markplindsay

Two jobs. One in 2014 (at a YC startup), and the second last year.

It really is so much cheaper. After dropping S3/RDS/ECS for OVH bare metal running Proxmox, my costs decreased significantly. I still use Route 53 and back up to S3, though.

Using hooks to integrate 3rd party libraries is so much cleaner than using HOCs.

The magic (and the learning curve, which I think is where much of the pushback on hooks comes from) is worth it.

My "one weird trick" for spotting this behavior is using my middle initial on LinkedIn. LinkedIn stores it as a part of my first name, so their spam always starts off with "Hey Mark P.!"

Those emails get ignored. I ignore most automated agency emails as well.

I will always reply to personal emails from in-house recruiters or employees, however. I am starting a new job soon, though, so it's only to thank them for writing.

Before purchasing and installing your own server, I would try out a bare metal server from a company like OVH for a couple months. You'll get a better sense of the additional setup steps necessary (as compared with a VPS) without buying hardware or committing to a collocation contract.

I've learned a ton (and saved a bunch of money) transitioning from EC2, RDS, and Elastic Cloud to a single OVH dedicated server running Proxmox to host multiple VMs.

Remaining airlines with 747s in passenger service:

- Air China

- Air India

- Asiana

- China Airlines

- Korean

- Lufthansa

- Rossiya

- Thai

This reminds me a lot of PARKROYAL on Pickering[0], a very cool-looking hotel in Singapore. It's probably much easier to pull off this look in a tropical rainforest climate, though.

[0] https://www.archdaily.com/363164/parkroyal-on-pickering-woha...

The PRC's pressure on Muslims is hardly limited to Uyghurs. Please consider this recent NPR report ("'Afraid We Will Become The Next Xinjiang': China's Hui Muslims Face Crackdown") in Gansu and Henan: https://www.npr.org/2019/09/26/763356996/afraid-we-will-beco...

This morning I'm finding out just how many of our supporting services rely on Cloudflare as well.

I'm pretty sure I tried this—I think the prompts were even in English, if I'm remembering correctly. However, I gave up after several tries of it looking for a taxi and not finding one while I was standing in the rain on a dark street corner. It would sit and look for minutes and appeared to be a broken feature.

I ended up taking a BRT line to get back to my hotel and it was great. All of my experiences with transit in Beijing were excellent. I just wish taxis or car services were an option for tourists.

Can you set up Alipay with a non-Chinese bank account or card?

It works great for Chinese people and foreign residents of the PRC who have a bank account. However, my experience as a tourist was that it was impossible to link my US credit card using the PRC version of the app downloaded while in China.

I was in China (Beijing and Wenzhou) in April. I had NO success finding a taxi in Beijing—the only way to get a ride was to use an app like Didi Chuxing.

I was able to install and use it just fine. The problem was that it is impossible to link a non-PRC payment method to it. The same is true for WeChat Pay or Alipay—you've got to use a Chinese bank account or card as a source. I was not able to find a way around this despite over an hour of experimenting with the apps.

In contrast, it was easy to get taxis in Wenzhou. The drivers all initially asked for electronic payment, though, so it's probably only a matter of regulation that is preventing them from going cashless.

What does the employee's accent have to do with it?

Just because it isn’t kitschy and filled with over-the-top praise of the Dear Leader doesn’t mean it isn’t orchestrated. I think it is a mistake to believe the DPRK isn’t capable of producing sophisticated social media like this.

I haven’t used ECS scheduled tasks, only the Elastic Beanstalk equivalent (which I don’t like very much).

For my “worker” ECS containers, I set them up to run their tasks using an app-level scheduling library. When a task finishes, the app phones home an event to Datadog. If Datadog doesn’t get notified within a certain amount of time, I get an email. So far it’s proven to be pretty reliable.

I’m sure similar functionality exists somewhere in AWS, but DD is so easy and we use it for a bunch of other stuff anyway.

Yes, academics who (generally) started their careers in the 1990s and are used to listserv-style communication. They kept wanting to interact with Discourse through email, but it wasn't the experience they were looking for.

I had a lot of trouble keeping Discourse running on my own. There are a lot of moving parts and a ton of configuration to keep track of. Making changes or even updating the instance were tasks I dreaded because of the likelihood something would break. It requires a lot of system resources. I like Docker a lot in many situations, but with Discourse it only seemed to reduce visibility into the problems I was having.

I have to say the folks on meta.discourse were helpful though.

In the end, the users decided—I ended up integrating a Mailman 3 server with the website, and we're in the process of switching over to it. The users preferred the simplicity of LISTSERV-style mailing lists over a web forum. This probably would've happened no matter the choice of forum software, but I can't help but think Discourse's unpleasant UX played a part in them reaching that consensus.

I wouldn't say it's "secret," it's just regular business conducted using a language most Americans can't read or understand. Probably even in dialects that most Chinese people can't speak.

See also: The Website Obesity Crisis[0] by Maciej Ceglowski

[0] http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

I like Singapore very much! I think it is a very livable city in a fascinating region. They have a straightforward visa process for skilled foreign workers, and a path to permanent residency.

But I'm not interested in taking a ~50% pay cut to move there from NYC when the cost of living is not that much different.

I've always read that Singapore is NOT a great place for startups, and that software jobs don't pay well vs. the cost of living.

I would love to hear otherwise because I've always wanted to live and work there.

Transloadit is great. I'm using it right now with an open-source video project (https://github.com/xiaofei-mo/mysteriousobjectsatnoon). The encoding process is just ffmpeg under the hood, but not having to write all of the glue code to get it running with AWS has saved me a ton of time.