jtheory

Adding to the other response here -- it's great to thank your customers, and you wouldn't want to hide that you're affiliated with AgileBits. But please bear in mind that people reading HN are here to read a discussion.

A good guideline is just "does this add useful/interesting content to the discussion?"; if not, think very hard before adding it.

Plus from the HN guidelines: Please don't sign comments; they're already signed with your username. If other users want to learn more about you, they can click on it to see your profile.

All that said, welcome to HN!

This one in particular -- I use KeePass for my personal stuff, still; but at work, there seem to be a ton of logins we need to share.

Never mind sensitive stuff -- we get lots of use out of LastPass for managing the list of test and demo users on our site. We setup sandbox accounts (with various types of users) for potential customers. Each time the main logins to into LastPass, so if they run into problems, anyone on the dev team can help them out (with no other coordination required).

I've not been terribly impressed by LP's usability, honestly; but for quite a while they've seemed to be the only mature product in this space.

I've noticed Dashlane seems to be catching up here; I'm keeping an eye on them.

This is a great approach -- don't just learn words (and string them together in sequences taken from your native language... not likely to be right!); learn common chunks that you can re-use everywhere.

There are still verb tenses that I haven't properly learned in French, but I use them because I learned some chunks that use them. I'm not at ease with using the tenses involved in "I should have ___ but I ___" -- but I know the chunks for that particular phrase without thinking about it (e.g., J'aurais dû lui dire mais j'avais complètement oublié) -- that's technically conditional past then pluperfect.. which I had to look up just now; I don't really know them! There are oddities with imperative form that I only really know through chunks -- but "don't be afraid" (n'aies pas peur) is easy even though it's irregular, just because I know that one.

And now they're less alien-feeling, so -- being comfortable with the chunked versions -- I now have mental hooks that let me recognize similar conjugations used on other verbs when I run into them.

Contract surgery is pretty routine these days, fortunately. Be careful about who's doing the surgery, double-check that they're inserting the right type & power of lens, etc. (mistakes are rare, but it's worth double-checking everything you can) and manage your post-op care very carefully, but that's about reducing risks that are small to begin with; it's pretty safe -- especially if you're not dealing with more fragile eyes due to existing conditions (my case) or advanced age.

But if you do have issues to work around -- e.g., problems with the original capsule holding the natural lens, or other inflammation/etc. to avoid, there are even now a handful of different ways to attach an artificial lens that also work well; I have artificial lens in the original capsule, and the other that basically clipped onto the iris.

You'll probably need glasses anyway (for standard artificial lenses, you will) but possibly only for reading.

I use progressive lenses in my glasses (no more bifocals, these days); and generally reading, driving, etc. are just fine -- I don't think about it.

The tricky thing here is that really getting this message across can be hard, and the doctors/specialists involved may not have any sense whatsoever what's going on inside the head of patient sitting across from them, nodding and looking a bit bored. And looking at them and seeing a parent figure, perhaps, some greying, slightly-ridiculous authority figure who's just setting up more rules because that's how they spend their time...

I remember some of these feelings; I've had an eye condition since I was 5 that gave me 20/200 vision at one point, and included various unpleasant treatments; fortunately for many years I've just needed to take eyedrops once a day and that's sufficient.

When I left home to go to college, I needed to find a specialist somewhere near school, and see them a few times a year to be sure things were under control. Think I handled that well? Nope, not really, but (to make a long story short) I was lucky that nothing irrevocable happened as a result.

At that age, I was aware that poor decisions, even non-decisions (ignoring something that needed to be done) could have severe real-life consequences, but all that still felt unreal, and even now I sort of feel like rolling my eyes at myself for saying it. What kind of person writes phrases like "severe real-life consequences", huh?

It's an age for breaking free of constraints, and trading in external rules for internal ones (through some amount of trial & error); that's just a much more dangerous process for people (like the author at that time, and myself to a lesser extent) who are leading lives with lower error tolerances.

