I'm an experienced mobile developer who is trying to learn more about web dev with React. I recently built a small web app with React, Typescript, Tailwind and a Supabase backend.
I'm seeking a developer with experience in all 4 of those technologies to do a code review with me over a screen share session. This would be fairly high level, as I would like to talk thru a handful of decisions I made and see if I made any mistakes, especially with my relatively simple Supabase setup.
I expect this would only be an hour or two of work. If anyone is interested shoot me an email, showing some experience with these four technologies, to "jared at jaredandrews dot com"
I had no idea Monster sold anything other than over priced guitar cables... About 15 yeard ago, I knew a guy who exclusively bought Monster... well he had two of them, one from the guitar to the pedal board and another from the board to the amp.
But it wasn't because of their alleged improved sound quality or whatever, it was because they had a lifetime warranty. Dude had bought two monster 1/4inch cables and gotten them replaced "for free" like 5 times.
From what I can tell they got rid of the lifetime warranty around 2018 and have mostly transitioned to licensing their name.
We used them at a student union for a similar reason - lots of students thinking they're a rock star swinging mics around and stuff meant we ended up with a lot of damage. Though IMHO the monster cables didn't actually take the damage any better than real "professional-tier" brands, that "no questions" replacement policy was used heavily by us.
> Dude had bought two monster 1/4inch cables and gotten them replaced "for free" like 5 times.
Every time I've had a cable fail it was at one of the solder joints on the connector. Stripping it down and re-soldering takes a few minutes, sure, but it saves you from having to drive to a music shop or pay for shipping. For this reason I try to only buy cables that are built to let you do this instead of ones with closed, molded ends.
Back before monoprice was bought by a Chinese company, I had one of their HDMI cables, and yeah - the connector just slipped right off. Buncha thin gold wires sticking out.
I contacted them. They asked for a photo, which I was able to text them directly from my phone (very advanced for 2009). He looked at it, said it was their fault, and to toss it. Another was shipped to me.
I have a Logitech mouse that’s double clicking. One of the 10 (!!!) steps I was supposed to do before they’d accept that it’s broken was to go to a website and click 100 (!!!!!) times.
I sincerely miss the companies that were totally dedicated to customer service.
I have this problem with my Logitech mice too. They work great for two or three years, and then they start registering about one in every 50 clicks or so as double clicks, with the frequency slowly increasing to maybe 1 in 10.
That might just be dust gathering or humidity/temperature weathering. I've fixed most degraded mice by cleaning them, and there's different sprays/lubes you can get that will not only help the hardware but the electrical responsiveness and accuracy.
That and the infinite-scroll wheel bearing fails. I’ve probably gone through 5-10 g502 mice in the past decade. I usually buy them 2-3 at a time when they are on sale.
As an IT professional; It's not even worth my time to substantiate those claims. The user gets a new mouse and I record it as a ticket. I've never had to "cut anyone off" from issuing new equipment, but if there's ever a problematic user I'll have a record of their equipment issues on file.
I hove some Monster cables around, and I bought them knowing that their claims are bogus, but the things are built like a tank.
None of them have broken or developed faulty connections over the years, and that's worth it the price difference in my opinion. In my case, for a couple of them, the price difference was nil, because the store was selling them at a 50% discount to just get them out of their premises.
I definitely got upsold on a Monster cable when I bought my first guitar on the back of that lifetime warranty. Joke's on me, I guess; the cable is almost 20 years old and still working, never had to use the warranty even once. I need to take worse care of my things.
Guitar cable?, ya...noooo
cordless my droogys
prolly cheaper too
did a custom stealth mod to one guitar where the transmitter, plugs into 1/4 jack,under the back cover
nice thing is that its possible to turn an amp up to face peeling loudness, and step back, and not get hurt, got to watch for things vibrating off of shelves though
and are you kidding me?, I know that as a guitarer
there are cumulative cognitive effects, but when a fucking speaker cable outfit starts suing people, something has definitly gone off the rails
but oh ya, there are people in jail for "cheating" on video games, but somehow there are government weed stores
tone is in the hands
I prefer a cable in my active bass, because it's one less set of batteries to think about, and that guy has a pretty hot output. Analog distortion is way better than the sounds you get when you saturate a digital signal path, heh.
