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RegBarclayon Claude Skills

I've had this experience too. I like doing the work. Claude is good and I do find it useful for brainstorming and some other things, but... I still like doing the work.

RegBarclayon Florida's DeSantis signs law restricting social media for people under 16

I'll add my own anecdata here. My older kids are in their late 20s and one has bought a home and the other is buying a new build home this year.

My youngest is 18, the greatest consumer of social media of my 4 children, and she's convinced she won't be able to buy a home like her under-30 siblings are doing right now.

Sounds very much like a YMMV situation, but it feels like social media has influenced my youngest to believe otherwise.

RegBarclayon An Air Force officer who spent $11M searching Earhart's plane may have found it

Then Arthur Clarke wrote "The Ghost from the Grand Banks" in 1990 (after Ballard discovered it was in pieces) with a slightly more plausible approach to raising the bow. The wreck has deteriorated now to the point where raising it would probably destroy more than what would be recovered.

RegBarclayon We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon

I had a 4 tens option at a previous job. We could have Monday or Friday off. I especially liked it late in the day when the 5 eights people left and it was quiet and there weren't any meetings.

RegBarclayon My Favorite Liar (2008)

One of my kids' high school teachers does something similar - not limited to a single falsehood per class period and bonus points given on the spot for students piping up and correcting. High schoolers aren't always very forthcoming with details about their classroom experiences, so this one teacher does stand out simply because they get talked about positively at home, so I'd say mission accomplished on student engagement.

RegBarclayon Cooking for Engineers

https://based.cooking/chocolate-chip-cookies.html

Servings: 4

That's about my level of self-control with chocolate chip cookies.

RegBarclayon Down the mechanical keyboard rabbit hole

>Investing once into something that feels good to use every day is worth it totally.

My mechanical keyboard makes me happy. Does it matter if that's some kind of placebo effect or confirmation bias? Nope.

RegBarclayon US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent

Agreed. On daylight time or off - just stop changing the clocks twice a year please.

RegBarclayon Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

I try to use words that hit the Wheel of Fortune RSTLNE letters - BEAST, RUSTY, ROAST. It's served me pretty well. I haven't had to go beyond the 5th guess yet and commonly solve it in 4.

RegBarclayon Father who used a signal jammer to keep his kids offline at night faces jail

I bought a Gryphon router to deal with this. It conditionally blocks VPN access by device/user. It's generally been really good, but I've had to back down some of the settings occasionally because school assignments/sites were blocked.

RegBarclayon Starship is threatening NASA’s moon contractors

That was my first thought. I haven't seen The Expanse, but in any case, Heinlein preceded The Expanse by decades.

RegBarclayon Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

I've had that happen. I have my own domain, but some of my family just have it set to forward to gmail and they've had mail service disabled intermittently because of spam coming from the domain account.

RegBarclayon I relearned typing to save my wrists

I've had to change things up a few times over the years mostly related to the mouse. Dude, are you left-handed? No, switched hands with the mouse because my right elbow hurts. Listen to your body. Adapt.

RegBarclayon Ask HN: I suck at math, where to start?

I hadn't thought about it that way. I was good at algebra, but can't get through calculus to save my life. I've mostly found that coding is more about logic than math. When math has come up in my work, it's generally a formula or calculation that's already defined and I just have to code it into a system, which has never been a problem for me.

RegBarclayon Leetcode has taught me that I'm a bad engineer

FizzBuzz != leetcode. You are correct - easy problems are a good filter. After starting with one company I started sitting in on phone screens and candidate interviews and I was shocked at what a lot of applicants didn't know. Actually helped me with my imposter syndrome. I walked away from several interviews feeling like maybe I did know a thing or two!

RegBarclayon Leetcode has taught me that I'm a bad engineer

I'm also self taught with over 20 YOE and pretty lost with leetcode problems. But I get the job done and have a really good eye for user and business domain concerns. My last two jobs haven't required any kind of test. I actually had to do a couple of short narrative essays for one to prove I could write - which was a hoot because I majored in English.

The only job I've ever had to do any kind of test for wasn't leetcode - just a practical demonstation that I could write a basic CRUD app. Was actually a pretty good test to weed out people who were just completely useless.

