Hacker News Reader

endeavoron Ask HN: How to manage developers who aren't very good?

This might be totally obvious to you, but it wasn't obvious to some junior managers that I manage. When you're an entry-level programmer and you get stuck on a tough programming problem for a while, you're supposed to go to your boss/lead for help. Now that you're an entry-level manager, don't feel like you have to solve this on your own. Go to your manager for help. They should have more experience dealing with this.

I think smart, experienced engineers who have been figuring everything out on their own for a while start a totally new role, then forget how to ask for help when needed.

endeavoron Show HN: Piste.io

I want to love this but I am really struggling with the UX:

- Takes a long time to load

- Runs fine on my newish MBP but runs like a dog on my Linux desktop

- I am having a hard time controlling the camera position using the trackpad. Maybe with a mouse it would be better. If the arrow keys worked that might help.

- Some instructions on how to use it would be great.

- As they are, the camera and style squares appear to be clickable buttons instead of just headings.

endeavoron Pump and Dump: How To Rig the IPO Market with $20M

I'm really interested to know this too. A few benefits I can think of:

- Their shares go farther if they buy another company with stock

- Helps recruiting and retention if their employees can sell their options on secondary markets

endeavoron Show HN: Opp.io – Meeting Minutes Made Useful

It looks like a lot of the functionality is only shown in the video, and it moves pretty fast. I wish I could pause it.

endeavoron LinkedIn to pay nearly $6M in unpaid overtime wages and damages to 359 employees

IIRC in California you need to have at least 2 direct reports to be considered a supervisor vis-a-vis exempt status.

endeavoron The daily routines of famous creative people

This reminds me of "The War of Art" by Steven Pressfield. One of the main thrusts is that if you are serious about your art -- whatever it might be -- you should treat it like your profession. Do your (creative) work every day, and make some progress, however small, every day. Whether you feel like it or not. Make your art your day job, and your old day job your side gig. Even if the change is just mental at first.

endeavoron Tell HN: My startup is making money and I don't know what to do

Well done! The site looks great. I've actually been thinking about a similar product in a totally different space. If you could spare a couple minutes to answer, I have a couple questions that are probably really basic but I've been struggling with:

1. I see that you have a "LIST YOUR PROPERTY" feature, but how did you seed your DB? Just search CL, call the owner and ask if they're open to renting to college students?

2. How did you settle on making your own advertising platform your main revenue stream? When you have a niche market like this, is Adwords (or similar) not a viable alternative? Have you thought about charging the listing agent directly?

endeavoron Awesome Sysadmin: Open-source sysadmin resources

Very good list. I do wish some of the entries had a more to their description than "written in Blub." Knowing the language is interesting but not really helpful if I just want to know functionality.

Of all the things I think this list is missing, I think the #1 is the backup software lsyncd: watches a local directory tree for changes, then uses rsync to copy the changes. Great for when your data become so large that you can't complete your periodic backup job in a reasonable period of time.

endeavoron Open letter by Ladar Levison

That's unfortunate but it's also a bit like saying, "it made less than 100k USD yearly revenue, they couldn't afford backing up their data." Yeah both a hard-disk crashing and a legal attack are rare, but in their business they need to expect that it will happen sooner or later.

endeavoron How ACH works: A developer perspective – Part 2

Very interesting, thanks! I would also be very interested in hearing some kind of ballpark figures for the fee structure.

There's one problem I've wanted to solve, and thought ACH might be able to help, but really didn't know where to start. This has been very helpful.

endeavoron Bitcoin Price Pressure

When you say "the typical consumer", I think you are really saying "the typical, relatively wealthy consumer living in the first world". For the some billions of people on the Earth who don't have a stable currency, credit/debit cards, mortgages and other financial products Bitcoin has more benefits. Think of the WhatsApp demographic without a smart-phone.

endeavoron Results of the GitHub Investigation

I believe the state requirement is for managers, not regular employees.

Every 2 years I have to spend a couple hours taking a traffic-school-style online training.

endeavoron Ask HN: What encryption algorithms should we take as compromised?

Your scale is way off.

To brute-force AES-128, if you assume:

- Every person on the planet owns 10 computers.

- There are 7 billion people on the planet.

- Each of these computers can test 1 billion key combinations per second.

- On average, you can crack the key after testing 50% of the possibilities.

Then the earth's population can crack one key in 77,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.

