bckygldstn

I opened Google Maps at dinner time last night and searched "Chinese", it took me to the country of China.

Also yesterday I asked Siri "what's 1300 mils in ounces". The text-to-speech worked properly, but instead of giving me the answer it opened a web search for "1300ml in oz".

These are the same companies in the same market as those gearing up to dive my car and interpret my blood tests.

We've had the technology for a decade to correctly process my AI queries from yesterday. But there's a chasm between technology and helping users, and crossing that gap is rarely the way to maximise shareholder value.

In my experience, it's not common in English-speaking countries outside US/Canada. "Leave" is common, or just "holiday", or non-abbreviated "time off" (the "paid" is implied!)

Perhaps the OP is referring to laws preventing employers from asking employees to work while on holiday: https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-law-in-Germany-or-any-other...

> stage left / stage right

Outdoor recreation often uses climbers left/right and skiers left/right (even when there's no rock or snow) to orient direction relative to slope, which is similarly descriptive and clear to those who haven't heard the terms before.

Except for rivers, where True Left and True Right are commonly used in New Zealand for hiking and kayaking, and I can never remember which way round they go!

I’ve had plenty of conversations like this with friends over a beer or coffee, incredulously diving into some bizarre aspect of their work or life!

Also wrong are "a hour" and "an cats". Sometime Spanish uses one word ("hablo") where English needs two ("I speak").

Comparative analysis of language isn't taboo [1]. It's just vastly more complicated than you make out, and the specific examples you chose aren't representative enough to support any point.

You're likely getting downvoted for misunderstanding basic socio-linguistic concepts that belie the confidence of your arguing: conflating biological and grammatical gender, implying that English was created by a committee of clever language designers, a focus on letters and words over concepts and comprehension.

[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594

The US and Canada since 2018. The EU since 2022 (for new models: existing models get until 2024)[1].

As for why in the US: literally too many kids being killed by their parents in SUVs and trucks [2].

[1] https://bmdv.bund.de/SharedDocs/EN/Articles/StV/Roadtraffic/...

[2] https://www.congress.gov/congressional-report/110th-congress...

- Applications and DBs run in docker containers. Deploying is basically git pull && docker-compose up --build -d

- Apt auto-upgrades, other software updates are handled in docker. The only software on the machine is haproxy, git and docker for deploys, newrelic and vector for monitoring.

- Haproxy runs on the server to route requests to docker containers. Cloudflare loadbalancing routes to servers.

- Scaling is avoided through over-provisioning cheap Hetzner machines. Adding new machines is done so rarely that a bash script is fine.

- DB backups are done in docker.

- Ufw locks down to ports 22, 80, 443, and DB ports. Because docker can interact with firewalls in surprising ways, I also replicate the rules in the Hetzner filewall.

You'll have no problems getting by in English, either professionally or in day-to-day life. Most software business is officially done in English, and most people you'll interact with speak very good English!

But if you're planning on living in Norway long term, I strongly recommend making a serious effort becoming at fluent in possible in the language. As in start learning now, take intensive classes while there, set aside 30 mins every day for structured learning, and keep all that up for a few years.

• It's isolating having every new person start speaking to you in Norwegian, then you having to interrupt them and ask to switch to English. A group of Norwegians talking will change languages when you join them, which can make you feel guilty or make you feel less like socialising.

• Many Norwegians are nervous or self-conscious to speak English (even if they speak it better than some native speakers!) so you won't get to experience their true chatty self.

• Children learn Norwegian before English, so if you have kids in Norway with a Norwegian partner you may not be able to communicate with them as well as your partner until they're a bit older. You also won't be able to communicate with your kid's friends or other children.

• Lots of humour, pop-culture, memes, puns, graffiti is gated behind Norwegian.

• If you're looking for a relationship, not speaking Norwegian limits your options.

And finally the obligatory: really think this through. It's a massive life change to live in a new culture, perhaps unimaginably large if you've never done it before. That you find Norwegian women hotter than your local dating pool is (aside from being gross) such a small factor compared to all the differences between your life now and moving to Norway.

Spend a month there in an Airbnb, read the local news every day, follow local influencers/subreddits/tiktockers, watch local tv. Again, the effort of doing all of this is miniscule compared to uprooting your whole life and moving somewhere you have no ties.

The great thing about a long generalist career history is that you can extract highly specialised threads for different applications by highlighting different parts of your experience.

I'm personally a generalist in the web and data science areas, but I do specialised consulting under a number of different "personas": Django web development, geospatial data analysis, non-deep data science, SaaS MVP backend web dev, etc.

For each specialisation I have a different resume and "tell me a bit about yourself" pitch, often referring to the same projects but highlighting different aspects of my skills.

When someone says they need a specialist they just want someone who can get their stuff done. Having additional skills isn't a detriment as long as you can do the work, just no need to bring them up in your application.

