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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • Would you accept a certificate issued by AWS (Amazon)? Or GCP (Google)? Or azure (Microsoft)? Do you visit websites behind cloudflare with CF issued certs? Because all 4 of those certificates are free. There is no identity validation for signing up for any of them really past having access to some payment form (and I don’t even think all of them do even that). And you could argue between those 4 companies it’s about 80-90% of the traffic on the internet these days.

    Paid vs free is not a reliable comparison for trust. If anything, non-automated processes where a random engineer just gets the new cert and then hopefully remembers to delete it has a number of risk factors that doesn’t exist with LE (or other ACME supporting providers).



  • Not OP but some stores have these hyper-sensitive scales you put your bag/scanned items on. They can be super annoying as tiny differences in the weight will lock up the entire thing and you need someone to unlock it again. E.g. if you didn’t start with all your bags already on it and you try to add a new bag. Or the area is full and you want to remove and already full bag. Or you nudged something with your leg while scanning the next item.




  • I don’t know if there are agencies focussing on this, but in general it probably comes down to the company more than the agency. Probably worth filtering for companies offering flexible hours in the description

    I would say at the moment the IT job market is incredibly competitive for candidates, so it might be even more difficult to find truly flex roles when they can so easily find 100s of people who just work regular hours.

    On your last question: I’ve been a hiring manager in 2 companies (although in the UK) for software engineers and adjacent roles (like devops, platform, QA) and I would not care whether someone needs equipment. In the big scheme of things spending $800 for a monitor, keyboard and mouse is not even a drop in the bucket for the cost of an employee. What I would want to know is how do you work in a team in your situation and what arrangement can we do where you have a good experience, but other people in the company can still count on you. E.g. if you are working on a project and an issue pops up that’s blocking others from progressing and we need you to discuss, but you’re having a bad day and not working, what are the options you can offer? Or what if you get blocked when everyone else is asleep so you can’t progress?

    I think being prepared and upfront about this in an early stage of interviewing would be ideal, it signals that you have thought about others around you and also weed out any companies who aren’t willing to make this arrangement work. That being said, as above it’s a very competitive market right now so chances are pretty slim (at least in the UK).

    Also keep in mind once you look at companies who hire from abroad, you’re now also competing with (comparably) cheap labour from developing countries, who will likely agree to much worse terms.

    Edit: one thing I forgot, you may have the option to be your own boss (depending on your skill level) and freelance on a project basis rather than on a per-day basis.


  • I get the convenience part so the staff doesn’t have to go around do it by hand, but it just seems infeasible to do it for the other examples mentioned.

    E.g. you go in, pick up item listed for $10, finish shopping in 20 mins, item now costs $15 at till… probably leave it (so now the staff has to re-shelf it) and start shopping at a place that is not trying to scam you.

    For the other example, if there are a few packs of something expiring and they reduce the price for all the items on the shelf, everyone will just take the ones which have a reasonable shelf life left leaving the expiring ones.

    Both of these just seem stupid.



  • I have never seen contributors get anything for open source contributions.

    In larger, more established projects, they explicitly make you sign an agreement that your contributions are theirs for free (in the form of a github bot that tells you this when you open a PR). Sometimes you get as much as being mentioned in a readme or changelog, but that’s pretty much it.

    I’m sure there may be some examples of the opposite, I just… Wouldn’t hold my breath for it in general.



  • For me, there are 2 specific things that annoy me to no end with it. 1 is my guilty pleasure, I love watching hour long videos from Asian channels where they just film restaurants or bakeries making food in large batches. Honestly, youtube seems to actively remove them from my feed. I have to search for them every 2 weeks despite watching this content at least weekly. The second is the opposite. At Christmas I searched for a video of a fireplace with music to put on as ambient background for dinner. My feed is chock full of 8+ hour music playlists now despite never having looked at another one. It’s been 4 months.

    I don’t know what it is but i swear they have content they like showing you and content they dont like. If you want the former your experience will be OK. If you want the latter then they just decide you’re wrong and still get the former.



  • Mine isn’t like that but there can be a few reasons I’d guess at:

    1. YouTube recommends you things other people in your household watch (which can extend to random people if your isp uses cnat and doesn’t give you an individual ip).
    2. This one is more of a guess, but I’d assume a lot of people would click on that content, so if you never watch shorts maybe their algorithm just gives you the default recommendations.
    3. If you watch adult content without protecting your privacy it’s most likely associated with your account in their recommendations.

  • Haven’t had any experience with eweka, but this is the reason why people tend to have multiple providers from different backbones and multiple indexers - to increase your chance for completion. Weirdly, eweka does not follow DMCA, but NTD which I’ve seen regarded as slower to take down content, so in theory the experience should be better, especially on fresh content.

    Your mileage will vary greatly depending on what indexers/providers you pick and unfortunately it’s very difficult to say whether it will reach your expectations until you try different options.

    If you’re willing to spend some more on it, you could try just looking for a small and cheap block account from a different backbone to see if it helps with the missing articles, but there are no guarantees.






  • Personally, I’ve had an experienced manager and took great inspiration from him.

    A few things I fell into:

    • it was a lot faster for me (I.e. experienced senior dev with context knowledge) to finish a task than for me to assign it to someone less experienced who has to learn the context and takes 5x as long to do it, with lots of help needed from me still. This yielded me not building up my team either in experience or knowledge.
    • I assumed deadlines I got told were set in stone and my job was to meet them. This made business-y people happy. It made everyone else (including me) miserable. I had to learn to say no and push back, it very much changes between companies but most of the time I found it to be a negotiation and either the deadline could move or I had to argue to exclude things from the scope to make the deadline reasonable.
    • on the above, everything takes at least 3-5x as long as I think it takes. If things finish early, great time to give my team some slack, add in additional QA work like extending tests or repay some tech debt. Delivering something early gives a pat on the back for us but no discernible benefit to the team.
    • every time someone said “you’ll have time to write tests/repay tech debt/upskill later once X is shipped” it never came true. Those things have to be built into delivery scopes, and it’s a constant battle - if you don’t do this, nobody else will.

    I’m sure there were other things too, but these are the ones I mainly recall. Talk to your team, ask for feedback. Every team, project and company are different - you’ll have to adapt.