user_agent

Those are superb points!

You might want to know that (4) has been IMO solved (long time audio enthusiast here, spent more than 15 years on solving that exact problem, developed my own startup that was focused on making DACs with the best possible analog sections - I gave up to a better idea done by someone else, which I'm going to mention next.

Rob Watts, a DAC designer from the UK has solved the problem with his FPGA based DACs and pulse array analog sections. Instruments' transients and how they impact a listener (human hearing is far, far more complicated than vision) seems to be the key for the brain to mark a given sound a "natural one" and properly place it into 3D space. Watts works exclusively for Chord Electronics nowadays, but he'd started his own kind of DACs in the 80s. The guy is a genius, I have nothing more to say. My long time quest for properly sounding audio source has been finished. Currently he's working on his Davina project which is going to bring the same technology for audio reproduction (and rebuilding) to studios, leveling up his game even more. Stay tuned, because it's going to take some time. The only other company that does something similar is DCS, but they're extremely expensive and they're rather on the fun side of listening than accuracy.

Myself, I use Chord Electronics Hugo 2 DAC (that's the cheapest one having all important Watts' technology, ca. $2500; there's also Mojo - very cheap, but it's mostly for the on-the-go listening) paired with either Audioquest NightOwl headphones or my valve custom made stereo. It's a bliss.

PS: Regarding (3) there's no way noise cancellation technologies can produce superb audio. Not possible (unfortunately) at this point of technological advancement of how speakers are being build (and close to nothing has changed during the last 60 years in that area), so they should rather be saved for dealing with unpleasantness of very loud environments, not necessarily suited for music listening.

I don't care that much about my HN rank, but truth is a very important value in my life. The book I've recommended is a unique one (although I was able to point to a couple of misinterpretations the author made, but nothing critical), in a sense that it has a lot of that kind of information in one place (and I think it might be the only one book of that kind available; I have a dedicated book shelf on the topic, so I'm more or less aware of what's on the market).

I'm not going to make anyone here to change his mind. People have their own right to decide. Moreover, I think that's the only way we can reasonably coexist with each other.

What I don't like and I won't accept is people acting-out their negative emotions when challenged with a point of view that they don't like. We aren't children anymore. Either something is a fact or a logical extension of thereof, or it's a BS. I refuse to pay attention to inappropriately configured emotional "processors" in case of some individuals. Consider that the book offers only unpleasant kind of information. The one that makes you think that maybe you should change your approach toward matters you've been associating yourself with. It derails you. The one that says: ups, shit hits the fan, and there's going to be a lot of work regarding making it right again. I'm also a psychologist and the mentioned phenomena is well know to me. I expected nothing else. But I'll keep my expectations regarding maturity and logical integrity if one wants to get into a discussion with me. But I also guarantee that the book does all of that for a good reason and not without one.

I would never recommend someone a piece of knowledge not in line with the truth, or one that hasn't been well checked by myself. It's a matter of honor to me. What I'd like to ask people to do is to assess an importance of a given advice / recommendation by the actual importance of the topic itself first, even before one is going to move to fact checking. In other words: we should be vigilant when confronted with something of utmost importance and we should inspect the topic in that spirit. This is how one makes proper risk assessment BTW. For people who can't transcendent themselves when challenged with reality - there's no hope. Would anyone be interested what position a hopeless person takes regarding anything? I guess that's a rhetorical question.

OK, whining mode off ;) Thank you for your encouragement and you're welcome.

PS: I completely agree on your "I'd rather see it as a complex interplay between groups with shared interests". We might be differently approaching the conclusions / predictions, though. That's not a big issue. But I must say I'm rather on the be prepared side and I consider the potential technocratic future to be a very real scenario at this point. One thing is sure: the phenomena discussed can't be ignored by a thoughtful individual. That would be against facts.

Finally that kind of stuff starts landing on the main page of HN.

I highly recommend a unique book: "Surveillance Valley", Yasha Levine. Although not without cons, the book makes a very strong case for the Internet to be planned from the very start as a surveillance vehicle of the future. The founding grounds of some well-known companies are at lest surprising.

The first 50% of the book is about (rather unknown) history of the net industry, 1950-1990, with focus on three letter agencies and their impact on tech. The remaining half is about a broader picture regarding what we've found ourselves in and how the future is going to be like.

Surveillance capitalism is just a tip of an iceberg...

