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This is a view from a rooftop in NYC that I sometimes get the pleasure to work from. I really like the view and it’s pretty quiet usually. It also overlooks one of my favorite buildings, the Empire State Building.
I’m looking forward to seeing everyone else’s desks, setups, and remote/outdoor workspaces.
We’ll be featuring them on our recently launched devRant Instagram account, devDesks (https://www.instagram.com/devdesks).
35 -
We're excited to announce the first devRant-sponsored hackathon! It features everything we could have dreamed of in a hackathon: huge prizes ($10k to first place and others), an awesome beer-themed dev competition from lead sponsor Anheuser-Busch, lots of free beer, and an awesome setting at Alley in Chelsea NYC (devRant's hometown, we'll be there!)
It's taking place right here in NYC from March 25-26 and @trogus and I will be there and we really hope we can hang out with members of the devRant community who are participating. devRant is an official partner of the hackathon and we're very excited about the competition itself. There are two challenges teams can pick from: "Internet of Things" (Raspberry Pi’s, Arduinos, etc.) and "Data Insights" - both with the goal of finding creative solutions/innovations to help people drink more beer!
Tim and I look forward to hopefully seeing many of you there. Full details and registration here: https://hacktheworld.beer/NYCHackat...
Please let us know if you have any questions and let's hack some beer!
P.S. the hackathon is 21 years and older only because of the beer theme
46 -
That moment when you come across other devRant lover while walking and then he requests you if he can take your picture! Thanks @dfox for this picture! Haha
7 -
Hey everyone! @trogus and I are headed to TechDay New York tomorrow (May 10) and there will be a devRant booth in the social network section. If any devRanters are attending, you should definitely stop by our booth! There will be free swag and we’d love to meet some fellow ranters!37
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I have a couple of stories that I think are memorable from co-workers quitting in funny/interesting ways.
1. At one of the first companies I worked at, they gathered everyone to make an announcement that began with, “this is just a reminder, any heavy objects/packages need to be removed through the freight elevators, and cannot be taken through the main lobby.” We’re all thinking OK... why are you telling us this. Next part of the announcement was, “so and so (co-worker) is no longer with the company.” Apparently, which we found out later, the guy either quit/and/or got fired and wheeled his desk chair out the front door through the lobby (keep in mind this is an office on one of the busiest avenues in Manhattan). The whole thing was crazy. That’s the last we ever heard about him.
2. This one was strange. A really quiet dev at one of my previous companies was clearly constantly bored at work (he barely had any responsibility and was pretty much ignored) but the job was pretty cushy. One day, he was out from work, and no one thought much of it. Then he was out another day, then another, and before we knew it, it was like a week. No one knew where he was. Eventually, he sent an email saying he got stuck out of he country or something and he wouldn’t be coming back. Ok... weird, but kind of made sense.
But, one of our ops guys was able to see the ip/location of where he logged on to send the email, and it was right from NYC! So pretty much this guy was just fed up, left one day (with no notice), and just never came back. And then lied that he was out of the country when trying to explain is hasty departure.11 -
New devRant energy drinks we'll be handing out at our booth at Techcrunch Disrupt NYC next Tuesday. Swing by and meet Team devRant (me and @dfox)!
10 -
Tonight I was getting ready to pay my monthly apartment maintenance bill so I Googled my property management company's name because I always forget the url. It's always the first result, but I noticed Google placed a little "This site may be hacked." line of text on their listing.
Seeing that before and knowing what it means, I went into the source for their index page, and to my suspicion, their WordPress installation was hacked with the standard invisible spam links.
I realize this happens to a lot of WordPress blogs, but this is an NYC property management company that is responsible for a lot of buildings and has millions of dollars in contracts. Normally I would inform them, but having dealt with them in the past I don't like them very much, but more importantly, I don't think they'd understand what I was saying because they are so technically inept. They might even think that because I found this, that I had something to do with it.
So devRant, it is up to you. What should I do?
