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nieksand

1,113 karma · joined July 12, 2012

https://reprep.io
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nieksand··on EU ban on destruction of unsold clothes and shoes enters into application
It seems like this policy would lead to shortages in less common sizes of clothing.
nieksand··on The founder's playbook: Building an AI-native startup
Nor will human generated market research.
nieksand··on How AWS is losing the younger generation with complexity
Unexpected, runaway AWS cost is a real problem.

"Tunable spending limit" has consequences that can create other, equally real, problems.

Best effort: Turn off all compute resources, drop dynamically-adjustable persistent resources to their minimums (e.g. dynamo write and read capacity of 1 on every table), leave EBS volumes and S3 alone. In some cases, a user might find their business effectively offline while still racking up a massive AWS bill.

Hard cutoff: Very close to deleting an AWS account. In addition to compute and dynamically-adjustable resources to minimums, this means deleting S3 buckets, Dynamo tables, EBS volumes and snapshots, and everything else that racks up cost by the hour.

The best effort approach sounds reasonable to me. The hard cutoff solution sounds worse than the problem it purports to solve.

Agreed that AWS is poorly incentivized to fix the problem.

nieksand··on How AWS is losing the younger generation with complexity
What semantics do you expect when your spending limit is hit?

Turning off all compute resources (EC2, Lambda, Fargate, etc) seems obvious, but what about systems managing state like S3, EBS, and DynamoDB? Should buckets, volumes, and tables be deleted?

nieksand··on The deindustrialization of Germany
https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2015/wp15162.pdf

"In 2003–05, Germany undertook extensive labor market reforms which were followed by a large and persistent decline in unemployment. Key elements of the reforms were a drastic cut in benefits for the long-term unemployed and tighter job search and acceptance obligations."

nieksand··on Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983
It's buried in Excel sheets, but looks like quite a few folks: https://studentaid.gov/data-center/student/loan-forgiveness/...
nieksand··on Why are so many young men single and sexless?
I find it fascinating that this article only calls for young men to change their behavior but demands nothing of young women.
nieksand··on What are executive off-sites good for?
I think periodic off-sites (or on-sites in the era of remote) are incredibly valuable even without a specific business issue to address.

It's easy to say that strategic thinking and planning should be continuous, but in reality there's always a storm of immediate tactical tasks sucking up your attention. That's true for both software engineers (living in Jira tickets, sprints, and one-to-two quarter projects) and the c-suite.

These sessions can force you to make time, put aside the tactical noise, and think.

nieksand··on FogBugz new owners attempting to auto-upgrade all free plans to paid
My last use of FogBugz was in 2012. After replying to FogBugz's fake bill, I noticed an auto-reply in my gmail spam:

Title: "Notification - Please visit support team"

Sender: "Sales and Success"

The short body declares that I have to go to their support portal.

I can't tell whether this stems from incompetence or if their aiming for Spam on purpose. Given their behavior, I assume the latter.

nieksand··on Ask HN: Where do you currently invest your money?
One big question is how long you have till you need the money. If you need to cash out within a year or two for a mortgage down payment, I would consider taking the inflation hit and plopping it in an FDIC insured savings account. If you have years or decades until you need it, I would either put it all in stocks or purchase a home that you plan to live in.

An asset tracking the S&P 500 is still a very reasonable bet. For my taxable accounts I use IVV with an expense ratio of 0.03%

https://www.ishares.com/us/products/239726/ishares-core-sp-5...

Another good, diversified choice is Berkshire Hathaway class B shares (BRK.B). Lots of boring but money-making businesses in there. The downside is that both Buffet and Munger will be out of the picture within a few years, so there is a chance of a rocky leadership transition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkshire_Hathaway#Businesses_...

nieksand··on Ask HN: Vacation activities to improve your skills as software engineers?
You could work your way through some of the "Linux Programming Interface" by Kerrisk.

Even if you only use high level languages, the LPI provides insight on what's happening under the hood. It also gives important context for when you do performance analysis and program optimization. Each chapter has a bunch of exercises at the end.

nieksand··on Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?
I've heard that publish-or-parish is a challenge for all theologians.
nieksand··on The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give
The questionnaire looks pretty reasonable, but I'd be concerned about the sketchy looking "Psychometric assessments" that's next in the list.

Also, at what point will the candidate be able to vet whether Canonical is a suitable match? Is that only after this questionnaire, psych test, and take-home assignment?

nieksand··on Ask HN: How to build a startup when your network is zero?
Building first and talking after isn't likely to end well, especially for B2B. Trying to buy online ads after the fact is not likely to get you anywhere... you are just one of a million voices screaming out in a crowd.

If you don't feel comfortable talking, consider partnering with somebody who does.

nieksand··on Germany has seized control of Gazprom Germania
Here is the German explanation of what happened:

https://www-sueddeutsche-de.translate.goog/wirtschaft/erdgas...

nieksand··on Five coding interview questions I hate
It sounds like a pretty good question to me.

As a follow up you could scope out how familiar the candidate is with alternate encoding options and what the trade-offs and use cases are. (BSON/MessagePack, Protobuf/Avro/Thift, FlatBuffers/Cap'nProto).

nieksand··on Five coding interview questions I hate
I would classify atoi() as a mediocre question at best.

