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gsylvie

391 karma · joined February 8, 2016

http://bit-booster.com/
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gsylvie··on I revoked $1M worth of EV certificates
Little silly to say "I revoked $1M worth" since the price paid for each certificate includes unlimited renewals to fix problems like he identified. They are still worth $1M despite everything he did, they just have different private keys now and slightly improved data.

Maybe a better title would be, "Humans not 100% reliable about ensuring accurate information stored within thousands of data records, despite such accuracy kinda being the whole point."

gsylvie··on Show HN: Investment Calculator – A simple retirement calculator
Unfortunately "How much do you currently have saved" does not take negative values, and so this is no use to me.

Decent UI for a monthly + interest style calculator. I like it.

gsylvie··on U.S. Regulators to Subpoena Crypto Exchange Bitfinex, Tether
This is becoming an issue of public financial safety:

"The other day my barber asked me whether he should put all his money in Bitcoin." - Paul Krugman

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/opinion/bitcoin-bubble-fr...

gsylvie··on Coinbase booked $1B in revenue last year, has told hovering VCs to back off
If you don't like the terms of the shareholders agreement, then you don't have to buy the (private equity) shares. But if you buy the shares and sign the agreement, I don't see why the directors should honour illegitimate share transfers you attempt to make in the future.
gsylvie··on How Atlassian Built a $10B Growth Engine
Bitbucket Server is only $26,400 for the 1st year in your scenario. The 2nd and subsequent years are $13,200/year.
gsylvie··on Max Howell's take on getting rejected by Google
He just got unlucky. It's always luck of the draw with job interviews. Just like those poker players that say they should have won the hand.

I'd like to try this in an interview: how would you re-root a binary tree such that the ordering of the elements remains the same, but the root node of the tree changes.

gsylvie··on Reddit is ready for advertisers, but are advertisers ready for Reddit?
I don't mind the promoted Triplebyte ad I see at the top of my reddit landing page. I'm subscribed to r/git and r/programming; I suspect it's coming from my r/programming subscription. My ad-blocker is enabled for reddit, but the Triplebyte promoted ad still gets through. I guess it's not really an ad but a promoted topic. It even has the upvote/downvote buttons. It's been there for probably the last month.
gsylvie··on Reddit is ready for advertisers, but are advertisers ready for Reddit?
What are you advertising? I'm thinking of running ads there for my Bitbucket add-on.
gsylvie··on Never raise money before launching a product
Exactly! Here's the BC, Canada website on exactly this (British Columbia Securities Commission): https://www.bcsc.bc.ca/For_Companies/Private_Placements/Priv...
gsylvie··on Never raise money before launching a product
I'm a 30+ year old software-engineer in Vancouver, BC. And there's a housing bubble. My friends are mostly also senior developers / software architects / managers etc.

Just get older. Then your friends will be richer.

gsylvie··on Never raise money before launching a product
I think it's better to structure it as an equity investment, and to really make it clear to friends & family that they are buying a lottery ticket that will probably lose.

Also, make sure the investors are people where you wouldn't be uncomfortable if they saw your company's annual shareholder reports every year for the next 20 years - both in the failure and mad success scenarios. An ex-spouse or potential ex-spouse perhaps not a good choice.

gsylvie··on Never raise money before launching a product
I would do a small friends & family round pre-revenue. E.g., 8 friends and family @ 12.5K each = 100K. I don't mind if my success makes my friends & family some money.

But I'll sure feel bad if I take their money and lose everything. Perhaps that would be motivating...

(Note: where I live (BC, Canada), the provincial government offers a refundable 30% tax credit for investments like this, so if I did lose everything, friends & family would only be out 70K).

gsylvie··on Confession as an AI researcher; seeking advice
If you're already a grad student you can usually take any undergrad course at your institution for free. It will slow down your progress on your graduate degree, but you might as well do it right if it's what you really want.
gsylvie··on Too poor to retire, too young to die (2016)
Hey, that's me! (Six figure income, stopped paying credit card bills.) Aside from the interest that continues to accumulate, you are absolutely correct: the debt does decrease:

At the 7-month mark one of the credit card companies (I owed them $15,000 at 29.9% APR) sent a piece of registered mail: if you send us 3 post-dated cheques for the next 3 months for $1200 each (total $3600), we'll consider the debt paid off.

I ignored them and did a Chapter 13 instead. (Well, the Canadian equivalent).

gsylvie··on Fresh Horrors from Equifax CEO Richard Smith's Congressional Hearing
THIS:

> "who is responsible for patching applications with no development team anymore?"

