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spongechameleonon Tell HN: You can't hire because you don't post salary ranges

As far as day-to-day satisfaction on the job, sure, salary could be way down the list compared to company culture and work/life balance. But I think we should acknowledge that salary is the only reason any of us work at all. If the salary is bad everything else will crumble around it regardless of how excellent culture and work/life balance are. If the salary is good there's no guarantees, but there's at least the potential for on the job satisfaction. Salary is the foundation. The exception to this is charity work for purely mission driven work, but that's not the work context for the majority of people.

spongechameleonon New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

I'm more concerned that this data is available for sale in the first place. There should be a limit on the length of location history a telecom can collect for individual phone numbers and that data should never leave the telecom. We need stronger laws.

spongechameleonon Code from the FBI’s Anom encrypted messaging app

I think something like Ricochet (if it were still actively maintained) could be a good solution.

https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet

Every user is their own Tor onion service, so you get E2E encryption and no centralized servers. The whole thing hinges on the security of Tor itself which is probably a safe enough bet.

spongechameleonon How Hong Kong became a police state

I think the lesson for Taiwan is clear here. There will be no sudden military invasion. The CCP will first take a similar approach of embedding party loyalists into Taiwanese civil society, assuming positions of power. Only once enough puzzle pieces are in place will a military takeover occur and by then it'll be far too late- the party loyalists embedded in Taiwan will sit on their hands and watch it happen.

spongechameleonon Life is not short

Journey > endpoints

"Live each day like its your last" is just as bad as "sacrifice everything so that when you turn 65 you can retire and finally be happy"

spongechameleonon Will Hare replace C? Or Rust? Or Zig? Or anything else?

I haven't seen anybody mention tooling. I've played around with Rust for purely academic reasons and love how cargo just makes everything work. Feature flags, a built-in test harness, cross-platform compilation, the only fight I've had with Rust has been the language itself. I haven't used it but I like how feature-rich the Zig compiler is too. I really hope strong tooling remains a focus for these newer languages.

spongechameleonon StarBook 14-inch

Does anybody know: (a) how many nits the screen is, and (b) how many Whr the battery is?

spongechameleonon Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought

Agree. The climate-friendly path must become the path of least resistance if we want to have any hope of staying within the 1.5C threshold.

Three step process to get there:

1. Identify the optimal "climate path" for every need- transportation, consumer goods, etc...

2. Disincentivize all other paths via penalties (taxes & regulations)

3. Incentivize the climate path via subsidies

It will take large scale government action first. Technological solutions will come as a result of the new financial rules of the game.

spongechameleonon Heuristics that almost always work

I find it so comforting to believe in Heuristics That Almost Always Work even when I know I ought to employ more scrutiny. It's too easy to jump on board.

spongechameleonon Golang’s most important feature is invisible

In the case of a CGO call you could prefix the enclosing function definition with the "go" keyword to manually initiate a new goroutine? Am I understanding this correctly?

spongechameleonon German Court Rules Against Internet Security Non-Profit Quad9

The onus is on Sony to engage in legal battle with the website hosting the infringing content. Nobody else should be coerced to help them. This is ridiculous.

spongechameleonon The S in IoT is for Security

I mean the alternative was installing the propietary app so I would say this is still a big win. But also yes, any wifi capable device in your home with no authorization is clearly a disaster waiting to happen.

spongechameleonon Creeping as a Service

While this made me feel creeped out at first, that “metadata” all seems like the public information that we intend to share when we signup for a service like Twitter.

spongechameleonon Ox is a fast text editor, written in Rust, that runs in your terminal

I love the focus on Arch Linux in the README

spongechameleonon Activists turn facial recognition tools against the police

Interesting point about the 2nd amendment. With that in mind I’d have to agree then that civilians should be able to employ facial recognition tech against the government.

The real question though is if that is a tenable strategy in the long term. Like that hatebreed song goes, “fight fire with fire and you’ll see everyone is burning”

spongechameleonon Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

Coinbase is an exchange for people to access cryptocurrency. The gradual adoption of cryptocurrencies weakens central governments’ currencies. Their entire business is by nature, political.

spongechameleonon The Era of Visual Studio Code

VSCode looks great and has a nice debugger but going through plugin management again is too much for me.

I’ve already invested the time and effort to setup neovim with coc as my general go-to editor and have very few complaints. If I ever need a true IDE for something I’ll just open something batteries-included like Jetbrains or Pycharm.