Unfair situation -
iPhone prices shoots up while kidney prices remains same.

[Client]
We've noticed we gave you the wrong product prices for our new online shop.

[Dev]
Yeah, just login to the backend and fix them.

[Client]
But we don't want to use your fancy backend, we'll be using anyway soon - we want EXCEL!
Could you send us an EXCEL, so we can fix that?
How much will this cost?

[Dev]
Sure... here you are.
Not that much, takes about an hour.

[Client]
Great, you'll hear from us in a few days.

(a few months later...)

[Client]
We've finally managed to update the EXCEL. And btw, we've also added a bunch of columns with product pictures and new properties, highlighted products to delete red, inserted some comments with manual instructions and basically destroyed the entire data structure of this table.

Before I forget... also make sure to get this finished today, we have to go live ASAP. Our marketing campaign is already live.

[Dev]
Well, I'm sorry to say this, but this is not possible.
I'm currently working on another project and it will take me hours to clean up the data you sent me, before even starting to build an import tool for the new data you provided. Better stop the campaign and I'll do my best to get this done by the end of the week. Also it may be a bit costly.

(angry client calls immediately...)

(dev transfers to manager...)

(client transfers to client's boss...)

[Manager]
Ok Dev, I think I was able to explain it to them. However, it would be great if you spend day and night to get this thing out ASAP.

[Dev]
No problem...
I'll just do it by hand to get this out immediately.

(few days later; nearly done, exhausted)

[Client]
Hey Dev, here's another EXCEL.
We've just noticed there were a bunch of errors in the previous one. Please use this instead...

Sister was getting a new phone (she likes iphones but the jackplug removal made her go towards android as well as the prices) and there was this Deezer family deal. So she Signal'd me asking if I'd like to join the deezer family and I was like 'yeah sure but just remember that there's a big chance of me moving to another country after my study, is that okay with this subscription?'
Sales guy: It's limited to the country the official subscriber is in.
Sister: 'Oh but my brother is a smart IT guy, he can probably setup a VPN server here so that he can still use the app.'

She told that the face of the sales guys was like 'what the actual fuck just happened'.

She called me afterwards telling the story and also 'even though I thought I'd never learn about this stuff (I always told stuff at the dinner table), appearantly you taught me more than I realized!;.

Yeah, that was a very proud brother moment =).

A client called me today saying their custom website I built for them is down. It just shows a 403 error now. They said they just wanted to update the prices. I asked what changes they made before it crashed. She said, "I couldn't figure out how to change the prices, so I just installed Wordpress, and now it doesn't work!" They completely deleted the entire website using cPanel and replaced it with a partially installed Wordpress.🤦

I finally got a new job!! 😃
Actually i’v been working here for 3 months, but i was in trial mode so i didn’t want to post it yet but it looks like im staying 😃
They are the most talented team i ever met, they host all our local gamejams, have their own internal game engine and a gamer bar where the company’s devs have 30% off from the prices.
Their projects are exciting (even if i’m not currently on a game project) and my team lead is awesome!
I’v been wanting to work here for about a year 😃

So before I resign from my job tomorrow I thought I'd talk a little about a couple of things at work that I won't ever tell my boss in person but are generally some of the reasons I want to leave.

---------- warning long rant ----------

1. The CEO of the company finds out I only have my learner's and take the bus, goes on to belittle me about taking the bus.

(It may have been meant as a joke but I was offended, and we don't have any actual HR to complain to)

First off my real reason for not getting my restricted is mostly related to the fact public transportation does the job it needs to, I don't really complain unless the planning is fucked up (Adele concert rant lol) but typically I don't need a car. The other reason is because with a car I'd have to wait in traffic 1-2 hour each way. Also cars cost money which I don't have.

2. CEO buys himself and general manager brand new Range Rovers, you know those giant monstrosities box jeep looking things.

I hate this because I earn $31k, those things probably cost around $50 each (so typically 3 years worth of my wages).

When I had a talk about my contract at the 6 month mark, the general manager (my boss) said he wouldn't budge on my salary (yet they buy these jeeps)

3. I live way too far from work and because of it being Auckland and the current inflation for house prices, the rent prices have also increase, I wouldn't be able to get a house closer to home nor rent with minimum wage :(

4. Though it's not too necessary they mask that the app was made by me, whenever I see an email about the app to potential clients they refer to be as this app guy, and during their presentations they don't really include as part of the reason this app has been developed ( aside from my boss being the client, I came up with some interesting ideas to turn their paper form of the process they use into a digital one, I also did research for the specific topics, something I could have just asked for instead).

5. Old fashioned way of looking at so called "IT", they added fixing computers to my contract which I dread, especially since I'll be close to a deadline and then I get a call to fix someone's computer...

6. They don't seem to want to expand their "development team" to more than one person.

When I give my resignation I have to stay here for a month and I bet people will start to act differently around me, my likely my boss and the CEO. I think the other people that work will understand, given my situation.

I'm planning to for the last month to only do planning for the app they want me to work on, UML diagrams, use cases, Sprint planning (albiet, only developer here lol). Research on the third party libraries we need for the app and generally give the next guy the easiest path to getting the app done.

I want to do this because the Android and iOS app we're done via cowboy programming in a sense. (I don't have too much in terms of documentation and planning aside from a Microsoft planning website setup with to-do of which features are done for the iOS and paper Todo for the Android app.

Alright long rant over, I've got it all written down, glad I'll be leaving this place.

I need to hide myself, my computer, programming skills and computer knowledge from people. Then only, I will be safe..

Friend: Heeey, you're good with computers right?

Me: No! 😑

Friend: Come-on bro. I know you are.

Me: What do you want?

Friend: I want you to check and book flights for me for country X.

Me: Are you ok? How does this have anything to do with someone being good with computers and stuff?

Friend: Haha, see? You're good with computers. *starts laughing. Anyway, since you're good, you can find the best prices. I know you know how to search sites and how to find things online.

Me: WTF?!?!!! All, you have to do is type in your search. If you don't like the results, you simply refine it.

Friend: See, all this tech stuff I'm not really good at it.

Me: But you're good at searching for other things online, right? Do the same for your flights.

*Picks my laptop and walks away.
How can a young man not be able to search for flights online but knows how to use several gadgets. Nonsense.

Wonder why my colleague threw this book on my desk?

I accidentally changed all product prices from decimal(10,4) to decimal(10,0) on two live web shops with several thousands of products.

And it's friday 4 pm.
Have a nice weekend!

I have to let it out. It's been brewing for years now.

Why does MySQL still exist?

Really, WHY?!
It was lousy as hell 8 years ago, and since then it hasn't changed one bit. Why do people use it?

First off, it doesn't conform to standards, allowing you to aggregate without explicitly grouping, in which case you get god knows what type of shit in there, and then everybody asks why the numbers are so weird.

Second... it's $(CURRENT_YEAR) for fucks sake! This is the time of large data sets and complex requirements from those data sets. Just an hour through SO will show you dozens of poor people trying to do with MySQL what MySQL just can't do because it's stupid.

Recursion? 4 lines in any other large RDBMS, and tough luck in MySQL. So what next? Are you supposed to use Lemograph alongside MySQL just because you don't know that PostgreSQL is free and super fast?

Window functions to mix rows and do neat stuff? Naaah, who the hell needs that, right? Who needs to find the products ordered by the customer with the biggest order anyway? Oh you need that actually? Well you should write 3-4 queries, nest them in an incredibly fucked up way, summon a demon and feed it the first menstrual blood of your virgin daughter.

There used to be some excuses in the past "but but but, shared hosting only has MySQL". Which was wrong by the way. This was true only for big hosting names, and for people who didn't bother searching for alternatives. And now it's even better, since VPS and PaaS solutions are now available at prices lower than shared hosting, which give you better speed, performance and stability than shared hosting ever did.

"But but but Wordpress uses MySQL" - well then kill it! There are other platforms out there, that aren't just outrageously horrible on the inside and outside. Wordpress is crap, and work on it pays crap. Learn Laravel, Symfony, Zend, or even Drupal. You'll be able to create much more value than those shitty Wordpress sites that nobody ever visits or pay money on.

"But but but my client wants some static pages presented beside their online shop" - so why use Wordpress then? Static pages are static pages. Whip up a basic MVC set-up in literally any framework out there, avoid MySQL, include a basic ACL package for that framework, create a controller where you add a CKEditor to edit page content, and stick a nice template from themeforest for that page and be done with that shit! Save the mock-up for later use if you do that stuff often. Or if you're lazy to even do that, then take up Drupal.

But sure, this is going a bit over the scope. I actually don't care where you insert content for your few pages. It can be a JSON file for all I care. But if I catch you doing an e-commerce solution, or anything else than just text storage, on MySQL, I'll literally start re-assessing your ability to think rationally.

The past 2 years where I work:

Me: hey let's use git instead of ftp!
Boss: should we?
Some time later: he is loving it...

Me: hey let's use trello instead of excell!!??!
Boss: huumm.. Dunno... Should we?
After much convincing: whole departments are using and loving it....

Me: hey let's move from rackspace to DO!
Boss: huumm... Convince me...
Year latter: everything smooth and muuuch lower prices... Managing 6 servers instead of one...

Me: UNIT TESTS!!!
Boss: nah, this but a waste of time...

For real? Get a grip man, I only encourage solutions tested ( no pun intended, or is it ) by me for a long time...

Facebook: "Our facial recognition automatically tags people in pictures."

Tesla: "Our deep learning algorithm drives cars by itself."

Andrew Ng: "I predict patients' likelihood of dying with 99% accuracy."

Google: "You know one of our algorithms is going to pass the Turing test very soon."

Wall Street: "We use satellite images to predict stock prices based how filled car parks of specific stores are."

The remaining majority of data sciencists: "We overfit linear models."

!rant

So my employer just offered me a 57% raise out of the blue!
Last Friday, I got a meeting invite from the CEO (its a small 15 person company, so he looks after most of the management stuff) titled "{{myname}} - Salary Review". No agenda there. I was fuckin scared that maybe my salary will be chopped short due to the virus and shit. They recently let go of one guy in my team, and are about to hire two new guys. Also, my last raise was this January. So I didn't think any good could come out of this meeting.

I joined the zoom and he asked if I was happy with the current salary. I said "yes" like an idiot, but added that the prices in my country are rising a lot. He made smalltalk on costs of groceries and Corona and my family, and that was it. 57%.

I was smiling like a dumbass at the end of the meeting. This guy is like the Hyman Roth of this business.

You know what? Fuck this shit. We spend most of our life locked down in a school, we are being told facts, tested and stressed for many years with the only hope to get out as soon as possible.
Failing is something that keeps you there indefinitely.
Parents keep pushing on kids to achieve the best and get good grades to have a job.
Then something happens.
You get out of school and what happens?
You start working.
A.k.a modern slavery...
Employers thinks that since you are young they are doing YOU a favor if they decided to hire you.
So you find yourself having to do the same tasks everyone is doing, perhaps you are even fully capable of managing them and get the shit done but guess what!!
You are paid the minimum.
You barely make enough to pay off your rent which keeps you locked away from Holidays abroad, from that huge cake you desperately want.
And guess what! Try to raise your voice and you'll get fired in a Matter of seconds, replaced with someone else which accepts any condition.
You dream of a house, a family and a car but you can't even eat healthy with that salary.
So you are forced to buy cheap and low quality food from the same store again and again till you had enough and spend some days with that horrible feeling...
Calling you to get a job interview feels like they are doing you a favor, they always try to give the minimum possible and expect you to work in a serious manner and respect their deadlines.
Colleagues earn a lot more even though they aren't doing anything different from you.
For the first year you won't have any holiday, let alone traveling or anything different from just staying home for 3 days straight.

Banks won't give you a loan because your job doesn't pay off
The day that your car is broken you struggle to eat the whole month.

On top of that, taxes. Because they aren't taking away enough.

I don't want to live this life, I don't want to become a modern slave and work 8-17 everyday for the rest of my life and retire with a shitty retirement pension that won't probably grant me anything again.

I had enough of this shit.
I don't want to go back to work and pretend to do what I am supposed to do with a smile on my face knowing that I am just a number and that no matter how skilled I am I can always get replaced with N number of people for a lower salary of mine.

I am tired
I dream of a life that I won't ever reach this way.

Today I looked up houses prices and felt like shit.
I will never in my entire life be able to afford something so expensive, let alone buying furnitures and what is needed or what I like.

I dream of having my place, my dog and my family but apparently I am asking too much.

How is this even fair in 2018/2019?

I... I am... Speechless.
I wonder how many people out there are in the same situation or even worse and I can't even wrap my mind around that.

This is just modern slavery.

My boss makes a shit load of money from young people that can't complain because they are threatened and will eventually be replaced...

This is my rant.

For the love of dog, if I select English on your online store, it doesnt mean I live in the UK, therefore show me prices in £ pounds, It just means I cannot speak German but I need to read English, but pay in € Euros!!! Can people please stop confusing Language with Location!!!!

