brango

Thanks Amazon! Now I can finally drop GCP :-)

Vertical sucks. You have to scroll down to somewhere different each time to find the thing you want. Also, the search box doesn't have all results cached so you type in, e.g. endpoints and it pauses for a few seconds until it displays a link to the menu. The GCP console sucks.

Bravo on the optimism. Personally I'd be crapping myself.

I was building something similar to meetup for a while but focussed on making new friends instead of networking/paid events.

The thing is, when I sat down and analysed the business model I realised that if it worked successfully, no one would use the platform again. I.e. if you wanted to meet new people, if you used my app and it had a 100% success rate, you wouldn't use it again.

I think that is the difficult problem to solve with an app in this space and explains Meetup's poor UX. If it actually worked, you'd just become friends and switch channels to whatsapp/FB/whatever and cut them out.

Different strokes for different folks. Sounds good to me :-)

> Meditation and yoga breathing are still exotic. Perhaps some day they won't be, and our descendants will wonder how people from our era stayed sane without daily meditation.

Yes! Energy can be experienced very simply after perhaps just 30 minutes of practice (for some - everyone's different). An excellent, clear introduction is "Energy Work" by Robert Bruce. Read with an open mind and practice.

Just because you haven't experienced something, don't discount it.

The dangerous aspect of religion for me is blind faith. If you view religious claims as hypotheses that can be personally verified, you become a scientist.

Yoga is such a scientific system. Kriya yoga is a good place to start, although at some level all of Patanjali's 8 limbs can increase the chance of experiencing the ultimate goal - enlightenment. Today, most people think yoga = stretching. That's just the preparation.

> If you just let me be and let me listen to some music without being disturbed, I'll be perfectly calm and relaxed, no mysticism needed.

Do you spontaneously laugh because you're filled with such joy in this state of "relaxation"? I've done that after a body scan and just mindful breathing.

The thing with relaxation is it's easy to think you are relaxed until you experience actual deep relaxation. Search on youtube for "Yoga nidra", lie down and just follow the instructions. Simple yet profound.

I was looking into this yesterday. Apparently while there's support for transpiling Kotlin -> JS, more work would be needed to support transpiling for react native[1]. Not sure why.

[1] https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2017/04/use-kotlin-with-np...

Well I did watch a film on Netflix ("UFOs: The Best Evidence Ever (Caught on Tape)"), but even in that it was obvious some was CGI - they had analysed it and reported it as such.

It's quite an old documentary so videos are pre-smartphones and pre-widespread availability of CGI software. But that'd be the other problem. If you search for "UFO" on Youtube there's loads of footage, but it could all just be CGId.

If these are real, is it alien or highly advanced Earth tech? It doesn't really matter from the perspective of if these aircraft are able to manoeuvre how they are reported to, the tech is obviously centuries ahead of what is publicly acknowledged and available now.

True, but some of the events had multiple independent witnesses reporting what sounds like the same object as it travelled overland.

IIRC some UFOs were tracked by multiple independent radar stations simultaneously.

Anyone know anything about the credibility of the Disclosure Project[1]? I think something like 100+ ex-service personnel testified under oath that they'd witnessed UFO activity.

If 100+ people testified to seeing me do something illegal, a court would convict me (barring exceptional counter-evidence).

Having researched things as best I can I am now of the opinion they're already here, based mainly on the number, diversity and credibility of witnesses (e.g. ex-military personnel, former nuclear military personnel, Air Force, etc, not that any I know anything beyond that).

[1] http://www.disclosureproject.org

Yeah but presumably as the end user you'd still want to interface with a single entity, even if behind the scenes they're then aggregating, filtering, etc. But yeah any humans employed by them doing that work are probably at risk.

They're aggregators. There's value in going to a single shop to buy everything instead of going to 200 individual suppliers for your weekly shopping.

Access to better healthcare lowers the infant mortality rate. That than leads to couples having fewer children since they don't need to hedge their bets as much (ie having a more offspring expecting several to die). Combine that with easier access to contraceptives and you have some major reasons why birth rates decrease in developing countries which have the money to spend on healthcare.

In developed countries you may also have factors like people focussing on careers, valuing independence, more choice in relationships (i.e. divorce/separation being more acceptable) etc.

Why not just go for a non-smoking break without any pretence?

> These days I just point the company to my github and am explicit that if that isn't enough to grant me a face to face I probably don't want to work there.

I'd be happy with that if the projects looked they were yours. I can count on one hand the number of candidates who have had GH profiles, and even fewer with anything worth looking at. All I really want to see is a few examples of coding style and basic thinking.