22 -
Went to hackathon @ Google HQ in NYC. Gotta say it was pretty shitty. Most people are JavaScript nerds and some code in objective-C, xcode (4-5 out of 50). The rest are chemists, scientists and general folks. Not what I anticipated when you know it's more like iOS hackathon. Anyways it was good to see the shittiest demos in my life made in less than 12 hours. We had 4.5 people working on a toilet project called "I gotta go". Public bathroom locator... One guy coded in JS, xcode and react Native. Another dude was pushing all the code to GitHub and doing backend in firebase. The third guy was making a website for no reason and then I see it's hosted weebly. He hand coded first, I looked what he is doing - just HTML tags. Thank God some organizers helped us and we had a 4 click demo with basic text and no real functionality. Plus the website who never seen. What a fucking waste of $100 and two days.4
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A few years ago I started a profile on a social media app to share programming endeavors and humor.
After a year or so I became somewhat close with the ~20 subscribers out of my ~1000 that would always comment on my posts. We started a programming group chat and all hung out there, sharing stories, posting random pics, etc.
When I was interviewing with my current company, I shared all the details with the group and kept them up to date while they cheered me on and wished me luck. Once I got my offer everyone was ecstatic.
One friend in the chat remembered my company has an office in NYC, where they live, and asked if I could arrange a tour. I asked around and it seemed like it wouldn't work out, but just a few weeks later I was sent to the NYC office to collaborate with another team for a few weeks.
I let my friend know I would be in town, and when the time came - we met up, toured the NYC office, ate really good tacos, and enjoyed the city.
10/10 would friend again.2 -
*wrestling commentator voice*
"In this weeks episode of encoding hell:
The iiiinnnfamous UTF-8 Byte Order Mark veeeersus PHP!"
For an online shop we developed, there is currently a CSV upload feature in review by our client. Before we developed this feature, we created together with the client a very precise specification, including the file format and encoding (UTF-8).
After the first test day, the client informed us, that there were invalid characters after processing the uploaded file.
We checked the code and compared the customer's file with our template.
The file was encoded in ISO-8859-1 and NOT as specified UTF-8.
But what ever, we had to add an encoding check, thus allowing both encodings from now on.
Well well well welly welly fucking well...
Test day 2: We receive an email from said client, that the CSV is not working, again.
This time: UTF-8 encoding, but some fields had more colums with different values than specified.
Fucking hell.
We tell the customer that.
(I was about to write a nice death threat novel to them, but my boss held me back)
Testing day 3, today:
"The uploading feature is not working with our file, please fix it."
I tried to debug it, but only got misleading errors. After about 30 minutes, at 20 stacks of hatered, I finally had an idea to check the file in a hex editor:
God fucking what!?!!?!11?!1!!!?2!!
The encoding was valid UTF-8, all columns and fields were correct, but this time the file contained somthing different.
Something the world does not need.
Something nearly as wasteful as driving a monster truck in first gear from NYC to LA.
It was the UTF-8 Byte Order Mark.
3 bytes of pure hell.
Fucking 0xEFBBBF.
The archenemy of PHP and sane people.
If the devil had sex with the ethernet port of a rusty Mac OS X Server, then 9 microseconds later a UTF-8 BOM would have been born.
OK, maybe if PHP would actually cope with these bytes of death without crashing, that would be great.3 -
Met the two founders of devRant at NYC Union Square to give me the squishy ball, stickers, and tee in person 😁
7 -
Congrats to localhost for being the second devRant user ever to reach 1,000 points! I've greatly enjoyed his awesome posts and I know a ton of other people have too! Thanks for the laughs/great convo and I'm looking forward to an NYC meetup in May :)
4 -
Never thought I will be hired by Chinese software/hardware company located in NYC to code in languages I don't know so well. Instead of lying and saying I know everything about C, PHP and SQL, I said that I suck pretty much at everything, but I'm a quick learner and will study day and night to catch up with their practices. Now I see they have no regret about me, but I still suspect them in hiring me because there is another guy who is Russian too and we all communicate well. Our current squad is 17 Chinese, 2 Russians, 1 Americans. Guess what, I learn Mandarin quicker than PHP. Sometimes a small lie is OK, but sometimes honesty is better.3
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Good luck to team devRant at the TNW NYC conference today. We are sure you will make our global devRant community proud as always. Thanks for all you do!
