thomaslord

This probably goes without saying since you presumably just read this article, but I always tell people to actually check the website like they're trying to buy service before moving somewhere new. This is a particularly important for me personally because I have a slightly-petty personal vendetta against Comcast, so I'll only live somewhere that has Verizon FiOS (or a comparable fiber provider).

Even this method can be flawed - there might be a hefty installation fee, or you might run into a situation where even though service is technically offered at your new place but it's not physically possible to install. My mom and I ran into the latter situation years ago when she moved into a new house during a FiOS installer strike. They scheduled installations weekly for a month or two, optimistically thinking they'd reach an agreement I suppose, but nobody ever showed up. We eventually had to sign up with Comcast, which sort of got us through a few months until it was possible to get FiOS installed.

I've run into this issue when creating G Suite accounts and sending the initial welcome email (with password reset link) to a user's personal Gmail account. Somehow delivering an email with content written by Google, from Google to Google, is an issue.

Yeah, I have a project that I've been wanting to add a status page to for a while. I haven't done it yet because I want to display accurate information about the inner workings of the system, which will take actual time and effort.

Meanwhile, large organizations seem to almost universally just have a static page with a bunch of green checks that don't change no matter what.

Maybe I should just serve the status page from within the app, and if you can't reach it that means something is broken! At least then it's providing some information about the state of the system.

Have you had any luck with picking and choosing what gets backed up? I have a bunch of smaller personal files I'd love to sync to B2 (photos, backups, etc.) but I also have 7TB+ of linux ISOs that don't really need to be backed up because I can easily download them again. I tried to exclude the folders I don't want to back up, but I haven't had any luck.

As a G Suite user, my "favorite" (/s) M365 feature is those "WARNING: EXTERNAL EMAIL" banners. Whenever I'm in an email thread with someone whose company adds those banners, it breaks Gmail's ability to collapse the previous messages at the bottom of the email.

This reminds me of the good old days of Mac OS X theming with Shapeshifter. There were a ton of crazy themes out there, most of which now seem to be lost to the ages (or at least difficult to Google). Some screenshots can be found here: http://web.archive.org/web/20110219030424/http://mac.appstor...

Disclaimer: This project isn't currently publicly available.

I was using Simple as my primary bank, and their Goals feature made it possible to do envelope-style budgeting really conveniently. Unfortunately the bank that backed them, BBVA, sold to PNC. This lead to my Simple being shut down, and my account was converted first to a BBVA account and then to a PNC account.

When I lost access to the Simple app I first built myself a spreadsheet, and then started work on a webapp called Complex to replicate their functionality. Currently you have to enter all transactions manually, but I eventually plan to integrate with Plaid so I can automatically pull in transaction data. Without automatic transaction imports, I'd say Complex currently falls about halfway between the original Simple app and a spreadsheet in terms of convenience/ease-of-use.

I don't have any kind of business model for this, but if I eventually make it public I'll probably charge a monthly fee to allow automatic transaction imports so I can cover Plaid's fees. There's not much server load required to run something like this, so I expect I'll be able to keep server costs below $20/month even if I pick up a couple hundred active users.

Firefox is a particularly interesting case because it has a bunch of issues that only exist when it's installed via snap. I just recently ripped out the default snap version and installed via the official PPA, and Firefox seems to be running much smoother now.

For basically any app I use that's installed via snap, I eventually run into a gamebreaking issue and have to remove the snap version and find a normal .deb to install from. Whether it's customization issues (setting up custom fonts in VS Code didn't work) or stability issues (the tab bar in Firefox windows freezing up), there always seems to be some kind of problem

From what I've heard, modification is both the strong point and the weak point of the Ender 3. There are tons of community-designed modifications, many of which you can print yourself without having to but a lot of parts off the shelf, but to actually get consistent prints you need to use some of those upgrades.

My girlfriend and I bought a Prusa i3 mk3s+ together, and despite going with the kit version to save money it was really easy to get good quality prints right away. One of the big things that I think helps with this is that Prusa has an auto bed leveling feature, so our printer checks the height of a bunch of points on the bed in a 9x9 grid before each print. It can then build a mesh of the print bed and use that mesh to adjust how it prints to compensate for a bed that's not perfectly level or even not perfectly flat.

IIRC they changed something about sleep states on newer CPUs. Most people who report issues are on Linux, but I've heard about issues on Windows as well.

I have a modern-but-not-new laptop (a Lenovo Yoga 720 from ~2012) and when I was taking it into work daily before the pandemic it wouldn't even shut down properly. An Ubuntu update in 2019 seemed to pretty much fix that. I was running newer kernel builds (stable but not yet adopted by Ubuntu) so that may have also contributed to the initial issue and/or the fix.

Of course I'm writing this comment in support of "Linux on laptops works better now" but I had to opt in to newer kernel builds to get drivers for the laptop...