Patients Know Best -- REMOTE ONLY. Core hours for most of us are in London time, but we now have developers also in EST and CST (partly overlapping). We're slowly hiring mid-level and senior full stack developers (one every couple of months), but our next hire or two will be focused on app dev! We have patient and clinician apps that need to be re-worked and greatly expanded (to navigate a diverse medical record), and we've been working for a while now on a maternity app that takes the midwives and mother all the way through a pregnancy. That app is based on AppGyver Steroids (which in turn is built around Cordova), so you should be able to jump into that fairly easily. We're thus working with JavaScript, WebSQL, jQuery, backbone, HTML/CSS. Extra points if you've dealt with large/complex apps and managing data offline (and the complexity that comes with synching periodically with the server, where new data may come from either the app or the server);

For the server side -- apps authenticate with OAuth2, speaking JSON to a REST API; our server-side back end and webapp are primarily Java-based, gradually being refactoring towards a microservice structure. So if you're interested in helping out as well implementing new REST calls as needed, Java experience will ease that path.

More about PKB

I've worked in a lot of different sectors since I first started writing code in the late 90s, including education, b2b supply chains, POS systems, e-commerce, banking, and anti-spam.

PKB has been head-and-shoulders above the rest in everything I care about.

We're building something that actively, directly, improves the lives of people in general -- not selling more stuff, helping others sell more stuff, or making comfortable people a bit more comfortable. If you're interested in PKB's growth, funding, profitability, contracts, etc., ask -- our CEO is also active on HN. I'm in the CTO role.

We're pragmatic about work/life balance. I work from France, or sometimes from Malaysia, where my in-laws live. Almost half of the developers have small children at home -- personally, I get my kids up in the morning, and I'm with them entirely late-afternoon & evening (while my wife works), then I fill in some extra hours around the edges as needed. We're collaboratively figuring out what works (e.g., how many working hours should you overlap to collaborate effectively?), and planning our lives and our work around what's effective, not around some photocopied list of rules stapled to a cubicle wall. One of our developers only codes part time (and occasionally takes long leaves of absence), because he's also a theatre director.

Culture -- we live in various parts of the UK, central France, Bangalore, Vienna, Budapest, NYC and Costa Rica; we range in age (though I don't actually know everyone's ages, so I can't say exactly!). We're not all native English speakers -- but communication skills trump even technical skills for remote teams, so we all understand, speak and write English easily and with the confidence to interrupt if we didn't catch something. We collaborate, not compete -- let ideas fight it out, but we're on the same team. We like to laugh (but jokes stay tasteful), we share stories of what we did over the weekend (but these don't normally end "then I passed out").

If we sound like a good match, get in touch: https://www.patientsknowbest.com/careers.html (I'm also contactable directly -- see profile -- but I get a lot of email). I do review all applications, though currently our hiring process is slow and with not-great communication; you should probably mention it if you think you're a great fit but need to jump to something immediately.

I got the impression she's not fully sure what happened, herself.

I'm curious to hear the next post, when she's had a bit of time to digest it.

If you're curious what part of the lunar cycle you're seeing, when you see a crescent moon, there's a trick French schoolchildren learn -- a moon like the curve of a "p" is in the "première" (first)/growing/waxing phase.

A moon like the curve in a "d" is on the "dernière" (last)/shrinking/waning phase.

Personally, I somehow spent the first few decades of my life assuming that a crescent moon always curved the same way; though if I'd ever paid attention to the actual moon it would have easily shown that was nonsense. :/

Well...

> The appear.in team currently consists of 14 people, and operates as an independent startup within the incubator environment of Telenor Digital.

That's not cheap, and it doesn't sound like it's just a side-project to raise awareness for the parent company or something like that.

What's your source of revenue? That needs to be clear before we can comfortably use a service for business purposes.

I'm in France -- I still see it for almost 100% of the purchases I make online if the merchant is here in France, and a decent number of them when the merchant is in the UK. The last purchase I made with my bank card that got the interstitial page was about half an hour ago.

It sends a text to my mobile for me to plug into the form to approve the txn -- thus, not like phishing in this case. But for a while this was a real nightmare because my mobile number changed, and I couldn't figure out how to convince my bank to store the new number (it turned out after many months and phone calls I was sending the requisite paper form to the wrong address for my type of account...).

There's a lot of luck involved, and just persistence over a long period of time. But I figure you also just have to start doing what you want to do. This is amazingly possible in the developer world in a way that's hard to imagine in any other industry.

