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dmlittle

600 karma · joined November 16, 2014

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dmlittle··on Creeping as a Service
I thought about creating a similar service for LinkedIn (targeted for recruiters) with the hypothesis that people updating their LinkedIn profiles are more likely to be searching or open to new jobs. Ultimately decided the creepiness was too high and that such tool shouldn't exist. There's also the caveat that while recruiters might be able to better target people in the market, HR can also identify people potentially job searching and punish them.
dmlittle··on Strange TypeScript Behavior
Adding on to this comment, here's the MDN docs that show the signature of the callback function that is passed into the `map` function https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
dmlittle··on Apple silicon M1 as-a-Service
Here[1] is the license for BigSur. The relevant section is 3.A.(ii). This clause was added for BigSur so I _think_ that if you're leasing a VPS with macOS Catalina or older you can legally rent it for less than 24 hours.

[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSBigSur.pdf

Edit: It seems that before BigSur the legallity of subleasing macOS was a "gray area". I guess as long as it doesn't hurt Apple they didn't come after you.

dmlittle··on Naked shorting: The curious incident of the shares that didn't exist (2005)
Whomever is the holder record has the voting rights. If you gave your stock to someone to facilitate a short you lose your voting rights until that position is closed. You can read more about it here: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/shortsalevotingr...
dmlittle··on Naked shorting: The curious incident of the shares that didn't exist (2005)
My understanding is that the following situation can lead to a short interest of over 100%. Let's imagine a hypothetical world where there exists 1 share of a particular company and it is owned by Person A. Person B then borrows the share from Person A and sells it to Person C (this is the first short). Person C now owns 1 share and Person A doesn't have a share but is contractually obligated to receive 1 share from Person B at a certain point in time in the future. Person D then borrows the share from Person C and sells it to Person E (this is the second short). Even though there only exists 1 share the short interest in this case is 200%.

Now there are obvious reasons as to why this isn't a smart thing to do as recent events with GME show but it's not necessarily illegal (as far as I know). If this is actually not true or it's illegal somebody please correct me.

dmlittle··on Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
Other companies also do aggregate payments (I assume for the same reason). If you buy several things from Apple (apps, subscriptions, or other things) you'll get a single charge 1 or 2 weeks later with all of your purchases.
dmlittle··on What You Should Know Before Leaking a Zoom Meeting
"Ultrasonic watermark" reminds me of this[1] great blogpost. It's not the same thing but based on the same concept.

[1] https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/encoding-data-into-dubstep-d...

dmlittle··on Ask HN: How do you log time?
A few years back I used RescueTime[1]. It can track what you're doing and for how long. Since then there are a few competitors doing the same thing.

[1] https://www.rescuetime.com/

dmlittle··on Context switching costs more than we give it credit for
I have the (somewhat) opposite problem of needing to concentrate to hear the lyrics of a song. By default the lyrics fade into the background and I only notice the beat and/or musical instruments.
dmlittle··on Amazon, Apple and Google Cut Off Parler
Governments usually move slow and sometimes (most of the time) they can't react in time and they are after-the-fact legislations. It's NOT OK for companies to sit back and not attempt to stop that behavior. By doing nothing but continuing to do business with them they are essentially approving that behavior. Here's a tweet[1] with some screenshots of some of the type of conversations that are happening on Parler.

[1] https://twitter.com/BethLynch2020/status/1347987417052172306...

dmlittle··on API pagination design
It depends on the implementation. For example, the post mentions using Elasticsearch in production "which naturally supports this cursor stuff" but it has a max keep alive context duration of 24 hours[1] by default. This limit can be extended on a cluster level but it's unlikely they have it set to indefinite. Which means that their search context is likely only valid for 24 hours.

[1] https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr...

dmlittle··on Show HN: A Twilio-powered interactive talk radio platform
Twilio[0] is company with a communications API. They have an API that allows you to do phone calls, SMS, fax, video calls, email, etc. If you've every used an app that sends you SMS it was most likely powered by their API.

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

dmlittle··on Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development
They recently announced the mac.metal instance type for EC2 instances[0]. They currently only have Intel instances but I can’t see why the newer M1 instances aren’t coming soon.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/11/announcin...

dmlittle··on Buy Don't Build
If you're using log rehydration with DD it's hard to hit the $30k/mo fee. Before I left my last company we were evaluating DD logging and it came out to ~$5-6k/mo for about 25B logs per month.

When you start you'll likely pay a few hundred dollars per month tops. Your personal time alone is probably worth more than that.

dmlittle··on Buy Don't Build
I haven't used DD logs personally but from what I've been told if you send the majority of your logs straight to archive to an S3 bucket and only rehydrate the logs when you need to access them their pricing is pretty reasonable. Because you're storing the logs in your S3 bucket you can keep them however long you want and rehydrate them when you need them (say 30 days later).