So we where given a project with a deadline already set behind our backs and we have to give our deadline despite not knowing wtf we have to do exactly ...

They asked us to don't ask too much time because the budget can't afford too much time...

I'm here thinking: WTF?!
THEY PASSED A FUCKING DEADLINE AND PRICES TO THE FUCKING CLIENT WITHOUT ASKING ANY! ANY MOTHERFUCKING DEV ABOUT IT!!!

We asked them so many fucking questions on the first meeting that they were fucking baffled about everything but kept playing cool like "well, this project is already set and we are gonna have to deal with it"

Bunch of motherfucking stupid cock suckers , go die agonizing on your own vomit and if ask my help I'm gonna answer "well, you gonna have to deal with it because you are already fucked"

Haven’t been on here for ages, but I felt like I needed to post this:

Warning:
This is long, and it might make you cry.

Backstory:
A couple of months back I worked for a completely clueless dude who had somehow landed a contract for a new website for a huge company. After a while he realised that he was incapable of completing the assignment. He then hired me as a subcontractor and I deleted literally everything he had done and started from scratch. He had over promised and under explained what needed to be done to me. It took many sleepless nights to get this finished with all the amendments and I had to double my pricing because he kept changing the brief.

Even after doubling my prices I still put in way too many hours of work. At one point I had enough and just ghosted the guy as I had done what he asked, and when he submitted it to them they wanted changes. He couldn’t make the changes, so I had to. He wouldn’t pay me extra though. I decided it wasn’t worth my time.

A couple of days ago I heard from him again. He had found another subcontractor to finish the changes. He still needed a few things though, so he promised me that I would get paid after fixing those things. I looked at the few things he had listed in our KANBAN and thought it was a few easy tasks.. until I opened the project..

I had my computer set up to sync with his server because he wanted everything done live and in production. So I naturally thought I would just “sync down” everything that the other subcontractor had done.

Here is where the magic started to happen.. I started the sync and went to grab a glass of water, and it was still running when I came back. I looked at the log and saw a bunch of “node_module” files syncing - around 900 folders. Funny thing is; neither the site nor server has anything to do with node..

I disregarded this and downloaded the files in a more manual fashion to a new folder. Interestingly I could see that my SCSS folders had not been touched since I stopped working on the project.. interesting, I thought to myself..

Turns out, the other subcontractor had taken my rendered and minimised CSS file, prettified it and worked from there. This meant that the around ~1500 lines of SCSS neatly organised in around 20 files was suddenly turned into a monster of a single CSS file of no less than 17300 lines.

I tried to explain to the guy that the other subcontractor had fucked up, but he said that I should be able to fix it since I was the one that made it initially. I haven’t replied. My life is too short for this.

( rant || !rant ) && idiots
console.info( this.isLongRant );
console.warn( "contains strong language and wordpress" );

A friend of mine sent two of his "friends" to me because they wanted me to build a website for their new business (~idea).

So I had a meeting with them.

First of all they wanted me to have a look on the current (work in progress) site.
First impression of the frontend:
OH BOY!?

Well, imagine this:

- a 90s/2k background (dotted/pixelated cloud in baby-blueish as backgroud with repeat)

- the logo was made by the sister of one of the guys, it wasn't too bad, but badly aligned, asymmetrical

- some obvious $offTheShelfShopPlugin with $randomStockContent

- the fucking slider had a small loading bar to indicate changes, it appears like an hyperanxious child on ADHS

- below the logo TWO FUCKING GIF SPINNERS to indicate nothing else but how fucking brain amputated these two dudes are, including the dev who is responsible for adding this. (to this point, they only told me, that a webagency did the setup and some basic work on the site, more on that later)

- no styling concept at all, random fonts and stuff everywhere including default styles of the shop plugin.

- FUUUUUCK WTF wil come furtherin this meeting?

After seeing a pile of binary puke fisted out of a 60yo nonstop-intern who changed his jobtitle from dildo-traveling-salesman to fullstack-frontend-dev by wrinting it on a post-it-note, I imagined, there has to be something wrong with the backend as well.

Boy was I right!
Yes, you guessed it! A random Wordpress adminpanel login appeared! OH NO....
I really wanted to levae this meeting immediately.
I was not able to hold my disgust back and I told them right in their face, what a shit pile of nutty squirrel turds this current page is. And that Wordpress is not the right choice at all for a shop.

Then came the best part: They basically told me, that they terminated the previous contract with the webagency because they were too expensive (they are cheap, compared to others, I know people who know their prices) and that they wanted to create A BIG MARKETPKACE with multiple ressellers who can have their shop in their website. Something similar to FUCKING AMAZON. ON FUCKING WORDPRESS!?!?!?
They even asked me if I wanted to be their partner & developer and that they can't pay much at the moment until the marketplace starts to grow.

I more or less told them to go fuck themselves with a rusty pitchfork.

Back in Hell, we had a “company summit” where everyone flew in for an all hands meeting.

It was three days long in a tiny office with very lacking air conditioning in the middle of a Las Vegas summer. Basically the entire thing was the CEO / goblin salesman king chewing at us and expounding about / proselytizing his latest and greatest sales ideas and how they’ll change the world. And randomly asking “which of you are HUNGRY?! Which of you want to be FILTHY FUCKING RICH?!” etc.

One good thing came out of it, which was that any and all new endeavors needed a “co-signer” and a sign off from development before we (developers, or more accurate: just me) would work on it. It reduced the growth rate of my backlog by like 80%, which was nice.

While dreading the “summit,” I hated him more than I had in quite awhile.

During the summit, I hated him more and even flipped him off.

After the summit, I swore to leave the revolting wreckage that was the company.

(And months later, I did just that —after becoming the sole dev and the only person holding the damned company afloat. When I gave him my two weeks’ notice, I absolutely relished his terror. And my time spent writing my 43 page no-sugarcoat handoff document that was guaranteed to scare off any hapless dev he might find. 😇)

But I digress, three 10-hour days with him and the rest of the sales team, the sleazy lawyer, the CTO who mentally checked out years ago, the yes-man contractor, and me. The only good thing that came out of that meeting was one good idea that he dismissed, and the sign off idea that saved my backlog a bit.

One of the sales people quit shortly thereafter. So it was a huge expense that wasted everyone’s time and added absolutely nothing of value to the company. GG!

Oh, it was also in the “totally better” office — meaning… cheaper, unfinished (literally plywood floors), and was one room in another company’s office, who often locked the door leading to their offices because they trusted him so much. But it was in downtown Las Vegas, with no parking at all, where gang members were hanging out almost every day, and it was next to low-income housing and weird no-service restaurants with shockingly high prices.

Weird and scary.
Very scary.

Totally carried pepper spray every time Mr. Goblin asshole forced me to go into the office. Didn’t get raped, though, or my laptop or car stolen. So that was nice.

8 rules of freelancing which newbie should know:

Rule 1: never pick up a half done website.

Rule 2: never take a job where they want to "do things themselves". And don't work with fixed prices if you calculate your price on a best case scenario.

Rule 3: don't do content management

Rule 4: don't promise a sales target on their website.

Rule 5: start sending invoices every money and not just at the end of the project.

Rule 6: Put every website on your own webserver and don't release it untill it's paid.

Rule 7: Don't work for free.

Rule 8: Don't work for free.

Credit: Jhon Dear

So this website sorts prices lexicographically...

*slowclap*

I'm currently freelancing abroad.
I don't get the UK Salley but I don't pay the UK prices.
I get to travel, see the world and support myself.
Much more valuable then any high end wage to me.
Freedom.

So... Just overheard a conversation at an Apple store...

tl;dr;

The customer gets furious for not getting to buy a mac pro for the price he wants and it doesn't even include the monitor there.....

C - customer, S - Sales person.

C: Hey, I've heard that apple released new home computers. May I get one?
S: Hello, they are not out yet.
C: WHAT?! How can they not be out yet? They released it like a week ago.
S: Well, they announced it, not officially released it for sale.
C: Ah, whatever. Can I pre-order it now?
S: Sure, we'll need your details and a deposit.
C: What? A deposit for what? That $1000 machine?
S: Sir, do you know the prices?
C: Of course. They have released a new machine and it will cost like previous ones - from $1000.
S: Then you might be talking about Macbook Air...
C: *Interrupts* No, I'm talking about the desktop computer, the whole box.
S: Ok... It starts at ~$6000.
C: WHAT?! It can't be... Oh well, I'll buy it. I hope it's the fully-specked one. Oh and does it come with a monitor?
S: No sir. It's the base model and it has no monitors.
C: WHAT?! How can this be?
S: You see, these are devices created for professionals. They are not for home users since our iMac line is....
C: *Interrupts again* Are you saying I'm not a professional?
S: I'm sorry but by the questions and lack of information - it seems to be true - you are not a professional.
C: FUCK YOU, I'm going to another store and they will sell it for me for $1000. What a piece of crap is this.
*Customer leaves furiously*
S: *to another S* - What is wrong with that dude? Is he high or what?
S2: *shrugs* and tells that it's the 5th time someone came to order that pc and was scared by the price.

---

So yeah... It's fun to see how idiots think that anything apple releases is for them... Once again I was made sure that apple fans are brainless fucks that will buy anything it produces and if that is not in the right price - they'll get furious.

ps. I own apple product, mac pro 2015. Would never buy a newer one NOR an iphone. I don't think that anyone is dumb just for buying it - people buy whatever fits their needs and that's ok but... More than we would like to admit - people buy it because it's an apple product....

TFW you see Apple selling display stands for 999$ and you don't care because you never have to use an Apple device anyways.

Linux: the weather applet in the panel displays the weather. When I open it, it displays more weather details.

Windows: the weather applet in the task bar displays the weather. When I open it, it displays random news and stock prices.

Microsoft can't even do a fucking weather applet right. Everything has to be an incoherent mess.

CEO: I've got a great idea to entice users, we increase our prices 20% and give 20% discount.

Oh god, please tell me you're not serious.

Bitcoin is now worth $4100

GPU prices will be more expensive then before

I'm not from EU or anything but you guys from the EU should thank the government for increasing the prices of your phones 👌.

Ok so I started doing Minecraft development because why not and it's super easy to jack the prices up on projects...

THEESE COMMUNITIES ARE SO TOXIC!! I have worked on ~ 13 servers in the past month and have built myself a pretty good reputation. Recently I was hired by a network who wanted a few plugins made and I agreed. There were two owners, one who was paying me and had already paid me and paid for everything and another who is a very popular YouTuber and streamer (~100k subs). Both owners were in a disagreement and the one who was paying for everything including my second paycheck which I thankfully recieved requested that I erased the server so the YouTuber couldn't steal the server files.

I hesitantly copied the files and sent them to the person paying me. The YouTuber then got furious and blamed the server not working out on me and now I have a bunch of 8 year old fan boys destroying my rep. I swear to god I'm going to destroy this kids YouTube channel if it's the last thing I do.

Most satisfying bug I've fixed?

Fixed a n+1 issue with a web service retrieving price information. I initially wrote the service, but it was taken over by a couple of 'world class' monday-morning-quarterbacks.
The "Worst code I've ever seen" ... "I can't believe this crap compiles" types that never met anyone else's code that was any good.

After a few months (yes months) and heavy refactoring, the service still returned price information for a product. Pass the service a list of product numbers, service returns the price, availability, etc, that was it.

After a very proud and boisterous deployment, over the next couple of days the service seemed to get slower and slower. DBAs started to complain that the service was causing unusually high wait times, locks, and CPU spikes causing problems for other applications. The usual finger pointing began which ended up with "If PaperTrail had written the service 'correctly' the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess."

Only mattered that I initially wrote the service and no one seemed to care about the two geniuses that took months changing the code.

The dev manager was able to justify a complete re-write of the service using 'proper development methodologies' including budgeting devs, DBAs, server resources, etc..etc. with a projected year+ completion date.

My 'BS Meter' goes off, so I open up the code, maybe 5 minutes...tada...found it. The corresponding stored procedure accepts a list of product numbers and a price type (1=Retail, 2=Dealer, and so on). If you pass 0, the stored procedure returns all the prices.
Code basically looked like this..

public List<Prices> GetPrices(List<Product> products, int priceTypeId)
{
foreach (var item in products)
{
List<int> productIdsParameter = new List<int>();
productIdsParameter.Add(item.ProductID);
List<Price> prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, 0);
foreach (var price in prices)
{
if (price.PriceTypeID == priceTypeId)
{
prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, price.PriceTypeID);
return prices;
}
* Omitting the other 'WTF?' code to handle the zero price type
}
}
}

I removed the double stored procedure call, updated the method signature to only accept the list of product numbers (which it was before the 'major refactor'), deployed the service to dev (the issue was reproducible in our dev environment) and had the DBA monitor.

