manyxcxi

I know Roku doesn’t exactly have the greatest track record but I’ve owned them relatively trouble free since at least 2010, having refreshed them all once or twice since.

Way back when Apple and Amazon were fighting Roku was the only one that had both on it.

I prefer all my TVs stay dumb, so I just plug a Roku box or stick into them. No more having to get a new TV because the Netflix app stopped working or whatever.

I hate the Amazon Stick UI and don’t want to pay 3x the cost for an Apple box- but I absolutely will eject from Roku completely if they start doing this stuff.

I may be able to help, I just sent you an email.

I have never come across a post on HN that was so scarily describing my current day to day and with a comment I agree with so wholeheartedly.

I’ve spent the majority of my career in tech with a finance angle to it, mostly sales and use tax compliance.

What I never fully appreciated was how much those accountants, controllers, and lawyers were rubbing off on me.

I was recently advising a pretty old startup on their ledgering system and was beyond appalled at what it looks like when a bunch of engineers with no finance or accounting background build an accounting system.

We don’t have to find magical accountant engineers either, it will wholly suffice if we sit actual accountants in with our engineering team during the design process.

After my design of their complete overhaul I had a friend who is a CPA completely review my work, we found a few holes in certain scenarios, but by and large we were good.

Money is a difficult engineering problem because with money comes all the human goofery that surrounds it.

You’ve captured the lions share of the problem.

My personal hobbies as well as an off-road race we started amongst friends years ago accidentally becoming insanely popular has lead to me getting to know and becoming friends with auto related content creators, TV personalities, and professional drivers through the last decade.

- A bunch of money came in just before but especially during the pandemic and the capitalists want ROI.

- This means the creators don’t get to do all of the fun stuff they used to do, and now have to justify and get approval for projects that they used to just do on a whim.

- Things get “grown-up” quick and the internal culture goes from likeminded folks “just figuring it out” to planning, meetings, and being forced to produce more repeatable and formulaic content on tighter schedules. Sometimes working with brands you do not want to work with, but have to.

- A lot of these deals happened 2-4 years ago and earn-out clauses have hit their expiration. Now they can bail and realize as much gain as they can.

- Some people are leaving because they realize how royally screwed they’ve gotten.

Finally, the whole industry is a grind. I’m only tangentially related to it as a hobby and seeing what my friends have to do seems EXHAUSTING.

You just described my last 6 weeks…

THIS is the real problem. For _most_ projects upgrading from 8 to 9 meant just adding a few packages that were removed from default JDK with Jigsaw. That part is generally fine, even with OSGi hell.

The Javax -> Jakarta changes for validation, EE, XML, etc. are a damn nightmare!

I do both. I’ve got lots of not computer hobbies (and kids) and I have tinker projects. I usually use early morning a couple days a week for tinker time as I’m an early riser.

It does. Primarily, worker threads query the DB for jobs to pick up. They can write state back when running a job, and they can have configurable (per job type) retry rules.

So in your case, the crash would likely leave it in an open/running state if it was already picked up, at which point timeout/retry rules would kick in after a restart.

If the job wasn’t running yet, just queued, then it would be business as usual upon restart.

I have a 15 year old Brother black and white laser all-in-one and a 6 year old black and white laser with Wi-Fi still on the starter toner in my office.

They work on Linux, Mac, and Windows. I can print to the Wi-Fi one from my iPhone.

In over 20 combined years I’ve never had a paper jam, magically been out of toner, or found myself in a pinch. The new(er) one has a very low power deep sleep so I don’t even have to fully turn it off.

I’ll probably never buy another printer, but as long as Brother doesn’t turn heel, my next printer will 100% be from them.

I follow it pretty closely. I don’t have any automation setup for changelogs or anything at this point, but it’s pretty easy for me, as back in ye old SVN/Trac days there were similar FIX, etc. semantics.

I often have trouble with enough room to have a meaningful subject but the time I include commit scope and Jira ticket number, but I don’t mind, I normally use the body anyway.

I’ve been using it for a long time and I’d happily pay $100 for it.

It can consume swagger/openapi docs and generate calls. It can generate code snippets and cURL requests. You can extract values from one response body to use as a variable in another request, the built in features go on and on- and there’s a decent extension ecosystem/write your own.

Most importantly, it just works, and it works well and quickly, with pretty much any auth scheme I’ve ever had to deal with.

I’ve only got really a couple of nits with the stand-alone version.

