mikeho1999's comments

This is absolutely true.

There is a pretty staggering difference in terms of how the different insurance companies pay out their claims -- everything from how they dictate services and hourly rates within their Direct Repair Program (DRP), and to the parent's point, where they set thresholds on the percentage of parts on a claim/repair which can be:

  * OEM (e.g. genuine parts from the auto manufacturer)
  * vs. Aftermarket (e.g. 3rd party clones)
  * vs. Remanufactured (e.g. picked up from a salvage yard)

In general, higher-end insurance companies that charge higher premiums tend to want collision repair body shops utilizing majority or even all-OEM parts, whereas other "cut rate" insurance carriers typically try and get body shops to utilize mostly or all Aftermarket parts, some of which can have very questionable reliability.

My company has many clients in the automotive and collision repair industry, and we've even built a number of parts procurement platforms for the US and Canada markets -- in one of those applications, we specifically had a module that put in the DRP part allocation requirements for each insurance carrier, and to run reports for those carriers to show body shops that were in compliance vs. out of compliance with those requirements.

> Depositors have a reasonable expectation that when they choose a bank (especially a publicly traded bank that is regulated) that their deposits are safe

@garry, while it may be a reasonable expectation, it's always been very clear and _explicit_ that it's not a guarantee beyond $250k (or $500k).

What's more troublesome is that VCs and Y! have portfolio companies that either didn't understand this and/or didn't take the time to shore up their exposure to this otherwise very easily, manageable risk.

Open additional accounts, utilize CDARS, etc. -- there are so, so, so many incredibly simple, straightforward ways your portfolio companies could've mitigated this.

And yes, I agree with you -- the risk _was_ negligible. But it was risk nonetheless. And the fact that the mitigation options are _so_ simple but that your portfolio companies didn't do this really brings into question their ability to manage cash / risk management in general.

So then to ask for taxpayer money to bail out companies who didn't take the time, thought or energy to minimize exposure to this is what I think most people on this thread are pushing back on.

> We're asking for depositors to be made whole and for regulation to prevent this from happening to depositors in the future.

In fact, depositors can _already_ prevent this from happening from themselves.

@metadat -- can you provide the source for that?

I'm genuinely curious how much Google spends on their privacy org, and esp. how that compares with the other big tech companies.

No, this is not a myth at all.

At least not in California...

"State-Provided" funds are calculated by the LCFF (Local Control Funding Formula), which is a combination of both State and Local funds.

Depending on the district, if local funds is not enough to fund the district, then yes, state tax revenue steps in to provide the rest.

However, for districts where local funds is enough or exceeds the district need, then these these districts (referred to as "Basic Aid" or "Excess Revenue" districts) aren't provided state revenue, and they are able to keep the excess local revenue for their needs. (https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/lc/ and https://www.saratogausd.org/Page/519)

For a more specific example, one of the top school districts in Silicon Valley is the Fremont Union High School District (https://resources.finalsite.net/images/v1626711559/fuhsdorg/...)

In 2021, their total revenue was $169M, where $156M (92%) came from property taxes. This resulted in spending per pupil of $23,491, far exceeding the state medium of $16,042.

It's useful to note that c19early is backed/funded by FLCCC, which has been widely reported to be a "fringe doctor's" group.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fringe-doctors-gr...

It's also worth noting that the site/group has been banned from Twitter for spreading misinformation about treatment options.

Actually, I would say anywhere in Taiwan other than Taipei, you'd be fine on $1k USD / month... so for those that would still prefer urban/city life, you should definitely consider Kaohsiung or Tainan -- both urban centers that are in the southern part of Taiwan.

Weather may be a bit more of an issue though (especially in the summertime), but cost of living is still very very reasonable.

Agreed on the language though -- Taiwan in general is a bit tougher to navigate for non-Chinese speakers. You may be able to get by with just English in Taipei, but in the rural areas or in the central/southern urban centers, it'll be a bit tougher.

I'd love to take a moment to talk about the quality of the code (assuming that the full code listing that the Ars article links to is accurate).

It's pretty clear that there are no coding standards, sparse comments (literally just 1), lots of mixed tab/spacing, misspelled names, etc.

Furthermore, the fact that this got into production shows that either the code wasn't even reviewed prior to release and/or it wasn't reviewed carefully.

I think this goes to a much larger issue of devices in this so-called IoT world we live in now. So many of these devices are built by "hardware-first" companies, who oftentimes put very little budget, time or emphasis on the software side of things. As people's daily lives depend more and more on IoT devices, I think this should be more and more of a concern: it doesn't matter how good the hardware is and/or how cost efficient a company's hardware production capability is if you don't value the quality in the software that runs said hardware.

