>You can buy and play Windows XP era games on Steam and run them just great on Windows 10/11.
Or older (pre-Steam) games in a virtual machine.
Hyper-V comes with Pro versions of Windows. VMWare has a Player that is also free (plus there's full Workstation). There's also VirtualBox, which sometimes is the packaged solution for very old titles sold on platforms like GOG. Never mind the solutions for Mac OS, Linux and BSD.
Recently my jam is going back to 1994 and playing a game from the Windows 3.1/Windows 95 transition era, rife with 16-bit libraries -- Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol. A game in which it was likely a lot of older folks here played the crap out of the demo, but never bought the game because it involved sending a check in the mail -- and because even the demo could provide hundreds of hours of enjoyment. Though you can legitimately buy it online from its current IP owner for about $10 (more if you want a boxed copy!), and it's just as fun as I remember it 30 years ago.
And setting it up in a virtual machine? Very straightforward, save for digging up some third-party audio library the game wanted. I actually just have a 40GB Windows XP VM I just maintain with all my old games from DOS and Windows 3.1 through 2002 or so. I can move it between hypervisors, between host OSes, etc. Just works. All my old games always ready to go.
There are a lot more and better Korean shows on Netflix than Squid Game. Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Inspector Koo, We Are All Dead, My Name (I really loved My Name), The Kingdom...
Time management is possibly the easiest part, for me. You end up putting it on your calendar and the calendar will take care of it for you.
The hardest part that I had to learn as an EM was how to identify ways to be effective with small blocks of time, safeguarding my energy, and making sure I (and my team) were working on the most important things.
* Time management - How do I organize my day?
* Activity management - What are the right things to work on?
* Capacity management - How many things can I plan at once?
* Project management - How do I break down my tasks into manageable sizes?
* Task management - How do I focus on an individual task, and what do I do with them?
* Energy management: How do I use my most productive time for the valuable things, and how do I make sure I don’t overextend myself?
* Knowledge management: How do I organize what I’ve learned so that I don’t lose time to trying to search for it in complex projects?
* Habit management -how do I stay on track with the habits I want to adopt or have adopted?
* Vision/goal management - what is my north star? What am I working toward and how do I get there?
There are a lot of people who have written about these topics individually. I think the important part is to identify what you need, and dive into those topics in particular as you build your productivity system.
Laid-off tech worker here. (backend engineer, ruby/rails/javascript). 5 years of experience. I'm working on not ever going back into tech. I've changed careers a number of times in my 34 years of life, and am doing it again.
I'm only a mediocre software developer, have always had strong people/business skills, informed by my pre-software experience of commercial construction, teaching/training at a climbing gym, customer support, customer success, and inside sales at a B2B SaaS company.
Modestly obsessed with mobility networks. (like... roads, streets, bike paths, sidewalks, and the vehicles and people that occupy that space)
Working on going independent here in Denver, acting as a 'broker' between businesses and their staff/customers to convert single-occupancy-vehicle-users to scooters, to increase the functional number of parking spaces in a given parking lot by 10% or more.
Just started recently, partially inspired by spending a few weeks in Bali. (Being a laid-off tech worker has its upsides).
If I can get traction around this business idea, I'll move sideways into guerilla action road network improvements, to make the junctions around the businesses I work with more habitable and safe for scooters, pedestrians, and cars.
Soooo I'm trying to make my job something like "one who improves the functioning of road networks, sponsored by the direct beneficiaries of those improvements."
With a little success, I'll be able to start hiring people to help. Maybe I'll find a few other tech people to help. There's plenty of room for software developers to make meaningful contributions to these projects, but only after spending a lot of time not behind a laptop.
