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demygale

278 karma · joined August 8, 2017

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demygale··on Ask HN: Name One Interview Experience
I’ve had a lot of good interviews. Most have gone something like this: phone conversation just to make sure I understand the job and they understand a little of my history, phone screen with basic technical questions, in person interview with one or more people, phone call or email with a decision later.

I’ve never been asked to whiteboard in twenty years of applying for and getting hired for development (coding ) positions. I’ve only had to do a take home project twice.

It’s a good process for me. A week or so from beginning to end. Sometimes there’s a recruiter at the start which is inefficient for me, but not enough to make me pass.

Is it a good process for the company, though? Do they get good hires who perform well?

demygale··on Ask HN: Platform to crowdsource writing a novel or short story
Interesting concept. Some writers have beta readers that give feedback during early drafts, but these are usually close friends who.

You might look at something like Critique Circle. It’s not set up for that kind of suggestions, but you could ask specific questions such as “what do you think should come next?”

The problem with getting feedback from readers is there are more writers who want feedback than are willing to give. So you either need non-writers to do it (what’s their motivation) or you need other writers to do it.

demygale··on Ask HN: Where do you write?
Not so much a recommendation on where to publish, but I do suggest you form relationships and connections with other writers. It may seem like a solitary art form, but you can’t do it alone.

Thy said, the platform doesn’t matter. No one will find your content unless you cultivate an audience. There’s not much difference between Medium and GitHub and pastebin as far as your audience is concerned. If you want readers you’ll need an outlet that has them already (existing magazine, for example) or you’ll have to learn about marketing and promotion.

Good luck. Keep writing! The world needs your stories.

demygale··on Ask HN: What cloud backup solution do you use to backup your machines?
Sure. So I go to cancel my account. Not unhappy with the service, just trying to save some money. Recurring subscriptions start to add up.

No cancel button. Read the online documentation. To cancel you have to delete all your computers from your profile which deletes the underlying backups.

The yearly charge will be authorized in the days before your subscription expires “so there’s no interruption in service.” But you can’t tell them you want to cancel without deleting all your backups and you don’t know when the charge is going to renew.

So in order to use you’re full subscription you’ll need to set an alarm to cancel on that day, and then go ask for a refund because they’ve already charged you for the next year.

It’s an intentional dark pattern to make cancelling difficult.

demygale··on Ask HN: What cloud backup solution do you use to backup your machines?
I used Backblaze for a few years. Not a bad service, but the dark patterns around cancelling were really sketchy. Turned me off to the company.

Avoid them if you can. Anyone willing to use UI tricks to keep you as as customer can’t be trusted and what’s the point of a backup if you can’t trust it.

demygale··on Why are CDC's Covid-19 daily case count numbers so low?
My state, Georgia, has only one testing center and it can only process 100 tests per day.

https://www.wabe.org/georgias-coronavirus-testing-capacity-t...

demygale··on Ask HN: What to do when company takes Covid-19 as a joke?
The UK has 500+ confirmed cases. It’s safe to assume the virus is widespread in the population. You’ll have the same numbers as Italy in a few weeks. There is no way to avoid that outcome.
demygale··on Ask HN: Why is everyone I talk to in the real world so unperturbed by Covid-19?
Low end estimates for mortality rate of covid-19 are ten times higher than regular flu.

So either: You didn’t actually look Or you looked and came to the conclusion that an order of magnitude higher mortality rate was not significant.

So what number would make you think this is worse?

demygale··on Mozilla lays off 70
I’ll do it for 1.5.
demygale··on Hard comp-fi reading list
I would add “The Bug” by Ellen Ullman. A remarkable portrayal of software development in fiction. A gift.
demygale··on Facebook launches Portal TV, a $149 video chat set-top box
Does it concern you that so few people in this thread (your peers within the industry) share your trust n Facebook to honor their privacy agreements? There is ample evidence they have not honored those agreements in the past. How do we trust a Facebook “pivot” when there is no financial or regulatory benefit to pivoting?
demygale··on Facebook launches Portal TV, a $149 video chat set-top box
Do you trust Facebook to adhere to their publicly stated privacy policy? Do you think they have honored those policies in the past?
demygale··on Ask HN: Read any good books lately?
Its a book for tween boys. You’re not missing anything.