I was a music major in university (and planning on an English lit or creative writing minor) -- then I took an intro compsci course halfway through, and had a bit of a shock; it was an entirely new thing for me, but I really had a knack for it, and enjoyed it as well. It was a bit late to change my major... but I just fit in as much compsci as I could, and also just starting building things outside of coursework. I managed to get a software dev job right out of college based on a bunch of interactive online drills I wrote for the music department, plus I had very solid communication skills and academic recognition.

The software dev job was doing custom dev on lots of different kinds of projects (that was good), and in my spare time I turned the interactive music stuff into a site that's still a side income stream. It's languishing somewhat these days, because 5 years ago I started as a developer at a UK-based startup (working remotely from France; long story) and gradually became the CTO -- mostly just from looking for the hardest, riskiest problems we had and chasing them down one at a time, and being easy to work with.

It's hard to abstract any of this to general advice -- maybe just that mastering anything requires a good deal of focus and just time. If you want to do technical work (huge range there) you need to be doing it -- making mistakes, finding your way to solutions (good ones and bad), paying close attention to what's hard and why. It's probably worthwhile building something other people use, and can look at, etc. -- plus (whatever your focus is), mastering the context of working with customers, colleagues, competitors is valuable. If you build and support something all on your own, you're forced to learn a lot about all that.

There's a lot out there spinning the same result different ways; but I think that's the general status -- social mobility hasn't changed in the US for decades.

There's rather clearer data that the gap between rich & poor continues to widen in the US, which makes it a bit more bleak that going from poor to rich is still a rough uphill battle.

It's also fairly disheartening when you think of all the things that have changed in the past 50 years, many efforts that should help social mobility. Attempting to stop pervasive lead poisoning, lots of grants and policies to help get poor kids through basic and into higher education, legal and other sorts of efforts against sexism and racism... all kinds of things intended to hopefully make the playing ground more fair for everyone haven't actually moved this particular needle at all.

For a bit more context, also look outside of the US. If you want to live the American dream, you'll have a much better chance in Denmark. Reference here (though I read about it elsewhere a few years ago... can't remember orig src): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the...

Of the 9 developed countries in that study, only the UK ranked worse than the US.

Notice that this is just a short essay. A blog post, maybe. But it's also potentially a reason to search for available domain names; to actually register one (after exploring the compromises around what registrar to choose), to find a host (navigating the truly bewildering options), to decide whether wordpress might be the right way to go, and what theme, and what big header image. Plugins? And what if it really goes viral... surely we'd better have some ads in there to capture a bit of value from that, right?

All of this can be really quite educational. But in the end it's fairly impressive that it was ever done at all... which suggests that in fact it's not done; there are a ton of other plans for what should be here, and only because of those plans was the writer able to get this far.

musictheory.net has some nice interactive tutorials (plus its own exercises).

I think you're assuming that the employees in question are permitted to install software freely on their work computers, and/or that the company decision-makers are aware of new sites/services they're denying themselves by their policy.

Firstly, the policy is there for a reason -- often something like "we paid a lot in 2003 for this custom software, and if we upgrade browsers we'll have to pay X to have it rewritten/replaced".

X may be a rather large sum of money -- easily enough to overwhelm whatever benefits they might get by becoming paying customers of whoever's new venture.

There's also a potential for a sort of catch-22; new sites/services may pop up that could even replace their old custom-built software... but if they can't even try it out and the site looks awful on their browsers, a) it's less likely they'll make the jump and b) it gives the impression of being a new-fangled flash-in-the-pan sort of thing. After all, the serious companies online put the effort into supporting older browsers.

Right; in some cases it's not a personal decision.

We have a set of users who are using our site in healthcare environments, on locked-down computers that are difficult/expensive, so in some cases they're stuck on IE7/IE8.

I'm pretty sure calling them "illiterate smugs" wouldn't go over well.

On the other hand, these computers don't have access to the general internet, so in this case they don't risk running afoul of site creators who decide to be "clever" and go out of their way to aggressively (or even insultingly) demand that visitors upgrade. But restricted corporate users who hit that sort of thing would be unamused.