I still can’t figure out how to make it “use the same auth scheme” for every single request globally. Each request requires the auth config, but this is solved by just copying an existing request and starting from that. This could very well be my lack of knowledge, though I feel like I know the tool well.

The .paw file is binary and doesn’t do well checked into source control if you’ve got more than one person using it.

The Teams version, which requires a monthly sub kinda/sorta mimics a git style branch strategy for merging different members changes and handles the team problem pretty well.

All in all though, it is absolutely and BY FAR the best request tool I’ve ever used. A great combination of simple just get out of the way and advanced automation strategies. I use it every day.

I keep my lid closed as well and I’ve never had it not wake up. Though, with the latest is version it has seemed slower to wake at times.

It’s _mostly_ kinda sorta like that. There are broad groups that are basically the same; Craftsman and Dewalt being owned by Black and Decker, for instance. But it’s a crazy web depending on particular tools or features it goes from a couple root manufacturers to a dozen or so. But there’s a lot of BS.

Pro Tool Reviews did a big break down [0] a while ago that was very eye opening for me. It could easily be out of date by now but I had no clue how deep the groupings went at the time.

[0] https://www.protoolreviews.com/power-tool-manufacturers-who-...

I’ve got the TS 3 Plus dock (which has Ethernet) and it has been working flawlessly on my 2020 MBP (Intel) the entire time. I _think_ there was a firmware update in the early days that unlocked the 85 or 90 watt charging. I had heartburn about the price, but it’s been worth every penny.

I’m not pushing 4K though, so mileage may vary. I’ve got a 27” TB2 Apple Cinema Display via TB2 to USB-C and a Dell via Display port.

As a guy working with Raspberry Pi and 3D printers a lot in my free time it is SO NICE to have the card reader right up front and easy to access. I also love un/plugging just one cord when I’m on the go.

Pretty sure it would be at most $5 - I’ll have to double check. We pay for premium Active Directory (almost exclusively to get the extra security features), so that might be why it works.

So the answer really is, yeah, it’s got to be paid for one way or another. If you’re using AD you’re paying per user whether or not you’re paying for the M365 suite or not.

I found with admin rules turned up I was getting the same. And you can’t have different rules per service, such as daily for email but every time for Admin console. So I did what I probably should’ve done, created two different accounts for myself.

The admin account I only need every so often, but my regular account with no admin privileges follows our regular user domain settings around MFA session times, etc. and I’m rarely prompted now and it is awesome.

I highly recommend this approach as a balance of practical security and quality of life.

Also in Oregon (Portland area) and though it doesn’t feel darn near as hot the addition of mediocre air quality from the forest fires and higher than normal humidity make it suck something fierce.

72+ degrees and 80% humidity the past two mornings at 5am when I started the dog jog and it was not fun. 95 degrees last night at 9pm.

For those unfamiliar we usually have very low humidity and cool off a lot at night. It could easily be 85+ degrees during the day and we will normally be in the 50s overnight, with the temperature starting to drop a lot by 8 or 9pm.

I thought it was first or firstOrNull. Or is there a new Kotlin collection method I need to learn about?

Aside, Kotlin collection extensions might be my favorite thing I learned in the last two years.

We had something similar in the Pacific Northwest of the US last month. It’s not uncommon for us to see a few days per summer in the 97-102 (36-39C) range but it will always be in the 50-60 (10-15C)range at night.

It’s rarer that we see 2 straight days. We had over a week, the humidity was high, and it wasn’t cooling off at night. I think our county had 40+ deaths they attributed to the heat. It’s absolutely miserable.

I was 30 (8 years ago) when I was diagnosed with it, but my teachers and friends had joked about my “ADD” since I was a kid.

A coworker was talking about their kid’s diagnosis and mentioned a bunch of the things they checked for and a little light bulb went off like “maybe I really do have it?”

I did well in school, tested extremely high in everything, and the few times my IQ was tested it was quite high. I also spent a lot of time in the hallway at school because I was a disruptive pain in the ass. Impulse issues (not violent) like class clown type stuff. I was popular, was good at sports, and got good grades- had any of those things not been in my favor I likely would’ve been sent to an alternative high school due to disciplinary issues.

I managed to accidentally find many of the coping mechanisms they teach about by myself over the years: - EVERYTHING goes in the calendar - Everything has a place and ALWAYS goes there or it will not be found - I cannot over schedule my day, but I must have routines

After my formal diagnosis and months of therapy I reluctantly agreed to give a stimulant a try. I opted for one that is longer acting and takes longer to activate so as to avoid any “sped up” feelings.

