jwiley

Others specifically mentioned Kobo as an alternative. I did a high level pass over the ecosystem before choosing them as an alternative to the Amazon monopoly, they seem somewhat equivalent to Chrome vs Firefox:

- supported formats, for the Linux issue: EPUB, EPUB3, PDF, MOBI, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, TXT, HTML, RTF, CBZ, CBR

- no native linux client: not a deal breaker for me

- is the company behind Kobo credible, will it be around for a while: yes, its owned by a credible company, 13.4% e-reader market share, probably shrinking

- could it be sold? Possibly: https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/will-rakuten...

- is there an export path if they go under: its Adobe DRM, so assumably yes with their support

- does the store work?: Yes, the interface is reasonable if slow, I could find books on it and buy

- are prices comparable: no, Kindle is cheaper in some instances but there is a price match (I used it, it works)

- are the books I want on there: yes, ever one of the 5 or so books I looked at are listed on the store, newest version

- is the reader comparable to Kindle: yes, same settings I use on devices and laptop, fonts, brightness, clarity etc all comparable

One thing missing is 'X-Ray', which is neat but not essential technology Kindle has. Kobo has a book search that is ok, but not as good.

It seems like this is nothing new:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/03/12/simple-ap...

Is there any non-paywalled variant of this story at another news site?

I wonder why patches for individual security updates are pushed out individually instead of following the hard release process? We moved away from that in the web / app space decades ago, it's hard to imagine saying "guys, we need to wait 3 months to fix an SQL injection vulnerability to avoid churn."

Also...Mac updates are theoretically 'automatically installed', but somehow I have to notice and update, enter my password, and agree to restart and occasionally terms of service for every update which feels clunky.

It would be useful to have a more direct comparison between this and Redux (assuming its not on the website and I missed it). In what use-cases is it preferable, in which would it not be a good fit? In the comments you mention O(1) vs O(n), diving more deeply into that would be helpful as well.

Can you expand on "the Trump/Iran release was estimated to be pretty close to the diffraction limit"? What is this in reference to?

I worked for a small health products reseller around 2008 that had stores on Amazon, Yahoo (when that was a thing) and other marketplaces. It was well-known that any exclusive distribution deals between the health products reseller and manufacturers had a very short life: if the product was profitable Amazon would go around the reseller, negotiate a better deal, and sell it themselves.

Fast forward to today, and companies that are direct competitors with Amazon (like Netflix) are completely committed to AWS. Amazon is watching, learning, and evolving from every piece of data they can get their hands on. What better way to learn about your business model than to watch them being tested and deployed on their infrastructure?

I'm not specifically pro or anti Amazon...but I find it surprising the C-suite of most organizations seems content to think of AWS as a separate business un-related to the business that is actively trying to corner the market they are competing in.

I used Crystal with VS code, I don't remember the autocomplete issues, but I'm not a big consumer of that functionality. Syntax highlighting (and I think formatting) were supported with the plugin I used, which was good enough for my purposes.

I tried Crystal for a small hobby project a few months back, and was generally impressed by the stability, ease of use and documentation. I found the type-system very straight forward, and with less mental overhead than Rust, obviously with all the design tradeoffs that entails. For the use-cases I'm interested in, Crystal has a little ways to go in terms of mindshare and ecosystem support, but it's a fun language to learn and try.

Fantastic game, greatly enjoyed it. 5/5 on the ycombinator app store. :)

Is there anything to stop an application from touching the cache periodically (in the Unix sense of updating modification timestamps without changing values) on load?

If so, assuming the application is used more than once every 7 days, this seems like less of an issue.

Thanks for posting! Applied on the website

Thanks for your post! Whats the best way to apply? I know in some cases HR systems can be overwhelmed...is it possible to send a resume to you or hiring managers directly?

I used to be pro-TODO, I find myself today firmly in the no-TODO camp.

I work daily on a large, mature code-base, littered with cryptic TODOs left by developers long-gone. They are generally as useful as street-signs in a ghost town.

TODO: clean this up

toDo: validate once ARF-211 is closed

todo remove

TODO factor

TODO: lol, hae to enable in production for some reason

TODO- will this scale? logarithmic?

If I dive into the commit logs, I can try and sus out why they were there, whether they can be removed or acted on. Generally other devs don't touch them out of superstition, they are probably there for a reason, someone else understands them, and they will eventually be useful.

Clearly, better team agreements, discipline, strict code reviews etc could have prevented this or made them more useful, but that ship had sailed before I arrived, and given the pace of maintenance and new feature development I am sure these TODOs will remain for quite some time...monuments to earlier days and priorities that are long gone.

