andyidsinga

For those of us out there doing consulting work and charging hourly - I encourage you to check out the Jonathan Stark podcast "Ditching Hourly"[0] and also the "2 bobs"[1] podcast with Blair Ens and David C Baker.

Both talk extensively about pricing work on either "value" (best option) or a fall back to pricing "outputs" (what gets delivered) ..and they try to get you out of charging by the hour - worst case charge by "blocks of time" (ex 2 week block of time minimum).

To be clear - getting clients out of the mindset of charging by the hour is extremely difficult ..all the back of the envelope math client will do in their head results in an hourly value.

[0] https://www.ditchinghourly.com/

[1] https://2bobs.com/

while I agree there are certainly adults playing. Web search of fortnite demographics put A LOT (like a 50% or more at < 24).

My own anecdotal experience in squads is that half are probably teens. So - the parent comment is certainly conceivable.

question: what makes hanging out in fortnite different from hanging out in a popular new bar; and corollary : moving on to the new cool bar when it opens up?

I've played a bunch of fortnite last year, even spent a bit of money on some outfits and got a better mouse for builds - don't want to be a default ya'know ;).

It was "fun times" for sure - even met a few people I tried to play with regularly if I saw them online. Ultimately, the fun factor sort of wore off....next.

speaking about interference : moved my home office to a new spot in the house the other day ago - which has 3 LED light bulbs for light in the space.

Turned on the ham radio - in scan mode - picked up someone talking, but noticed a bunch of static also being picked up. Didn't think much of it until I turned off the lights and the static went away. radio antenna was about 4 feet away from 2 diff bulbs (!).

These things are noisy ..thinking about trying a few diff brands to see if there is a difference.

also thinking about borrowing a buddy's spectrum analyzer to see if I can isolate the frequencies of the noise, might be able to put a a filter on the antenna.

Hey - thanks a lot for the note - much appreciated. will check out TNeo too.

I'm currently looking at FreeRTOS and mbed for a project on an STM32F07 mcu. Anything you can share about either of those that made you decide against?

Also considering a super simple no-os fw loop with some light abstractions because our real time constraints aren't very tight..

the organized Show HN event - actually sounds like a better idea that the OP. hmm - maybe organized for the same April 26 - 28 weekend?

curious to know who the "20 people who are already at the top of their fields" are.

...wondering why they wouldn't publish that so that folks who apply have a better idea who they'll be spending time with.

absolutely this! Gervais principle is a very valuable (and entertaining) way to decode what is going on in the organization.

The one bit of advice I would give to someone trying to use Gervais to understand someone in the organization's motivations : just because they may act according to Gervais doesn't mean they are bad or evil or broken in some way.

A long time ago I used to write CGI endpoints in C (strangely, not because I had to, I just wasn't as good at perl ). I used to say "its not a CGI 'script' maaan! I wrote it in C" with the accompanying l33t glance of respect in response ;)

Anyhoo - same arguments about forking, process & memory limits arose ; so things like FastCGI and ISAPI were the solution to reduce/avoid some of those overheads.

I suspect Rust based CGI endpoints would have similar <quote>issues<unquote>.

But I've been thinking about this CGI comeback from time to time - the left side of backend infrastructure (load balancerss, reverse proxies etc) and middle tier machine resources are much better now. Docker containers and lambda spin up is similar to some degree in terms of topology but maybe with even more overhead?

..so does does make one wonder if cgi like simplicity make a comeback with today's order of magnitude better infrastructure? I keep waiting for someone to come up with "lambdaGI" ..with will lead to "fastLambdaGI" and so on (and that's not a snarky comment).

This is an interesting idea - and sailplanes can carry a lot more than 2 people :) ex. Waco CG-4 .

That said, they were also nick named "flying coffins".

re: winch tow - when I was an Air Cadet in canada as a teen, we used to fly in schweizer 2-33's and occasionally went up on the winch - it was absolutely exhilarating!

While I generally agree with that - more ram is better. I was doing android os builds a few years ago for a wearable project and using the -j make arg reduced build time significantly.

curious though - what event / issue motivated you to even start looking for another solution?

> all they need is energy

A comment above about being as intelligent as a mouse seems to touch on this problem domain rather elegantly : "navigate the forest floor looking for food and avoid predators".

> One is more hypothetical: the microservices had gotten to the point that no one knew how to start the system if all services are down,

this is a good one and have been thinking about this myself. Even with smallish projects that might have 10s of container based applications / services. In my case I end up with what is essentially a 3 tier architecture with each tier being a group of containers/machines with their own rules for startup/shutdown.

> cliche-ridden

hmmm. have you read his book "The Innovator’s Dilemma" ? I was shocked that it's already 25 years old. I think it maybe be the seminal book on disruptive innovation. Low-end disruption, new-market disruption, "job to be done" AFAIK - those are all Christensen.

