thatsamonad

> Right, and in my experience urban retail is often high cost, low quality. Some of the dirtiest stores/restaurants you see are in urban centers.

This may depend on your area but this hasn’t been my experience. I used to commute into downtown Portland for work and we had a great selection of options for lunch and happy hours, a plethora of food cart options which were great and affordable, and a number of decent bars where you could meet a friend for drinks afterwards.

Now I work from home in the suburbs and, while I wouldn’t trade being remote for anything, the food options here mostly consist of bland fast food and chain restaurants. One of the things I miss the most is grabbing a decent lunch with a coworker and breaking up the monotony a bit.

I don’t believe so, but the judge sentenced him so harshly because the amount involved was astronomical, exceeding the maximum amount specified by federal sentencing guidelines for fraud ($400 million at the time)[0]. Also, many people lost their life savings and the fraud lasted for nearly 30 years and the judge didn’t feel that Madoff did everything he could to mitigate the harm caused by his actions.

[0](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/0...)

My spouse bought me a Chemex coffee brewer years ago. It makes significantly better coffee than a standard drip brewer and I use it pretty much every morning. It’s not as easy as pushing a button or using a K-cup, but there’s something slightly meditative about the process.

I’m also not in that age group (I’m late 30s) but I’ve been watching TV and movies with closed captioning enabled since I was a kid and have found that it helps my comprehension of what’s going on with plot lines, etc, immensely. Maybe I’m just a stronger reader than listener, but I’m at the point where I vastly prefer to watch movies at home rather than at a theater because I can have CC on by default.

I’ve also always had CC on for my kid and they’re an excellent reader. I don’t have any concrete evidence for it but part of me thinks their strong reading skills are partly due to that.

It’s not totally an archive per se but I discovered this site for electronic music when it was originally a Flash application: https://music.ishkur.com/

The Walmart near us has a set of EV chargers in its parking lot that offer free charging for up to 2 hours. I bought my first EV earlier this year and I’ve definitely visited that Walmart more than I ever would before because it’s convenient to get a quick charge in and grab a few groceries, etc, I might need anyway.

We recently started letting our 9 year-old walk down to a nearby park alone to meet and play with friends. It’s helping them build independence and confidence and I have no concerns about kidnapping, etc, because it’s only a couple of blocks away and we live in a safe neighborhood (they also have a phone they take with them and know to call/text us when they change their plans and go to another nearby park).

What I DO have concerns about, however, is overzealous adults who see a kid playing alone at a park and decide to call the police or child protective services.

I’ve been remote at least some of the time for the last 4-5 years and fully remote since the start of the pandemic (which is what I intend to do going forward).

I totally understand why some people would rather be in an office, even those who are “just” writing code. But I’m just not a very social person and I value time with my family over in-person social interactions with my coworkers (despite my current coworkers being very nice and awesome people).

There’s also just zero need for me to be physically colocated given the work that I do, so any benefits are greatly outweighed by the commute and lack of flexibility that comes with a requirement to be in an office everyday.

I would add that it’s not only expensive financially but also in terms of time.

I grew up very poor and was fairly poor as an adult until about 6-7 years ago. I constantly had to make time trade offs. Do I exercise or evaluate and cut coupons to make my meager grocery budget last longer? Do I meal plan to make my money stretch further or spend that time investing in a skill? Not to mention things like not having reliable transportation, which meant taking the bus to and from work which tends to be a 2-3x longer commute. And if the bus was ever late, minimum wage retail jobs don’t really care so you get a “mark” on your record and potentially written up/fired if it happens too many times.

I consider myself very fortunate that I was lucky enough to find myself a tech job and pull myself out of my previous financial situation. But I get the sense that a lot of people here haven’t been through that so they underestimate just how much more difficult it is to be poor, at least in the US.

This is one line, posted out of context, from a very large codebase. I don't agree that you can learn much about the culture at Twitch from this snippet.

In my case they didn’t. My former boss and I basically met up for lunch, talked about it, and then a few days later I got a new offer letter. I did have to do another round of background checks just to make sure nothing had come up in the months I was gone. They also hadn’t fully backfilled my role (they had hired a couple of contractors during my absence) so it was still technically an available position.

Another thing to note is that when I left previously I did so on very good terms and gave plenty of notice. I’m sure that played a part in how willing they were to have me come back.

I will say that for me, personally, the people I work with have a much larger impact on my job satisfaction than any of the technical aspects. I don’t currently work with the most advanced and interesting technologies but I do really like the people on my team and we all get along and work really well together.

An anecdote: I previously left a job to pursue what I thought would be a great opportunity to work with a “modern” and fun technology stack. However, my new manager turned out to be a totally manipulative jerk and my coworkers were rude and uncaring. I lasted about 9 months there (enduring stress and panic attacks like I’d never dealt with) before I reached out to my old boss and asked for my old job back, which is where I’ve been for the last 4 years and I’m very happy I made that decision.

