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karim

906 karma · joined January 15, 2009

Hiya, I'm Karim!

I'm happy to chat --- just send me an email at "hello" @ khamidou.com!

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karim··on Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio
One year into it you knew the company was going to fail yet you stayed on for 3 more years? What happened there?
karim··on The new Paris métro
A single ticket in the Paris metro is €1.90 (about $2) flat for anywhere in the network, and not considering subsidies, monthly etc.
karim··on From Aristocratic to Ordinary: Shifting Modes of Elite Distinction (2020)
"Common People" by Pulp is a great example of that
karim··on You can now hail an Uber without the Uber app
Not all of HN is German :)
karim··on You can now hail an Uber without the Uber app
So, just like taxis who for some strange reason never seemed to accept credit cards, or would hold your luggage hostage if you didn't add a tip?
karim··on Azure dropping database support for MariaDB. Users advised to migrate to MySQL
They were able to spoof tokens for a long time, access mailboxes, etc.

If this isn't enough for you, there's also ChaosDB, the cross-account vulnerability Palo Alto found (https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/azure-container-instance...), among many others.

This isn't an isolated instance, that's a pattern.

karim··on Azure dropping database support for MariaDB. Users advised to migrate to MySQL
All vendors have weaknesses, but few have Microsoft's cavalier attitude towards security. Case in point: https://www.wiz.io/blog/storm-0558-compromised-microsoft-key...

If you bragged to me about being locked into Azure I would be very puzzled.

karim··on The German group buying ticket dodgers out of prison
Do you think the controllers in the field are the one making the rules or are you just casually racist
karim··on Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars
Especially given current population trends — there are no guarantees you'll be able to sell your house for much more than you bought it in 30 years.
karim··on How to add thousands of lights to your renderer and not die in the process
This article kinds of buries the lede here: the author is working on a fully raytraced version of Jedi Outcast!

I’d be really curious to hear how easy it was to adapt the Q3 engine for this!

karim··on Show HN: Tally Forms – A free Typeform alternative
The illustrations on this landing page are beautiful!
karim··on Ask HN: Too old to be a front end developer?
Thanks for taking the time to get back to me! This is super interesting!
karim··on Ask HN: Too old to be a front end developer?
Wow that’s very impressive! If you don’t mind, I’d be curious to hear more about your career transition into and out of being a paramedic.
karim··on Brian Kernighan on the Origins of Unix
Could be that Amazon sold you a counterfeit copy — it happens a lot with popular titles because of their inventory commingling.
karim··on Unix Recovery Legend (1986)
Most likely they didn't have a VAX in the same building they could do that with, so they had to improvise. These things were pretty big and expensive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX#/media/File:VAX_11-780_int...)!
karim··on What upcoming tech trends do you think will change the world
One reason I think ebikes are great is because their main target isn't hardcore cyclists but everyday people who need to get from one point to another easily.

Ebikes require a bit more maintenance than a regular bike for sure, but a lot less than a car. They also let you transport more cargo than a regular bike and very often get you there quicker than a car.

I also know a couple people who own ebikes and use them exclusively for running errands (e.g because they don't want to break a sweat when getting groceries).

karim··on James Gosling: Java, JVM, Emacs, and Computing History [video]
Absolutely. Java was the first mainstream language with automatic memory management and garbage collection. You have to remember that before that people were building line of business applications in C or C++.

Java made it possible for average engineers to turn out relatively reliable applications, in a fraction of the time it'd have taken them with any other option (apart from Smalltalk but it was already niche by then).

karim··on Ask HN: If you could work remote where would you live?
There actually is a measure on the ballot to modify prop 13 this year: https://ballotpedia.org/California_Tax_on_Commercial_and_Ind... — as you said, this is the year for it to pass.
karim··on Speeding up Linux disk encryption
Genuinely curious, would you mind explaining why some operation can be fast in software but slow in hardware?
karim··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2020)
Nylas | Senior Sales Engineer | SF | ONSITE, VISA | Full-time | https://nylas.com

The Nylas Cloud APIs makes it an order of magnitude easier for companies to add email, calendar, and contacts integrations to their applications. By being at the core of business communication, scheduling, and contacts, we believe we can shape the future of how people work.

Because our product is highly technical — it has to bridge the gap between several very old/proprietary protocols (IMAP, ActiveSync, Exchange Web Services) — we're looking for a seasoned sales engineer that will help our prospects and customers integrate with our APIs, all the way from the initial stages of the implementation up to signing a contract.

