Having worked in organisations of various sizes, my observation is that the network effects issue rings true, and large companies feel horrendously bureaucratic.
I had one Engineering Manager joke that his year at Volvo Cars had been one long meeting. Even the then-CEO at the time complained about the number of meetings the company held.
I also remember a tale from a colleague in a startup that had come from a much bigger company talking about how colleagues in India were asking for promotions or pay raises every year. Why? It turned out the colleagues in India had strong expectations from their parents to consistently be progressing in their career, hence they had to show progress in the form of being promoted or having increased salary.
What did the company do? They started creating job titles to essentially create the impression of being promoted without much changing in terms of the day to day job.
It seems like a kind of inflationary effect on organisation structures, where you solve one issue but potentially create other issues, namely bureaucracy.
I was amazed when I realised that Word docs were just zip files and you could poke around in the xml files embedded inside of them.
I almost implemented a working React -> Word document renderer back in 2017, but it didn't have support for creating the xml tags with : inside of them (which OOXML documents use).
Even though markitdown is a Microsoft project, it's just a thin wrapper around a bunch of 3rd party Python packages. For example, to go from docx to Markdown, it uses mammoth to convert docx to HTML[0], then uses markdownify to convert the HTML into Markdown[1].
Technically, they're a bit more than just zip files (they're OPC containers [0]), but if you're hand editing the file content it doesn't really matter.
She's the ex-CEO of a private company owned by a billionaire. What power did she really have?
If the company was still public, then all the stupid shit Elon Musk did would put her in a much stronger place as the adult in the room during board meetings.
The things done to Twitter since it became X is a form of cultural vandalism that should never be forgotten in the history of the web. It will be a cautionary tale for decades to come.
Although WebSockets are simple to use, there are a bunch of issues that the spec doesn't cater for when using them:
1. Connectivity. The WebSocket connection is only as persistent as the underlying network connection between the client and the server. A person playing a web-based game on a mobile device on a train that then goes under a tunnel is a good example.
WebSockets do not reconnect if they close unexpectedly. In such cases, you have to throw the WebSocket instance away and create a new one, and so you end up having to implement your own reconnectivity logic.
2. Message Sending. Messages will only be sent if the connection is open. If it is closed, not only do the messages not get sent, but they don't get queued up either, so they end up disappearing into the ether.
If you want to guarantee message sending, then you end up having to implement a queuing mechanism that is linked to knowing the status of the WebSocket connection, and is able to send when the conditions are right.
3. If you don't use WSS (WebSocket Secure Server) for the WebSocket host and connection url, then the WebSocket connections can get interfered with if they are connecting over a mobile network - ISPs sometimes inject packets which ends up distorting WebSocket connections over http. But I think since the days of Ed Snowden's leaks everyone has their production WebSocket systems setup using WSS.
This comes from the experience many years ago of working on a WebSocket-powered web framework called SocketStream which ran into these issues, and then some years ago I managed to build a library that focussed on dealing with those WebSocket-related issues, called Sarus: https://github.com/anephenix/sarus
WebSockets is great though, and there is still much that can be done with it as this library in the HN post demonstrates.
Loved the node up podcast, especially the episode on databases. He was always a great presence on there. Played a big roll in getting me back into hobby programming after I finished my undergrad
I recently read about a story in my local newspaper (Colchester UK) about someone who stole £13,000 from his girlfriend's phone via her banking app so that he could fund his gambling addiction. He was found guilty of theft and sent to prison.
I wonder if there is any merit in building an app that helps gambling addicts by letting them play the same games that they would play on their phones, with a few caveats:
1 - It's all virtual money, just like a demo account on a stock trading service where you can test it out without real money being involved. You don't use real money, and the app is free to download and play. The goal isn't to make money from the app, it's to help treat gambling addiction.
2 - Where the games would tempt you to place another bet and say "better luck next time?" or "so close" and tempt the player to make another bet, this game would do something different:
- When a player loses on their go, it would say "if you'd staked real money, that would have cost you £2 etc".