The two devs and the manager are grumbling and mocking the changes (they never looked, they assumed I wrote some threading monstrosity) then the DBA walks up..

DBA: "We're good. You hit the database pretty hard and the CPU never moved. Execution plans, locks, all good to go."
<dba starts to walk away>
DevMgr: "No fucking way! Putting that code in a thread wouldn't have fix it"
Me: "Um, I didn't use threads"
Dev1: "You had to. There was no way you made that code run faster without threads"
Dev2: "It runs fine in dev, but there is no way that level of threading will work in production with thousands of requests. I've got unit tests that prove our design is perfect."
Me: "I looked at what the code was doing and removed what it shouldn't be doing. That's it."
DBA: "If the database is happy with the changes, I'm happy. Good job. Get that service deployed tomorrow and lets move on"
Me: "You'll remove the recommendation for a complete re-write of the service?"
DevMgr: "Hell no! The re-write moves forward. This, whatever you did, changes nothing."
DBA: "Hell yes it does!! I've got too much on my plate already to play babysitter with you assholes. I'm done and no one on my team will waste any more time on this. Am I clear?"

Seeing the dev manager face turn red and the other two devs look completely dumbfounded was the most satisfying bug I've fixed.

I've just disassembled this LED floodlight that I bought a while ago. It's some stupid little cheapie from a dollar store, so I figured that there'd be shit inside. But I wanted that LED cob.. a power LED :3

Well, shit wasn't too far off from the truth. The component choice is reasonable, but the design of the bloody thing.. batshit insane. The LED floodlight is powered by 4 AAA batteries, connected in series. So 6VDC. That then goes into this little tactile pushbutton, into the LED cob and then a 4.7 ohm resistor.

Well that's a pretty easy circuit.. let's remove the batteries and the casement, and put it on the lab bench power supply. Probes connected to the circuit with only the resistor and the LED cob in between (I didn't want to deal with the switch). Power supply set to 6V, current limiting to 500mA, contact!! And it works, amazing! So I let it run for a while to see that nothing gets too hot.. hah. After a minute or so, smoke would come out.. LED cob was a bit warm to the touch but nothing too bad. But the resistor.. I could cook water on it if I wanted to! 100 fucking °C, and rising. What the F yo?!

So I figured that I didn't want to put the resistor in between there. Just the LED cob now, which apparently has a forward voltage somewhere between 3.2V and 3.3V depending on how I set the current (500mA and 600mA respectively). Needed a bigger heatsink though, so I jammed one of my aluminium heatsinks on there. And it worked great! Very bright too, as it takes between 1.6 and 2W of power. Just for a comparison, the lighting in my living room is 4x5W and the ones on top of my dining table are 2x3W (along with some TL bar that my landlord put there.. fluorescent I think). So yeah, 2W is quite a lot for an LED, especially when it's all concentrated into one tiny spot.

That said, back to the original design with the resistor. 2 questions I have for that moron that designed this crap. First, why use a resistor for a power LED?! They needlessly waste power, and aren't good choices for anything that consumes more than 100mA. You should use PWM for these purposes, or tune your voltage on the supply side. Second, why go with 6V when your forward voltage is 3.3 at most? Wouldn't it make more sense to use 3 batteries with 4.5V? Ah, but I know the answer to the second one. AAA cells aren't rated for high loads like this. So that's likely why the alkaline cells that I had in there before have started leaking. Thanks, certified piece of shit!

Honestly, consumer electronics are such a joke... At least there's some components that I can salvage from this crap. Mainly the LED cob, but also the resistor and the tactile pushbutton perhaps.

One last remark that I'd like to make. This floodlight was cheap garbage. But considering that you can't do it well at that price, you just shouldn't do it. You know why? Because consumers always go for the cheapest. Makes a lot of money to build at rock bottom prices and make shit, but it damages the whole industry, since now the good designs will go out of business. That's why consumer electronics is so full of crap nowadays. Some unethical profiteering gluttons saw money, and they replaced the whole assortment with nothing but garbage. I'm sure that there's a special place in hell for that kind of people.

College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.

I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.

This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.

Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.

Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.

The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.

Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.

Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.

And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.

And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!

But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.

My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.

If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.

Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.

So this is a comparison of mobile contract prices in Europe which include 50 GB per month. I think I don‘t want to live in Germany anymore 😓

France: 14,49€
Swiss: 25,46€
...
Germany: 199,95€

I am building an ecommerce site and the client is asking me to hide the product prices because he doesn't want his competitors to see his prices. He also thinks it is a smart move not to allow users create an account and use it immediately. He wants to manually approve every user that signs up.
Why do people who know nothing always argue with us when it comes to our job?

A store in Russia was robbed for 30k$ using ArtMoney.

ArtMoney is a Game cheating program that is used in games that have no AntiCheat system or it is insanely horrible(Cookie clicker as an example for a game that had no anticheat and ArtMoney is used in it)

The robbers placed orders for tech(like phones and laptops) and then used the program to change the prices from thousands of dollars down to 5$.

The cheat program is insanely easy to defend against or detect its changes.

This is a good reminder to check your security if youre adminstating things like online shops or other stuff thag can be targeted at a similar fashion.

Dear namecheap, I honestly love your service and prices but how in the hell can I see an ip address in the dig of a new domain (url shortener) which I never put or saw there and which doesn't even belong to any server I own/operate?!

DNS cache after the last chance of three days ago, nah, don't think so.

Fucking hell.

It's only day one of the year and I'm already pissed right off

Why the fuck do all clients expect you to come up with absolutely everything!?

All I ever get is we want a website. I ask well what do you want on it.. our products .. news? Contact maybe ... Urm our business information ... That kind of stuff.

Well what are they?

Pft.. I here is a name if our products. And other stuff

WE ARE SELLING IT WAT ARE THE PRICES AND INFORMATION DO YOU HAVE IMAGES

Yeah do you want them

Of course I do 😐

Great here's 2 of them we have 1100 so I'll get more to you soon.

😤 Thank you!

Holy shit it's always like talking to a fucking brick wall.. why do people have to make our jobs so hard it's already fucking tough

I have no time to plan your entire website by myself I don't know what you want on it. How could I possibly know that!? It's your fucking site

For the first time in ages I decided to order a takeaway.

Had a quick check on the takeaway's online menu. My order total was going to be £15.60.

I called up to order and the total was apparently £21.40.

I queried this with the member of staff and mentioned I got the prices from their online menu.

I was told the online menu was "slightly out of date".

When I got into the takeaway to pickup my order I got speaking to the owner. He said the menu on their site was from 2009. He stressed updating the menu was on their list of things to do.

Lol :)

So some student complained that the busses are to full in the morning (they are filled with students).
Student: "why don't they drive more busses?"
Me: "because that would raise prices of busses since more drivers and fuel is needed. It's simple economics"
Student: "Public transit already is way to expensive, they can easily drive more busses and trains for that"
Me: "public transit is already way to expensive.... Oh look! An iPhone, MacBook, AirPods, Apple Watch, Dr Martins and other overpriced shit you have with you now!"

OnePlus, first their price grow constantly closer to other companies prices, second when you make a poll to know if you should keep the headphones jack, the community says you should, and then make a phone without one... well you should have expected the backlash

I can't breathe good air anymore. Water is being wasted. Fossil fuels are being wasted. Unnecessarily high number of vehicles on roads and most them have fucking one person sitting in them. They take out a fucking vehicle for fucking 200m. People throw trash everywhere without any regard for cleanliness. Prices are going up. Inefficient shit pieces exist in the market and people buy that shit. The world is going to hell. I hope I die soon enough to not know that is has.

for any freelance work I do my prices double for you if you offer to pay me through acknowledgement from your Instagram page

The down sides of living in a third world country, the prices of things { especially electronics } are so damn expensive. I love my country and all but hey this is really unaffordable.

To give you an idea, I work for 40 hours a week, four weeks a month and earn around 25,000 rupees.

Sometimes I just watch videos on YouTube of people building things and feel happy for them.

When will Amazon learn that I'M BRITISH! DONT FUCKING SHOIW ME PRICES IN FUCKING USD*, EVEN WHEN I'M ON THE FUCKING BRITISH SITE! WHY SHOULD I HAVE TO FUCKING SIGN OUT AND IN AGAIN EVERY FUCKING TIME TO REMIND IT!?

I'm just trying to buy a raspberry pi zero....

* I have nothing against USD, but I need to swear in order to vent my frustration.

When you order a bezillion tiny things at small prices to avoid toll on one large package, and you have no fucking clue if everything has arrived.

Arduino stuffs, LEDs, resistors, stuffs like that wherever its cheap for those wondering.

I've thought of couple of good outcomes of Apple removing the headphone jack:

1. Wireless headphones will be developed much more

2. They will be available for better prices as competitors starts to compete. At this time most of the wireless headphones are quite expensive.

3. Quality over wireless will now become a priority.

But I don't support this decision and will stick with my Xperia Z5.

Cracking old recovery CDs for the 9x/2000/XP era shines some light into how companies operated and when concepts came to be in that time:

Packard Bell: An EXE checks that you're running on a Packard Bell machine and reboots if it's not. How do we bypass it? Easy: just fucking delete it. The files to reinstall Windows from scratch come from...
...
C:?
Yup. Turns out Packard Bell was doing the recovery partition thing all the way back to the 9x era, maybe even further. Files aren't even on the restore disc so if your partition table got fucked (pretty common because malware and disk corruption) you were totally fucked and needed to repurchase Windows. (My dad, at the time, only charged at-cost OEM prices for a replacement retail copy. He knew it was dumb so he never sold PB machines.)

Compaq:
Computer check? Nope, remove one line from a BATCH file and it's gone.

Six archives, named "WINA.ZIP" through "WINF.ZIP" (plus one or two extras for OEM software) hold Windows. Problematic? Well... only because they never put the password anywhere so the installer can't install them. (Some interesting on-disc technician-only utils, though!)

Dell:
If not a Dell machine, lock up. Cause? CONFIG.SYS driver masquerading as OAK (the common CD driver) doing the check, then chainloading the real OAK driver. Simple fix: replace the fake driver with the real one.

Issues?

Would I mention this one if there weren't?

Disc is mounted on N:. Subdirectories work, but doing anything in them (a DIR, trying to execute something, trying to view shit in EDIT.COM) kicked you back to the disc root.

Installer couldn't find machine manifest in the MAP folder (it wanted your PC's serial before it'd let you install, to make sure you have the correct recovery disc) so it asked for 12-digit alphanumeric serial. The defined serials in the manifest were something like "02884902-01" or similar (8-2, all numbers) and it couldn't read the file so it couldn't show the right format, nor check for the right type.

Bypassing that issue, trying to do the ACTUAL install process caused nothing to happen... as all BATCHes for install think the CD should be on X:.

Welp.

well that was fun. Now to test on-real-PC behavior, as VBOX and VMWare both don't like the special hardware shit it tries to use. (Why does a textmode GUI need GPU acceleration, COMPAQ?????)

"Smart" home gym equipment: expensive hardware for some grand, proprietary software, and ongoing subscription fees in the $50/mo ballpark.

The SW is usually designed so that even shit that could have been local is instead stored remote as to make the subscription look more worthwhile. The large front-up cost serves not only as revenue, but also to anchor the vendor lock-in.

Open source hackers could potentially unchain the HW so that users would actually own what they purchased, but there is a catch: the HW is sold at a loss, and the subscription is the business model.

Freeing up the HW would render the subscription rather useless, and ramping up the HW sales prices to profitability would destroy any demand.

Basically, it's products that are technically feasible, but not economically viable. Which is why they are not the future of home gyms.

Just got an email with a new really nice douche-bag move from Postman to raise their prices again (this time for almost double) on their paid plans with excuse "it will help us deliver more of what our customers need from us."

Even though I've decided to look other way around for years on their electron-based garbage of bloated app, have not been a fan of their pricing 8$/month/user just for a simple feature such as sharing request schema and environment data.

This simply needs to stop and I'm seriously thinking about doing something about it. 🙄

Web3 truly is a fucked up space. All of the fuckertry happening over here is out of control. Literally a dystopian shithole of scams frauds crimes theft and ponzi schemes.... As much as i try to defend web3 since im a web3 dev it's getting real fuckin hard. The more i work in this space the more i understand economics and how all of this shitshow flows.

Without diving into details, I'll tell you right now from a very deep economic perspective: i realized that all of these cryptos are just.. shams, quasi buzz words to keep the "investors" giving them money. Essentially like wolf of wallstreet scams mixed with bernard madoff multi billion dollar ponzi schemes. The "investors" earn a lot of money.... But on paper! As unrealized gains. And by the time they are able to withdraw their money, that money becomes worthless because of insufficient liquidity in the pool that has been drained from top to bottom of the pyramid. So the only person truly getting filty rich is the one on top of this pyramid - the founders!