I always thought that eventually I'd settle into a specialisation as I mastered narrow niches and got referrals within a specialisation. But that hasn't naturally happened, and I'm very happy as a generalist working specialised roles in a wide range of domains.

From [1] it looks like

* You pay $400 for 3 years of coverage. * Must have the bike locked and file a police report. * They can choose whether or not to attempt recovery. * If they choose not to, or fail to recover the bike, they'll replace it. * Up to 3 replacements are covered in the 3 years.

So it's really just theft insurance but they can attempt to recover low-hanging fruit. In wonder what their attempted recovery rate is.

[1] https://www.vanmoof.com/en-US/peace-of-mind

Ah to clarify: VanMoof make (very expensive) e-bikes with integrated GPS that's used mostly for "smart bike" features. I doubt the researchers could afford a used VanMoof for their study, and the company only tracks their own bikes.

I'd guess part of their motivation is to dissuade theft and resale of their bikes, which are quite distinctive. Though that might be attributing too much rationality to a bike thief.

There's a Dutch bike company (VanMoof) that offers a Theft Recovery service for their bikes: they have teams of people that track down the bike (using GPS primarily) and basically steal it back.

They used to produce monthly videos of bike recovery operations, though it looks like they've stopped the videos so you'll have to scroll past a few years of promo videos: https://www.youtube.com/@vanmoof

Often they recover the bike from a yard / homeless camp / shop with 100s of other non-VanMoof bikes they leave behind. It would be so easy to crack down on organised bike theft. The financial, social, and environmental costs of securing bikes and recovering from a theft is huge.

1. I see reddit's bodyweightfitness routine [1] recommended frequently (though I personally lift weights so don't have experience with callisthenics)

2. Keep in mind that most influencers, actors, athletes, and trainers have gained their physique through genetic luck, drugs, unhealthy eating, camera tricks, lack of balance in life, and extremely hard work guided by one-on-one coaching. It might take you 12 months to look muscular if you're a normal person doing a normal routine. Good strength routines will have you making regular small increases in resistance, so you will see constant small progress in strength on a daily/weekly/round basis from the beginning!

3. Spend a week tracking what you eat in an app like Cronometer. Those results will guide you on how best to modify your diet: the default macro/micronutrient targets in the app aren't a bad place to start. It's often recommended to increase protein and calorie intake above those targets if you're trying to put on lots of muscle.

Finally the sibling comment about goals is a great one. I'd suggest your #1 goal should be to not get injured, as injury will prevent you from achieving your other goals (and is very common when starting new sports/activities!)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/wiki/routines/bwf...

SEEKING WORK | SF Bay Area, CA | Remote

Hi HN, I'm Andrew. I have 10 years of experience with Django web development. Some projects I've worked on recently include

• Performance optimization of Django apps to get below 100ms response time.

• Building out SaaS websites with authentication, billing, subscription management

• Advising teams on Django project architecture

• Turning machine learning notebooks into production http apis

In addition to client work I also run some web apps including https://gpxz.io and https://redditreads.com, and I work as a Python security code reviewer for HackerOne.

Past clients include Pepsi, Mercedes-Benz, NZ Metservice, and YC-backed Lob.com.

Please get in touch via andrew@ajnisbet.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajnisbet with some information about your project, from there we can set up a call to talk in more detail!

As an immigrant to the US I hate the window screens and have removed the ones I can: it feels like being in prison not being able to truly open the windows. We live in an area without mosquitoes or bugs to speak of, but all the apartments here seem to have the screens anyway.

You (the consultant) sets the rate you get paid. Toptal adds a secret margin on top of that which is what the client pays.

I haven't done Toptal in a while, but my rate was always higher than that. I got pushback from from Toptal's internal recruiters whenever I asked to increase my rate and a few of their clients did turn me down due to the rate. But I never backed down and it never took more than a few weeks between starting applying to jobs on Toptal to signing a contract.

I wouldn't want to depend on Toptal for my income. But it's great as a way to fill in between other engagements if you're firm with your rate and the kind of work you want.

It seems to vary greatly by browser. Based on this SO answer [1] MS edge only supported 2000 characters in 2017, while Chrome currently handles 40 million characters (of compressed, encoded json).

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/44532746

> most of us are more concerned by the identify theft

To give a single datapoint, I am much more concerned about automated discrimination than identity theft. (I do agree with you though that the bill ought to cover more information).

> addresses

Until recently, everyone's address were printed in a big book that was sent to every household for free. I lived for years in a country where the government published everyone's address online and never experienced or heard about any issues.

> banking information

Many jurisdictions required banks to (eventually) make whole anyone impacted by theft of banking information.

Don't get me wrong: I wish I had more privacy around my "identity/administrative" data. But we understand pretty well the risks involved there and have some legal mitigations in place.

I think we're just seeing the tip of the automated discrimination iceberg. This data props up almost all of the marketing industry these days, and is spreading faster than laws can be made or than people can comprehend what's occurring.

