Hacker News: jamiepenney

New comment by jamiepenney in "Ask HN: Are tech layoffs happening abroad?"

jamiepenney — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 22:35:32 +0000

Yeah I would say the same thing. Slower hiring overall but less big layoffs. I'm a contractor and haven't had much of a shortage in work for a while now, but we did have a big contract drop off in 2022 when the company went through a double-digit layoff.

New comment by jamiepenney in "New Relic Security Incident – Security Bulletin NR23-01"

jamiepenney — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 23:52:33 +0000

Does anyone have any _actual_ information about what has happened? This seems like the email was sent out too early - I've got nothing actionable to go off.

> We will continue to provide relevant updates as we have more information to share.

"Continue to provide" implies you've shared something in the first place. This is a placeholder page.

Am I missing something?

New comment by jamiepenney in "There were no humans at all in New Zealand until about 1250AD"

jamiepenney — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 07:33:28 +0000

Polynesian navigators were amazing at navigating via the stars. Kupe made the journey from Hawaiki (it's still unclear exactly where that is though) to New Zealand and back, and his grandson was able to navigate back to New Zealand just from his description of the stars. That grandson came to New Zealand on Ngātokimatawhaorua, the canoe that my family traces their ancestry back to.

New comment by jamiepenney in "iOS 17 is available today"

jamiepenney — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 00:00:41 +0000

I must have entered my wife's name in lower case at some point, because it autocompletes everyone else's names with a capital but leaves hers lower cased.

New comment by jamiepenney in "Why Socialism? (1949)"

jamiepenney — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 03:09:35 +0000

I've seen it convincingly argued that large corporations like Walmart operate like a planned economy internally, even if they are acting in an externally unplanned economy.

JT from Second Thought talks about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuBrGaVhjcI as well as early socialist attempts at doing the same thing with computers (Cybersyn in Chile).

New comment by jamiepenney in "Why Socialism? (1949)"

jamiepenney — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 03:06:20 +0000

Gotta start somewhere, capitalism in it's current form has only been around for a few hundred years at best. Too many people have bought into Fukuyama's The End of History imo.

New comment by jamiepenney in "Are cooking videos making us better cooks?"

jamiepenney — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 00:34:27 +0000

I came here to talk about ATK, Lan Lam is amazing and has really helped me make nicer dinners https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnbzopdwFrnYyvwrqTB_5...

I just used her fast caramelized onions technique last night actually. I like that she explains why she's doing everything and how it contributes to the flavour of the meal.

New comment by jamiepenney in "Total data loss after botched GitOps and failed backups"

jamiepenney — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 07:33:47 +0000

Mate means death in te reo Māori, which also kinda works here.

New comment by jamiepenney in "Show HN: Shimmer – ADHD coaching for adults, now on web"

jamiepenney — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 20:09:08 +0000

Not sure if you've already done it, but I find the current state of it just fine - I wouldn't say it's overboard. Not to put extra work on you, but I wonder if it's worth creating a both a highly visual and low-noise version of your blog posts, considering ADHD tends to be co-morbid with stuff like ASD. Just a thought.

New comment by jamiepenney in "Tech workers remain some of the highest paid in New Zealand"

jamiepenney — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 01:38:55 +0000

> I'm now afraid I've priced my self out of the NZ market and will have a rude landing if I'm forced back into the NZ market (you never know, things happen).

Just go contracting - I charge probably on the low end for my experience but take home almost 2.5x what I used to as a salaried worker for less time on the clock. As long as you keep a decent chunk of cash (which is easier since you're making more) then you can ride out short-term gaps between contracts. That being said, I haven't been without work for the six years I've been contracting so haven't had to dip into it yet.

New comment by jamiepenney in "Dawkins vs. Rose on whether there’s a sex binary"

jamiepenney — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 01:49:23 +0000

Ah nice, thanks for that. I'll keep that in mind for next time.

