vegancap

It's been late several times, and I've had to remind and pester. I started working with them full-time in December, they pay every two weeks, the mid-week payment has been late a few times. But I said 'this is now my full time wage, so I need to be paid before the 1st because of bills'. So there was never an issue with that one until this month. I sent a reminder the day before, which was ignored. Then, as warned, all my bills bounced. Three days into the month and nothing still.

I suspect they're not happy with something (this happened once before I was full-time, I knocked the money off for a single task that they weren't happy with, which was something I know I'm not good at, but tried anyway). But like... you can't play those games with someone's full time salary. It's insane to think that's okay.

I can certainly prove I did a whole bunch of work for a fairly lengthy period, so could be something worth me exploring. Thanks for that! Was about to just write it off

Going through something similar now, all my bills and direct debits bounced today because I wasn't paid and my reminder message was ignored. I guess it's always a risk. I have no legal recourse because I didn't have a contract (was told it was going to be sent over to me, but never was, which seems intentional now come to think of it...).

If you have a contract, you might have some legal recourse you could pursue if it does turn out they're out of runway. But, if they're not making any effort to explain the situation to you, i.e., keeping you in the dark, then just get out of there. This is your livelihood at the end of the day, how you pay your bills. Don't accept it. Do what you can legally (depending on your contract) to recover what you can and move on asap.

That's a good point, I realised as I was writing my original comment that I'm probably using very recent definitions of those terms. Historically, 'techno' probably was a more all encompassing term, so it's easy for me to discount all of the historical disagreements based on the current definitions. So, I'm sort of over-simplifying it just by using todays definitions

This issue seems to stem from the misuses of the term 'techno'. My understanding is that Detroit was house music. I feel like they're using the term 'techno' as an all encompassing term for electronic music. Detroit House and German Techno sound nothing alike and have different influences (and some shared influences if you go back far enough). They both stemmed from Disco in the likes of Summer's etc, but diverged in very different directions, House retaining more of the Disco musical elements, Techno retaining more of the synthesised and electronica sounds.

I could be totally wrong here, but Techno is more than just loops 4x4 beats, and so is House, so it's kind of apples and oranges. I'd associated Techno with Germany and House with America, I'm not sure there's a valid dispute here?

As if they posted a link to his LinkedIn...

Oh man, this is excellent news. Wrestling with my 16-inch laptop out of my overpacked rucksack, then trying to cram it back in again when you're cutting it fine already is a pain

I paste whole blocks of code into it and ask it to improve it, like make it simpler or reduce duplication. If I have a straight-forward 'thing' I need to do, like, break a file up into chunks of a certain size, I'll ask it to produce that code. So, scenarios where there's a clear-cut task. I recently had to write an SDK in a bunch of languages, I had it convert most of it from one language to another without a huge amount of refactoring/tweaking.

I exported all of my trades into CSV format in 3commas, and asked it to generate the Python code to analyse various hypothesis for that data, which I then pasted into a Jupyter notebook.

It's incredible how much time it's saving me day to day already!

It actually got me my current job. An investor found my blog on Go microservices, and was looking for someone with some experience around that to help get his product/platform off the ground. I worked on it part-time for a couple of years, then when I got made redundant late last year, I got the chance to work on it full-time. And I absolutely love it.

Asides from that, it improved my written communication skills, my ability to constrain ideas and concepts down to the bare minimum. I took it down recently as the content was old and the website needed updating, and I got requests from folks in India, China and Russia requesting me to put it back up again because they use it as a reference. I even found out it had been translated into Mandarin, and was shared a lot around Chinese tech blogs. It blew my mind. It wasn't some huge effort to make really, but it had a big impact on lots of people trying to learn Go and microservices. I wish I had time to revamp it and do some more, but sadly not these days!

I'm not sure it's age related, sure, we might slow down slightly over time, but what we lose in speed... we gain in wisdom, soft-skills, experience in general. Which I suspect more than makes up for a slightly decline in sheer speed cognition wise.

I can't help but think of Donald Knuth, aged 85, sat in his home office somewhere, still chipping away at some of the hardest problems in computer science.

It sounds like your problem is something more temporal. For instance, someone else here mentioned about other stresses and responsibilities in your life for example. It might be that it's just a boring and arduous task, not everyone excels at tasks that are just not that interesting. Besides, I don't think the vast majority of us are good at remembering layers and layers of calls and abstractions.

My advice is, there's probably nothing wrong with your abilities or your brain, just try to work on small sections at a time and don't be hard on yourself. We're not 100% all of the time, there are so many factors that play a part in how we perform on each task.

I'd also say that, 40 isn't particularly old, it's easy to think that when so many engineers are in their mid-20's, but in the grand scheme of things, your cognitive abilities probably haven't changed all that much since you were twenty-something. Hang in there mate.

I have ADHD and have found Slack to be a massive distraction. I haven't fully solved the issue, but explaining to your manager 'look, I can't always be available on Slack, I need to block time off in my calendar where I have Slack closed' - to any reasonable manager, that should be absolutely fine. Set your status to something like 'distraction free mode' and just close it for a few hours.

