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brendonjohn

94 karma · joined August 10, 2012

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brendonjohn··on Deno 2.8
I’ve loved using deno.

Full time for the last three months.

Deno replaced a pnpm monorepo I was using.

brendonjohn··on Edamagit: Magit for VSCode
Yes
brendonjohn··on Show HN: I made an open-source Loom alternative
Principal engineer for Loom here: Congrats on the beta launch.

Super cool, I’m looking forward to trying it out.

Welcome to the Thunderdome.

brendonjohn··on Stripe announces new round of funding and plan to provide employee liquidity
Hah, touché.

To counterpoint, their success is probably correlated with consumer spending habits (If consumers don't spend, transactions aren't happening, Stripe isn't getting its commission)

The case against Stripe probably sits with an understanding of how an incoming recession will impact the volume of transactions Stripe is dealing with.

brendonjohn··on Stripe announces new round of funding and plan to provide employee liquidity
> the way of WeWork

That's an unreasonable comparison. Stripe is not deeply tied to commercial office real estate.

brendonjohn··on Show HN: StackAid – Fund all your open-source dependencies
I must be missing something here.

On a donation of $10, their cut should be $0.75, given that's 7.5%.

brendonjohn··on On pretending to have read books
I thought this was going to be a critique of Blinkist.
brendonjohn··on Can a $310M startup avoid due diligence?
There's clearly been a lot of thought put into KubeSail, the platform & pibox provisioning service looks interesting.

Have you had businesses try to make this part of an internal provisioning process?

It looks like you're aiming for hobbyists, but I'd take a guess you could be integrating with businesses at a premium.

brendonjohn··on Reverse Engineering Snapchat: Obfuscation Techniques
Assuming this is for Android, the APK would no longer be signed and would cause all login attempts to fail.

Have a read about "SafetyNet Attestion API" for Android.

brendonjohn··on Reverse Engineering Snapchat: Obfuscation Techniques
This is brilliant work, I'm hoping in part II we get to see it working against the API.

I reverse engineered this in a production environment. It took approximately 7 months to build a scalable solution.

The investigation on how to create the x-snapchat-client-auth token is brilliant. One day I hope to do a talk on what my old team did to circumvent it.

There's a painful gotcha on the homestretch for this token: You may be creating the token, but it's not obvious what you're supposed to be using the method to sign.

What do they use it for? As far as I could tell, it's so they can verify requests at the edge nodes of their network. When you provide a bad x-snapchat-client-auth, you get a near-instant 403.

brendonjohn··on New York Times phasing out all 3rd-party advertising data
This is a massive move, I read this as they are hoping to climb the value chain and are optimistic about transitioning into a company that competes for the the social media advertising dollars.

After all, they own their content. Social media companies are just linking to it.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say https://advertising.nytimes.com/ will be getting a revamp in the next eighteen months.

brendonjohn··on Ask HN: Who is hiring right now?
I currently work at Loom. I think it's worth mentioning, when they say it's remote, they actually mean remote and not just "you can work from home sometimes".

I did the whole interview process from home in New Zealand and continue to work in my home city.

brendonjohn··on How to Buy Drugs
> full-service dealers advertise their wares is through Snapchat or WhatsApp:

Oh dear, just because a snap disappears doesn't mean a record doesn't exist.

While Snapchat (I don't know about WhatsApp) says that they "typically" don't retain your expired story data, you only need one of your friends/followers to be using a third-party app that does capture and retain data for your record to persist.

I'm guessing that the moment an account is of interest to law enforcement, a social network organization is obligated to start persisting and reporting account data.

brendonjohn··on Ask HN: What are your predictions for the next 10 years for our daily lives?
This probably sounds crazy... I think in the next ten years there will be a cultural shift away from carrying any form of electronics on yourself. That's including mobile phones and media devices.
brendonjohn··on I know why rejection emails suck – I write them
I don't think a company should offer an interview if they're not willing to give proper feedback at the end of it.

When interviewing candidates, I have been more than happy to give detailed feedback if they've asked me to give it. I realise it's unconventional, so I get the feedback peer reviewed before sending it away. I'm pleased to see that there are other companies learning how to give better feedback.

Giving feedback is a small token of respect that a company can give in return for a candidates time.

In my experience, interviewees have been thankful and shared how hard it is to get feedback from their interviewers.

brendonjohn··on Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
Speaking as someone that has stock options... how did your employee options get wiped out?
brendonjohn··on Five minute guide to better typography
I should of said Helvetica-derivatives.
brendonjohn··on Five minute guide to better typography
That really depends on what you're starting with.

My one-liner didn't go into the care that this article went into, I couldn't do the topic justice.

brendonjohn··on Five minute guide to better typography
Helvetica and its derivatives are beautiful, they're not boring.
brendonjohn··on Five minute guide to better typography
Helvetica and you're done.

^ My one sentence guide to better typography.

brendonjohn··on The Lisp Curse (2011)
> ...and certainly doesn't think of himself as a genius

This is intellectual humility. He's obviously a genius in his own right.

brendonjohn··on Wal-Mart Tells Workers: Don’t Download Labor Group’s Chat App
Do you know what the connection between the two writers is? Seems to me that the quote is neither here nor there, but I haven't found anything solid to confirm who said what.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck#Disputed

> "John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires", Wright, Ronald (2004). A Short History of Progress. Toronto: Anansi Press. pp. 124.

brendonjohn··on React Router v4 FAQ
Yes, I like this. It's important to learn what react is and why it's good for handling state in a component before you start trying to build the routing of a full web app.
brendonjohn··on React Router v4 FAQ
It took me over a week to grasp how routing would combine with redux, async, react and then server side rendering.

We got there, but there just hasn't been a simple (to reason about) way to do this in javascript. Acknowledging that the current library is fighting (I would call it an anti-pattern) with react is probably a good step. Thanks devs!

brendonjohn··on Follow-up of Kepler data yields more than 100 confirmed exoplanets
Using what humans have learnt from developing software as an analogy for how the universe operates is fine until you start expecting human-type exploits to also be present in the rules of physics.

At that point you're basically hammering a square peg into a round hole that may not exist, expecting the analogy to hold true.

brendonjohn··on Burnout and Mental Health
The time it takes to go into burnout is supposed to be the time it takes to restore yourself.
brendonjohn··on WordPress is not easy
Lets use the vocabulary proposed by Rich Hickey.

Wordpress is complex and is not simple. Wordpress is certainly easy if you have taken the time to learn Wordpress, but this understandably isn't the case for the honey bee entrepreneurs.

brendonjohn··on For gifted children, being intelligent can have dark implications (2015)
I have a friend that is considered incredibly intelligent. When he attended kindergarten he realised he was different from the other children and so deduced he must be an alien. Fortunately his hypothesis was just a phase.
brendonjohn··on The Melbourne Shuffle: Improving Oblivious Storage in the Cloud
thanks :D
brendonjohn··on The Melbourne Shuffle: Improving Oblivious Storage in the Cloud
I've briefly read through the paper and tried to trawl through google. Can someone explain to me or link me to something that explains what oblivious storage is?
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