Not gonna lie, I get nights where I don’t sleep at all and my mind ‘glows’ with thoughts and the thoughts are intrusive, almost an imposter on my mind. This is a good time to write and take notes. Missing a night’s sleep is detrimental to the next day where all the things that would normally excite me are boring as hell. All I can do is exist during the day and I feel slightly drunk and can’t do anything that requires good dexterity. It’s horrible. Then I make up the sleep debt by falling asleep on that day, and the feeling of rejuvenation is tremendous and I can function. I’ve talked to my doctor about those nights where my mind ‘glows’ with activity and I was diagnosed with mild psychosis. Luckily it’s treatable with meds, so there is that.
How much of a connection has your "digital nomadry" made with locals? It sounds like most of your connection is with other people in the same rootless situation, not with people who actually live in the nifty places you're visiting.
You are certainly in a community but you are probably not much of a part of the community you're visiting. And if my experience as someone who grew up in a tourist destination is any guide, the locals whose job it is to be nice to you probably swap stories about your cluelessness about the local culture, and a lot of the locals whose job is not being nice to you view you with vague disdain at best.
You are raw material for the local economy and, we will generally do our best to politely pick you up by your ankles, shake you until money stops falling out, and send you on your way, while making sure you have a good enough time doing this to come back again once you have more money.
Important to add that we don't catch the whole spectrum of the market (missing FAANG-like and some top international startups), so basically our 90 percentile will be probably an 80 percentile if you add those.
I think it's important to also have this perspective, because not everyone has the determination & luck to go through the whole interview process at FAANG-like companies.
I skipped binance interview in the past when there was no crisis, their assignment:
Design and code a Content Management System (CMS) for Binance. The CMS would used to post articles for the public. The current Binance site supports up to 17 different languages. Each article would have some translations but not all articles have all of the 17 translations. Design and code a RESTful API for the CMS.
The user of the CMS would need to input the different translations for the same article. Design a user interface to facilitate this. We would only be looking at the functionalities of the user interface, so do not spend too much time on the design aspects.
Derive your own data model as deem fit. The preferred language for backend is Java and frontend is JavaScript though you are free to choose any other languages as well as frameworks.
Submit the code as a GitHub repository and make sure that the GitHub repository is public. Remember to add a README file for instructions on how to run the application and explanations (if any).
I'd like to know what to do with ~10 000 euros, right now. Where should I put it so it doesn't lose its value and keep a bit with inflation ?
edit for a bit of context: Western Europe, renting, unlikely to be able to buy/invest into a house/flat, looking at gold ingots, not the nerve for crypto.
Rising prices are bad for all but the most wealthy
* It’s bad for people who don’t own a house, which disproportionately impacts the poor and the young.
* It doesn’t really help homeowners either: their property taxes go up but the increased land value will just be spent on the increased cost of a new property if they move nearby.
* So the only way to realise increased land value is to move outside the local market. This turnover reduces the community of a neighbourhood, and creates pockets of dull old homogeneous people with no shared history.
* The only real way to benefit from rising prices is to invest in property, further concentrating wealth among the wealthy.
* Treating one of society’s most important assets as an investment has a ton of negative side effects, like poor utilisation due to land banking, cheaply finished low quality buildings rather than ones that vest serve their occupants, evictions, further increased community turnover.
* It’s a self perpetuating cycle, as the wealthy investors vote, lobby, and just straight up are politicians.
same. i just set up a P14s Gen 2 AMD (with 4k display, ryzen 7 pro 5850u, 48GB ram) and after swapping out the garbage wifi/bluetooth module for an Intel 210 and the NVME for a 980 Pro this machine is excellent with EndeavourOS/KDE (5.17 kernel with AMD p-state support).
the only tweaks i've had to make are
1. enabling bluetooth service to autostart (disabled by default by distro for security)
2. installing the amdgpu vaapi drivers to get hardware video decoding in MPV and tweak some Chromium flags to get hardware video decode on Youtube, etc.
the only "issue" i've run into is getting TRIM to be re-detected properly for UASP-capable USB storage devices [0], but it's so minor that no one except me will notice :). it's not a ThinkPad problem, but likely something in linux's udev.
i dont use the fingerprint sensor, TPM or secure boot, so cant say anything about those.
