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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • I’ve interviewed many people and most people are terrible in that situation, even when I try to help them along.

    Nervousness is the number one thing that throws people off during an interview. Instead of taking a breath to calm down and think things through they either immediately start speaking without a clear plan, or they clam up and don’t give me anything to talk about. Using the STAR/START method of answering questions works great to give a framework.

    The next is that they just don’t demonstrate their skills or that they learn over time. I’ll ask a technical question about something and they show no understanding of why they did something. I love asking questions about what a person learned while doing their work, so many people just don’t have anything to share.

    Lastly, interviews are way easier if the other person treats it like a conversation rather than a one way Q&A session. I get a much better idea of what they will be like to work with and I’m more comfortable when I can ask questions that continue on the discussion. On the flipside, some people take over conversations and don’t get that our time is limited and answers need to be concise. That said, even if the interview is the conversation style, make sure to save at least a couple questions for the ending when you are inevitably asked for questions.


  • I recommend dual booting, not a VM. It is easy enough to choose which OS to boot into if you need to go back to Windows, while being enough friction that you don’t immediately fallback to going into Windows every time you don’t know how to do something in Linux.

    I don’t code, but from the gaming standpoint, things are pretty decent on Linux these days. I’ve been on Linux full time on my laptop for well over a year now, and 6+ months on my main desktop now and find very few reasons to boot into Windows. I think I booted into Windows last weekend for the first time in at least 2 months because I had to upgrade the FW on a device that only had a Windows tool. Otherwise I do have a windows VM on a server that I use relatively frequently, because the state of 3D CAD software on Linux is horrible.






  • 10+ years experience in product design here. There is nothing about a “simple” product that is cheap or easy. Say you hire a design engineering firm to design it, who is going to make the parts? Have you ever worked with manufacturing in Asia? Who is going to assemble it? Who deals with the inevitable issues?

    Then you have to think about selling it. What certifications do you have to get?

    That is just hardware, now repeat many of these same questions for firmware and app development.

    Now you have a product, what are the customers and who do you need to hire to market and sell to them? Assuming someone is interested in purchasing it how much money do you have to pay for all the product up front and warehouse it?

    There is a damn good reason why so many Kickstarter projects never actually ship. Hardware is hard even if you know what you are doing.


  • Obsessive apologizing makes a person appear not confident in themselves. If it is a person I care about I want them to be confident in themselves.

    Additionally the more you repeat something the less meaning it has. So if someone apologizes too much for things that really don’t necessitate an apology when they have something they genuinely need to show remorse for and apologize for the apology holds less meaning.







  • I don’t know what it is but I’ll read my posts before posting and then come back later and it will have an obvious autocorrect error I missed.

    It pisses me right off how bad predictions have gotten on every keyboard. SwiftKey and Swype were damn near perfect at one point and now I swear it purposely chooses the wrong word.


  • Yes, surface material and colour can affect the thermal performance of a device. However when it comes to a smartphone with different colours this difference is almost certainly negligible.

    Heat is transmitted by 3 methods, condition, convection and radiation. For radiation heat transfer there are two properties that affect how much heat is transmitted/absorbed by the surface, temperature and emissivity. Generally darker colours have higher emissivity than lighter colours or reflective surfaces, but different colours of a phone are going to be close assuming they are the same material and radiation is a minor component in cooling a phone.



  • Because that is what people are willing to pay for them.

    A lot of those types of goods are priced extremely high compared to the actual cost to manufacture. Lighting is another example of this. You are paying for the design and brand in many cases even though they aren’t built better or with better materials compared to a more moderately priced faucet. High end faucets do have some more expensive components in them than cheaper ones. For example, orings are replaced by ceramic cartridges that feel better. Those changes maybe account for a couple dollars of manufacturing cost though.

    It can be frustrating knowing how much stuff costs to manufacture, so often I look at items like this and get frustrated because I know the manufacturer is selling for >10x what it cost to make.


  • VGCG

    I mostly came into the series at Tribes:Ascend during the beta, but had played a bit of Tribes:Vengeance with friends in the past. This video is a great summary of the mishandling of an amazing series that nothing else comes close to. There are few things more satisfying in gaming as flying at high speed across a map and hitting that blue plate special.

    I was excited to see Tribes 3 until I saw it was old Hi-Rez employees running the show. I played a few of the early playtests and decided to hold off on purchasing anything until the game got into a more polished state. I don’t know if others doing the same was a contributing factor to development stopping, but by the time I started thinking about checking it out again, they had announced the cancellation of development.