lazerwalker

Yes, but you also described it as the strictures of "the religion", as if there is a single monolithic Judaism that universally follows that rule.

She disagrees with the way they operate; she doesn't need to justify herself either. They were able to come to a satisfactory business agreement regardless.

I think what I'm responding to is that your circumcision comparison made it sound like you're suggesting she's somehow "less Jewish" or an outsider to Judaism, when in fact the specific thing she's disagreeing with isn't a universal part of the religion.

I mean, this is a short blog post on her personal blog, right?

I don't know if there's that much more to it than "here's an interesting story that happened to me, including being happy to tell you about how I was able to donate $500 to some good organizations".

You say the phrase "exact strictures of the religion", as if there aren't an untold number of different ways to interpret a set of religious texts that are in many places explicitly and intentionally ambiguous.

Location: Berlin, Germany

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes (US citizen)

Technologies: iOS, JS (front-end + node), games, hardware

Résumé/CV: https://lazerwalker.com | https://www.linkedin.com/in/lazerwalker/

Email: hn@lazerwalker.com

I'm looking for a developer advocacy or evangelism gig! I speak, write, livecode on Twitch, run community events and conferences, make weird viral art on top of new tech platforms and APIs. I'd love to do all that to grow your co's dev ecosystem.

Some examples: the Amazon-funded Alexa board game I worked on was nominated Game of the Year at Toy Fair 2019; I run the single largest indie dev conference about open-source games; multiple conferences have linked to my talks in their CFP as examples of great previous talks.

> Unfortunately, our observation is that the ratio of commercial to free users is about 1 to 25.

That's a ~4% conversion rate. Anyone have data for any similar OSS software libraries with a free tier?

Well, "easy" for men who could afford a suit that passed the "good enough" bar.

I dunno if this is still true, but it used to be the case (10+ years ago?) that Costco's pricing model was transparently "charge X% over cost", with X constant over all items.

This meant some items at Costco were expensive relative to what you could find elsewhere on sale, but it also meant it was phenomenally useful to figure out what items other retails were making obscene amounts of profit on.

In my experience, not so much? You'll need to worry if you're working on tasks that touch the same corner of the codebase, but larger teams tend to correlate with larger codebases, meaning that's not necessarily more likely.

That sort of XP style development also tends to come hand-in-hand with near-constant pair programming. So even if the conceptual limit is "5 sets of committers", that's still double the actual team size. And in practice, the cross-pollination that comes with swapping pairs every day or every few days means there's less of a cognitive load to needing to be aware of what's going on, since chances are either you or your pair already has context.

I mean, they're still doing that. Amazon is still planning on staffing up their existing NY offices, just to the tune of 5k new jobs instead of 25k.

The big dog and pony show was about asking for major tax benefits. They're still welcome to open a giant LIC office, they just won't get showered with a tax windfall for it. That's Amazon's decision that it wasn't worth it.

I'd be curious to hear your characterization of the reactions to MS buying GitHub.

My observation was a bunch of people in places like the HN comments being angry, but no meaningful mass protest, or exodus from GitHub to competitors, etc.

I think it's worth distinguishing install time from subsequent launch time. You seem to be describing the time it takes to go from seeing the app to using it for the first time. For an app you use regularly (or even just more than a few times ever), how long it takes an already-installed app to open from cold start seems like a much more important metric.

While bundle size might sometimes correlate with cold start times for PWAs (depending on whether it's JS code that's bloating the bundle, or other media assets that won't trigger an initial parsing + evaluation hit), that's less likely to be the case with native apps.

I wonder if https://glitch.com has a mobile-friendly IDE and will also let you set up a project to be a PWA? Seems like it'd be a great fit for what you're describing.

I agree the loss of control is unacceptable. I agree that only being able to get commercial apps like this that monetize through advertisements and selling opaquely-gathered tracking data is unacceptable.

But I'm curious how much download weight matters, outside of as a proxy for "how much bloated ad bullshit is hiding inside the app bundle"?