It’s been amazing for me. We found the right dose fairly quickly, and I don’t even notice when it kicks in. Usually an hour or so after I take it.

It’s just like if a loud party was going on in your brain and you stepped outside and shut the door. All your competing thoughts quiet. I am so happy to have found it and it has allowed me to be more present and less internally anxious in most of life’s situations.

Could I live without it? Yep. I did for most of my life. Would it be as effect without all the work I did before? Maybe. I wouldn’t bet on it though.

My recommendation for anyone is basically this: the pills can do wonders but some day you won’t have them or can’t take them anymore. Make them the backup to the skills you’ll have for the rest of your life. Do the therapy, read the books, get the help. Then try the pill.

If RDS or other “hard to replicate very quickly during disaster” infra is being run I personally would still have cross A-Z replication at minimum, to reduce network costs I would configure the “other zone” as a backup replica only and not for performance clustering.

With automation we can spin up full new compute stacks, including load balancers and DNS in about 5-10 minutes per “unique” environment configuration.

While it guarantees we could never have a no downtime failover, we’re okay with it and have more than halved our network costs (which admittedly were about number 8 on our AWS bill by cost).

As someone who was a motorcycle safety instructor, which required a ton of training and memorization of safety statistics for a 20 something year old in order to teach new riders for a few summers during college - the numbers agree with your sentiment.

Loud pipes don’t do squat. All the noise is behind you, no one hears you coming they only hear you going, and at that point they hate you.

Now… I have an admission to make, and public apologies to give. The pipes on my current primary motorcycle are the exact same pipes I had on my previous motorcycle but they are significantly louder and it was way too late to do anything about it that wasn’t going to cost thousands before I realized.

They are not jerk levels loud, but they have enough rumble to them that I essentially do everything I can to idle out of my neighborhood in the morning (I’m a block in from an agricultural road). They don’t really reach “Harley level loud” until I’m at least 85% throttle and on my bike that is basically drag racing level of throttle position.

Here’s the thing- they were incredibly expensive and my bike is completely, _perfectly_, tuned for them with new FI programming, air intake, and full dyno tuning. No accel/decel pops, etc.

So- neighbors, world, I’m truly sorry. When I replace this bike I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again. Until then, know I feel like a jerk every morning in my new neighborhood basically coasting to the main road.

I took CS among others in high school but didn’t have to sacrifice foreign language for it. It uses different parts of your brain.

Honestly, my exposure to foreign languages has helped me at various points building tech where I may have made a wholly English centric view about encodings, data models, etc.

The other thing about studying foreign language is that it encourages foreign travel and teaches us about other cultures which only stand to make us more well rounded students and people.

Maybe my opinion is the minority, but I feel so positive about the benefits of language study that we try to get our kids in the 1/2 day language immersion program at their elementary each year. Apparently in my area enough people feel the same as we’ve lost out on the lottery the last two years :(

It’s easy to ignore various humanities/social studies when we are interested in learning about such different things like CS and robotics.

At university my engineering classes were in fancy new buildings but a lot of my general studies classes were in old uncomfortable buildings that would always be too hot or too cold- just adding to the misery of studying something I had no interest in.

I’m still glad for every one of those boring classes I took. I wouldn’t have known how much I absolutely loved studying Greek/Roman mythology, basic philosophy, and early North American native archeology.

I’ve lived in Oregon most my life. Not unlike Washington (or many other states), when you get out of the metro areas the voting turns from “blue” to “red” pretty quickly. East of Bend has significantly more in common with Idaho than the valley (Portland, Salem, Eugene) or the coast- in fact there is a section of eastern Oregon even in the Mountain time zone. Once you get 200+ miles east of Portland, you’re closer (and more likely) to go to Boise than you’ll ever come to Portland.

For reference, Baker City, a larger eastern Oregon population center, is approximately 300 miles from Portland and about 140 from Boise. Pendleton may be about equidistant. I’ve got acquaintances and friends that have only been to the western side of the state a few times in their life and they’re more likely to spend their time in Idaho or Nevada than come west.

The way of life out there is completely foreign to most on the western side of the state, and the eastern side thinks the west is full of “crazy liberals”. It’s been that way my whole life, but the last few years have made it seem completely broken.

I spend a lot of time out east, whether it is Idaho or Oregon, I’ll still spend my time out there- but I’d love to find a way to prevent the divorce (that they’ve been talking about since before I was born).

And on many of these points I agree...