I've had a 20' monster cable for at least 15 years now that is showing no signs of slowing down, even after a period of regular practice/shows. If only I was actually able to cash in on the warranty! Other cables from reputable brands haven't lasted this long in less demanding conditions.
A few of my friends did the same. They could easily run to Guitar Center and swap broken cables before a gig. That could easily be worth the added cost.
This is why pro gear doesnt come with a replacement warranty. The seconds/minutes spent finding and swapping a cable during a live show far exceeds any concept of replacement costs. Multiply any failure rate by the hundreds or even thousands of cables at a modern concert and any failure rate is unacceptable. If you care, buy good parts and build the cables yourself by hand. That is the only way to be sure it was done right.
> I had no idea Monster sold anything other than over priced guitar cables...
Basically, someone asked themselves "how do I port the audiophile scam to the home entertainment space?" And monster cables was born.
When Monster first came out it became a meme.
Their advertisement was laughable and remember joking with tech savvy friends about how all wire was vastly inferior to the alien technology monster used in their oxygen free high purity copper that "allows more music to flow" (actual quote from their shitty packaging.) They sold cables for everything AV and then invaded the musician space with their trash.
Overly aggressive salesmen in electronics stores would push them on every sale. It was tiring. Buying a little TV for the kitchen? "Dont forget the monster HDMI cable and monster coax cable to hook up the cable box! oh and the monster surge strip that purifies the electron essence before the harmonic protuberances make it into your music!" Sure thing chief, lemme spend a hundred bucks on five bucks worth of cable. No wonder they turned into a meme and a lot of people hated them. But there's always a sucker who loves showing off his $80 cables to another sucker.
If you travel back im time you’ll find audio connectors corroded. It was standard practice to use an eraser to polish the jacks. Monster offered gold plated connectors. It really made difference. Any benefits beyond non corrosive is questionable.
Back in the day, Radio Shack offered gold plated connectors on their cables, too (IIRC, there was "Archer" and "Archer Gold"). To this day I always get a little prickly at people who sneer at audiophile cables and specifically rag on gold-plated connectors rather than, I don't know, oxygen-free silver cables or whatever. The gold plating was actually a real valuable thing, and the cables could still actually be pretty cheap (e.g., Radio Shack!).
I actually did have Monster-brand speaker cable many years ago, but it was the original version with no connectors, just a bare spool. I don't remember it being much more expensive than any other 12-gauge speaker wire at the time, and it was both more flexible than some other brands and prettier when exposed -- which is arguably a selling point. I still have a segment of that original cable, actually, and use it for my center channel. Somewhat amusingly given the actual linked article, the rest of the cable I have is from Blue Jeans.
I still have a radio shack 3.5mm cable with gold connectors that my dad and I bought when I was 5. Still works great. One of my favorite cables. Has a lovely soft touch rubber insulation, which has survived all these years
My town has a radio shack still, and I visit them as much as I can, but I have yet to find a cable that nice
The sad part is that, once upon a time, those crazy claims mattered. There were once good and bad cables. But over the last centry all the best practices were universally adopted (twisted pairs, shielding, consistent conductors made of soft copper). Monster now sounds like a car company shouting about seatbelts and crumple zones, things we now just expect but were once important to look for when selecting cable.
Given Monster some credit for at least being a brand. Have fun trying to reclaim a warranty from the discount chinese numbered company that tops your amazon search. It will be out of business before your delivery arrives.
