user_agent

You might want to run it through something like Cloudflare to prevent the DDOS problem. It's free, easy to configure and has a couple more perks on top.

I'm not a fun of Cloudflare, but until I'll find time to organize a proper security for my network (I too host a personal website on my home BananaPi m1), Cloudflare is better than nothing / being completely opened to the world.

Plus some of what you have mentioned, @OP, craves to be packed into Docker containers!

Well, Ansible is the kind of software which does exactly that and has been created to address this issue from the start. It's an industry standard. You define how your environment should be configured in a declarative way, and Ansible connects via SSH to your machines and does the job for you; might work like cron does - running periodic tasks. Surely a very useful tool for everyone who has anything to do with bare-metal machines.

You can always go with the Bash / Python scripts, but hey, Ansible is really cool! I'd give it a try even for small things. I use it to get in touch with my home RaspberryPi cluster.

The above doesn't make you free from knowing how your operating systems work, BTW! That's a must.

Have fun!

I just wanted to quickly thank you people for making topics like this one widely discussed, so I can easily make a decision to blacklist that company as my future, potential employer, saving time for more reasonable options!

This is how I see it: the only reliable / stable model in which our civilization has a chance is the one in which everyone auto-regulates himself. In other words everyone must take responsibility over one's life.

You start with yourself. Make yourself resourceful, healthy, etc. Then you can have a solid chance to do something for others. The other way around - immersing oneself in helping others combined with sacrificing yourself is a big pathology. Ayn Rand has been writing about that her whole life. Besides, it's easy to do virtue signaling coming down to presenting oneself as an altruist. Building a life that works and has meaning is much harder. Don't go the easy route.

Whether you opt out or join doesn't matter. What matters is if at the end of your existence you can look at yourself with peace in mind. Start with small things. That's not a shame at all!

We're not in a complete control of reality, but every one of us with sufficient effort can master his own life. This is how we can produce something that's bigger than the sum of its parts. So, the starting point is very simple: contribute to stuff that matters, refuse to cooperate on harmful enterprises. Neither of them has the "ignore" part in it. Only ignore those things that don't matter.

Yes. Basically this is why I went away from a very successful career in tech sales to Fortune 500 companies and became software dev. Being a dev enables me to work in a much broader group of companies, so I can at least abandon those I'm going to find not in line with my moral values.

Look, buddy, this is a very serious problem. The more you're going to work on your personal philosophy, the more problems you're going to have with moral compromises like the one you've mentioned. Please, do yourself a favor and try to deal with that problem BEFORE it's going to be a much bigger issue.

I'm kind of proud of you because of your "The only viable action I can think of is to quit and not participate". If more people could be like that, most of the evil in this world would be long time gone.

I can only second that!

The control part is crucial here. From psychological perspective - human beings loose motivation when faced for a prolonged amount of times with environments they can take control over / achieve satisfaction. An edge case scenario within the same set of problems is called learned helplessness and is a well know phenomena.

Gain control, and you will feel all the good juices flowing thru your body again.

2 pages long article with 2 short paragraphs on the topic, not answering the question stated. Considering the importance of the topic, I say the article is a click-bait at best.

Go and minus me now, but at least improve the quality of your writings. I hope you will.

It's been proven long time ago that generally the approach of generalist-specialist is probably the best one universally, looking like an upside-down "T". You are a generalist, but in one specific category you're also an expert.

The above is of course purely theoretical and all depends on how you're going to compose your "T" in both: the generalist part and your specialization.

For instance and contrary to a popular believe, a model in which the base of your "T", the generalist part, is narrower but you know a little bit more about every topic than just scratching its surface like in the above paragraph, is not an optimal one. It might be even a waste of precious time.

Consider risk management of both strategies and their statistical implications. The first one is much better suited for dealing with unpredictable, real (volatile) world than the second one, although it's not intuitive at the firs glance. But it's very important to understand that risk mitigation and hunting for chances in life has exactly the same profile (they are mirrored to each other). It's called a proper (beneficial) convexity [take a look on Nassim Taleb and his works - highly recommended] when you're set up in a way that enables you catching good winds and ride a wave of opportunities (and in case of Taleb's antifragility models - even disasters).

There is no balance! There are only trade-offs between risk and chances of success. Positioning oneself in a good direction is the key, and in the world where "I have no idea what I'm doing" MUST BE a norm, being a generalist-specialist is a very, very good starting point. With time passing by one can easily fulfill spots that should be strengthened. It's much easier to do than pivoting from a bad place we've found ourselves in due to inappropriate, past decisions.

