csharpminor

Had it, felt completely exhausted for 3+ weeks. Standing for more than a few minutes was hard. Recovery was very gradual.

Afterwards I developed a strong abnormal heart rhythm (PVCs). I had had these previously, but the ones post-COVID were really intense. They were on and off for a few weeks accompanied by acute fatigue.

If you're an athlete / active person pay attention to your heart after infection. I gradually ramped back up to high intensity activities.

The issue here is that power among people tends to concentrate rather than diffuse. CEOs are comped disproportionately because the top 1% have an exceptionally better network and power structure over others. Why? Because people bandwagon onto known entities.

There’s a similar phenomenon with authors, actors, and musicians. A-list actors command an order of magnitude more in compensation over B-list because they have concentrated a much stronger hold over an audience.

This isn’t only true of “celebrity” CEOs like Jobs, Musk, etc. CEOs can develop their own mini fiefdoms of celebrity within a niche industry. This network and power gives them access to opportunities that can be pivotal to the success of a company.

I think in order to equalize exec pay, you’d need to figure out how to stop the bandwagoning that consolidates exec power.

I don't like Confluence either, but the platform is only 10% of the problem. Knowledge Management platforms are something that PMs love to debate, purchase, and use to get promotions. So you end up with a company that has 6+ platforms. This is way worse than having one unified, crappy-UX, wiki.

Finding the perfect documentation platform becomes a waiting-for-superman game. Everyone loves to complain, but nobody wants to put in the actual work to write clear content, define information structure, consider audience, etc.

The real solution is hiring people who are excellent writers. To do this, leadership must be good at reading and writing themselves (not a given) and be able to recognize top contributors.

I think it is. Firing is horrendously expensive, so most companies will follow a progression of cuts before resorting to layoffs. They'll typically start with perks (e.g. travel / team entertainment / office space) and then progress to a hiring freeze, and then move to layoffs.

In Stripe's instance it seems like they went directly to layoffs. I heard that they did institute a PIP process last year but not sure what percent they cut.

As someone who gets pinged on Slack by random people throughout the day... these conversations are more articulate and unique than most of the people I work with.

They’re not just claiming circumstantial evidence. The plaintiff says they have FOIA documents describing confiscated Navy radar tapes that show an object striking TWA 800.

Damning if true, but a lot hinges on documents we haven’t seen.

So why did the CIA produce a video about the fuel tank exploding, when that is something clearly within the purview of the NTSB? Why did they continue to devote resources when it was established that it was not a terrorist attack?

Aviation incident analysis is not one of the CIA’s core competencies, but propaganda is.

Yeah the fact that it was the CIA releasing the video always seemed like a red flag to me. Why were they even involved in the investigation? Why didn’t those statements come from the FAA?

They’re being sued for misleading statements about their sustainability: https://www.thefashionlaw.com/hm-is-being-sued-over-misleadi...

Don’t fall for their narrative.

It is a subliminal response to protect oneself from guilt and fear of change / death.

Agree, and re-hydrating projects that have been left sitting for more than a few months invariably leads to dependency mismatch hell.

FYI Twilio has a few guides on how to connect their SIP trunking product to Cisco SBCs:

CUCM: https://twilio-cms-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/InteropGu...

ISR: https://www.twilio.com/docs/sip-trunking/sample-configuratio...

They also have a porting process you can use to migrate your numbers from GV/Bandwidth (or you can just buy a Twilio number for $1).

Other levels of gov have funding issues, but not federal. In fact, big appropriation bills often create these mega-procurements that companies like BAH latch on to.

Government's ability to attract people who could execute a project like this requires different compensation and career incentives. Base pay is capped at <$150k for the highest GS level at the highest step. There's also no real potential for bonuses or equity.

Beyond pay, government careers fundamentally optimize for low-risk decision-making. The goal is to not get fired over 20 years so that you can retire with a pension. This is why contractors like BAH gets hired: you, as a government program manager, don't get fired for going with a brand name even if they fail. If you hire some unknown development firm with great tech skills and they fail, you get canned.

There's also a lack of bold leadership and urgency that is customer-experience focused. Healtchare.gov benefitted from some amazing engineers, but the true catalyst for its comeback was that Obama realized it was a do-or-die initiative for his administration. His team moved heaven-and-earth to steamroll entrenched vendors, recruit talent, and hold people accountable.

Leadership and talent are what make the difference.

Honestly recreation.gov is one of the few government websites that has a “good” user experience. I’m not a fan of BAH but I think they executed well in this case.

While $184M may sound like a lot, compare that to the $200M+ that was spent on the failed launch of Healthcare.gov - taxpayers got nothing out of that. That work was scrapped. That website ultimately cost closer to $840M.

What you don’t see in these numbers are the insane requirements needed to launch successfully. It’s not just building an AirBnb clone for parks, there is a huge amount of bureaucracy and stakeholder management in a national project like this.

$20M in annual recurring profit also doesn’t sound like that much in the grand scheme of things. Morally I wish it wasn’t necessary, but practically it’s impossible to deliver quality customer service without some form of financial performance incentive.

Would I love to live in a world where government employs programmers and DIYs this stuff much cheaper and more efficiently? Of course. USDS and 18F are bright spots that are trying. But they also don’t have the capacity to work on anything except high priority projects.