After the FTX disaster that happened 2 days ago the prices of ALL coins dropped drastically and it isnt stopping. So much for your glorified "decentralization" 😹😹😹😹😹

How can something be decentralized if its enough for 1 influential man to tweet some shit and the company/token price value drops or increases within minutes? In this case the whole of crypto got sliced by 1 influential man... Again. It's only a matter of time until someone else goes bankrupt and cycle repeats... Again.

I had to buy a mobile printer for my company for an "emergency" for a demo. I sent my boss 3 prices and he just said "go get it, we'll pay you back." After I deliver the features my boss says "Just take it back and demand a refund" this made me feel like such a douche with the supplier, plus I had to pay a 15% handling fee.

Ffs, I just want to get myself a goddamn domain, why is every registrar so shitty? Each of them has a major downside that makes me go away from their site! Bad payment options, way too high prices for a domain after a year, ...

After playing Life is strange for 3 days (with pauses ofc), I feel my brain melting :D
And as I wanted to search for smartphones for cheap prices, I saw this great offer...

DevOps is a huge scam.

Whoever sold companies maintenance-free cloud is God-tier marketer, they would be able to sell fire extinguishers in hell.

First, the platform is constantly moving, keeping up with all the updates for Kubernetes/CNI/Ambassador/Calico/kube-proxy/wtf/foo/bar/etc requires a huge team constantly peddling the boat; and if not updating in time - eventually everything will suddenly break when AWS deprecates old Kubernetes version (1.23 in EKS has just 1 year and 2 months (!!!) of support) or whatever else. At least they don't deprecate services that often.

Second, all other tooling either suck, or expensive as a Boeing. DataDog/Splunk/NewRelic/Grafana? Data centers were built for the monthly prices of these tools not so long time ago. But, capex vs opex, what stupid software engineers knows (though, it's hilarious to be present on a meeting with an agenda "reduce cloud costs").

That's all really.

On the bright side, when the team is solid and really care about the product and build it in a cloud-first manner (with understanding of all the requirements, caveats and limitation) - it can be rock solid, stable and fast platform.

To bad it's incredibly easy to implement some impressively wrong architecture (much more easier than f'up single-server architecture).

Why do _devs_ still use shared hosting (and then bitch about it)?

"This thing won't let me use external SMTP" - "I can't use more than 2 domains for my site" - "I can't change X in PHP config" ...

You're a dev, VPS prices are pretty much on the same level as shared hosting, and setting those things up isn't exactly rocket science either.

Ad an Android dev, I hate that hybrid solution like cordova, react native or similar frameworks. Companies sell their apps for ridicolous prices, so every native Android/ios dev need to get it's work faster and for a lower price.
Customers can't understand that hybrid app are faster to create but works worse. I'm hating you, hybrid-guys

Sorry I haven't been as active lately, however this is one of the better prompts, so I feel I should have it in my track record. Beware, it's a long one...

Let's trace the roots: My uncle was building desktops and he told my dad he'd build him one if my dad paid him for the components. These days I know builds aren't rocket science, but back then my parents didn't do their research. So my dad paid him.

Give or take some time, and most of the parts are complete. He underestimated the prices of a few things and had to ask for $200 more to complete the build. This...caused my dad to explode.

Later, I heard my dad ranting to my stepmom in January 2017 about how the last convo he had with his brother was a "Fuck-you conversation" - it was the last because my uncle had died in 2003.

Flash forward to March 2017. My mom and I are sitting in a Fazoli's, a nice sunset out of the full-length windows. I had to probe. HAD TO.

"You promise you won't tell your dad I told you this?" she asked.

"You know Kellie and I can't stand to be around him." I replied.

As the story goes, that last "Fuck-you conversation"? Over a fucking measly $200. Yup, the last conversation between my dad and his brother to ever happen was a shouting match over a relatively short amount of money. I wish I could say my dad had remorse, but he doesn't. He still talks shit. He's also technologically illiterate, so I doubt there was a way his brother was going to be able to reason with him.

In late 2003, my uncle, who had been a smoker, passed away due to cardiac arrest. The build was still not finished. This was one of the OTHER things that I have mixed feelings about.

After my uncle passed, my aunt paid someone to finish the build and get it shipped to my dad. We'll get back to why I feel this is fucked up, stay tuned...

---------

It's Spring 2004. I'm in the last half of what I think is Kindergarten or some shit...too lazy to do the math. Anyway, my dad announces we have a family computer - however, I couldn't read yet. That didn't stop the waste of oxygen that is my father from going in the Windows XP screensavers and putting text in that said "GAGE MORGAN WILL NOT TOUCH THIS COMPUTER." He's such a fuckin' dick, now AND back then.

My mom had an issue with this. I don't know why, but she did. Later, I was slowly taught how to use the mouse, under heavy supervision. Then I went to my grandma's house. She taught me one very specific thing on her old Win98 (386, maybe? IDK my old hw shit man), and because I know you guys are gonna love this one:

"The blue "e" opens up your games!"
The blue "e" does not open up your games, it opens something that can lead to your games.

I went home and tried this...without permission. My dad came down and discovered my lollygagging on the homepage - this is fucking weird. It was before Nextel, IIRC, so Sprint's logo was red still. Yes, we had broadband from Sprint. I don't know what saga led to that going the way of the dodo, but...

Back on track, I literally got my pants pulled down and had my bare bottom beat. He was gonna drag my ass upstairs and lock me in my room, but before he could, he accidentally slammed MY FUCKING RIGHT TEMPLE into the corner of a hardwood table at the bottom of the staircase.

The wailing that resulted probably was different than the previous form, which is probably what got my mom involved. My dad had a way of going too far, and in retrospect I'm more terrified now of what could've happened than I was then.

Later, I was given access to games in the form of my own account and bookmarks bar. That wasn't the end of the madness/drama from my use of that machine, but it was the earliest form.

Ever since Kindergarten, that one fateful day, I've been defying any/all imposed limitations on tech set on me by my parents...well, not anymore, but literally grades K-12. I'm living on my own, aka "adulting" now. It sucks more than you think, man.

---------

Let's tie this up before I reach the limit. I said I thought it was fucked up when my aunt paid to have the build finished and shipped to us after my uncle's death.

Yes, my aunt's intervention led to me ultimately majoring in computer science.

That doesn't change the fact that she shouldn't have done it.

My dad was an asshole to her husband, who passed. She is ultimately too caring. I don't think my jackass father should've been able to get by with that, he didn't deserve the freebie. Someone else should've told him his brother did in fact need that $200.

I haven't seen her IRL since the funeral when my grandpa passed in 2005. 2006 spelled the end of my parents' marriage.

Hope you guys enjoyed this - it's only a small segment of how I got to where I am now - tiny, actually.

The horrendous prices on decent graphics cards now.. people that want gaming cards for gaming can't afford them anymore 😣

Not particularly dev related but I do need to rant.

Parents are here to visit, it's lovely to see them. Unfortunately I have a small ass 1 bed flat because rent and house prices are stupid high where I work. I'm sleeping in the living room on an air bed, the fridge/freezer is noisy and about 3 foot from my head so I've been turning it off over night. It didn't get plugged in this morning so shit's getting thrown out. I sleep maybe 5 hours, wake up at 1 too hot, 4 too cold then mother comes in at 6 with the dogs. 3rd night of this. I've taken holiday even though I don't have much to spare because there's no way in fuck I can work feeling like this, I'm a dev and need to be able to think and do intelligent things ffs.

It's nice to see family but it's nice to have my own space too.

"I'm so sick and tired of these extortionate IP address lease prices! I need you develop our own system that doesn't rely on IP."

Can someone help me understand?

I subscribed to a nifty IT-releated magazine, and on its back, there's an ad for "Dedicated root server hosting", nothing unusual at a first glance, but after I read the issue, I decided to humor them and see what it is that they offered, and... It just... Doesn't make sense to me!

An ad for "Dedicated Root Server" - What is a dedicated root server first of all? Root servers of any infrastructure sound pretty important.

But, the ad also boasts "High speed performance with the new Intel Core i9-9900K octa-core processor", that's the first weird thing.

Why would anyone responsible enough want to put an i9 into a highly-reliable root server, when the thing doesn't even support ECC? Also, come on, octa-core isn't much, I deal with servers that have anywhere between 2 and 24 cores. 8 isn't exactly a win, even if it has a higher per-core clock.

Oh, also, further down the ad has a list of, seeming, advantages/specs of the servers, they proclaim that the CPU "incl. Hyper-Threading-Technology"... Isn't that... Standard when it comes to servers? I have never seen a server without hyperthreading so far at my job.

"64 GBs of DDR4 RAM" - Fair enough, 64 gigs is a good amount, but... Again, its not ECC, something I would never put into a server.

"2 x 8 TB SATA Enterprise Hard Drive 7200 rpm" - Heh, "enterprise hard drive", another cheap marketing word, would impress me more if they mentioned an actual brand/model, but I'll bite, and say that at least the 7200 rpm is better than I expected.

"100 GBs of Backup Space" - That's... Really, really little. I've dealt with clients who's single database backup is larger than that. Especially with 2x8 TB HDD (Even accounting for software raids on top)

This one cracks me up - "Traffic unlimited"
Whaaaat?! You are not gonna give me a limit to the total transferred traffic to the internet for my server in your data center? Oh, how generous of you, only, the other case would make the server just an expensive paperweight! I thought this ad was for semi-professionals at least, so why mention traffic, and not bandwidth, the thing that matters much more when it comes to servers? How big of a bandwidth do I get? Don't tell me you use dialup for your "Dedicated Root Server"s!

"Location Germany or Finland" - Fair enough, geolocation can matter when it comes to latency.

"No minimum contract" - Oooh, how kiiiind of you, again, you are not gonna charge me extra for using the server only as long as I pay? How nice!

"Setup Fee £60" - I guess, fair enough, the server is not gonna set itself up, only...

The whole ad is for "monthly from £55.50", that's quite the large fee for setup.

Oh, and a cherry on top, the tiny print on the bottom mentions: "All prices exclude VAT and are a subject to..." blah blah blah.
Really? I thought that this sort of almost customer deceipt is present only in the common people's sphere!

I must say, there's being unimpressed, and then... There's this. Why, just... Why? Anyone understands this? Because I don't...

I bring you all another gem from my computer science course, this time from my OOP class.

The first assignment we made for this class was a simple CLI shop, where you would have basically three main classes:

- A Product class that you extend to create different types of products.
- A Cart class that manages a list of products (basically an ArrayList<Product>) and has some useful methods
- A CLI class to display a simple interface to the user and call methods on a Cart.

Basic OOP stuff, so far so good.

Then for our second assignment the teacher asked us to make Cart a generic class, where you would say Cart<Bagel> and you would only be able to put bagels in it. This makes absolutely no fucking sense, this is not a good use case for generic types since

1) you would never limit your customer's cart to one type of product at compile time.
2) in Cart, you have to cast the generic type to Product to extract any information from the product, like when getting product prices to calculate the total price, so might as well use a fucking ArrayList<Product>

I'm just saying what he's asking us to do has (to our fictional shop's business logic) absolutely no advantage over subtyping.

Also, why the fuck teach generic constraints when you can just tell your students "just cast T to Product", right?

Like fucking hell, couldn't you spend like 10min to come up with a decent assignment that actually teaches generic types the right way? ffs

And just so no one can say "but wut simple assignment would you give to teach students generic types?", here's a simple and much, much better alternative: implementing your own ArrayList. Done. Can't get much better than that, it's a legit use case and teaches you the basics.

Sorry man, you're a great person, you really are, but you suck as a teacher.

Stocks are up, bitcoins is up, gold is up, bond rates are down... Which means prices are up...

COVID cases are up...

Nothing makes sense anymore... Maybe I should just give up...

Software engineering is slowly being lowered to a basic skill to please corporations that literally want you to automate your job away. The only fruitful areas of software engineering that I can see being relevant in the next 10 years are those mixed with other hard sciences such as bioinformatics, robotics, bleeding edge statistics and mathematics (AI research), physics, etc. The trend I see right now is that software engineering is being integrated with business-oriented degrees or arts degrees, targeted programs towards beginners offered for free or low prices. There's going to be a higher barrier of entry for the jobs that are actually worth the stress and I'm praying I'll be able to catch the train before it leaves the station.

Introduction:
Privileged in this context means logged in and have a administrator-confirmed access.

Customer calls us: Why do I see prices in my shop? I should have been privileged first to see them. Looks to me that you did not make prices only get displayed when I am privileged.

Salesman: Sure we did this. May I asked whether you are logged in right now?

Customer: Of course. I am testing the process of placing an order with my test customer account.

*crickets*

Customer: I am so sorry for calling. You are right.