Again, read Nassim Taleb. At least The Black Swan and Antifragile. You're going to thank yourself later.

@bilater You might also make a search to execute after hitting enter, which doesn't work like that at the moment - one must mouse click the search icon.

(thx for fixing that C# thign!)

This is a serious problem. As someone with audio engineering background I can honestly say that probably only condenser microphones (like those big Yeti Blue youtubers use) are going to do the job. Contrary to a popular belief the dynamic ones, even if head mounted, aren't the best idea.

You can buy a cheap condenser mic from China for maybe 30 bucks. It'll be fine. You'll need an usb audio interface with a phantom power to run it (another maybe 50 bucks). Or go the easy route and buy an all-in-one usb condenser mic like Yeti. There are also cheaper options available I'm sure.

But! Before your friend is going to buy something ask him to tinker with his audio settings. Even the best mic isn't going to save you if you don't have a control over your audio workflow.

OVH.

They offer 1 free 5GB email account to every domain you register with them which I often find very handy. Especially for smaller initiatives that need just a contact@xxx.zz and nothing more. Plus they offer a free funny 10MB shared "hosting" with FTP which also can be used in a creative way.

There's a couple of them: an used high-end office chair, a good mechanical keyboard with ortho layout, a trackball instead of mice, a proper coffee maker from Italy, my videoconferencing setup with a head-on mic and a Canon cam instead of a webcam, a cat that keeps me company, a smartphone with 128GB+ memory, a couple of cheaper BT headsets instead of one so I can charge them interchangeably, LED desk lamps with regulated light color (I have 6), an electric scooter, a worst-case-scenario emergency supply for 2 weeks...

I like this thread!

OK, I just figured out you can use quotation marks around the language field which does the job for C#, but I'm not sure you want to keep it that way.

Yeah...

@bilater The search can't distinguish C from C# [I corrected myself in a comment below]. If you'd be willing to make it work, I'd be happy to use it. Other than that, good job!

I'm a junior dev, so I try to stick with things that have been proven to work without problems. This is why I think you can almost never go wrong with SQL. Some say that PostgreSQL is one of the most advanced ones and it's free. Others say and I can confirm, if your projects isn't huge give a try to SQLite. On the other hand there's this "new" trend with no-SQL approach, but the only proven thing I know about it is that there are people out there who made their career from saving other companies from troubles generated by young devs / CTOs / architects wanting let's say MongoDB very much, which occurred to be often a terrible choice. That makes me cautious. Don't ask me about details regarding that - I don't know.

I have personal experience with MariaDB / MySQL and SQLite. A pleasant thing about both is that they are reliable and you are going to find a lot of resources (also help) online, which saved me some headache a couple of times. In more complicated projects I'll be using Postgres. I'll try to keep Mongo-ish stuff away until I'm going to have a very specific reason to use its advantages, which I don't fully understand at this point.

Again, I like things I can rely on. SQL is one of them.

PS: I'd be willing to know more what are you going to simulate @curiousgal. MC simulators are cool!

Interesting.

@dongyx Problems I've stumbled upon: 1) the website dongyuxuan.me has a bad SSL cert. 2) The sub-site https://dongyuxuan.me/posts/c2w.html where GitHub points to doesn't work.

This makes me sad. The only thing I can do in a case like that is to ABANDON every tool (having a replacement) whenever the company / group behind it starts to drift from the core idea toward strange waters having nothing to do with the objectives of that group... I urge you to do the same. Consider that personal integrity (calling a scam a scam is a matter of honor) is a crucial factor in being in a good relationship with oneself. Let's not accept immaturity as a new norm. Let's slowly and methodically make unfit ideas die, like evolution does. Peace. PS: I never thought that I 'll live thru that kind of crap from tech industry on a large scale. PS2: Think what would happen if evolution would be so easy on its creatures, leaving partially-sound ideas as blueprints for the humanity to deal with. You eat an apple, and you crash your teeth on an unexpected brick of gold inside of it. What? Although gold is precious, a bar of gold found that way is a misery. And it makes the existence of that kind of apple just... Inelegant. Wise nature doesn't do that, and you shouldn't too. Some things are the way they are because it's the most optimal way for them to be. The passage of time is an excellent tutor of what might be considered as a proven solution. The master branch concept has been working for a long time. I have it in my muscle memory by now. And NOW some kind of enlightened, progressive geniuses are going to tinker with how the feedback loops between my mind and the universe have been set up? No way bozos. Get back to school. Take some lessons on philosophy, and maybe even oh history, so you can understand that a wise man isn't going to speak until it's needed. Not even to mention that he isn't going to progressively cry on anyone's shoulder that he doesn't like a this or that definition. I'm a master of my own self, therefore I'm a racist. Said no one to anyone ;) One thing is sure - I'm not going to be a slave to the puppets of the neo-marxist war on language.

