Hacker News Reader

ctideon Facebook engineers: we have no idea where we keep all your personal data

It became difficult when your 'database' turned into exabytes of random files in s3.

ctideon Operation Luigi: How I hacked my friend without her noticing

Where's the social engineering part? Trying to convince people you aren't a scumbag so they become your friend long enough for you to swipe their password?

ctideon Slack may regret its letter to Microsoft

Actually, they don't use Slack because Slack would be the most expensive piece of software they license. The enterprise model from Slack is so prohibitively expensive it's like they're intentionally trying to drive away large customers.

ctideon Angular 1.x Banned from Firefox Addons

I had an extension a while ago that I was attempting to publish to the Firefox app store and it was rejected on grounds of using eval. I don't remember why I needed to use eval, but basically this is something they do already. I'm guessing that previously they were allowing for an Angular exception.

ctideon After a year of using Node.js in production

Not really.

These things aren't pain points in the browser the way they are in Node. I have never felt the need for an ORM in the browser. I have never dealt with client-side code that was using so many libraries I had to worry about whether exceptions would be handled via exceptions, or the first argument of the callback, or rejected promises. No one (at least, no one I know) is installing node modules like isArray to use in the browser.

Yes, these things _could_ technically apply to the browser, but it's not commonplace. In the node world, these are all things you deal with consistently.

ctideon BYOT: Bring your own team

It's like you've never heard of an acquihire before.

Companies do this all the time.

ctideon How We Moved from Heroku to Containers with No Docker Experience

At a previous company, we initially set everything up at Heroku. As things got cost prohibitive, we moved them one by one to AWS. Since Heroku is setup on AWS, it was easy enough to connect to our Heroku postgres instance from AWS web servers and it doesn't add any extra latency vs. running direct on Heroku. Over time, we slowly migrated everything off to our own infrastructure on AWS, but we were able to leverage Heroku to avoid all of that development effort until it was cost effective to do so. You'll need to deal with your own SSL endpoint if you run your web servers on AWS, but it's pretty trivial to do so with ELB.

ctideon Arbitration Everywhere, Stacking the Deck of Justice

It depends. I tried to switch to Simple, but at the time I was working as an independent contractor. The maximum size of a check you can deposit without mailing it to them is $3k. Having to mail in every check I received was a hassle that outweighed any benefits Simple provided over a regular bank account.

ctideon Lessons learned writing highly available code

I'm guessing MySQL doesn't support this (hence the need for a cron job), but postgres lets you set a statement_timeout on the connection. It will force kill queries that go beyond that timeout. I worked on an app not too long enough that occasionally would have some queries go off the rails and start blocking everything. We set up postgres to just kill off anything taking 30s automatically, and then were able to root out the issues without worrying about everything blocking on these broken queries and taking down our systems.

ctideon We’re Bad at Interviewing Developers – Interview with Kerri Miller

Do you doubt your skills? Why are you interviewing if you're employed at a good company?

I hear this position often when people talking about contract-to-perm, and I just don't see it. If you're good at what you do, and people enjoy working with you, why wouldn't you take a contract to perm position? The only reasons I can see are that you are afraid you don't get the job (well, then you wouldn't have been a good fit if they hired you) or you end up not liking the team/company as much (same as if they had hired you.)

So, why wouldn't you? And I don't buy the 'I have a good job' line, because you wouldn't even be entertaining offers if you weren't interested in leaving your current role.

ctideon This Industry is Fucked

You forgot the '#gamergate' at the end of your post.

ctideon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (July 2015)

SEEKING WORK - Remote / Seattle

I'm an engineer with 15+ years of experience at all levels of the stack. Have worked both for, and at, a handful of YC companies. Currently have about 20 hours / week of availability, with potentially a bit more freeing up next month.

Main Technologies: Rails, React.js, Backbone, iOS, HTML/CSS/etc, Postgres, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, AWS.

http://www.github.com/ctide - http://www.twitter.com/ctide - chris at fifteenb.com

ctideon Ask HN: Should I join startup for less-than-expected equity?

And no dilution is not realistic given that they haven't even raised a Series A yet.

ctideon The Rise and Looming Fall of the Engineering Whiteboard Interview

You know what isn't setup the way my normal editor is?

A fucking whiteboard.

ctideon Show HN: Coachella playlist / streamer

I noticed a few hours ago that I wanted to listen to a bunch of acts at Coachella that were on different channels. I didn't really want to have to remember to switch, though, so I hacked this together so that I could select all the acts I want to listen to and it would just switch between them for me when they came on.

https://coachella-streamer.herokuapp.com/?ids=8,12,16,17,19,... is my planned listening for the weekend. Hope someone else finds this useful!

ctideon Orbit: EA's first open source project

https://github.com/Eonblast/Emysql for example, was originally written at EA.

ctideon Blue Moon: The “Craft” Beer Made by Coors

If you visit the Sandlot at Coors Field, you can actually have 'original recipe' Blue Moon. They have a handful of other beers that are only available there, it's a cool spot to check out if you like Blue Moon.

ctideon Mumbling Isn’t a Sign of Laziness, It’s a Clever Data-Compression Trick

Sometimes people just talk too fast. To you, it's mumbling. To them, they're just conveying a lot of information quickly and you're struggling to keep up. Don't assume malice in their intent.