I was careful to choose popular, and not project opinions about SQL/NoSQL/etc. In my field, most of our data is relational and we use NoSQL for caching, queues, shared work, ETL performance, dashboards, etc. but at the end of the day for persistence, the RDBMS is where the “gold copy” data ends up.

As you mentioned previously, knowing the tool set and the domain is critical to either approach. At a certain point with technology the benefits and costs are weighted by subjective preference and project specific needs. I have weighted SQL higher than JPA by many factors because I can take my SQL knowledge to any backend project, and I’ve been a part of a lot of different tech stacks in my career.

Maybe my travels have lead me to be surrounded by many more engineers that trust the database (and their knowledge of the database) to handle the persistence without a too many layers in between.

I, personally, have never seen a JPA based project that actually worked well with large-ish datasets, high concurrency, or when non-trivial ETL functions are part of the system- and this general domain has been the majority of my career, so I may have blinded myself to THE majority being confused for MY majority.

Thanks for the response and a good look at the topic from a different point of view.

I disagree on most of your points but I am trying to read your entire comment favorably, but my personal experiences do not line up with almost any of this.

>>> JPA/Hibernate is still the best way to actually produce working applications if you have to use an SQL database for some reason...

This statement makes me think that you either do not prefer to use SQL RDBMS, don’t have to use them very often, believe they are some dusty piece of tech, or all of the above when my experience has me believing that RDBMS are absolutely the most common persistence layer I encounter in JVM, .NET, PHP, and Python codebases.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a senior JVM based engineer proclaim that JPA/Hibernate are “the best way... to produce working applications”. It simply isn’t. For basic CRUD applications you will AT BEST barely write fewer lines of code with JPA than with native JDBC queries and ResultSet mapping and have all the lock-in and performance drawbacks of JPA.

Lazy loading will inevitably wind up with Session scope problems with any kind of concurrency, forcing nasty internal list enumeration to force a faux eager fetch to work around the problems.

Fetching just the columns you need for a particular projection will have you writing either SQL or Hibernate “SQL” in annotations.

If you have a mix of JDBC and JPA in a codebase you will inevitably wind up with enough consistency and visibility issues as to either ditch one of them or ditch the entire codebase.

Vanilla SQL is so pervasive and CRUD operations are so simple that I would have serious doubts about the credibility of a JPA proselytizer that didn’t know SQL.

I expect every single one of my backend engineers (on any tech stack) to understand the fundamentals of SQL INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements.

I felt the exact same way until last year. Java 8+, IntelliJ IDEA, and Lombok combined massively reduced boilerplate.

Groovy was great for “more than Bash” and DSLs.

I was wrong. Last year we gave Kotlin a try as a team and at this point we’re 100% Kotlin where we would’ve been using Java or Groovy (which would be the vast majority of our code).

Spring and IDE support has made this transition easy. Coroutines are great for the type of code we write, SAM advances in Kotlin 1.4x have removed the last couple “I like the way Java handles that better”. Best off, all of those libraries we already created and use are still completely usable, we didn’t have to rewrite anything.

For me nullability checks by default, synthetic/map backed properties, extension functions, inline/reified functions, and coroutines have so drastically improved the readability AND conciseness of our code I can’t imagine going back.

I went with a Filco Ninja Majestouch TKL about four years ago and I’ve loved it. I needed ten keyless because my new under desk keyboard/mouse tray setup wasn’t really wide enough for a super wide keyboard.

You can choose the switch type you want to run with it as well, I’ve been running Cherry MX Blues, I think Black, Brown, and Red are also offered.

It’s a Windows keyboard so I swapped some keycaps and did some OS rebinding for Mac but I’ve loved it. I don’t know if they offer a Mac version yet or not.

It wasn’t cheap, but it wasn’t as expensive as my Das Keyboard I was moving from- which I had to replace after two years as it was fritzing out and the USB hub in it stopped working.

Here’s a link to a review I just found of it as it gives more detail. The reviewed version isn’t TKL though.

https://www.samkear.com/hardware/filco-majestouch-2-ninja-me...

Screen resolution problems make a lot of sense. I’ve built a few Raspberry Pi gameboys lately with a 3.5” 640x480 screen and they look great but text is _tough_.

I’ve never tried Odroid but Steamlink, even on a Pi4 is not without flaws. Pi3B+ wired has been mostly unsatisfactory for me and Pi Zero W/Pi3 wireless have been nearly inoperable.

Have you had a different experience? If so- what have I been doing so wrong? I’d love to get it to work on a Pi.