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dodgybon Ask HN: What are some must read books?

Patrick Leigh Fermor recounting walking from Holland to Constantinople in the early 1930's is an enchanting tale. He was in his teens when he started the walk, but only started writing the travelogue when he was in his sixties. He was a fascinating and erudite character. The three books in the series are:

A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, The Broken Road (unfinished)

dodgybon Bats and the Origin of Outbreaks

Try dark reader, it has a sepia setting and works on nearly all sites:

https://darkreader.org/

dodgybon Ask HN: Could plain old RSS be a replacement for Twitter?

I get twitter RSS feeds. Find a users profile page and then use your client to search for feeds. It works with twitter lists too.

I use a browser extension called Feedbro. It is really neat because you can read twitter in reverse chronical order, without any of twitters feed optimisations.

dodgybon Custom, realtime RSS feeds for Hacker News

This is super useful:

https://github.com/damng/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content

as it says on the tin, it inlines the contents of the linked page

dodgybon Unexpected, Useless, and Urgent, or What RSS Gets Right

https://damng.github.io/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content/...

It does what is says on the tin, pulls content from the OP link. Links to HN comments too.

dodgybon Unexpected, Useless, and Urgent, or What RSS Gets Right

Did you know you can follow subreddits via RSS? It makes reddit work for me.

dodgybon Ask HN: An alternative to IMDB scores, whats a better way to pick movies?

Metacritic consistently come out on top when compared to IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes. This article is a good dive into the pros and cons:

https://thenextweb.com/syndication/2018/02/04/imdb-rotten-to...

dodgybon Ask HN: Good books written before ~1900?

Joshua Slocum - Sailing Alone Around the World

A fascinating account of the first solo circumnavigation of the world. Definitely a digital detox that will prep you the next book in this list

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6317

John Esquemeling - The Buccaneers Of America

This is a fascinating read and provides some insight into some of the influences on the origins of American democracy. One to read before you start the de Tocqueville.

https://archive.org/details/historybuccanee02perkgoog/page/n...

Rudyard Kipling - Kim

A spy thriller set during the great game between Russia and the Indian Raj. Most anything by Kipling is a rollicking good read.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2226

The travel writings of Isabella Bird

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_Bird

Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita

Not pre 1900 but it is the perfect counterpoint to the paranoia inducing crime and punishment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita

dodgybon Things from leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg and his employees

I am not sure librarians are the ones who decide that a particular subject is socially or technologically dangerous.

The point still stands, the information that libraries provide is organised to an open standard defined by information science, not an opaque algorithm that is subject to the whims of its creators.

dodgybon Things from leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg and his employees

The featured books section is not curated specifically for you and you also have the choice to avoid that bookcase.

dodgybon Things from leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg and his employees

But Facebook does regulate the feeds of their users by employing algorithms to surface content that they think the user will engage with, and so get bucks for the eyeball.

This distinguishes them from libraries, the only other similar platform for unmediated content. Libraries treat all information as equal and curates it as such. Facebook does not treat information equally, this means it is already moderating content.

Facebook already censors content that politicians deem unsavoury, so why should one political message get a free pass while another is removed?

dodgybon Covid-19 and HIV: Follow Me Down the Rabbit Hole

This is a very well researched and referenced investigation into the origins of CoV-SARS-2 virus and the activities of Shi Zhengli and her associates.

https://greatgameindia.com/covid19-files-scientific-investig...

dodgybon Covid-19 and HIV: Follow Me Down the Rabbit Hole

This is more than a rabbit warren Sarah...

A quote from a peer reviewed paper by Shi Zhengli the 'Chinese Bat Lady' on how she combined SARS and HIV

"we investigated the receptor usage of the SL-CoV S by combining a human immunodeficiency virus-based pseudovirus system with cell lines expressing the ACE2 molecules of human, civet, or horseshoe bat"

https://project-evidence.github.io/#%28part._p1%29

dodgybon Some doctors moving away from ventilators for virus patients

podgaj - have you checked out https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/? It a well moderated discussion thread focused solely on the science. You will find it a little saner there.

dodgybon Ask HN: Do you still use RSS?

FeedBro user here too, it also runs well on Chrome. I have nearly 1k subscriptions and the tab consumes less than 2Mb. Highly recommended.

dodgybon Ask HN: What sites should I have in my RSS feed?

popurls is an aggregator of aggregators, you will find content to suit your taste there.

http://popurls.com/

Some of my fav science and culture sites are:

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/feed/ http://nautil.us/rss/all http://feeds.feedburner.com/IeeeSpectrumFullText http://www.quantamagazine.org/feed/ https://www.sapiens.org/feed/ https://medium.com/feed/deep-code http://quillette.com/feed/ http://feedproxy.google.com/brainpickings/rss https://www.thisiscolossal.com/feed/ http://slatestarcodex.com/feed/ https://lithub.com/feed/

dodgybon Alternative for Feedly?

Try Feedbro, it is an extension for chrome and firefox. It is free and unlimited and the UI is customisable to a degree.

