sbrother

Plenty of talented folks will do it as actual contractors taking on projects for a few months at $250-300/hr. I did that for five years and was always open to my clients bringing me on full time for the right price. But the opportunity cost/price of exclusivity is very high.

"Contract to hire" is the worst of both worlds; I've only seen that work for bottom-of-the-barrel employers/employees.

Oh man, I am not looking to switch companies right now, but this sounds amazing. I'll be following you guys.

Also: I could swear I saw you comment on something Mathematica related a long time ago. Is there a Wolfram connection here?

Nelson, BC?

I think we are technically supposed to use Zoom at my employer, but almost everyone (at least in eng) just uses Meet instead. The UX is so much better, and it's rarer that something isn't working with someone's setup.

Also I swear the audio latency is worse with Zoom -- I find myself accidentally interrupting people more often.

I've done this in a lot of projects -- it works great. Protobuf is nice in a lot of ways and pretty simple, while gRPC is overkill (imo) for a simple web server that doesn't see tons of traffic.

I’ve also been doing exactly that for 20 years and will probably do it for 20 more years :) it works everywhere and is perfectly adequate and flexible!

I'm glad I'm not the only one who has had awful luck with that IntelliJ Elixir plug-in. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but it just doesn't work for me.

I've been using emacs + elixir-mode + alchemist since Elixir came out and I have zero complaints, it all works beautifully complete with autocomplete, jump to definition and documentation popups. But obviously emacs isn't for everyone.

Yeah I would agree with this. I wish more effort would be put into production use-cases though, as it's incredible how flexibly and concisely you can implement complex ideas with it.

I can't tell if the signature on that post is a parody or not:

> Jay Nagendran, P.Eng., FCAE, ICD.D, FEC, FGC (Hon.)

I can see doing this for a nanny, but surely no one is jumping through all these hoops for ad-hoc, hourly babysitting? Any of the random highschoolers or college kids I've used would look at me like I was crazy if I tried to set them up on payroll lol.

100%, and I have a ton of respect for how he thinks about work. While I can't bring myself to do the multiple FTE positions thing, I've spent half my career doing freelance/consulting work for multiple clients at once, and I love the mindset since I feel like it gets to the core of what "work" is.

In a lot of ways the "overemployment" thing comes down to treating full-time jobs like agency clients. Which I'm all for in theory and I'm a lot happier when I'm working with clients instead of employers. But I can't personally handle the dishonesty required.

Nah. I know a guy who does this, he views it as a game and all the money coming in is his score. Tripling his salary would just raise his high score and he'd keep playing as hard as ever.

Do you know why there aren't any PHEVs with a more reasonable electric range? Something like a 100 mile range with backup gas tank would let my family do most of our driving on the electric battery while still being a usable car for roadtrips. But nothing like that seems to exist.

I did the same thing in the Netherlands. And promptly studied the local road signs after that terrifying experience.

All that users do when they get hit with restrictions like that is repeat their password again, or fill it out with exclamation points. Not a lot of entropy getting added.

HN seems to be struggling too, but that could just be everyone here to talk about the outages.

They don't? I've worked in ad tech at some smaller places and we absolutely refunded spend during outages.

I've worked with both extensively and I agree that Elixir's rebinding is a bit of a wart. FWIW you can get the Erlang behaviour by using the "pin" operator:

  iex(1)> x = 4
  4
  iex(2)> ^x = 3
  ** (MatchError) no match of right hand side value: 3

I haven't looked at the other two, but DuckDuckGo's salaries are in no way competitive in the US market.

Thanks! That is really fast for personal use.

Can I ask how many tok/s you're getting on that setup? I'm trying to decide whether to invest in a high-end NVIDIA setup or a Mac Studio with llama.cpp for the purposes of running LLMs like this one locally.

Wait, what is the meaning other than "Low-Rank Adaptation"? It's hard to google the difference.

Well, this is one of the reasons you charge more as a freelancer. It's ~$2k/mo for a family; even if I charged exactly the same as my market rate as an FTE, that would be less than the tax benefit I get from operating through a properly set up LLC taxed as an S-corporation. LTD and E&O insurance are other big expenses, but they're not prohibitive given the delta in hourly rate between FTE and C2C.

This is why the logical conclusion of this culture change is for anyone who can to move toward independent contracting. Like I mentioned in a different comment, I’ve had my best clients longer than any single job. But for the ones that didn’t work out, no one bats an eye at a 3 month contract.

The easiest way to follow this advice is to take it to its logical conclusion and just offer your services on a contracting basis, as a single member LLC or a small partnership. At this point in the US tech industry the relationship between employers and FTEs is so tenuous that there isn’t much difference between the two legal arrangements in terms stability. I’ve kept my best clients much, much longer than my longest tenured FTE jobs.

And there are lots of benefits to being independent legally. Tax benefits aside, the pay is usually much higher, and you can/should take on multiple clients simultaneously. This leaves you less exposed to the whims of a single C-suite, and lets you stack up silly amounts of money when times are good.

Not really, because I always maintain at least a few clients so I'm not too worried about losing one. Once you have a solid pipeline, losing a client becomes just part of the business, not the scary emotional experience of "getting fired".

And I have a network of other independents I can bring in to help out with things. They're a good source of leads for me as well.

Actually #1 is my favorite, as I'm better at technical sales and rapid prototyping than I am at slow, FAANG style politicking, planning, risk mitigation and eventual development. I've done both at various points in my career and consistently make about ~twice as much money running my own consultancy, not to mention I'm so much happier in that environment.

It’s probably my favorite gift I have ever received, even though I did have to rearrange my office to store it properly lol. The curation is incredible, as is the sound quality, the packaging… everything.

Deutsche Grammophon produced something similar recently, which I was lucky enough to get for Christmas last year: https://www.bach333.com/en/

It is stunning in every way; I highly recommend it for any Bach fans!

It's not about the button color, other than the fact that a green bubble means your group message is degraded and a bunch of expected functionality stops existing. It's hard not to feel some annoyance if someone is added to a group and that causes the experience to be degraded for everyone else.

I use Whatsapp for all my European friends, but getting Americans to adopt a different messaging platform is as unlikely as getting the Dutch to start using iMessage... So we're left with this situation, and it will continue until Apple/Google adopt RCS and cross-platform messaging becomes as seamless an experience as iMessage.