So even if the stack is terrible, think about how other aspects of the job impact your mental health and stress levels. Can you live with a terrible stack (or maybe even think about ways to improve it) while working with good people? Does your compensation cover any downsides to working with that stack?

If you feel you’re underpaid, can’t stand the technology, and the relationships with your coworkers don’t balance either of those aspects out, then I think it’s time to pursue something else. But be warned that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side.

> they keep showing up asking if I need anything, refilling my glass unprompted

Generally in the US these kinds of things are “mandated” by management or corporate offices, especially in retail stores and chain restaurants.

When I worked in retail I HATED bothering people who seemed like they were fine browsing without any help. But of course one time someone complained because they weren’t greeted within 3 seconds and didn’t receive white glove service, so at the door greetings and constant check ins became the standard practice even when most people don’t care.

Regardless of the tool you pick for actually managing the data, first you’ll need to go through some data classification to determine what your dimensions are and how to reconcile them.

For example, if you have multiple data sets for Contacts, what dimensions should be used to say that a record from system A is the same as a record from system B? Is it email address, full name, some other identifier? From there you have to then decide which source system is more “correct” and how to determine that.

You’ll also need to figure out if reconciliation should be automatic, manual, or both. Does a “master” record get flagged when it’s out of sync for user review, does someone have to intervene to say which values are correct and merge those records, or are you relying on some keys and algorithms to make a best attempt? In some cases it’s helpful to have a set of “staging” tables for dealing with the source data and a “pre-merge” table for resolving conflicts before overwriting the master record.

This is why many MDM platforms can charge as much as they do. They’ve already figured out decent ways to manage this for some known platforms (Salesforce, ERP systems, etc).

Written communication, with a special focus on “writing for an audience” (and by that I mean understanding what your audience needs and not trying to impress them). My company is now almost entirely remote and my team works with a lot of internal stakeholders. Being able to write clearly in a way that makes sense to your target audience is seriously underrated. Some people may think it’s “just” IM and Email but it makes a huge difference, at least for me.

I don't think I've seen this mentioned here so far, but a big reason why I use (and pay for) native apps is because the subscription management process, at least in the Apple ecosystem, is quite a bit simpler and less user hostile than having to go through an individual site/company for each service.

If I subscribe through the App Store, I can easily cancel my subscription at any time by going to one place and just clicking "Cancel Subscription". Contrast this with some well-known news sites who make you place a phone call and then give you the run around just to cancel a basic subscription.

It would be a nightmare to subscribe to multiple different websites and then have to go through a user-unfriendly process to cancel through each one.

I enjoy working on and solving technical problems, but the “core” thing that I’ve found I really love is working with other people to figure things out together (even though I’m fairly introverted). Once I realized that it shaped my perspective on a lot of work tasks and hobbies.

For example - a good friend and I regularly play battle royale and co-op games together after work in the evenings. The joy of those games, for me, is that we are communicating and working together to achieve something or win. I don’t get the same kind of enjoyment from single player games or games where I’m just grinding alone.

I think looking at “core values” and trying to extrapolate from there might be a good approach (or at least it has been for me). If you don’t have a sense of what those are, maybe take some time to reflect and see if you can find or create them.

For me it’s a tie between two:

- “Bloodmoon: I” by Converge and Chelsea Wolfe

- “Eternal Blue” by Spiritbox

Usually I am in the right lane. My area has laws where “slow moving” traffic should stay to the right, so I use the left lane for passing and move back over whenever possible.

Typically I am in the right-most lane. I was taught during drivers education that the left lane is for passing and that you should move back over to the right-most lane whenever possible, especially if you’re a “slow moving” vehicle.

But there are drivers who weave through traffic whenever they see an opening and those are the ones who appear to be angriest when they’re behind me in the right-most lane because they were impatient in the other lanes.

It’s similar in my area, but not just limited to truck drivers. It’s amazing to me how angry people appear to be when I drive exactly at the speed limit and refuse to tailgate the car in front of me.

They seem to think that I’m the one in the wrong for treating speeding hunks of metal that weigh thousands of pounds as dangerous things that can and do kill people.

Fair question. My general understanding is that the risk is very low for children, especially when it comes to severe disease and/or death (though there are still some questions about long-term effects), and even more so now that they have been fully vaccinated with two doses.

I’m mostly just curious if we’ll see booster recommendations for children as we have for adults and if the efficacy impact of Omicron is due to time or something inherent to the two-dose vs three-dose mechanisms at play.

And generally as a parent I’d prefer to see my child not get sick at all, though I know that’s basically unavoidable. That being said, I like to understand what the risks involved are if possible.