Source: Seagate, http://dator8.info/pdf/AES/3.pdf

endeavoron The 49-U6U Slaughterhouse

I love that B-R5RB was started by something trivial and without deliberation. It seems so Archduke Ferdinand-esque to me.

endeavoron "OpenSSL has exploit mitigation countermeasures to make sure it's exploitable"

Chrome and Firefox both use NSS. I would assume that the big institutions looked at OpenSSL and decided their money would be better invested in other projects.

endeavoron Introducing StandDesk [video]

That woman in the second photo has crazy ankle range of motion. Also helps if your torso is relatively long compared to your femurs -- relatively common among east Asians.

endeavoron In defense of the Google Chef (2011)

I remember when a friend of mine went to work at Google, relatively early in their history. I'm sure he told me that there were smart people working there, working on cool things -- but I don't remember much of that. What I do remember is that if he was going to be working late, he could order up a steak and it would get delivered to his office. That anecdote stuck with me.

endeavoron Denial of Service Attacks

Their Pages hosting feature uses Fastly -- I would assume they use the same service across their infrastructure.

endeavoron How the NSA Plans to Infect “Millions” of Computers with Malware

It sounds like they are going after a vulnerability in the browser. My guess would be that do a man-in-the-middle attack where they have a device that acts as a proxy so you get YOUR Facebook page, but with an exploit injected into the code.

endeavoron Why Super-Fast Internet Is Coming Super Slowly

I read some VC stories regarding Skype recently. At the time they were looking for series A (?), broadband penetration was still poor. Obviously they managed to get by until the broadband environment tipped to their advantage. The point is that you don't want to wait until it's obvious that gigabit is really coming. At that point you may already be way behind.

endeavoron Comcast vs. the Cord Cutters

I feel the same way about magazines. It's dumb that they are packed with ads and yet you still have to pay for them.

This is basically the same fallacy as a Google user who thinks he is Google's customer. Magazine readers are the product for the magazine main business of selling advertising space. The reason they charge money is because paying readers are considered more valuable than non-paying readers. This sort of thing is why you'll often see magazine subscriptions selling for a few bucks on Slickdeals.

endeavoron Show HN: Abacus – Killing The Expense Report

Looks like a great system. Two thoughts I had when I scrolled down to the bottom of your landing page were "oh there's only 3 of them, and they all look very casual." Sure you're going for the 5-100 employee segment, but small and casual aren't attributes I look for when buying accounting products.

I hate to be the conservative one here, but I thought I'd share my initial reaction. Might want to save those photos for the company profile page?

endeavoron Zappos says goodbye to bosses

This no-managers movement strikes me as disingenuous. The manager is still there -- there's just fewer of them. Big conflicts just get escalated all the way to the CEO/founder/owner.

There was a recent HBR article about Google's management structure. They tried eliminating managers in 2002, but too many people just came directly to Larry when they had a problem (1). Holacracy doesn't scale.

1) http://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-mana...

endeavoron We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)

My understanding from reading his blog is that everyone works from home. Which means that he doesn't have to pay for office space, and he can hire people who live where engineer salaries aren't as high as they are in the major tech hubs.

endeavoron Government Announces Steps to Restore Confidence on Encryption Standards

If the keys used for each cipher are independent it should not weaken security. See section 15.7 of Applied Cryptography (http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/anuag/crypto.pdf).

endeavoron Costco CEO Craig Jelinek Leads the Cheapest, Happiest Company in the World

Are you talking about Costco? I like Costco, but they have so few people out on the warehouse floor, and those that are there dress like civilians so it's hard to find them. My takeaway is that there is zero customer service, aside from the cashier. Everywhere else I am on my own.

If only I could get back a fraction of the time I've spent searching for products that they moved from one aisle to another.

endeavoron Introducing the New Yahoo Mail

FWIW, it does say: "Over the next few days, most mail users will begin to experience the new web version of Yahoo! Mail." [Emphasis added.]

So we may still be seeing the old version. That said, they probably should have held off on the announcement until it was generally available.

endeavoron Github redesigns Profiles

I certainly understanding wanting to have control over what you want private. But stars and forks are the main things I use to evaluate a project I'm unfamiliar with. If a project has 1000 stars and 100 forks I know it's pretty solid. If those metrics were disabled by default Github loses a lot of value, since the majority of users would stick with the defaults.

endeavoron Google's "Bacon number" search

Hopefully this was a 20% project.

endeavoron 34.5% of US Internet Population Not using Facebook/Twitter

Interesting survey but I think an A/B test is really what we need here. A = traditional authentication / B = FB, Twitter, Google OAuth.

The people without FB and Twitter are late adopters and won't try your service no matter what kind of auth you use. For the people that are concerned about privacy, I'm not sure how big their impact will be.