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NYC meetup reminder! If you're in NYC, don't forget about the meetup tonight! It will be a great opportunity to meet fellow devRant users and he founders. We also have a few squishy balls to give out :)
We're meeting at Stout NYC (midtown). All the details here: https://www.devrant.io/meetup
You can email me at david@devrant.io with any questions.
Looking forward to seeing some devRanters there!
6 -
I forgot to git fetch, so I spent quite a while doing exactly WHAT MY TEAMMATE HAD DONE JUST HOURS AGO3
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I used to work for a Mexican bank in Mexico, as a developer I opened (and use) an account, since the bank was not famous(most of its business was with the government), going to the bank and see no waiting lines was an advantage, so I started using it as my only bank account even nowadays.
Now I live in NYC, and some years later I see on the news the bank merged(was absorbed) with another bank, 'sounds good, I don't care' I thought.
Well, I open my online account and the nightmare begins:
1) Redirection to the 2nd bank page
2) My credentials does not work
3) Call the original bank(no answers)
4) After several calls and days I got a phone contact
5) 'well, try all other passwords you have' (transaction passwords, operative passwords, login passwords, etc), among many other stupid answers, which by the way, were preceded by infinite question about the 2nd bank, like:
- when did you open the account with the 2nd bank?
- what is your 2nd bank account number
6) after 20 calls like that, they asked for documents, information and screenshots, and send all that to the 2nd bank tech help email.
7) After several days a person responded: 'Go to your bank(which fucking bank?)' and ask for a new user.
8) a ton of calls to know what bank I was assigned
9) called the bank: 'well, you have to come in person(no exceptions allowed) and request to close your 1st bank account and open a 2nd bank account' (I am not sure if that is gonna work)
All the technology nowadays and still I have to travel thousands of miles hoping this 'solution' works.
to be continue....2 -
Two places: At a major NYC firm, I was in charge of social media. I was also involved with an intranet community. Something went bad with the intranet community project politics and I got blamed for it even though I had emails to prove I hadn't said/done what I was accused of. But to assert their dominance, my bosses called me to their office, sat me in literally a corner of the room, and interrogated me for 2 hours. The only thing missing was the bright light in my eyes and the "good cop" part of the routine. I'm ashamed to say they "broke" me and I just gave up and did what they told me to do to "fix" it even though I hadn't done anything wrong. The bosses were old enough to be my parents, so I wonder how much of that worked its way into the psychology of it all.
The second toxic workplace was where each month the boss would come from his home by the beach to tell us plebes what new ideas he wanted us to work on. We would just get done reporting on the results of his delusions of grandeur from the month prior and he'd pull the rug out and start us on some new thing. Never got any consistent traction on anything. He was the ultimate seagull manager: fly in, make a lot of noise, poop all over everything, and leave us cleaning up the mess. Oh, and we had to change the locks because we had to fire a customer service guy who was a little bit on the ragey side of things. Because of high turnover, I had seniority within 4 months of starting there.1 -
Fuck NYC....just got hit with a fucking parking ticket for double parking. $115. *sigh* *pets cat in sadness*16
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I got stickers!!! B)
P.S. Only a week for NYC to Veliko Gradište, Serbia?! I'm pleasantly surprised!
6 -
In my last rant (https://devrant.com/rants/5523458/...) I regaled you lovely folks of how I had to diplomatically yet firmly defend my work/life boundaries during off-work hours for non-life threatening affairs (a frustratingly common occurrence), and concluded the thread by mentioning that I still had a job, but would make a note of my frustration of that for whatever exit interview happens.
Well, no need for those notes any longer.
I and half of the engineering force, along with several senior managers were laid off this morning in the form of a "mandatory on-site all hands".