One thing I’m curious about and on which I haven’t been able to find any good data/information is whether the drop in vaccine efficacy is a function of time since last dose (i.e. due to waning over time) or whether the third dose drives up total antibody or T-cell activity and/or broadens the immune response which leads to it being more effective against Omicron.

My spouse and I have both had boosters but my child has only had two doses because they only recently authorized use for children ages 5-11. I think my spouse and I are fairly well protected but it’s uncertain if my child is well protected or not given the timing of everything.

I don’t have any good advice for you but I do sympathize. My wife runs a small coffee shop and about a month ago Instagram flagged her business username as spam without any warning which prevents anyone from tagging and sharing her business. She’s had the username for over a year, and does NOT spam other pages with it. The closest she ever gets is people taking pictures of their drinks in their stories and posting with the business tagged in them.

We’ve tried and tried to get in touch with someone at Instagram but it’s impossible to do so. The only reason we could figure out it was a spam issue is because I opened the Chrome developer tools at one point to review the network request made by the “Report a Problem” button and there was a property in the POST body labeled “spam=true” (the message on the screen was a generic “sorry we couldn’t do that please try again” error). Eventually we gave up and changed the username to get around it, but all of her branding material has the old username.

It’s incredibly depressing and frustrating that there are no avenues to get these kinds of things resolved, especially for small businesses that depend on word of mouth and social media to grow and succeed.

Some of the smaller markets in our area sell milk in glass jugs/bottles and charge a deposit (usually $3-5) that you can recoup if you wash and return the container. You can also keep the glass container if you want to use it for other things and just lose the deposit.

It makes the upfront cost higher but if you exchange a used bottle for a new one each time you buy milk it ends up being about the same cost as a plastic jug with quite a bit less waste.

I’m a pretty casual user who does some basic photo touch ups and and occasional vector art design. For my use cases I use Pixelmator Pro (https://www.pixelmator.com/pro/) and it works perfectly. It’s also dirt cheap (40 USD without any discounts) for what it does and they have a decent trial period.

The biggest downside is it’s macOS only.

I’m not sure if this fully addresses your comment but, similar to AWS SQS, Google Cloud Pub/Sub supports both message ordering[0] and dead letter topics[1].

[0](https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/docs/ordering#receiving_mess...)

[1](https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/docs/handling-failures#setti...)

> But, rolling back to your post: why can you not retire?

For background: I came from a poor family with a history of substance abuse problems. I lifted myself out of my family situation by attending and graduating college, but in order to do so I had to take on a combination of student loan and credit card debt, most of which I am still paying off despite having a decent tech industry income. No one ever taught me to save, so I had to learn budgeting and finance management on my own while I was in college. I didn't start really saving until a couple of years ago when things sort of stabilized.

Currently I am able to save about 5% of my income for retirement with a match from my employer. However, every "retirement calculator" that I use basically says I will fall well short of replacing most of my income in retirement, even if I assume Social Security will fill in a portion (which is uncertain to me). I also don't currently own my own home and that also feels like a very far off prospect if not an impossibility.

> Thought about moving somewhere were this is not a problem?

I have considered moving to a cheaper area, but unfortunately that means no longer being near some family connections so it's not a simple decision. My current job also adjusts salaries based on regional cost of living, so I'd have to factor that into the equation.

> I am one of the people who never wants to retire

Honestly, this is also a factor for me. I am very fortunate that I like the work that I do and work is, for better or worse, where I get most of my social interactions. I have some hobbies but none of them make me feel as engaged as when I am solving a technical challenge or working on a high-level business problem.

My spouse and I also joke that we might kill each other if we're both just puttering around the house without anything "productive" to do.

They get flagged for a variety of reasons:

- They are considered "off-topic" as outlined by the HN guidelines (Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.)

- They are unlikely to result in "good faith" debates about the case given how politically charged the subject matter is

- The comments very quickly devolve into flamewars and/or trolling

I honestly don't think anyone is trying to "squash" debate about the case due to some personal agenda. It's just unlikely that the comment sections on those articles are going to be productive and/or result in anything new or interesting.

> Will you be managing your current peers?

Yes, which is another factor I’m considering as part of the move. I have a good rapport with my coworkers and I would hate to lose that, but I don’t think becoming a manager necessarily takes that away.

> And lastly, why do you want to move to management?

I’ve been involved in a large project for the last 7 months or so and during the course of it I found myself more and more taking on the role of “unblocker” and providing guidance rather than delivering features (though I’m still doing that too). I like being the one to help talk through ideas and come up with a good solution even if I’m not the one ultimately implementing it.

I’ve also found myself “laterally” managing some of my peers so becoming an actual manager feels like a logical next step.