The one downside is it is not a cloud app, so won't sync across devices.

I have been using it since inoreader and feedly introduced caps and I am a happy convert.

dodgybon Ask HN: Which RSS reader do you use?

After running into Inoreader's limits I found Feedbro, it is a free extension for Chrome and Firefox and it does the job very well.

https://nodetics.com/feedbro/

It is not open source but I haven't managed to find any negative comments on the developer.

dodgybon Roll Your Own Analytics

I have recently switched to feedbro after trying feedly and inoreader. Recommended.

https://nodetics.com/feedbro/

dodgybon Security Checklist

Another good source of info - produced by ThoughtWorks:

https://martinfowler.com/articles/web-security-basics.html

dodgybon Ask HN: A large tablet for PDFs?

I came across this beauty a couple of days ago> Not seen it in the flesh but is does seem to fit your use case.

https://remarkable.com/

Specs

https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/11500455428...

I use a refurbished 1st gen sony xperia 10.1 tablet that I bought for £100 on ebay. It is very light and has good resolution but the screen could be a bit bigger. The big plus is it takes an sd card and also a portable s/hdd can be attached so storage is no problem.

dodgybon Ask HN: How to find good project manager?

Post an advert on Glassdoor:

https://www.glassdoor.com/post-job

Use keywords in the job description that are relevant to your industry.

State the years of experience and any qualifications you would expect an applicant to have.

LinkedIn is another avenue to explore.

dodgybon Ask HN: As a team lead how to handle project going off the rails?

Be prepared for the questions that you will be asked when the alarm is raised.

Q1. Why late? Work is 'outside of comfort zone', thus accurate estimates are impossible.

Q2. When will it be ready? Scope, timescale and quality are interdependent. Ask 'the business' which two are most important to them. The remaining item will need to be revised. My recommendation would be to curtail scope and deliver the rest in phase 2. If they say timescale can be extended the revise estimates based on current velocity, i.e. if you are 30% behind where you expected, add 30% to all outstanding work items. If quality is cut, make sure they are aware of the additional support and maintenance costs that will be incurred.

Either way, do as rinka_singh says and get the PO/PM to establish a risk log accessible to all. I would add that each risk should be assigned to someone who is responsible for tracking it. Review the log each week.

Raise the alarm now because there will be dependencies, and you are probably not aware of all of them.

I would not be worried about how the alarm is percieved, if your intentions are to steer 'the business' away from a cliff it will be recognized.

dodgybon How to find an international remote job

There are some good remote job lists on GitHub:

https://github.com/search?q=remote+job

This also looks like it may be useful:

https://github.com/yanirs/established-remote

Some tips on custom search:

https://remotejobcourse.com/topic/remote-jobs/

Trello has a useful guide:

https://blog.trello.com/how-to-find-and-land-your-next-remot...

dodgybon Ask HN: How to improve my SQL skills?

http://sqlfiddle.com is another nice query building site. It gives you the option of working with different engines.

dodgybon Ask HN: Google Analytics Replacement

I recently found this interesting blog on rolling your own for free with AWS Lambda:

https://sbstjn.com/serverless-analytics-with-kinesis-stream-...

you could also consider Open Web Analytics:

https://github.com/padams/Open-Web-Analytics/wiki

dodgybon Ask HN: Why did you choose not to have children?

I decided not to have kids because I could not guarantee that they would have as many opportinuties as had been provided for me.

The main reasons for this negative outlook were exponential population growth, the degrading environment and the threat of nuclear war. At best all I could see was hand-wringing in response to these challenges, in general most people chose to ignore them.

Maybe things are beginning to change, but not enough to guarantee that the next few generations will not experience a degraded quality of life.

Regrets? None. You can't choose your kids but you can choose to live as you wish without the risk of getting a 'bad egg'.

dodgybon Resources to learn project management best practices?

http://blog.practicingitpm.com produces a weekly summary of useful PM content - subscribe by RSS

https://opensource.guide/ is full of tips on how to run OSS projects

Managing remote teams is almost a separate discipline unto itself, there's some useful tools and tips here: https://blog.toggl.com/managing-remote-teams/

dodgybon Ask HN: Are there any useful GDPR references?

A good reference is the Information Commissioner's Office. They are charged with enforcing the regulation:

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-da...

For a summary of concerns that may be pertinent to your use case - General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for Identity Architects:

https://medium.facilelogin.com/gdpr-for-identity-architects-...

dodgybon Ask HN: I have £100k to spend. How can I use it to increase my quality of life

Start by getting fit. I would go and live on a beach for 3 months. Exercising in soft sand (running, volleyball, etc.) will do your body the world of good with the least risk of injury.

You will find that you will be spoilt for choice for ideas once your body is firing on all cylinders - after all the body is the temple of the mind. Ideas will come especially if you base yourself where you are likely to meet people with lots of different backgrounds.

Hydroponics has an interesting future, worth looking into if you want a mix of tech and activity.

Zappa said "You are what you is", I would add "remembering". Friends and family make the memories sweet and it's the memories that count when all is done.