I'd wager the difference between a 2KB PWA and a 5MB or 30MB native app download is relatively insignificant — in storage space, in cellular data use, in initial download time — to your average user when compared to streaming a film on Netflix or downloading a F2P game with 100MBs to GBs of assets.

(where "average user" is assuming most of these apps are only localized in English and only available in largely-western countries — totally get how the story is very different in emerging markets)

This sounds like you haven't had a competent manager before (nothing to be ashamed of, I was there once!)

Meetings like weekly 1:1s are supposed to be helpful for you as the engineer. They're a safe space for you to complain, and share what sucks about your job, and brag about what's going well. It's like work therapy, but a lot of the things that you complain about can actually become things your manager can fix over time.

Things like help in goal setting might not seem strictly necessary if you're self-driven enough. But doing good work doesn't help your career if nobody notices, and spending your time focused on Doing The Thing is time you're not spending playing a game of politics to make sure upper management is hearing your name all the time. Having a manager to establish a paper trail of what you claim your goals are, and then doing them, makes it easier for everybody above you in the organization to justify giving you a raise/promotion/etc.

I agree that, in a lot of situations, poorly-trained managers do more harm than good. But I promise it's theoretically possible for good managers to provide value!

FWIW, as someone in the process of trying to set up an Electron app to generate Linux / Mac / Windows builds on CI, I found Travis's Windows support to be unusably slow and flaky.

I hear Appveyor and Azure Pipelines are the two most usable Windows build systems; I'm quite happy on Appveyor.

There may not be much in the article itself, but the "Further Reading" list is a great summary of good work that's been done to date by others.

The good news is I think this is a problem that goes away (or at least is lessened) as remote work becomes more ubiquitous. When there's more supply of remote employers, presumably some of them will make a big point of paying people the same rates everywhere as a hiring differentiator, which will make it harder for employers just looking for a good deal.

Most times Google has issues like that, it's for a free service, rather than something affecting paid customers, yeah?

The vast majority of Slack accounts are tied to a paying employer[^1], and yet most of the responses we've seen are individuals (justifiably!) upset they've been barred access from their work tool. I'm curious to see how companies respond to Slack disrupting the productivity of their salaried employees.

^1: Well, hmm, I wonder what % of active instances are on a free tier, but that's a separate unrelated question

If a specific implementation of a bikeshare or scooter share program is borderline useless because the hardware is junk, that sounds like an implementation detail rather than the sort of philosophical argument you seem to be making.

I've been in cities where the bikeshare was borderline useless. I've also spent lots of time in NY, where its bikeshare is both at least as useful as the subway within Manhattan and legitimately the fastest way to get e.g. north or south within Brooklyn.

I'm currently based in Berlin, where I agree with the parent to your comment. Berlin's metro is generally great, but there are a large number of places I go to regularly that are ~10 minutes away by bike but ~30 minutes by public transit, purely because of the way the system is laid out.

If you're going to complain about bikes or scooters cluttering up sidewalks, perhaps the answer is they should have dedicated space on the streets (as with docked bikeshare programs like NY). I'd love to see studies about the effect on number of transportation trips that e.g. a dedicated scooter stand the size of a car parking space has on the flow of traffic as compared to letting that single parking space be usable by cars.

I totally get your point that this is something that should be handled at the civic planning level rather than at SV-funded startups. Copenhagen is probably the clearest example where the city government was able to make massive improvements to the way people move around their city, encouraging non-car transit. That doesn't change that bikes and scooters are arguably a more effective way to move individuals than cars (either private ownership or rideshare), and a shared system has transportation benefits that are unique from the benefits offered by traditional public transit.

Only if you only view the scooters as a "hazard" and an "eyesore". An alternate interpretation (even if you're rightfully skeptical of for-profit venture-funded startups like these) is that the scooters are a fairly sustainable and scalable form of individual transit compared to cars, and a world where scooters (or similar devices) fulfill a useful last-mile role in public transit is one that's beneficial for society and civic infrastructure.