>Have fun trying to reclaim a warranty from the discount chinese numbered company that tops your amazon search
Well it's not fun because most of them have very painless warranty claims - hammer the product with a 1 star review and applie for replacement, most will just give you full refund, no / barely any questions asked. Anything to keep their top Amazon search positions and reviews. I remember when Amazon was slammed with MPOW bluetooth products, I had minor hinge issue after almost a year on a set of cans and they just shipped me a new one, didn't even need photo evidence of destruction of old device. That's been my experience with multipe "Chinesium" products on Amazon, and essentially why Amazon > Aliexpress for the RMA premium. Buy from a top ranked product where seller doesn't want to compromise position with bad reviews, pay a few bucks extra on Amazon, get faster shipping and no question asked exchanges/refunds because seller already have it built into margins.
> Have fun trying to reclaim a warranty from the discount chinese numbered company that tops your amazon search.
I remember seeing someone else raging about how a Chinese company on Amazon had no accountability because the business address field was filled with unintelligible gibberish and there was no way to find the company.
So I looked it up. Not only was it very easy to find the address, it was obviously the address of the owner's personal home. So even if the company did go out of business, odds are good you could make contact and ask for redress.
Yeah, back when I first started playing bass (which would have been around 2008, interestingly enough) I used their cables for a bit because of the unlimited replacements. As a young teen without any income, it honestly was a pretty decent deal; in retrospect, the cables certainly weren't high quality and probably developed issues far more easily than a higher quality cable, but I could also go into any guitar store that sold those cables and then trade them in for fresh ones, no questions asked. It wasn't like I really had that many gigs, so being guaranteed not to ever have to buy new cables was easily worth it even if it meant that I would have to go back to the store any time they failed. Eventually I got old enough that I had more disposable income and would play a bit more often to the point where it would be more inconvenient to have to get a replacement on short notice, so I moved on to buying higher quality ones, but I don't really see the experience I got as a scam. Maybe the were marketed to the point where people who really weren't getting the benefits from their model were still buying them when they would be better served by a different company's cables, but I feel like the model they were trying to do did at least make sense for me at the time, and I think that it's worth making a distinction between "trying to exploit naive customers by selling something no one needs" and "trying to market beyond the actual customer base that is served well by the business model", mostly because I feel like the latter is a spectrum that quite a lot of companies fall on to some degree, and it's not as clear to me where exactly the line should be drawn for how "acceptable" this is. (I'd be fine with literally any instance of this being called out and shamed, but realistically I think this is looked past by most people so much of the time that it's not accurate to claim anyone is actually doing it)
They proved a serious vulnerability to the entire site without causing irreputable damage.
Phreak on.
(and not very important but to be pedantic, I don't know if hn has an sql backend? It used to be all in-memory if I recall, but that was many years ago)
> I had no idea Monster sold anything other than over priced guitar cables..
Overpriced because you are envious of their marketing or pricing strategy? They were appropriately priced as long as the marketing wasn't more deceptive than products are generally (and noting it's not a food product or medical claim).
> But it wasn't because of their alleged improved sound quality or whatever, it was because they had a lifetime warranty.
Isn't that (along with branding) a valid reason to price a product at a certain level?
Anyone can make a top quality cable in 10 minutes: buy 2 Neutrik connectors, buy as many Cordial cable as you need, four solderings and you have a top guitar cable for life, for maybe 1/4 of the price of a similar Monster.
Don't like to solder? Cordial has also cables with Neutrik connectors ready to use, for half the price of a Monster.
The lifetime warranty clearly was valuable to many people here.
The problem though, is the _misleading_ marketing around "better sound" and similar that is false and does not justify charging more to basic home consumers who don't know any better.
This is what I used when I was 11. Been 15 years since I last used it, so no idea how much it's changed. The thing that was nice about Game Maker for young me, was that it had a drag and drop and programming language interface and you could switch between the two pretty seamlessly. This really helped me learn how to code early on.
This looks pretty cool, I am someone who gets annoyed by excel, sheets, numbers for not just letting you code it in a nice language like python and then visualize/query after that.