You might feel a sense of separation anxiety doing this initially, but you get used to it, especially when you realise you're almost never missing anything important by doing this. Start small perhaps, block off an hour a day for a week, then next week block off two hour periods. Eventually, try to block off certain mornings or afternoons. Try to keep the times you do this consistent so other folks in your team know/expect it. Just be honest about it and step away from it, if they're a decent place to work, they'll understand and encourage it. If they don't and expect you to be 100% available all the time, then they're both ridiculous and not a good place for folks who are neurodivergent, which is a bit of a red flag

Shame, Atom was an absolute game changer back in the day. Pathed the way for new text editors. Fond text editing memories!

I haven't used PHP in almost a decade, but I've been super impressed with what I've seen in the most recent few versions. Looks really cool, it's gotten me tempted to dust it off again at some point

It was 16%.

It was 16% and it sucked.

Not at all, writing code only make up a relatively small portion of what engineering actually is. Writing code is a tool in the tool box. Engineering is about managing complexity, creating order, understanding what to build and when.

It's so much more than lines of code. And in my experience, programmers who started later in life can pick up how to code pretty quickly, and they don't need to be amazing coders, because I've found them to be realllly good with all the other stuff. I've found them to be cautious, good at communicating, able to think about problems at an abstract level, very dutiful and see the importance of things like documentation and keeping boards up-to-date etc.

When I was 21 and coding, I was rising the ranks as a coder pretty quickly, but I lacked the maturity to see the bigger picture, I neglected processes - and even dismissed them, I didn't think about things like reliability, I didn't really think about product fit or all the none code related things. I didn't even see them as my concern half the time. In fact I'd go as far as to say I was a bit of a liability at times.

So, I've found older programmers introduce an air of calm, wisdom and diligence that, certainly I had absolutely none of as a precocious 21 year old programmer.

In fact, I work with an intern who's a fair bit older than me (I'm in my early thirties), and I'm often amazed at the things he considers and mentions, things I hadn't given a second thought to, and they're not necessarily technical or code related things, they're the bigger picture things and ideas, that are just as vital as writing code. Oh, and he's gotten to be a good coder in a short space of time, too. I think older folks are more focussed and methodical learners generally. I spent most of my 20's trying to learn about 10 programming languages, badly. Rather than learning the few I actually needed to an intimate level.

So in summary, I've found that older programmers have life skills and experience that help them get up to speed that perhaps younger programmers lack. And they also tend to be better and all the none-code but vital skills, which I certainly lacked when I was in my early 20's. I absolutely love to see a mix of ages in a team, because they bring different skill sets.

I hope not, I genuinely enjoy driving, I love the feel of shifting gears in my Type R. Plus, in a lot of cars, Type R's are a good example, they have a really high red line, you can squeeze a lot of revs out of the engine. But the gear indicator tells me to shift up at around 3000rpm. Which is more fuel efficient, for sure, but where's the fun in that? I want the option to drive like a lunatic from time to time and get the most out of the engine. I've never driven an automatic, so maybe that's still possible somehow. But I love the interaction with the engine you get from a manual.

Exciting idea, I love Clojure, but every time I tried Clojure, I found myself butting heads with the Java ecosystem, and I always wished it had its own ecosystem and interpreter/compiler. I will caveat that that's just because I've never spent long in the Java ecosystem, so it's not a criticism of the current Clojure + Java ecosystem, more my own lack of experience.

Yeah we're not really equipped for this...

A friend of mine who's lived in South Korea and China for the past ten years tried to open a Monzo account and they denied him without reason. I suspect it's because he hasn't had any credit history in the UK for the past ten years. So suspect lack of credit history is a big factor. Which makes sense, but it does make it useless to a lot of people. Especially given you have to apply to enable the credit features anyway

This website has a list and schedule of active and historical numbers stations, with links to listen in live. If you're fascinated with numbers stations, this is a must: https://priyom.org/

Having the house to myself, cracking open a beer and putting some tunes on

Love it

I've been playing Red Alert on this for a few years, and it's sooooo good. I used to play RA as a kid, and I love having it back.

I lived in Lichfield for eight years, there's some really decent restaurants there for sure. Not that I ever went! Surprised to see a Birmingham Mail article, front-page HN :D

It's potentially incredible for the established artists though

Not to be overly cynical, but could that create a surge of people claiming to be artists, given the lack of means testing?

I work for an ISO certified company, our company laptops have specific things for things like firewalls, allowed software, etc. Things for actual security. But no spyware, I don't feel like you need spyware to get ISO or SOC2, just sounds like a ruse to me for a company that lacks trust. Big red flag.

If it's your own personal laptop, then it's your property, they have no right to make you install something on it. If it's their laptop they've given you, then they do. And it's up to you whether you want to work in that way. But as I said, that would sound alarm bells for me.

Oh god yeah, I wish SO got better at blocking scrapers, I'm pretty sure services like CloudFlare have anti-scraping protection. They need killing off ASAP!

I really hate these. Especially when I'm trying to figure something out and I'm struggling to find answers, I end up haplessly finding the exact same wrong answer on three different sites.