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mosburger

1,370 karma · joined February 9, 2008

Fifty-something polyglot developer, occasional engineering manager, and sometimes wannabe entrepreneur.
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mosburger··on FCC votes to limit prison telecom charges
Aware that this comment is wading dangerously into U.S. politics - will the recent Supreme Court decisions w/r/t the powers of executive branch agencies like the FCC make it impossible to enforce this?

Edit - this from the article makes me thing that maybe it'll be OK? Sounds like there was some congressional approval involved?

> The regulations adopted today mark the implementation of the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, which established the FCC’s authority to regulate in-state phone and video calls from correctional facilities, in addition to out-of-state phone calls that it had already regulated. The discussion during today's vote will result in only minor changes to the draft rules released on June 27, and be released in the coming days.

mosburger··on Railroading the Pascal Language
Brings me back to a time early in my career where I had to write Cognos QTP, QUIZ, and QUICK programs (blech!) ... their documentation used this format, I didn't know there was a name for it. It was the only nice thing about working with those languages.
mosburger··on The curse of the goitre in Switzerland
FWIW, that was addressed in the article:

> Whatever chefs might claim, this fact is well established: in 1995, Unicef, concerned about the sensitivity of children to odd flavours, commissioned a study in which rice was prepared with salt iodised at ten times the maximum recommended concentration. In double-blind taste tests, the iodine was undetectable.

mosburger··on My $500M Mars rover mistake
Hey neat - I once destroyed a $5000 prototype disk drive (I was a Firmware engineer at Quantum in the late 1990s at my first post-college job), also with back-EMF (it flowed from the braking spindle motor into a power chip and melted the circuit board). I felt terrible and that was multiple orders of magnitude cheaper. :)
mosburger··on Ertdfgcvb
Welcome, to Ertdfgcvb. This is Ertdfgcvb. The unattainable is UNKNOWN at Ertdfgcvb!

/me wonders if anyone still knows this reference

mosburger··on Windows 2000 64-bit for Alpha AXP
My first industry job was a co-op on the DEC Multia team. Multia was another attempt to lure people over from the VMS/Unix world by bundling an X Server and system administration software along with Windows NT.

While I was there, we switched over from Alpha to Intel because the performance just wasn't there on Alpha - IIRC the 75MHz Intels blew the 233MHz Alphas out of the water. Most of us chalked it up to the fact that Microsoft wasn't super interested or able to optimize Windows to run on Alpha.

As sort of a "stunt" I got the newer versions of the Multia software that were only available on Intel to run on the old Alpha Multias under a (then internal project) emulator called FX!32

mosburger··on Apple Music Classical
I worked on a project for Sony Music called "Ariama" a little over ten years ago that addressed this very problem w/ metadata, and organizing classical music differently than the artist/album/track way. I worked on the search piece! We also offered FLAC downloads.

Looks like we were just ahead of our time. :-/

mosburger··on Sex worker-led payment platform shuts down after being cut off by processor
Wouldn't chargebacks only really impact the merchant, and not the acquirer/payment processor?
mosburger··on ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off
Yep, I worked in the disk drive industry over twenty years ago, and I was surprised to learn that a lot of what we read off the disk is actually wrong! If not for a lot of generous error correction they'd've been pretty unusable.
mosburger··on Why is Rosetta 2 fast?
OMG I forgot about FX!32. My first co-op was as a QA tester for the DEC Multia, which they moved from the Alpha processor to Intel midway through. I did a skunkworks project for the dev team attempting to run the newer versions of Multia's software (then Intel-based) on older Alpha Multias using FX!32. IIRC it was still internal use only/beta, but it worked quite well!
mosburger··on Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
If it's a one time payout (to be clear, I'm not that will be the case here? It was for me the only time that I was laid off), I think the withholding would be calculated as though that single payment were a regular salary extrapolated to the entire year. This is similar to what happens if you receive a bonus; to compute the withholding they assume your annual salary is $BONUS * $PAY_PERIOD. So you'd likely be taxed at a much higher rate on that single payment than you would be amortized over a year like a salary is.

You'd get that withheld money back after filing taxes, but most people who are laid off would prefer to have that money now.

