.uk/torchbox-digital-agency-mov...

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mrtromboneon Show HN: Userdoc – My new startup after selling my development agency

This looks great. Will definitely try it out. I run a dev shop and have been thinking along these lines also.

mrtromboneon Ask HN: What skill do you want to develop or improve in 2023?

I want to learn about quantum mechanics. 10 year old me is pretty bummed I haven't invented a teleporter yet and ChatGPT said this is a pretty good place to start :)

mrtromboneon Ask HN: How can I best assist my wife with a career transition?

I run a software dev/ digital services company and my take on this is for her to consider retraining in a business analyst or change management role. - These require very complementary skills to teaching, - good fundamentals training (iiba, acmp) is usually private, short and no too expensive as opposed to going back to college - the market demand is massive (at least in NZ) These kind of roles fly under the radar in startup world but it's a huge, well paying field in enterprise, local govt etc

mrtromboneon Ask HN: What's the fastest way to become employable in tech

The right starting point is probably "what are their skills and interests" and based on that what is the simplest thing to segue into. Obviously this forum is mostly focused on developers but there is a while world of business analysts, technical writers, testers etc out there and these are often pretty convenient to get into if a person comes from a more 'liberal arts' / soft skills type job.

mrtromboneon NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

Maybe someone should release a smart context which is a literal MLM/pyramid NFT where everybody in the upline gets a portion of the sale (rather than just the seller and the creator)

mrtromboneon Tools for Better Thinking

Fantastic toolset. I found the posts by Leyla Acaroglu [1] an excellent introduction to systems thinking and many of these concepts

[1]: https://medium.com/disruptive-design/search?q=tools%20for%20...

mrtromboneon Analysis of dev agencies with hourly rates, team size and tech stack

It would be interesting to know whether the same issues would exist outsourcing to a country such as New Zealand with less of a language and cultural barrier or if it is still largely the nature of remote agency work.

mrtromboneon Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?

Sorry try https://www.hygen.io Didn't like the missing www

mrtromboneon Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?

For low-code dev friendly in our React/ node environment I've been impressed with https://hygen.io for generating boilerplate entities, models, controllers etc. Extremely light weight and flexible so it only needs to do what you want it to and can be changed per project to suit.

mrtromboneon Ocean cleaning device succeeds in removing plastic for the first time

This has been an interesting discussion but I am surprised at the high level of criticism towards the project. There seems to be two primary critiques of the project:

1. This should not be an area of focus - There are better climate change opportunities to put money towards

2. The project is ineffective and introduces a lot of other environmental problems

For the first point it seems like people are arguing as if it is a binary problem. It isn’t - The threat of climate change / environmental damage is an incredibly complex one that will not be fixed by a single technology / focus/ policy change. For me the questions are a. ’Are existing plastics in our ocean a problem? (yes) b. If someone is passionate about this should they have a crack at improving things? (yes) This is not consuming all the worlds available financing for environmental action so I don’t think wasted resourcing is a particularly good argument. Several commentators also talk about focusing on other ‘lower’ hanging fruit but this is not an objective measure - For a team made up of excellent engineers, oceanographers, fluid dynamics experts etc this may be a lower hanging fruit than trying to implement large scale policy change.

For the second point it comes down to the motivations of the team and their capacity and capability to improve the product. I would presume the team are incredibly passionate about improving the environment and so things like danger to floating marine life, use of diesel in boats etc would absolutely be something they are aware of and actively looking to mitigate. The fact this is (at least) the third iteration demonstrates they are working to improve on what they know is a currently flawed solution - This is development cycle!

This is not to say that critique is bad. Hopefully the team are humble enough to absorb the critique and continue to iterate on their solution to resolve the real issues raised but as long as there is a continued focus on the goal of environmental cleanup and good governance surrounding this I think this is a fantastic project and hopefully it is joined by many more ambitious activities.

mrtromboneon Dead sperm whale found in Indonesia had ingested '6kg of plastic'

I recently came back from Padang, Sumatra, was really impacted by the level of pollution and did quite a bit of research.

- It is too simplistic to just say it's all about education. Yes it needs work however there is just not the infrastructure to manage the level of rubbish. Jakarta has a giant landfill that receives 9000 tonnes of rubbish a day. It had a landslide in 2005 that killed 143 people [1]. Indonesia are working with Sweden around waste to energy technologies but it seems locked up with other environmental concerns. This would be a great area for R&D spend - making efficient / environmentally sound waste to energy systems that are cost effective (and robust enough) for this part of the world [2].

