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Is it practically impossible for a newcomer selfhost without using centralised services, and get DDOSed or hacked?

I understand that people enter the world of self hosting for various reasons. I am trying to dip my toes in this ocean to try and get away from privacy-offending centralised services such as Google, Cloudflare, AWS, etc....

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If your needs are fairly low on the processing side, you can snag a cloud VPS on LowEndBox for five or six dollars a month. Quality is highly variable ofc, but I’m reasonably my happy with mine.

No AWS, etc (though I don’t know offhand where the actual box lives), SSH access defaults to a key, and the rest (firewall, reverse proxy if you like, and all the other best practices) are but an apt-get away and a quick searxng to find and dissect working configs.

Incidentally, searxng is a good place to start- dead easy to get rolling,and a big step towards degoogling your life. Stand it up, throw a pretty standard config at nginx, and do a certbot —nginx -d search.mydomain.com - that all there is to it.

YMMV with more complex apps,but there is plenty of help to be had.

Oh…. Decide early on if anonymity is a goal,or you’re ok tying real life identity to your server if someone cares to look. Register domains and make public facing choices accordingly.

Either choice is acceptable if it’s the right one for you, but it’s hard to change once you pick a path.

I’m a big fan of not hosting on prem simply because it’s one more set of cables to trip over, etc. But for a latte a month in hosting costs, it’s worth it to me.

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After you spend down your allotted PTO, yes.

Mildly surprised that someone in a position at that level wouldn’t have at minimum short term disability coverage, at least as an option. It’s hardly expensive.

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Visible is wholly owned by VZW, and runs a whole $30/mo inclusive of tax and such.

Best compromise I’ve found between network and not getting screwed or being surprised with outages.

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I support accounting professionals using one of perhaps four or five highly complex pieces of software that handles individual, corp, trust, and other misc tax forms

The churn rate is very low YoY, because it’s what they know. They have the freedom to move their data, and we will help them to the extent possible, but at most they’ll get a subset of client data and lose the ability to query agai t prior year datasets, etc.

They’re not locked in, but between 10/15 and, say, 2/15 is a damn short time to implement and learn a new piece of software with that level of complexity.

Interestingly, I’ve never seen a long-standing calculation bug in the program. The overwhelming majority of support is d/t user error or data entry error. From that standpoint, there is of course a financial incentive for it to work well - arithmetic errors would be unacceptable - but in terms of UI/UX, no one cares and if anything were improved folks would just whine about the change anyway - even if it made their life easier

Not a CPA/not your CPA, just a software guy who got lucky enough to be in the right time/place when I decided I didn’t have the energy for the startup world anymore.

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To wit, WorkDay is universally regarded as trash. But companies keep writing checks, so employees on both sides of the time clock have to keep tolerating it

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As long as the reports that the C-suite gets look pretty, that’s all that matters. Have seen that one from both sides.

“I need five developer hours to implement a UI for this manual process that is time sensitive and exposes us to significant risk if we screw it up. Oh, and I’m the only one who knows how to do it in prod, so we have a bus problem.”

“Nah, I want reports…. Wait, why did we write an HO4 policy in Corpus Christie, AFTER the hurricane warning was issued?”

“See above, and prioritise things that matter.”

___ OP ,

I don’t disagree, just not sure why there’s always a cost associated with it. No one benefits from the $5 net I pay, and it’s just one more (costly) admin step.

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It’s not a physical card always, it behaves like a secondary insurance payor, and if a $5k drug is covered for $2.5k by insurance, the card writes down the difference to $5 (as far as the patient is concerned).

Not unlike goodrx in principle, but specific to a drug.

___ OP ,

Nobody is buying the med I have in mind out of pocket, in any world. Orphan drug, rare condition, and six figures a year.

Not to suggest your scenario doesn’t happen - it absolutely does. But I’m more curious about why I have to deal with a tiny company when they’re already eating a couple of grand a month on it.

