mrmekon

I spent a truly obnoxious amount of time importing my music library into beets. It took a couple of weeks to get to 95% imported, and got so bogged down in the last 5% that I never completed the import and never switched over.

This isn't necessarily a fault with beets, really, but a model mismatch. The model of beets is very, very strongly tied to associating each imported item to one well-known, commercial release. While it's possible to stray from that, it takes tons of time and experimentation to cram some things into its model.

Purchased, popular albums are a breeze; they import nicely and make sense. I struggled differing amounts with:

* brand new indie label releases (bandcamp)

* commercial albums variants missing from musicbrainz/discogs

* non-commercial albums (self-released CDRs)

* fan-recorded concerts

* fan-recorded festivals (a special case, a true nightmare)

* fan edits/remixes of commercial releases

* playlists & mix tapes

* mixed media releases

Each was eventually possible, but sometimes it took hours to figure out how to import a specific folder. Worse, after doing one festival it didn't necessarily make it easier to do the next festival. Even if I get to 100% imported, additional imports will still take thought.

This isn't an argument against it, I still think it's a fantastic tool. Just understand that the farther you stray from collecting commercial releases, the more of a struggle it is.

I've been tracking my costs for ~13 years. The cost here includes all equipment and ingredients over that time, including all of the unnecessary stuff that I bought for fun, like pH meters and titration gear.

  |-----------------+-------------------------------+--------|                                                                                                                                      
  |           Years |                               |  12.92 |                                                                                                                                      
  |          Liters |                               |  831.5 |                                                                                                                                      
  |         Bottles |                               |   2494 |                                                                                                                                      
  |      Cost (SEK) |                               |  35373 |                                                                                                                                      
  | Cost/year (SEK) |                               |   2738 |                                                                                                                                      
  |       SEK/liter |                               |  42.54 |                                                                                                                                      
  |      SEK/bottle |                               |  14.18 |                                                                                                                                      
  |      USD/bottle |                               |   1.38 |                                                                                                                                      
  |-----------------+-------------------------------+--------| 

It obviously matters what you brew and what you brew with. This is mostly pale ales and stouts. They certainly haven't all been great, but I've never dumped a batch, so there's no waste to account for.

Huh, that's interesting. The Android team was absolutely hounding me for an interview back in ~2009, to the degree of finding my parents' home phone number and asking them to convince me to take an interview.

I reluctantly obliged, and had a couple of phone screenings where they said they were looking for experienced embedded systems developers for low-level hardware development. I was specializing in 8-bit microcontroller firmware and Linux kernel drivers, and the recruiter said it was exactly what they wanted.

When I took the first technical interview, they grilled me on MapReduce and cluster storage, and then asked me to design a collaborative text editor for the web. The interviewer didn't have a copy of my resume, hadn't seen it, didn't know what position he was interviewing for, and didn't know anything about hardware. We had a really awkward moment when I explicitly said, "there must be some mistake, I'm supposed to be interviewing for an embedded role." I bombed the hell out of that interview, and never heard back from them again.

If my experience was typical, then no wonder the Android team had trouble with staffing.

I know an animation/media rendering company that buys every model of Mac Pro in bulk. They'll buy dozens of these things. I assume that many similar companies do the same.

HN really shows a lot of ignorance whenever Mac Pros are discussed. HN readers, for the most part, are not the market for these devices. The market is non-tech companies, with little or no IT staff, that have extremely resource-intensive tasks. They buy Macs because non-IT people can figure out how to use Macs on their own. They buy the top of the line because it makes their jobs easier. They don't care about the price tag because it's still cheaper than staffing an IT department.

The price of a Mac Pro isn't the price of a good computer. It's the price of a good computer that is guaranteed to work, under warranty, and comes with basic IT service from at the local mall. That's useless to someone who knows how to build and administer their own machine, but easily worth $50k to a profitable business.

Huh, I thought the original was a sarcastic question. In that case, let me explain:

I keep a browser window open at all times. It is never full screen, because if it were full screen I wouldn't be able to see multiple windows at the same time.

I keep my browsing window as close to 1024x768 as possible. In 2019, a lot of websites can't handle a browser window using a mere 75% of the laptop screen, so they either render incorrectly or, worse, switch to a mobile view. When that happens, I either blacklist the website forever in a contemptuous fervor, or just resize the window. Apparently, this resizing action is trackable.

When I say "as close to 1024x768" as possible, I mean exactly 1024x768 unless I have resized it and forgotten. I use a little AppleScript thing to resize it to 1024x768, precisely for browser fingerprinting reasons. When you resize the window by hand, you typically end up with a VERY unique window dimension.

Since maternity and paternity leave are frequently more than 6 months long, employees temporarily leaving for a big chunk of the year is just a fact of doing business here.

Granting unpaid leave to go try your own thing for a while is, from the employer's perspective, not any different. Some people never come back, most people do. The same is true for parental leave (many quit their jobs towards the end of their leave, if they had already been thinking about it).

Even when they aren't required to grant it, larger Swedish companies will often give you unpaid leave if you just ask. The fear is that otherwise you will quit. Hiring is hard here, so it's better to have a promise of someone coming back in 6 months than a job opening that can take 12 months to fill.

Sweden has an enormous market of consultancies compared to the U.S. for filling these temporary gaps. Obviously consultants are expensive and not trained on your projects, so it's not the same as a long-time employee, but it gives options to "control the bleeding."

In my network of friends, which is within the EU and comprised entirely of EU citizens and spans multiple EU tech companies from dinky startups to Giant Unicorn, GDPR has been almost universally approved. We had to implement it, and generally feel better for having done so. The Giant Unicorn employees were dismayed by how little time they were given for such a giant task, but were in support of the law.

Everybody is completely and 100% against the copyright law.

There is a huge difference between the two from my point of view:

GDPR is not a law about "The Internet", it is a law about company records. It applies to Google, but it also applies to the Pakistani food stand on the corner. It affects Google a lot more, sure. I support the concept that a company does not have some inherent right to be a steward of my personal data without my explicit consent. GDPR is also easy enough for even tiny startups to comply with, and is significantly easier for small companies than large ones. It does not create a large barrier to entry for new startups or a rift between the existing small and large companies.

The copyright law, however, is a law about The Internet. It controls how businesses interact with the internet. It sets _technical_ restrictions on how they can do so. It sets technical restrictions that are probably not even feasible, at that. It absolutely does create a huge barrier to entry for small companies, and could possibly enshrine the existing tech giants into de-facto monopolies (I mean, if they aren't already...)

The copyright directive is horrible enough on its own. I don't see why everyone is in a rush to pull in mentions of GDPR to make it seem "worse". For a lot of us, it weakens the argument instead of strengthening it. Not everyone likes GDPR, obviously, but we can _all_ agree that the copyright law is garbage.

> completely block all gTLDs. Screw 'em, they are 99.9999% spam

That's for _my_ e-mail. Your experience may differ. Perhaps you communicate often with people on .loan domains.

E-mailing Microsoft accounts is just not an option. They have no process for fixing incorrectly blocked IPs. I take the same approach with Microsoft as with gTLDs...

Never had a problem with any other mail provider. Google has never blocked or spam-holed me.