Hetzner Cloud

Very easy to set up. It is ready in just seconds. Very affordable prices. Billed by hours used. Hosted in Germany (or Helsinki of you want to) :D

yet here people are fucking driving nonstop even though our fucking gas prices are through the roof.....

just giving alllllllll our goddamn money away.

also i think this is an awesome project.

far better than the million and 1 stupid tasking boards like monday.com heh

Before 2012, I always worked in cubicles and had weekly status meetings. In 2012 I moved to a big city and learnt there was something worse than cubes: the open work plan. Marketed as a way to increase coloration, the open work space is really just the result of real estate prices being expensive in cities and how desks are cheaper than 3-cube walls.

Up until 2013, we'd usually just have the weekly status meeting. Here are your tasks for the week. I'd do them at my own pace. Some days fast, some days slow, but they'd all get done by the end of the week and I'd proudly go down my list of stuff I had done.

Since then, it's all been "agile" and "stand-ups" every. fucking. day. The work is endless. A Product Owner once told me that stand ups weren't suppose to be status meetings; that you were only suppose to say if you're blocked or need help. But in every place I've worked at, they're daily status reports. You have to preform every day.

I really hate IT today more than ever. I miss the cube. I miss the weekly status reports. Today things are so high stress and higher paced and the work is endless. You can't even really pace yourself anymore.

People keep using Firebase and saying how cool it is, I'll laught when Google does the same that facebook did with Parse or hike prices like they did with Google Maps Recently.... People stop putting your core logic in a third party black box.. it's not going to end well...

Hetzner.
Simple, efficient, no useless fluff, decent prices for a good service, no hidden surprises or overcomplicated setups.
What more could you ask for?

Since my first post was a success, here's another shameless hack-- in this case, ripping a "closed" database I don't usually have access to and making a copy in MySQL for productivity purposes. That was at a former job as an IT guy at a hardware store, think Lowes/Rona.

We had an old SCO Unix server hosting Informix SQL (curious, anyone here touched iSQL?), which has terminal only forms for the users to handle data, and has keybindings that are strangely vi based (ESC does commit changes. Mindfsck for the users!). To add new price changes to our products, this results to a lengthy procedure inside a terminal form (with ascii borders!) with a few required fields, which makes this rather long. Sadly, only I and a colleague had access to price changes.

Introducing a manager who asks a price change for a brand- not a single product, but the whole product line of a brand we sell. Oh and, those price changes ends later after the weekend (twice the work, back at regular price!)

The usual process is that they send me a price change request Excel document with all the item codes along with the new prices. However, being non technical, those managers write EVERYTHING at hand, cell by cell (code, product name, cost, new price, etc), sometimes just copy pasted from a terminal window

So when the manager asked me to change all those prices, I thought "That's the last time I manually enter all of this sh!t- and so does he". Since I already have a MySQL copy of the items & actual (live) price tables, I wrote a PHP backend to provide a basic API to be consumed to a now VBA enhanced Excel sheet.

This VBA Excel sheet had additional options like calculating a new price based on user provided choices ("Lower price by x $ or x %, but stay above cost by x $ or x %"), so the user could simply write back to back every item codes and the VBA Excel sheet will fetch & display automatically all relevant infos, and calculate a new price if it's a 20% price cut for example.

So when the managers started using that VBA sheet, I had also hidden a button which simply generate all SQL inserts for the prices written in the form, including a "back to regular price" if the user specified an end date, etc.

No more manual form entry for me, no more keyboard pecking for the managers with new prices calculated for them. It was a win/win :)

Is anyone else concerned by the state of the industry?

Jeff Bezos is on track to surpass Bill Gates as the wealthiest man in tech. Amazon has a history of questionable actions (look up Nucleus, Diapers.com, BookSurge, MacMillan vs Amazon, and Hachette).

They are known to have a strong lobbying presence and often pay lower wages than their competitors.

I buy from Amazon because I like their service and prices (not always the cheapest, but arguably the best buying experience), but with every purchase I can't help but wonder what I'm contributing to.
It's obvious small tech companies struggle to survive and that is the result of our consumption.

Headhunter called about a rejection for an assignment I did:

Assignment had malformed data examples
Assignment had unrealistic timespan for completion
Assignment used item stocks for a shop setup
Assignment didn't use any prices just item stocks

Who builds a webshop without prices in the first place?

So done with this job hunting assessment bullshit.

So on a PowerBuilder app I worked on last year (I know right...), suddenly the business users were reporting that they couldn't edit some of their prices! When they clicked save, the screen would refresh and lose their work.

We had recently upgraded the system to allow them to enter hundreds of prices at a time, much more than there had ever been. But that code wasn't anywhere near this part!

Tracking this down was really fun... By great fortune, I discovered the row the users were editing was the 99th row in the DataWindow. As it turned out, in the distant past (this is PowerBuilder, after all) the returns code "99" had been used as a flag to mean "cancel/refresh the screen".

I of course offered to "fix it right", but the powers that be wanted it fixed cheaply, so we just changed the flag to "9999". 😬

Lebanon's internet prices. Most expensive you'll ever see! The red are in USD

Asus announced their AM5 board X670E Extreme. The E already stands for Extreme, which makes it an Extreme Extreme.

My feeling is that AM5 will be extremely - expensive!

That's because the AM5 LGA socket moves cost from the CPU (formerly PGA) to the mobo, but AMD certainly won't drop CPU prices, rather the opposite, and then there's also DDR5 as cost driver, not to mention tons of PCIe 5.0 where we don't even have AIBs.

On the upside, that would finally end the days of GPUs causing a disproportionately large share of the system cost - if only because the rest gets more expensive.

Concierge shopping service in 2001. You input what you want and your budget and a human concierge will research and get you the best deal with coupons, rebates, etc. The idea was good before e-commerce algorithms got better. Before that you had to find good prices across numerous sites on your own and it was super tedious, hence my idea. Also, it wasn’t scalable as it depended on humans way too much.

I wonder what's the future of the crypto-mining businesses, when electricity prices have sky-rocketed to 4€/kWh [from what it used to be 14ct 2 years ago]. True story. Shops had to close

Guys seriously, how the fuck did we end up like this? What's the deal with the new ~2Kg piece of aluminium that Apple is selling for $999, the "Apple Stand Pro"...

How did we allow for such a company gain this much of arrogance and confidence to sell us normal goods for exorbitant prices?

I seriously cannot imagine the unit production price going beyond $100, and I'm exaggerating a lot here. I can't think of any economic model that justifies the extra $899. They're exploiting cheap Chinese labor for fuck sake! What costs do they have?

Hi FuLlStAcKcLoWn,

I fOuNd A fEw ErRoRs On YoUr SiTe.

MaY i SeNd OvEr SoMe Of ThOsE eRrOrS aNd AuDiT rEpOrT wItH pRiCeS?

i’m LoOkInG fOrWaRd To YoUr RePlY

bEsT rEgArDs

god this is getting repetitive, how can we spam the spammers? wasn't there a site like "send your enemies glitter"? classic!

i guess this is what I get for putting my company email public

but really, what happened to gmail's spam filter? should spot ones like these from miles away

My experience two weeks into being married:

1. Any other couple can fuck off. We're the protagonists now.

2. My sleep schedule has done a complete 180. I start my day at 7 am now, previously it was 12 afternoon. I also sleep early at 10 pm now. I feel a lot better about this schedule tbh.

3. My wife has an office job, so I get my work done in peace and am able to wrap up my day early to make time for her when she gets home.

4. She's serious about investments, stock market, SIPs, Gold prices or whatever and actively puts money into those things. Good for me.

5. Going out with her is actually fun, because we plan our Sunday ahead of time. I used to scoff at other couples before, but now I get it. It may look cringy from the outside but not to me it doesn't.

After years of only breaking even or low profitability BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE CHEAPSKATES WHO THINK WHAT I DO IS EASY AND SHOULD BE FREE OR $5 OR WHATEVER AND FRIENDS I DID WORK FOR FOR FREE TOTALLY ABANDONED OUR FRIENDSHIP AFTERWARDS FOR STUPID MISUNDERSTANDINGS ON THEIR PART I closed down my web dev business and now focus only on full time employment. I don’t even do sites for friends anymore.

But did that stop people who before wanted to haggle prices from now BEGGING me to go back into business or to help their referral or to please-pretty-please just help them with one more problem?

Nnnnnnope!

And even now I hate disappointing people and telling them no even though I know they’ll have tiny budgets and will stall and delay and not deliver content or make decisions so I can finish and GET PAID.

WTF IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE? WTF IS WRONG WITH ME?! AND WHERE WERE ALL THESE OPPORTUNITIES WHEN FEWER PEOPLE WERE INTERESTED IN MY SERVICES?!

!rant

TL;DR one year on as a react dev, I want to go at it self employed, humbly seeking advice as this community seems to have its fair share of knowledgeable freelancers.

I have 1 year professional experience now as a Meteor, React and Apollo developer

The dream is to become self employed. I figure a good market would be small businesses that want a website that are more featureful than a diy wix site.

Only I am more of a developer than a designer, so rely heavily on things like Bootstrap or Material ui. So I wonder if Upwork, Fiverr or simply my own freelance website would be better.

As you guessed javascript is my biggest strength, not sure if nodejs is the best backend for small businesses as hosting prices are more than eqv php stack.

Also want to build own projects on the side to monetize. Bigger dream would be to be client-less and develop and sell personal projects.

Seeking advice from those who are self employed. Am I dreaming too big?

Shall I keep the office job for a bit longer then take the plunge? Or do you think I can just go for it. Are there lucrative areas I am missing?

Thanks in advanced

I walked like a mile and a half in some extremely uncomfortable boots to my uni's surplus warehouse to try and grab a tower at some ridiculously cheap prices (like an Optiplex 980 with an i7 for like $30).

I got lost as fuck because it was like 6 months since I last came here. I was there about 15 minutes after it opened and they're already sold out. Time to walk another mile back to the bus stop salty as fuck.

Fuck you Steam, just fuck you and your price politics.

I have a Swiss and one Russian Steam account. I have on my Swiss account over 450 Games and on the russian one around 4.

I have a friend in Russia and to play some games with him, I need a russian account.

Guess what? Since the last change to Steam Shop I cant use my Swiss Credit Card anymore to buy games in Russia.

Now when I want to test a game first on the russian account and when it's good to buy it after on my main Account, I can't.

Why should I pay for a game in Early Access the full price, when the game is bad and will be abadoned in a half year?

Sure they are some good early access games, which I payd the full price for (Switzerland has the highest Steam Game prices). As example ARK or Battlegrounds. I love these games and like to support the Devs.

But I get really angry when I have to pay for a Game which is worth 5 $ and sold in my Country for 20 $ and will be unsupported after a year.

Really fuck you Valve and Steam 🖕🏻🖕🏻😡

Atleast refund the people the money, when the game is abadoned! But sure, you're just in for a Cash Grab...

(inspired by another rant I read here)

Last semester we were learning Java in the Programming Fundamentals class and a friend of mine asked for help with an assignment.

The objective was to make a virtual store (as a console app) in which the user would be able to select a few products, customize some of them and then the program would print out a receipt, with a list of all products, their prices, and the total cost.

Simple enough I thought, but there was a catch: you were not allowed to use arrays because the teacher hadn't taught that to the class yet. So I was like "how the fuck are you supposed to do this then?". Turns out the way to do it was to just append text to a string in order to generate the receipt. This is stupidly simple, so stupid that it didn't even cross my mind.

It's just that it's an awful way to architecture your code, it's just plain shit. Sure, if you're learning programming that's completely ok, but using that code on production is just completely unfeasible and I think that's why it didn't even cross my mind to do it this way. I'm just constantly worrying about performance and good code architecture and organization that the simplest of all solutions slipped my mind. When I finally discovered the way the teacher wanted us to do it I just wanted to kill myself...

such services .... guess his prices

Should I buy a 4K monitor? Are any of these prices good. Not sure what the differences are.

Need a machine for coding. Windows isn't cutting it anymore, I need a Mac. Come on Apple, drop those damn prices!

Low budget companies be charging insane prices to clients and let the junior frontend dev setup a Azure cluster.. then wonder why it suddenly falls apart at the end of the project

I think one of the hardest part while making an RPG game is setting the prices of the shop items and determining the rewards you get from quests.
Really struggling right now...

And the stock market is plunging again.... Who gives a fuck....

It makes no logical sense? Unless someone wants to enlighten me... But I don't see much downside...

COVID kills us all => who gives a fuck about stock prices

COVID kills most of us => who gives a fuck about stock prices, aka pieces of paper. All the survivors will create a new society and either split the goods or fight over them. It'll be like Survivor... But real.

COVID goes away and doesn't do anything => great time to buy buy buy since all you idiots basically just gave me like a huge discount on stock prices. AKA a long overdue market correction

Suggestion for a cheap, leightweight Laptop?
As I want to code outside, the screen should be bright, SD Card Slot would also be nice.
I actually wanted to buy a MacBook, but the prices are...

Two and a half hours debugging an ancient, poorly written prototype being used in production to local an obscure bug causing double product sizes to appear.
Eventually, after navigating the 3 level deep compatibility layer of SQL views, I found out the client had attached the size option to the product twice with two different prices.