If you're someone who gets that the future by necessity will be both totalitarian and technocratic and you have a high-level technical ability / awareness of how one can plan for that, please LEAVE A COMMENT HERE, so I can at least take a look on your profile, read your entries on HN and follow you in the future.

It's incredibly hard to try to be a cypherpunk today due to a lot of BS people tend to recommend. A lot of awareness once quite common in the past has been forgotten. If you can help in any reasonable way, please do. I still have some time to make myself knowledgeable enough to be able to operate in that new world, but the topic is so huge and I truly think that one day my life is going to depend on that knowledge -- so I'm stressing too much instead of methodically work on it.

(I'm a web dev, I get some Linux, maybe even more than a little bit, I'm to some degree knowledgeable about both networking and security, unfortunately more on the level of enterprise products than fundamentals. I know a little bit about everything, which is far from thorough understanding of what's going to be really important in the future, and I have a persistent feeling that obscure / not well known solutions / tools are going to be a cornerstone of making it right).

If you really can distinguish a BS advice from a brilliant one, you're almost there. I consider what you do very important. There's no way one can do anything of substantial value in life, whether performed on oneself or others, without understanding oneself first (what is reality and what's it mean to be human, and what are logical extensions of these answers? -- are the oldest questions in philosophy; they're also considered the obvious common ground in terms of what people consider interesting among intelligent individuals). Making notes, creating written feedback loops with yourself, is probably the best way to get to bottom of what's really going on with almost everything. I know it changed my life. Decades passed by and I only do more of that. I knew you get it :-) I'm so happy. The world is going to have one more reasonable individual. So keep going!

Beware of HN and similar communities, though. Although often one can meet exceptional people here, the HN also suffers from usual: social-media-ish mobs, cargo cults, herd thinking. I wouldn't be for instance particularly eager to take life advises from techies. A lot of them are let's say not very much grounded in reality ;) But every person who can reasonably answer the previously mentioned "what is reality and what's it mean to be human, and what are logical extensions of these answers?" is truly a good candidate for asking. One must have a framework in which one interprets reality. Gödel's incompleteness theorems are all about that (that might be the most important conclusion in the philosophy of science ever made). Our problems, even if just trivial ones, are definitely a part of reality, therefore one must know reality top to bottom in order to efficiently maneuver in it. The only other wisdom one can stumble upon is how to efficiently deal with this or that (I mean technical, not necessarily technological, problems). I must say that HN is great for that.

Also, consider learning about biases typical for human beings. Among them the most crucial one might be the survivorship bias. Knowing what kind of cognitive errors people make tremendously helps in our own reasoning, especially in keeping oneself vigilant in regard to that kind of stuff. It might save you life one day.

PS: Regarding "sorry for the trouble" - to me our discussion is far from that. It's a pleasure to help others, especially if that person is going to really apply the advice. It's like having 1000 children all over the world. Good ones. Also, thanks for pointing that email visibility issue. Now I get it. I was pretty sure the email address is available for registered user, which isn't the case. Howk!

PS2: Surely, we can only validate ourselves using logic. Then we can take other people's words and put them thru the filter of logic. If something is going to remain intact during that process, it's worth to think about it. Usually it isn't going to be the case. There's a well known phenomena in psychology called "crabs in the barrel" problem. Take a look on that. Let's not be like that kind of individuals, also let's not listen to what they say. Otherwise we'd be left with no time at our hands to do the real work, only confusion which crabs are eager to share with others to make themselves feel better.

PS3: From my experience and to the best of my knowledge, there's only one kind of successful individual this planet can deliver. A self-directed, self-managing, hungry for truth one. Again, you seem to be on a good way toward that.

Nothing very fancy:

1) A home server for hosting a couple small websites for free, instead of wasting cash on $5/mo VPS. 2) A cluster of PIs for training with distributed computing (Docker, K8s). 3) An EMP proof remote backup case with a Pi and a large, encrypted HDD -- mounted in a metal military case intended for storing ammunition. I keep it in my pal's place.

Hahaha, this is brilliant. You made my day, @OP :-)

Yes, on several occasions when I was very young (therefore stupid) and angry, I put something like "suck by balls" with white font on my resume, when I was targeting companies I didn't respect. I don't know why / I don't remember. I guess I wanted to feel superior with my 1999 MS Word skills? Lol.

