Hacker News Reader

jamiepenneyon Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

Or Google. At least Oracle would keep its dead corpse alive while it was still producing revenue.

jamiepenneyon I Got Catfished by a Candidate

2 pages is what I go for. I've started leaving out older jobs in favour of pointing them at my LinkedIn profile for more in depth info for older positions.

jamiepenneyon I Got Catfished by a Candidate

I find it handy because most of the time I know some shared connections and I can chat to them about the person (like you said, New Zealand is a small place). I know what you mean, I avoided creating a profile for the longest time, especially because they were doing a lot of shady stuff around sending emails to all your contacts. However I find it to be a genuinely useful tool now.

In saying all of that, I'm not going to write you off for not having one and if your CV can give me the same info then that's fine. I just think it's best to use what's available to you - if you're in Wellington like I was, you're pretty much 2 degrees of separation from anyone else so finding someone to vouch for you that's trusted by the person hiring you is easy using LinkedIn.

jamiepenneyon Ask HN: What keeps you going?

I'd say give it a go. Sit down, work out a budget for say a year, and go do something else! I imagine after the amount of time you've spent in industry you've probably got enough contacts to come back to it later if you want/need.

My dream was always to retire by 40 - probably won't get there at this rate as I underestimated how expensive kids are but I still want to be semi retired by 50.

jamiepenneyon Ask HN: What keeps you going?

Your relation to the work would change I think. You would be less inclined to put up with bad working conditions, heavy deadline pressures, that sort of thing. Things you would normally let slide for the paycheque become dealbreakers or things you push back on.

jamiepenneyon Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming

Don't feel bad about that! My dad didn't know what the hell I was talking about when I was learning C++ as a teenager, but he asked anyway because he saw I got excited about it.

jamiepenneyon Pose: A declarative motion system for HTML, SVG and React

Wow, this is really nice!

jamiepenneyon Scrum for One: How to Apply the Scrum Framework to Personal Projects

I really like the sound of this! I've been using a bullet journal for my contracting work and it's been great, and yours sounds like a good system for managing personal projects. I've tried using digital tools and run into the same problem as well - too much ceremony which I don't have a lot of time for outside work anymore.

jamiepenneyon America’s Misguided War on Childhood Lead Exposures

Are you making a Dr Strangelove joke or actually serious?

jamiepenneyon Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

Like the AI Winter.

jamiepenneyon Sysadmin left finger on power button for an hour to avert SAP outage

386s had a push button power switch where if you were really fast you could let it out and immediately push it back in and the power wouldn't be interrupted. Found this out in class - we would walk over to each other, lean over pretending to talk to a friend and sneakily push the power button in. Before we worked out that trick, you would have to get your finger on the button before the other guy took his off, then hold it down while you saved your work.

jamiepenneyon Sysadmin left finger on power button for an hour to avert SAP outage

Had a power supply open to replace the fan, turned it on while open to test if it was wired up correctly. I flicked the switch with my thumb, with two fingers inside the case to stabilise it as the fan was loose. Those fingers briefly touched across the back of the switch and I got 240v mains straight to my hand. Luckily it caused my whole arm to contract so my hand couldn't seize up around the terminals!

jamiepenneyon Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

That's the perfect way to put it! Definitely going to steal this for later use.

jamiepenneyon How GDPR Will Change The Way You Develop

It's not just Europe, I've heard of banks here in New Zealand doing the same. The cost of compliance for them was more than the customer was worth.

jamiepenneyon The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority (2016)

Back then, wouldn't it have been? I think they used ammonia as a coolant initially.

jamiepenneyon Why we transitioned from Medium back to our own blog

I use it to keep track of where I am on sites like HN that have some combination of wide content, small fonts, and tight line spacing. It gives my eye something to flick back to when I'm scanning back to the start of a line.

jamiepenneyon Getting free of toxic tech culture

From personal experience, this is the problem rather than age. God forbid you aren't purely a machine that takes money and produces vastly more money for the company.

jamiepenneyon Comcast accused of cutting competitor’s wires to put it out of business

I live in New Zealand and had Vodafone do the same thing when they installed the cable internet for the previous owners. They cut both the phone line and the satellite lines leading into the house. No bloody reason for that to happen, the Chorus tech that came out to fix it said he found the same problem at a bunch of other houses in the area.

jamiepenneyon Twitch nabs exclusive streaming deal with Blizzard for e-sports events

Subscriber only mode on chat cuts back on the spam.

jamiepenneyon Twitch nabs exclusive streaming deal with Blizzard for e-sports events

My primary problem with twitch streams is that even though I can easily get all the 1080p60 bytes onto my machine, the bloody web player can't keep up. My fans spin at max speed, and eventually it starts dropping frames.

Contrast that to running it in unstream (the windows app). Absolutely no problems. Hell I'm pretty sure my iphone can run the Source level streams better than Chrome on my macbook pro.

jamiepenneyon A day without JavaScript

We've already learned from our past mistakes changing the prototype of the standard library - the Ruby community learned the same thing with monkey patching their standard lib too. The maintenance overhead far outweighs any immediate benefits.

jamiepenneyon A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats

Whenever I've raised the issue with other developers they've been open to the idea, but to be perfectly honest I have no idea how you'd even go about starting something like that.

jamiepenneyon New Surface Pro

Yeah, it's running a normal version of windows.

jamiepenneyon Reddit Is Being Manipulated by Big Financial Services Companies

/r/popular is filtered by looking at the most popular filters that people have used on /r/all - and it turns out that heaps of people have /r/the_donald filtered out. Lots of people also filter the League of Legends sub, so that gets removed from /r/popular. Data is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/5ubthi/top...

jamiepenneyon Mailgun Becomes an Independent Company

Not to mention they changed their volume pricing - we had to switch because our costs were going to quadruple.

jamiepenneyon How I Ruined Office Productivity with a Face-Replacing Slack Bot

Smart phones kinda ruined chitchat a little bit for me. Someone states a fact and I have a strong urge to pull out my phone and check it out. Takes me out of the flow of conversation, so I have to make a major effort not to do it.

jamiepenneyon Layoffs Taboo, Japan Workers Are Sent to the Boredom Room (2013)

I've seen it described as the Dead Sea Effect.

jamiepenneyon How much does employee turnover really cost?

Yep, been there. To be honest, nothing much changed when I left. The org was big enough that by leaving I wasn't doing catastrophic damage, so I had no leverage there. By staying, I was just allowing them to bleed me dry a bit longer. Took me too long to realise that and get out.

jamiepenneyon Bitcoin Beat the Trough of Sorrow

That's because it's a pump and dump scheme. They're just trying to rustle up some new bag holders.