But then I see "AI-driven", which I should note is the _third_ line of text on the web page. I assume it is an important feature for the author of the page.
I control-f, "ai-driven", it is only used one other time on the page:
"Perform easy AI-driven visualization with Matplotlib"
There is no further elaboration on the home page and I have been unable to find additional docs. (Someone please post a snarky RTFM response with a link to the manual, cuz like I said I am very interested in this. I did google "pysheets docs" which uhh linked to a python library with the same name...)
Last week, for the first time ever, I used noted "AI" ChatGPT to review a resume I had written. I wouldn't normally do this, but the company I was applying for heavily emphasized that they use chatgpt to generate code and review things.
Ever the skeptic, I decided to try it myself. I have to say I was impressed with the results. EXCEPT, ChatGPT, pointed out a grammar error in my resume which literally did not exist. Like the sentence it was critiquing in it's feedback was not found anywhere in my resume nor was there anything similar (from my perspective, I'm sure 1000 layers deep in it's network there was some similarity to something that had the error and wouldn't it be cool if we could effectively debug that).
ANYWAY, when I see ai-driven without elaboration in a spreadsheet program, I am very concerned that my data might be "hallucinated" and I would encourage the author to explain what exactly this means. Will my charts be correct 99% of the time but sometimes a hallucination? What's going on here? I would probably be signing up for the beta right now if I had any idea. Thanks.
If you sign up for PySheets, we give you 7 tutorials. Two explain how to use AI to import data, convert it to Dataframes, and visualize them using Matplotlib. The generated code is impressive and can help novice data scientists explore the Pandas and Pyplot APIs.
The AI is used to generate Python code, not to analyze or generate data in the sheet. I will clarify that on the landing page. Hopefully, that will inspire you to try it out.
Yes thank you. This is my "actually it's GNU + Linux" tic, please fellow Americans (and I would be interested in learning if this problem exists in other countries) do not accept the framing that a bank giving a loan to someone they thought was you is _your problem_! It's their problem! We should not be normalizing this phrase or practice.
There are four companies in Norway that do credit assessments. You have to individually register your desire to not allow credit assessments for your name with all four of these.
But then, what protects you against someone simply requesting that your credit is unlocked and then taking loans in your name after all? Well, from what I gather one would have to use BankID to confirm that credit is to be unlocked.
So even if someone steals my passport, they will not immediately be able to unlock my credit. They’d have to jump through a bunch of hoops to also steal my BankID.
You can do this in America. It’s called a credit freeze. A problem is credit freezes can also be fraudulently lifted, but serve as a decent barrier for most run of the mill mass frauds. They’re virtually unknown and require you to independent contact each individual credit bureaus to both freeze then unfreeze.
Having that credit freeze saved me from at least two attempted frauds since then - I was notified by two credit card issuers that credit card applications in my name that I had never made were rejected because my credit file was frozen.
Interesting. This should be adopted by the EU. (I know Norway is not a member state but this makes good sense and that's why I would love to see the EU to adopt it.)
I disagree with this system, banks can instead require the exact same Auth process they'd use to unblock your "no credit" request when they want to start a new credit for anyone. Why would there be more checks to "remove block" than to "start credit"? I can think of one reason that's good for the banks.
The "locked" state should be the default, whatever extra checks they need to do to a person that has it "frozen", that should just be the default to start any credit!
If anyone has some dire need for easy credit all the time they can do the opposite and go to some "light checks" state like TSA pre-check.
I imagine they already exist in EU states. I got one in Finland after my ID card was stolen and someone was trying to buy stuff on credit with my ID. Paid a small fee of like 10€ to get a two-year credit freeze. They also give you a certificate from it that you can use to verify that the black mark in your credit history is a voluntary block. Never actually had to use it, was a student back then and I didn't have any credit to apply to, mobile phone plans to buy, apartments to rent etc.