Can you provide any sources on Texas having grid issues because of renewables? The biggest publicized issue I'm familiar with was caused by inadequate maintenance of fossil-fuel-based generation facilities - during that period of time renewables produced the expected amount of energy for the weather conditions. Of course that expected amount wasn't their peak output, but that's something you plan for if you're competently managing your grid.

Are you putting react there because you consider it to have the largest learning curve? If not, I'd probably substitute Vue.

When I was first getting into reactive frontend frameworks it was part of a time-sensitive project, and we chose Vue because we could basically just write HTML and sprinkle in the reactivity. This was back in the Vue 2 days before they made everything functional, and I still think that older Vue API is the most self-explanatory for people who already know HTML and some vanilla JS.

The tiger / housecat analogy is great for this context! Even if a tiger fit in the housecat's cage it could easily rip it apart, while a housecat could slip between the bars of a tiger's cage easily.

There are documented cases of Tesla selling a pre-owned vehicle that was purchased with an optional feature, listing that optional feature in the sale ad, and then disabling the feature after the person they sold the car to has taken possession.

I was in a situation where I was managing a junior developer and felt like I didn't have time to properly train him, so instead I was leaving tons of comments on merge requests in GitLab with explicit instructions on what to change (often literally "Change this line to say this instead" with a brief explanation why).

In hindsight, I think I would've been much better off in the long run if I spent the first few months doing a ton of pair programming. Your situation seems a bit different, but I'd say it's at least worth a shot.

Wireless internet always has tradeoffs, and satellite internet is inherently less reliable than wired internet. Calling 25/3 "broadband" was laughable even in 2015, and since the pandemic created more remote positions (or at least more opportunity to work from home part-time) it's more important than ever to make sure everyone has access to real broadband.

Starlink also costs $110/month (plus a $600 setup fee), which is... decidedly more than the $10/month a low-income household would pay for the Comcast essentials plan. If you're in an area with lots of Starlink users you may see speeds under 10mbps, which is on the border of usable in 2022 even for 1-2 devices.

TIL the original author of GNU arch shared my name and was born in the same state as me!

Even better, a very similar system is currently being implemented by Tesla (under the name Tesla Virtual Power Plant). It's for their Powerwall product rather than the cars, but I think it's safe to assume they'd design a similar system for their cars.

It looks like the Virtual Power Plant program lets you configure a backup reserve, so you can choose how much of the capacity you keep for yourself and only push a small portion of the battery's capacity to the grid.

This issue is that this affects private servers. Since Microsoft is trying to make Minecraft a kid-friendly environment, their chat moderation is going to be aimed at protecting 10 year olds from profanity.

Imagine you have a private server where everyone is required to show ID and prove they're over 30 before joining and profanity is explicitly allowed. Maybe it started with a small group of friends and then expanded to include friends-of-friends, so there are some people who don't know each other IRL. With this new change, player A could get mad at player B. Player A then waits for player B to send a totally-inoffensive message that includes profanity (ex: "holy shit the new house you build it awesome") and report it. Because of this new system, player B now gets banned from playing multiplayer Minecraft despite properly tailoring their language to the server they're playing on.

Even with zero customization, just using it for a Kanban board is incredibly slow and frustrating. My 2-person team was using the free version of Target Process and needed to migrate to something else since we hit the entity limit, so we went with Jira because it seemed like the industry standard. What we got was the slowest initial page load and slowest interactions of any webapp I've ever used.

After struggling along for 2-3 months, we moved over to Clubhouse (now called Shortcut) and the difference in speed and overall experience is night and day.

Yeah, they didn't even put the fan next to the heatsink on their later Intel laptops. I've seen some speculation that it might have been an attempt to make M1 look better by comparison, since the Intel chips weren't able to hit anywhere near the performance levels the same chip got on better-cooled laptops.

Then again, Apple has a long history of sacrificing cooling performance for form factor.

I can't point you toward a specific part, but I think something like this must exist for the 3rd gen Moto 360 to exist. I wouldn't be surprised if it was substantially more expensive than the ones with the tab, though.

I've seen dongles you can buy (I think in the $30-$50 range) that sit between your normal non-QMK keyboard and your computer. Then when you press a key, the dongle takes the keycodes from your keyboard, runs them through QMK, and everything works like your keyboard had QMK to begin with.

This is probably the route I'd go for a wireless board. I'd likely choose a keyboard that really has the wireless part down (Logitech is a decent option here, I think - the experience with their receiver is better than Bluetooth for input devices in my experience) and then run it through one of those dongles if I really wanted wireless.

It's interesting to see everyone's different views on Docker. Here you (at least to my reading) suggest that people who need simplicity should just chuck their app in a Docker container, but elsewhere I've seen it portrayed as something you shouldn't touch until you have an infrastructure team.

