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KB1JWQ

239 karma · joined June 24, 2013

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KB1JWQ··on Ask HN: Who is firing?
Hand of fate is moving and its finger points to you

It throws you on the street; now what's next for you?

Your options: worthless, and you're bound by NDA

Pied Piper seems quite cushy, best update your resume

-- Iron Maiden, "The Wickr Man"

KB1JWQ··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2016)
Can you explain a bit for us how "come work at a company that's actively laying people off" would be compelling?
KB1JWQ··on The No More Ransom Project
CrashPlan. Not Cloudflare.
KB1JWQ··on Expensify's firing strategy
Likewise. I enjoyed my time there (well, until this blog post wound up on my radar!), but after a year it was time for me to go, so I resigned without much in the way of hard feelings.

I'm not at all pleased to discover today that we (and many like us) are now being painted as "disruptive," "miserable," and ultimately crappy employees. Expensify has just taken themselves from "Not what I ultimately wanted, but a good experience that I'd recommend to most folks who fit their model" to "company I'll actively steer people away from if they asked me."

I struggle and fail to understand the point of this blog post; did someone think this would be well received? Do they think it makes them look better than the average company? Is there now an internal sense of "achievement unlocked" that thrills them when the rest of the industry sees this as abhorrent? Their GlassDoor reviews are starting to seem a lot more ominous lately as well.

If you take a look at NetFlix, another company whose culture speaks to "top performers or get out," there's always been a sense that people who've left are still great people / employees. When someone leaves (voluntarily or not), the consensus and messaging becomes that it just wasn't a good fit, and they stand behind their former employees as being fantastic hires elsewhere.

This entire blog series / ad campaign just comes across as either profoundly deluded, or a desperate cry for attention.

KB1JWQ··on Comodo has filed for express abandonment of LetsEncrypt trademark applications
Sure, but most CEO's tend to determine exactly what their public-facing position IS before speaking. In this case he looks the fool as they're walking back his statements.
KB1JWQ··on [dead]
Concur. "Here's a current business situation. Please stand by while I speculate wildly based upon that situation in isolation" is how this reads.
KB1JWQ··on Docker Betas for AWS, Azure, Mac, and Windows
Very interesting that GCE wasn't mentioned on the slide of supported infrastructures at the DockerCon keynote today.
KB1JWQ··on Draft bill would boost H-1B worker pay for big visa users
Fascinating.

I wonder what the cultural implications are if this passes. Someone generally expects their peer group to make within ~20% of what they make, not "2x."

KB1JWQ··on My First 10 Minutes on a Server
At least one log parsing tool I've seen in years past was vulnerable to log injection attacks. Hilarious proof of concept to own a box by way of PTR record.

I haven't checked to see whether fail2ban suffers from this model or not.

KB1JWQ··on Beyond Movie Material, Is Theranos Worth Anything?
Pretty much "as a cautionary tale" is as far as I see it going. They pretty clearly fabricated results; in the healthcare field, this is the kiss of death.
KB1JWQ··on If you snore or your SO snores, there is new tech to fix it
"This hasn't gotten FDA approval yet, but be sure to ask your doctor about it!" is a bit of a non-starter. As a culture we're generally leery about "disruptive" startups that affect our bodies surgically...
KB1JWQ··on Dropbox says it is cash flow positive, in no rush to IPO
I agree, if you're able and willing to pay market salaries rather than 80% of market plus some ephemeral equity that you've no realistic possibility of realizing value for...
KB1JWQ··on Dropbox says it is cash flow positive, in no rush to IPO
There's a whole crop of companies / people in this situation. I'm wondering if new hires register this as the glaring red flag it should be with respect to how companies treat the people that got them to where they are.
KB1JWQ··on The Failure of Coin
I think Siri is a great example of this. I've had it fail to work enough times that I simply don't think to use it, despite its improvement over the past year or two.
KB1JWQ··on Ask HN: What is a (non-existant) service or tool that you want as a developer?
Dynamic image generation / hosting.

