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brechin

Re:Steam Machine on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @11:15AM (#48646361)
My guess is connectivity. I was only happy with the Steam Link when it was using a wired connection. This isn't an issue in my home, but most homes don't have wired Ethernet all over.

I did not love the v1 Steam Controller, but it's easy to use with other controllers.

Re:Steam Machine on Monday June 22, 2026 @05:27PM (#48636445)
Based on https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ I would imagine out of 100 Steam players, most are playing at a Windows gaming computer with an Intel CPU, a bunch with Windows/AMD, then a few with a Mac, then one with a Steam Deck.

Most of those are probably NOT plugged into a TV, so in that way I agree that these are not typical Steam users. That's why the Steam Machine was developed, to bring gaming back to the couch in a way that the Steam Link didn't succeed at.

Re:New Docs Reveal US DHS Conspiracy to Violate First Amendment on Wednesday November 08, 2023 @03:44PM (#38196681)
So your argument is that it's coercion through implied threat, or that social media companies are so complicit that they will just do anything the "right" government official asks of them? Is that government censorship, or a problem of weak service operators?

I don't think there's a compelling case for government agents' top priority to be moderating online speech, but ensuring that the American people are not being subjected to massive mis/disinformation campaigns is a legitimate cause.

Re:New Docs Reveal US DHS Conspiracy to Violate First Amendment on Wednesday November 08, 2023 @02:58PM (#38196054)
I see a lot of requests to label and possibly remove content, but I see no description of how social media companies were compelled to do so.

Is there any example of a social media company being impacted by refusing to comply with one of these requests?

This reminds me of the "Lock In" series by John Scalzi. In it, a pandemic virus causes lock-in in about 1% of the population which drives immense investment in technology to improve the quality of life for those folks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_In
Re:I lost all my savings in a mistaken Ethereum transaction on Wednesday December 16, 2020 @10:26AM (#25443654)
My interpretation (not a crypto buff) is that it's like he accidentally buried a locked suitcase of cash in concrete at the bottom of the ocean.

It might be recoverable, but would require extraordinary efforts.

Re:Privacy is the most important concept of our time on Friday October 02, 2020 @10:16AM (#24662830)
This is a very misguided take, seeming to support that people saying terrible things should be left to their own devices because _some_ people "get it."

I knew this author's approach was doomed when I read:

> So, to defend privacy we need to accept shared norms of behavior.

At least in the US, this simply doesn't appear to be possible. Look at how our lives have changed (or not) during the COVID pandemic. Look at the recent debate between 2020 POTUS candidates. We don't DO shared norms in the way that would be required to make true/complete/meaningful privacy a reality.

My expectation is that if it's on the Internet, if it's outside, if it's in a crowd... it's public (or can be made public). Everything you express can be observed and used, and that sucks. Does that have a chilling effect? Of course!

Re:Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote on Thursday May 02, 2019 @11:34AM (#19808959)
This is my experience at the company I'm currently at which has offices in SF and other US locations, as well as a significant number (as a % of the Eng team) of remote people across the country. I don't know the origin story, as the practice was in place when I joined this team, but it's proven its value time and time again. We do consciously make time to document and discuss how to make that information more useful/discoverable/accurate.

* Use the tools - ticket tracking, chat rooms, wikis or other documentation repositories

* Own it - engage in the conversation, do the work, help the whole team get better, accept responsibility, acknowledge your own mistakes, and acknowledge others' wins and contributions

* Do it in public - @mention people in tickets, etc., use PUBLIC chat spaces, use org-wide sharing of documents

A company I worked for in the past, which had a SF office and a smaller number of remote engineers, did not embrace the value of thoughtful written communication, and ultimately didn't see the value of remote engineers. It fostered a culture of "need-to-know" conversations where they felt if you couldn't be "in the room" then you simply weren't going to have the information you needed. They didn't value recording (video, text, etc.) the agenda, discussion, or outcomes of these discussions, so it only lived on in the individuals involved. This artificially stunted the remote engineers, and in turn it backfired on the entire team's productivity.

Re:Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote on Thursday May 02, 2019 @11:05AM (#19808627)
> So it is a A versus B for those people - people who are having to commute for hours to work, mandatorily sit at their computer screens . Versus others who wake up late (because no commute) and can walk about the house in their pyjamas.

It's a false dichotomy. It's not commute + "mandatory" screen time vs. sleeping in and wearing PJs.

When I worked in offices, I enjoyed commuting, it gave me time to listen to podcasts and transition between home and work. Working in an office with other people brought many opportunities to socialize, get pulled into impromptu conversations, take long lunches, and leave really early (to beat the commuters) if I needed to get home for some kid's after-school activity.

I work remotely now, and I still have to wake up on time, get dressed (hello video chat!), and be accountable. If I step away for a measurable amount of time, then I let people know in chat. It's far easier for a remote person to engage in overwork because there's not a clear boundary for when you're "at work" vs. "at home" (unless you create one). For better or worse, I "work more" as a remote employee than I ever did in an office.

The office folks who commute sometimes get to work late (traffic, train/bus issues, etc.), are pulled into random conversations and are unexpectedly unavailable just as much as any remote person. Are they contributing more by being in the office, or is the value just in their "presence", that you could literally tap them on the shoulder?

IMO, It all comes down to communication and empathy. If you're experiencing a major issue because you have to wait 10 minutes for someone to finish walking their dog, then imagine that person were in the office but in the bathroom. Would you still sneer at them because they were holding you up? Very few conversations are _SO_ urgent that you absolutely need an answer immediately. Having remote coworkers allows us to engage more thoughtfully with each other, and often pushes us to write more (and more useful) documentation so that we _aren't_ expecting immediate answers from any specific human.

