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sickygnar

127 karma · joined March 22, 2019

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sickygnar··on Retirement the Margaritaville Way
I'm not sure whats so enraging about it. Average people having fun with a goofy lifestyle?

Some of the Jimmy Buffet stuff is tongue in cheek. I mean "cheeseburger in paradise?". Everything about the song is awful, and I think everyone understands its awful, but it's juvenile and fun. The margaritaville thing is a welcoming in-group. It's "who cares, don't worry about it, live and let live." Key West certainly reflected those values when I visited. I kinda get it now.

sickygnar··on Two-minute battery changes push India’s delivery riders to switch to e-scooters
Each scooter has 2 smaller batteries, presumably because of this problem.

I own a Sur Ron too, and I don't find the stock battery weight to be an issue. ~30 lbs isn't unreasonable for the average person to lift. It's amazing they packed a dirt bike into 125 lbs. I'm able to lift it over barriers and load/unload it from my sedan, and it doesn't ride far off from a mountain bike. It's only twice the weight of a top of the line e-mountain bike, but has 7x the power output and goes further. Easy decision. It's the most fun machine I've ever owned.

Zero uses 3.6 kwh modular batteries. I'm guessing they are 40-50 lbs or so which is probably around the upper limit the average person would be comfortable lifting and loading regularly. I'm sure they could be engineered to sell them in smaller sized units, but I don't think they're actually hot swappable.

Keeping my eye on this one: https://starkfuture.com/en-us-US/products/stark-varg

sickygnar··on Senior devs. Is anyone else insulted by coding exams?
They filter out positives, though according to hiring managers, that's the point. I had a frustrating experience with a hackerrank recently. My code was passing all of the public test cases, but failing one of the hidden test cases, and there was no way (that I could find) to debug it. Incredibly frustrating. Even if you're a long time senior developer who can code, don't be fooled into thinking you can pass one without practicing on the particular platform.
sickygnar··on LXC vs. Docker
I never hear systemd-nspawn mentioned in these discussions. It ships and integrates with systemd and has a decent interface with machinectl. Does anyone use it?
sickygnar··on Get mock interviews now, pay when you find your next job
Sounds like he'd be a perfect fit for those companies
sickygnar··on Where have all the insects gone?
I've done the same drive, thru the farmland and cattle ranches to the south of the salton sea by Brawley. God it was noxious. Despite the sea having a reputation for an awful smell, it didn't compare to the farmland below. My throat hurts thinking about it. You sometimes get a similar effect in the san joaquin valley.
sickygnar··on Rethinking Triplebyte
hah, fair enough.
sickygnar··on Rethinking Triplebyte
I'm salty towards the platform because they rejected me a few years ago, and my ego has barred me from using them again despite their outreach. I was also very unhappy when I heard about the public profiles. I don't want people to see that I interviewed poorly, or to have any kind of public record of that. I'm a decent engineer, I swear!

I had some bad luck. My nodejs build broke after a recent update on my machine, which I didn't realize until right before the interview. During a test with a different language, I tried to define a constant with the same name as a built-in function and ran into a vague compiler error (something about missing parentheses, ugh). This language has case-insensitive function names to compound the confusion. I unfortunately looked up how to define a constant in the docs. Their conclusion was that "I was uncomfortable in the language," despite having used it for 10 years. There was some other feedback which I felt was inaccurate, I think I just had a bad day, and obviously didn't convey my knowledge and experience well. I could see why a recruiter would hard pass on me for some of the stumbles, since their main goal is to forward candidates who interview well. It hurt to get rejected.

sickygnar··on Seizing the Middle: Chess Strategy in Business
The guy didn't just cheat, he blatantly cheated, using the computer for every move outside of his first move blunder. Then he bragged about winning in the post-game interview.

The guy obviously lied about his chess background, he lost to a scholar's mate (4 move checkmate) in one of his recent games. He probably just said he had a chess background to sound smart. Arrogant narcissist.

sickygnar··on The IRS Is Coming for Crypto Investors Who Haven’t Paid Their Taxes
I received an unsolicited airdrop which had a spot price of "$20k USD" because there was no liquidity. It's absolutely worthless.

