simi_

Not saying it's not stupid, but FWIW I noticed ACRush (competitive programming legend) is behind that startup - at least it should mean it's not a full-blown scam.

simi_

10 lat temudiscuss

Moving from the UK to Germany, I chose Deutsche Bank based on its reputation.

Pros:

* English! There is always someone on the phone who can speak English, and they can even send their letters in English. (for Germany, this is very rare)

* More "high touch" - there is a person assigned to your account

* I can't remember if this was the case in UK, but I noticed that transfers to some Western EU countries have no fees and happen almost instantly. Yay!

Cons:

* Buggy app and web interface, sometimes the login fails or hangs randomly (revenue was €31.95 billion in 2014, it's understandable that they can't afford spending too much on this)

* The way to authorise online transactions is with a piece of paper with 100 codes printed on it (TAN list). This was a shock, but it's apparently common here.

* Taking advantage of new customers. They offered me a loan which I later realised had a ridiculous interest rate. (I guess this isn't exclusive to DB, but silly me expected that a good, more prestigious bank would value longer term customer relationships)

* Stupid useless cards. The default account (€5/month) comes with a card (EC Karte) that can only be used at German ATMs and in most German stores. Good luck trying to do anything online with it. For that you need a credit card (extra €5/month), the very idea of something like VISA Debit seems completely alien to Germans.

simi_

10 lat temudiscuss

I keep all my dotfiles in a repo at ~/cfg, and have a script to perform tasks such as creating symlinks (e.g. ~/.emacs.el -> ~/cfg/emacs.el) and installing brew, antigen, etc.

https://github.com/andreis/cfg

simi_

10 lat temudiscuss

If I have to use a Windows machine, CCleaner is one of the first tools I install, it's fantastic. On OS X I use App Cleaner (I run it in parallel with `brew cask rm` just to be safe). PS: That's numberwang! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjOZtWZ56lc

simi_

10 lat temudiscuss

Seems like a perfect task for asciinema

https://asciinema.org/

simi_

11 lat temudiscuss

I had a similar experience buying a somewhat expensive watch through them - my wife was surprised to receive a very fancy, and empty, box. However to their credit they sent another one immediately, no questions asked. I really hope for Amazon to fix the issues OP pointed at, as an amazon.de customer I'm extremely happy with them.

simi_

11 lat temudiscuss

This made me think of "The Making of: Dust", which describes the iterative (and serendipitous) process of creating [two of] the most well-known Counter Strike maps. I think it's a brilliant how a design that feels obvious involves a lot of work and uncertainty.

http://johnsto.co.uk/design/making-dust

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9772521

simi_

11 lat temudiscuss

> But meeting the needs of customers is what I get paid to do

That was like being slapped with a good dose of pragmatism – I love it!

Wrt the later part of your post, try Dart. It's annoying in entirely new ways, but it does away with a lot of JS pains; it's also mature, powerful, and production-oriented. It even comes with a VM to run it in, so you can pretend it's a real –boy– language. Its obscurity also means that it can be hard to come across help/tools (emacs completion, anyone?), but despite all the shortcomings I enjoy using it, and am happy to back Google's bet on Dart.

simi_

11 lat temudiscuss

Same [1], but I'm considering deleting it, as most of them are shit anyway. After seeing Assembly die in less than 2 years [2], I filtered my side project ideas through a "do you see this running in 10 years?" filter, and I saved them as bookmark folders [3].

1: https://github.com/andreis/ideas

2: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wUe7XO...

3: here they are

  cask.space: website for brew cask packages - categories, info, screenshots, discovery, etc.
  "deep" ai: strong artificial intelligence - more of a career goal than a side project
  docsite: simple, standardized landing pages for doctor's offices, á la jameda or zocdoc
  games: tons of game dev resources and indie game websites - if I ever find time to work on one, I love game development
  peer interviews: p2p pair mock interviewing for interview practice - an interest of mine (github.com/andreis/interview)
  sidelog: a tool to organize [ideas for] side projects + collaboration

simi_

11 lat temudiscuss

Sourcegraph has pivoted into a git hosting appliance, it's pretty cool, even if nowhere near as full-featured. https://sourcegraph.com/

simi_

11 lat temudiscuss

I'm inclining towards this option, too. I didn't think it was likely because both watches (can you call them that?) had the same issues. This reminds me of my experience with Razer: out of 5 mice bought (4 abyssus, 1 orochi), two were faulty.

simi_

11 lat temudiscuss

You might like this http://steve-yegge.blogspot.de/2008/06/done-and-gets-things-...

simi_

11 lat temudiscuss

I had a Charge HR for almost a month, got one for my wife too. I finally returned them this week. They're nice to wear and pleasant to use, but the battery lasts one day and the reported steps/calories/distance is basically science fiction.

simi_

11 lat temudiscuss

My thoughts exactly. IIRC Tim makes around 10 mil per year.

simi_

11 lat temudiscuss

Tried some short gmail handles, can confirm. Creepy and stupid. Cloud-based datastores coming with your browser (aka what Chrome has* and probably its competitors too) have better performance, privacy, and UX; I can't think of any reason why I'd use something like this.

* - AFAIU if you set a sync passphrase you also get some (probably limited) form of "zero knowledge" client-side encryption; this makes me hopeful they implemented it properly i.e. "we literally can't access your shit" https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/1181035?hl=en

simi_

11 lat temudiscuss

I've used Spectacle for so long that I can't remember how it was to use OS X without it. The hotkeys are tied to my muscle memory, and don't clash with any of the stuff I care about (emacs, iTerm2, Chrome, etc).

simi_

11 lat temudiscuss

Hey Iwan - I just shot you an email over at your fastmail address. Looking forward to start a discussion there.

simi_

11 lat temudiscuss

Definitely not something unique to them, I just don't like that practice - also, you usually have the regular car brand and the upper-market version, e.g. Lexus/Toyota, not N degrees of "luxury" e.g. Audi/VW/Seat&Skoda. I like what BMW are doing, they have 3 branches based on different applications/philosophies.

simi_

11 lat temudiscuss

Edit: Thank you for the several downvotes.

I initially wrote a stupid rant based on this [0] about how VW's ex-CEO doesn't speak English, but a quick Youtube search proved that was wrong [1]. Oops!

I'll just leave some quick facts that I dug up in the process:

* VW just had another scandal that made it to HN recently, regarding hiding security vulnerabilities [2]

* VW Group numbers for 2014: €204B of which €12.7B revenue, 583k employees [3]

* the board made some weird-ass declarations about the ex-CEO [4]

My confidence in VW is shaken to the point that I'll never buy another car from them again (I didn't like how they artificially segment the market by owning Audi/VW/Skoda/etc anyway), but how do other German manufacturers compare? [5]

0: http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/17/9347275/auto-industry-meet...

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEPJluU09RU

2: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-14/vw-has-spe...

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Group

4: http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/23/9383835/volkswagen-board-s...

5: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/volkswagen-may-not-only-car-18...

simi_

11 lat temudiscuss

I was going to mention the same thing wrt leap seconds: if a company at Google's scale could apply a "hacky" solution to this, then you don't really need a more "scalable" solution. The fact that it simplifies things massively for the developers can be a turn off for some people, though.

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