'main.dart.js' in the example Flutter KENKEN app linked in the blog post:

Chrome - 359kb

Firefox - 990k

I agree that Chrome is becoming more and more a proprietary channel for Google products, which is probably what its original intent was all along.

I've heard anecdotally from people working in non-profit agencies assisting with tax preparation that there was extensive lobbying to prevent changes that would make it easier to file for the earned income tax credit.

The average return for those applicable is ~$2,500, which is a huge amount for people who qualify, lost so Intuit and H&R block can better market their product.

https://www.eitc.irs.gov/partner-toolkit/basic-marketing-com...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/04/30/research...

I like the idea of multi-cloud very much, kudos to the author for pushing for it.

One crucial issue that isn't addressed by a hexagonal architecture however is data egress charges.

Data egress is the gravity of the cloud services world, and it's are an insurmountable barrier for many services. The moment you start planning a multi-cloud deploy, and start looking at shifting services that are tightly coupled, or require data replication (databases, logs, storage) between clouds, you're going from low or no cost data charges, to paying egress on -both sides- of every transaction.

I know first-hand that these costs can quickly out weigh any disaster recovery / eggs in one basket argument you might put forward. It even dominates an "this cloud provider will probably be our competitor in 2 years or is our competitor right now" argument, and my guess is data egress has strongly contributed to companies like Netflix continuing to use AWS.

My experience at Dave & Buster's is around 80% reproducible, so I think progress is possible.

Can you clarify why "the target series should be log-normal returns" is important or provide a pointer for more information?

How is this different than the "Think Different" Jobs era ads with Einstein and Martin Luther King?

Or the giant American flags waving over every car lot? Or pictures of veterans learning to walk again on an add for Prudential insurance?

This is a very old marketing game, and I'm sure whatever qualms the team creating it had, if any, were overruled by the need to make it rain and get bonuses and keep all of us engineers employed.

"Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack."

Can someone clarify what the use-case is for this new functionality? I've regularly used POS stripe devices based on iPads, is the idea this allows Stripe to be used on proprietary POS devices?

Some more discussion on Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/58plow/why_are_...

Next step in operation Foie gras: Amazon connects a tube to your mouth and pushes corn through it, automatically deducting the cost from your credit card. Totally effortless shopping

Nice project, thanks for sharing. One interesting application that comes to mind is creating a "safe" subset of Javascript, that could be run in an end-users browser without requiring a sandbox. One definition of safe might be: not allowing access to the DOM or global variables.

Is this a reasonable use case? Is Ohm's executing environment appropriate for this usecase?

I liked your original post as well, and appreciate the DIY site, nice work.

I didn't read your new write up extensively, but if you haven't I strongly suggest mentioning some feedback I remember from from your earlier posts:

- the need for appropriate fuses to avoid fires - the need to weight the solar panel appropriately to prevent it from flying off due to wind

A fire or injury due to a flying solar panel would unfortunately provide much more negative publicity than the positive publicity of this site.

References:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15222194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14824702

When I posted it, the original article was offline, the site was showing a database error

Possibly a reference to:

http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-top-manager-at-russian-cyb...

I graduated during the first dot.com boom, and decided to transition from Economics to web developer. I got a job at a small company, with minimal programming knowledge. My programming test was explaining how a Perl program I wrote worked.

I certainly wasn't a great engineer, and I have never been a natural programmer. But the company I worked at realized that they didn't need the top 1% to build basic enterprise software. Paying a kid out of college 1/5th the salary of a top 1%er, and who a maniac about learning, was pretty attractive to them.

The barrier for you guys is so much higher now, and it's a shame. We need you. We really, really need you.

I think the real question is: do you like building real applications? Algorithm questions are wonderful intellectual challenges, and useful background knowledge. But most engineers I know spend 90% of their time figuring out why something wont compile, trying to integrate with crazy APIs, or dreaming about how new technology X will fit into the stack. Worrying about whether the hash table Java uses is O(n) or O(1) is very low on my priority list, and something hard to justify to bosses and customers who care about a shipped product more than microseconds of optimization.

Take a break from programming if you can. Get a job in retail, and experience a different form of suffering for a while. Or join the Peace Corps. When your brain gets rested, find an open source project that interests you, and contribute to it. If you can't find one you like, or find that it bores you to tears, consider another profession. There's no shame in that, the world needs doctors, lawyers, chemists, business people and barristas as well.

Whats EOPL?

"bespoke"