Seems like illiquid airdrops are a good way to screw someone over in the eyes of the IRS, lol

sickygnar··on The IRS Is Coming for Crypto Investors Who Haven’t Paid Their Taxes
Curious as well, especially with USDC and USDT. They are so convenient for sending arbitrarily large amounts of USD with instant settlement.
sickygnar··on $365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin
I'm the oppsite, and I'm not a btc maximalist. I'm not going to make any predicitons about the price direction of either coin, I'm mainly surprised by eth's huge rise. there's some risk with the eth2 / PoS migration, though it comes with a huge benefit. would someone mind explaining the technical risk? i'm not that well versed in it, maybe i'm overstating it (the market is obviously bullish about it). without it, smart contracts are borderline unusable.

eth also has a big target on its back, a lot of the top coins are going after the smart contract space, mainly the centralized bootleg garbage called binance chain, which unfortunately does fill a market need, at least to less discerning "investors." to my detriment, i haven't touched it.

in contrast to eth, i'm not surprised about btc's rise. it does one thing and it does it well. it seems to work well as a hedge against inflation. i don't think that many people care about the environmental impact. it's not immediately visible, at least not like cars and other polluters. it's out of sight and out of mind.

sickygnar··on How to send $ETH in 19 lines of Python
brave is bundled with metamask. its not technically native, but it works very nicely.
sickygnar··on Washington state approves capital gains tax
Why is real estate always exempt from this stuff? Is there a good reason or is the special interest just large?
sickygnar··on Ethereum: A Store of Value with Cash Flow [pdf]
Algorand has a handful of validator nodes which are chosen by the creators. You can't participate in validating even if you want to. It's completely centralized, which as far as I'm concerned defeats the purpose of cryptocurrency. Why do you think, despite the hype, it hasn't taken off in price like others, despite "appearing" technically superior? Massive sell pressure from these behemoth validator node holders, who receive the lion's share of the stake rewards for... running a vps
sickygnar··on Ethereum: A Store of Value with Cash Flow [pdf]
That 10% isn't remotely risk-free. All the combined lending/defi/erc20 smart contracts are held together by paper clips and rubber bands. The popular ones have been stable so far but there is a proven history of hacks and exploits in crypto in general.
sickygnar··on The Kilobyte’s Gambit
the almighty hippopotomus. love playing it against humans too (with limited success)
sickygnar··on Discord bans r/WallStreetBets server, subreddit went private for a while
Someone likely paid the platforms and/or admins to take them down
sickygnar··on Nq – A simple Unix job queue system
nohup detatches the process from the shell
sickygnar··on A Brief Goodbye to CentOS
I do it similarly. I run multiple versions of a service at once with systemd service files. It gives me the same stuff as containers - cgroups, isolation, logging, service definitions and automation with ansible, but its easier on my feeble psyche.
sickygnar··on Ethereum 2.0 launches
KYC = know your customer = anti money-laundering. Yes, it is bureacratic, and it can be a pain for regular, non-money-laundering customers. With crypto, you can instantly create an account offline and trade around the globe.

As far as programmable banking, I meant it in the sense that people can create "bank apps", aka contracts. It goes way beyond simple routing of funds, since it's turing complete.

Financial censorship is a feature, since the finance industry does exclude people and countries. For example, in the US you need to have a $1M net worth or something to be an "accredited investor" which grants you certain privileges. Ethereum doesn't make such distinctions - you can interact with and create any financial product/contract (depending on its rules). Brokerages also regularly halt trading, and make you answer a bunch of questions before trading certain financial products. There are 2 sides to the financial censorship coin so I'm not going to pretend this is always a great feature.

I'm focusing on finance because so far it is the main use case for ethereum. There are a lot of decentralized financial products and derivates now, that even trade in a "USD"-backed crypto (USDC, DAI). Honestly, it all works pretty well, but its not without its downsides and pitfalls.

One of my favorite things about the whole thing is that it gets rid of ACCOUNT CREATION. It's so nice to visit a website/app and just approve it with your wallet. It's the ultimate SSO - there is no email verification crap, its all so instant and frictionless to play with financial products that would otherwise be a bureacratic maze. It's even easier than logging into hacker news.

sickygnar··on 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test
Right now I have ~20 tabs open and a few apps, a workload which is probably similar to the average user. My machine currently has 510 processes running with 2379 threads, though most of them are background. I'd wager core count is more important than ST performance nowadays, especially considering the fact that applications seem to be multicore optimized.
sickygnar··on Ask HN: How do you deal with chronic illness?
As you know, this condition is totally unpredictable, so it may just be a temporary lull completely unrelated to my diet. I also feel obligated to leave the "I am not a doctor" disclaimer. And good luck with your seizures as well. They're so awful
sickygnar··on Ask HN: How do you deal with chronic illness?
I've never has issues with blood sugar, so I'm not sure if any of what I would do would work for you.