Maybe I'm interpreting this wrong and the HN-consensus path is something like bare VPS => Docker => use AWS directly and tweak everything how you want it?

I haven't used the slightly older models, but it may be worth sticking with them because it's possible to adapt them to use a standard 20v tool battery (I've specifically seen this done for the V8).

Meanwhile on the V10 I have, batteries cost $130, can't be hot-swapped easily, and use a higher voltage that makes the 20v tool battery modification impractical. I planned to replace (and upgrade) the cells on the refurbished model I bought because the battery has been subpar since I received it, but so far I haven't managed to get past the abnormally-tricky plastic clips.

When I read the headline, I assumed that this was going to be a negative review from a user.

We got a Nest thermostat for free as part of a SolarCity solar panel installation, and I spent months fighting with it to try and make it do what I told it. The Nest has a motion sensor on it, which is how it determines whether to turn on the energy saving mode - if it senses that you're home it will run at the set temperature, otherwise it will disobey your commands and go to the configured energy saving temperature. There were 2 problems with this, one universal and one application-specific: first, if you live in anything other than a small apartment your thermostat may be in a different room from you. In our 2-story house, the Nest thinks nobody is home unless you're specifically in the living room. The 2 2nd-floor bedrooms, the 1st-floor bedroom, the kitchen, the basement, the dining room, and the 1st-floor office all don't count. In our house specifically the thermostat was installed behind a wall-mounted TV, which only makes things worse - even if you're in the living room, the Nest thinks nobody is home unless you're actively playing with it.

Trying to make the Nest ignore whether you're home and disable the eco mode is an exercise in futility. I found a setting to disable eco mode, but the house was still never the temperature we set it to. When I checked the thermostat I saw the green leaf icon, indicating that the Nest completely ignores the setting that disables eco mode. When I called Nest support, they couldn't figure out what was going on either. The only way I could get it to function semi-reasonably was to manually set the eco mode temperature to the temperature we actually wanted the house at, which means that you have to set the temperature twice to actually set the temperature.

The idea of a thermostat that tries to save power automatically is great, but it falls apart when you rely on a single motion sensor to determine if an entire house is occupied. This bad assumption was a letdown, but the fake setting to disable eco mode turned me off of Nest completely.

I have a project that uses Heroku Postgres because they handle high-availability and backups, and because they have some fancy metrics that help find areas for potential optimization[1]. Does anyone have recommendations for an alternative with similar features? As far as I can tell RDS should handle the HA stuff, but it doesn't look like they have query-level metrics.

I'm open to looking at a separate dashboard of some kind for query metrics if necessary, but I pretty much need the reliability features to be abstracted away. This product needs to be reliable to be worth anything, and I handle development/deployments/infrastructure by myself so I don't have the required knowledge or time to build out a proper solution myself.

1: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/expensive-queries

PHP is the only language I've set up production environments for, but I can't see any reason why it would be more complicated than other languages.

I have a PHP project that handles atomic deployments by pointing the web server at a symlink named "latest". New versions get deployed into their own folder in the "versions" folder, and then the "latest" symlink gets pointed to the new version. Super simple to set up, and as long as you delete old versions as you go (keeping, say 3 versions so you can roll back as necessary) that's pretty much all there is to it. This all gets triggered by a Gitlab CI workflow, so I can hit a button to deploy after merging changes.

Another PHP-focused way to handle this would be deploying into a new folder, then updating the nginx config to point to that folder and running `service nginx restart`.

You can also use one of the many other atomic deployment options that replace more than just the running code, at which point the only difference between deploying a PHP webapp and deploying a Java/Go/Rust webapp is what gets included in your new server/container when you build it.

It sounds like the issue noted above is less the actual pricing, and more that it's difficult to find out what the pricing is.

This matches up with my personal experience - I had to get in touch with an actual human and ask them for the pricing just to see if a project would be viable. I did get a relatively fast response that made the pricing very clear, but because it didn't come with any caveats (e.g. volume-based pricing or "we need to negotiate pricing on a per-client basis") it almost made the experience more frustrating.

Basically if your pricing is simple and universal enough that you could post it directly to the pricing page, you should post it to the pricing page. Especially for developer-focused products, hiding the pricing can lead to a serious reduction in conversion.

My use case is transaction data so the pricing for Stripe's competing product isn't posted yet, but if I was choosing between the two products and only one had pricing clearly posted on the website I'd immediately go with that one unless the pricing was so ridiculous that it wasn't affordable. And if the pricing was ridiculous, I'd probably assume that Plaid's pricing was just as bad.

Basically, I should be able to evaluate your product and its pricing without engaging with any of your employees wherever possible. I routinely remove companies from consideration because I can't plug them into a spreadsheet of prices without going back and forth with a sales team whose time I'll just be wasting anyway.

To be fair, other hand dryers only do better on this metric because they don't actually remove the water from your hands.