ProblemFactory's comments

> the path of least resistance is very different in the US, Europe and Asia

My theory is that in US compared to Europe, you are going to need the path of least resistance more often. If you are working two part-time jobs with variable hours and schedules to make ends meet, then you are going to reach for the easy & fast food options. Whereas if you have the stability of 40 hour work weeks, regular schedule and social safety nets - regardless of the total income - then you have the time and mental energy to eat healthier.

This seems more interesting, as it's not a code for a physical address but a lookup key for one.

You can update your code to point to a new address when you move:

> Their digital addresses will not change even if their physical addresses change. Their new addresses will be linked to the codes if they submit notices of address changes.

> later investors effectively collude with founders

> a small startup that never found product-market fit. The economy was bad, and they were running out of money, and they took - as I understood it - a dubious Series B led by a dubious investor

The unfortunate reality is that if a startup cannot survive for long on its own, the economy is bad, and investment interest is low - then past invested effort from founders and employees and money from early investors is a sunk cost. They have together created something with almost no independent economic value.

The later investors can buy the assets created so far at near zero cost (the alternative is a bankruptcy auction). They can reasonably argue that the future value of the business is all from their investment, together with a deal to hire the founders and current employees to invest future effort into it.

Most streaming services take a similar cut of the revenue.

Spotify pays out 70% of revenue they receive to owners of the music, BandCamp 75%, SoundCloud 80%. Could be slightly better, but it's not outrageous.

The real problems for artists are:

a) they are not the owners of the music, their record label takes most of it, and the rest is split between the artists, songwriters, producers, etc.

b) bad deals with (but good for) the customers - ~10/month for unlimited music too good value

> Theoretically it should be possible to do that using two cameras connected to some kind of image processing unit

That "some kind of image processing unit" in humans has an awful lot of compute power and software.

If you remove $100k of sensors but have to add $200k of compute to run more advanced computer vision software, then it's a bad tradeoff to use only cameras, even if in theory that software is possible.

This is probably a question about classic CRDTs as much as eg-walker:

Do all possible topological sorts of the event graph result in the same final consensus document? If yes how do we know that, and if no, how do they resolve the order in which each branch is applied?

> Overall I've taken eight weeks throughout the year and never been questioned with it.

If you have taken eight weeks of vacation per year, and have not even seen push-back on it, you are definitely on "unlimited" compared to most of the world.

> If I could give my employees a $50k cash bonus and it got taxed at 24% or I could gift them a $50k car "for testing" and it was tax free, everyone would be getting paid in cars.

Belgium has exactly that (use of a car is tax-free) and as a result company cars are wildly popular. Getting rid of this tax loophole has been unpopular, but as a compromise they will only apply it to electric cars in the future.

> Was the backdoor used on obscure build servers or obscure pieces of build infrastructure somewhere?

And developer machines. The backdoor was live for ~1 month on testing releases of Debian and Fedora, which are likely to be used by developers. Their computers can be scraped for passwords, access keys and API credentials for the next attack.

Variability in software runtime arises mostly from other software running on the same system.

If you are looking for a real-world, whole-system benchmark (like a database or app server), then taking the average makes sense.

If you are benchmarking an individual algorithm or program and its optimisations, then taking the fastest run makes sense - that was the run with least external interference. The only exception might be if you want to benchmark with cold caches, but then you need to reset these carefully between runs as well.

Burnout and depression can be connected to, but aren't the same thing as a mid-life crisis.

I would distinguish a mid-life crisis (or in the positive case, mid-life inspiration) by the realisation that you don't have infinite time left to do everything you dream to do.

In your 20s, it's easy to think that your entire life is still ahead of you, and you will have time for everything. It doesn't matter if you spend a few years in a mediocre relationship, a career that won't work out in the long run, on a terrible startup idea, and so on.

Somewhere in your 30s you realise that you do need to get started on what you really dream to do, or you might never have the chance to. Whether it's a crisis or inspiration depends on how far off your previous life was from it.

These sort of reports can be very misleading because they are often based surveying local companies competing for employees with other local companies. The salaries are very different when working for example for a local bank, vs. for an international tech company or well-funded international startup.

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...

> For example, Aldi can just decide to hire a contractor that they know does good work at a reasonable price. In contrast, the govt has to use a lengthy fair and open bid process and if they want to select a bid that isn't the lowest, it's a painstaking process to justify that selection.

It's unfortunate, but probably better than the corruption that anything else will enable in the long run. Churchill said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. For government spending, lowest bidder is the worst form of contracts, except for all the others.

> that only speaks when spoken to

Feedback loops are an important part.

But let's say you take two current chatbots, make them converse with each other without human participants. Add full internet access. Add a directive to read HN, Twitter and latest news often.

Interesting emergent behaviour could emerge very soon.

Developers will care if they are spending their time waiting for a build.

Both could be satisfied with a single-threaded make keeps the standard order to ensure backwards compatibility, but `make -j` that also turns on --shuffle. Which is also backwards compatible, because timing of each target might rearrange them.

Despite the electrical risks, it's crazy how much Christmas safety has improved.

I remember https://i.imgur.com/vKbfzEs.jpg from my childhood. Small metal clips to attach real candles to the Christmas tree. 20-50 open flame candles on a dried out Spruce, one of the best fire starters possible.

It's legal to install an aftermarket turbo, swap the engine, lift the car by a few feet. Or repair your powertrain with zip-ties.

Git provides all of those things, as long as everyone agrees on what the current HEAD commit id (hash) is. You could publish that hash in a printed newspaper or with a government regulator. After publishing it is impossible to rewrite commit history without evidence of tampering.

Rewriting history and amending commits forces the recalculation of all commit hashes that follow it, and you end up with a completely different final hash.

AWS QLDB does the same thing with Amazon holding the final hash.

It's not empty, it's just way, way! too politely phrased. It's not advice on how to find ideas or how to become that person, but advice on who is ready to give founding a startup a try.

During my career I did freelance mobile app and web development for about 10 years.

In that time I came across many people who wanted to found a tech startup because "that's where the money is" and being a tech startup founder being a status symbol. Some enthusiastic youngsters, but mostly people who had a successful non-tech small business. And they were not the right sort of person and did not have the right hunches, they didn't use what they learned from their non-tech business, but instead sat down over a beer with friends to brainstorm "social-local-viral" app ideas.

The advice instead should be that if you are struggling to come up with startup ideas, you probably aren't the right sort of person at this time. You should do something entirely different for a while until you find a product that just has to exist.

Unfortunately, they had never read HN or PG, nor could I do more than politely refuse their business.

> I would say that proper password manager is the best investment you can do from any app.

My bed is the best investment in the sense that I spend 1/3 of my life there. That doesn't mean it would be a good idea to pay 1/3 of my income towards a bed and mattress subscription.

Healthy competition from many suppliers means that I can buy a bed for a one-time, materials cost + profit margin price instead of purely value-based pricing, and spend the surplus elsewhere.