talkingquickly

Sona | HR Tech | Remote (within Europe / UK) | Elixir & React Native Engineers

80% of the workforce doesn't work behind a desk, but only 1% of funding has gone into building tools for them. We're changing that.

Our web frontend is Elixir & LiveView, our mobile app is React Native + Typescript + GraphQL. We're a tight knit, fully remote team with a 4.5 day flexible working week.

If you find us here, please mention HN in your application; https://apply.workable.com/sona-3/j/C940C55DB2 or any questions feel free to email me (cofounder / cto), ben@sona.is

Really like this approach but 7KG cabin baggage limits on lots of international flights are what makes it really hard for me. I sometimes struggle to get single laptop + iPad + charger + power bank within the limit, let alone two sets.

Yup agree, that's exactly what's being used here, along with some tweaks to make it easier to do things like passing the auth JWT's back to the underlying app etc

There are still a few places in Scotland which operate on such a system (I spent a bunch of time in one of them growing up and still go there at least once a year). There's a fish van and a meat + fresh produce van which comes on a (relatively) predictable schedule. Nearest supermarket is 2-3 hours drive, more due to road quality than physical distance, so people still go there semi-regularly and generally run big deep freezes.

Thanks for this, generally find discovering new (as in recent) guitar music challenging. You've sent me down a veyr enjoyable rabbit hole of awesome new stuff!

Any chance you've got a documentation link for this? My Google foo is failing me and this is a feature I've also wanted for ages!

This is an amazing response, thank you!

I'd be really interested in how you're approaching persistence? I've also found self managing clusters provisioned with kuibeadm fairly hassle free until persistence is involved. Not so much setting it up (e.g. rook is fairly easy to get going with now), but the ongoing maintenance, dealing with transitioining workloads between nodes etc etc.

This is a really good starting point; https://github.com/hobby-kube/guide I've used it for several projects and it works a treat.

Do you know of any more accessible books which might give people a feel for what they might encounter? DSM-5 is pretty heavy going for someone outside of the field but agree that some awareness of it could be really valuable.

I was really confused initially, I thought these guys https://www.gousto.co.uk/ were already called Gusto.

Similar in the UK, I'd say I make most of my small purchases (e.g. lunches, coffees etc) contactless now.

Exactly this. I've found (on OSX) that an Alfred custom search to quickly do a Google Last Year only search is incredibly useful.

This is definitely what I was getting at. My admittedly fairly small sample makes me think I'd rather hire someone who appears to be an excellent developer in general and train them on a new language/ framework than someone who appears mediocre but already has experience.

Yeah you're totally right, it's a huge over simplification. I was specifically thinking of the scenario where you add roughly the same number of users each period, where that number isn't really enough for it to be a viable business but because there are some users, it becomes really hard to say "this isn't working" and either radically change something or quit. Agree that retention is often a much better metric.

Hey, author here. My logic is usually that an NDA is a restriction on me, so I won't usually sign one unless I'm getting something in return. E.g. I'm happy to sign one in the context of a piece of paid work.

Most people are quite receptive when I explain the above and that in practice I don't believe that ideas really get stolen. Well not (web/app)tech startup ideas anyway. I've never had what you'd call a "bad" reaction to it and in about 75% of cases, people have then gone on to explain their idea.

I think the counter view here is that video can be incredibly inconvenient depending on your exact use case. E.g. my scarcest resource is time and video is, for me at least, a very slow way of consuming content (compared to text). So if it's content that I need to consume quickly, video is a none starter.

If I'm browsing the web, I'm already reading textual content so reading is about as low effort as can be. Watching a video means "context switching", reading to watching, along with making sure I've got headphones on, pausing any music I'm listening to etc.

That's not to say the above is true for everyone, but for some people, watching a video is substantially less convenient and entails more effort than reading text.

Yep they purchased Periscope earlier this month. http://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-acquires-live-video-stre...

That still seems to be the behaviour, so it still works for open tracking just not the additional meta data. Fantastic tool you've created by the way!

I'd argue that so far, that's exactly the point, their response makes it worse.

"We have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not find any evidence to substantiate security concerns" is a laughable statement to have issued.

I can understand the legal reasons for not admitting to the security issues. But outright saying that they can't find anything to suggest they exist indicates a company I wouldn't want to do business with.

To expand on that, in this case I know enough about the subject matter to understand that it's ridiculous to suggest there aren't security concerns. But I can't guarantee this will be the case for other problems. So going forward I'd probably avoid being a customer of a company who I have positive proof is prepared to issue blatantly incorrect statements about security issues.