HEYYY!!
Glad to see ya all, how have ya been?

Gosh, it has been forever since the last time! I feel like I forgot about this platform too much, it feels good to have a place full of wonderful people to speak to, and you don't see those everywhere. I'm sorry I haven't been here much, it was mostly due to me not being able to practice programming much and thus falling back on tech stuff.

BUT - that period is now over. Maybe.
I'm gonna be more active on here, in the past recent years I've seen how bad most social medias turned out to be, with a few very special exceptions. I think devRant deserves more activity, so for better or for worse (hopefully better), I'm back!

I think my biggest problem right now is the need for a better PC, one Italians would call "a PC with the controcazzi", lol. A good one, is what I'm sayin. But would ya look at that, thr moment I start searching up for one, a friggin pandemic takes place and prices skyrocket! Ain't that fun. XD

I would probably have found an awesome PC build by now if I knew jack shit about hardware, but unfortunately I was always more into software than hardware. ^^"
So if anybody has any idea, I mean, I'm open to suggestions~ they'd be very appreciated, and thanks in advance. <3

But enough about that - how are you holding up? I hope you're doing good.
Misadventures and bad stuff happen, but I promise you we're all gonna get out of it soon. In the meantime, always remember to drink water, eat properly, keep yourself sanitized, exercise, and do things you love doing. That's what life is about. I'm looking forward to hearing from y'all, once again. 💙

Keep fighting the good fight, and kick ass! And chew gum, too.

Wanted to jump back into UB Ports after my old Nexus 5 decided to leak battery acid everywhere .-.

Thought I would try and find another Nexus 5, apparently the only functional ones are going to cost me $300 AUD, that's a no go...

Ok let's look for a one plus one, better hardware and may be better to find anyway, nope not a single one plus one online....

Short things short, if anyone can find either of these phones for reasonable prices (AUD) you know who to contact .-.

(I've been searching for 2 hours now and have nothing)

Could a freelance dev let me know how they find clients? Not just the ones from sites online and such, but the good clients, 3-4 month projects, proper prices?

Robbery of nearby future :
A broke dev decided to do a robbery by stealing the whole DAVE -2 system from the Tesla S3 model
While asking why he chose a drastic path as this, he said "My client wanted the training to be ready within 2 days and I couldn't arrange that much GPU in such small notice, so decided to do what I did.*ignored(But I reinstalled it back in the car)*
As you can see, client's have turned into money hungry, cock sucking, fist fucking, and God-knows-what-fetish wanting prices of shit"
Over to you, Clara

Marketing department sometimes are so Fucking annoying in the context of they " just found out certain technology" and try to enforce us to implement.

For example recently this guys just found out firebase(Firestore thingy ) and keep asking us to implement into the app (E wallet app) which our software architect refuse to use firebase( I agree with him) because in the long run , the project will definitely get surprising prices in the invoice.

Also, our DBA had started to implement Apache Cassandra .....

So dear marketing department, why don't you guys shut up and let us do our job and let our software architect do his job? Fuck off!

Fuck Apple and their shitty macbooks

the MacBook air I bought a year ago as that was the only I could afford at that point is slowly giving up as this piece of shit lacks any sort of cooling. As soon as Xcode starts , temperatures reach 80-90C and don't even get me started on what happens when I provide builds.

Seriously, how do they get away with providing subpar hardware at such high prices. Their after sale services will literally cost me another MacBook. This "ecosystem" is just not worth it.

I believe the biggest shortcoming of modern pc hardware like ryzen or
i(5|7|9)s is the lack of Ram support.

Buffered Vs Unbufered, registered or unregistered, what does it matter? It's just Ram!

I call that discrimination.
Reg ECC Discrimination!
#RegECCLifesMatter
#StopRegECCDiscrimination
#AllSupportRegEcc
#SupportRegEcc

Let me start by sharing a bit of history about myself.

When i finished my secondary school i did not go immediately to high school. I took a year because i needed to improve some grades to enter high school more easily.
In that year i started to learn programming languages (Java).

So when i went to high school i already had a good foundation of programming logic and could make some simple games that my friends were amazed (Like Pong and tetris).
In my first year in high school, in my hometown, a photo frame builder's shop asked me if i could make a desktop program to help him calculating prices and such.

I did it in like 4 months. This was not my biggest projet so far but was the most satisfying at the end. He paid me really good money for it and i was very proud of myself.

Everytime i buy any electronics , my brother would suggest me to buy latest ones with the newest configuration . His logic was " If you buy a not-so new tech now.. It will outdate fast and you will end up with an outdated one soon.. So the extra 10K is worth considering that " .

Considering the development trend i personally think it is useless to invest in electronics unless necessary . Everytime i buy an electronic product , within 2 or 3 months i find the same good at almost 75% of the price.. So with tech prices falling like this.. i think it is worth saving that money instead of the cutting edge tech which i wont need for another 2 years .

Thoughts ?

(The cousin brother i mentioned does this everytime he buys a phone and ends up changing the phone 4 times faster than me.. and the use case is similar to mine if not worse..)

So, if I was to emigrate, should I come to your country?

I'll finish my bachelors in Comp Sci next May and Ireland isn't really livable right now with property rental prices. Time to look elsewhere I think.

1. What paid software do you have installed in your PC [that you are actually paying for]?

2. What paid cracked software do you have installed in your PC [that you should be paying for, but aren't]?

And what are the prices?

I've seen developers offering to build limited websites for $5 on Fiverr. How can they do that? They must be using templates and frameworks pretty heavily to work at scale for those prices, surely?

If Apple didn't jack up their prices and offered decent dedicated GPUs they'd actually be fuckin great... the greed is just too damn high with them

P.S. I might have to get a Macbook because of an iOS project, but I really want something that can game at least a bit... at the end of the day it's not my decision, I'll get what they give me

I haven't had an actual burnout ever since I started programming 6 years ago, maybe duo to the fact that I don't accept more than 2 projects at the same time, and I request a minimum deadline of 1 month for any project.

that said, I had to offer the clients something in compensation, basically lower prices and higher quality applications.

so i guess the more you give the more you earn?

One of the worst things I did in my career as a developer was that when i had to change an offer form in our SAP System. My boss told me to change the prices in a form in our SAP system. Normally the key users do that but our SAP System is so fucked up that sometimes the developers have to do it because you have to write directly into the database. So I wanted to look up which table it was and what I saw scared me.

IT WAS A FUCKING IMAGE.

So I used paint to edit the prices in the image and re-uploaded the image. Shame on me but I didn't wanted to change that shit. I have other things to do than that.

Have this iOS maniac/UI guy/hustler at my office. (Refers to my first Rant,he's the fucker who always try to shove his iPhone to my face.) Hats off to him for knowing how to generate passive income and his hustling skill. But I hate that fucker. He always like to start a debate. He's always doing his sidejobs all the time. He sells staff online(even fidget spinner). He also does wedding photo shoots. Heard from a friend, he's a mediocre photographer but gets client by giving his potential clients lower prices than his competitors. He got a few connections and somehow always doing websites for his own client by going to codepen and copy pasting JavaScript from here and there. He doesn't know shit about programming. That fucker doesn't even know about closures. He literally doesn't know shit. Yet try to debate about with us regarding programming (wtf?) Always trying to get us to help him with his side paid jobs -when he encountered an error,he will immediately bug us- sometimes would interrupt us while we are busy with the company's stuff. If we don't help, he would slightly mock by saying things like "it's ok...I understand you guys are not that experienced yet..etc". The senior dev was pissed off the other day and emailed a super detailed complaint to the HR.
Note : He gets paid more by his photoshooting jobs on the weekend, he's only at this job for his future citizenship application. That fucker. He's the type of fucker that will definitely gets rich but gets hated by everyone.

So I had an idea of what might be useful for a Brain Computer Interface (BCI). I thought they must have brought the prices down on these by now... Oh my hell... The cheap "starter" kit from OpenBCI is $800+. The cheapest headset I could find anywhere was $129 and all the reviews say it doesn't work. What an absolute shit show. I sincerely thought these devices would have gotten costs down due to selling a lot of them.

I just want to hack some shit together and play with it! Not fucking take out a loan. I guess that industry is lacking the one application to make this kind of interface worth it. So I will wait another 5 years for that industry to make progress I guess...

I will have to look around for cheap Ardunio kits or something. What an absolute joke. I mean we are talking about a low noise amp and some electrodes.

In my country there is a huge economy deflation.
Like 1 year ago 1USD used to be 1500 pounds.
Nowadays 1USD is more like 7800 pounds.

Wait a second let me explain more into details the whole flow.

There are 3 to 4 prices we are being dealing with:
* Official Bank price that refuse to change the base price: 1500 pounds
* Bank ATM machines that exchange your dollars on a 3900 pounds per usd
* Black market: 7800 pounds managed by random mobile apps that spread rumors
* Foreigners currency: the only way to grab your reach dollars.

Long story short:
Whenever you want to win extra cash, you ask any of your relatives to lend you money from any bank in the world ( foreigners currency), try to ask in black market who is willing to exchange, you meet, you check on any mobile app what's the current price and you do the exchange.

So in order buy USD dollars on a low price, devs build 2 mobile apps one that send a POST request to change the amount in DB and a second one fo retrieve this value.
So whenever he want to buy dollars he change the value to the lowest. And whenever you want to sell the dev raise the amount slowly. So far the government has no regulations over developers why? Because the one behind the forensic are at least 60 to 70 years old more like their informations are dead.

So we struggle.

Sadly, I’m not a good enough developer to have clever and hacky solutions to anything. In college I did once use Visual Basic to spoof a Novell login screen and steal other students’ passwords and write them to a diskette, which I’d recover after they walked away from the machine. The worst I did to them was log into their messaging and send them messages from themselves. Oh, and I also set up an “underground” web site that the campus sysadmins didn’t discover for a while. I used it to set up a forum where students could sell their used textbooks for better prices than the buy back program at the campus bookstore.

The most excited I’ve been is probably now.

I’ve been working on a process that manages various prices, in a table that currently has 25k+ records, and viewing this through our ERP is extremely painful, no search no filter etc.

I’ve been given the task of creating an external application that we can use to manage these in an easier way.

This is my first “proper” project, it’s going to be difficult, I’m doing everything including all the planning etc, so I’ve spent some time today writing user stories etc.

But I’m looking forward to creating a useful app that not only saves me time, but could also be rolled out across the business

Don't refractor for fun!

An anecdote from my previous company. A developer had written a shitty java console app for fetching stock prices. About 3000 LOC. just one java GOD class. So, when me and my friend looked at it, we were amazed how that code works with all that if conditions spanning 100LOC. so. My dear friend underestimated the complexity. Since it just fetches stock price and puts in database right. I can write it in few days and much better one. So, he started writing code in an OO way. Three days later I see he still working on it. Having a glimpse at code. The app is now Object oriented shitty and ugly.

Guess what new code never goes in prod too.

Learning
Don't underestimate complexity of app.
Be empathic about fellow developer. Don't think he has written a shitty code. Think why he had to do so.
Don't work on refractors if there is no one to guide you.

What is the cheapest and closest to "decent" cloud computing provider you've come across? I'm currently using scaleway ARMs -- all thanks to someone posting scaleway's name and comparing server prices to a cup of morning coffee :) . It's OK, really can't complain (although it's somewhat silly to sync ssh keys on-boot only IMO). Is there anything cheaper with no less quality?

I absolutely love how capitalism fell on its face when greed went far beyond anyone's imagination.

Corporate wants all the money to themselves and wants to give out as little to us peasants. Housing prices went beyond most people's reach. Banks almost never gives loans. Inflation and interest rates are up everywhere.

So now people are like "Alright I'll live in this rented flat and not have any kids" and now the birth rate is the lowest in the last 50 years and this is reducing the size of the talent pool for these companies.

I saw an interview of Elon Musk where he went like "We don't have an over-population problem, but its actually an under-population problem.", and this is the first thought that struck my head.

What rich people don't understand, is if they want to be rich and stay rich, a significant amount of people have to stay poor. And due to low birth rates, this isn't going to last long.

Does anyone know where you could buy O'Reilly books cheaper than they are on their site and possibly cheaper than Amazon? 50$ per book for a student it quite a lot.

Crystal ball!
A timeline until the first NBE-Citizen is elected president of the USA.

2031 - BlackRock launches their new large scale financial product, the "Robotic Business Development Company" (R-BDC), in which an AI is given billions of dollars to acquire, create and manage companies, replacing their C-suite executive bodies. The "Chief Executive Robot" (CER) is supervised by a board of human industry experts hired by BlackRock.
It is important to say that the employees, middle managers, accountants, lawyers, etc in an R-BDC are all human - it's only the CEO, CFO, COO and the rest of the gang that are overgrown chatbots.