No, because that isn't going to work the way you think. Keywords search is usually performed internally on corporate HR systems, but not on the docs you attach to the process - ONLY on what you put in the forms on their website during apllication. They also calculate some BS numbers from that data, like: how many years of experience total, how many years of education, how old is the candidate, bla bla bla.

I'm not sure you're referring to me, because I both didn't refer you back to my profile for anything, nor I miss the email address there ;)

You're welcome. But I have something I'd like to ask you in return. Think about it - what's the point of gathering people's contact details if there's no prof that what they can offer even in terms of an advice is of any meaningful value? So, first read the books I've mentioned, or at least those you find interesting from that pool, then you can make your decision about how persistent you're ready to be in order to get to someone based on the real value that person can deliver. People are busy. Almost all of them. And a chance that a reasonable person is going to have more time than a regular Joe, who'd be thrilled to misguide you with his retarded ideas, is, well, not very reasonable. I'm sure you get it. Moreover, it's perfectly logical.

Regarding building your own healthy life philosophy your own work is crucial. Only rarely someone can point you toward a reasonable direction, which will mostly come down to a book recommendation. A back-an-forth Q-and-A ping pong game via email or anything else has no chance to work. I'd like life to be that simple, though! One needs to think for oneself, and there's no way to pass understanding from one person to another. Again, I wish it could be possible.

It's not the external events that are the problem, but the way one reacts to them. Healthy people simply deal with their problems keeping more or less positive attitude during the process. The moment you start getting into a downward spiral of retreat from life, sabotaging oneself, having a "crisis" twice a week - you know you need to start digging, because your emotional configuration defines you as not prepared for dealing with the world. Every form of walking in circles for a prolonged amount of time is the same thing.

Psychotherapy. Definitely.

Three words that changed my life: Getting Things Done (GTD) back-envelope project and tasks management methodology.

Great! I do it exactly the same way.

>Can you explain or post a picture of what proper tilting looks like?

It's very simple. Either make the whole thing flat, or tilt it, but make the part that's close to your wrists higher than the rest, so you can look like a mantis - you bend your hands in a similar way, which is the opposite to how people usually do it and where keyboard's jibs are usually mounted. In both cases gel pads for wrists are mandatory. And the keyboard should be close to the body, not the monitor. Split is a must too.

Sure, even if it doesn't look like so, I'm happy that Zoom exists. I use it every day without thinking about it at all. This is how technology should work. It should be transparent. Moreover, I myself converted at least 7 companies to use it instead of other solutions.

> Do you have any thoughts on why/how Zoom appears to have much higher quality than say Skype/Google Hangouts without the need for additional equipment?

Zoom founders are former Cisco guys. They took let's say 70% of what's the best Cisco has developed in terms of know how and started selling it for pennies. So, they have a lot of experience with that kind of tech. That results in: a great noise cancellation by default, extra good algorithms for balancing sound levels between participant (that might be even the most unique on the market), an algorithm that can focus on (also audio) for a currently speaking person - working VERY fast. It also seems that they leverage a big cloud provider for low latency between ALL continents (tested, 4 way connection between the US, Asia, Europe and Iceland - works probably better than anything their competition can offer). One must remember, though, that the initial cost of development of all of that, plus the cloud costs (it must be a lot, this is why they forbidden 1080p and HD voice) must have been very large when they had started. The only other company I've seen doing that in the last couple of years was Star Leaf (they were like a father to Zoom), and they are... I'm not sure if they're out of the market or in just a bad financial shape. Financially it's a high-level game. No wonder there's not that much actual competition. Only on the first glance all those products look similar, but Zoom is like what Skype was for regular people 10 years ago, although for enterprise. Microsoft is entirely different beast, and Google is just a joke for hipsters.

Skype belongs to Microsoft, and they went the UC way (like unified comms market does it always) - I mean that they assume you're going to make your config tailored up to your situation; which comes down to dedicated rooms, DSP processors, etc. Zoom went with completely different approach - everything is configured with some assumptions in mind. They are like Apple. They want you not to see all the files on your HD by default. No wonder it works wonder for a lot of people. Especially those non-technical ones! It just works at least reasonably well.

It's hard to argue with the fact that Zoom has nailed it from the very start. They made a bet and now they can enjoy the results. Being former Cisco guys, I'd just expect them to strive for quality too, but that's not going to happen. It's crystal clear now - even providing advanced encryption is now a big deal. They are going to be like Apple. That has both pros and cons. Up to everyone to decide for oneself, exactly as it should be.