(supposedly switching suspend mode to linux in bios helps, too)
There is a great Jewish joke about markets: Shlomo was returning from Antwerp, when he met Moishe: "Look at this bag of diamonds I've bought there! only 1000 florins, it's easily worth double that!"
"Wow, that's a hell of a bargain, how much do you want for it? 2000?" "deal!".
Shlomo went home. He told his wife Sarah about his daily business. "So Moishe bought this bag for double the price without bargaining? He must know it's worth much more than that, you moron! Buy it back tomorrow!"
The next day, Shlomo met Moishe : "listen, I'll take back the bag of diamonds. 3000 florins?" "deal!"
That night, Moishe told the story to his wife Debrah. "Imbecile! can't you see you've been gamed? You're now 1000 florins poorer than yesterday, and what do you have?"
The next day, Moishe met Shlomo: "listen, I've think about it, I want to buy back the diamonds. 4000?" "deal!"
So this little back and forth game goes on for a week, when someday, Shlomo said to Moishe: "Listen, I'd like to buy the diamonds back after all..."
"Too late, I've sold the bag yesterday to a merchant from Hamburg!"
"What? You've sold a stranger a bag of diamonds that was making us 1000 florins A DAY?"
For me it was "easy" on Linux. But you need to commit to it, no pun intended.
I moved from Ubuntu to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with almost no downtime. Only two things I had to change IIRC was to create the same group as Ubuntu with GID 1000 (100 on TW) and to find out the different package names because ubuntu is a mess.
The process that lead me to my current setup
- Install OS fresh (always using the same username because there are many cases where you can't eval or access env's)
- Ignore most of the $XDG folders except Desktop and
Downloads.
- Have a centralized root folder and a scripts folder inside of it. All my scripts start with a check to see if the root is correct by checking an ENV
- Start a repo bare = false, worktree = /home/user, and use git add + excludesFile. I've tried everything there is and this is the best option by far because it's way faster, you have to be explicit about what's in your vcs. On VCS GUI .desktop I have added MimeType=inode/directory; so it's aware of the root.
- All my dotfiles are there but I use KDE and I added all the config files I care about so I can see what changes on updates, it helped me debug problems on update more than once.
- Don't customize the OS manually in any way (unless the GUI writes to a config file), create a script and only make changes through it. That includes what you install, what you remove, config changes, daemons, EVERYTHING.
- I prefer programs that are configurable by config/plain text files.
It's "reproducible", you have a script that describes your OS.
Personally use flatpak for everything that isn't on TW's repos and docker/podman for local development.
Now some examples of things in my script that also show some statistics after I run it. There's also a "first run" set of functions that I only run when it's a clean install.
And things like enforcing correcting permissions for .ssh, .gnupg. Set up mounts and shares.
My root partition is btrfs, home is xfs. But I keep a tab on it with sudo btrfs filesystem usage /.
I have tested a lot of tools and in the end there's no replacement to discipline (it becomes second nature) and using a script instead of relying on 3rd party tools for config/provisioning.
What I see here is tax evasion. But done in a roundabout legal loopholish kind of way.
1. Establish profitable company in your home country.
2. Establish 2nd company in a tax haven country.
3. Give 2nd company some kind of ownership, and then pay rental fees, licensing fees, or simply set up a high interest loan that the 2nd company loaned the first.
4. Once you set up a way to make it look like you owe the 2nd company tons of money, now your 1st company no longer is "profitable" and actually in debt losing money, which means it doesn't need to pay taxes on the massive profit it's making.
While I believe it's legal it hinges on bad ethical practice. But many large companies do this, such as cruise ships and I think Apple.
May I also additionally ask how on Earth a 50k salary for a software engineer is at all justified? After paying taxes and rent, it seems to me there is not much money left over for saving or lifestyle spending?