(Full Disclosure: I'm a full-time independent software developer who has worked on many IoT projects, working directly with hardware and device manufacturers)

SEEKING FULL-TIME FREELANCER | Sr. PHP Developer | REMOTE (preferably Eastern Asia tz, but American tz would be considered)

We are Quasidea Development, a team of about 10 people who build custom business applications for primarily medium-sized businesses (or medium-sized departments in larger organizations).

Over the past 20 years, we've been blessed to have built mission critical applications for such well-known clients like NASA, Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, Stanford University, as well as dozens of smaller companies and startups.

We're looking for a full-time remote Senior PHP Developer to help take over the maintenance and build out new features / modules for one of our clients.

This would be a permanent role as a full-time freelance/contractor.

Ideal candidate would be someone who has:

  * 8+ years of PHP and MySQL Expertise
  * Strong understanding of OO principles and design
  * Experience with JavaScript, especially with ReactJS is a huge plus
  * Fluent in English (both spoken _and_ written)
  * Able to work independently, and very comfortable communicating over IM and online collaboration tools (Slack, Zoom, etc.)

While we are based in San Diego, CA, our team is all over the world, including the US, Latin America and Eastern Asia.

Feel free to reach out to me directly (I'm the founder and Principal Engineer) if you're interested. You can contact me via my profile. Thanks!

Quasidea Development | Sr. PHP Developer | REMOTE (preferably Eastern Asia tz, but American tz would be considered) | Full-Time Contractor (Permanent)

We are a team of about 10 people who build custom business applications for primarily medium-sized businesses (or medium-sized departments in larger organizations).

Over the past 20 years, we've been blessed to have built mission critical applications for such well-known clients like NASA, Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, Stanford University, as well as dozens of smaller companies and startups.

We're looking for a full-time remote Senior PHP Developer to help take over the maintenance and build out new features / modules for one of our clients.

Ideal candidate would be someone who has:

  * 8+ years of PHP and MySQL Expertise
  * Strong understanding of OO principles and design
  * Experience with JavaScript, especially with ReactJS is a huge plus
  * Fluent in English (both spoken _and_ written)
  * Able to work independently, and very comfortable communicating over IM and online collaboration tools (Slack, Zoom, etc.)

While we are based in San Diego, CA, our team is all over the world, including the US, Latin America and Eastern Asia.

Feel free to reach out to me directly (I'm the founder and Principal Engineer) if you're interested. You can contact me via my profile. Thanks!

Maybe this is just way too niche, but I've been wondering why there hasn't been any e-ink based laptops with a powerful enough of a processor (e.g. 10th/11th gen core i7 would be great) and ability to put enough RAM (e.g. 16GB) to run a development environment.

Something like that would be oh so light and great/easy to carry around. And something purely used for dev doesn't need to have the ability to play videos, etc. (that would just be distracting anyway, right? =)

I know there have been a few tablet/reader-based devices that use e-ink and have the ability to run Linux, but of the ones I've seen, none of them seem to have powerful enough of a CPU (and definitely not enough RAM).

Full disclosure: I have had the distinct "privilege" on having worked with all aspects of large consulting firms, from working at Cap Gemini, to being a sub for a smaller company on a large gov't contract with Lockheed Martin, to actually competing (and winning) against the large companies with my own, small consulting company startup.

In short, the above comment is spot on. Companies like Deloitte, Cap Gemini, PwC, etc. all make their margins purely on their reputation. Just like back in the 80s when the phrase "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" became popular, I think from the mid-90s all the way through to even 2010s there has been a similar sentiment with large, multinational consulting companies.

These consulting companies know they have a strong reputation for large scale, enterprise software projects, and so they will milk margins by charging high rates, upselling all sorts of additional features, and fulfilling projects with the lowest cost resources, whether it'd be outsourcing overseas, utilizing H1-B workers, or bringing in recent college grads. (Accenture is probably one of the most notorious for this -- not sure if they still do this now, but back in the early 2000s, they were known for bringing in college grads from all sorts of usually non-STEM majors, and they would put them through a 2-week bootcamp (er "Core Analyst Training") out in St. Charles, where more focus was on the partying and hooking up than anything else, but then shortly afterword, they'd be put on projects where they'd be expected to do technical design and even coding, while being billed out at $180+/hour)

Now, in all fairness, for every highly publicized, disastrous rollout that one of these companies gets notoriety for, there are actually still dozens of much less public, relatively successful implementations that gets deployed without any issue or fanfare.

But despite this, the costs for even the successful projects are still ridiculously high. As the main reason for their huge margins are primarily in their reputations, then as their reputations continue to erode from things like this news piece, clients will start to wonder if the large costs can continue to be justified.

