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h1srf

137 karma · joined August 8, 2012

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h1srf··on Ask HN: How do I deal with the first sexual harassment complaint at my startup?
Yup same here. Every sexual harassment training course I've attended has said that just because it is not happening on company time or on company property does not make it not harassment.
h1srf··on Inside Palantir
My guess: forward deployed engineer = implement the system at a client, business cultivation engineer = sales
h1srf··on Cover (YC W16) Helps You Insure Anything with the Snap of a Photo
> Cover connects you with an insurance brokerage in your area best suited to insuring that piece of property.

I want to send you a picture, you quote me a price and I pay. If I have to talk to someone else, you've totally lost my interest - I can go talk to an insurance broker myself.

Side question: How many penis pictures have you gotten?

h1srf··on How to Learn Advanced Mathematics Without Heading to University
Where did you go to school? Those were just the prerequisites for my engineering degree.
h1srf··on How much is Spotify paying Google Cloud?
The post is a cool example but I'd be shocked if Spotify doesn't have a contract for up to X events/mo and overages at some reduced rate. No way they're paying per request. The only place I've never seen negotiate rates is Bloomberg.
h1srf··on Show HN: I learned to code to launch my new startup
Are benefits like these taxable? My gut feeling is yes.
h1srf··on Pizza Compass
Shhhh...you're ruining the secret
h1srf··on Top Reasons I like Postgres Over SQL Server
In a previous life, I did a lot of MS BI & SharePoint work. On the BI side MS was just starting a push into the BI world and was gaining quite a bit of traction. I've worked on huge MS BI implementations and you are correct there. A lot of large firms use it for their whole BI stack.

On the SharePoint side of things, while I believe MS did oversell its capabilities, the problem was (could still be) that most places thought it was plug and play. It seriously wasn't. I don't know if things have gotten better but documentation those days was severely lacking. Add to that enterprises that were in the mindset that SharePoint was just another ASP .Net application and their in house devs could just pick it up without some sort of guidance.

There were a bunch of places where I was brought in to clean up the mess that happened because of those two things. I'm not sure if the landscape has changed or not but SharePoint is a beast unto itself and I've personally seen it implemented well at 30k+ seat organizations and the largest I've done was 50k seat org across 3 continents. It's not cheap to set up or customize but when it is done correctly, it does work.

h1srf··on Show HN: Streem.io - Media Center on the Cloud
How much can I upload 1GB? 10GB? 30TB?
h1srf··on Amazon joins Walmart in push for online sales tax
The article doesn't mention one important historical factor. For years, Amazon was fighting to not collect taxes until more and more states started passing laws saying online retailers must collect sales tax at the behest of B&M merchants. Rather than fight a losing battle, they decided to beat those merchants at their own game: "Fine, you want us to collect sales tax? We'll build warehouses everywhere and have same day delivery instead of having warehouses in only a couple of states."

I live in NY where Amazon already collects sales tax so it doesn't really matter to me.

h1srf··on Sorry, Geeks, Microsoft Excel is Everywhere
Agreed. They were doing CDS deals. Every bank I've worked at has their models in COM assemblies that can be consumed by Excel. Excel lets the traders value their instruments using the models. The inputs may have been copy-paste but I'd be hard pressed to believe that the risk numbers were generated by hand in Excel unless this was some very exotic instrument which I don't think it was.

Risk numbers aren't generated by Excel but an automated process that uses the same assemblies.

h1srf··on Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes
It's not that simple.

In the US, I think most places let you write in whoever you want. If they get enough votes, they win. Google "Lisa Murkowski".

The other problem is that unlike parliamentary systems, in the US we vote for multiple things and not which party/who your MP is. These are some of the things on the ballot:

1. President & VP 2. Senator 3. Congress Representative 4. Judges 5. Ballot measures

Unless each of these is on a different sheet of paper, counting them might be hard. Don't get me wrong though. I think that we should be using paper ballots. What does it matter if it takes 2 days instead of 1 to figure out who won.

h1srf··on Farming hard drives: how Backblaze weathered the Thailand drive crisis
If prices are expected to drop, your hedge would be for that somewhere around the price you expect it to be wouldn't it? Say you expect 3TB hard drives to be $110 in 3 months and the current price is $130. You may buy a contract for $115/hd - if someone is willing to sell you that contract.

Typically if you're hedging a commodity for actual use, what you're trying to do is to lock in your cost and not to make money out of it. Let's look at an airline for example. The price of oil currently is $90/barrel and I think it might go up even more to $120/barrel. I buy a contract for 100 barrels of oil at $100/barrel deliverable in 3 months. Say I use 100 barrels of oil every 3 months. I now know that my fuel cost is now $10,000 for those 3 months. This then allows me to price my product based on that $10,000 assumption.

In the case of hard drives, I have no idea if it would be a good idea to hedge since the prices keep on dropping and the Thailand flood is not an everyday occurance and in general prices of hard drives are pretty stable and don't fluctuate like oil prices. But fundamentally, you're not trying to avoid losing money; you're trying to lock in your cost so you can price your service accordingly and not be in a bind if the price of your commodity fluctuates.

h1srf··on Facebook's Release Engineer
I vaguely remember a reading a similar article that was a lot longer.
h1srf··on Please come break my web app.
No offense but your site doesn't tell me what I'm looking at. I have no idea what it does but I did click around and I still have no idea what it does.
h1srf··on Show HN: Get Maid - Uber for Maid Service in NYC
2 questions:

1. Is it not possible to schedule one using the website? I'm too lazy to download an app and 3G at my office is terrible.

2. If the maid steals something, can I file a claim with you?

h1srf··on Who’s buying the Nano? Why is Apple is still selling them?
It's good when you're running/exercising in general and can hold more than the shuffle . It's lighter than the iPhone/iPod touch.
h1srf··on TSA Moves On From Your Underwear to Your Starbucks
That(screening at the gate) has been going on forever though and most people (international travelers) are used to it by now. Most international flights to the US will have additional security screening for liquids/whatever since most destinations don't require the whole liquids/take shoes off/turn on your laptop crap.

Not saying it's right, just that it's been going on forever.

h1srf··on Good riddance, PayPal
I repeat this almost every time this topic comes up:

With a credit card, you can say that the charge was fraudulent and they will take the charge(s) off and you're not on the hook. With a debit card, you're out the money of the fraudulent charge while the bank investigates. From my personal experience, this can take a few days to 3 weeks before the bank puts the money back in your account. If the charge happens to put your account into overdraft, you may still have to pay the overdraft fee which may be hard to get overturned.

I pretty much only use my debit card as an ATM card. Very rarely do I actually use it as a debit card (there are rare instances where I may need to)

Conclusion: Don't use your debit card online if you have a credit card.

h1srf··on How the NYT paywall is working
I pay for it and I think it's worth it for the quality of reporting.
h1srf··on Pilot Rapid Prototyping with JavaScript and NodeJS Class
Traditional Computer Science education sucks big time when it comes to modern agile technologies like Ruby on Rails, Django, NodeJS, and NoSQL databases.

I'm teaching myself Node right now and my degree is in Computer Engineering not CS but I'm pretty sure CS is more than flavor of the month languages/frameworks.

h1srf··on The market doesn't care about your overpriced valuation (Failbook)
Merrill shorted FB at the IPO? I seriously doubt that. First of all, I don't think there would be enough inventory to borrow for a few days. Secondly, the borrow cost would have been astronomical for those first few days. There was a WSJ article that talked about the borrow dropping from 40% to 6% about a week after the IPO. Are you talking about that period?
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