I basically just eat 2-3 eggs for breakfast (100% no carb breakfast). Then I don't eat lunch until 2-3pm. I find I can pretty much eat whatever I want for lunch and dinner but I still try to keep it low/medium GI foods and opt for fattier stuff if I can.

I don't have any problems with blood sugar, and I don't get crazy hungry (I actually forget to eat pretty often, I find it more of an inconvenience, hah). I WFH so it's not like I burn many calories sitting on my biscuit anyway. My main problem with it is weight loss. I'm not overweight and I like to exercise, so I need to make sure I eat enough. Another downside (I'm guessing) is electrolytes or vitamins. Maybe I'm simply underfed but I seem more prone to muscle tightness/cramps.

I find I can break the "diet" regularly and not lose therapeutic effect. I do it 4-5x/week. I'm down to 1-2 partial seizures a month, whereas previously I was hitting 30+. I have neocortical TLE (likely focal cortical dysplasia, adult onset), so the partial seizure numbers tend to be higher than your standard hippocampal/mesial TLE. Overall my seizure control is pretty good lately. I'm hoping it stays good - but as you probably know, can't let your guard down.

I ended up here after failing to maintain keto and the low gi ("south beach") diets. They seemed to improve seizure control a bit, but I had real problems sticking to them. Fasting is all the rage now, so I figured I'd borrow the easy/good parts from both of those diets, while trying out a simple, loose version of fasting. I'm glad I gave it a shot. Good luck!

sickygnar··on Ask HN: How do you deal with chronic illness?
> --Stay away from online "support groups" for chronic illness. 99% of them are toxic as hell, especially the "spoonie" community. Instead, seek out people who have chronic illness and are living the sort of life you want. Develop individual friendships with them, and learn from them.

Totally. The more I think about the disease and difficulties, the unhappier I am. If I don't read that garbage the unhappiness and bitterness subsides into a dull background noise.

---

I'm epileptic. I don't deal with it well at all. I hate it and it annoys the hell out of me. There is the giant, "what if" fear that overshadows pretty much everything I do, including going to sleep. Fortunately, I have a good pulse on how I'm feeling (i.e. if I'm going to have a seizure in the next few days), and I know what I need to adjust in order to keep the seizures mostly at bay.

Apart from medication, the most important thing to keep in check is diet. I've found intermittent fasting and low-carb/gi help the most, it's annoying to keep up, but if I fast in the morning (aka skip breakfast, or keep my a.m. meals keto), then I can generally coast and not have to worry about seizures too much, but if I eat a moderate amount of higher-gi carbs, then I will likely have a period of a few days where I have partial seizures.

sickygnar··on Ethereum Is a Dark Forest
at least for now, it's a solution for gambling, speculation, and no KYC lending and trading
sickygnar··on Ethereum Is a Dark Forest
hmm, maybe you are referring to money as currency, where i am referring to it as assets (tokens)

anyway, yes there is money locked in the lending platforms. most of it is used as collateral, which is locked when borrowed against. the reserve ratios are high (60-80%), so unlike a regular bank, no money is "printed" when lent.

"real money" does enter these systems. people spend resources to acquire real money which is subsequently traded then locked into these platforms. also, while a lot of ethereum tokens are simply minted with no real backing, some are mined (even erc20), which again people dedicate finite resources to

sickygnar··on Ethereum Is a Dark Forest
there are plenty low power proof of stake blockchains. they are becoming a lot more popular for scalability and efficiency reasons. currently everyone is on the hunt for the next proof of stake 'ethereum killer' with a lot of speculative investment. ethereum itself is planning a migration to proof of stake.

right now, i'm not personally a huge fan of proof of stake because of the 'nothing at stake' problem, but one will eventually take off.

sickygnar··on Ethereum Is a Dark Forest
I heard of one being baited into making transactions that would fail, but still being charged gas
sickygnar··on Ethereum Is a Dark Forest
Well, gas prices are insane right now so no doubt bots are bidding them up. Gas prices hit 250 gwei or so 2 weeks ago. $150 fees for some of these contracts and arbitrage aren't abnormal.

Here is a $188 transaction fee - looks like they were trying to "mine" compound from a $5 million flash loan? https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0d5def630cd20a1a24389982e99801e011...

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