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Mandatumon Ask HN: Why is pay so much higher in the US? (or is it?)

Because that’s where all the money is.

Seriously look at global GDP, maybe American citizens aren’t the wealthiest but the country and the businesses that run it sure as shit is.

Mandatumon Why public chats are better than direct messages

It comes down to culture. Will you be reprimanded for talking the wrong way about a project, feature or service in your organisation?

I’ve worked at FAANG where I was reprimanded by HR equivalent for raising an issue in chat rather than email because of who was in the channel. I wasn’t rude in my report, I just explained the issue, the impact it had and the likely resolution.

Maybe a VP was having a bad day, but I’ve since learned to keep my mouth shut working for large organisations as an IC.

It’s something I expected from shitty workplaces like Big4, consultancies or FinTechBroCorps but it’s everywhere.

Mandatumon Amazon CEO says company will slow hiring rate, no hard return to office planned

Hiring is speeding up again in Australia and New Zealand in private companies. Government and public sector not so much, but all the consultancies have massive shortages which feeds into public sector quite a bit.

I don’t think it ever really slowed like it has in the US. Then again inflation is only just starting to ramp in Australia. New Zealand doesn’t really have an excuse.

Singapore seems pretty healthy too.

Mandatumon Reddit's favorite products in one place

Looking at SkincareAddiction and a few other subreddit's, it's fairly clear there's some gaming going on. Be it Mod-sanctioned or not.

Mandatumon Ask HN: Work Culture Canary?

https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

Once they cut benefits that are widely lauded. Holiday-free PTO, exercise and health benefits, stuff that makes sense to anyone to attract talent when times are tough. You can cut corners, you can cut bonuses when times are tough - but you can't cut benefits. It's a short-term way of thinking, and you'll lose your best employees over it.

Mandatumon A Message from Signal's New President

This isn’t written for you. It’s for investors and middle managers internally.

Mandatumon The WFH Folks

Do you have relationships with people you formed online? I think there's a subset of people (potentially the majority) who are unable to do that, and you're likely one.

Mandatumon 2 Weeks Notice Checklist

I have never heard of an employee being penalised for giving zero notice in New Zealand unless they weren't an employee, but a contractor with a business partnership relationship.

Mandatumon Samsung Recent Security Incident

Having reported a critical bounty, their incident response and disclosure process is a complete shitshow. Absolute mess of a company.

Mandatumon The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal

Wow, Auckland is 12. Didn't realize they were that bad comparatively.

Mandatumon Ask HN: Contractors, what is your hourly rate?

You obviously haven't been the decision maker for anything remotely important.

Mandatumon Ask HN: IT Security Checklist for Startups?

2FA is fine.

Don't bother with VPN's if you're SaaS-based. Just take the zero-trust route with mandatory MFA everywhere, invest in Yubikeys for all employees and set up a SIEM box to ingress audit logs from your various systems.

Setting up an Elastic box for this should be relatively straightforward. For many people it's easier to keep SIEM locally hosted (pulling data, no external access) and then periodically push encrypted backups offsite).

You'll probably end up setting up business metrics monitoring from this eventually too, at least in the early days before you start the "data lake" approach.

DNSSEC is a waste of time right now.

Mandatumon New Zealand's plan to prepare for inevitable climate change impacts

It really is. New Conservatives have cut out a large part of the die hards, but just look where wealthy National voters and MPs send their kids.

Mandatumon Ask HN: Is forcing users to use a photo of themselves (Slack, etc.) ethical?

We have a professional photographer come in once per quarter, all new hires have their photo taken - and anyone who wants an update are able to join. For remote employees however, this just isn't possible. There are opportunities for this at team offsites or conferences, so with careful planning provided they're not too far offsite, it's still possible. Depends on the company.

There's also cultures, beliefs and personal preferences that just run diametrically opposed to having your headshot on every message you send. I think for those younger-looking people, having no profile photo at all can actually be beneficial in more traditional environments.

Mandatumon Removal of Heroku free product plans

yyyyMMdd is international? Or do you mean MMddYYYY?

Mandatumon Ask HN: Why do some companies build their own CICD orchestrators?

Or you can read the article: https://slack.engineering/remote-development-at-slack/

Mandatumon Good conversations have lots of doorknobs

Sounds like me when anxiety is at a 10. I still replay moments for a decade ago.