It’s cool to read children’s literature as an adult. Less cool if you think it’s literature’s final form.

demygale··on Ask HN: Have your weekends evolved into “workends”?
You’re paid by the hour and getting time and a half, right? If not you are devaluing the labor pool for your coworkers. They make less money because of you. Maybe you think worldwide income inequality hasn’t grown large enough and it’s your job to push money upward toward ownership at the expense of your coworkers. If so, keep it up.
demygale··on Doc Martens’s vegan boot business is thriving
Wills Vegan Shoes is good, but not inexpensive.
demygale··on Ask HN: Where do the real hackers hangout?
This is my experience on irc today as well. It’s dead.

I used to keep a few channels open at work all day long in 2007. #j2me, #java, #c. The conversation was active with no more than a few minutes of silence at a time. People would say good morning at the start of the day, goodbye at the end, they would talk about their weekend. It was like a virtual break room where you could ask tech questions (except #c was hostile to questions, those guys were weird) and make friendships.

It’s not just less active now. It’s dead every time I look.

demygale··on Ask HN: Why do so many apps on my iPhone need bluetooth?
They’re spying on you. Since you already give them access to your location, they can use that to find other devices around, pinpoint your location with even more accuracy, and spy on your friends.

Contacts and camera permissions irk me as well. I’d like to give you access to my contacts so I can invite a friend or something, but the app uses the permission to upload all my contacts to their server. Same with photos. Cool, you now have every picture I’ve ever taken.

This industry has an integrity problem. Programmers who write code like this should not be allowed to practice.

demygale··on Stephen Wolfram Version 12 Launches Today (and It’s a Big Jump for Wolfram
And let’s close that parentheses. It’s breaking my syntax highlighting
demygale··on Pyodide: Bringing the scientific Python stack to the browser
% python —version Python 2.7.15 %
demygale··on Create a Crisis, Capture a Unicorn
This is not funny, but I’m not sure what the actual point is.
demygale··on Ask HN: What are some repetitive tasks you do at work?
pandoc will do this for you
demygale··on Ask HN: What Moonshots Have Had Real, Tangible Progress?
Here we are with a handful of cars driving around in the least regulated state in the US. From Theranos to Uber, if you want to test unproven technology on private citizens, Arizona is the place to be.

Google can’t even roll out fiber to a whole neighborhood without getting distracted. Waymo is still vaporware and years beyond when they said it would be available.

demygale··on Ask HN: Does your smart phone survive with out a protector
I’m an iPhone user. Haven’t had a case on any phone I’ve ever used. So far just one cracked screen and they aren’t that expensive to repair.

My son cracks the screen of his phone every six weeks or so. Expensive cases haven’t made any difference.

demygale··on Mark Zuckerberg Promised a Clear History Tool Almost a Year Ago
It might be a difficult problem to solve, but there’s no evidence that Facebook is working on it or that they ever intended to work on it.

The easiest explanation is that Zuckerberg was lying. We could give him the benefit of the doubt but since he’s always lying it makes more sense to save time and assume he’s lying about this as well.

demygale··on Google says Nest’s built-in mic not listed in specs was not meant to be secret
1 is the correct answer for Google.
demygale··on Facebook's security team tracks posts, location for 'BOLO' threat list
Their justification for spying on these people is that they believe they need to spy on these people.

It’s cool that they’re not just picking people at random, but they are engaging in a level of electronic surveillance that would require a warrant if they were a government agency. Do they share this BOLO list with outside groups? Do they share the surveillance results with law enforcement or other people?

It’s disturbing behavior from an utterly disingenuous corporation. Zuck is like an incompetent Lex Luthor. We should expect him to announce a run for the presidency soon.

demygale··on The Communal Mind
Patricia Lockwood is a national treasure. Check out Rape Joke as one powerful example. But it’s strange to see her on hn

Headline really needs punctuation.

demygale··on Ask HN: How bad is freelancing?
As a native Atlantan and long time consultant/freelancer, this is not a thing. No one in my experience has ever characterized a consultant as a freelancer supported by their spouse.
demygale··on Ask HN: How do you explain to non-technical people that bugs happen in software?
If you buy a brand new house, you do a walk-through and make a list of problems you want the builder to fix.

These are bugs.

No one would skip this step when buying a new house because there are always bugs.

demygale··on Ask HN: What paths for a software engineer are age-resilient?
I’m in my late forties. Just been coding for the past twenty-five years. I stay away from management by turning down management offers. I’m not a rockstar or anything. Just doing the work.

There are places that won’t hire me because of my age but I’ve never been unemployed. I’m not the oldest person in my department.

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