I give you a baseline image. You dynamically modify that image and host it for me based upon (ideally encrypted) parameters that I pass you.

Example use case: I send an email that features a thermometer that shows how far from $100 your balance is. It dynamically calls this service to generate a thermometer showing your $96 as meaningfully different from my $22.

KB1JWQ··on RIP Apple Ping: officially closed the service on September 30, 2012
It was that column in iTunes that everyone immediately disabled / hid / mentally blocked out.
KB1JWQ··on Dropbox says it is cash flow positive, in no rush to IPO
I wonder how their current and former employees view this decision.

I further wonder whether or not people leaving have a 90 day window to either exercise or forfeit their options.

KB1JWQ··on Shippo's learnings from integrating the UberRUSH API
It's very, very nice to see public retrospectives of something other than outages.
KB1JWQ··on Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B
Let me guess-- they use Taleo?
KB1JWQ··on VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks
I have no idea. I haven't seen the content before-- but when I show up and my first experience is a power and bandwidth draw, not only will I not pay for the content, I won't return to that site willingly.

This becomes a problem for the publisher more so than the reader from my perspective. My job in the context of this relationship is fundamentally to consume your content. Your job is to figure out how to monetize your content in a way that isn't offensive and is sustainable.

I'm not saying I won't pay for quality content (I do!), but there needs to be a way to monetize that's respectful of your readers.

KB1JWQ··on VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks
As a user, I'm requesting only YOUR content. I don't get a choice past that what your revenue model looks like. Your decision (or not) to host ads from various networks means that from my perspective, I visit your page and suddenly my performance / bandwidth turns to garbage.

Ergo the lesson I learn is to not visit your site. How's that a net positive for content creators?

KB1JWQ··on Elon Musk is doing for executive compensation what he did for electric cars
Exactly. Most people aren't in a position to waive their salary for a few years on the off-chance a moonshot works out.
KB1JWQ··on Why Suburbia Sucks
I can see this. It tends to be the "safe" middle group between urban and rural while having none of the benefits of either.
KB1JWQ··on Refined Twitter
I find myself consistently wondering why I pay money for a third party client five years into my use of Twitter (I was late to the party).

What's more is that Twitter knows what I follow, what I read, what I like, and what I retweet. So why is it still suggesting I follow pop celebrities instead of well known developers? It seems that despite everything they know about me, they don't know me at all.

KB1JWQ··on Google opens access to its speech recognition API
They did something very similar to this for their translate API. Realtime IRC client plugins that translated lines in foreign languages into yours in near-realtime went from "awesome" to "just kidding, nevermind" virtually overnight.
KB1JWQ··on An administrator accidentally deleted the production database
And as Gliffy is discovering to their detriment, exactly how long said restore takes...
KB1JWQ··on An administrator accidentally deleted the production database
Backups are stupidly easy.

Restores, on the other hand...

KB1JWQ··on An administrator accidentally deleted the production database
Ah, the good old "blameful postmortem." Sounds like a toxic culture...
KB1JWQ··on How Amazon took control of the cloud
> Take another look with a free trial account?

I'm not OP, but I tried that in a bake-off a few months back. Setup went well, I got some free trial credit-- and immediately found my account turned suspended due to fraud concerns. Note that this was the same payment details I was using (and continue to use) for Google Apps for Domains.

If GCE can't get the simple things like billing handled, I've got little faith in their ability to solve the harder problems.

Curiously, a few months later (this week in fact) I got a message out of the blue telling me that my account was unsuspended. Rather obviously, I had already gone with AWS around mid-summer...

KB1JWQ··on How Amazon took control of the cloud
> * Google has earned a reputation for shuttering products with little warning. CTOs really dislike an ad-hoc forced migration.

Exactly why we smiled and said "thanks but no thanks" when their salesfolk hit us up; I can't trust that any given Google platform will still be there in three to five years.

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