Re:$30 Toll to Use Express Lanes on Friday January 06, 2017 @09:50AM (#13336581)
Some of the highways in and out of Minneapolis, MN have HOV lanes with this kind of pricing model. It currently maxes out at $8.

http://www.dot.state.mn.us/mnpass/howmnpassworks.html

As someone who worked at a company that used almost all of the GCP products, I agree with just about everything in this article. GCP is pretty amazing (and simple) to deal with. They offer so many features that work very well within their platform. They have a similar 99.95% SLA on most of their services, and they often automatically apply credits for missed SLAs (YMMV, this may only apply when you have account reps paying attention).

The major downsides that I've noticed are: 1) Documentation is lacking (but improving!) 2) Issues that aren't affecting a lot of customers can sometimes take a long time to resolve. 3) Many services (including App Engine Flexible Environments) are still in beta, meaning no SLA, and they recommend against using them in prod. Unless you have a big paid support contract you'll have no clue how soon (if ever) things will reach GA.

Hamilton?
Re:Introducing StandDesk [video] on Thursday March 20, 2014 @06:03PM (#7439167)
I've been happy with this mat, often standing >5h per day.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005GZRS22

Re:Our SaaS app helped a customer make $18k on Friday February 28, 2014 @11:30AM (#7319720)
The Subscribe box near the bottom of the page doesn't work. It tells me that I'm entering an invalid email address (it's a standard gmail.com address, nothing tricky).

If you're interested in trying a different solution, you could try using LeadBoxes - https://blog.leadpages.net/announcing-leadboxes/

FD: I work for LeadPages.

Talk to your current employer before seeking, if that's an option. You shouldn't have to seek another job to get a raise/promotion/change from your current employer. In my opinion, seeking or accepting a counter-offer is unprofessional.

Companies should be proactive about keeping their employees engaged, challenged, and relatively happy.

Whatever you do, keep the connections you've made--don't burn bridges. The new opportunity may not be all it's cracked up to be, and it will be nice to have some people to call when you're on the hunt again.

Re: on Saturday January 11, 2014 @09:25AM (#7042649)
The angle and color/temperature are wrong. He's spraying something with his left hand.

Why is this on the front page of HN?

Re:My contribution to XKCD’s #949 on Thursday December 19, 2013 @10:46PM (#6939816)
Glad I could help!
Re:My contribution to XKCD’s #949 on Thursday December 19, 2013 @01:12PM (#6936460)
I've got a CLI that lets you upload a file through FileTea. I'll clean up the source and post it soon.

See https://github.com/brechin/FileTeaSend Tested with Python 2.6. Only external requirement is requests.

Re:Google Made My Daughter Cry Today on Saturday December 07, 2013 @06:40PM (#6868242)
We had this same experience with my daughter around the same age. This is also an issue with Android devices that desire (require?) a Google login when setting them up.

If you need to have a Google account to use a Chromebook, and the under-13 crowd can't have one, then why do they market Chromebooks to kids and families? I shouldn't sign into it for her, since then she would have unfettered access to the net (including my email, Google Wallet, etc.) as ME, right?

My clock DOES have a ten-minute snooze. I know previous clocks I've used had a 9-minute snooze, but currently when my alarm goes off at 6:00, I hit snooze a few seconds later, then a few seconds after the clock displays 6:10, it alarms again.
I am not an experienced interviewer, but since I'm in a position to interview someone whom I'll work with closely I've been facing this challenge.

We're looking for a more junior level developer. We want to gauge their skills, but don't want to make any questions that are too domain-specific. I like the problems from places like Project Euler or codewars.com, but some coworkers feel they are too difficult. Solving a variation of FizzBuzz, allowing any reasonable language, even pseudo-code, shouldn't be beyond my expectations, right?

Re:Lego robot that strips DRM off Kindle books on Sunday September 08, 2013 @04:14PM (#6350105)
Just because you can get away with it doesn't mean it's not illegal.

After all, do you think you'd get away with stripping DRM from your own e-books for personal use? Probably.

Re:Poll: How old are you? on Wednesday July 17, 2013 @03:50PM (#6059843)
And plenty of discussion on how we can't trust their results any more

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5537023

  The most significant result of this poll is that HN now seems to be past the point where we can rely on an honor system to prevent users from giving junk answers to polls. A few years ago we could. That's an unfortunate change.
Re:Python Headless Web Browser Scraping on Amazon Linux on Monday June 17, 2013 @12:15PM (#5893998)
I'd consider it still active, since it was updated on 2013-06-07: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/beautifulsoup4

I prefer using lxml myself, since I like using XPath queries, but bs4 sometimes parses broken HTML better than any of the provided lxml parsers do.

Re:Python Headless Web Browser Scraping on Amazon Linux on Monday June 17, 2013 @12:09PM (#5893962)
If you're writing Python and need to do something like this, you could try using Phantompy, a Python port of PhantomJS: https://github.com/niwibe/phantompy

It's still "in an early stage of development" but it's on my list of libraries to keep an eye on for when I have time to tackle the JS-heavy sites of the world.

Re:I hired someone with Asperger's – now what? on Friday April 12, 2013 @12:15PM (#5539340)
Thanks for the link. I scored higher than I expected.
Ahh... this brings me back to my college days (I also majored in Linguistics).

I wonder what the current feelings are about the benefits/drawbacks of establishing an official US English dialect and/or declaring US English as (one of the) official language(s) of the United State?

Thoughts?

Re:First 100 users on Thursday March 28, 2013 @11:15AM (#5455275)
Congrats!
Re:Ask HN: Take over abandoned GitHub repo on Wednesday March 27, 2013 @10:40PM (#5453122)
Thanks!

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