Yet, I'd like to point to the fact, that the paramount value in videoconferencing since always was immersion. Now the market decided it wants more of the cheap+fast+I-don't-wan't -to-thing-about-it stuff. I want videocalls to be like in SF novels! I want it commonly used and 4k with ultra-HD voice, with multi-directional audio coming from like 7 different directions. I want immersion. I must be biased though, because I work remotely and I prefer it over other options ;) Howk!

What? After getting a proper audio setup for videoconferencing (studio quality) my jaw dropped on the floor when I realized how BAD Zoom's audio quality is. It's comparable to a 128 Kbps mp3 file. The only thing they do well is noise cancellation. That whole Zoom thing is built for people using their MacBooks with built-in microphones and speakers, and these are THE LOWEST quality possible. A set of those internal peripheral costs maybe $4. I was expecting something close to a RedBook (uncompressed 16 bit 44.1 kHz) quality investing money in a good microphone and an audio interface. Money wasted.

A lot of WebRTC software made by hobbyists has usually much better quality than Zoom has.

PS: Zoom also sucks in their over-compressed 720p. I use a Canon camera with a separate HDMI->USB encoder and what I get straight from that setup vs what Zoom can handle are two different worlds. Shame, again.

PS2: I've been using videoconferencing tools since 1995 (I was also selling high end ones like Cisco) for a long time. The quality delivered by them has been very good for a really long time. Zoom isn't even comparable to something like mid-range Polycom ;/

I use Zoom a lot, but let's be honest - the only good things about it is price and reliability (and good noise canceling tailored up to shitty laptop microphones). I tell you, guys, the Zoom people don't want to pay for bandwidth...

I can understand, though, that someone who uses only a laptop for calls might be in love with Zoom. Myself I'll rather zoom out of that product toward something better focused on quality, especially audio. Immersive experience is important to me. I don't expect that much. Just a stable 1080p (sharp!) and a RedBook audio.

(before anyone is going to ask: I sit on a 1 Gbps fiber... And my PC is an i7 with 16GB RAM)

I don't have RSI, I have Fibromyalgia. It'a a similar PITA.

What I'd wish to know earlier?

- That computer mices are retarded and trackballs are the way to go.

- That there are much better keyboards out there and the standard layout is retarded (ortho is a minimum) - currently using X-Bows, previously Microsoft Ergo 4000. There are options.

- That the tilted keyboard (its top tilted) is one of the worst ideas ever. It should be exactly the opposite.

- That I need to make breaks.

- That when something is titled "ergonomic" in 9 out of 10 cases is at best anti-ergonomic. Plus what's really ergonomic is often ugly.

- That weightlifting helps a lot with maintaining rarely used muscles in a good shape.

- That sometimes the only thing I need to do is to put my hands into a warm water for 15 minutes.

- That I don't need to write everything on a computer. I switch between a pen and a keyboard all the time.

One more thing that might help you:

There's this guy, Josh Kaufman, who teaches people how to decompose problems in a way that they can be more "digestible", so it's easier to approach them when we don't know much about a new topic.

Take a look on:

1) The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything ... Fast, Josh Kaufman

2) The Personal MBA, Josh Kaufman

Another one is Tim Ferriss. I doubt one can mimic their techniques, but sometimes it might be a good idea to just see how other people are struggling with new things and they win at the end ;)

You're not alone! Take a look on this guy (he's a seasoned developer; I've seen him here on HN I think yestarday):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FpRI-i5NNo&t=629s

I've shown a middle finger to Apple long time ago when they stopped producing macbooks without a non-glare displays and asked for additional 400 USD for removing a glass panel from a regular glare display unibody mbp to achieve a "similar" effect. Lol.

That company is dead to me. What they call "pro" now should be rather called "lol" instead.

This book is going to help you a lot with establishing whether you really can do it or maybe only have been fooling yourself:

Nail It then Scale It: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Creating and Managing Breakthrough Innovation, Nathan Furr & Paul Ahlstrom

It's basically a unique primer on the exact topic you've been struggling with. I would buy it even if the price was like 10k USD. I think that speaks for itself.

I wish you luck!

No doubt that clarity of thinking and weighting risks is a no. 1 priority.