> I mean you can definitely earn more than 60k in Germany.
exactly. I made that as a Junior in my first full-time job in Munich in 2000 already. Then moved on to freelancing and for the next decade never invoiced less than EUR 12K/month (average was actually EUR ~16K). I did a lot of hours and paid a lot of tax but it also got me fast cars, holidays in Italy, Austria or Switzerland (just for the weekends) and a nanny to help look after my kids. And I wasn't even an outlier since anyone who I worked with (often via places like Hays or Allgeier Group etc) was on pretty much the same.
What I've noticed in the recent years (I moved around 2009) is there has been a push to "Arbeitnehmerüberlassung", which is basically a racket where the outsourcing agency hires you out to their clients, they skim the margins and leave the employees with a crap salary. They sit in their clients office and are second class employees. When the project ends they're moved on to the next company if they're lucky or are asked to come in to the office (not on the client site but the place where they organize this type of slavery), then they get to call prospective clients and beg for jobs that they themselves have to do. It's surreal and idiotic but it's peoples fault for putting up with it instead of just freelancing and writing their own invoices.
Hi OP, I'm Erik CEO of IncludeSec. We do many FOSS audits for Mozilla, OpenTechFund, etc. I can give you some ranges and points of consideration from what I'm seeing in the industry today.
First consideration point is quality of the team and the seniority of the people ACTUALLY DOING THE TESTING (a lot of pentest shops do bait and switch senior presenting but juniors do the actual work.)
Next consideration is location of company; EMEA and Asia are lower hourly rates than US teams.
Next consideration is scope. Do you want the front door checked, or the entire house inside and out? In this case Cure53 spent 25 work days on this asmt, which gives quite a lot of time to analyze the software and check lots of different avenues of attack.
Next consideration is type of attacks to try and security assessment methodology. Do you want just fuzzing? Perhaps you can get that for free from Google's OSS-Fuzz, they will sponsor people to set up your FOSS app with their fuzzer via CI/CD. Do you want static analysis from some big COTS vendor like coverity/fortify/checkmarx/etc. that could be useful and they often have discounted/free scans they will do for FOSS. Or perhaps you want super smart hacker pentesters to code review and dynamically attack your app (that's what my team does)
Next consideration is publicity, do you want this reporting public? Some charge extra for that.
There's a million other thing to consider when hiring a pentester, but this message is already too long. To give you a ballpark, estimate $10k to $40k for small projects, $40k to $80k for medium sized projects, and $80k to $150k for large projects. YMMV of course, but those ranges and the consideration points should get you well on your way.
Hit us up if you need more tips, happy to help via email <myfirstname>@includesecurity.com
In terms of risk-adjusted returns, Bitcoin worse than index funds. You can get smoother returns using 3x ETFs like TQQQ and TECL compared to bitcoin and about the same absolute returns. Nasdaq 100 has much better sharpe ratio compared to bitcoin. Same for FAAMG portfolio
One of the biggest sites is chrono24.com, which is essentially ebay for watches. The majority of sellers will use the site's integrated escrow system so there's little risk of somebody failing to ship.
To get started just enter "soviet vintage" into the search-box. Once you have some results click on "Filter" and you get the option to set "Location: European Union", "Max Price: €100", etc.
There are a lot of regional variations, so I use chrono24.fi, for example. But the content is the same - I think it's just the default location and currency that changes based on TLD.
The site has been around for many years and is well-regarded, but even so I don't think I've ever paid more than €1000 for a watch there. Just in case.
Edit: Main thing to pay attention to are the dimensions of the watch. Watches from the 40s-80s tended to be smaller. So you'll find diameters of 34mm, 36mm, etc. Most people prefer larger watches these days. For me 36mm-42mm is fine, but that's because I have thin wrists. But I know looking at photos can be misleading in terms of diameter/dimensions so read the details.
