simi_

Not saying it's not stupid, but FWIW I noticed ACRush (competitive programming legend) is behind that startup - at least it should mean it's not a full-blown scam.

Moving from the UK to Germany, I chose Deutsche Bank based on its reputation.

Pros:

* English! There is always someone on the phone who can speak English, and they can even send their letters in English. (for Germany, this is very rare)

* More "high touch" - there is a person assigned to your account

* I can't remember if this was the case in UK, but I noticed that transfers to some Western EU countries have no fees and happen almost instantly. Yay!

Cons:

* Buggy app and web interface, sometimes the login fails or hangs randomly (revenue was €31.95 billion in 2014, it's understandable that they can't afford spending too much on this)

* The way to authorise online transactions is with a piece of paper with 100 codes printed on it (TAN list). This was a shock, but it's apparently common here.

* Taking advantage of new customers. They offered me a loan which I later realised had a ridiculous interest rate. (I guess this isn't exclusive to DB, but silly me expected that a good, more prestigious bank would value longer term customer relationships)

* Stupid useless cards. The default account (€5/month) comes with a card (EC Karte) that can only be used at German ATMs and in most German stores. Good luck trying to do anything online with it. For that you need a credit card (extra €5/month), the very idea of something like VISA Debit seems completely alien to Germans.

I keep all my dotfiles in a repo at ~/cfg, and have a script to perform tasks such as creating symlinks (e.g. ~/.emacs.el -> ~/cfg/emacs.el) and installing brew, antigen, etc.

https://github.com/andreis/cfg

If I have to use a Windows machine, CCleaner is one of the first tools I install, it's fantastic. On OS X I use App Cleaner (I run it in parallel with `brew cask rm` just to be safe). PS: That's numberwang! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjOZtWZ56lc

Seems like a perfect task for asciinema

https://asciinema.org/

I had a similar experience buying a somewhat expensive watch through them - my wife was surprised to receive a very fancy, and empty, box. However to their credit they sent another one immediately, no questions asked. I really hope for Amazon to fix the issues OP pointed at, as an amazon.de customer I'm extremely happy with them.

This made me think of "The Making of: Dust", which describes the iterative (and serendipitous) process of creating [two of] the most well-known Counter Strike maps. I think it's a brilliant how a design that feels obvious involves a lot of work and uncertainty.

http://johnsto.co.uk/design/making-dust

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9772521

> But meeting the needs of customers is what I get paid to do

That was like being slapped with a good dose of pragmatism – I love it!

Wrt the later part of your post, try Dart. It's annoying in entirely new ways, but it does away with a lot of JS pains; it's also mature, powerful, and production-oriented. It even comes with a VM to run it in, so you can pretend it's a real –boy– language. Its obscurity also means that it can be hard to come across help/tools (emacs completion, anyone?), but despite all the shortcomings I enjoy using it, and am happy to back Google's bet on Dart.

Same [1], but I'm considering deleting it, as most of them are shit anyway. After seeing Assembly die in less than 2 years [2], I filtered my side project ideas through a "do you see this running in 10 years?" filter, and I saved them as bookmark folders [3].

1: https://github.com/andreis/ideas

2: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wUe7XO...

3: here they are

  cask.space: website for brew cask packages - categories, info, screenshots, discovery, etc.
  "deep" ai: strong artificial intelligence - more of a career goal than a side project
  docsite: simple, standardized landing pages for doctor's offices, á la jameda or zocdoc
  games: tons of game dev resources and indie game websites - if I ever find time to work on one, I love game development
  peer interviews: p2p pair mock interviewing for interview practice - an interest of mine (github.com/andreis/interview)
  sidelog: a tool to organize [ideas for] side projects + collaboration

Sourcegraph has pivoted into a git hosting appliance, it's pretty cool, even if nowhere near as full-featured. https://sourcegraph.com/

I'm inclining towards this option, too. I didn't think it was likely because both watches (can you call them that?) had the same issues. This reminds me of my experience with Razer: out of 5 mice bought (4 abyssus, 1 orochi), two were faulty.

You might like this http://steve-yegge.blogspot.de/2008/06/done-and-gets-things-...

I had a Charge HR for almost a month, got one for my wife too. I finally returned them this week. They're nice to wear and pleasant to use, but the battery lasts one day and the reported steps/calories/distance is basically science fiction.

My thoughts exactly. IIRC Tim makes around 10 mil per year.

Tried some short gmail handles, can confirm. Creepy and stupid. Cloud-based datastores coming with your browser (aka what Chrome has* and probably its competitors too) have better performance, privacy, and UX; I can't think of any reason why I'd use something like this.

