I got into HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) fencing last year through a club in my little town. Olympic/sport fencing is fun, but imagine (safely) swinging a 4lbs. steel longsword with two hands at your opponent instead. It's a ton of fun, a great workout (I burn ~1500 calories per class), and competitive so it keeps my interest.
Then there's the whole nerd layer of reading all the original sources from the 15th century, attempting to retain the historical character of the techniques while engaging in real combat, etc. It's both intellectually and physically stimulating.
That's because publishers these days basically require you to have that magnitude of social media presence or they generally won't touch you. If they do, they will do next to nothing to help actually sell your book after it's printed. Very rarely will you see someone who hasn't built a platform already be given any sort of extra marketing or distribution for their work. You'll effectively give them 90% of the sale price for printing and possibly some limited distribution. Publishers used to be tastemakers and make picks and bets based on book merit, but now it's basically like they're just looking for things that would already succeed on their own and injecting themselves into the process.
They've basically figured out how to take half of their job and shove it off on the author while they still take their oversized cut. It's pretty egregious in my opinion.
I've seen this with all types of publishers, btw, from children's books to technical books. Heck, most technical publishers these days are mostly print on demand, so you're barely getting any unique product from the publisher at all.
My mom spends easily that much with her tax preparer who is an independent person who tries to dissuade usage of software like TurboTax. My sister spends about $100 to file, and they have simple W-2 stuff. I know several folks at my church who spend $50-$75 on TurboTax or something similar every year.
I just spent like $200 to file mine with TurboTax only because I have a very simple 1099-K/Schedule C since my wife sells things on Etsy. I know Schedule C can range from my simple setup to absolutely ridiculous, so I don't totally grudge it. But at the same time, there are a lot of small business owners where that's a big chunk of change for them.
Precisely why I built https://freetofile.com (it’s a simple static site with React for internationalization that automatically renders in Spanish, Chinese, Haitian Creole, or English depending on browser settings). It’s shocking and depressing how many low income people don’t know they don’t need to spend $100-200 to file their taxes.
I want to blanket my area (well the whole country really but baby steps…) in signs with the URL during tax season. I really do loathe the entire industry at this point due to their gross practices around free filing. Some offer “free” online filing but deceptively upsell until they squeeze some money out of the customer. So I want to make any little push back I can against these companies.
GitHub was founded to make managing permissions and sharing a git repo easier. It was a nightmare when git was first starting to get traction. Their original tagline was “git repo hosting - no longer a pain in the ass.”
The social stuff came later as they realized that a big part of the friction in software development (and the actual business opportunity) was the actual working together part. They really innovated here and created a culture of workflows that has permeated the way most of us work.
But then there were a few years where they really didn’t seem to do anything of note (I remember there was a five month stretch where they didn’t post a single product update). And then they got bought. After that I don’t really know what their intention has been, but I guess this change brings it more into focus.
The product works fine for our use cases (and the fact everyone has a GitHub account makes the management piece super easy even with wacky enterprise requirements), but I hope they don’t start jacking up prices to pay for AI that I really really don’t want.
There are a lot of odd choices here. Is there a mailing list thread or something where this was worked out? I couldn't seem to find one on a quick scan, but I don't know where these discussions happen these days.
I really don't want to assume incompetence or ignorance at all since I'm sure someone worked really hard on this. But I'm genuinely puzzled by a lot of what's going on.
Sequoia Capital - REMOTE (but must be US based and enrolled in a college/university)
I'm looking for a software engineering intern for the summer at Sequoia!
Here's a tl;dr:
- It's paid.
- It's full-time.
- It's remote.
- The work will be based around a discrete project that we will select alongside the intern to give them something to add to their CV rather than just "I worked at a place."
- The position is on my team of experienced folks who will help appreciably level up the intern's skills while also exposing them to a lot of interesting tech and people.
- Candidates must be U.S.-based and currently enrolled in an institution of higher learning (i.e., college or university, not a bootcamp, sorry! We're working on options for those folks soon).
My team works on a wide range of projects, from simple integrations to full on AI pipelines and everything in between, so the project possibilities are wide. If that sounds interesting, please send me an email at [email protected] with "Intern" in the subject. In the body of the email, include a short paragraph about yourself and your studies, a list of any project ideas you might have, and any links we might find interesting (e.g., GitHub, blog, social media, etc.). If you have a resume/CV, please attach that as well.
(Side note: please do not use an LLM to compose this email. We want to talk to you not a machine! )
I'll be accepting applications of interest through Friday April 19. Once you reach out, I'll be in touch with next steps and a very short technical assessment. The assessment will be 3 questions and should take much less than an hour to complete.
I look forward to hearing from you! If you have any questions, please feel free to email me or leave a comment here. We're really looking for a wide set of applicants from all backgrounds, schools, and even programs of study (assuming you can pass the assessment!), so please share at will!
Properly used white list parameter controls (i.e., strong parameters) that are the default Rails behavior at this point would have prevented this bug completely.
Maybe my experience was different but the lack of smell from COVID was farrrrr more acute and noticeable than I’ve ever had with a sinus infection. It was like the sensation just starkly disappeared rather than diminished. It was really one of the most disconcerting symptoms I had if I’m honest!
I have a lot of friends (including my spouse) who are teachers, and I can pretty confidently say that an office environment/culture/work sphere as we as engineers are used to is vastly different than working in a classroom. We don’t often value experience because, you’re right, often times fresh eyes do bring useful insights. But in the case of teaching (and probably many other things), consensus seems to be that experience does vastly affect one’s effectiveness.
I applaud the OP for their attempt to bring something new, but I feel like if maybe they’d waited a couple more years they may have an easier time thinking through the problem set and creating a product to fit the need. Perhaps I’m wrong! But that’s just my feeling from the many conversations I’ve had with teacher friends.
Then there's the whole nerd layer of reading all the original sources from the 15th century, attempting to retain the historical character of the techniques while engaging in real combat, etc. It's both intellectually and physically stimulating.