New comment by jamiepenney in "Dawkins vs. Rose on whether there’s a sex binary"

jamiepenney — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 02:07:22 +0000

I wanted to say that but also as the first commenter I didn't want to start the flame war I was asking us to avoid. There's definitely a lot more non-conforming people of all types in tech (I came to work with nail polish on today, by way of example) and it pains me to watch what should otherwise be culture-war free spaces get overtaken by it. HN isn't some bastion of "wokeness" (god I hate that term but it's a useful shortcut) but so much of the other commentary / social media spaces I frequent are caught up in the current right-wing culture warring and I'd just like some place where I can read about techy stuff without having to wade through more shitty comments about me and my friends.

New comment by jamiepenney in "Dawkins vs. Rose on whether there’s a sex binary"

jamiepenney — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 22:14:14 +0000

Is this really appropriate for a tech forum? Not getting into a flame war about who is right here, can Hacker News actually bring anything useful to this discussion that hasn't been discussed ad-nauseam elsewhere on the internet?

New comment by jamiepenney in "Goodbye MongoDB"

jamiepenney — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 21:25:20 +0000

I like these kinds of blog posts. Not because he's ditching mongo, I like the detail around his thought process because there's an over-abundance of articles about "large company does X" but less of the hobbyist version of the same.

New comment by jamiepenney in "I wrote my own smart home software"

jamiepenney — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 07:44:31 +0000

Yeah I have the same approach - I don't update the second a new release comes out, and check the comments to see what the earlybirds have encountered just in case it's a bad release.

Personally I haven't had any issues for a while now, prior to that it was the Python upgrade and all the Z-Wave changes that caught me out. That's all stable now though so updates don't stress me out much.

New comment by jamiepenney in "Triplebyte acquired by Karat"

jamiepenney — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 22:24:15 +0000

Yep pretty much this. I was a contract interviewer with Karat for a few years and taught people how to conduct interviews. There's a graded scale of assistance, anything more than gentle prompting to re-read your code or the error output starts counting against you. If I have to point out a block of code or even a line, then that's getting to the point that most clients will pass you over when they review your interview, so the rules are we don't give that stuff proactively.

New comment by jamiepenney in "Tell HN: Do not store any funds in PayPal or use them for anything critical"

jamiepenney — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 21:53:01 +0000

I will never use Paypal ever again. I created my account when I was still at university, around 2005 I think. They wanted a phone number for verification so I gave them my home phone number (if I remember correctly, they didn't support mobile numbers in my country at this point). Later, they added mobile number support so I added my mobile and moved on. 16 years later, I get a 2FA prompt on login and they will only accept my original home phone number as the phone to use. I haven't had that number for 13 years at that point, there was no way to use it. I called them and asked if I could verify with _any_ of the other numbers on my account but they refused, and said the only thing I could do was close the account.

Luckily the only subscription linked to it was my Nintendo Switch online account, and that was easy to fix. I didn't have any funds stored in the account luckily, but there's no way I'm risking anything else with them given the experience I had with customer support.

New comment by jamiepenney in "Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?"

jamiepenney — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 20:31:53 +0000

I'm one of the managing directors for a 3-person software development co-operative. We each made around double the market rate for developers in our country last year, with a small amount left over in the company at the end of the year to invest in new staff and a small side-business the company owns.

Loomio[1] is a successful product-based co-operative, and was spun out of another successful co-operative called Enspiral[2]. Enspiral got up to over 200 co-owners before they started splitting off to other companies.

This is just looking at New Zealand, which is small and doesn't have a big co-operative sector. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples around the world.

1. https://www.loomio.com/about/ 2. https://www.enspiral.com/

New comment by jamiepenney in "Trying every combination to flash my Asus motherboard's BIOS"

jamiepenney — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 17:45:08 +0000

Yeah I was going to say, this reminds me of the Pentium 4 days when Intel ran into problems with both maxing out the clock speed and their huge instruction pipeline. I just want a machine that can perform well under pressure, but doesn't double as a space heater while idle...

New comment by jamiepenney in "'Bin chickens' learned to wash poisonous cane toads"

jamiepenney — Sat, 26 Nov 2022 19:54:09 +0000

My kids love the bin chicken stories and we aren't even aussies.