___ OP ,

None of is trustworthy. Mine is $$$$, and they know damn well insurance won’t pay it all. Of course, if the FDA didn’t require a single source pharmacy to ship it with all the infrastructure that entails, it would help, but only marginally.

Nightmare of a system even for relatively healthy folks. The older I get, the angrier I get because the people who most need the help are the ones either in enough pain they can’t nav the system, or old enough they don’t know where to start

___ OP ,

I’m mildly curious to see what happens in the next month or two, as I’m about to hit my OOP max. Never ran into that combo of scenarios before.

The one I’m thinking of has a couple months “bridge” program for uninsured/just started new job/etc, but very time limited and an even bigger hassle as they’ll only send out two weeks instead of a month supply with each shipment.

IIRC, if I had insurance and it explicitly excluded the drug, the card would cover it, but it’s been a couple years since I left that job so memory isn’t clear.

___ OP ,

Unfortunately not an option for specialty and niche drugs. Wish it was, I’d rather him get a cut than a certain PBM

___ OP ,

Ironically, there are two newer formulations and the older soon to be authorised generic. My PBM in their infinite wisdom doesn’t want to cover the cheaper one. My doc has yet to get a PA approved for anyone for the newest version, so I’m stuck with the version they foisted upon us as soon as original exclusivity expired “because sodium raises BP,” and the newer one is salts with other metals.

Funny how they didn’t figure that out years ago……

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Lord, we can only hope.

Getting both generic and specific models shoved down my throat by $multiNationalCorp on a daily basis is exhausting.

If I write an email that annoys someone and costs the company money, I’m thrilled to bits to own it and admit I fucked it up. But I dont have the time or energy to make sure that AI isn’t turning a reasonable email into something rage-inducing just by missing an obvious nuance. I’m certainly not hanging the quality of my code on the strength of an AI “helper.”

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I’m just now unravelling the last of the truly important bits of my life that are in their clutches, for that and other reasons.

Two phone numbers, a handful of documents I’ve shared over the years that probably don’t matter anyway, and a couple email addresses that I’ve been actively monitoring for months for anything important, and searches my password mgr for….

I should be free by 1 July at the outside, possibly a few days early if I don’t delay the actual deletion process. Feels fuckin great.

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I’ve used TimeTrex in the past. For my needs “, it was overly complex.

This is one of those areas where I’d think long and hard about self hosting, if you’re doing more than tracking your own hours.

Lots of compliance risk here, and transferring some of that risk to the payroll company is part of what one pays for with those services.

In my case, I just needed to substantiate invoices for a couple of clients I contracted for, and I was strictly paying myself and once in a blue moon my wife.

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Just too easy to get over a barrel trying to DIY it, and the first time ya screw it up, you lose a ton of credibility with employees which also has a great deal of value.

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Will take a look - I’ve been kicking around the possibility of writing something quick and dirty to track my rapidly growing fountain pen hobby, what ink is in which pen, grade/size of paper on hand, and the like.

I’d much prefer using something that exists already, less distraction with design choices and bugs = more time to enjoy the hobby itself.

How do I explain two years of doing nothing to a university for masters?

Ever since I’ve graduated on September 2022, I’ve not had a job. Maybe a crappy internship, but I wasn’t provided with a ‘certificate’, or letter that proves if I’ve worked for them. That was around October 2022, and I quit voluntarily at the end of January 2023. Since then, I’ve not worked anywhere as a software...

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Agree - I’m mid 40s with both deep and broad experience, US based so no picture or irrelevant biographical bits, and I still absolutely cringe at the idea of sending out 2-3 page resume/CV.

Could I reasonably fill that space with relevant and compelling information? Sure.

Do I think anyone would read it? Not a chance.

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Ante

Not anti.

Lunatics, through and through. Not even well educated lunatics. Just garden-variety crazies.

And people wonder why I don’t Facebook.

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Presently, my Fediverse presence is mostly self-hosted by one definition or another. This Lemmy instance lives on my server, and my Masto is hosted by a company dedicated to exactly that because it’s dirty cheap and one fewer thing for me to worry about.

Looking to add to the list.

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