joecot

One of the reasons I went with a 99% remote job. I'm an hour from the office. There's nothing I can't do from home a vast majority of the time, but the proximity to the office means that when there is value in me showing up, I can, on very short notice. They definitely paid me more for that ability, even though they were fine with me only planning on coming in maybe once a quarter. And I like that I'll still be getting some face time.

Relatedly, after my previous job tried to force everyone back in the office a majority of the time, and I gave them my notice after accepting an offer a week later, my former boss was suddenly very willing to discuss working from home 3 days a week if it meant I stayed. They can do it, they know remote work has been fine for a year+, they just don't want to. If you're an employer, make your peace with a hybrid or remote environment and make the accommodations clear now, not after all your people have started interviewing places that will. No matter what you're paying your tech folks, someone else will pay them more right now, and then it'll be too late.

Yeah, there are likely 3 categories of people currently waiting on the vaccine.

1. People who watched how chaotic it was to get a vaccine at first, and tuned out. They might not know how easy it is to get one now in most of the US, so some campaigning might be able to reach them.

2. People who want to "wait and see", who have concerns that there are longer term effects from the vaccines and want to wait to see if it's fine for other people they know. This might not necessarily just be people who are paranoid. Lots of folks with conditions that suppress their immune system are leery of the vaccine too, seeing how it's laid out some people with no immune system issues for days.

3. People who believe a wild conspiracy theory about getting microchipped, 5g, plannedemics, etc.

A lottery might get some of group #1 to check back in, but so would just better engagement. How much door to door canvassing would $5 million get?

It will have the exact opposite effect on groups 2 and 3, making them even more paranoid. If this is so great and doesn't have real drawbacks, why offer millions of dollars to get it?

The conversations I had with multiple recruiters who were having trouble placing candidates with clients because they were getting hired elsewhere faster than they could even finish interviewing them. I didn't envy their position.

This of course isn't universal. If you apply to the flashy postings on WeWorkRemotely where companies have high profile CEOs making dozens of blog posts about revolutionizing their industry, those positions are getting hundreds of applications, and they can take their pick.

But if you find a posting on a job site posted by a recruiter, and apply, you will get phone calls from several other recruiters at that agency, struggling quite hard to find candidates for small and medium size companies having trouble placing people. And they are having a lot of trouble placing people right now. Get yourself into recruiter databases, set yourself as open to work on LinkedIn, and the requests just pour in.

> Should I quit before or after returning to the office?

> Consider going back for at least a week or two. Think of it as a test of your hypothesis. Humans tend to be really bad at predicting how they’ll actually feel.

This is really bad advice for a lot of people. Especially tech people.

1. Currently you're working from home, and almost all the other companies you'd consider working at are also home. This means you don't need to take unexplained time off work to go into the city for an interview -- you're at home, your interviews are remote, and most companies have been willing to work with people to interview outside business hours, since everyone's home anyway. This is the time to look, not only because you have time and aren't commuting and coming home exhausted, but because companies are being more flexible with remote. Instead of fighting with your current company for a flexible remote policy, while you're stuck back in the office, you can work out a full or hybrid remote arrangement with a new company, as part of the terms of starting there.

2. At least for tech employees, this is a sellers' market, and you're the seller. Tech unemployment is around 1.2%. No matter what you're currently making, someone is going to be willing to pay you more to do it there. I've watched medium sized tech companies streamline their byzantine interview processes because they couldn't interview people faster than they were hired elsewhere. If you have good tech chops, it has never been easier to find a job quickly, and never easier to set your own terms and salary. The big tech companies are still being stodgy, and the small silicon valley tech startups still want to pretend they're big tech companies, but if you get your resume in front of a recruiter, they have small and medium sized businesses lining up to hire literally anyone they can.

So if you're in tech, which is probably why you read Hacker News, this is not good advice. If your company isn't giving you real plans for coming back that you're comfortable with, throw your resume out there and watch companies fight to have you. They will work with you on those plans, and you're in a better position than you think you are for those discussions. Everyone's laughing at fast food places putting up signs saying "No one wants to work anymore" because people realized they didn't have to. We're a few months from some tech companies being in the same spot.

This is the normal progression. A new technology comes along, and folks are so happy to use it everywhere that they teach new people to use it, without any understanding of why it's useful or what it was made to fix. And they have little to no understanding of the ecosystem that preceded it.