I started as a clerk, then became a DJ (detroit techno, yeah!), then I was selling custom software in a software house, then I became an account manager for a couple system integrators (ICT), then a manager of a data center department (sales too), then a global account manager working for a giant tech vendor (networking) where I was dealing with the biggest accounts and massive deals, and now I'm a software engineer (web dev) and an entrepreneur (I've had 3 other companies in the past, too, with 2 of them bankrupt). 2 next companies planned, but I don't have time to startup them! Ugh, meanwhile I learned 2 foreign languages, become a psychotherapist (a good one!), read over 1000 books, became proficient in trading stocks, and God knows what else... I don't even remember. Ough, I converted from an atheist to a more spiritually aware person due to my journey thru philosophy and metaphysics ;)

I'm 34. I started working when I was 19. I don't have what you people call a degree. Instead I've put all the money that I was about to put into a "degree" to fulfill my home library with a lot of good books. Now I have 1k+ of them. Best investment ever!

What do you think, that I'm some kind of genius? WTF, I'm just a regular dude who's incredibly bored with BS the world has been trying to sell me on every corner. I do what I want to do and what makes sense. Period.

Coming back to the topic:

1) You sit on your ass and you start. If you don't have a clear vision why you are doing a given thing (especially long, complex projects), no wonder that you don't know how to start. Try to visualize the positive outcomes from the enterprises you want to dive into. Make a mission statement. Then make a plan. At least a hypothesis and test it. Doesn't work? Click next and prepare another one. Repeat, until it's going to work. Keep track of your attempts.

2) The same as (1). If you haven't internalize why you're doing a given thing, you won't stick with it.

3) You don't "pivot". You just do stuff you consider to be worth doing. The method is the same as in (1). First a plan / hypothesis, then fire and eventually you are going to get there. Isn't that logical?

There's no need to be scared, dude. The whole universe is trying to help you. No one knows anything! We can only test what we think might be a good shot. I'm not sure if you realize how much one can accomplish in 10 years. You basically can completely change your life... Twice. People tend to overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate long periods of time like 10y.

The rest is just details.

I wish you luck!

Obviously books:

[!] 1) The 360° Leader, John C. Maxwell

2) Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel H. Pink

3) The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, Reid Hoffman & Ben Casnocha & Chris Yeh

[!] 4) It's Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy, Michael Abrashoff

5) Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness, Frederic Laloux

6) Immature People with Power How to Handle Them, Larry Mullins

7) Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships, Eric Berne

In no particular order. That kind of list could be endless, but 1-7 I consider the most important ones (you can throw away (5) if you aren't interested in how to simplify corp structures) regarding shaping anyone into a reasonable leader. It's all about: attitude, values, understanding oneself and other people.

The only reason I'm putting all of this here is because it's a good investment. I hope you will read those, because I don't recommend stuff I know nothing about to random people ;) This world desperately needs better managers, not another infantile prick who thinks he gets it (I'm not pointing that to @OP directly, it's a more general problem). Again, I can only hope that the 10 minutes I've spent here are going to blossom in the future as at least one good guy who knows what he is doing because he thinks about what he's going to do beforehand. If that's not going to happen that's going to be on you (and I will find you and then we're going to have an unpleasant conversation). Meanwhile, I highly recommend the mentioned books and reading in general. This is how you can easily distinguish yourself from a herd of management sheeple who consider reading to be harmful for their egos ;) Howk!

A general tip: I've written "books, obviously", because management is on of those disciplines where there ARE good books, as well as good trainings available. The books route is far less expensive, it's as good as let's say expensive couching, and there's some space between the lines in books in general one can utilize for thinking for oneself!

All of the above comes form my own experience.

In case of Linux, obviously:

CompTIA Linux+LPIC-1 Training and Exam Preparation Guide (Exam Codes LX0-103101-400 and LX0-104102-400); Asghar Ghori

Yeah, look, it's called purpose, not a "zone".

A book recommendation: "If Life Is a Game, How Come I'm Not Having Fun?: A Guide to Life's Challenges", Paul Brenner. Another one: "Man's Search for Meaning", Viktor Frankl. Regarding the "zone": everything written by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Pomodoro technique.

I've just posted extensively about that in a similar thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23531361

Here you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23475085

There's been a topic recently on HN where an engineer was going into selling tech services. A lot of good advice there, including mine.

Crap, I promised myself I'm going to take a break from commenting to get some substantial work to be done, but this one is an important one.