And I'm beginning to see this sentiment directly -- my small dozen-person consulting company has not only been able to compete directly against these larger companies, but we have started winning contracts against them as well. For the latest contract we won, we bid at about 20% of what one of the larger companies ended up coming in at -- they actually thought they were a shoe-in because they were the incumbent, having built out several other projects already for the client. But we ended up being selected not just because of our pricing, but because of our overall proposal, favorable terms and expertise on the domain.

What's even more surprising is that even though we offered "bargain basement" pricing relative to theirs, it will still end up being the most profitable project we have had to-date -- it just makes it crazy to think what kind of profits/margins that they can make.

I concur 100% about Taiwan.

I am a US-born Taiwanese-American who lives in San Diego most of the time, but we spend most winters here in Taiwan to visit relatives and try and get mandarin language immersion for our kids.

Since we're all WFH and remote school anyway, we decided to spend an extended period of time this winter to ride out the pandemic.

If you're able to do so and are interested, I'd highly recommend it, since like the OP I have enjoyed being able to go out to eat dinner, hang out at coffee shops, etc.

To answer a few questions that have been raised so far:

* Unfortunately, Taiwan is now closed to non-residents. You are not able to come here on a visitor's visa anymore. However, as another poster mentioned -- it's relatively easy to apply to get a Gold Card (https://taiwangoldcard.com/). As long as you can document income above about $67k USD/year (the actual requirement is to be above $160k TWD / month), you should be able to get it. The process is normally supposed to take about 30 days... but since there has been so much interest in the program over the past year, I believe the process is now taking 45 ~ 60 days.

* If you have a spouse / children that you want to bring with you, the process will take even longer -- you can only apply for your spouse/kids resident visas after you get the Gold Card. This process usually takes an additional 2 or so weeks.

* Everyone who comes in is required to undergo a 21-day quarantine restriction. It's a 14-day strict quarantine (where they monitor you and call you at least once a day), and then a 7-day "self" quarantine after that. (Although there are rumors that they may increase the restrictions on the 7-day period)

* For the specific question about race -- if you are African / African-American, IMO you likely wouldn't see much in terms of direct, hostile racism. OTOH, I would imagine that you would likely encounter racialism -- https://www.huffpost.com/entry/racism-and-racialism-are-_b_6... is a good article distinguishing it.

There's a lot more I could post about the experience about coming out here and what life is like once you're here (especially as a software dev / digital nomad) -- but in the interest of brevity, I'll stop for now. But if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me.

I've never heard of nix, so I can't comment to that specifically.

But being able to have multiple / separated environments on my machine would be hugely beneficial.

Working for a full-time software consulting agency, I'm normally actively working on many projects at the same time, each of which have their own nuances of packages that are required (e.g. different versions of PHP, different sets of dependencies, etc.) So if nix truly offers seamless switching between environments (and if it can do it quickly and efficiently), it would definitely be worth it for me to look into it further.

Sorry, but I couldn't help. But please cue Vizzini from "The Princess Bride":

"I've hired you to help me start a war! That's a prestigious line of work with a long and glorious tradition."

=)

First of all.. congrats! It's always exciting to see something you've created grow and start to gain traction.

Second of all, please take all of the advice that you see here with a grain of salt. I think most of the ideas that people have shared are really good things to keep in mind for consumer-oriented SaaS platforms in general, however, IMHO the university / college student listings market is a completely different beast.

Speaking as someone who co-founded the largest student classifieds system (at our peak 4-5 years ago we had over a million students using our system at over 400 universities nationwide), I can tell you that a lot of the business modeling that people do for consumer software service businesses are not necessarily compatible with the market that you are in.

I couldn't help but notice from your site that you're in San Diego -- I'm actually in SD as well, and if you're up to chatting more, I'd be more than happy to meet up. From my HN profile you can link to my website -- the very bottom of the "With Whom" section talks about the startup I helped to co-found, and the "Where" section provides contact information if you want to get in touch with me further.

Best of luck!

Interesting story... but just out of curiosity, if there was already the investment made in the codebase for your application, as well as the team in place to continue with the project and maintain it afterwards, was there a consideration to switch to .NET / Windows Server?

If so, I'm curious to hear the reasoning behind abandoning the project altogether and re-writing from scratch (and likely re-interviewing and hiring a different team with different skillsets) as opposed to simply moving the production environment onto Windows...

Yes, you are correct, on pretty much all of your points.

> IANAL, but my understanding is that HOAs in California can't put a lien on your property for failing to pay fines, only for failing to pay dues.

Yes, however, most HOAs do have ways to make it difficult for homeowners who have become delinquent on fines. One common approach is that the CC&Rs allow a delinquent homeowner to be placed as "a member NOT in good standing", which means that the owner will be precluded from using the association amenities (pool, clubhouse, tennis court, etc.) or even being able to vote for board members, until the fine is paid off and the "good standing" is restored.

> Furthermore overly punitive fines aren't allowed, and that rule does in fact have teeth (and is also abused by homeowners to make it more expensive to collect fines from them).

