Hacker News: bigmanwalter

New comment by bigmanwalter in "My First Week at Google (2005)"

bigmanwalter — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 19:45:18 +0000

Not at all. The MBAs have taken over at this point and expectations are far too aggressive for anything like 20% time to exist. The rule of thumb is that they give so much work that even if we only complete 80% of it, that should be considered "meeting expectations".

I've heard people refer to 20% projects now as "120% projects".

New comment by bigmanwalter in "Swedish court rules against Tesla in dispute with postal service over deliveries"

bigmanwalter — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 19:28:38 +0000

What's wrong with a doctor refusing to treat a patient they don't like?

New comment by bigmanwalter in "Swedish court rules against Tesla in dispute with postal service over deliveries"

bigmanwalter — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 19:14:32 +0000

Should individuals be forced to perform their duties against their wills?

New comment by bigmanwalter in "What I learned getting acquired by Google"

bigmanwalter — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 18:26:37 +0000

Even some smaller ones too. The Google Montreal office has an excellent music room!

New comment by bigmanwalter in "Most of Us Are Blissfully Ignorant About How Much Rancid Olive Oil We Use (2016)"

bigmanwalter — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 14:39:36 +0000

I'm a fan of PDO olive oil from regions in Greece that are known for their olive oil. Anything from Crete, Messinia, or Kalamata is usually top quality.

Since it's PDO, it's guaranteed to be a single cultivation, and from a region that takes its quality seriously.

New comment by bigmanwalter in "Choosing the Right Rust Web Framework: An Overview"

bigmanwalter — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 15:09:57 +0000

Rust is good for writing performant code, incorporates a lot of the latest programming language research, and gives great error messages.

You don't need it. But if you prefer using it, it's nice to have a web development framework.

New comment by bigmanwalter in "Throwing away 10 months of work after 2 months on the job"

bigmanwalter — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 16:38:33 +0000

All this to get a feature that was already prevalent 15 years ago in oldschool PHP applications.

New comment by bigmanwalter in "Generate invoices from the command line"

bigmanwalter — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 14:32:21 +0000

This is great stuff! To use this in Canada, we have a few extra requirements as well. Firstly, we have to separate our tax onto two lines, one for Federal tax (called GST) and one for Provincial tax (has a different name in each province) and we are also legally required to include our Federal and Provincial tax registration numbers on the same line as the amount of tax being charged.

Even trickier is that some line items could also be tax-exempt.

A config option such as the following would help for that:

  --tax 0.05 "GST" --label="GST #12345679"     \
  --tax 0.09975 "QST" --label="QST #55592929"

And to handle items that are tax exempt, an item can have the:

  --item ... --tax_exempt (or --tax_exempt="GST" in case it's only exempt from one of the sales taxes)

New comment by bigmanwalter in "Ask HN: Is anyone hosting their own Jitsi server?"

bigmanwalter — Tue, 23 May 2023 01:15:46 +0000

I used to host a Janus server, which is similar.

https://janus.conf.meetecho.com/

Was fairly straightforward to setup. Eventually I replaced it with Twilio as it was easier to scale across regions.

New comment by bigmanwalter in "Automate your Python project with Makefile (2021)"

bigmanwalter — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 01:47:44 +0000

Definitely avoid makefiles per directory, see Recursive Make Considered Harmful https://accu.org/journals/overload/14/71/miller_2004/

The approach being recommended in the sibling comment to this is quite nice!

New comment by bigmanwalter in "Automate your Python project with Makefile (2021)"

bigmanwalter — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 19:03:59 +0000

Did you try searching stack overflow? https://stackoverflow.com/a/43402649

If you dedicate a specific directory for all your JSON, then you can depend on that directory and it will do what you're asking for.

New comment by bigmanwalter in "Ask HN: When to make the jump to freelance/consultant?"

bigmanwalter — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 21:46:02 +0000

Let's say someone working for FAANG making $300,000 USD per year (including benefits), that's roughly equivalent to $150 per hour. Could they make the same on Top Tal?

New comment by bigmanwalter in "Ask HN: When to make the jump to freelance/consultant?"

bigmanwalter — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 15:50:44 +0000

What kind of hourly rates can you expect to find on Top Tal?

New comment by bigmanwalter in "Quebec’s Great Maple Syrup Heist (2016)"

bigmanwalter — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 14:08:54 +0000

I'm a fan of this shop https://www.facebook.com/kiosquemontroyal/. Not sure what they do for international shipping as I usually go in-person since I live pretty close by, but feel free to contact them.

They offer different grades of maple syrup, from Light, to Medium (Amber) to Heavy and Very Heavy. I like the very heavy syrup, it's made later in the season and has way more flavour. Most people tend to prefer the Amber as it's the most common and they're more used to it. I recommend trying them all and seeing for yourself!

In terms of specific brands, it can be difficult as most syrup is produced on smaller, family-owned farms, and then relabelled by exporters.

There are some award winning syrups which could be worth trying if you really want to aim for consistency, something like Saint-Paulin https://souvenirdefamille.com/en/products/sirop-derable-2021... or Escuminac https://escuminac.com/ (I don't know why but their site is broken for me and keeps reloading.)

New comment by bigmanwalter in "Coordination Headwind: How organizations are like slime molds"

bigmanwalter — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 17:41:24 +0000

This slide deck is somewhat popular as an internal resource that gets shared around within Google. Does anyone know if it's by the same author? He has 13 years of Google experience on his Linkedin so there is probably some sort of connection here.

New comment by bigmanwalter in "Steam has been banned in China"

bigmanwalter — Sat, 25 Dec 2021 19:29:44 +0000

I backpacked through China and stayed in youth hostels. Highly doubt they were bugged. They didn’t even have heating (we used electric blankets)

New comment by bigmanwalter in "Leaving Google"

bigmanwalter — Sat, 23 Oct 2021 13:11:42 +0000

The most desirable teams are filled by internal transfers. External hires get the teams that have trouble hiring internally.

New comment by bigmanwalter in "The mortifying ordeal of pairing all day"

bigmanwalter — Mon, 10 May 2021 14:41:47 +0000

It's like arguing if a piano sounds better when played by one or two people at the same time. It's just different. Hard to argue that the solo pianist is "better".

New comment by bigmanwalter in "Little Tasks, Little Trust"

bigmanwalter — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 18:39:30 +0000

> Being an effective manager often means buying cover for your team to do their work and evolve it organically.

You hit the nail on the head! I might have to print this out and frame it.

New comment by bigmanwalter in "Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine"

bigmanwalter — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 02:07:43 +0000

The tyrannical boss is a classic trope due to the necessities of competition.

Companies are unlikely to stay profitable if they’re overly generous. They need to profit handsomely to survive.