You should apply to auditing firms (Trail of Bits, Open Zeppelin, Quantstamp, ...). They are all booked 3 months in advance at the very least and would love to onboard new blood.
In a traditional corporation you wont get fired for hiring devs with many years of experience in the correct stacks. That is the most important incentive. If you hire devs with experience in the wrong stacks and it doesn't work out people will start asking questions, why did you hire this guy even though he didn't know the things we need?
This is what I thought was easily on top originally, I don't buy weed anymore but do enjoy hanging out on /d/opsec and the other places seeing what the vibe is. Mr White is amusingly active on forums, it's so incredibly strange when he replies to you randomly with advice. For someone who works in security there's a massive difference between all the wild uninformed speculation you'll see on the clearnet and actual cybercriminals or marketplace kingpins talking about their techniques/tactics. It's an interesting world out there, these folks have serious fucking skin in the game.
Same with hugbunter who seems to have no market affiliation but obviously knows her stuff and can clearly hack a thing or two.
Nope. American management was created in the late 19th century with railroads.
In fact, management didn't exist before the US invented it. Most large companies in the UK were run by people who had no interest in management. They bought a factory then promised a piece rate to a labour gangmaster (this is an abtruse point but wage labour wasn't really a thing until the 20th century, the model was proto-industrial "business" structures which paid by output...wages shift risk to employers, and so that took time to develop). In Germany and much of Northern Europe, there was a very well-defined capitalist and worker class who negotiated through govt (because the capitalists mostly owned the govt and got their money to build stuff from state-owned banks, most unions ended up being allied to those capitalists/govt because revolution was taken quite seriously...left-wing unions didn't really exist). Again, there was no real concept of professional management...you negotiated with workers en masse, there was total seperation (and there is still is in Northern Europe, to a large extent...most billionaires in Germany got rich in the 30s, for reasons best forgotten, and have just passed it down unchanged which is why wealth inequality is so high).
So it was with the railroads that actual professional managers started appearing (railroads were undoubtedly a new kind of complexity but US ones were run far more professionally), and shortly after this that you see management training and the like. The US was, and still is to a large extent, one of the only places where you see universities actually relate to the real world i.e. you have universities teaching practical tasks like management (I am in the UK, management is still thought of as a "joke" subject by most academics...stuff like Classics and Politics is far more respectable than business, people who need to work for money are looked down upon as hopelessly gauche...it is kind of funny that people believe the opposite is true, but that isn't self-evident if you come from a society where practical knowledge is valued).
Btw, the defining book on this is Alfred Chandler's Visible Hand. He is probably the greatest historian of business (yep, he is from the US which is the only place where historians actually study this kind of thing en masse).
Ironically, based on the original comment, the issue is that East Asian countries (like Germany, which was the archetype industrialisation model for East Asia) are largely run economically for the benefit of large corporations. So developers are hired en masse like every other employee (in particular, skilled labour is hired once after graduation), there is a stigma against switching jobs (even if you could find somewhere to move), employees are essentially interchangeable, and there is almost no innovation.
The original comment is hard to understand. Germany and Japan are two of the absolute worst places on earth to be a consumer/worker in the developed world (the IMF even produced a paper on this in an attempt to put pressure on Germany to improve standards for workers). The US is nowhere close to having a management aristocracy because the system is open. Even in the UK, which has a similar economic model, the low-level of competence among managers is actually a major factor behind weak productivity growth. People just long for systems that aren't like the one they have, low levels of employee turnover are not a panacea, they led to heavily rigid management and are often linked to a high proportion of unproductive, family-owned business that are managed by birthright...professional management is, innately, open. If you look at Denmark, high levels of employee turnover actually lead to higher wages because it creates so much more innovation (most countries that have any other model, including Japan, are trying desperately to get away from it).