I'm also finding that experience matters. It's just tough to get that across up front.

RegBarclayon Ask HN: How can a non-techie mom regain access to her FB account?

After the usual government ID requests were satisfied and the automated e-mails started saying "we're done here," I just googled it and found a few anecdotal cases where someone had gone the Oculus route. It worked for my daughter. She had a really tough time returning the Oculus. She's a slightly more than casual gamer, but she's also a poor grad student.

RegBarclayon Ask HN: How can a non-techie mom regain access to her FB account?

I'm no genius. Just good search engine skills. Geek dad jumped in an started looking for answers and found reports where others had done this.

RegBarclayon Ask HN: How can a non-techie mom regain access to her FB account?

This happened to my daughter. I got a notification that she'd changed her profile picture and it was changed to text that looked Arabic to me. Between the time I said something to my wife about it and my wife pulling up Facebook on her phone, the account was locked and disappeared.

HERE'S THE SOLUTION:

Purchase an Oculus device. Do not open it. It's a Facebook product and requires a Facebook account to use it. Oculus tech support has humans and inside channels to resurrect Facebook accounts that have been left in limbo by the dumb Facebook automated support.

Once you get your account back, return the Oculus device for a refund.

You have to act fairly quickly because the suspended Facebook accounts are permanently deleted and become completely unrecoverable after around 30 days.

RegBarclayon Atari took on Apple in the 1980s home PC wars

> But also in retrospect, stretching the budget to afford the computer was well worth it since it gave you and your brother valuable skills worth more than money.

I bought my Atari 800 and a disk drive using newspaper route money. Probably the best investment I ever made.

RegBarclayon Ask HN: How do you manage your personal documents?

Scan to searchable PDF. Dump in folders named for the year the document is relevant/scanned. I never need 99% of it, but when I do need something, search usually finds it or gets me in the neighborhood.

RegBarclayon Are daily standups hurting your team?

Something that I've noticed as a remote employee (before and after the pandemic) is that the usual interpersonal interactions that happen organically in the office have to be done intentionally. You've decided to have some fluff in stand-ups. My team has a social meeting every week for about 30 minutes. It's not running into people in the breakroom, but it meets the need to be social.

RegBarclayon It’s time for Americans to buy less stuff

Could we start with better quality stuff to buy? I own 2 washing machines. The nice one I paid more for is so unreliable, I bought a cheap one to use while I wait for the nice one to get repaired.

RegBarclayon When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost

I completely agree. The robot novels would be much easier stories to adapt with little deviation from the novels. It's been decades since I've read the whole canon of Asimov robot and Foundation novels, but I recall the Foundation novels being very dry and academic - I loved them, but they're just not high adventure action stories that translate well to the screen.

RegBarclayon Reasons Truck Drivers Walk Out the Door [video]

I've threatened off and on for years to get out of software work and go drive trucks. I love to drive and go places and I enjoy handling large vehicles.

I understand the realities of time management and that driving has it's own set of work and life challenges. But I'm still tempted.

RegBarclayon Reasons Truck Drivers Walk Out the Door [video]

This is universal. Eat where the truckers eat was passed on to me by my father in the US decades ago.

RegBarclayon Free Returns Are Complicated, Laborious, and Gross

I believe there's a certain sticker, but I don't recall the specifics.

RegBarclayon COSO, an ultrasound-based and reversible approach to male contraception

I wonder how long the effect lasts? How often would a man have to do this to maintain continuous contraception? Seems like there might be some long term effects from repeated ultrasonic treatment of any human tissue.

RegBarclayon Free Returns Are Complicated, Laborious, and Gross

My son worked the returns line at an Amazon facility. I can 100% guarantee that stuff gets restocked and resold - including stuff that shouldn't be resold. My son can look at the packaging on newly delivered purchases from Amazon and tell you before you open it that it's been returned and resold.

RegBarclayon Michelin's airless tires are scheduled for market launch in 2024

I understand the dynamics. My interests and driving style rank fuel economy over handling. I've never had tires wear out middle-first. I generally get edge wear first or even wear across the tread.

I just got a set of tires replaced under tread life warranty because they wore out edge first. The tire shop set the pressure higher than recommended and actually a little higher than I usually set it myself.