Not only that, but the Davis-Sterling Act (which is the California state laws that govern common interest developments) as well as most of the local courts in California are very much sided towards the homeowner and against the overall community. Much of the Davis-Sterling Act was written and approved at a time when there was a lot of concern that large community developments would do things to abuse and harm the individual homeowner, or more specifically, that the will of the majority (within a CID) would do things to make life as difficult as possible for those in the minority. Davis-Sterling (and the many of subsequent court cases that dealt with Davis-Sterling) was basically set up to help prevent that as much as possible, unfortunately sometimes to the detriment of well-meaning HOA Boards that are dealing with a delinquent homeowner that understands these loopholes and uses them to willingly violate rules, or skirt out of paying fines, etc.

> "they are just borrowing it from the HOA while paying the taxes, insurance, and doing all the work for them to keep the house up."

I'm not sure if this sentence was meant to be snarky or if this was a genuine comment... if it's the former, then heheh, I will agree that the sentiment of the sentence does have some merit.

But if it's the latter, I just wanted to try and clear something up -- speaking as an owner of a condo (in an HOA) and as the former president of our HOA.

Typically, owners of homes within an HOA are classified as owners in a "common interest development", where owners are all equal share holders of the development as a whole. Meaning, if there are 100 homeowners in a condo community, each homeowner owns an equal share (1%) of that overall community's property.

The owner is not "borrowing" anything from the HOA... especially since the HOA, itself, doesn't actually own anything at all.

The HOA is technically a corporation (yes, all HOAs are incorporated as a corporation, at least in the State of California) which has been chartered to manage and maintain the common interest development property, while maintaining things like the reserve fund, enforcement of the CC&Rs, architectural reviews, etc.

SO as a homeowner in the common interest, you actually own the HOA (and not the other way around).

Furthermore, homeowners within an HOA are granted limited, exclusive use of a certain part of the overall property... in most cases, that is the space inside condo or townhouse unit itself, and maybe a patio or yard, etc.

What's key is the limited part of "limited, exclusive use", as well as what is noted in the CC&Rs, itself, which describes the definition of what is "limited". Yes, these limitations can very well (and usually do) include provisions on what can or cannot be rented out, how long guests can stay within your home, etc. Typically, these provisions are not meant to make life difficult, but these provisions are in place to help maintain the overall property value of the all the homes in the community.

But the most important thing to note is that the CC&Rs are, in fact determined by all of the homeowners, and not by some arbitrary "HOA" or "powers that be", etc. CC&Rs are (or should be) regularly reviewed by the board members of the HOA, and changes are required to be approved by a certain majority (or supermajority) of homeowners by anonymous vote (again, at least this is how it is in the State of California, as dictated by the Davis-Sterling Act).

Bottom line: if you are a homeowner in a condo or townhouse community and feel like you have no freedom to do with the home that you rightfully own, just remember that you actually just own a portion of a much larger community/property, and thus, you are bound by some of the limitations / restrictions that the overall community has placed on each owner. But moreover, if you feel that some of those limitations / restrictions are unjust, unfair, or outdated, then work with the HOA Board (or better yet, actually be on the HOA board) and work with your neighbors to get those rules and regulations changed.

Absolutely.

I was building an enterprise app doing multiple simultaneous asynchronous HTTP calls, but was running into issues where certain connections would just die outright. The problem was that the dying connections seemed non-deterministic, which obviously made it very difficult to debug.

I spent most of the week before WWDC trying to debug the issue (to no avail), but since WWDC was coming up (and since I was already registered), I made sure to set aside some time to go to the Framework labs to see if I can get some help.

I went the first day it was open... and was able to talk to the Apple engineer who actually built the Foundation httpClient class. I sat down with him for about 20 min, where we actually went over my code, and he was able to explain what I was doing incorrectly.

20 minutes. And it was fixed.

I probably would've had to spend at least another week banging my head against a wall, and even then, it might not have gotten fixed correctly.

Given any reasonable hourly rate, that single one-on-one alone already paid for the entire conference.

IMO, if you're going to just hobnob and go to the keynote and sessions, then yes, your money is probably going to be better spent elsewhere, especially since all the sessions are available online, and because most of the after-parties and networking events all throughout SF/SOMA don't require you to register for WWDC.

But if you have projects you are actively working on and are encountering issues or anticipate that you will be encountering issues that will be time consuming to debug on your own, then if you spend some or most of your time in the labs, WWDC is absolutely invaluable.

What an incredible idea for an event! But just out of curiosity, has this been publicized at all? I live in SD, and I regularly tune in to local media (especially NPR/KPBS), and yet, reading it here on HN is the first time I've heard about Walk for Salk...

Anyway, it sounds like a great event, and I hope to come and bring the family!