JustARandomGuy

I think you should check out the Light Table kickstarter[0] which originally had a similar premise to yours, and raised several hundred thousand dollars. I personally put in $50 to be in the beta, and that was almost 15 years ago.

I think you would get a lot of takers if you could make a convincing demo.

[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table

Comment · 2 years ago

Unread RSS Reader. Godawful poll timing. 6103 requests in 52 days is about one poll every 736 seconds _on average_, but they're hugely spread out. WTF? Put it this way: the list of unique intervals (nn seconds, nn minutes, ...) is four pages tall on my web browser.

Not entirely sure what the criticism here is other than polling on average every 12 minutes seems a little excessive at best. Why does in matter it the intervals are a bit wonky? I could think of many reasons why: maybe the poll intervals are smaller during the daytime and more spread out over the night to optimize for reading conditions, etc

Comment · 2 years ago

Surprised nobody has mentioned it, but my favorite movie of his was Pride and Prejudice 2005 edition. He plays the father role extremely well - you can feel the emotion in the room.

Going to have to rewatch it this weekend in his honor.

Comment · 2 years ago

> If you understand that this is primarily an exercise in marketing and not tech, then you'll be on your way

A solid gold insight right there. I graduated into a bad economy as well (Millennial into the 08 recession) and what got me hired was not my honors GPA or dual major or any other academic achievement. I got hired because of my side project hosting a JSON API that offered some very simple data. I was able to talk about it during an interview and pretty much my passion for it got me hired.

Another alternative is to get into an open source project and offer to do some "developer evangelism" type work. Code up examples, documentation, write up blog posts - great way to get your name out there.

Comment · 2 years ago

It is what happened to each of the wives of King Henry the 8th. It's a famous rhyme intended to make it easy to remember the order of what happened to them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wives_of_Henry_VIII

Comment · 2 years ago

I don’t necessarily know if the famous graph is accurate - I don’t think the divergence in beliefs is so extreme as that graph indicates, but it is undeniably true that on a worldwide scale there is a growing rift between men and women. Articles like the following are frequently written about the gender gap in South Korea: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna59747

And obviously there are the redpill and other gender-centric movements in the US.

Here is my fundamental question: why is society suddenly producing so many people that have ill will to the opposite gender? There have always been discussions about the differences between genders - the famous “men are from mars, women are from Venus” was published 30+ years ago - but what is making todays discussions so vile and toxic?

Comment · 2 years ago

This article strongly reminded me of the "helicrane" system developed by NASA for the last Mars probe, which oriented itself by recognizing the terrain below it and using that to orient itself toward the right drop location: https://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/what-we-do/flight-projects...

Fun stuff. Wonder if there is any requirements for how "bumpy" the terrain needs to be to get recognized properly by the system.

Comment · 3 years ago

Glad to see someone else had that problem too - I spent hours reading through the Twilio documentation to try to figure out if transactional sms was allowed because all I kept seeing was campaign registration, campaign fees, and etc all about campaign sms. And if we had to pay the campaign monthly fees even if we sent transactional sms, not campaign.

I understand that it's not Twilio's fault, but they desperately need to hire some developer evangelists to write some documentation.

Comment · 3 years ago

A pretty insightful look at how Google thinks about its ads - I was surprised by the System Challenges slide - it looks as if they’re having hardware concerns about the Ads fleet? I wonder if the Ads software inflicts more “stress” on its machines than a regular workload such as gmail, search, etc.

Comment · 3 years ago

There is one thing you should always remember: Never accept responsibility, without the authority to change things.

You are being given the responsibility to manage all of this, without the authority to do so. So here is what I would do:

1. Ask for a title bump. Technology/Project/Services/etc Manager - frame it as other people need to know that you are the person in charge of technology, therefore you need a title to signal that you are the point person for decisions.

2. Insist on being in all high level planning, budget, etc meetings. Frame this request as saying that they are setting less-than-100%-completely-informed deadlines, therefore you need to be in planning meetings so that you can temper expectations and give technology's input.

3. Ask for a department budget so you can purchase what you need. Contractor expertise/books/courses/etc.

4. In the event that you don't get any of these - and I fully expect you won't - start interviewing. You sound like a smart individual who's outgrowing their position and need new challenges, and if they won't give them to you, you need to find another position that will.

Comment · 3 years ago

Argonne is a highly regarded national lab; results from there would be highly credible. Also an Argonne staffer has gone on record[0] saying that they're attempting to replicate, while other labs have not said whether they're trying or not.

Personally I'm waiting for the Argonne results which should be done by the end of the week.

[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/spectacular-supercon...