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kodyon Ask HN: What password manager to use for IT team?

I used to manage a small IT department. I used LastPass as my personal password manager and purchased licenses for my team. It worked so well that we rolled it out to (most of) the rest of the organization. It made credential sharing (which is beginning to seem like an unsolvable problem) much more secure and gave admins tools to enforce strong password policies.

I still use LastPass for personal use. I haven't been an admin in a few years so I couldn't tell you if it's still a good option. I want to check out Bitwarden soon; it's been highly recommended to me.

kodyon List of Twitter mute words for your timeline

Yeah, it popped up for me as it was rising (I couldn't tell you how many likes it had). I thought "wow, I didn't expect Bernie to address this issue in that way." Then I saw the username, felt a little duped but hey, this is the web, I'm used to it. Then I felt very duped when I realized that nobody I followed had followed the account, let alone liked or retweeted it. It wasn't Promoted. It ended up on my feed because it was popular and related to my interests, I guess? What made me feel uneasy was that I follow the real Bernie Sanders, and a website showed me something that I legitimately thought he had said for a moment, and I didn't even set myself up to be in that position.

kodyon List of Twitter mute words for your timeline

The most egregious example of this that I have seen was this tweet, just the other day https://twitter.com/BernieeSanderrs/status/12197474935308328...

I'm not following this account. Nobody I follow is, and nobody I followed interacted with this tweet in any way. Twitter's "reason" for showing it to me was "Bernie Sanders (Parody) received a reply", which is a bizarre justification for adding it to my feed.

For a moment I 100% thought this was a real tweet because I usually look at the user's handle rather than their display name. Anyway, this encounter has made me decide to take a break from Twitter this election season.

kodyon How to Read Self-Help

I recommend the podcast "By The Book" if you're fascinated by/interested in the self-help book genre. The hosts select a self-help book, try to live it to the letter, and report their findings.

kodyon Ask HN: What would the Dunning-Kruger “test” be for your field?

I'll let you know when I no longer feel like the chaff!

It'd probably be similar to beefield's. Present a problem with a clear success condition and see how resourceful they are in solving it. A failure would be solving the wrong problem, making excuses (or "the problem is not solvable"), confidently talking in abstractions that don't concretely pertain to the problem, or failure to ask a question/say "I don't know".

I don't know that there's a technical question or problem I could ask to make a call on whether or not they know their stuff.

kodyon Ask HN: What change in your programming technique has been most transformative?

Probably learning to use a debugger and decreasing my reliance on print() statements. It's a nonzero initial investment but saves time in the long run.

At the team level, probably CI/CD. It forces us to break the monolith into digestible chunks and makes regression testing easier.

kodyon Inside the Chase plan to ‘ban’ screen scraping

Agreed! I've avoided using 3rd party budgeting apps because I can't bring myself to give them my banking credentials. This would be a much more secure solution. I'm hoping this ships with an API available to customers. I would be extremely happy with an endpoint to retrieve all of my transactions, at the very least.

kodyon Amateur Radio

I'd also recommend checking out https://www.ke6mt.us/

This blog was my introduction to Summits on the Air (SOTA), in which operators broadcast from mountain summits.

kodyon College-educated workers are taking over the American factory floor

It can lead to cringe moments as an adult, but more crucially I think it leads to fear of cringe moments, so you never really get the chance to fail, look like a goober, and reorient and try again. It also makes it easier to constantly judge other people for social slip ups or for not having a perfectly predictable personality.

I think I've mostly caught up. I moved to NYC for college, which was sort of my socialization boot camp. I learned how to start and maintain relationships VERY quickly. If you don't learn to like (or at least tolerate) just about any kind of human, the city can become very lonely and difficult.

A very stubborn part of my brain still judges Very Extroverted people and, weirdly, athletes. I'm working on it.

Thanks for asking!

kodyon College-educated workers are taking over the American factory floor

You're absolutely right. I was homeschooled K-12 and grew up hearing praise because I was good at "carrying myself like an adult" and socializing with adults, but I had no idea how to make friends or socialize with PEERS. Homeschool kids don't have the opportunity to have "cringe" moments that other posters here seem to regret and feel are unimportant to kids (or should avoided altogether) because they're often admonished to act like small adults.

kodyon College-educated workers are taking over the American factory floor

Not everyone can or should homeschool. My wife and I were both homeschooled our entire lives, and we are absolutely not going to homeschool our child.

I think many homeschool parents vastly overestimate their ability to educate a child. I know mine did. It's hard work and you have to cover all the bases, including socialization, or you'll be responsible for some pretty important shortcomings in your kid's development.