As someone who went thru 10+ years of corporate sales before becoming more technical, I can recommend a couple of books that are going to do the job for you - I built a career on the frameworks offered by them: - SPIN Selling, Neil Rackham [solution based selling is very important] - Major Account Sales Strategy, Neil Rackham [if you're going to work with Fortune 500] - Rain Making: Attract New Clients No Matter What Your Field, Ford Harding [that's a classic, but it's a little bit not in line with selling tech, although still worth reading, especially for biz dev]

There hasn't been ANYTHING new in selling for at least 30-40 years with an exception of the social selling trend, but that can be mastered rather fast over the net.

Yes, it's really that simple. Learn, apply, pivot. Repeat. You'd be surprised how many account / biz dev managers never had a chance to read. Therefore they speculate about "intuition" and "talent", which are obviously BS. Master the process and you'll shine (and your head is going to forever free from thinking endlessly if you could have done something better). I wish you luck.

Hmmm.... I definitely need a "secure", separated computer like that. The presented form factor is ideal, but the price is meh. 1,177 USD for 32GB RAM and a nice 512GB NVMe storage. That's too much. It's the same problem like with that German company that sells workstations with Coreboot, also for a little bit too much.

I need at least 24GB RAM and a good NVMe drive for Qube OS. The processor isn't that much important, though. I could live with i5 as well. The best solution I came up with for now is an old Intel Core 2 Quad processor + old Asus motherboard (Coreboot supported) that supports 32GB of RAM. Plus an NVMe drive on a PCI slot. The good side is that it's commonly known Core 2 Quad was the last "secure" Intel processor. Yet it's old and will be a little bit to slow for extensive virtualization.

People know a thing or two about Coreboot and Libreboot, but they don't realize that's still a wild west of computing. You either go with old platforms like the one I have mentioned, or you can choose from the offerings of a couple of quirky vendors that by definition must overprice their hardware. Those vendors and their new platforms (Purism is one of them) use some custom methods to cripple Intel Management Engine and switch UEFI to Coreboot. I'm not sure how secure the result of that process is to be honest. With old platforms it's always problem with motherboards supporting more than 8GB RAM. Kinda sad :(

The support from Coreboot isn't that great. It fits within the abovely mentioned problems.

If you have better ideas than me (complaining for the pricing and security status of new solutions like the one from Purism vs. suffering from virtualization low performance from old processors that are IME free) - please let me know. Maybe I'm missing something.

I'd be so happy to be able to get a new mini PC with let's say an AMD processor, deprived of RAM, SSD, etc.,; but also reasonably priced and PROVEN THAT the vendor managed to kill IME and implemented Coreboot properly...

@OP Listen to me very carefully, because what you're going to read here might significantly not only improve your skills but also make the whole process of learning languages far more simpler than what most people (incorrectly) apply.

There's a branch of linguistics called "applied linguistics". Within it the people studying it learn how to - and this part is crucial - teach a person of a given nationality a foreign language of choice using proven, mostly effective methods. As you see, the AL process is going to look like differently for an Italian leaning Spanish and an American learning Polish. This is why the person that can guide you, a teacher, must be of your native nationality. It takes on average 2,5-3,5 years of not that hard work to make a person speaking let's say English into someone who's impossible to distinguish from native speakers. I've seen the results myself, and I was glazing my eyes!

Instead of looking for a regular teacher take the one that's been studying applied linguistics instead. Those people aren't much more expensive. You need a guidance of that kind because someone knowledgeable must tell you what you, specifically, do wrong. Having that knowledge and reasonable tools to address your challenges you're going to love what you can get from the learning process.

I'm the best example :) My teacher told me after 2 years that I'm the most untalented, lazy, not motivated enough, stubborn person she's ever seen in her life. Plus that the fact that she made me who I am today is her greatest success ;) Kudos to her - I'm doing pretty fine with English (being Polish). Moreover, I know what I don't know, so now I can work on my own. You can't put a price on that.

Good luck!