- It would also remind you of the total balance, and say "if you'd played for real, then you would be down £200 tonight, but because you played this game instead, you've saved yourself £200."
- When a player wins on their go, it would say "congratulations on winning, that was your first win in the previous 6 go's".
The idea is to change the cognitive behaviour of the player so that a) they get to play a game that they enjoy playing and find addictive to play, but crucially b) they don't lose any money, and because they are shown the reality of what gambling is like from an accounting perspective, their cognitive association with gambling is changed.
It's better to play a fun game for free then to play a game that drains you of all your money.
Such things exist, but for the gambler the crucial thing is the possibility of winning real money. Also apps that don't make money don't pay for advertising themselves.
(Compare vs gatcha, which doesn't allow you to cash out. Predictably there's also gatcha simulators if you just want to roll for things meaninglessly)
There are plenty of Facebook/mobile "play casinos" which produce a fair amount of revenue by not refilling the customers' "free chips" fast enough to be fun so people will pay for more.
There's also a bunch of fun dark patterns (side currencies, battle pass and leaderboard features, and account evolution you need to play X amount to unlock different games, and once you've played that much you can no longer scale down to very low wagers to make the free tokens last longer.)
At least Genshin Impact has a fairly high quality game with some play value attached to the shitty casino.
… when I got a real smartphone I wanted to try Fate/Grand Order because I was a fan of the fanart but when I saw the summon screen it used the same visual language as slot machines and I lost interest.
That assumes that the addiction is to the game itself, and not to the hope of winning real money. If you take the real money out of it, I expect many people with a gambling problem just won't be interested.
Some people just want to piss their money away. I know people that spend hundreds, thousands even on opening magic boxes in games which have "rare" items in them, the games dont even have a marketplace to make the money back.
While I am generally against gambling and would like to see more social and legislative action against it, I would advise against forming opinions based on news pieces like the one you mentioned in the beginning of your post, because news has a bias towards reporting only the most extreme events without giving you the full picture of how prevalent (or not) they actually are.
If anything news is like a mirror image of gambling. People vastly overestimate how likely they will hit a jackpot the same way they vastly overestimate how likely they will die in a plane crash.
Plenty of such apps exist. In fact before gambling was legal all apps had to use fake money. And no one used them. Unless you can replicate the rush that comes with winning real cash you aren't really providing an alternative.
I started making it about 2 days ago - One of my former colleagues even managed to play the Jurassic Park theme song on it for a bit.
What I loved about working on that side project I think is a couple of things:
1 - I could have an idea, implement it, and push it up right away.
This is a breathe of fresh air compared to the coding process at my last gig. The client had a well-structured process of submitting pull requests which required a code review approval before being merged into the codebase.
That process meant that you essentially spent your day picking up tickets and moving them along, and because people wouldn't necessarily be immediately available to perform the code review, the PR could stay open for quite some time.
That delayed feedback loop and hoop-jumping process adds stop-starts into the coding flow state. You can never get into it the same way you can working on a side project.
2 - The tech stack choices are yours to make and quick to do
The tech stack choices used with the client were made by the tech steering committee and your job was essentially to implement the features required by your product team within the parameters of those tech stack choices. They do that to ensure that there is a consistent use of technologies within the company, to the extent that you can quickly swap say frontend engineers from one team to another whenever needed and they can be productive.
On one hand that is great, but on the other hand you don't have the freedom to try new technologies, or even introduce tooling that you feel is better suited for the requirement.
I even had to justify trying to use Sentry rather than ElasticSearch's Kibana for error logging, even though the client was using both tools within the business.
When you are working on the side project, you can make choices and decisions far quicker and easier - the feedback loop is just much quicker and progress happens faster.
3 - The scope of your input into the side project is far greater
When I worked with the client, I was effectively working as a frontend engineer, because they had a gap in a product team to fill.