I would look for the following in a "fine" question:

1. It demonstrates knowledge of fundamental concepts or techniques.

2. It lets you distinguish the quality of answer/implementation rather than just works or doesn't.

3. It leads to natural follow-up questions that can demonstrate the candidate's knowledge or expertise.

4. It does not require fiddly code. (e.g. linked list pointer twiddling questions: they aren't hard but are easy to muck up with a stranger staring at you.)

5. If its unrelated to what candidates normally work on, the question should not hinge on knowing a specialized "trick" to change difficulty from hard to easy.

Atoi under that criteria:

1. Does not show much interesting besides a basic understanding of decimal numbers and writing loops.

2. It's hard to imagine much variability in the quality of responses. A "real" atoi implementation is not interview material: https://github.com/golang/go/blob/master/src/strconv/atoi.go...

3. I guess you could follow it up with questions on testing and error handling. Nothing super interesting comes to mind, but that could be lack of imagination on my part.

4. It meets this criteria.

5. It meets this criteria.

Perhaps you have some particularly good way of posing an atoi() question.

nieksand··on IBM open sources fully-functional Lego microscope design (2020)
If you are interested in assembling your own microscope and have access to a 3D printer, I highly recommend: https://openflexure.org/

For me the interesting part was the build process. If you care more about microscopy than tinkering, you are probably better off just buying a pre-made scope.

nieksand··on Ask HN: Should HN require/encourage job postings to have a salary range?
Who do I have to justify it to? What makes said entity qualified and competent to evaluate my justification? What criteria will be used to determine if my justification is valid?
nieksand··on Intel removes Xinjiang references from shareholder letter
Weird. There were goods crossing between the Ukraine and Russia, but that didn't stop soldiers from crossing the border and occupying Crimea.

Perhaps it was the exception that proves the rule.

nieksand··on Ask HN: How do you optimize your microbiome?
How can you optimize something that you can't measure? For any proxy measurements (e.g. how well you are sleeping), how can you ensure it's not something else in your life driving the effect?

It sounds like snake oil territory to me.

nieksand··on Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company
Google owned Boston Dynamics at one point. I'm curious what made them flip flop back to robotics again.
nieksand··on The Secret Life of Machines
Mr. Hunkin has been publishing a new Secret Life of Components series to youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JAgXz6xO0s&list=PLtaR0lZhSy...

It is really great stuff if you enjoy building things.

nieksand··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2021)
Cape Analytics | Senior Software Engineer | Munich, Germany | ONSITE (currently remote) | Full time

Cape Analytics uses machine learning on aerial imagery to characterize property risk and value for the insurance industry. We have offices in Munich and Mountain View.

We are hiring backend engineers to work with geospatial data at scale. Candidates should be comfortable with parallel and distributed programming techniques.

Full job description: https://jobs.lever.co/capeanalytics/249c055c-1dc6-46c3-8a2d-...

Feel free to send questions to niek@capeanalytics.com

nieksand··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2021)
Cape Analytics | Senior Software Engineer | Munich, Germany | ONSITE (currently remote) | Full time

Cape Analytics uses machine learning on aerial imagery to characterize property risk and value for the insurance industry. We have offices in Munich and Mountain View.

We are hiring backend engineers to work with geospatial data at scale. Candidates should be comfortable with parallel and distributed programming techniques.

Full job description: https://jobs.lever.co/capeanalytics/249c055c-1dc6-46c3-8a2d-...

Feel free to send questions to niek@capeanalytics.com

nieksand··on Raspberry Silicon update: RP2040 on sale now at $1
Some example power draws are in Section 5.4 of the RP2040 datasheet: https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/rp2040/rp2040-datasheet.p...
nieksand··on Raspberry Silicon update: RP2040 on sale now at $1
I have been playing with the Pico for a couple of weeks now, though I haven't incorporated it into any big projects yet.

The quality of the documentation is phenomenal. Very competent people clearly put serious effort into making it great.

Another stand out is the Programmable I/O feature. Basically, you have eight separate, programmable state machines that can manipulate I/O pins and do DMA. This lets you offload bit banging from the main cores. Details are in Chapter 3 of the C API docs: https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/pico/raspberry-pi-pico-c-...

I'm a total amateur when it comes to embedded development, so I have no idea how the RP2040 sits in the competitive landscape.

nieksand··on The End of Retirement (2014)
Which country is this? I was not able to identify it via googling.
nieksand··on Ask HN: Desperately need “sales for nerds” advice
You might find "Three Steps to Yes" by Gene Bedell helpful.

Much of the content is obvious in isolation, but put together it helps orient your outlook.

nieksand··on We mailed one hundred letters to test the postal service
I doubt I represent a typical American. You can perhaps find comfort that I was down-voted to oblivion within fifteen minutes for posting such a naughty thought.

Here is my distillation of arguments for keeping the USPS:

* USPS is required to service areas which may not be covered by other carriers. A handful of commenters note, from first hand experience, that rural inhabitants may have to pick up mail from centralized depots away from their homes.

* USPS transactional mail serves those without internet access. The internet is effectively controlled by a handful of private entities. If internet access was universal and treated like a public utility, it is unclear if this second argument still holds.

Interestingly, nobody brought up mail-in voting and its importance to democracy. Nor is the environmental impact of the USPS apparently worthy of consideration.

My biggest takeaway is that the USPS is a sacred cow. Like the topics of gender and race, it's unwise to ask questions.

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