Notes from the actual post:

> When we shipped Bootstrap 3, we immediately discontinued all support for v2.x, causing a lot of pain for all our users out there. That was a mistake we won’t be making again. For the foreseeable future, we’ll be maintaining Bootstrap 3 with critical bug fixes and documentation improvements.

The current plan is already keeping basic support in place for BS3, but no new features. That's probably just where we'll stay, then.

Dropping old tech means projects/companies that require that support have to do it in-house. We need to support IE7+ for much of our UI, unfortunately, because of paying customers in hospital environments where upgrading is a nightmare.

So it's a good thing in that libraries can be leaner/meaner for everyone who doesn't need to care about old tech, but it also means the unpleasant work of supporting the old tech now has to be carried on by lots of different developers in lots of different companies, rather than being done well in one place.

If there's any possibility of keeping alive an "old-browser-support" branch of BS (like jQuery's 1.x and 2.x streams), that's rather better than abandoning it -- in theory we might be able to contribute some developer time into it.

It's useful to frame it that way -- the law is about doing two legal things, together.

Forcing violators to stop driving can seriously damage their lives (remove their ability to earn a living, see friends/loved ones, etc.), but hey, they're still allowed to get drunk!

It's seems in retrospect like needlessly cruel punishment, when "force violators to stop drinking" is the other option.

That's a fun quick brainteaser! Reminds me of those old puzzles where you'd have a list of facts -- like there are 7 houses in a row, all different colors and with different species of pets in the yard, the blue house is next to the orange house, the green house has a pet with 2 legs, etc. etc., and they provide just enough info that you can logically chain together the order of colors and pets.

They're a bit like the word-problem version of working out sudoku (vs. guessing at it, which is a different game).

The "guide" thing is a metaphor, which only goes so far. :)

It falls apart in that a guide is in a business relationship, and that adds a distance that isn't there for parenting -- in that sense a parent can be more of a friend.

But one way parents are not like friends is that friends choose each other, and can drift apart. Parents have a much stronger motivation to keep a close relationship with their kids even as interests diverge, personalities may not mesh terribly well, etc..

The important aspect I wanted to touch on, though, was more about "authority" vs. "friend", and in that balance I think a parent should fall much more on the friend side.

I'm not at all saying that the same tactics work for all kids. But there are tons of ways to influence kids' behavior that don't involve corporal punishment, and I've never had to go too far down the list, when I sit down and brainstorm ideas.

It's also essential to think longer-term. I don't know what your brother was doing, or what your parents tried. But part of raising kids is being aware that a child's behavior is going to keep changing, week to week, almost regardless of what you do. So if they're doing something you don't like (but that isn't risky), it's sometimes the best course to just endure it for a bit.

Personally, I'm pretty open about these things, so I remind my kids that yes, they have the power to make me miserable, any time they want. Sometimes they do. But they're clearly not enjoying those times either, so we work together to try to figure out what's going on, and how we can optimize for more fun.

Being a really good parent (in my view) is all about mixing authority and friendship/trust/empathy.

Kids have a lot of interesting ideas that (for various reasons) they can't act out, and sometimes you're the one preventing them. If it sucks (e.g., my daughter wants to pick every flower she sees... I have to stop her, because these are flowers other people bought & tend, to make their homes look nice), then I show her sympathy rather than anger. I still have to stop her from picking them -- it's part of my job as a parent, to keep my child's behavior from harming others -- but I tell her that in so many words. "I'm your dad, so this is part of my job, to stop you from doing things that will make other people really sad... but I'm sorry, it would be cool to bring all these flowers home!". And (because I'm sympathizing) I can think to go looking for wildflowers, or pick our own flowers. We're in the same boat -- there are also lots of things I want that I can't do, and I point them out when I can.

I don't ever say "because I said so" -- that's something I don't want to teach them. I have to have a reason, and if I can't come up with one, then I re-think what I'm asking them to do (or not do). Okay, so we're running around out in a field, and it seems kinda wrong to me for you to take off all your clothes; but honestly we'd see anyone coming a mile away, so if you can get dressed again lightning-fast if someone comes... then go for it. And remember if the lightning-fast thing doesn't work, then next time I'm going to say it's a bad idea.