If there's cliches there - I suspect they came about in the shadow of his body of work over the years.

Thanks - I've been using "Plyr" [0] for some personal video projects. Interesting to compare features and see this one done in TS.

[0] https://github.com/sampotts/plyr

I thought Lesson #8 is pretty critical to anyone who either wants to lead or ends up in a lead position. specifically:

> Some founders take pride in working long hours. That’s dumb. You should take pride in having huge leverage (which often requires long hours). When I would work 100 hour weeks, instead of feeling self-satisfied, I knew I either 1) wasn’t delegating enough or 2) didn’t have the right leaders around me to delegate to. By working longer hours you can get 20% or even 40% more done, but with effective delegation you can get 10x or 100x more done.

I remember talking to a coworker years ago, who was also a long time software developer. I asked him something along the lines of what his near term goals were. I was surprised by his answer because I thought his answer would be about learning some new tech, getting a part of his project done etc. His answer was along the lines of "I want learn to lead better and hire good people to work for me so that we can get 10x more done" ..that really changed the way I think about leadership and hiring.

interesting list on github - thanks for sharing that here.

I'm looking at the "Coding is not fun" article right now ..will also check out the "Manufacturing an Artificial Intelligence Revolution" that you linked above.

I like the format / layout of this site - very low on distractions and easy to look at. looks like its this "touch folio" wp theme: http://dimsemenov.com/themes/touchfolio/

I was trying get to come up with pretty much your exact comment ..sparse with a sense of excitement pretty much spot on!

fwiw - here's a FAQ on non-competes in oregon: https://www.oregon.gov/boli/TA/Pages/ta_faq_noncompete.aspx

yep - that's pretty minimal - about what I get when I'm just starting off with a skeletal electron app.

for refernce, on win 10: whatsapp - 200+mb and 4 processes. slack - 325mb and 5 processes.

damn - i wondering if this with marketing in order to find out where your audience hangs out.

This! - and looking at the demo - there could be some attractive elements (no pun intended;) ) there to learn from & fork to hack on.

it does seem a little harsh on the eyes - especially relative to something like python.

that said, I've heard similar arguments about lack of beauty strongly typed languages ..especially in the mid 2000s when the pendulum seemed to be on opposite end of its swing.

sooo. I dunno - probably best to look at what kinds of things can be done with this tool effectively relative to other tools that could be used. I can do A LOT with my circular saw, but there are many cases where reciprocating saw is a better idea.

Edit: I used to write a lot of C code - and for the longest time turned up my nose at that "toy scripting language : javascript." Then a buddy who I respected set me straight in terms of it being a "real language" which coincided with the very early days of node.js. This also led me to dive into python .. after years of ignoring another guy who said it was pure joy. now I take a totally different view of languages that show up on the radar (although I'm still having a hard time grokking rust).

hmm why do you say that? - it's built on top of wolkenkit - which does seem to be actively maintained - also - there were not insignificant commits only a few months ago [0].

https://github.com/thenativeweb/wolkenkit-boards/commit/18f0...

hot damn!

I really appreciate the walk through of the apache bench (ab) results and learning process even though it didn't get them to their objective - I've been thinking about using ab myself, and these are great things to know.

I took down a few notes while reading the article:

- mentions use of apache bench ( ab ) command for load testing

- mentions use of ganglia tool

- mentions configuring HAProxy for multi-core using nbproc setting

- mentions the 'parallel' tool for running commands in parallel

- simulate long run requests by having the server delay a little vs client (work around for ab deficiencies )

- have the server also send different response lengths back simulating varying load

- pdsh tool to remote parallel shell (ssh) sessions

- vegeta tool - that got them to their scalability / tipping point objective

- nodejs (used for their backends) had a default request timeout of 2 mins

- used dmesg to learn that haproxy was running out of mem (at around 1.2mm conns)

- pdsh to run vegeta tool on multiple machines (acting as clients) - script included in article

- mentions haproxy maxconn setting - and verification by checking proc fs limits for the haproxy pid

holy crap - works on my hp spectre 360 too! - i'm doubly impressed.

I liked that post - this especially near the end, referring to Adam Jacob and some of his posts.

> Adam has endured the challenges of the open core model, and is refreshingly frank about its economic and psychic tradeoffs. And if he doesn’t make it explicit, Adam’s fundamental optimism serves to remind us, too, that any perceived “danger” to open source is overblown: open source is going to endure, as no company is going to be able to repeal the economics of software. That said, as we collectively internalize that open source is not a business model on its own, we will likely see fewer VC-funded open source companies (though I’m honestly not sure that that’s a bad thing).