Yes and to add: if an SMS’ sender ID successfully spoofs another number, the message would appear threaded into an existing “legitimate” conversation.

One thing that many people don’t know is that SMS caller IDs are also being spoofed more frequently. In the article the author mentions noticing that the authentication code came from a number the bank didn’t ever use.

Sophisticated scammers can spoof your bank’s phone number and send a message that appears in a thread alongside other legitimate SMS from the bank.

This is harder to do than caller ID spoofing, but has become more prevalent recently.

For some systems it seems as though a prisoners dilemma develops where communicating in bad faith can give one actor an edge over another.

In company environments I think it’s a factor of size and what core leadership will tolerate. With a good CEO, it’s hard for a bad-faith leader to thrive at a 1000 person company. But at 3000 (anecdotally) it somehow becomes easier for this behavior to thrive.

I’ve been looking for something like this. My residential street is a short cut for drivers and we have people doing 40+ down it trying to skip the lights.

We (as a neighborhood) can petition the city to install traffic calming measures like speed bumps. But the city requires some form of traffic analysis to prove that more than a certain percent of drivers are speeding.

I don’t know if this app would be acceptable as a data source (e.g. if I mounted a phone to our mailbox somehow). But I was surprised by seemingly how few affordable traffic / speed measurement devices there were. Most cost thousands of dollars, or we could hire a consultant which would cost even more thousands of dollars.

Seems like a market opportunity, though maybe a niche one.

I will say if you think this is bad, you ought to read about Washington State’s loss of $650M to organized cyber crime: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/auditor-state-unem...

And it’s especially easy to fake invoices since most local govs need to publicly post contracts and contract value.

I wonder if there is some phishing going the vendor’s direction as well where the city requests to review the next invoice.

It’s truly amazing to me that you can completely lose your money in an ACH transaction with little to no recourse.

Heads up: Chrome's giving me an invalid cert error and refusing to load your site.

For those wondering, this is in response to the Politico article which called out Crisis Text Line for sharing anonymized data with a for-profit spinoff: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/28/suicide-hotline-sil...

I love CLI tools, and I think we're just scratching the surface of what's possible. It's really neat to dig into the UI components that charm has available.

It feels as though many GUI-based web / chromium applications are collapsing under their own weight. They're slow and discoverability is bad. Maybe worst of all they're always distracting me with a popup / modal / alert that's unrelated to my current task.

A lot of these issues go away in a CLI, and I think there's a back-to-basics movement forming that could extend beyond the HN crowd.

I recently put a down payment on a house using a windfall from crypto. It was not easy: mortgage brokers need to do AML due diligence on all cash sources looking back at least six months.

I used a major crypto exchange to sell and convert my holdings into USD, but frustratingly they did not provide adequate documentation to show how the funds were contributed and transferred. I needed to email the exchange's support team, escalate multiple times, and finally they sent me a series of screenshots. The delay almost caused my offer to fall through.

This would have been much easier if I could have transferred crypto directly to the mortgage company.

As an aside, I really wish there was a public repository of corporate customer service hacks. Maybe it already exists?

Their data can also be seriously flawed. When I went to apply for a mortgage a few years ago I was nearly rejected because "The Work Number" told my lender that I worked at Arby's and made $11.75 / hour. I've never worked for Arby's and my name is pretty unique (so I don't think it was a duplicate name issue). In any case I searched all 4 other people in the U.S. who share my name, and none of them had worked at Arby's either to the best of my knowledge.

I had to call Equifax, spent 1.5 hours on the phone with multiple confused reps until I found someone who could change my record. I thought there would be some kind of validation process, but nope they just asked me where I worked and how much I made.

It is such a broken system. I'm dumbfounded that Equifax hasn't been sued out of existence.

Not exactly the same, but goTenna Mesh delivers similar functionality.

It connects to your phone via Bluetooth then transmits data via UHF to a mesh network of devices.

I think you and PG are actually in agreement on this: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1404321931491430403

It depends on what your life goals are. If you want to travel the world, do that. If you have big ambitions™ then work hard. Either is OK.

This essay is not a call for everyone to work hard, it is a guide for those who choose that path.

That’s a tough position. I felt the same pressures when I was an SWE. The way I solved it was to go into sales engineering, and overall it was a great career choice. My product is pretty technical so there are enough challenges to keep it interesting. But at the same time I’m always playing on home turf.

I’m (usually) well respected by customers because of the reputation I’ve developed for my expertise. I’ll spend 10-20 hours each quarter per major customer to unblock their team / launch a project. For me it’s more rewarding than closing endless JIRAs.

My base compensation is less than the equivalent SWE level, but with bonuses my take home ranges from being on-par to significantly more. It comes with the intangible benefit of developing a much broader professional network.

Your mileage may vary. I consider myself extremely lucky and have no illusions about sales being a cakewalk. But if you’re looking for a way to find routine, going to into technical sales with a product you respect might be a good route.

At its core, Salesforce is a SaaS database platform that lets a non-programmer admin create data models for a business, as well as custom views and queries.

But Salesforce goes beyond being a database to the point of being more like a web and mobile framework specifically dedicated to building apps for business. Salesforce has its own flavor of Java (Apex) and its own MVC paradigm (Lightning). You can develop entire custom apps on Salesforce, similar to how Shopify has its own app ecosystem.