I live and work in NYC. Several people took trains and booked rooms from as far away as Boston to be here (or at least I know of specifically two people who commuted up here on Sunday to be here for the "all hands"). I presume those people used their travel benefits to get here and back.
We were dismissed before the meeting even took place, and according to a coworker I became friends with (yes, despite my snarky comments in other threads, I *do* actually have coworkers I became friends with lol) who survived at least this round of layoffs, once the actual all-hands commenced, the company first disclosed the layoffs, then announced being awarded a major contract with the very client the entire org had been working on overdrive to win for the last nine months. He had already been looking for a new job and got an offer last Friday, had been mulling it over, but told me once we were off the phone he was calling them up and accepting. He had three people reporting to him, and lost two. Even he had no idea it was coming until one of his now-former subordinates asked him to come outside and told him they'd just been let go.
I knew going in to this startup that "it's a startup, anything can happen, just mind the gap". That's why I asked on numerous occasions and tried to get time with our CFO to ask about revenue and earnings; things that in my years at this place were never disclosed to the rank and file, I'm not a professional accountant or CPA by any means, but I did take a pair of corporate accounting classes in community college because I like the numbers (see my other rants about leaving the field and becoming a math teacher), and I was really curious to know how the financial health of the business was.
It wasn't so much a red flag as it was an orangish-yellow that no one ever answered those questions, or that the CFO was distant but not necessarily cagey about my requests for his time; other indicators were good while interviewing--they had multiple fully integrated, paying customers (one of which being a former employer from years ago, which aided me in having strong product familiarity during the job interview), but I guess not enough to be sustainable.
Anyway. I'm gonna use the rest of the week to be a bum, might get out of the city and go hang with friends Pittsburgh, eat some hoagies and just vibe for a while. I've got assets and money stashed up to float pretty easily for a while, plus a bit of fun money so losing the job isn't world ending. Generalized anxiety because everything is going to shit worldwide, but that quickly faded into the backdrop of the generalized anxiety I always have because existentialism or something like that.
Thanks for reading. Pay the teachers.5 -
Sounds too good to be true and it is
New York Councilman Proposes Bill That Would Grant NYC Workers 'Right To Disconnect'
"(...) advocating for the rights of employees to stop answering work-related emails and other digital messages, like texts, after official work hours. (...) got the idea from France, where a bill passed early last year by the Ministry of Labor requires companies of over 50 employees to define out-of-office email rules. (...) And the New York version of the "Right to Disconnect" bill includes exemptions for jobs that require 24-hour on-call periods."
source: https://m.slashdot.org/story/3387894 -
Is there a specific reason your company is called 'Hexical Labs'? If so, could you share the story of where it comes from?2
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Just spent an hour looking at the NYC Subway maps vs the direction Google wanted me to take.
Google found the most efficient way is to take E train then transfer to R which then goes back a bit like a U-turn to get to my stop.
Then looking at the subway map, I can just take the R train... Since none of these trains are express... How the fuck did Google think that A-B-C is faster than A-C....11 -
The program 'x' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing: sudo apt install x.
Wow, thanks! I didn't know! I've always wanted to know how to install programs with apt.10 -
A few years back, I was a newly hired developer visiting the corporate HQ in NYC. We went to lunch, where the execs ordered a round of drinks.
I commented that drinking during the work day was an odd practice in my experience. The CEO jokingly explained how it made going home to his wife at the end of the day easier (or something to that effect). “You know what I mean?”
To which I reply (with no hint of irony): “No… My life loves me.”
😎9 -
I really feel like coding right now, but I don't have time. Problem is: when I do have time and I have to code I probably don't want to anymore.
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Hey there! New here. Just found this app and it seems pretty cool so far! Where is everyone from? I'm Janelle from NYC.17
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Not a rant, but I think it's really cool, so I just wanted to share this with you guys. I recently went to a small symposium by an alumnus of my university. He uses the program Mandelbulb3d to explore the wondrous world of fractals. He's recently started to apply Neural Style Transfer to fractals. His website is julius-horsthuis.com.