The bill will still be in the low thousands but paying 30-40k per year for a logging solution is probably worth the cost if it means you don't have to maintain it. Having logs and metrics (and the APM if you're using it) all in one place is _really_ nice.

dmlittle··on Buy Don't Build
Even for built systems the cost of ownership and maintenance will grow as the system grows. Take the logging example above and say you're using the Elastic Stack. Things are going pretty well and usage is increasing. Over time your system grows and logging is now present in all of your applications. You've seen your logging rate go from 100 logs/s, to 1,000 logs/s, to 10,000 logs/s and now are encroaching the 100,000 logs/s rate. Over time the amount it cost to host your ES cluster has surely gone up. You probably went from a single node cluster when developing the solution, to a multi-node cluster, to now a hot-warm-cold cluster with several more nodes than you originally had. You also have a dedicated team making sure your in-house logging solution is working and stable. The cost of ownership and maintenance of this system is real. Not only do you need to pay for the huge clusters you'll likely have a dedicated team supporting it. Most people I've talked to in the industry don't like maintaining their in-house logging solutions and would gladly pay for one if it wasn't for the fact that it was too expensive to switch then. Because you need specialized people that know this logging solution it's also hard to hire for this role when the person currently maintaining this system eventually leaves (because he doesn't want to do this anymore). At the end of the day it's cheaper to pay for a logging solution even if it's in the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year than it is to build your own.
dmlittle··on Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack
I don't think this is true. You can't really join/leave channels on Discord (yes I'm aware you can use roles to give permissions but it's not the same).
dmlittle··on The Nintendo Switch uses my open source code
He's just surprised/happy about it and isn't demanding anything. Other people are the ones saying Nintendo should compensate him in some way, shape or form.
dmlittle··on GFXBench: Apple M1
> If you want to convince me about the graphics/ML capabilities, compare it to a 3090 RTX using running Vulkan/Cuda.

You can't really compare a laptop SoC with a dedicated graphics cards like the 3090 RTX. One is using a battery on a laptop and the other is plugged in to a power source with dedicated cooling.

Yes, Apple is claiming this is a better solution but that's mostly for laptops. While they did release a Mac mini, they still haven't released an Apple SoC Mac Pro or iMac. Those would be fair game for such comparison.

dmlittle··on Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing
Isn't that rate part of the 2.9% + 30c fee? Not the additional 0.5% for Stripe Billing.
dmlittle··on Aak HN: Social Login Button Images?
Each company usually has their own branding guidelines. I was able to find Google's[1] and Facebook's[2] pretty online.

[1] https://developers.google.com/identity/branding-guidelines

[2] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/web/logi...

dmlittle··on Ask HN: How much do you pay/charge for a website homepage design?
It depends what work you're doing and for whom you're doing it. This is a pretty good talk about pricing design work [1]. This is also why a lot of companies have a "Contact Us" enterprise pricing. You might have 2 different companies using the same product in the same way but paying a 10x difference. They're doing value based pricing and different companies value different things at different rates.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKXZ7t_RiOE

dmlittle··on California appeals court rules Uber, Lyft must reclassify drivers as employees
I can only speak for SF. While SF does have a public transportation system it leaves a lot to be desired. It usually runs late or not at all. Sometimes it's faster to walk 40-50min than it is to wait for the bus to stop by.
dmlittle··on Uber Drivers Sue Company over Pressure to Support Prop 22
I'm not a lawyer and I'm sure there are things I'm not seeing but I think the loophole here is that as of right now, because of the emergency stay on AB5, drivers are independent contractors and not employees so this might not apply.
dmlittle··on Ask HN: Alarm clock that's not a phone
This is not necessarily what you're looking for but the latest watchOS bedtime alarm on the Apple Watches has been game changing for me. I have the alarm set on weekdays and the watch gently vibrates to wake you up without any sound. Because it's very subtle and not a sudden alarm I wake up feeling much better. If you have a partner, it also means you won't wake them up with sound.
dmlittle··on Ask HN: How does WhatsApp make money?
Adding a bit to this the contents of the message are E2E encrypted but the metadata is probably still available (sender, receiver, timestamp, etc). FB probably already has the phone numbers of most of users in WhatsApp and can use the metadata to make inferred decisions about those users.
dmlittle··on Ask HN: How can we help with the 2020 presidential election?
Not directly answering OPs question, but I think VoteBox[0] answers most of those criteria you're mentioning (except initiatives and waiting times)

[0] https://votebox.us/

dmlittle··on Ask HN: How does Hacker News work?
FYI Show HN is used to show work that you've done but not work that someone else has done. Reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23543259
dmlittle··on We Hacked Apple for 3 Months
Not to discredit the great work all these people did but not all exploits are created equally. Generally speaking the bug bounty amount is directly correlated to the blast radius of the exploit.
dmlittle··on US Insulin prices 8 times higher than in other nations
> the newer long acting insulins work so well for many it is like they no longer have diabetes, they can pretty much eat whatever they want and be fine.

I seriously doubt this. Type 1 diabetes is _a lot_ harder to manage than simply taking long acting insulin and you can go about your day regularly. Almost anything you ingest has the ability to raise your glucose levels and a single dose of insulin is not enough.

Having long lasting insulin can be potentially deadly if not administered properly as it can tank your glucose levels and make you hypoglycemic. You need to be aware of your glucose levels and eat something to increase it if it starts going down below healthy levels. For example, if you take too much of the long acting insulin late at night, it's possible your insulin levels drop during the night and you're not awake to do anything about it (this is one of the reasons people use sensors, it'll ring an alarm if your glucose levels are too low/high).

Some people also use a combination of a 1 or 2 long-lasting insulin doses as a base and use short-lived insulin for small adjustments throughout the day.

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