Mandatumon Ask HN: Anyone working 4 day week here, as an employee?

Unfortunately you're in the minority in my experience. Maybe your colleagues and yourself all act in good faith during negotiations, but they are no longer the majority in a large part of the industry. Many recruiters don't act in good faith with candidates these days, especially as KPI's are getting stretched and firms are starting to close out their recruiting efforts.

For candidates who have this as a dealbreaker with a hard-sell like this, I have one suggestion: Don't tell them it's a deal-breaker, just say you're looking at another offer with this perk and see what they can do. That way it doesn't look like you're gaming their hiring process, nor that you were interviewing in bad faith.

Mandatumon Tesla Virtual Power Plant

Couldn’t you run a diesel generator and turn a profit with this?

Mandatumon $5.6B cloud company Fivetran acquired its way to survival

Wow you weren’t kidding. Finally a startup in a field I know about.

This is a bubble.

Mandatumon Fintech is making credit cards weirder

Sure, if you can prove revenue, income or assets. Same process for someone with good credit in the US - except we don't shut the doors on people who haven't got a fucking credit card like some sort of racket.

Mandatumon Fintech is making credit cards weirder

It is insanity that the US still works on a positive credit system. Literally every other developed country in the world has it the other way round, prove you have negative or bad credit with failed payments.

The US system is both inequitable and exploitative.

Mandatumon Software engineering books to read and reread

What’s the copyright law on taking ideas and principals from a book like that, and rewriting it?

Mandatumon Show HN: Property Trends Scraped from Zillow

It's usually the PM who prompts the lawyer, "hey that person is stealing my limelight, please fix it".

Mandatumon What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?

I think they're trying to push down salaries, there's still plenty of hiring for technical roles. Recruiters, marketers, sales reps on the other hand..

Mandatumon Librarian's Letter to Google Security

Write to your law makers. Don’t trust companies to provide access through public shaming and media, force them all to do so.

Mandatumon Repurposing the cadaver of a spider to create a pneumatically actuated gripper

Eerily similar to "Roach Biobot".. I'm very surprised this was published, the cockroach is still alive.

https://phys.org/news/2012-09-technique-remotely-cockroaches...

Mandatumon Pros and cons of API management platforms

Wait, so that list is things you WANT? To be honest it sounds like you've read what's on the back of the box of some proprietary integration platform sold by IBM in the 90s. It's a bit like when a vendor writes an RFP. You're not telling me anything about the problem you're trying to solve, you're giving me a list of solutions.

Based on your list of features - let's think about what would be a good option..

1. Less expensive

Than what, a private jet?

2. Encourages collaboration between internal dev teams by connecting to active directory (or source of authentication & authorization)

Authentication, pretty much every paid platform has this. Some take more setup. Where does your AD sit, if you're a Microsoft shop, Azure might serve the best products. Having said that, there's out-of-the-box integrations with AD with many major platform providers.

Secondly, is this for internal access only - or is this AD environment also serving external users and partners? Maybe you're looking for AD integration because that's all you know to support RBAC.

3. Curation i.e. takes care of the lifecycle management i.e. design, arch. approval, development, test, release, production, versioning, monitoring, deprecation

So you want an API platform product that supports the end-to-end SDLC in a single product? Why? What is the the "solution" to? Also you're asking for "approval", so you're expecting an API Manager Platform to also have a baked in release process.. But based on requirement 5 - you can't go with a single cloud vendor.

4. Compliance - PCI compliance and app management (generating clientIDs and secrets, rotation included)

Any commercial or Enterprise provider will provide this, however if you're building a solution which touches card data - you're going to need to re-certify the end-to-end solution. Expect to pay an auditor for this.

5. Multi cloud-native

OK, this is the first thing on the list that would actually be useful in driving you towards a decision. You want something you can download and host on a server. This takes away all SaaS options and really only leave self-hosted options. You've removed all cloud providers and all proprietary providers with this decision. There is only open-source (and NOT that bullshit "open-source heritage").

6. Simpler UI/UX experience

Than what, a TI-84 graphing calculator?

7. API based role access.

All major cloud providers will have this well supported. However I'd likely set up SAML integration with an IdP, and outsource the authorization and administration of users and roles to a purpose-built stack or SaaS - and not some crappy afterthought implementation that'd been strapped on top of an API Manager product. Think Okta.