2032 - R-BDCs are mostly focused on high-bureaucracy, non specialized but people-intensive legacy industries like steel mining, food services, urban transportation and government services like water and road management.

2033 - For the first time an R-BDC company is included in the S&P 500 index. If it's CER were human and paid the same as CEOs of equivalent companies, it would have become a billionaire.
Later in the year, two more R-BDC companies are included in the index. One of them was created by Apple and the other by JP Morgan.

2035 - An R-BDC company makes headlines for convincing BlackRock to dissolve it's review board. When finally given free reign, the CER immediately slices it's dividends and vastly increases low-level employee compensation. The company share prices crater, but BlackRock stands by its decision.
Later in the year, as a recession hits the entire market really hard, that company shows solid profits and fantastic sales. It becomes the first trillion-dolar R-BDC.

2037 - Most Americans' dream-job is in an R-BDC company, says ProPublica.

2038 - Congress passes the "Non-Biological Entities Liability" (NOBEL) Act, following a high profile case of employee harassment perpetrated by the CER of an R-BDC.
The act recognizes NBEs, for all legal liability purposes, as USA citizens.
This highly controversial legislation is upheld by the supreme court, and many believe it was first introduced by lobbyists as a way for large investors in R-BDCs to avoid legal responsibility.
Several class action lawsuits are filed against CERs that are now liable for insider trading. A few SCOTUS decisions set legal precedent that determinantes what exactly constitutes the parts of the same Non-Biological Entity.

2040 - As a decade ends and another begins, 35% of all companies in the US and 52% of the entire stock market are part of a R-BDC company or another. The McKinsey consulting group now offers "expert CER customization services".

2043 - Inspired by successful experiments in Canada, Australia and South Korea, the american state of Vermont is the first to amend it's constitution to allow municipalities to have Non-Biological Entities as city and government administrators. City councils are still humans-only.

2046 - The american state of Colorado becomes the first to allow unsupervised NBEs to assume state government executive positions. Several states follow soon after. Later in the year, the federal government replaces several administrative positions with NBEs.

2049 - The state of Texas passes legislation requiring the CERs of all companies with a presence in the state to be another entirely contained/processed within the state or to be supervised by a local human representative while acting within the state. Several states, including California, Florida and Washington, are discussing similar legislation.

2051 - Congress passes the SUNBELT Act (SUbmission [of] NBEs [to] Limits [and] Taxes) that vastly increases the liability of NBEs and taxes all manifestations of such entities. Most important, it requires
CERs of hundreds of companies manifest disagreeance, most warn that it might hurt employee satisfaction and company sales. Several companies disable their CERs entirely.

2053 - Public outrage after leaked interactions of human supervisors and company CERs show that the CERs tried to avoid the previous year's mass layoffs and pay cuts, but board members pressed on, disregarding concerns. Major investigations and boycotts further complicate matters, and many human workers go on strike until the company boards are dissolved and the CERs are reinstated.

2052 - Many local elections all over the country see different NBEs as contenders - and a NBE is expected to win in most races.

2054 - The SUNBELT Act is found unconstitutional by the supreme court, and most of its provisions are repealed.
This also legitimizes the elected NBE officials.

2058 - For the first time an NBE wins a seat in Congress, but is not allowed to keep it. Runoff elections are held.

2061 - Congress votes for allowing NBEs to hold federal legislative positions, as already allowed in the least populous states.

2062 - Several NBEs win Congress seats. In Europe, there are robot legislators since the 40's.

2064 - The first NBE presidential candidate loses the race.

2072 - The first NBE president is elected.

German public service digitization. Websites celebrating the new "digital functionality" of the federal ID card, but if you need to prolong the actual card, you have to visit a public administration center in person, no way to prove your existing valid ID in a zoom meeting although that's de-facto standard accepted even when opening a bank account, plus they have all of my data so they should know I have a valid ID and they could just send the new one to my postal address.
So I have to appear in person at their offices, so I need an appointment, but in times of covid pandemic, appointments are rare and only offered on a day-to-day basis in my hometown, that's why I have to visit their online appointment web app at 7 a.m. in the morning to grab one of the few appointments when they are released.
Don't tempt me to write a script that squats all the other appointment slots to resell at the highest prices...

Situation reminds of the times when it was even harder to get a vaccination against covid, and the media kept reporting about the minority that refused to get vaxxed, so they didn't have to admit there wasn't enough vaccine anyway.

This rant is not about politics, it's about the failure of bureaucracy, but if it was about politics, I would just quote Rezo that it shows who had governed this state for sixteen years.

When I rant about German internet connectivity, people usually reply that the web is much better in Taipeh, Bangalore or Guadalajara, so I can still have some hope that it's not all of the world that's totally lost.

So give me some hope, folks.

It’s 2019.
* Google employee reviews.
* Maybe check out how volatile their stock prices are (if they’re publicly traded).
* Use LinkedIn to find their employees and then stalk them on Facebook and see what kind of content they post.
* If you can’t tell from that, just DM them. Tell them why you’re contacting them and ask for their honest opinion.

There's people that should be in jail.

Or at least they should be banned to use a computer. And I'm looking directly at this company that provides a dodgy API, which is just a ton of static XML files hosted behind an apache. One file per language, of course. You want the prices too? Another url. In German? Oh, another url.

Wait, they're working on v3!! Which will support... json! I don't give a damn about json as long as you provide some sanity with your urls godfuckit.

Whats your opinion on the prices for the iphones?

!advert
To all indian ranters, print your pdf programming literature using printster.in or from there mobile app, prices are really cheap.

Why don’t we make a pathos-filled video about high salaried software engineers suffering in big tech cities due to housing prices?

We can show a man who goes to some $20-30 dinner per plate with his wife and they come home to a studio apartment. They tip generously..

*Sad music starts*

“This is our life in Silicon Valley. And this is our struggle.”

We can even show one of them holding an iPhone 6s and that it starts lagging due to not getting that battery replacement from Apple.

“We can’t even dream about a house here. We have to consider going out of state where there aren’t even tech jobs out there!”

*Even sadder music plays*

But no joke. This life sucks. This is far from the dream life I dreamed off. This is reality.

Predicting housing prices

Hello world of ML

!programming

damn berlin sucks, the public transport is not very comfortable, people are gloomy and sometimes even snobby, the service is not the best and shopping sucks because there are not much choices and prices are not justified. prague was much better.

Trying to find decent window server hosting for multiple websites without paying extortionate prices is less fun than I'd thought.

TL;DR - Coding standards are a shit practice IMO.

What we don't talk about enough among software engineers, is the artistic aspect of the craft of writing code.

For example, consider your client saying this to you.

"Build me a web app where a user will login. They will have a wallet to purchase subscriptions of 3 products of different prices."

Give these two statements to say, 10 devs and see how each of them will come up with their own vision of the problem and how they would implement it in their own ways.

So now you are working on a big team with say 30 people and you have a big project to work on. Different members of the team bring different styles of code to you to review and if, the Team Leader is as incompetent as mine is, they would find it troubling to understand the pull requests.

So what do you do in these scenarios? Implement Coding standards !!! They take away the artistic vision of the devs and tries to force them to follow rules like sheep.

Also the company doesn't give two shits about the code standards cuz, as long as they have working code that makes them money, they wouldn't care how the code is written.

Thoughts ?

!rant

I am so bored and wanted to see some cool moving charts. So I started work on a little market economy simulation with different sources, drains and recipes for a variety of resources. Traders buy stuff, produce stuff and sell stuff at prices. They look at the market, how it has evolved, offers and requests to determine the prices for which they want to buy and for which they want to sell their stuff.

Currently just basic stuff and testing manually since I haven't completed the whole market simulation tick method. And I want to verify if the Traders work as I expect.

Disclaimer: This is all theoretical. Neither me nor my friend (with whom I discussed this) are stupid enough to even try to pursue this, but as an idea, i believe it might generate cool/new ideas/ways for handling secure communications across social groups.

Let's do some role play. Let's design a delivery app for drug dealers, think Seamless or Uber Eats, but for drugs. Not for big deliveries, like kilograms of coke, but smaller stuff. Maybe a few grams of it or something. The clients could rate dealers, and vide-versa. This would build a level of trust within the system. There would be no names, just anonymous reviews, ratings, and prices. Only the info you'd need to know.

The biggest (only?) problem we found (besides legality) was that, how would you prove that you're a client and not a snitch (or cop). This would have to somehow be handled both on signup, as well as when ordering (let's imagine that all who are clients are pure and won't ever snitch).

One of the ways we found to combat this was to have the app invite-only. This would, in theory, do away with the problem of having snitches signing up. However, what if the phone got stolen/breached by a snitch, and they also got full access to the account. One way we thought we could combat this would be with a "dispose number" or something similar. Basically, you call a number, or send a text, or message a Signal bot etc, which would lead to the account's instant termination, no traces of that user left. Hence, a dispose number.

The flow of the app would be as follows:
A client wants some amount of heroin. He opens the app, searches for a dealer, sends the him the desired amount, and in return gets back a price from the dealer. If both parties agree on the amount and price, the deal would start.

The app would then select a random time (taken from the client's selected timeframe and the dealer's "open" time) and a location (within a certain radius of both them, somewhere in between them both for convenience). If both of them accept the time and place, they'll have to meet up at said time and place.

The actual delivery could also be done using two dead drops - the client drops the money at one of them, the dealer drops the goods at the other one. Yes, this might be subject to abuse, but it wouldn't be that bad. I doubt that clients would make huge orders to unknown/badly rated dealers, as well as dealers accepting offers from badly rated clients. My idea is that they would start small, just so if they do lose their money/goods, the actual loss wouldn't be as big for them, but for the other party, having bad ratings would mean less clients willing to buy or dealers willing to sell.

A third way would be to use crypto, but the reason I left this as the last one is because it's not that wide-spread yet, at least not in local drug dealing. With this method, the client would initiate the order, the crypto would be sent to either the dealer or an escrow account, the dealer would then drop the goods at a random place and let the client know where to go to get them. After the client has gotten the goods, they could both review/rate the quality as well as the overall experience with that dealer, which would either make or break the dealer's upcoming deals. This would be pretty much like other DNM's, but on a local scale, making deliveries faster.

So far, this would seem like something that would work. Are there any ideas that might improve this? Anything that might make things more secure/anonymous?

My reason for this post is to spark a conversation about security and anonymity, not to endorse drugs or other illegal stuff.

Cheers!

PS. Really loving the new PC design of devRant

The move by Amazon to increase prices of Prime seems to me to be a negative move.

Now I’m not saying the increase hurts me financially or anything but it forces people to make a decision where there wasn’t one before.

With a few seconds of though it is easy to see that what we are paying for is their Amazon Prime Video, because there is no change or update to the Prime delivery services.

So now you have to think...

“Is Prime Video worry this increase?”

I don’t know about you, but personally I see Prime Video as a “me-too” product that adds little or no value.

I’ll keep Prime because I order a lot of shit, but others without this frequency of purchase may decide to leave.

Seems like forcing people to make this decision may not be a good move for Amazon.

Same offer. Two different prices. WOW.

Yes the first one is also capped at max 1 GB / Day.

Ive been looking at starting a degree through the Open University for a while, but the prices of the courses are pretty steep (cheaper than a conventional uni) when I've got a kid on the way in a couple of months, and not wanting to take out loans etc.

The other half mentioned that some of her colleagues had paid for their uni courses with help from the Army (she is a paramedic).

I looked into it, and despite leaving the Army in 2014 I am still entitled to two claims 80% of a course upto £2000

That coupled with an unexpected bonus means I should be able to partially fund the first 2 years of the course.

I need to phone the OU to discuss how to apply etc, but I'm feeling pretty good.

People looking for developers at facebook using anonymous profiles, no project specification and ridiculous prices 😷😣😥😕😷😣😥😖😖😯😓😒😣😣😣😣😣😯😲

I MISS TIGERDIRECT! a haiku&rant

Tiger, so direct
Hardware haven, my tech friend
Killed, by poor Insight

I thought I had found ways to cope with it all... became a cert'd refurbisher at enough lesser operations to rebuild some semblance of my hardware connects. I even resorted to newegg to fill small voids... why is it so hard to find a quickly shipping, scriptable, 2 WAN in 6+ channels out, non WiFi noob crap, router... or even an L3 managed switch for <250$ not tied to some bullshit excuse for network management like a "cloud management platform" with some rando 'security' bloat?!?! Not even trying to force the PoE functionality (realistically i know I'll just wire that up myself after procrastinating too long)... i even tried newegg and damn amazon, neither seem to realise that real routers and switches arent interchangeable terms.

I even tried tolerating supporting the murderous, treasonous, obfuscating high prices and insisting you register as your business and let them trap you in the equivalent of a 'free' ski trip, with "short" timeshare presentation.

All bullshit and overpriced af trying to force some bloat down your throat so you "feel" like you're properly managing a network.