I watched it happen with virtualization. Everyone was so hyped about virtualization that everything was run in VMs. Later there was a counterrevolution of folks going "hey, we discovered that running things on bare metal servers is a thing you can do, and it's way faster and cheaper", a push that has mostly died out now that virtualization has hit near bare metal performance anyway and cloud hosting is the norm. But that counterrevolution happened because everyone embraced VMs and cloud services without dwelling on its actual use case, or in what cases it was an improvement over bare metal hosting. I watched similar happen with both the NoSQL and Serverless revolutions, and now we're watching it with containers.

So yes, this would be better setup as a deb package, or deployed as part of a cloudinit startup script or similar. But if you came in when everyone was just shoving docker down each other's throats, you don't know what stages there were before that, and which one is the most appropriate one for your use.

There's enough publishing a range that I only apply to those. Unless the company gives a range, or asks as part of the application for your target salary, I just don't apply. But not everyone is in a career position to do that.

Given the ludicrousness of the tech interview process, if I have to wait for the offer to ask about company culture, that's too late. I've already put in a dozen hours on the rest of the steps, and passed countless gates, only to now find out I don't actually want to work there with the offer in hand? These things need to be cleared up in the phone screening and the first interview, before both sides have put a tremendous amount of time and effort in.

This is a lot of companies, but this is not every company. Yes, they probably can't get into specifics with avoid harming worker privacy, but if they have to spend their time obfuscating their culture, I probably don't want to work with them.

At this point in my career, as I'm looking for senior roles in internal development, I'm interviewing the company as much as they're interviewing me. If I have to take over major development projects and architecting, I need to know what I'm walking into. If they aren't comfortable answering questions, I don't need to work there.

Recently I interviewed for a senior position at a development company, and their CTO seemed miffed by fairly straight forward questions about their history and practices. I didn't get a third interview, but I also see they've now made a posting for that same job a 3rd time, so it doesn't seem like that strategy is working out for them. If you want senior developers to lead, you have to be honest with them about what they're leading.

Previously the easiest way to bring down an entire AWS Region involved just waiting for AWS to take down the region on you. They stopped using VA as their guinea pig, but they took it down so many times that many of us started spanning across multiple regions. Only very naive serious users would be in just one region, let alone AZ at this point, so I highly doubt this plan would've taken down 70% of the internet.

> Then they should simply charge the higher amount.

The normal cost goes to their boss. The bribe goes to them. The bribe is just another version of tipping culture, except a differently coercive one.

Maybe try out NetBSD, I'm sure you'll love Theo de Raadt

The biggest problem in this game is the networking. It seems to have the same sort of networking issues Age of Empires did before the HD revamp, except worse. Once you hit a 100+ units for each player, the gameplay slows down dramatically. If the multiplayer desyncs, the game is over and there's no way to continue. The unit pathfinding is pretty janky as well.

I've played it, we liked it, but the multiplayer issues made it a non-starter for us. And while other changes have been made, it doesn't seem like any real networking optimizations have been made in years. The only recent change that might help is them adding a global population max in addition to a per player one, so you can keep the lag from getting too bad but add more units per player as other people get eliminated. But it's not enough.

I'm not very familiar with machine learning setups, but in general with hosts you trade SLA for pricing. You trade the 99.999% uptime and data consistency of hyperscaled hosts for cheaper pricing at smaller hosts. Assuming you can backup your data at checkpoints, consider running it on a setup like this for very cheap, and then back it up every hour/day to a consistently reliable data storage. AWS EC2 is very expensive for computing, but S3 is relatively cheap for storage. Backblaze B2 storage is also even cheaper, but with less guaranteed reliability than S3. But the odds of both this going down on you and Backblaze failing at the same time are pretty low.

I run a credit card processor on AWS, my important personal websites on Linode, and my fun time websites and video conferencing on a small Chicago host called Genesis Hosting with a website out of the 90s and dirt cheap pricing (but excellent support). Match your price and SLA with how much pain it's going to cause you if it goes down, and don't put pay extra to put all your stuff on the same 5 9s host if you don't really have to.

Most apps could really be Progressive Web Apps, using html css and javascript with local caching and storage. Both angular and react can handle running PWAs as do many other frameworks, and it's not rocket science to make a PWA. Even Parler had a PWA people could use when they got pulled from the store.