If Stripe is making regular salary-like payments instead of one lump sum, then the taxes would be pretty much the same as always.

mosburger··on TomTom’s new mapping platform and ecosystem
no hate here - the "replace everything with an iPad" movement of car dash design has been generally, IMO, a horrible change. When driving, you need tactile feedback when adjusting things like the cabin temperature so that you can keep your eyes on the road. Replacing knobs with GUI sliders on a screen that you have to see to manipulate is a step backwards. I would love it if auto manufacturers came to their senses and went back to old-fashioned knobs and buttons, but I suspect that just sticking everything on a screen is cheaper to manufacture and maintain, so I won't hold my breath. :(
mosburger··on Solarized
As a 48 year old who's feeling quite burnt out, I'm curious to learn more about this sideways move... I'm feeling a bit trapped right now. :(

EDIT: Ah, checked your profile and history and it seems like you've become a writer? Hmm... maybe I could do that...

(BTW, the SSL cert for your website has expired!)

EDIT2: Thanks for the advice on writing, all! Honestly, I was thinking of taking the technical writer route. I've always been pretty good at authoring things like technical specs, so it seemed like a potential "lateral move," albeit one that probably pays a hell of a lot less than software development. I'm suspect that technical writing has some of the same soul-crushing aspects of software development, so perhaps it wouldn't even be worth it.

mosburger··on Brave browser now blocks cookie banners
I'm surprised that no one in this tread has mentioned Opera. Weirdly, a lot of my son's Gen-Z aged group has started using Opera. When I asked them about it, it's because it "seems faster than Chrome." I haven't tried Opera in... like... forever (probably I last used it when they had their own rendering engine instead of being yet-another-webkit), so I have no idea how much veracity their claims are.

I just think it's odd that many of the young punks I know are switching to Opera of all things.

mosburger··on Arecibo telescope won’t be rebuilt
I've wanted to get the "Arecibo messsage" as a tattoo for a while now... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message
mosburger··on How Americans edit sex out of my writing
also very weird use of French-style « guillemet » quotation marks?

(not weird because they're guillemets, just kinda weird because they're in an English language article and being used for emphasis instead of quotations)

mosburger··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2022)
Sendwave (YC2012) | Various Roles | Remote | Full Time

YC2012 (https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/sendwave)

Hiring in the following countries only: Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Costa Rica, Kenya, Poland, Senegal, UK, USA

Join our global team bringing modern, affordable banking and remittance services to those who need them the most. We offer competitive pay (includes equity), great benefits, and a compassionate work environment dedicated to using technology to help people connect and support each other, today in Africa, LatAm, Asia and eventually, worldwide!

We’re looking for experienced engineers with strong technical design skills and excitement about mentorship to help keep our team well rounded, and help keep our product quality high as we grow the team and the product.

Senior iOS Engineer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/sendwaveapp/jobs/5971885002

Senior Android Engineer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/sendwaveapp/jobs/5971837002

Senior Backend Engineer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/sendwaveapp/jobs/5881610002

Plus many others - we have lots of open jobs for non-engineering roles too! https://www.sendwave.com/careers

mosburger··on Google is shutting down Stadia
I feel like it might be a little "safer" if it wasn't tied to Dart. :-/
mosburger··on Google is shutting down Stadia
> I can't recall any Apple service that has been shut down without an alternative.

I can think of an esoteric one that no one misses: Ping (their music-based social media network)

mosburger··on Ken Thompson really did launch his "trusting trust" trojan attack in real life
I thought a lot of it was developed at JetBrains' (now shuttered) St. Petersburg R&D site? Could be wrong, though.
mosburger··on Ken Thompson really did launch his "trusting trust" trojan attack in real life
I know this probably falls into the category of red-baiting hysteria, but sometimes I've wondered (not seriously, in more of a spy-vs-spy, campy, tinfoil hat way) if the Kotlin programming language is a secret plot by the Russian government to embed backdoors in everything compiled with it. How many people have done a deep inspection of the compiled product?