Listen, @OP, never ever give up. I took me 7 years and a large pile of money to figure out I have Fibromyalgia (which occurs not to be what people think it is). My health was gradually worsening since I was 23 (now I'm 34 and in a middle of a multi-year treatment, enjoying first fruits of thereof). Modern medicine sucks if you have something non trivial to fight with. Doctors have no time to invest in complicated diagnosis and custom approach, pharma companies don't care about customers if these aren't coming in large quantities, and an overall level of awareness in the society about how human body should work is close to non-existent. You're on your own. The good news is that patience will probably get you there. But you need to become a CEO of your own healing process. There's no other way around it. No one is going to take that burden from you.

I consider my case a pretty complicated one, this is why it took 7 years to figure out. Meanwhile I became proficient in: neurology, cellular metabolism, brain biology, and a couple more. That's not rocket science. Having time at your hands you can learn whatever you want. If I was able in my condition, so will you. You're going to see yourself how bad doctors are with connecting the dots, and you'll (you have no choice) develop better models. That's going to also help you in your future life. An ability of thinking clearly might be the most valuable resource in the universe.

Don't be pessimistic. The chances that you have something that's incurable are incredibly low. Officially Fibromyalgia is incurable. Guess what - it isn't. Using a well proven method of eliminating invalid hypothesis, you're going to be left with a handful you'd like to inspect more. This is how one by one you're going to get to a valid diagnosis. From that point you can focus on healing and rebuilding your life.

Definitely include Fibromyalgia (seems to be in line with the symptoms you've described), CFS, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, etc in your research. Even if you don't have any of those, people involved in that kind of communities are going to help you to track down rare diseases you should inspect in detail. This book has been fundamental in making a breakthrough in my case: "What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Fibromyalgia: The Revolutionary Treatment That Can Reverse the Disease", Dr. R. Paul St. Amand.

The only thing it takes for you to dig out of that hole is just one person figuring it out and publishig results of his work. Even if he's alone and the health problem an obscure one, you're going to find it, so you can reason about it and test it. Again, the chance that you have something really incurable is very, very low. You'd be probably dead by now if that would be the case.

PS: Beware of diagnosis made by clueless medical practitioners. I've been diagnosed 14 times with false positive things ranging from Parkinson to ME before stumbling upon on the proper one. That's ridiculous. Doctors usually can't even understand what does it mean if something is a proof of X in their own field, so they constantly misinterpret data from scientific papers :( Not even to mention that they have A LOT of trouble with not making statistical errors.

I wish you luck, buddy. Now it's time to get to work. For both of us ;) Take care.

I don't need to conclude, I guess, than instead of looking for a way around in your work environment, all the resources should be put into finding a proper diagnosis. PS2: There's no such thing as pain without a reason. Look for a reason, not a BS explanation about how you should proceed from now on. Solutions, not a blind acceptance of what seems to be inevitable.

You're welcome. It's easy to forget about those things in the age of cloud computing ;)

"What would a more advanced router add?" -> A centrally managed firewall integrated with the rest of the networking stack = having cotroll in one place. You also can use the software one on Linux directly. I like to have a central one, because I have multiple servers behind it and I don't want to think too much about hardening them. This how I can make experiments inside the network not risking anything and overthinking the security for partially ready services. Good security is always about the firewall stuff divided into 2 parts - 1) a firewall on an edge; + 2) a light set of firewall rules on a server. It's just much simpler that way. Even if for the sake of reporting only.

PS: You can also buy just a firewall leaving your current router intact. pfSense is great software and it's free! You can install it on almost anything. An old laptop will do the job. Probably you could even run it on your Pi in a Docker container, leaving your Pi to perform 2 functions with additional Ethernet cards: the www server, and a dedicated firewall. Many options are available and tinkering with that is fun!

The config you've mentioned looks fine. The rest comes down to details: is your network going to survive a lot of incoming DDOS like traffic (how beefy is your network edge device, is your system going to block DDOS attempts automatically (with fail2ban for instance)), etc. Good idea with rate limiting on UFW. Try to take a look on the mentioned fail2ban too. It can do wonders combined with UFW. I consider it a mandatory resource on every of my servers, even if for SSH protection only (controlling login attempts).