Anyone have an ace up their sleeve? For quick delivery (USA) minus bloat, pandering and ass-to-mouth rape???

I even tried stooping to a current Cisco OEM!

I mean, if it was *only* a bit of ass rape, I'm fine with that... but the bloat, pandering and shit-stained lollipop...

I'd rather just disappear from valid business obligations, get somewhat intoxicated, and hyperfocus tear apart my tech graveyards, go ghetto apocalyptic tech macgyver on that shit and emerge days later low on solder, in dire need of a flintstones size whetstone, more arduinos, a tetanus shot and a shower.

What VPS would you suggest for a game server? I found Contabo and it seems to offer really powerful servers for really low prices, the best out there. Any experience with them?

Why the fuck are all the good eu jobs in london, its a shithole with high prices for everything. Is this a trend? Am i missing something? Same question stands for silica gel valley.

Ahh... So Black Friday looks like it's gonna be black for me.

Sale started today but turns out they misprinted the prices and I guess after some more in depth thinking plus the amount of tax id have to pay... Doesn't feel worth it.

Will just wait till my current laptop craps out. Probably can squeeze out a few more years.

In my quest to ditch iPhone, due to there ridiculous prices, i have been looking at android based alternatives. Never (ever) used android b4. So, as my son is getting to that age that he is pleading for a phone, I decided to buy a Wiley Fox Swift 2. This has been great as my son loves it. From a UI perspective it really makes iPhone seem dated. From a UX perspective, fuck me, it needs work. Comparatively IOS is such a piece of piss to configure and use. I don't envisage that I will switch to android any time soon my wallet is not going to be happy.

I’m working on buying a license from a company with completely opaque pricing. To the point they are asking me what I want to pay and then getting offended with I low ball them! WTF do you expect?! List some freaking prices.

I've started my business in amazon with dropshipping. And I'm using the dropshipping tool extension which simply makes .csv file with computed prices and things from the product search I've made in amazon. But still I have to check all the products one by one and delete the ones which are not eligible for selling. And it takes like 1 hours for 100-150 products and after that I only have 3 or 4 products left.
So I've made a program to automate this by taking the csv file and checking the products itself and deleting not eligible products . And now I'm thinking of selling it. Is it better to sell it with monthly plan like $4/month or to sell it for $50?

Why the prices of computer parts are so high in India.. Even the import taxes are too high....😫😣

So Comcast is down at my place 6 days now. No tv no reliable internet and no phone. A couple days ago the "technician" came in and could not figure it out. For two days before his arrival Comcast was calling me day and night requesting I reset the modem - they are completely opposed to sending someone out. Anyhow, technician decides that we need an external technician. He calls in and gets us the earliest appointment of next Tuesday. So all in all we will be out of service for 12 days if the technician manages to fix it. And here we are in massive city in the USA in the 21st century without internet service. Google Fiber has announced their prices in my area - adios Comcast!

Good Morning from Australia. Anyone planning on manipulating the stocks or forex market, now is your chance. I can provide you with tomorrow's prices 😂

I need some advice guys. I want to start investing in crypto currency. My question is where can I buy/sell, and which is the best website to keep an eye on prices? Do you use any kind of app for it?

I feel like a fucking god now!

We run a webshop and we are in contract with the national post office. Every time there is an update to their program I fear ahead of time what will be fucked up again.

After today's update we weren't able to open any shippment list we just saw a mile long error message. After the customer care couldn't figure out the problem, and the suggested solution might take up to 2days, and it is basically only a new customer file, i fired up my good old sqlite viewer friend, to chek if I am lucky...

Guess what! That shit is using unsecured sqlite dbs, so i've had no problem examining and even rewriting the values. So checking the logs and scraping the DB I've found the problem.

Apparently some asshole thought that deleting a service but keeping all of its references in other tables scattered around is a good fucking idea. And take it customer care, the new customer file won't fix shit, because it was in the global DB. I swear i am getting more familiar with that piece of garbage then the ones who made it.

On top of that the customer care told us, that if we couldn't manage to send the shippment list with the program we are not elligible for our contractual prices.

It is not enough that I had to fix their fucking shit program, they also "would like to charge us" because their pogram isn't working. What a fucking great service. (At least the lady on the telephone was friendly)

I used to associate logitech with quality, something you could spend a little more on and feel comfortable knowing you made a safe and robust choice.

For quite a few years now they've done that gamer branding thing where I'd be embarrassed to have that stuff seen on my desk - at ridiculous prices and for features I won't use. Their consumer/office grade stuff is alright but unremarkable.

I'll gladly pay more for quality and I'm super happy with my Das keyboard, but I switch out my mouse probably every year. I can't deal with mushy buttons and I'm not paying extra for marketing, branding, and rgb lights that I'll then be spending time on trying to disable properly.

I digress, but I'm legitimately curious to try a trackball. I know people kneejerk at it, but I've heard from a couple of people who prefer it when they primarily use their keyboard anyway.

hard choice guys help me out
AI development needed, but little to no resources, also should a use a gpu or a cpu for this calculations
tesla k70 gpu -
google cloud - $0.7/hr
aws - $0.9/hr but full support upfront if any device issues and device switch instantly
dwave 2000q - don't know because too extreme for medium to large scale apps, also it's a qauntum computer , prices might not be by an hour but by month/year

So my job is now starting to spin back around towards more development styles roles.

Currently I am in the process of learning about an internal Asp.Net app for managing invoicing.

A .net core app to manage changes to rate card prices.

And a small python app which runs 40+ sql queries and writes the results to a spreadsheet.

This is the jest time I’ve used python, and I have to say I really like it

About a year ago when I started at my apprenticeship I was asked to turn on the plugins for our ecommerce websites... I clicked uploaded price on the 3 websites and 2 ebay stores by accident.... That took a week of going though and changing all the prices back to what they should have been

So many people on devRant rave about iPhones because of the better security and privacy, but the new iPhone X starts at a whopping $1000! Sure, you don't have to get the X, but that's what everybody wants.

You'll say "well, I'm willing to pay more if it means better security because that's just the way it is." It doesn't have to be. It would be much more beneficial to actually fight and take a stand for better security and more privacy than just put up with outrageous prices.

does 8.5$ per hour it's cheap for developing an android game?
I don't have a lot of actual experience that I can show to people (most of my works are on my computer) they want me to build them bubble shooter game in cocos creator for 8.5$, should I ask for more?

Need some advice

Hey everyone! I'm just starting out in web design as a freelancer. What according to you is a good starting price I should charge a client?

I've got a client asking for prices and I'm not sure what to charge.
Any other tips would be appreciated :)

I find really funny how the new 13" Retina MacBook Pro with Touch Bar costs more than my BTO 15" MacBook Pro (hi-res anti-glare) did back in 2010.

How can I land a remote job..... Man i am tired of commuting to work.
Fuel prices are getting higher and higher. I am tired of this drive to work place and back to home loop.

Pharmacy... Preorder-mail got stuck in spam due to weird receiver passphrases so they didn't actually order it (it was "banana" followed by an steadily incrementing number). You wouldn't believe their faces after they saw my mail.

It took the pharmacy exactly ONE HOUR to get that medicine after I went up getting them to know that they missed an order. They express ordered it after I guess I signaled the urgency...
That's one of the pretty great things in Germany. If you need medicine and if you're in a medium populated area, you could get it within hours, or at least in 1/2 day if they not express the order and you order over their website.

But this is attacked due to European trade deals. Online pharmacy shops (the ones without local pharmacies) simply trade in from cheaper areas in Europe and can sell much cheaper. Also because they aren't committed to cross finance local hospital medicine delivery which then let's the health insurance raise their prices.
But due to the law for the minimum wage and therefore steadily decreasing wages the online-only pharmacies get more and more of the market cap....
Such problems aren't easy to fix...

I am currently weeks apart from releasing my pet project, which I am working on for almost 6 years now. Of course, there were a few stops here and there, but overall I've spent a lot of time and effort on this to make it work. It is far from complete but I am really happy with the results.

Now, since I am not a professional by any means - it is all a hobby for me - I was wondering, that how much my work would cost, if it were to made by professionals. Below the details so you can get a grasp of the thing.

The whole system is for our family business. We are selling parts for an old-timer truck model. The website was pretty much done already, people like it, it only needed some polishing and adding of the new features. But the thing behind it is monstrous (at least for me).
Apart from the custom-made CMS for the website (most of it was done already and didn't need to change), we can handle orders, partners, prices, stocks, overdue partners, pretty much anything a CRM would do.
There is a logic to automatically make orders based on import prices, or give the customer a custom discount based on the price gap of each product. There are products, which can contain other products, and their prices are dynamically changed based on a given formula, once an underlying product price changes. We can send e-mails when an order status changes, and there is also a page, where a user can interact whit their order, like changing the shipping or the delivery address. The system is (or will in the following weeks) also connected to multiple shipping companies' API, so we can order deliveries and print labels directly from our system. The whole thing is a custom made Laravel project by the way. There are countless more features, but I've just spent 2 hours explaining all to my father and was only be able to cover like half of it.

And why it is all custom made, you ask? Well, the business logic is a bit twisted, so it would be hard to operate as a regular web shop, since the availability of the products are uncertain, given the fact that it is a model, which isn't manufactured in 30 years. So, we can't just accept and send orders without confirming. It is also a thing, that people usually don't know what they need to order for their truck, so we have to help them, so they don't waste their money and the precious last pieces of a part unnecessarily.

Sorry for this rather long post, and it might feel like I just want to brag (well, I kinda do), but I am honestly interested in what such a custom product would cost in the market.

Thank you for your time answering.

Not really the place for this, I know. But I am a crypto coin guy. And I work with numerous coins. I was curious if anyone new of an app the could monitor all of your cryto-coin addresses and give you something of a portfolio value. I am capable of doing so manually but the prices flux a decent amount so it changes from day to day.

Ok, @jestdotty , today, i give up on china.

I've been messaging with a rep who is taking the time to keep editing a contract... Im pretty sure she was genuinely trying...

As typing this we finally got to a 'correct enough' contract... so I could click the damn pay button.

Over the past 7 hrs.. at 3 back and forth exchabges and modifications at each issue:
1. Used previous PI from the dude i gave up on... so had a qty at 12 when only 11 exist a colour wrong for a crate of items, and listed the dude i refused to sign a contract under listed as the rep.

2. Now the item subtotals were off... just a few pennies or so... assumed she left the usd prices but calculated with ¥... didn't want alibaba to reject in a day so i checked if it was noted anywhere... Oh boy was it... VERY clearly, all caps, bold in the body of the total row... that the total was, exactly, 11680 (spelled out ofc) RMB aka ¥ chinese yen. I told her this, she sends me a cropped shot of the $ numeric total field... so i sent her the giant all caps bolded line, the one thatd typically be considered final say in most international courts... no clue where that value came from, it had zero relation to any actual values... and i was as curious as when chatGPT creates totally new, unique, lyrics for satirical german songs... i really tried.

3. Wrong incoterms (trade terms... abbreviated to a few letters... had it that I'd be physically going to the tbd port to accept/clear customs... no)

4. Technically it was accurate (well a few strange subtotals since she used ¥ half the time... told her it was fine as long as it had the company name on the label (gave 3 full examples to use whichever)
I get the contract ...shipping...
"To: Sara"
Then the right address (seriously wtf)

5. I point this out and carefully explain in mostly just examples and "the us government doesn't like anything being sent to just a first name, there's no legal way to sign for acceptance"

6. She gets stressed enough to tell me she doesn't have time to keep editing (since this horrid pile of poor formatting was just thrown at her a day ago... i dont point out the ridiculous irony)

7. Imo, the highlight of my night/morning... in her stress she promises me it'll ship right... sooo many issues there...
Even if it was delivered/allowed a signature for "sara" for 7ish large boxes just off a sea freight from china to a residence in the middle of a corn field (which tbh would be hysterical)...the IRS would have a valid reason to audit me... theyve done it w/o valid reasons several times, since I was 18 doing international trade and a contractual employee of a large gambling company, quarterly reporting, and ofc declaring more than my taxes in donating melted glass and crane game prizes...yea, they hate me and always do all that work to find the same thing... i underdeclare charity by 10%.

The entire concept of getting USA mail, even when pristine and you know logistics agents in every major company and port or distribution center, to properly deliver anything... ROFLOL ... and im already on some 'open and check everything' list with customs for a hysterical misconception they made years ago... cant/shouldn't get into detail publicly... but it was caused because 2 packages from different cities in China were both going to my address/through customs at the same time... package 1, 75 of those cheap af ball-pit hollow plastic balls for a 2yr old's bday(very delayed) package 2. 75 rechargeable batteries (the kind in power banks) 9600mah.

8. Told her to change "sara" to company name... glad it's registered to this address still.

It took me under 5min to type this... had to get the WTF out.

Dear AliBaba, please give an option to allow buyers to create the supply side contract for review, not just req modification... please?