To me, being an engaged participant in the open source community is a massively positive signal, even if it's just reporting issues and the very occasional PR.

The thing is, as gilleain says, the majority of promising-sounding candidates aren't worth progressing with. This is a combination of:

* Failing outright to do anything even close to the requested task

* Not even basic error handling

* No tests

* Using generated code where it's not appropriate, or not bothering to implement e.g. catch blocks they've generated

The instructions explicitly tell candidates what we're looking for, so it's not worth chatting to someone without doing this filter.

[1] says "A probably even larger issue with EncFS is a security audit from 2014 that attests EncFS to deviate from established security standards and also found some vulnerabilities in the current EncFS implementation."

[1] https://www.cryfs.org/comparison

This is what we do. We created a small programming test that's very representative of 80% of our work. Candidates are asked to only spend 2 hours on it. If they can follow simple instructions and write a reasonable implementation we'll have a face-to-face.

This saves us a huge amount of time and I don't feel it's overly burdensome on candidates.

In the UK (IIRC IANAL, etc) the interview must be about assessing a candidate's suitability for a job and unsuitability for performing the work is the only justifiable reason for not offering someone a job, as opposed to, e.g. gender, disability, age, attractiveness, etc.

So I'm wondering how you'd justify not taking someone on by assessing them on a task that:

1) you know they can't do and, 2) if you've already vetted their CV, presumably those skills aren't required for the performance of the job in the first place.

It seems irrelevant whether they know you'll ask this kind of question, since they can't prepare for it, and flagging up something that is potentially unreasonable doesn't make it acceptable.

So, how do you objectively assess that person X did something that wasn't required for the job better than person Y, and justify to person Y why that matters?

Why not ask them to build an anti-gravity device as well while you're at it?

I just ask interviewers what the point of these questions is now.

If you can't give someone an interview with relevant questions, how can you justify not hiring the candidate? AFAIK at least in the UK candidates have a legal right to know why they weren't selected to make sure it wasn't based on prejudices, etc. So if your response is "you didn't do something that we both knew from your CV you never claimed to do", that sounds immediately unfair.

Well for a start you have to stop a GCE instance to add a new scope to it. So if your devs want to use a new API and you're running a massive production K8s cluster, you somehow have to stop your instances to add the new scope and otherwise mess around. Of course if you know this in advance you can plan to do blue-green deployments with K8s, but if you don't know that you won't architect for it and it'll bite you.

Their authentication in general seems convoluted and complicated, their console is slow and useless (why aren't all the search results preloaded? I type in 'iam' and it takes several seconds for the results to appear). Oh, and also alpha K8s clusters will terminate after 30 days whether you like it or not (perhaps you're using a feature that's apparently stable but languishing in alpha - I'm looking at you, cronjob). There's a lack of services in general (an elasticache type service would be nice) and development seems to move glacially.

Also, they seem to have multiple versions of SDKs, some with outstanding bugs that were reported years ago but are just closed or there are comments in the README that only critical bugs will be addressed. There's no indication which SDK to use where there are several versions. Oh, and if you only want to use one service in python, you have to install about 40 different packages because splitting them up is too difficult.

We've had DFP buckets have their configs get screwed up so we mysteriously couldn't access them, logs stopped being delivered, etc. Apparently Google have such poor monitoring that we had to prompt them about these things which took too longer to get resolved. I could go on...

Not just physical devices. A lot of the Google stuff I have to use seems half-baked, unfinished or with crappy UI/UX. And Google Cloud is complete shit compared to AWS. I guess that's what happens when engineers lead a company. They'll never have the customer focus that has made Amazon dominant.

You could call yourself a Whoover.

Jumped out at me too. The link 404s so there's no source for the claim. Plus, what does "use it" mean? They dabbled with it for a small, non-critical application, or they're using it as their primary language in a non-solo project?

Thanks! I've set up an alert for when it goes on sale :-)

Anyone play Battlefield 2 on the PS2 I think it was? You could look at any allied character on the battlefield and hit a button and you'd take over control of the character. So you could be a soldier on the ground being pinned down by a machine gun nest, look up to an allied helicopter, hit the button, become the pilot, launch missiles at the nest, then look down to a tank, become the driver, then back to the soldier, etc,... So much fun! I think they called it 'hotswap' or something.

Any game devs: This was the single most fun mechanic I've played in years. Please please please make an FPS where you can hotswap between characters like that. For some reason apparently this awesome feature didn't even make it into the PC version of the game. I'd love to play a game with that mechanic again.

You're not meant to write it by hand. I know you can, but why would you want that world of pain?

Jealousy is a thing. The quickest way to lose friends is to tell them you're a lot richer than they are.