Afaik, France is the only country that has the aristocracy model: it is usually literally impossible to be promoted into management if you didn't go to grandes ecoles, and most of the top jobs in govt and business are just rotated through this group of people. Unlike the US, the curriculum of related courses often has no relation to reality, and is designed to be as complex/abtruse as possible so entry to the higher reaches of society can be limited. It is difficult to understate how envied the US system of management is compared to this...it isn't just that the US does this slightly better, it is that the US is at 100, and everyone else is at 10. It isn't close.
>It seems that Europe has decided to stop evolving and just do anything to protect the status quo. Innovation is forbidden here. But hey! It’s for our own good.
Yeah, this. Europe is an old continent that's mostly old money. The Europeans of today are rich mostly due to inherited wealth and former imperialism, not wealth they created themselves through innovation, with some families tracing their wealth back for centuries when land was cheap and plentiful and taxes were next to nothing that any hardworking person could buy land and build a business and while the wealth didn't go stratospheric, it still multiplied handsomely for their successors since "time in the market beats timing the market".
If you look at Europe's biggest and wealthiest companies, most of them are several decades if not centuries old with some of their major shareholders still being old European nobility, in contrast to the US where the top tech companies are at most 30 years old, with older ones that fail to innovate always dying in a healthy cycle (IBM, Sun, Oracle, SGI, etc.), leaving room for new players(FAANG) to come on the market and eat the lunch of the dinosaurs. While in Europe, with so much of the pie taken by the old players, there's no more room for new players to spring up since the old established ones pulled the ladder up after them.
The image of the typical wealthy successful German is not that of a hip 20-30 year old who built some cool business in his dorm room or his parents' garage like in the US, but of a 40 year old man with a Porsche who inherited his dad's machine shop and rolodex(typical owner of the famous Mittelstand that's always revered here on HN).
All this old wealth is very risk adverse and feels threatened by disruptions and will fight tooth and nail to keep their status quo.
I use a USB host-side switch [0] to quickly move my keyboard and mouse between my desktop and my laptop's docking station, since my 4k monitor already supports multiple inputs, and 4k capable KVMs are expensive and buggy.
In order to make the switch, I push one button on the USB switch, and then select the next input on my monitor (four button presses using the monitor's OSD). There's a great little tool called ddcutil [1] that allows you to send commands to your monitor via the i2c bus embedded in your HDMI/DisplayPort connection, so I tried to write a script to do the monitor input swap on either a key binding or after detecting the appropriate USB event.
It almost worked. My monitor only listens to the i2c bus of the selected input, so I need to run this script on both my desktop and laptop rather than just on the desktop. But apparently there was a bug in the way my (TB3) dock handled forwarding of the DP i2c data to the docking host. And by bug, I mean write forwarding was just not implemented in the kernel driver. So ddcutil would work on my laptop with a direct HDMI connection, but not when it was connected via the dock.
Anyway, long story short:
5.10 fixes this [2], so I'm particularly excited about this release.
Or older (pre-Steam) games in a virtual machine.
Hyper-V comes with Pro versions of Windows. VMWare has a Player that is also free (plus there's full Workstation). There's also VirtualBox, which sometimes is the packaged solution for very old titles sold on platforms like GOG. Never mind the solutions for Mac OS, Linux and BSD.
Recently my jam is going back to 1994 and playing a game from the Windows 3.1/Windows 95 transition era, rife with 16-bit libraries -- Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol. A game in which it was likely a lot of older folks here played the crap out of the demo, but never bought the game because it involved sending a check in the mail -- and because even the demo could provide hundreds of hours of enjoyment. Though you can legitimately buy it online from its current IP owner for about $10 (more if you want a boxed copy!), and it's just as fun as I remember it 30 years ago.
And setting it up in a virtual machine? Very straightforward, save for digging up some third-party audio library the game wanted. I actually just have a 40GB Windows XP VM I just maintain with all my old games from DOS and Windows 3.1 through 2002 or so. I can move it between hypervisors, between host OSes, etc. Just works. All my old games always ready to go.