Struts 2.2.3 (oldest vulnerable version) was released on May 7, 2011. Personally I find it easy to imagine an app depending on that, going into prod, and just chugging away, forgotten for 6 years on some obscure corner of an enterprise's public (or internal) web assets.

gsylvie··on Why SQL is beating NoSQL, and what this means for the future of data
NVMe SSD's are 100x faster than 15k disks. How many shops run 100+ machine NoSQL instances?
gsylvie··on Why SQL is beating NoSQL, and what this means for the future of data
SSD's.
gsylvie··on Fucking Sue Me (2011)
Would you have represented your client for the litigation?

(Or would your firm have?)

I'm just curious to understand how your own incentives don't point you towards court. Are you in-house counsel? Are you a small shop with no litigation department?

gsylvie··on Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
Do you have the insanity and the tenacity to un-rot the fish from the bottom up?

> Corollary 1. Who can, and sometimes does, un-rot the fish from the bottom? An insane employee.

http://yosefk.com/blog/people-can-read-their-managers-mind.h...

gsylvie··on Ask HN: What problem in your business is worth paying 10k/y for?
Do you report them to any credit agencies?
gsylvie··on Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
Confront and address? You ain't gonna get your boss fired without a scratch. He's just bragging that he achieved a local maxima, and I think he's correct.

Maybe during the exit interview he could have said, "oh by the way, there's a file on my computer..."

But then he might suddenly find the severance offer is retracted.

gsylvie··on Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
Becoming managers to sooth their self-esteem issues.

I don't mean this as a cynical joke at all. In my experience too few managers see the job as a job, and instead they see it as a power and status boost --- a way to be "winning" in the game of life.

It should be a calling. It should be the thing you were put on this earth to do.

Of dozens of managers I've encountered, I've only met 1 or 2 where it seemed to be their calling.

gsylvie··on Side Project Marketing Checklist
It's a great list. And I love the little inspirational quotes above each section. I think the "common sense" items should stay, since what is common sense to one is not always common sense to another.

But akin to what others have said, it's not a checklist! I think I'd need 2 additional full-time staff on my side project working on nothing but this to implement it.

To make it more specific to side projects I think it could use a preliminary strategizing paragraph. E.g., if you only have 2 hours / week to devote to marketing, here's how to use this list...

gsylvie··on Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business?
If you effectively train 10% of the cohort, and some of that cohort find jobs, then several of those 10% would enthusiastically recommend you internally for any positions that come up in their companies.
gsylvie··on Should Community Colleges Abolish Algebra?
I think there's more algebra in frontend development. For example: CSS or SVG gradients, JavaScript animations and fades, the occasional clever data visualization. Heck, even the CSS box model?

Backend or frontend, if you use any quantitative metrics in your year-end performance evals, then some algebra is going to be helpful!

And you never know what will come up. I was once contracted by a regional government to write some code to correct hourly sensor readings (water levels in wells) based on a monthly manual human reading (ground truth). When it was done my boss remarked, "oh, this is just a linear transformation."

gsylvie··on Redesigning GitLab's navigation
When did you last try Bitbucket? Bitbucket Cloud or Bitbucket Server (on-prem)?

I write add-ons for Bitbucket Server. I'm curious to know what you find unusable about it.

gsylvie··on Ask HN: Passive income ideas for solo developers?
Oh you work at Atlassian! I wonder if the PR I recently had accepted into "Auto Unapprove Plugin" will affect you! (I get the sense Atlassian uses that add-on internally).

https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/stash-auto-unapprove-plugin/...

(Issue #15 in particular - base unapprove on: git diff target...source | git patch-id).

gsylvie··on Two Commits and the User Experience of Git
You cannot recover your unstaged changes if you happen to toast them with "git checkout --".
gsylvie··on Two Commits and the User Experience of Git
For me the UX issue was that I came from "svn" and "svn checkout" is a VERY different command. Obviously this is not git's fault. I suspect git is much easier to learn for those untainted by svn.

As for "git checkout branch" and "git checkout -- branch" doing very different things, I find the "--" works well to bump my mental model into the right state, and so in practice I'm never confused about the distinction.

It also helps (a lot!) that "git status" teaches us about these modes for "git checkout --" and "git reset HEAD":

    On branch master
    Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
    Changes to be committed:
    (use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)

    modified:   pom.xml

    Changes not staged for commit:
    (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
    (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes)

    modified:   src/main/java/com/bitbooster/FoxtrotHook.java
gsylvie··on Wildcard Certificates Coming January 2018
I want multi-wildcard-certs (using subject alternative names aka SAN). Also, if I get a cert that covers:

    [*.a.company.com] and [*.b.company.com]
Can I please also have [a.company.com] and [b.company.com] stuffed into two additional SAN slots!

p.s. How do I get an inline asterisk into my HN comment!?

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