Yes, it was awesome being able to rush through my "boring" school work by lunch time so I could program computer games and read books all day.

No, it wasn't awesome feeling totally incompetent while trying to talk to girls or make friends in college. Turns out, all those "dumb secular public schoolers" were pretty good at some things, like having fun together and bonding.

I would not call homeschooling a "hack". It's an alternative system of education that takes a lot of hard work, a single-income-bearing parent, and enough awareness to fill the gaps that your child is losing by being at home all day, every day.

kodyon Ask HN: Where do you do quick back of envelope calculations?

Like a few others here, I typically use an interactive Python console.

kodyon Ask HN: How do you get into mental flow?

No kidding! I envy people who can pop off their headphones, talk for a few minutes, and (seemingly) get right back into the groove.

kodyon Ask HN: How do you get into mental flow?

Turn off my phone completely. Put it in a desk drawer. Clean my desk completely. Flip my notebook to a new page. Close all chat/email apps. Open my IDE. Write down the most important thing to do today (check Jira if I'm unsure). Open Spotify and play a lyricless music playlist (jazz or metal). Work.

So far, this is the ONLY way I've been able to reliably get in the zone. It's crucial that I avoid Slack, email, or the web until well into the afternoon. Sometimes I feel mentally "fragile" for struggling to multitask or return to work after being interrupted, but if it works, it works. I'm lucky to be part of a team that isn't too keen on frequent meetings and doesn't expect instant Slack responses.

kodyon Half-Life: Alyx

I completely agree. This site is the first I've read of the new dev tools, and I'm excited to see what the community builds on Source 2.

kodyon What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

Agreed. Even after Googling "ACH" I had to reconcile the article's usage of "ACH" as a verb, when it appears to be a electronic payment system.

kodyon Just Enough Piracy Can Be a Good Thing

If the tried and true method of getting paid is through concerts, Patreon, crowdfunding new albums, or selling CDs in the street, I don't think the market is as "unfair" as xhkkffbf is arguing.

I agree that this has nothing to do with the propriety of people taking content with a price tag for free. But I think muddling the market sense of fairness (I don't want to/cannot perform in a concert; people should pay me for selling MP3s online) and the ethics of copying data is dangerous. Especially when we are solving the problem through legislation.

kodyon Just Enough Piracy Can Be a Good Thing

This creates inefficiencies and it just isn't fair to those who just want to sell their creations without holding a concert or drumming up some other scheme to get people to pay.

Are you arguing that it's unfair that a business needs to sell something that people are willing to pay for in order to make money?

kodyon REST Introduction

Sorry, it's under Chapter 2. API Paradigms / Request-Response APIs / Representational State Transfer

kodyon REST Introduction

I strongly recommend Designing Web APIs: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920123880.do

You can jump ahead to the Representational State Transfer chapter to get a good overview of REST, then read whichever chapters seem interesting or solve whichever problems you're facing.

kodyon Ask HN: What Linux distro are you using (personal/workstation)?

Mint for personal use, Fedora for work use, and CentOS 7 for servers.

kodyon Millennials What is more important? Saving for short-term or long-term?

Asking this question on HN is probably not the most effective way to understand what "millennials" value, but I'll offer my anecdote.

My #1 priority is to have $10k in emergency savings. I guess that's my version of short-term savings.

Once I've hit $10k in liquid savings, I try to max out 401k and Roth IRA contributions. I am working towards having enough for a good down payment on a house by the time I am 30-32 (~10 years from now).

kodyon Why is history always about humans?

Combine that with Debt: the First 5000 Years and you have your bases covered

kodyon Ask HN: Aren't Netflix's autoplay video ads with audio egregious?

Yes. I mute my TV while browsing Netflix now. It wouldn't be so bad if you could disable/mute autoplay in the app's settings.

kodyon Tech Companies to Watch 2018

It worked for the article in question. Did you have a problem accessing it?

kodyon Tech Companies to Watch 2018

You can click ‘web’ next to the submission link to see the article without a paywall.

kodyon Chatbots were the next big thing: what happened?

In my experience, cursing loudly will get a human on the phone pretty quickly.

kodyon Ask HN: Forum(s) that you visit daily?

What is IH?

kodyon Features of a successful therapeutic fast of 382 days' duration (1973)

Thanks! This looks like a good start.

kodyon Features of a successful therapeutic fast of 382 days' duration (1973)

Can anyone recommend a good book on the subject of fasting? My (admittedly shallow) exploration of the subject tends to lead to pseudoscience/bro science.