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dpritchetton Catalytic Converter Theft

That was kind of like hitting the lottery for us,” said Sacramento County Sheriff’s Detective Tom McCue, who led a multi-agency task force on the case.

Glad they busted up a theft ring but this sounds like a moral hazard, assuming they’re keeping the money.

dpritchetton My service to check whether an item is counterfeit or not

Presumably the perfect fake often costs too much to reliably manufacture.

Think of the randomness inherent in the microscopically unique features of the original and how you might emulate them reliably with a margin that still lets you compete with its luxury pricing.

dpritchetton Green vs. Brown Programming Languages

Blacklisting sounds extreme.

Wouldn’t we also need to blacklist a company that loses a programmer before the five year mark?

dpritchetton What I Worked On

This article suggests that he and JL were half of a self-funded YC that took 6% of each company they funded. The YC portfolio is estimated at $300 billion from a random article I just Googled.

3% of that would be nine billion, assuming all four YC founders had equal shares and disregarding dilution as the portfolio companies took on more investors.

Likely off by an order of magnitude in one direction or the other but still fair bit higher than 50 million.

dpritchetton Ask HN: Why are e-ink note-taking devices so expensive compared to iPads?

For a few decades I tried and failed to make hostfile blocks, guided access mode, browser focus-tracking extensions, day planners, public accountability, timers, and more work for me.

What actually works as I count the weeks to my fortieth birthday is a fragile and ever-shifting combination of adderall, sleep, diet, exercise, therapy, e-ink devices, and the courage to be open up and be vulnerable with those who depend on me at work and at home.

Splurging on a color laser printer and an e-ink tablet have given me two more ways to have a hope of staying on task a bit more every day.

dpritchetton Ask HN: Why are e-ink note-taking devices so expensive compared to iPads?

What stops you from unlocking the parental controls?

If that’s not a recurring issue for you then you may not have an executive function disorder.

dpritchetton Ask HN: Why are e-ink note-taking devices so expensive compared to iPads?

Not supporting a browser, games, or a media player IS the killer feature for anyone with ADHD or other focus issues.

There are lots of us out here.

Some even people do their deep work on a separate airgapped computer just to preserve their focus.

dpritchetton Pattern matching accepted for Python

Are you sure the second one isn’t just declaring not_found as a stand-in for 404 so the case statement two lines below can refer to business logic rather than a “magic” constant?

I would NOT expect for the line “case not_found:” to reassign the status variable to 404 regardless of what it was before.

I can’t see how or why that would be intended behavior.

dpritchetton Rust Foundation: Hello, World

Most people in the US know their offsets from the other three US time zones as well.

dpritchetton Done, and Gets Things Smart (2008)

Urs Hölzle or Paul Buchheit, maybe?

dpritchetton Sci-Hub Is Now on the ‘Uncensorable Web’

Here’s Swartz detailing how Reddit was rewritten in his own Python framework a scant six months after launch: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit

dpritchetton Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel

The owner visibly cashed out recently. CSR could be under orders to tighten up some internal metrics under new management.

dpritchetton Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

What are you hoping to learn? Might be hard to get it all from a single coach.

dpritchetton World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon

Yes! Today is a good day to reread Phil Haack’s 2014 essay on the lengths MS goes to for backwards compatibility: https://haacked.com/archive/2014/05/27/backwards-compatibili...

Edit: Haack heavily cites Raymond Chen from 2003: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031015-00/?p=42...

dpritchetton GitHub CLI 1.0

I’d be surprised if bitbucket’s dev tooling budget was 1/10th of GitHub’s even before the MS acquisition.

Working with BB APIs has not been fun at any point in the past 5 years or so :(

dpritchetton A Text Renaissance

Me! Been reading vgr for about a decade.

It works better if you know what you’re getting into and are prepared for a long read with some personality.

dpritchetton The Next Step: Application-Level Fault Injection

Gremlin infra engineer here. I'm happy to answer or route any questions on chaos engineering in general or application-layer failure techniques.

It's really compelling for exploring and shoring up my own systems and I expect it to be good for others as well.

dpritchetton Software resilience: The 500 test

OP has been in the API business for quite a few years at Heroku and Stripe. You can find him on Twitter sometimes if you have specific questions - not sure he'll read this.

dpritchetton Joy of Elixir

I've met him IRL and benefited from his tireless OSS leadership as a communicator and a code. Ryan is the real deal.

dpritchetton Introverts, Emotional Processing, Self-Esteem and Salary Negotiations

First response to a coworker storming in to cuss you should be to stand up to your full height and look them straight in the eye. You're not the one who set this belligerent tone, they are.

dpritchetton How to present a GitHub project for your resume (2016)

I failed a interview for a job I'd like to have gotten by trying to impress the reviewers with more handrolled stuff and nothing bloated. I asked and the folks who passed just used Rails. My submission was alternately perceived as underwhelming and trying too hard.

dpritchetton What Makes a Senior Software Developer?

Just FYI your calculator's cost of living adjustment makes it completely uncompetitive for the Memphis, TN market. Possibly you are already getting good leads from other countries, but I wanted to point that out all the same.

dpritchetton It Takes 6 Days to Change 1 Line of Code (2015)

"Leave it better than you found it" is one thing, but "perfect everything you touch or don't touch it at all" is another, vastly more expensive and high-friction thing.

dpritchetton As Our Jobs Are Automated, Some Say We'll Need a Guaranteed Basic Income

http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

There are definitely dead-end jobs that don't make you want to get out of bed in the morning. Maybe something like the CCC would help with the feeling of meaningful labor.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps

dpritchetton Don't Blame a 'Skills Gap' for Lack of Hiring in Manufacturing

If these manufactured products can't be brought to market without the button pushers, the value of the button pushing is almost certainly higher than minimum wage.

dpritchetton Low-income students can soon get federal aid to attend coding schools

I've worked with one who became an exceptional backend coder straight out of the code school. This is out of maybe six total and she had some excellent mentorship at the first job. Another had great frontend skills within a few months.

dpritchetton Soylent Coffee: Nootropics, fat, carbs, protein

Some people don't balk at the sight of a mostly-grain ingredients list. Lots of people aren't into macronutrients.

dpritchetton Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer on Selling a Company While Trying to Turn It Around

But most startups have hard working early employees - not just the successful ones. Focusing on hard work seems close to a just world fallacy. Ask a billionaire if they got there via hard work. Ask a hard worker if they've got a billion dollars.

dpritchetton How a team of young people helped rebuild healthcare.gov (2015)

It's pretty wild to think they had to go to the opposite coast to source a node/mysql/nginx solution. I know people who were doing such things much closer to DC. Granted, we are lower profile and maybe less pre-certified as "sure things". I wonder if borrowing Googlers is the government tech fire fighting equivalent of "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM"?

dpritchetton Simple Ways of Reducing the Cognitive Load in Code

Haven't touched Java in a decade and that is beautiful. I like Ruby's functional idioms and LINQ though.