https://penk.in/ - one day I will add a proper blog in there and testing bed for tech, but for now it is as it is.
The background image is the one I took in Iceland, really proud of it
When running your own backup server, you're forgetting about scenario(however less-likely) when Google Photos will loose your photos, or if your google account gets banned with no ability to call anyone in Google to dispute that. In this case you can safely rely on your own backup to have those files at hand.
I was skeptical about this scenario until one day Gmail lost 1 year worth of my emails. It's just gone. All other emails are there, but not this particular year. And there is no person who you can call to talk about that.
They're missing the key feature I'm looking for: Decentralized backup to the same devices owned by people I choose. That's the "someone else's computer" part of what I want in a "cloud."
I can already easily run such things on my home computer. It's having remote (encrypted) backups and redundancy if my own system goes down that I'm looking for.
There was a post about 2 years ago on HN so that people would post links to their blogs. Somebody saved that post and extracted all the links in to the CSV file with their name and karma, and put it on a website(it's not there now).
I've downloaded that CSV file and slowly went through all 1626 blog links over the last 2 years. I finished just about a week ago. It was quite a journey! Some links I would glance at the homepage and immidiately close, and some I stayed for days - reading all interesting articles from the Archive link. It was a blast!
Yes, and senior is supposed to be the highest rank of IC. But at some point, people gave this advice to call yourself a consultant instead of a freelancer... and it worked. So we have to live with this new term, and so do actual consultants.
I prefer contractor because it doesn't have the same stigma as freelancer, and is still accurate about their relationship.
My wife is from civil/construction engineering and she thinks terms like developer, engineer, and architect are all BS when software people use them. But idk, eventually we need terms for what we do.
Well, if we aren’t developing (creating and bringing to life new software solutions), engineering (designing and building software systems), or architecting (planning and structuring the overall framework of software), what are we doing then?
Now that you mention it, I prefer the term consultant over freelancer
The standard "Accept Cookies" banner is, give or take, malicious compliance to the EU's cookie laws. For actually required things, it doesn't *need* to be a banner. Companies tend to use a standardized, third-party-powered "follow the EU law" tool that they get the ugly cookie banner. And even that banner's malicious compliance is under attack now because it takes too many steps to opt out.
For things like sign-in, you barely have to mention the use of cookies on your website, because it's necessary. For things like items in an anonymous shopping cart, a simple "adding this item to the cart when you're not logged in will cause the item to be saved in a cookie so we can remember it later" would suffice.
Not even that. There's no rule in the GDPR to disclose the use of cookies. The regulation doesn't actually mention cookies at all, except maybe in an example. Instead, any data collection that's obviously required to do what the user requests (including session and shopping cart cookies) doesn't require any explicit consent. Only additional data collection, whether performed by cookies or any other means, requires consent.
That's why there are websites without cookie banners, like GitHub. It's not even hard to do that; it's just that most companies don't bother, because they know the EU will be blamed anyway.
The cookie banner pop-ups are not compliance with the EU legislation, in fact, many of them are in direct violation of EU laws. If you were to give sites the benefit of doubt, they are doing it because they are copy pasting, but the reality is, that the law is that they can not track you without your concent and that they are not allowed to bother you. The fact that they do is likely malicious compliance to get you to blame the EU rather than their shitty tracking practices.
Any site that doesn't have a single button click to ignore all cookies, breaks EU law. But to truly follow the law, you would have to go into a site setting on your own, and enable tracking. Which nobody would do.
The alternative would have been banning tracking and I don't think that would have happend. At least now you're being informed and have at least the perception of an option to opt-out.
Had you truly preferred not being informed, not being allowed to opt-out?
This is a persistent stupid take but many HN readers are also on the wrong side of the consumer protection. Those startups don't make money out of thin air eh?
Once again. The full consumer protection would be banning behavior-based advertisement completely, which I would welcome. GDPR is striking a balance. It forces the companies to ask if they are going to collect data and use it in any other purpose from delivering the information / service.
Almost all of the web is feeding data into Google's ad and statistics services which are used to profile people and completely out of scope. That's the minimum. Worser services feed your data into every single PII broker. If you don't collect such data, no banners are necessary. If you need an address and an email to just ship a product, you need 0 cookie banners. The websites can also do geo-fencing so you don't see any banners. They don't want to spend any money to engineers though.
But no, it is EU's fault to create a balanced law. Companies should be violating you and your pricacy left and right. That's their right, isn't it.
For many years I worked for US based company from European timezone. 9-10 hours difference. It's been okay. I started work around 2-3pm and left around 10pm. It was pretty tough because I couldn't sleep for 3-4 hours after my work day ends that meant 1-2am.
On the bright side I could sleep as much as I wanted in the morning and do chores in first half of the day.
What helped me with motivation is Daily Standup with my team where you have to report about your L24 progress and what you're going to be N24. This added enough stress to increase my motivation to do stuff. I couldn't show up with nothing or lie my way out of it.
Also US comp was pretty big motivator. Geo arbitrage etc.
I can understand the comp being a motivator, but stress. L24 and N24 has always seemed ludicrous. That's insane micromanaging. Is it really unacceptable for something to take more than a work day? Not every task can be broken down that way, you also sometimes change something which breaks something else so you are actually further back. Plus when do you plan work?
I guess we have different understanding of L24/N24. There is no need for a task to take 1 day, it can span days easily. I had tasks which spanned a week or two just because they were deep technical work. But I was able to explain what I did and what progress did I make to the room of engineers. Nobody has been asking me about deadlines or when would it be done, it's not that type of meeting. But it's a nice check-in point to see if I(or the team) move in the right direction and if I don't report meaningful progress for multiple days maybe I need help or extra eyes on my work. I would post draft PR with the code so other people can evaluate and correct my approach. This saves you from working days in the wrong direction.