If that's not clear enough: at this point I'm pretty sure your server is going to survive a flood of incoming traffic, but I'm not so sure about your router. If it's a consumer grade device, the answer is obvious - it's going to freeze when a DDOS is going to start. Too much traffic to handle. Either make it beefy to handle EVERYTHING possible and/or put a firewall before it, so it can put thru only the valid traffic. Otherwise you have a weak spot. As you see DDOS is also possible when targeted to a network edge, not only www servers.

Ok, let's not be paranoid. If you're going to have real trouble with DDOS your ISP is going to intervene. But anything below massive floods is on you. I'm just saying that most home routers are VERY weak to host any services behind them, so they're naturally a weak spot I'd be targeting first knowing your IP. This is why for anyone serving web services from your home it's worth to buy a professional networking equipment. Ten years ago I was selling that kind of stuff for 5k-40k USD a piece (like Cisco stuff). Now I have a $250 beefy Mikrotik which handles 10Gbps and does things on the Cisco level easily. I like where the networking market went! One of those good and cheap companies is also Ubiquity, which might be better know in the US than Mikrotik.

Have fun!

Yes, make your own blog and learn how to make it "visible" to a large audience. Also how to serve it in a seamless way for years.

I didn't like Twitter from the very start. There's no chance to have a meaningful discussion in a small window limited to a couple dozen characters regarding what you want to publish. That's just retarded. All important epiphany moments I've had in my life were coming from studying extensively written material, mostly books. Regarding short forms like articles, maybe even multimedia, something similar happened to me maybe 5 times. The only other role these short forms perform is to confirm my believes I've already had. That's pointless for someone who's looking for truth and/or has a need to solve a specific, important problem.

"There might be brilliant people in the world whose brilliant ideas never even crossed our ears" World if fulfilled with brilliant ideas yet majority of population has two left hands and can execute even two projects concurrently, whereas what we deal with nowadays demands a sharp focus on dozens of projects, goals, tasks, etc. Before one is going to move toward using other people's brilliant ideas one must do the job of becoming someone who's capable of doing any advanced stuff at all. That takes years if not decades and has everything to do with a lot of reading and thinking, and nothing with consuming 140-characters long BS created by bozos between eating a morning sandwich and scrolling thru Facebook. Don't be a sheeple, think for yourself. Except of rare cases there's no place for small windows with limited characters input in a life of thoughtful person.

How do you see my post fitting into what the Twitter crowd demands? And I've just touched a tip of an iceberg. Howk!

I don't know even one reasonable person using Twitter for things other than marketing or just messing with sheeple. Really.

PS: Twitter's whole model only contributes to the "loud ideas overcome great ideas" problem.

WAN acceleration comes to mind. I know this tech from the enterprise world of the past, but maybe there's something FOSS out there!

Besides that I'd go with some good stuff long forgotten: pure text email, terminal based web browsers, pre-downloading web resources you use often during the night (some browsers were able to do that in the '90s), IRC, etc.

When I started to use the Interned we've had ONE dial-up 64Kbps modem shared over 10 PCs :D It wasn't amazing, but everyone was able to get something valuable out of it. Now I'm sitting alone on a 1Gbps cheap fiber looking on my CHEAP router capable of 10Gbps... I've almost forgot how it is to be limited by bandwidth. But I also remember that limitations of that kind were responsible for people becoming very creative with how they use infra.

It basically comes down to mastering a firewall on your side and having visibility of what's going on with incoming traffic. I' ll do my stack the old-school way. I've got a nice Mikrotik combo router with a lot of very advanced configuration options for pennies (a pretty advanced ones are like $70, will do for 1Gbps WAN), including a nice firewall) and I already mounted it on the edge of my home network; I didn't have time to tinker with it extensively yet so learning the firewall is yet to be done. I'd like to somehow process at least firewall logs from that device in a centralized way with alerting for DDOS like events (easy to do - the Mikrotik already can send logs to a central server, so I only need to decide which network monitoring software I', going to use). For the incoming traffic analyzing I'll use GoAccess harvesting logs from NGINX, which works as a reverse proxy for all web services on my home Pi.

All of that is easier to do than it sounds. It's all about having visibility over what's going on and being able to react when needed.

The idea of Cloudflare - yeah, I don't like it either, because what they do is basically a man-in-the-middle probing on my personal services, but temporarily, or if one is under heavy attack, it does the job too. This is what that service has been intended for - to make the external IP address for your web services unavailable / not visible for general audience of the Internet.