All models are wrong, some are useful.

CICO is neither a religion nor a complete explanation of metabolism. It’s a super simplified model that leads to some useful practical conslusions (eg it’s easier to eat less to lose weight than exercise more, some foods will make you more fat than others relative to how full they make you feel).

It’s super accessible, you can look up the calories of whatever you eat and whatever exercise you do.

I’ve seen lots of valid complaints about CICO, but never a suggestion for an alternative that’s similarly useful with even the same magnitude of simplicity.

Note I take CICO to mean bio-available calories roughly equals base metabolic rate plus exercise out for the average person. Actual energy-balance “draw a box around a person” joules in equals joules out is unhelpfully reductionist.

It’s accounted for in the “calories in” component: the calories printed on the side of a package are the calories absorbed by an average body, not the total chemical potential energy of the food.

SEEKING WORK | SF Bay Area, CA | Remote

Hi HN, I'm Andrew. I have 10 years experience with Python web development. Some projects I've worked on recently include

• Turning machine learning notebooks into production http apis

• Building out SaaS websites with authentication, billing, subscription management

• Bringing old hard-to-maintain services up to modern standards with new stable technologies

• Performance optimization of django and flask apps to get below 100ms response time.

In addition to client work I also run some web apps including https://gpxz.io and https://redditreads.com, and I work as a Python code reviewer for PullRequest.

Past clients include Pepsi, Mercedes-Benz, NZ Metservice, and YC-backed Lob.com.

Technologies I work with include Python, django, flask, fastapi, docker, nginx, sql, Postgres, html, css, d3.js, tensorflow, scikit-learn, numpy, pandas, gdal, postgis, R, MLops.

Please get in touch via andrew@ajnisbet.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajnisbet with some information about your project, from there we can set up a call to talk in more detail.

A while ago a built a generator for acquisition announcements [1]. Might be time to do one for heartfelt layoff announcements.

[1] https://www.ajnisbet.com/blog/this-startup-acquisition-annou...

Advanced Operations Course

(Found by googling "AOC Hamburger University -cortez")

As a kid I saved up for a used laptop so I could play Halo LAN games with my mates. The computer didn't meet the required specs for the game, but it mostly worked if you turned the all the graphics settings down to low.

Except for invisibility: invisible players are normally rendered as, well, invisible, except for a slight rippling of the air that's only perceptible if you're a few metres away. But on my underpowered machine, invisible players were rendered as an opaque explosion of colourful glitchy noise!

We agreed to just not use the invisibility powerups after I got in some epic cross-map shots of supposedly invisible players.

Here's the NHSTA report for a 2015 Ford Focus, the female model is used in the passenger seat [1]. In a quick look I couldn't find any tests with female drivers though.

The male [2] and female [3] dummies look to be in different proportions.

[1]: https://nrd-static.nhtsa.dot.gov/reports/vehdb/v00000/v09000...

[2] https://www.humaneticsgroup.com/products/anthropomorphic-tes...

[3] https://www.humaneticsgroup.com/products/anthropomorphic-tes...

I've never noticed a big link between the stock market and my freelancing business. Perhaps there are more laid-off developers looking to freelance during a downturn, but companies also hire more contractors/freelancers during times of economic uncertainty and hiring freezes.

In any case, economic conditions count for about zero compared to your leads and sales skills.

SEEKING WORK | SF Bay Area, CA | Remote

Hi HN, I'm Andrew. I have 10 years experience with Python web development.

I run https://gpxz.io with the help of some freelance developers. When we're not busy working on GPXZ we help other companies with Python web development.

I will be your point of contact and I typically do most of the development, looping in specialists for specific tasks. You get the skillset of a team with the simplicity of working with a freelancer.

Recent projects include:

• Turning machine learning notebooks into production http apis

• Building out SaaS websites with authentication, billing, subscription management

• Bringing old hard-to-maintain services up to modern standards

• Performance optimization of django and flask apps

• Ongoing hosting and ops as a part-time engineering department

Technologies we work with include Python, django, flask, fastapi, docker, Postgres, html/css, d3, numpy, pandas, gdal, postgis, R, MLops.

Please get in touch via andrew@gpxz.io or https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajnisbet with some information about your project!

Wind power accounts for about 10% of total generation in the US. So even if turbines were added to account for 100% generation, and demand increased 10x, it'd still be far less than anything else on the list.

Very works but it's missing out on an opportunity to give more detail.

Most of the adjectives in this app have multiple alternatives, one of which is likely closer to what you're trying to represent.

Or to put it another way: concepts like "smartness" are complicated and multidimensional. Someone who is "very smart" could be: good at their job, naturally intelligent, built up knowledge though experience and hard work, street-smart, smarter than average, smartest person in the world ever etc.

I wouldn't say there's always a better single word alternative to "very adjective" but it's worth thinking about when writing (and probably not worth thinking about in everyday speech!).