I'm the hiring manager for this job, please apply by sending me an email directly at karim AT nylas.com

karim··on Ask HN: How do I help my Indian coworker get a raise?
ex-H1-B employee here. I think your advice is well-meaning but far off the mark. There's two reasons for that:

- first, US visas are complicated but not that complicated. Plenty of people have been in that situation before and there is a lot of advice but online and offline about how to deal with this. Coaching someone doesn't necessarily mean giving them a play-by-play of how to do things – you can point them to the right resource.

- second, it's possible that OP's colleague simply feels trapped and just hasn't considered that it was possible to improve their situation. Even a small nudge from OP could provide a huge improvement in their colleague's life.

@OP – thank you for doing this.

karim··on What happens to a mail-order mattress after you return it
That's straight from their S-1, page 6: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1598674/000104746920...
karim··on Stripe's API was down
Genuinely curious — what happens when Spreedly or TokenX are down, though?
karim··on I am stressed out about interviews
Here's one way to see things – there's around 3.6M software engineers in the US. Google has 100k employees, so let's assume they have 50k engineers. Do you think the top 1% of engineers in the US all work at Google?

Obviously they don't. The truth is, there's no perfect interview process, and chances are you may fail (or succeed) for reasons completely out of your control. You've been studying for a month, and have a degree from a great school – what else can you do to improve your chances? Relax, accept that interviews are a crapshoot and try doing your best.

Worst case you won't get an offer but guess what? Plenty of great engineers got passed by Google or Facebook.

karim··on Belgian programmer solves MIT’s 20-year-old time capsule cryptographic puzzle
Whoa, are you the Bernard Fabrot that wrote intro to Linux books in the late '90s early '00s (https://www.amazon.com/Bernard-Fabrot/e/B004N6XBQC/ref=ntt_d...)? If yes, I have to say thank you very much — I owe you my career!
karim··on Google Employees Uncover Ongoing Work on Censored China Search
> I'm not saying that people don't have the right to morally object something like this project, but it's kind of baffling that many are loudly voice their concerns while looking the other way when tweet from their Chinese made iPhones, and write dissenting articles in their Chinese made computers.

I don't get it — following your logic people shouldn't be protesting anything China-related because they're using chinese goods? I mean, this isn't a binary issue — you can buy chinese computers because most computers are made there and regret that Google is building a search engine to censor political queries.

karim··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2019)
Nylas | Staff Software Engineer | Full-time | SF, NYC or REMOTE

The Nylas Cloud API makes it an order of magnitude easier for companies to add email, calendar, and contacts integrations to their applications. By being at the core of business communication, scheduling, and contacts, we believe we can shape the future of how people work.

We’re looking for an experienced Staff Software Engineer to join our team in San Francisco or New York. This person will work directly with a broad team of engineers to architect, advise, mentor, and be hands on to grow the Nylas API and internal systems.

You’ll be responsible for the design, development, and operations of large-scale systems that power inbox sync for all of our customers. Right now, our open-source Python sync engine regularly archives terabytes of data across a massive SQL cluster, and our Flask APIs handle tens of millions of requests a day. We aim to scale that several times over in the next year.

Full job posting: https://jobs.lever.co/nylas/a70ace09-c1af-4022-a586-ffedd18e...

Benefits and Perks: https://github.com/nylas/handbook

Our team is roughly equal by identified gender (including engineering) and focuses on creating an inclusive environment for all people. We welcome people from all different backgrounds and currently employ startup founders, college graduates from all over the country and the world, and coding academy graduates. We are actively and regularly working with the entire team to shape our culture in a conscious way to our ideal of empowerment, transparency, and kindness.

To apply, send me an email with your resumé to karim@nylas.com.

karim··on Books I Recommend
This is unnecessarily harsh. Sometimes there are circumstances outside of your control. I don't think it's a good idea to judge someone's career when you don't know them.
karim··on Ask HN: How Do Services Like PythonTutor and Repl.it Run Code Safely
I’ve actually written a short blog post about it (http://khamidou.com/sandboxing/)!

Basically, most of them build a sandbox to prevent the guest system from interacting in unexpected ways. There’s a bunch of ways you could do this — intercepting syscall, limiting them using seccmp(2), etc.

karim··on Handling 1M websocket connections in Go
"When people rewrite system from X where X in (Python, Ruby, Node, Clojure) to Go they usually see at least 10x improvement."

Sure but how much of the performance gains come from Go and how much come from just having a better understanding of the problem the second time around?

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