- So much of the rubbish I saw was from single serve items, particularly snacks and toiletries. Reducing plastic bags would help but I think it's not focussed on the primary issue. I think pressure on companies like Procter & Gamble, Nestle, Unilever etc to move towards biodegradable single serve packaging would go a long way - perhaps pragmatically this is a much better place for governments to provide subsidies??

- As can be seen with the Sulawesi earthquake other countries cannot just show up and expect Indonesia to welcome them with open arms. It has to very much be a partnership not a 'we know best' colonial spirit - Perhaps an effective thing for universities to do is increase scholarships in these key areas for Indonesian students.

[1] https://geoenvironmental-disasters.springeropen.com/articles...

[2] https://www.infrastructureasiaonline.com/strategic-partnersh...

mrtromboneon CraftCMS vs. WordPress vs. other CMSs

I have worked with Silverstripe before and as you mentioned about CraftCMS I find it flexible and lean compared to Wordpress - I feel like it is much easier to be close to the data etc so great from a developer point of view. It is OpenSource and has been chosen as the common web platform for NZ Government so presumably this means it hosts some pretty large sites.

mrtromboneon Ask HN: Platforms for building 2D mobile games for kids?

http://gamesalad.com/

My son used this for his science fair project last year and I thought it was an excellent platform.

mrtromboneon Ask HN: Tumblr alternative without pr0n?

I signed my son up with Jux.com. It looks great out of the box on desktop and mobile and is pretty straight forward,

mrtromboneon Microsoft Azure Sales Top $1 Billion, Challenging Amazon

Yes but an amazingly common one. If I look at the NZ city I live in (pop ~80k) both Tertiary institutes, City Council, Regional Council, primary Health organization etc are all very much happy Microsoft shops.

mrtromboneon Ask HN: If you would launch a website in 4 hours, what would it be?

I set my son up on http://www.jux.com. Nice and easy

mrtromboneon No office, no boss, no boundaries – rise of the nomadic rich

I went and lived for 2 years in France with my wife and 8yr old step daughter.

Recently I also took my kids to Kathmandu for a couple of weeks and mixed working with holidaying - so it's definitely possible. Of course in almost every major city in the world there are plenty of expat families raising kids successfully.

I guess you need to decide how nomadic you wish to be. Personally I think it's nice for kids to feel like they have some kind of home base so I'm more in favour of longer stints in places (e.g. not moving every 3 months) but that is only based on a hunch, and also depends so much on the personalities in your family.

mrtromboneon Ask HN: Do any open Furby-like projects exist?

Great links thanks.

One thing I have been wondering is what text to speech synthesis would sound like with non 'human' voices. Most demo's are of course focussed on human voices e.g. http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/morevoices.html but it would be interesting to develop some 'creature' ones as per elmo, furby, alvin etc

Have you heard the Karotz rabbit's voice?

mrtromboneon ASK HN: What is HN's current overall job satisfaction?

Not sure what the best way to research is. A couple of websites that might help:

http://www.idealog.co.nz http://unlimited.co.nz/

Few other high profile companies: http://www.vendhq.com http://www.silverstripe.com http://www.optimalusability.com/ http://www.rakon.com http://www.starnow.com http://www.smallworlds.com

mrtromboneon ASK HN: What is HN's current overall job satisfaction?

There's definitely some awesome companies in NZ open to bringing quality developers from overseas. Check out http://www.xero.com/about/careers/ Note: I'm not associated with them in any way

mrtromboneon Ask HN: What service would you pay me 10$ a month for?

Have you looked at vend? (vendhq.com) interesting startup from NZ

mrtromboneon SendHub (YC W12) Lets You Send Mass SMS to Students, Clients

What's the unique proposition with this? In NZ this is already very common with Universities, Dominos etc. Is it just a market that SendHub wants to contest in or does SendHub bring something new to the table (or is this difficult in the US?)

mrtromboneon The state of HTML5 for mobile app development

Has anyone else played with the dojo mobile framework? It is rarely mentioned in these type of articles. We started using it mainly for business reasons but after playing with it for a while it seems to me to have a lot more functionality than jquerymobile and the speed of new features getting into the nightlies is pretty impressive