Hacker News: sgs1370

New comment by sgs1370 in "Ask HN: How to self-learn electronics?"

sgs1370 — Fri, 06 Apr 2018 19:48:36 +0000

I took a physics class using the Art of Electronics in my senior year of undergrad (my major was nuclear eng. and my lab partner was another nuclear eng. friend).

This class ranked right up there with my nuclear engineering labs in the following sense: 1) using an oscilloscope in a lab setting takes a lot of patience & hard work (similar to radiation detectors) 2) I wasn't prepared for how "fuzzy" (sorry, I know that is not the right word) electronic components behave when examined in a lab setting. I was used to resisters and capacitors, and in previous labs they behaved fairly well. This class showed me how complex it all is, and "Art" is not a bad word to describe it at all.

I learned a lot and strongly 2nd the Horowitz recommendation if you want to really get down into the nitty gritty. Maybe it isn't the first book you pick up depending on your background, I dont' know. AND, I hope oscilloscopes and their user manuals have gotten a lot more friendly in the intervening years since 1991 :-)

New comment by sgs1370 in "The reason Facebook won’t ever change"

sgs1370 — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 18:36:32 +0000

Unless someone is actively trying to sell the domain on sedo.com (or similar site) the best bet is to use whois to find the owner and email them, we get a few inquiries for our domains a year and we just send back a friendly "no we're not interested in selling" if that's the case. When we've asked to buy other domains, some say they're not selling and some have been willing to it to us... as with all business negotiation is next!

With other countries, sometimes nobody owns the one in question and they will have various willingness to sell it or not, with various levels of paperwork.

New comment by sgs1370 in "Successories: dorky motivational posters invented internet memes"

sgs1370 — Sat, 17 Feb 2018 01:11:30 +0000

"Demotivators" was a copycat company, and the chief scientist of my previous company had this one hung on his cubicle, which I loved (by the way, he did help with customers when we asked)

https://despair.com/products/apathy

New comment by sgs1370 in "Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level"

sgs1370 — Thu, 30 Nov 2017 01:13:05 +0000

Nowadays, this might not be true. 10 years ago, I hired Oracle dbas (not many, mind you) at hourly wages of 300K+ (edit: yes, they worked 40hrs/wk at least)

New comment by sgs1370 in "Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level"

sgs1370 — Thu, 30 Nov 2017 01:08:36 +0000

"There is no risk"

What? You're wrong.

New comment by sgs1370 in "Alibaba hits nearly $18B in ‘Singles Day’ orders in 12 hours"

sgs1370 — Sun, 12 Nov 2017 00:17:58 +0000

Monoprice: $1.76 - https://www.monoprice.com/product?c_id=102&cp_id=10218&cs_id...

New comment by sgs1370 in "Beer giant ABI bought many craft brews and is now buying beer rating websites"

sgs1370 — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 23:45:31 +0000

Would the proper category then for Bud be some type of "lesser" sake then?

New comment by sgs1370 in "Is there an upside to having no social life?"

sgs1370 — Sat, 14 Oct 2017 00:53:51 +0000

Huh? I am all in favor of people having kids and know it is necessary for society... But are you saying you can't pass on other stuff to the next generation? An example of this is teachers, i.e. a teacher who had no kids but who did nothing but did a great job of teaching kids, teaching and inspriring, but didn't socialize with anyone (except with parents during conferences or to the extent necessary with other teachers & administrators)... would you say they "failed at life"?

New comment by sgs1370 in "TerrariaClone – An incomprehensible hellscape of spaghetti code"

sgs1370 — Thu, 12 Oct 2017 22:15:24 +0000

Your comment reminded me of a game (maybe the only one) I wrote in middle school, on a TRS-80 Color Computer (I think 4K, although maybe I had the 16K upgrade by the time I wrote the game). I wrote it in basic & saved it on some cassette tape... random blocks of one color on the screen, and you are a block that starts at the bottom and you use arrow keys to avoid the blocks as you are thrust upward. (I guess it was basic in more ways than one). I might have added a 3rd color block that gave you points if you hit those.

I wonder if I could even write it now - even at low resolution? My limited scripting is now systems-oriented, the tiny bit of UI stuff takes me forever & I find HTML & JS way more complex than basic ever was. (Don't misunderstand, I think my python scripts that interact with various AWS services, postgres, etc are just fine and don't take me long to write or maintain, its just the whole graphics world I never latched onto...)

New comment by sgs1370 in "Nothing Is Too Strange for Cities Wooing Amazon to Build There"

sgs1370 — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 22:27:22 +0000

The Elon Musk battery plant went through a similar bid process, although I don't know if it was on the same scale. I think Nevada and Buffalo won that bid.