That means there's approximately a 30x markup from raw ABS to a spool of 3D printing filament being sold over the counter in a shop to a consumer. I don't know how much filament costs if you buy industrial quantities rather than consumer ones.

To be honest I don't know enough about industrial pricing to understand if it's ridiculous or not, 30x from raw material to something being retailed at a consumer level doesn't seem unbelievable to me.

Markup on a black ink cartridge (the original comparison) is something in the region of 200x, so nearly an order of magnitude higher.

Really? My impression has been that filament is pretty cheap e.g. < $30 per kg. For printing small objects, enclosures, small replacement parts etc, the filament cost has been pretty much negligible. That's why a lot of 3D print shops end up telling people just to buy their own printer if their doing any reasonable volume, because once the capital cost is out of the way, the consumables are fairly inexpensive.

Yep absolutely, have been wondering about the C1, my only concern is that getting OpenCV and some of the supporting libraries to build on the Pi was a big challenge but doable because there's such a large community to help out. The same was true with WiFi and Camera drivers.

So the C1 and related boards look great but I'm cautious of building around something with a smaller community just because of the potential for it taking far longer to troubleshoot the underlying stuff I need setup to work on the actual project. That said I'm pretty sure I'll succumb to a c1 in the next couple of months!

Definitely agree with this. I got Face Detection using OpenCV on a 320x300 video stream to work at about 2fps (e.g. two detection cycles per second) on the B+ over-clocked to 1Ghz so hopefully the Rpi2 will be a substantial improvement on this.

I was using it the context of controlling the "eye" of a wheeled robot so both the eye and the robot could follow faces. 2FPS was workable on this but 320x300 didn't give it much of a field of view.

This is one of the languages covered in the excellent Prag Prog book "7 Languages in 7 Weeks" (https://pragprog.com/book/btlang/seven-languages-in-seven-we...).

It wasn't until I went through that books section on io and how prototypal inheritance works that I felt like I really started to get a handle on JavaScript.

Often (in the UK at least) if your insurance is provided as a benefit through a company rather than buying your policy directly, pre existing conditions will be covered even though the provider would normally exclude them if purchased by an individual.

I was incredibly impressed with how easy it was to create a simple VR app which works with Google Cardboard using Unity. Took me less than a day to get to grips with despite never having done any 3D modelling or game programming before. Put together this tutorial aimed at other devs who want to give this a shot. Any questions or problems, please let me know

I'd be interested to see the method behind any data which looks at whether giving the issue much thought correlates with thinking that eating animals is immoral.

In particular with reference to the study you mention, whether it includes any assessment of the answers from those in the general population sample who could be considered to have given it much thought vs those who haven't.

It's the type of question where it seems like the risk of selection bias is huge. I know plenty of people who could, if asked directly give a very well reasoned argument about why they eat meat, but they don't feel especially passionate about it so wouldn't publicise this viewpoint.

So the people we'll tend to hear from are the people who have a) given it thought and b) come to a viewpoint which is contrary to the mainstream and c) feel passionately that others should come to the same realisation.

It sounds like a really interesting study, but in general I think it would be difficult to find a study on any topic which concluded "philosophers largely agree with the general public".

To use a contrived but parallel example, if I were to suggest that "we should not use walking as a method of moving around" I'd expect the onus to be put on me to explain why this was a good suggestion.

So if accept that from an evolutionary perspective it's "natural" for human beings to eat meat and therefore the onus tends to be one people suggesting we shouldn't to demonstrate a solid argument against it then I don't think that's a bad thing. If of course you don't agree with the evolutionary part then that's a fascinating argument in itself!

I could not agree more that people should question norms. The more "obvious" a viewpoint is considered by most people, the more important it is to question it and the bigger the potential benefits from doing so.

But my intuition would be that whether or not to eat meat is actually one which is questioned fairly often, at least in western society. It's a friendly debate which I'd estimate I encounter at least every month or so between either myself or friends with other friends who are vegetarians. But having heard a multitude of arguments against eating meat, I've not yet heard one which (ethically/ subjectively or economically) in my opinion stood up to scrutiny.

Now people working 8 - 8 in jobs they hate, that's a norm I'd like to see questioned more!

I'd agree that the line in this case seems to be quite arbitrary but I'd respectfully suggest that it's not fair to say individuals whom eat meat having not given it much thought.

Although that may be true for some people, myself and many people I've talked to have given it significant amounts of thought and simply not found a sufficiently compelling argument against it.

It seems unfair to suggest, and apologies in advance if this wasn't the intention of your comment, that people who eat meat automatically do so due to lack of thought rather than having considered the options and positively chosen it as a course of action.