The problem is that the extra few steps to install a PWA (which is really just a webpage bookmark you put on your home screen plus some local caching) are a lot of friction. The hilarity after Parler got pulled was non techies trying to describe installing a PWA to each other and failing at it.

You also lose a lot of "organic" search results with a PWA. You don't get the app marketplace searching/related results like Google Play or the Apple Store has if you aren't in the marketplace. If you do both marketplace apps and encouraging people to install PWAs instead of your app, that's now less downloads in the app store and therefore lower rankings. It's doable to make a PWA instead of or in addition to an app, and that means you're still a usable service if you get pulled from stores, but it's not straight forward or perfect right now. The push to make Google and Apple let apps stay in their stores is the wrong push -- instead the push should be for more straight forward PWA support.

I've used 2 different generations of Intel NUCs as home servers for running VMs and a media server. This time around I got an Asus PN50 and I'm quite happy with it.

One time I bought a Nissan Versa. It had a Continuously Variable Transmission in it. They knew that they broke constantly, and they sold it anyway. They lied to me and said my transmission was fine a few months before the warranty was over, so they wouldn't have to replace it. Years after I traded that car in and it went immediately to a junk yard, Nissan settled a class action lawsuit over it. The compensation? A voucher for a few thousand towards a new Nissan.

I promise that when I joined a class action lawsuit over Nissan screwing me over, my goal wasn't to buy more Nissans. I would hazard a guess that many players who felt cheated enough by Epic to join a lawsuit against them likely feel similar.

> This is patently false. YTM has a library of tracks and albums that is equivalent to spotify or Google play music.

Then its completely separate library of tracks and albums randomly has songs disappear from my playlist or be unplayable in a manner indistinguishable from it sourcing its tracks from random youtube videos. My guess is that their native youtube music library does not have the breadth that their GPM one did, so some of the songs are from the community instead, and randomly disappear.

> I thought this was a rant about deleting data?

If you read the comment I'm replying to, they noted they didn't consider this a service going away if it's just a rebranding or a merger of features. I don't consider it just a rebranding, because they are removing a fully featured service and replacing it with a half baked one. I then proceed to explain the various ways it is quite half baked. Which is why my reply is on topic.

> I also did not experience this problem but they did screw up the order of my likes which was very annoying. This complaint is still off topic though.

I went from a curated list of Liked Songs in GPM to a hodge podge of those liked songs and every random joke song video I've liked since I started on Youtube. That playlist is now useless. That does pertain to my original point.

I would call it that, but Youtube Music is not just a rebranded service.

* Instead of a library of songs to listen to, you're listening youtube videos without the video. I make playlists with them and songs disappear randomly.

* The player is buggy. The music will skip, or randomly restart. Randomly a song won't play because it says the format isn't supported (which doesn't make any sense), and then the playlist stops altogether.

* In Google Play Music, you Liked songs and they would be in a Liked songs playlist. In Youtube you like videos and they are in a Liked Videos list. In Youtube music, after you've merged it, you now have a Liked list that is both your music from GPM, and every Youtube video you've ever liked that's also a song.

Youtube music is a drastic step backwards from GPM. I would've left for spotify already. but I appreciate also having Youtube without ads, and I don't want to pay for both services. I would've been happy with GPM sticking around forever with next to no updates, but Google always has to change something so managers can get their raises and promotions.

So is this Google trying to navigate around Australia's proposed changes, or did Google blink and decide not to pull out?

I want to love these things but the first one appears to be unfinished, and the second has hardware you have to assemble and then depends on an android app that appears to be quite flaky from the reviews. I would very much like a radio enabled encrypted communications system to complement Briar, but both of these look extremely iffy currently.

Reminder that while apps like signal are more convenient for every day use, if you want to have a way to message certain people when communications are being blocked, you should setup Briar[1] with your friend group. It connects over Tor when you have internet access, but can also pass messages ad hoc over WiFi or bluetooth, so that messages can be distributed across a group.

1. https://briarproject.org/

They have a Progressive Web App, which should be able to be loaded up and a home screen shortcut just like any app would. But it's not straight forward for Android (Parler users were trying to explain how to do it to each other with hilarious results), and I believe on Apple it can't be done.

There have been called for regulating how Apple and Google protect their app stores after Parler was pulled, but I don't think that's the solution. The solution is getting them to integrate PWAs into their ecosystem. They don't want to, because it draws from their app store revenue.