There really seem to be a lot of parents who think they need to "discipline" their children, need to keep punishing them (often more & more severely) until the child learns to stop fighting back, stop challenging their authority, and will do what they're told. This is a painfully short-sighted view of parenting.

Think about it -- if my daughter doesn't pick flowers, ever, because she just knows I'll get mad, what has she learned? Nothing, just "here's another thing that makes Daddy mad" -- and optionally "if I keep picking flowers, Daddy keeps getting angrier until he stops taking me on walks, or he slaps my hand", or however else I escalated my reaction until it finally "worked". I might be more or less smart about how I enforce my authority over her, but all I'm thinking about in that case is "how can I force this child to do X" -- empathy is nowhere in sight, and it's just a struggle between us... which is going to carry over into our other interactions as well.

If I'm empathizing with her (and cheering her up, since neither of us can pick these flowers), the short-term end result is identical (flowers are not picked), but long-term is much better. She learns a bit more about the restrictions of living in a world with lots of other people in it (and can learn to apply the reasons for not picking other people's flowers to other situations), she's a bit closer to me (esp. if I managed to cheer her up successfully), and she's a bit further on her way to being a responsible, thoughtful adult.

There are a lot of ways in which being a good parent is like being a really good tour guide, much more than being a policeman/judge.

[note: this is a long rant answering a little comment! sorry about that... this is a topic I feel strongly about.]

Sure; it's not considered an evil thing generally; it's just that the subculture of people who go out of their way and pay more to get organic/local/etc. generally aren't eating much of it: they're paying more for the AOC-certified, locally-produced real cheese.

They're also (in my experience) buying a ton of homeopathic remedies for just about everything, which I have trouble not rolling my eyes about, but that's another subject.

There's one not far from me, so I may look into it. Well, 20 min... far enough that "drove 40 minutes to pick up local produce" starts to sound dumb, though. I'm in central France.

But in context -- it's not hard to find local produce, including plenty of local, organic produce, without relying on a specially-organized meetup point. The closest large town to where I live has about 8K people; that's big enough for them to have a (smallish) dedicated organic/specialty grocery store, and street markets every weekend, year-round, with a few organic farms selling their produce there.

If I drive into Limoges, there are several large grocery stores that sell only organic produce, and highlight local produce.

These are all noticeably more expensive than shopping at a regular Super-U or Casino/Geant (big chains), but the selection and quality is quite good.

I'll check into the Ruche near here to see what it's like; but if it's the same farmers we can buy from directly at the weekend market, I'm not sure I see the point.

Edit: "276 Membres"... Huh -- that's significant. Oddly, the producers include a "Safranier", i.e., a saffron farmer. I didn't think that could even grow here.

I'd assume not -- because la vache qui rit is sort of the French version of American cheese (a factory-produced cheese-based product, not an actual cheese), so it's not really the sort of thing they'd want to be associated with.

The name is ringing a vague bell -- maybe there's a childrens' story about a talking hive? No idea, but a quick google didn't find the answer either, so I can't say for sure.

I'm mostly coding in Java, which doesn't have named params... but I don't like either extra variable declarations just for this, nor mysterious booleans.

My current habit is to use comments for non-enforced named params; e.g.,

   fetchLatestFoo( long barId, false/*fetchContent*/ );

No compile-time checking, etc., but it still serves the purpose.

Context...? Are they a custom dev company seeking new clients? Or a great group of devs who are all suddenly out if work because a company went under, and they're looking to be hired? And what's your position, evaluating/recommending them? Former/current boss, client, family member, friend?

Good luck to them; but you're more likely to pick up useful contacts for them if you fill in some details.

The problem is that "secure version" is a constantly moving target; the taskforce would need to go around once a month (or whenever there's an urgent vulnerability discovered) and update apps that needed it.

If Docker apps were somehow integrated with maintained Linux repos, this could be possible by default -- e.g., all Docker images built on Debian stable dependencies would have their internal dependencies auto-upgraded with each Debian stable sub-release, and possibly be flagged as "needs human intervention" on major releases.

Have there been efforts to do anything like this? I'm new to the Docker world....

There needs to be, though, otherwise a "secure app" is always a temporary creation.