ritchiea

I’ve had other disconnections and sporadic complete DSL outages during the day. It might be there’s more traffic during the day when people are performing work duties from home.

Netflix might also be good enough at queuing up downloaded portions of the film ahead of time that the brief outages don’t affect the viewing experience.

Here in Berlin my DSL connection has been awful since the social distancing began. And many of my friends have complained of similar problems. Frequent disconnections, broken up zoom calls. Though ironically the streaming has been fine from both Netflix & Amazon.

I used to have a job that relied on FOIA requests to perform my duties. Like any inter-organizational relationship it took a mix of formal requests and personal contact to get what we needed. And the ease at which we could get our FOIAs filled depended on the gov department budget and morale. You can define policy then structurally drain departments of The resources necessary to execute that policy & their mission.

Oh yea I agree, SXSW music & film are great. But as someone who’s been to SXSW I don’t understand the point of SXSW “interactive”. And in this article it’s talking about big tech companies backing out.

Really what I’m saying is who cares if tech pulls out? Its the worst part of the conference. I can’t imagine anyone other than Austin beer & discount ice sculpture sellers would mind if SXSW interactive disappeared forever.

What does SXSW even do for the tech industry? Is it just advertising for companies and people peddling themselves as influencers?

Yea this idea has been tried and never found a market at least a dozen times over. It's not impossible for the market or execution to change (e.g. Dropbox) but given the recent software is eating the world boom, it's hard to imagine that the market has changed dramatically so recently or their execution is going to be so much better than other teams who have tried and failed.

Oh and I will add, I hate the criticism that a take home test is "free, unpaid work." So is looking for jobs and taking time out of your schedule to interview on site. It is inevitable that in a job search you put in unpaid time to try to find the best possible work experience. But it would be nice to try to find ways to make it less painful for job seekers and more accurate in assessing developers's real ability to be productive team members.

I agree with you and there is nothing inherently wrong about a take home test. I do prefer taking home a test and working on a feature and talking about it with the hiring panel over whiteboarding. But the expectations they express about the take home work can still be poorly thought out and make me feel like I'm in the wrong for taking a longer time than they budgeted for me. Or that I'm being secretly tested to see if I will ignore the suggestion and throw myself at this exam to show my dedication to their company.

This joke is a suggestion there is still room for improvement.

That sounds ideal but oftentimes, intentionally or not, that isn't the expectation communicated. And in some cases I have seen take home coding exercises that are literally projects big enough for weeks of work. That particular small startup had copied their take home exam from a bigger company. They told me "work as far as I can," but it is intimidating and accomplishing a reasonable amount in say half a day still would feel like I had barely scratched the surface of the work they "suggested" I do "as much of as I feel like." It made me feel like an inadequate candidate by feeling like I can't possibly put enough of a dent in that task for it to be meaningful.

Oh and by the way the people asking me for that work were significantly more junior than me. I politely passed on the company and even beginning the take home test.

I have also had a company give me an API to build with sparse instructions. I did my best, I probably should have asked them more questions. I got no response. I followed up weeks later to see if there was more I could do with the coding exam or if I misunderstood it somehow. They didn't have anything else to say about the coding exam but they did invite me in for an in person interview. They then ghosted me and my further follow ups about the status of the hiring process.

The thing about the hiring issues in the industry is they aren't as simple as the solution you offered up. They are systemic and it doesn't feel like anyone is even trying to improve them. And that the changes that do happen are equally but differently absurd in their expectations as the mistakes of the past.

Even in your example it wouldn’t mean the cloud is dead, the big US cloud companies would suffer as smaller country and region specific cloud providers thrive.

Has Firefox fixed the bug that made it eat up resources, crank the fans and go nuts on retina MacBook Pros?

SEEKING WORK | Berlin, Germany or remote (originally from NYC, can make trips to US east coast)

Full stack Javascript and Ruby developer with experience as a lead, as well as a teacher/mentor. I believe in writing clear, readable, simple code and refactoring for performance as necessary. I believe in making reasonable decisions quickly & working extremely pragmatically rather than spending lots of time in debates about ideal architecture. I believe in choosing relatively mature tools and libraries over the most bleeding edge tools. I'm good at communicating with other stakeholders, including non-technical execs/managers, thinking about the business problem and advocating for the user.

I have worked with a mix of startup and big companies, including projects for the New York Times, Axel Springer and Cleversafe ($1B onsite file storage service acquired by IBM). Over the past few years I have also worked for a niche social media company, a B2B fashion supply chain management company and on a one-off art installation project for Davos.