↓ this is 1 (composite) formula, by the way
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Excited for Official devRant NYC meetup? Here you can find more details incase you missed notification.
https://www.devrant.io/meetup
2 -
I was on the train and a woman came aboard. The only available seat was next to me. She takes this huge laptop out of her bag. While I observed this, I thought: she's going to code. She logged in and.. GitLab! She was writing R code.
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Got a new job on a big brand bank in the financial district in NYC, went through multiple code interviews, 2 hours of in person interviews asking me about architectures, design patterns, solutions to imaginary complex problems(which I enjoyed thinking about), finally got accepted, background checks needed before starting (previous job check, credit, drugs, etc..) so I waited 2 months, 1st day at work, the building is huge and cool, biggest spaces I've ever seen, amazingly insane large monitors and people working on a great variety of new technologies.
I was assigned to a corner far away from the open spaces, trying to understand a project that I will maintain who works with java 5, struts and jsp(for fucks sake, JSP!!!)
Why life laughs on my face? why?4 -
**random rant**
So next week I have a technical interview with TripleByte and I'm supposed to spent the next 2 days sorta preparing. Just woke up and had this thought tho:
What's the point? Yes I think I could try to get a better job but been trying for years (banking tech area) but now it feels like I'm at a "local optimum" sort of a sweet spot. Team/company could be smarter/more efficient but...
I've got my own place in a city that's also near NYC. It takes me 20 minutes to get to my current office, fairly flexible with the 9-5 work day, I can work remotely. I get enough money.
And then finding a new job === technical interviews about stuff you will rarely use and usually with no feedback like a pass-fail test where they only tell you if you pass or fail (and for me it always feels skewed towards fail the moment i walk since I'm deaf).
But at this point, I feel more like "you need to convince me to work for you". In my head, the plan is mostly to just have a nice chat and wing the technical questions just to see how good i am without any prep (i.e. poring thru Cracking the Coding Interview or Big O concepts, sorting...).2 -
Nice surprise today hiding in my snail-mail-box, among bills and publicity. It took a couple of months from NYC to Cheeseland, but the cute stickers are finally here!
Thanks, devRant!
2 -
So an update on my last health rant..
It's got off to a great start... not
My intentions were to go into NYC to walk around in Central Park.
I'm currently wandering around aimlessly in the park, taking a break..
On my way over though I passed a bubble tea festival that was happening...
Gotta get bubble tea now... *Bad* but easier it's so expensive.. They're price gouging!!!
*good? But more I want a drink... I have water but I want something tastier...*
**Sees Duane Reade, goes in no sole, too expensive**
** Sees McD...pass... sees sign saying any large drink for $1**
...
I'm now waking in CP while drinking a large Sprite.... and I want cake bc I'm already in NYC goddammit... might as well get some as it's in the way... And I won't get another chance until.... **Some far away date** ( I know is probably not true...)
Help?1 -
Just arrived at NYU hospital for a 3 days of medical exams. While walking in from my nice day in NYC I get the feeling like I'm turning myself in at prison....
Then on the other hand compared to work... I'm on a 4 day vacation...
3 -
Interesting weather we're having... is it Winter, Spring or Summer?
BTW if anyone is in NYC today... http://www.japandaynyc.org
Was planning to go and have a fun day out but forecast keeps changing and said it gonna rain... With 90 wait... 80... 60... now 50% probability....
(I live in NJ, takes me 2hrs to get there, can't drive)
Someone plz figure out how to forecast weather more accurately........😩😢😭😟😞😖😧😦
7 -
I've been working from home for 3 months yay!) but today was the nicest day off the year so far so decided to goto office.
Well seems everyone else thought that too and also the trains were delayed. i.e. I had to stand all the way...