I believe there's a decent amount of prior art for games supporting cross-platform play across Steam and traditional consoles (PS4 / Xbone / Switch). Presumably you'd need to re-buy a game like Rocket League to get it to show up in your Epic library, but the Steam version could likely be patched to allow Epic players to play alongside Steam players?

The only thing I'd caution (particularly about #1) is that being able to parrot facts — even ones you know cold — on-demand in a high-intensity interview setting can be very different from using those same facts day-to-day. If someone can't describe the difference between abstract classes and interfaces, how confident are you it's because they don't understand it and not just because they're horrible at being put on the spot in an interview-style environment?

It's not fair to say they "don't want business". They don't want certain forms of business — laptop coworkers — that in many cases are both low-profit customers and actively limit the throughput of total customers.

I had a good chat once with a guy who runs a small coffee roastery and number of fancy third-wave coffee shops in a posh university town. One of the most popular coffee shops in town went completely bankrupt and he ended up taking it over. The first thing he did was turn off the WiFi; to hear him tell it, revenue doubled or tripled overnight as soon as he did. Turns out actually having available seats can drive sales, and having a giant store in a high-rent area full of people who buy one $4 coffee and sit there for five hours isn't profitable. At the time, he was in the process of renovating half of the space to be formal paid coworking.

(I personally think there's room for middle ground. My favorite local coffee shop only allows laptops in a dedicated section, which has ample power but also higher-density seating than the normal area. When it's warm enough to sit outside, they allow laptops outside during the week but not on weekends. Another favorite coffee shop just turns the WiFi off on weekends.)

Based on a naïve reading of your description, it's unclear whether those problems are due to some inherent properties of a centralized database, or if they're merely implementation details of the current host. Any thoughts?

You’re totally right about options. I was thinking more explicitly about stock itself (e.g. RSUs in the case of employees at companies that issue those instead of options, or founder's stock in my personal case).

Separate from that, things are still more fraught in Germany: whatever your US taxation situation is, I'm not aware of any situation where a valuation change in stock/options/etc you're holding will trigger a taxable event for you, as I understand to be the case with Germany. As I understand equity taxation in the US, you'll only ever be taxed when events happen that you yourself have initiated (e.g. exercising options or selling stock).

FWIW, Germany specifically has complicated tax laws that make equity tricky. Namely: if your equity ever increases in value — e.g. if your startup raises a round of funding and gets a higher valuation — you owe capital gains taxes on the increase, even if the equity itself isn't liquid (which it might very well never be). There are workarounds, but they're a hassle. None of this is an issue in the US, where you're only taxed when you sell.

I've never been an employee of a German company, but I'm in the process of founding a startup here in Berlin. I totally get how saving early employees from having to deal with that headache would be a blessing.

(In general, the advice in the article tracks with my experience working not just with SF-based startups but companies in other top-tier tech cities like London and NYC. If you get a job at a startup in SF, you'll absolutely get equity as meaningful part of your job offer, even if you actively don't want it. A large part of startups' ability to hire depends on them being able to convince you it's okay you're being paid literally less than half of what Facebook pays because someday your 0.01-0.1% equity stake might be worth something)

To flip the question around: what benefits does Tor give me over my existing setup? I can see an ideological argument, and I can see the $5 or $10 a month savings, but — especially given my threat model is well enough served by a VPN — I'm curious if there are other practical benefits of Tor that might help overcome the obvious downsides (more complicated setup, slower)

Honestly? My VPN setup works for me, so I haven't particularly bothered to spend time investigating alternatives. It's not that I do or don't trust it more than Tor.

That said, the few times in the far past I've tried to use Tor as a VPN, it's been slower and less reliable than the VPN I pay for (especially on my phone). Using a regular VPN also makes it easier for me to do things like spoof my country for region-locked services.

(If I was going to bother making a change, it'd probably be to hosting my own VPN server on a VPS provider instead of specifically paying a VPN provider)

I can't read the original article, but I'd hope it has a rational discussion of threat models?

I don't necessarily assume my VPN is 100% secure; I do trust a company that I pay money to more than I trust that nobody's sniffing my traffic at a rando coffee shop.