I am most experienced working with React, node.js and Rails but I can be flexible about technical stack.

Github: https://github.com/ritchiea

Resume upon request.

Email: ritchiea [at] gmail [dot] com

There are very real reasons not to use DOM methods assuming you're using a front end framework. Not only is the coding style more imperative than say React, but frontend frameworks have been designed to efficiently update the DOM and have diffing algorithms that can check for necessary state changes. Is there really a compelling reason for writing your own DOM manipulation in a sizeable frontend codebase in 2020?

I would assume they charge you for extradition as part of your court fees. Similarly to my knowledge if you get deported or have to leave a country for visa reasons you have to pay for your own travel even though the date of departure is enforced by customs and/or law enforcement. Though fortunately I have never been extradited and I hope to keep it that way.

Gentrifying neighborhoods tend to have more of this behavior from renters because the big corps are new to the neighborhood and expect to have a long future presence there as neighborhood property values and incomes only increase. Whereas an existing competitive market like downtown Toronto with lots of big corporate chains should have renters with less optimism their space will be particularly desirable.

Another somewhat related problem that I know happens in NYC is a building is owned by a parent who dies and leaves the property into split ownership amongst the children. Then the children cannot agree on a strategy to rent the building. And the fight results in an empty property.

Usually the pattern is allow a local small business lease to expire and wait for a big company that will pay at the highest end of the market or above market rents. So kick out local business with thin margins who wants to negotiate the rent and wait for Starbucks or Chipotle to pay you $$$.

No clue if it is actually financially beneficial for the renter but many believe it's beneficial to keep a store empty to wait around for a big company to want the property rather than committing to a small entity who can't pay big company rates.

Tenants also make the building more difficult to sell, if you are trying to sell.

First of all no one remembers everything they read. If you spend time reading lots of books you will find things that stick out to you personally that you are surprised other people didn't bring up in the summaries you are accustomed to hearing elsewhere. You'll also find yourself disagreeing with other people's summaries and interpretations of books you've read.

So yes, I would say reading books is worth it. And the best way to start is for now is put aside your "must read" list. Instead think about something you're personally curious about right now this moment and pick a well regarded book that touches on that thing you're curious about. Don't limit yourself to nonfiction, if you're interested in memory maybe you could pick up Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow or maybe you could choose Tom McCarthy's amazing novel Remainder. If you're interested in live performance maybe you could pick up Viola Spolin's Improvisation for the Theater or maybe try Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater.

Then repeat, follow your curiosity again. Pick another book, maybe the first book you read pushes you towards selecting another. You want more from the same author or topic. And don't be shy about not finishing things, sometimes a book doesn't pay off on the curiosity that led you to it. I often start reading a handful or more of books at a time until I find one that really grips me. Or just keep alternating between reading lots of different things for weeks. Kindle & the kindle app are actually very good for this because you can send yourself samples of books so you can try them before investing in them.

I would also say in general, the depth of knowledge shared, and the quality of work put into a book tends to be much greater than 99% of what you find online. It is a lot of work to publish a book, the authors, editors and everyone else involved want to make it worth it. Not that there isn't great online content, but people work hard to make books worth the time investment.

You are missing out. At least try to get out there and read.

To dang and the other moderators, can you think of a way to auto-penalize effectively contentless/empty anti-Javascript comments?

Imagine this kind of comment for any other language, C, Python, Ruby, Rust, Scheme whatever. It would be downvoted to death. And yet people still make & upvote these comments about JS despite JS being the most popular language, run on the most devices & having a massive community of people fixing its warts and modernizing JS.

There are still valid critiques of JS but they have nothing to do with Al Pacino or Bruce Willis. Please spare us, or if you want to criticize Javascript, learn something about Javascript in 2019 & criticize that.

Can’t personally vouch for this org but they were active in nyc recently and seem interesting:

https://www.catchafire.org

I don't believe Harvard is choosing the wealthy kids and the legacies because they are most likely to succeed, I believe Harvard is choosing those people because they are most likely to have the highest ROI for the Harvard endowment & future donations. Someone from a low socio-economic status or otherwise marginalized background that has worked hard enough and smart enough by 17 or 18 to be a good candidate for admission at Harvard is an outstanding bet to have the determination to succeed later on in life.