> the framing that a bank giving a loan to someone they thought was you is _your problem_
Brings to mind the tale that jaywalking laws were the creation of early-days automobile manufacturers and dealers who wanted to clear the streets for the vehicles they wanted to sell. [0]
While I personally didn't go down this path and wouldn't necessarily recommend it... if you are going to, the answer has almost nothing to do with any particular tech stack.
NETWORK NETWORK NETWORK, hop jobs every one to two years and make sure each of those jobs comes with a salary increase greater than what you could get via the promotion ladder at company you are leaving. Be a good enough software developer that you can switch tech stacks at will. Learn the software engineering (design patterns, how to communicate with stakeholders, etc) and language design / compiler / networking fundamentals (so you can easily switch programming languages / stacks).
Beyond that, certain subsections of the tech industry have higher salaries so network with people in those subsections.
Also just to be clear, the point of networking is so when you hop jobs you aren't applying to random jobs, you are being referred by employees at other companies.
Wow, I experienced this yesterday while I was absentmindedly using my computer.... I assumed I had clicked something without realizing it. The idea that it was an intentional pop up didn't even enter my head.
For me it hit as a double-whammy. I tried opening a new tab, but had to stop what I was doing to restart Firefox instead because of a Snap[1] update, then I got this immediately after Firefox started back up. A really nasty snapshot of where free software is at in 2023.
I went through the song-and-dance for several versions to remove the Snap firefox and go back to the deb, and now that the deb is gone I just downloaded it directly from mozilla so it can use its own internal autoupdate feature. It works better that way anyway.
I've been meaning to write a blog post about this but the code is so messy I keep telling myself "I'll clean it up first and then show it off"...
Growing up I had an alarm clock that you put a CD into and it would fade in the CD instead of an alarm noise. I really loved this, though having to wake up super early for school everyday, I will admit that I developed negative associations with the first track on many albums.
I created an improvised version of this a few years ago: a timer switch hooked up to a light, a cassette player and a water heater. When the timer went off all three would turn on. This worked but wasn't great cause nothing faded in.
I remodeled my bedroom last summer and wanted to replace this alarm with something more sophisticated.
I used a Raspberry Pi to do the following:
- At the set alarm time, access my media server and generate a playlist of 10 random songs. Start this playlist and slowly increase the volume.
- I bought a separate module to hook up to a lamp that points at where I sleep. This module lets me slowly turn up the brightness of the lamp as the music volume increases.
The water heater is hooked up to a timer in my kitchen now. But I just finished building an arduino based wifi switch, so once I get it integrated, that switch will get turned on 5-10 minutes before the alarm is set to go off and heat my water for coffee.
I built a dashboard for all of this using HTMX. It lets you set the alarm time, snooze, play arbitrary playlists, adjust the light etc. I also added a weather widget and I have a JSON file of all important birthdays in my life, so it tells me whos birthday it is when I go to review the weather.
Something that HN may appreciate, I have it setup so when I ssh into the Pi, I get dropped into a tmux session where an instance of emacs is running with the actual alarm code being executed inside of it. This makes editing and trying the new functions sort of like a lisp machine. You get dropped into emacs and can tweak all the scripts and test them in a sort of live environment (you have to restart the server to update the dashboard but everything else is 'live'). I have a dream of rewriting this so it really is a lisp machine and everything can be `c-x c-e`'d to run but I doubt I'll ever get around to that.
I would also like to integrate motorized blinds and open them up when I wake. I'm still researching this, if anyone has recommendations.
I'm an experienced mobile developer who is trying to learn more about web dev with React. I recently built a small web app with React, Typescript, Tailwind and a Supabase backend.
I'm seeking a developer with experience in all 4 of those technologies to do a code review with me over a screen share session. This would be fairly high level, as I would like to talk thru a handful of decisions I made and see if I made any mistakes, especially with my relatively simple Supabase setup.
I expect this would only be an hour or two of work. If anyone is interested shoot me an email, showing some experience with these four technologies, to "jared at jaredandrews dot com"
Thanks!