AWS is just one of hundreds if not thousands of hosting services. Is GoDaddy allowed to terminate someone's account? Linode? The 1 employee host I use in Chicago? AWS is one of the biggest hosts on the web, but they're still just a host. Other hosts exist and are readily available to move to, and there's no meaningful loss in internet availability between one and any other. The most likely reason that Parler can't manage to find a new host is that every other host now knows who they are and what they stand for, and will come knocking if they try to sign up and spin up instances. Parler ran out of giant megahosts they can hide in without having to speak to a person. On an internet that still hosts The Gab, Stormfront and numerous other deplorable sites, it's quite a feat to not be able to find any host willing to take you. That feat is pretty much relegated to child pornography and terrorism.

Let's not mince words: Parler knowingly aided in organizing a domestic terrorist insurrection on the US Capital. Anyone providing hosting to them at this point would be taking on a massive liability. Slippery Slope arguments about kicking off dissenters simply do not apply in this case.

The walled garden app stores are a problem, and it's a problem Progressive Web Apps can solve -- Google and Apple should be required to make PWAs easier to use and more accessible for non technical people. But it is possible to use Parler's PWA, and it's been a bit hilarious watching folks try to explain to each other how to use it.

But there are plenty of other places for Parler to host, register domains, etc. There are at least dozens of hosting companies that can do cloud hosting at the scale they need (which isn't exactly huge despite the hype), there are hundreds more that could be used in tandem to cover their needs. Either Parler's inability to handle these moves is a result of them being incapable or unwilling to take slightly more effort in hosting than launching Amazon or Google server instances with a click, or there's an unprecedented amount of unity in companies against Parler. The Gab is still up, Pirate Bay is still up, 8Chan still finds its way onto the internet.

The internet is still decentralized. It's the super easy hosting part of the internet that is centralized. It's the hosting that's big enough they don't notice or have any questions about what they're hosting. Parler ran out of hosting companies they could quietly hide inside without someone noticing what they're doing, and in order to find hosting again, they'll have to have an actual conversation with a vendor that sees what Parler is doing and is OK with being a part of it.

I'll watch both eventually, but the first note from that interview at 24 minutes is that the breakdown of the black family is a huge issue in the US. That kids are much more likely to grow up and commit crimes if there's no father figure in the house. And he's right, it is. But he skips the reasons behind them, and comes to the incorrect conclusion that that's not a "white cop's fault".

1. Those families often don't have dads because they were arrested on minor drug offenses, or killed by said cops.

2. America's social safety net is packed full of means testing. That includes means testing on welfare, which leads to broken families because there will be significantly less public assistance if there's a father in the picture than if there isn't.

Hi there! I'm in the "Left" bubble. What are some of these points the "Right" bubble has that I should be taking a good look at?

If a hacker hacked the CEO's email address, and then used that address to email their secretary asking for information, and the secretary responded.... that is not a security failure on the secretary's part. That's the CEO's security issue, and the company's security issue. Therefore, it's a useless pen test, unless the purpose is to tell employees no emails from anyone can be trusted.

A phishing email can come from the inside. But seeing whether employees will respond to a valid internal email is not a test of employee security. And in this case, it was as heartless as it was useless.

It's a message from a valid internal email address. If a company's own email servers can't tell the difference between valid internal mail and external phishing, that's the company's problem, not the employees. If the company's email is hacked so that a hacker can send valid emails from a legitimate internal email address, that's the company's problem, not the employees. Nothing of value was learned by this test, besides the disdain GoDaddy has for their own employees.

If I put myself on the other side, I'd stop producing gross sexist ads, stop supporting overreaching internet legislation, and stop treating my employees like garbage.

If a company had a pen tester offer bribes to people, and those employees accept bribes, the pen test was indeed failed and those employees should be rightfully reprimanded. That's good security.

If a company had a pen tester send what appears to be a perfectly legitimate message to employees offering them a company bonus for responding (during a worldwide pandemic where everyone is short on money), and then says it was a pen test and they've failed, that company is awful and heartless. There might not be a legal case against them, but the company is still deserving of public scorn and outrage.

That nickff's comment asked whether both a promise of a bonus and a promise of a bribe would be equally considered a "promise of compensation"? That's who I was replying to.

Whether or not a promise of a gift is a legally binding contract, there's a vast difference between a promise of a gift and a promise of a bribe.