* - AFAIU if you set a sync passphrase you also get some (probably limited) form of "zero knowledge" client-side encryption; this makes me hopeful they implemented it properly i.e. "we literally can't access your shit" https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/1181035?hl=en

I've used Spectacle for so long that I can't remember how it was to use OS X without it. The hotkeys are tied to my muscle memory, and don't clash with any of the stuff I care about (emacs, iTerm2, Chrome, etc).

Hey Iwan - I just shot you an email over at your fastmail address. Looking forward to start a discussion there.

Definitely not something unique to them, I just don't like that practice - also, you usually have the regular car brand and the upper-market version, e.g. Lexus/Toyota, not N degrees of "luxury" e.g. Audi/VW/Seat&Skoda. I like what BMW are doing, they have 3 branches based on different applications/philosophies.

Edit: Thank you for the several downvotes.

I initially wrote a stupid rant based on this [0] about how VW's ex-CEO doesn't speak English, but a quick Youtube search proved that was wrong [1]. Oops!

I'll just leave some quick facts that I dug up in the process:

* VW just had another scandal that made it to HN recently, regarding hiding security vulnerabilities [2]

* VW Group numbers for 2014: €204B of which €12.7B revenue, 583k employees [3]

* the board made some weird-ass declarations about the ex-CEO [4]

My confidence in VW is shaken to the point that I'll never buy another car from them again (I didn't like how they artificially segment the market by owning Audi/VW/Skoda/etc anyway), but how do other German manufacturers compare? [5]

0: http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/17/9347275/auto-industry-meet...

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEPJluU09RU

2: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-14/vw-has-spe...

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Group

4: http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/23/9383835/volkswagen-board-s...

5: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/volkswagen-may-not-only-car-18...

I was going to mention the same thing wrt leap seconds: if a company at Google's scale could apply a "hacky" solution to this, then you don't really need a more "scalable" solution. The fact that it simplifies things massively for the developers can be a turn off for some people, though.

That was a surprisingly well sorted out read. Chapeaux!

Lavaboom CTO here. This came as a shock even for me, I knew money was running tight but I imagined we would continue in austerity mode.

TC article: http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/20/lavaboom-deadpools/

Call them "legacy apps" and run them over a compatibility layer. Hardware will gradually get good enough to run the old Java apps without hiccups, and the apps that get translated to Go will run about as fast as the Java-Android versions [citation needed], but with oodles of memory to spare.

For me this just puts into perspective how much it sucks to have Java as the language powering Android. Would a rewrite in (say) Go even be possible? I guess you could machine translate a lot of boring stuff like support for a gazillion devices, and the memory footprint savings would be quite substantial.

That's not at all what I meant. Gmail redirects emails to "youremail+whateveryouwanthere@gmail.com" to "youremail@gmail.com". Some people filter emails this way, henceforth my suggestion to check for this edge case.

http://gmailblog.blogspot.de/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-mo...

PS: The downvoters are downright silly on this website lately.

I'm not entirely skeptical of how ethical their exploitation will be conducted, I'm just raising the point that we're a country with heavily affected (ex-)forests. Moreover, there's a rich recent history of external interests being facilitated by our ultra-corrupt government, to rather devastating effects.

Here's a list of disposable email domains if you'd really like to block them: https://github.com/lavab/disposable

I would go one step further and look for {spam_words} in "username+{text}@{googledomain}.com", where spam_words can be "junk", "spam", etc. This is like a very narrow edge case, but still might catch something. Again, if you're into that kind of thing; I'm quite skeptical that it brings any value.

As a Romanian, I'm livid. We've had huge problems with illegal deforestation in the last couple of decades.

https://www.google.com/search?q=romania+deforestation

  Location: Cologne, Germany
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Western Europe or Romania
  Technologies: Go, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, Java, C#
  Résumé/CV: Google Drive [0]

I work as the CTO of Lavaboom - we make secure email, using a mostly Go/JS stack, powered by RethinkDB and Docker. We're entirely open source [1]. Having got quite close to a "1.0" with Lavaboom, I'm looking for the next challenge.

Trivia: I've been programming for 10 years, in at least 10 different languages; I like building dev tools, privacy-friendly stuff, emacs, algorithms and data structures, compilers, linux and different BSDs, etc. If you'd like to chat I'm on #lavaboom (it's linked to our #public channel on Slack), or you can hit me up via email/Hangouts - see my Github profile [2].

edit: I also maintain this rather popular repo of coding interview resources [3] (long due for an update).

0: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zTtf4LAa_n5H-_ngMGq-0oY8...

1: https://github.com/lavab

2: https://github.com/andreis

3: https://github.com/andreis/interview

IMHO if you need to break down a task well enough to run on a supercomputer, there isn't a lot more to do to make it run on a regular server farm.

edit: Actually, in the scenarios you'd use a supercomputer for, the added latency and overhead (shoddy servers, network, etc.) would most likely make the run time orders of magnitude higher.