However, my skills and experience in my career extended to being a full-stack developer who also liked to work on design work in Sketch and even knew how to deploy to VPS, not just work with a PaaS.
When you don't get to use those skills daily in your client work, they will wither, and you can end up becoming pigeon-holed and institutionalised into a narrow way-of-working, which is a danger to being able to apply the full extent of your capabilities.
So the side projects end up serving as a way to exercise those underused skills. Especially if you relish having creative freedom, which reminds me of something that Paul Graham said about developers - they don't do it necessarily for the money - they do it to have creative freedom.
First of all I'm sorry to hear about the loss of your mother and grandmother. Losing one relative is hard enough, but losing another and then experiencing a separation is quite a lot to go through.
In your spare time, it may be good to visit the Switchpoint center to help get their advice and support:
With regards to the $890 you would pay to continue driving the car you use to work as a cab driver for Lyft/Uber, I would ask:
- The $400 for tyres - there are 20+ tyre shops in St George, Utah. Which tyre shop did you visit in St George for your quote? It might be possible to get a better deal. I don't know, but it's possible. If you google "Tyre shop St George. Utah", you will see the list of options there.
- With regards to the insurance, if there is a price comparison site in the US for insurance, try it out and see if you can reduce that amount. I know in the UK there is comparethemarket.com and gocompare.com as examples, so I presume that there has to be something like that in the US?
I would ask "how much do you make weekly doing this job?" alongside "how much are your weekly expenses?" to help workout your income and outgoings to work out how sustainable your current situation is, and where changes can be applied to make it not just sustainable, but actually getting you to a place where you are good.
In terms of programming, what are your skills like?, what programming have you/are you doing? Do you have a GitHub profile where you have code that you can show to people?
If you are programming right now, then it might not be necessary to go and attend classes in school/college/university to study this subject. I can confirm that from 1st-hand experience. I studied a course in University in the UK that was a mixture of Business and Mathematics, but I ended up becoming a software developer.
What programming languages/apps/tools/frameworks are you familiar with?
It may be enough to sit down at a job interview, ask someone to pair program with you on a coding scenario, and demonstrate your capabilities right there and then. If the time allows.
In terms of finding local programming jobs, that will require searching for those.
Also, if you have a desktop computer, like others have suggested in the HackerNews thread, having a laptop will be far easier. See if you can find options to exchange the desktop for a laptop computer - donations, part exchange, part-payment anything. The mobility will enable you to be more mobile and suit you.
Lastly, you mentioned Ketamine. Please be careful because that is a very addictive substance and in the UK recently a public figure by the name of "the Viviene" died from consuming it.
Lastly, I hope that for your case that you manage to get to a better place. Life is a journey and not necessarily a smooth one - we hope for better times, but you can't rely on hope to gift you that - you have to strive for it.
I will leave you with one of the most inspirational talks I've ever watched - Jim Carrey's commencement speech at the Maharishi International University of Management class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYAk295MZZM
Tire shops are the worst. You might have better luck getting used tires from a junkyard/ u pull auto parts. I needed a new alloy rim. Got two rims with tires for 50 bucks. Saw they had tires for 10.
Can’t say enough good things about libraries.
Try and get a job in food service. Mostly evenings + free food-and it leaves your days free to work.
I had one Engineering Manager joke that his year at Volvo Cars had been one long meeting. Even the then-CEO at the time complained about the number of meetings the company held.
I also remember a tale from a colleague in a startup that had come from a much bigger company talking about how colleagues in India were asking for promotions or pay raises every year. Why? It turned out the colleagues in India had strong expectations from their parents to consistently be progressing in their career, hence they had to show progress in the form of being promoted or having increased salary.
What did the company do? They started creating job titles to essentially create the impression of being promoted without much changing in terms of the day to day job.
It seems like a kind of inflationary effect on organisation structures, where you solve one issue but potentially create other issues, namely bureaucracy.
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