No big deal except... apparently I am way out shape now...
was planning to go walk around NYC too like I do every Spring/Summer (~1-2 miles).... Looks like I'm gonna need some prep this time... 😞😓😭🤕😧2 -
I'm kinda amazed at how simple it is to host my private git server on my raspberry pi. That being said I couldn't get it to work well as an access point with hostapd. Therefore pushing and pulling while on my home wifi works like a charm, but doing this in public requires ethernet. Having an Ethernet run from outside my backpack really does make me look like some hacker terrorist person, especially in NYC7
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So I got offered 85k job in NYC. The interviews went well and they were impressed with all my answers. Now here's the deal.
I have 2 years of good software development experience in.my home country and then moved to USA for further studies. Now graduated this May.
Not sure if 85k(including all perks) is the right amount ? Or negotiate it to make it 90k...5 -
TLDR: Decision making is hard...
Get up at 7am, weather looks crappy but need go to the Drs today in NYC.
Original plan was to spend the morning in the park catching up on my reading list. Don't really want to goto the park now but lunch is still good? (Appt at 4pm, was only one left)
Walk into train station, pay for ticket. Get email from Drs saying he's sick...
Oh good... Except I already paid for the ticket.
Decide it's not worth it since weather is crap.
Walk out the station and... it's sunny... Fck...
Now what.... I can either go home and code or go shopping locally and eat out.
Currently decisions these and well shopping and eating out are also hard decisions...
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CS teacher: "I want you to do this project using DSDM. Every member needs to be appointed a role that is best suited to their abilities."
He has never heard of Agile.1 -
Just got my Maker Fair NYC tickets. Me, My Brother, My Nephew and my Daughter. Gonna be a blast. Just a little disappointed that Raspberry Pi will not be having a booth this year.
We won’t be hard to spot, we will be the group of nerdy looking people... lol ... if that narrows it down for you.2 -
For everybody who's had to start job hunting for their first real programming job, I have a few questions.
Is starting to apply for jobs 4-5 months ahead a good idea or is it better to wait it out with a 2-3 month time frame? I'm graduating in June 2019.
Is it better to apply for jobs with a search field of "junior developer" or to be more specific like "Jr Java web dev/Jr node.js"?
I know a lot of job descriptions are just company wishlists and not real indicators of skill. I have enough job experience to know how that part of the world works.
My aim is to try for Chicago(go Cubs) or New England, maybe Boston or NYC. I'd say I have a better shot with Chicago being just a 4 hour drive from home base. But, you never know. This is my first real shot at a job in this field so I'm trying to keep my expectations in check.
Hopefully I can get something to work before rumblings of the 2020 election start in my home state. 🙄2 -
Why it's so difficult to get a junior php developer job in NYC? Should I bullshit on my resume because staying honest I couldn't even get phone interview! Feel like I'm a loser. Bad bad.4
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Watching The Next Web conference live stream to see if devRant stand will appear at some point! https://video.twentythree.net/the-n...5
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!dev
Went to NYC to get an MRI and ate out afterwards around KTown, 32nd St and walked into one restaurant. Got the menu and basically saw everything was at least $20-30... Walked out sorta embarrassed but wondering when did they get the expensive... Were they always that expensive...
Went to a curry place next to it and it was OK, just got a beef curry, but that cost $17...
So this year I got a raise "because I'm a top performer" but today I'm just wondering, is this just another inflation adjustment...
Oh, I also bought some cakes... Those were $4 each but had a 3 for $10 deal... and some special bubble tea was $6, gave a pass on that too...4 -
Never disturb a programmer in heat !
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[RIP to all the lives lost in Uri and NYC.
this planet has no place for terrorism.]
1 -
suggestion?
Maybe we can have some sort of weekly rantcast podcast (maybe with @dfox hosting it or something through Google Hangouts) where we talk about certain topics and let a group of ranters take the word or something. Not sure if anyone would be interested or would listen to it but it sounded like a good idea to me (it would also grant the ability for people who don't live in NYC or in the US to kind of meet other ranters more personally and stuff like that)
Thoughts on this?3 -
Hey devrant community, i have a question.
I am 22 and currently work as a C++ developer in a large company in London. I really want to move into finance and possible HFT and move to NYC. Can ayone suggest a good learning path for the transition from the airline industry to finance ?
Thanks im advance1
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