As opposed to the current 1/3 legacy, unclear percentage propped up by wealthy parents, elite prep school system that consistently and efficiently finds the best students.

There are still plenty of directionless Harvard kids that end up back in their parents's basements after graduation.

Also have you ever stopped to ask yourself who reads and evaluates these admission packets? How often do we complain about hiring here on HN? That it's hard, that you can't tell enough from the slice of information you have about a person. Do you really think the admission people at Harvard have such a gift to accurately tier these teens futures?

And if they had such a gift, why are they admission officers at a university and not in a position where their impeccable qualitative assessment skills can be better leveraged to make tons of money or truly great careers? The same people assessing these applications are the same, reasonably intelligent but flawed people that are doing recruiting and hiring and screening in every other prestigious institution that struggles to choose the best candidates.

Anyway I'm not trying to argue most people are undeserving (except for the legacy and wealthy parents kids, who are again, a very sizable percentage). But the idea that we actually have a finely enough tuned comb and good enough data to actually pick the children with the most elite futures is on its face absurd. And culturally both the benefactors and the people in awe of the halo of achievement around our elite universities are taking it too far.

A professor in my social circle has taught at various schools across North America including Harvard, University of Toronto and a few prominent USA state schools. He says in his experience there's no difference between the intellect and quality of work he sees at the schools he's taught at but the Harvard students are more ambitious and more entitled.

In my own personal experience Harvard, Princeton, Stanford types often carry an elitism that they need to justify the work they put in to get to that school and the amount the school prestige means to their own self worth.

There's also a classic OpEd from I believe the Harvard Crimson from a Harvard admin officer saying Harvard could admit sufficiently qualified students from it's applicants several times over the actual count of its freshman class. So basically you have to have rich parents or be lucky not just be qualified. The elitism exists nonetheless and it's a fraud.

I agree all that stuff was interesting and innovative. Maybe we just disagree on how far you have to push expectations to be avant-garde. When I think of avant-garde I think of creators trying to push toward a paradigm shift or break as many rules as possible or be experimental. At their heart Metal Gear games were still action games but Kojima was innovative enough in how he presented the story and gameplay mechanics to the gamer that they felt like more than that. The Metal Gear games I played never felt experimental, they felt like exquisitely done versions of an existing genre.

What was daring or avant-garde about Kojima? He makes incredibly popular mainstream games that had cool quirky gameplay mechanics and great attention to detail and had a focus on storytelling.

When I think of "avant-garde" games, I think of games like Katamari Damacy, or Untitled Goose Game or Feather. Maybe Ridiculous Fishing.

I can't think of a single thing avant-garde about Kojima's games. Or Minecraft tbh, though I'm significantly less familiar with Minecraft.

Credit card and predatory loan companies target low wage workers before they are even old enough to vote. They aim to get you in a cycle of debt and many of the targets for this type of lending do not have family support to help them avoid falling into the trap. In fact their family are likely to be other impoverished people who have fallen into the same trap.

How much of that is because they are accruing credit card debt while simultaneously living without health insurance knowing a severe illness will leave them in even more crushing debt. While also feeling that they don't have real access to a greater life and the wealth they see around them in their own countries while being barraged with advertisements tempting them to spend money on goods to temporarily ease the built up day-today frustrations they experience. And the physical toll that their labor intensive jobs take on their body?

The distribution center is usually a nightmare to travel to. I've lived in NYC and Berlin and both systems are disasters in their own way. Here in Berlin someone is always posting a note in the stairwell that a package was delivered and they aren't sure who in the building has it. And what if it was left with a neighbor who has a schedule opposite yours and you don't have a phone number for?

An abundance of packages disappear in both systems. Although if your package happens to be left at a local Spati/Bodega/corner store instead of with a neighbor the German system works out pretty well.

And the distribution center in NYC is often in a far out place with no public transportation access.

This is a good start. I would strongly recommend focusing on listening and asking questions when a friend comes to you with a problem or something on their mind. People universally want to be heard and understood. Offer emotional support, if by some chance you really think your friend is in the wrong, that person probably needs to be lovingly nudged rather than abrasively confronted.

Occasionally people do legitimately want your advice & perspective and to be careful about it you can precede it with "would you like to hear my perspective/advice?"

> (with the possible exception of Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison) no one else in America was writing at the same level

I believe the greater literary community would flip that and say no one else was writing at the level of Morrison & Bellow and perhaps Roth & Updike were at that level. And Updike’s work does not age nearly as well as the work of the other three.