New comment by sgs1370 in "Hewlett Packard Enterprise Is Said to Plan About 5k Job Cuts"

sgs1370 — Sat, 23 Sep 2017 02:32:36 +0000

re: IBM, I'm not sure that SoftLayer/bluemix is getting a lot of traction. AWS: IMO they are the leader to be defeated by the competitors, doing well, cutting prices, making it easy for devs. Google: have heard positive signals especially around ML. MSFT: don't know a lot but I heard they are going to let you run your own Azure on-prem. HPE as a IAAS provider? I doubt it

New comment by sgs1370 in "Hewlett Packard Enterprise Is Said to Plan About 5k Job Cuts"

sgs1370 — Sat, 23 Sep 2017 02:27:17 +0000

So if you're not allowed to give less than 4 weeks notice, what happens if you say "I am quitting in 4 weeks" then you come to work and do nothing all day, I guess the employer can fire you then?

New comment by sgs1370 in "APFS – A Backup Software Developer’s Perspective"

sgs1370 — Sat, 23 Sep 2017 01:51:43 +0000

thanks - this is a good heads up. I asked my team to back up anything not checked into our git repo to some disk not controlled by OSX, and btw don't rely on your time machine, who knows if some bug in the new FS might affect that also. Better safe than sorry. I finished my note with a suggestion to just wait a few months before upgrading to 10.13

New comment by sgs1370 in "Ask HN: Sell my startup for $14M because I can't raise $2M?"

sgs1370 — Sat, 23 Sep 2017 00:36:11 +0000

I could be wrong also, my remembered banker stories were about larger transactions, it's true.

(PS, why can't I reply to the comment to my comment? I guess I don't comment enough to understand HN :-)

New comment by sgs1370 in "Ask HN: Sell my startup for $14M because I can't raise $2M?"

sgs1370 — Sat, 23 Sep 2017 00:26:02 +0000

Annual recurring revenue, I'm not sure if monthly subscriptions or even 1-year contracts count but I think multi-year contracts definitely do.

New comment by sgs1370 in "Ask HN: Sell my startup for $14M because I can't raise $2M?"

sgs1370 — Sat, 23 Sep 2017 00:15:54 +0000

PS if you do a "next thing", don't spend very much of your own money on "it". Even though you don't "have" to get outside funding, do the angel/seed/VC thing based on your previous success and the strength of your idea & team... and if any stage fails, bail on "it" and go to the next thing. The investment you can make is not paying yourself a salary for a year while you figure out if the product succeeds during the angel round stage. Just my $0.02, your mileage may vary.

New comment by sgs1370 in "Ask HN: Sell my startup for $14M because I can't raise $2M?"

sgs1370 — Sat, 23 Sep 2017 00:07:34 +0000

You should* also be working with a banker who sells companies for a living. They will take some % (10%? Who knows) of the deal, but in my limited experience it seems worth it, since they will also help you make introductions and give advice - maybe not perfect advice but it will be advice that will either raise the price of your sale, make it happen faster, or promote some corrupt agenda the banker has (i.e. work with a banker who comes to you from someone who can vouch for them)

There are obviously some things to be very careful in terms of shopping for a deal, but that's also how higher valuations occur. And, if the acquiring company doesn't want to deal with it they can give you a "no-shop" offer that is higher, in addition to the breakup/no-deal fee.

*This "should" in addition to everything else above is just an opinion. I've only been in a company once that was acquired successfully and heard stories about other situations, so take it for what it's worth which might be nothing :-)

New comment by sgs1370 in "A student loan collector must halt collections"

sgs1370 — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 02:06:14 +0000

I'm obviously very old compared to the target audience. I was accepted to Columbia and Texas A&M and chose Texas A&M because I had various scholarships that paid for my tuition and room/board. I had some scholarships to go to Columbia but was facing debt of ~20k/year so I choose to go to A&M instead. My life is fine but I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who take out huge loans. (I had to work after my freshman year and I didn't go out a lot etc.) Not seeking sympathy for me, just saying I don't have any desire to "forgive" the loans for anyone.

I don't know the solution but having the govt secure all loans and think about forgiving them is not going to help the next generation. Where is the incentive for univ to bring their costs down? Also, where is the incentive for people to either shop for a college they can afford, or even forgo college in favor of some other training or on the job experience?

New comment by sgs1370 in "A Social Network That Costs 10¢ to Post"

sgs1370 — Sat, 16 Sep 2017 23:33:49 +0000

Google is no longer using email data for gmail ads. They might still use it for their google search ads or anything else they want.

New comment by sgs1370 in "The Great Man Paradox"

sgs1370 — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 01:12:35 +0000

Aren't there two other very recognizable and very rich people trying to reduce space costs? I'm not sure if the other 2 want to go to Mars first (before other profitable space ventures), of course.