I won't argue that calling it 'data compression' is nothing more than cute spin, though.

ctideon Missing the Point of Server-side Rendered JavaScript Apps

You're getting downvoted because you miss the point. You want the web to cater to you, and big companies with infinite resources will, but smaller companies just won't. The cost to support users such as you is just not worth it, you're too small of a segment. People are going to focus their design + resources on the 99% of users who have decided they want the web to work properly.

I mean, shit, lots of startups completely eschew IE support, and they're a way more significant portion of the market than the neckbeards who disable javascript.

ctideon Show HN: Artpacks.org – Archive of the ANSI and ASCII art scene (1990 to present)

My BBS: http://artpacks.org/1995/ice9507a.zip/MA-UNH1.ICE

I was never especially good at making art, but this was my favorite of the things I did make: http://artpacks.org/1995/fsn-0895.zip/CT-ASY.ANS

I feel bad for people who were born too late and missed out on the whole BBS scene. Those years were tons of fun, and nothing on the internet has ever been quite like that world.

ctideon Will WhatsApp kill Slack?

Why is the deal breaker a cost that you don't have to pay? Slack works fine for free.

ctideon How Instacart Built Its On-Demand Grocery Delivery Service

The current issue is not due to single page app, the previous one was. That one was prevalent for about a year since I was using your site when I lived in SF and noticed it then, and it still had the same issue when it launched in Boulder recently.

ctideon How Instacart Built Its On-Demand Grocery Delivery Service

B: Yeah, but … yeah, we could’ve. But I like single-page applications. They feel more responsive.

It's not more responsive when you break the basic functionality of the web. Open in new tab has basically never worked with Instacart's site. I see that they attempted to remedy it a bit since the last time I placed an order (about a month ago). Now instead of generating hashbang URLs that the frontend completely ignores, it just generates broken URLs instead such as: https://www.instacart.com/store/whole-foods/departments/whol.... I get that there are a lot of challenges involved in building a business like this, but a frontend that's had basic functionality totally broken for months shouldn't be one of them.

ctideon Finding ROI in Higher Education

Because what people charge is based on what their costs are. If you have to provide staff, location, etc. for a longer period of time it drives up your costs which in turn drives up your prices.

ctideon [dead]

We just gave up on getting our addon into the Mozilla store and distribute it directly via our website. Their process is not worth the hassle. We were rejected because:

1) This version contains binary, obfuscated or minified code. We need to review all of your source code in order to approve it.

We included all of the source, but we didn't explain how to setup a local environment to build handlebars templates, setup grunt, etc. so apparently source is not good enough on it's own. The reviewers have to understand enough about your app to build it themselves. Writing enough documentation so that someone in 30 days can hopefully glean everything they need (with no understanding of your app, or structure) without them being able to ask you questions is absurd.

2) Please use the CSS 'text-overflow' property rather than trying to deal with overflow via `innerHTML` modification.

We have multiline text we need truncated and displayed correctly. This means not having a random floating ellipsis at the end of the div, and it means we can't use text-overflow.

Mozilla's addon policy is just hostile, period. It doesn't have anything to do with open source.

ctideon A Reminder To Investors

If you don't understand why this needs to be done, you're part of the problem. If you think romantic overtures as an investor to a founder is 'ok', or should be ok, you're part of the problem.

EDIT: For those of you who think this is too harsh, you're proving my point. Sexism in tech will start to become less of a problem once people recognize that it's an issue. If you don't think it's an issue -- you're part of the problem.

ctideon Diversity and Startups

Will all the misogynist trolls still come out to play on this one given that it's a YC post?

ctideon Job interviews go both ways (2011)

Sure, but long term strategy at a 6 month old company is a year out. 2 years at best. 5 years is multiple lifetimes for most startups.

ctideon Job interviews go both ways (2011)

I don't think I could have answered that question at any startup I've ever worked at. And, certainly if I had, I would have been wrong in every case.

ctideon Tinder sued for sexual harassment by former co-founder

Posts like these remind me how many socially maladjusted misogynists exist on this site just waiting for stuff like this so they can throw their 2c in.

It says right there that IAC confirmed he sent the messages. The rest of this honestly does not matter at all, it's just kindling on the fire. Those alone are enough to prove that he sexually harassed her. If you're honestly trying to argue that we 'don't know all that facts' and that 'we shouldn't jump to conclusions' then I feel bad for any women who have to interact with you because you're probably a fucking scumbag too.