(Insert balloon boy meme of the conspiracy theory guy at his bulletin board)

Of course, the Russians would probably be justified in wondering the same thing about a programming language created in the United States.

mosburger··on What happened to Tandy computers
My junior high school library had Tandy Model IIIs that I learned to program on (alongside the Apple IIs). The elementary school had a mix of CoCo 2s and Apples.
mosburger··on What happened to Tandy computers
My first computer was an Tandy 1000EX (in... 1986?), and this article is spot-on. The sound and graphics were miles ahead of my friends with IBM and Apple PCs at home (but not quite as good as the Commodores). And, as the article points out, they didn't keep up with standards. I made the mistake of going with nostalgia and "upgrading" to a Tandy 1000TX in 1992 when I headed off to college, and everyone else was running Windows (my old Tandy could run Windows 3.0, but not 3.1). I ended up needing to do my homework on my roommate's Wang (another dinosaur) PC.

Still nostalgic for my first Tandy 1000, but I regretted my decision to get the second one, and ultimately sold it a year later to buy a no-name 486 PC.

mosburger··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2022)
Sendwave (YC2012) | Various Roles | Remote | Full Time

YC2012 (https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/sendwave)

Hiring in the following countries only: Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Costa Rica, Kenya, Poland, Senegal, UK, USA

Join our global team bringing modern, affordable banking and remittance services to those who need them the most. We offer competitive pay (includes equity), great benefits, and a compassionate work environment dedicated to using technology to help people connect and support each other, today in Africa, LatAm, Asia and eventually, worldwide!

We’re looking for experienced engineers with strong technical design skills and excitement about mentorship to help keep our team well rounded, and help keep our product quality high as we grow the team and the product.

Senior iOS Engineer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/sendwaveapp/jobs/5971885002

Senior Android Engineer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/sendwaveapp/jobs/5971837002

Senior Backend Engineer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/sendwaveapp/jobs/5881610002

Plus many others - we have lots of open jobs for non-engineering roles too! https://www.sendwave.com/careers

mosburger··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2022)
Sendwave | Various Roles | Remote | Full Time

YC2012 (https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/sendwave)

Join our global team bringing modern, affordable banking and remittance services to those who need them the most. We offer competitive pay (includes equity), great benefits, and a compassionate work environment dedicated to using technology to help people connect and support each other, today in Africa, Asia and eventually, worldwide!

To achieve our mission, we need to make sure our app is easy to use for every interaction from signup to sending to editing info to resetting your password. We’re looking for experienced engineers with strong technical design skills and excitement about mentorship to help keep our team well rounded, and help keep our product quality high as we grow the team and the product.

Preference is given to candidates in timezones from UTC-5 to UTC-3, but we're hiring in all European and African timezones. We are fully remote, and have engineers in the Americas, Europe, and Africa.

- Senior iOS Engineer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/sendwaveapp/jobs/4337436002

- Senior Android Engineer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/sendwaveapp/jobs/5971837002

- Senior Backend Engineer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/sendwaveapp/jobs/4383168002

- Cloud Infrastructure Engineer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/sendwaveapp/jobs/4673569002

- Data Science Manager: https://boards.greenhouse.io/sendwaveapp/jobs/6016954002

Plus many others - we have lots of open jobs for non-engineering roles too! https://www.sendwave.com/careers

mosburger··on Render: a Zero DevOps Cloud Platform
depends on the project - once it was AWS, once it was Linode, the most recent one was to GCP.
mosburger··on Render: a Zero DevOps Cloud Platform
Right now I'm on my third job in my career where we've migrated off from Heroku. There have got to be agencies out there that specialize in this, right? If not, it seems like a hell of an opportunity for someone.
mosburger··on USPS Begins Postal Banking Pilot Program
Yeah, good point - I can't say what the ID requirements are for those banks. I know that for international remittances (my line of work) we need things like a national ID or passport, so it seems like it'd be along the same lines, perhaps even a little less strict because there are fewer concerns w/r/t money laundering or terrorist funding.
mosburger··on USPS Begins Postal Banking Pilot Program
I think that allowing companies to pay in cash is seen as dangerously close to paying "under the table" and not properly documenting for taxation purposes - governments like a money trail.

Not saying that's an unsolvable problem, but I can understand the reluctance.

mosburger··on USPS Begins Postal Banking Pilot Program
There are at least a handful of countries that offer services like this (basic check cashing, and in some cases, accounts with balances) via the post office. Italy, France, and Japan come to mind as examples, I'm sure there are more.

(The company that I work for is a fintech that deals a lot with unbanked/underbanked communities)

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