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rson Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2014)

XP-Dev.com - Remote - https://xp-dev.com

XP-Dev.com does version control and project hosting (in the same market as Github, Bitbucket, etc). Profitable and bootstrapped.

Looking for backend and frontend engineers who would like to get their hands dirty in Subversion, Git and Mercurial. You will be working on new features on the platform that may involve work on the whole stack. You will be liaising directly with real users. Deployments are really quick, and you get to see the impact of your work almost immediately.

Stack:

  - Nginx, Apache
  - Java (Core, Wicket, Hibernate)
  - Python (mainly for scripting)
  - Linux
  - AngularJS, JQuery
  - MySQL
  - Redis
  - RabbitMQ
  - Fabric

There are other products in the pipeline - most of which are akin to xp-dev.com (hosting/productivity platforms). So, there is plenty of room to switch products and try out new things: https://deployer.vc, https://zoned.io amongst them.

What we're looking for:

  - Self starters
  - Sound understanding of programming
    you don't need to be a Java/Python/JavaScript guru

Benefits:

  - No keeping track of holidays
  - Flexible working hours
  - Flexible working conditions (see below)

Position location is remote. You'll need to factor in working from home or from a shared space near you (all will be paid for).

To apply, just drop a short cover email describing yourself and your CV to rs@exentriquesolutions.com

rson Show HN: Open-Source, Free, Agile Project Management Tool

Repositories (Git, Mercurial, Subversion) hosted by us integrate with DoneDone quite well: https://xp-dev.com/features/repository-integrations.html

(Disclaimer: I run+manage xp-dev.com)

rson The Apple Watch

Having run quite a number of marathons, half-marathons, 5k, 10k and all distances in between, I have noticed that there are still a good amount of runners out there (whether serious or not) who use their 4"/5" phones for tracking.

rson Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2014)

XP-Dev.com - Remote - https://xp-dev.com

XP-Dev.com does version control and project hosting (in the same market as Github, Bitbucket, etc). Profitable and bootstrapped.

Looking for backend and frontend engineers who would like to get their hands dirty in Subversion, Git and Mercurial. You will be working on new features on the platform that may involve work on the whole stack. You will be liaising directly with real users. Deployments are really quick, and you get to see the impact of your work almost immediately.

Stack:

  - Nginx, Apache
  - Java (Core, Wicket, Hibernate)
  - Python (mainly for scripting)
  - Linux
  - AngularJS, JQuery
  - MySQL
  - Redis
  - RabbitMQ
  - Fabric

There are other products in the pipeline - most of which are akin to xp-dev.com (hosting/productivity platforms). So, there is plenty of room to switch products and try out new things: https://deployer.vc, https://zoned.io amongst them.

What we're looking for:

  - Self starters
  - Sound understanding of programming
    you don't need to be a Java/Python/JavaScript guru

Benefits:

  - No keeping track of holidays
  - Flexible working hours
  - Flexible working conditions (see below)

Position location is remote. You'll need to factor in working from home or from a shared space near you (all will be paid for).

To apply, just drop a short cover email describing yourself and your CV to rs@exentriquesolutions.com

rson Barclays Not Smart

> You could argue that what Barclays really should have done was channel some retail flow into LX, but sources of that kind of unlimited, innocent liquidity get snapped up pretty quickly.

To add to this: another issue with retail flow is price and volume. Only a few really big players out there have enough of this flow to make it interesting to institutional traders.

rson Open-Source Static Site Generators

Using Pelican for almost everything under http://exentriquesolutions.com - have tried Jekyll, but somehow Pelican seems much more pluggable.

Can't recommend Pelican enough - if you're still looking for one, do give Pelican a try: theme support, Jinja templating, plugins and much more.

rson Xip.io: Wildcard DNS for everyone

There is http://nip.io as well, which does resolutions quite straight forward:

   $ dig 127.0.0.1.nip.io
   ;; ANSWER SECTION:
   127.0.0.1.nip.io.	432000	IN	A	127.0.0.1

rson Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2014)

XP-Dev.com - Remote - https://xp-dev.com

XP-Dev.com does version control and project hosting (in the same market as Github, Bitbucket, etc). Profitable and bootstrapped.

Looking for backend and frontend engineers who would like to get their hands dirty in Subversion, Git and Mercurial. You will be working on new features on the platform that may involve work on the whole stack. You will be liaising directly with real users. Deployments are really quick, and you get to see the impact of your work almost immediately.

Stack:

  - Nginx, Apache
  - Java (Core, Wicket, Hibernate)
  - Python (mainly for scripting)
  - Linux
  - AngularJS, JQuery
  - MySQL
  - Redis
  - RabbitMQ
  - Fabric

There are other products in the pipeline - most of which are akin to xp-dev.com (hosting/productivity platforms). So, there is plenty of room to switch products and try out new things: https://deployer.vc, https://zoned.io amongst them.

What we're looking for:

  - Self starters
  - Sound understanding of programming
    you don't need to be a Java/Python/JavaScript guru

Benefits:

  - No keeping track of holidays
  - Flexible working hours
  - Flexible working conditions (see below)

Position location is remote. You'll need to factor in working from home or from a shared space near you (all will be paid for).

To apply, just drop a short cover email describing yourself and your CV to rs@exentriquesolutions.com

rson Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

I run https://xp-dev.com and more recently http://deployer.vc and https://zoned.io - all as a solo. I am hiring now, have used freelancers for help over time, but generally it has been a solo effort.

Do tell if you have any specific questions, and I'll be more than happy to help out!

rson Stripe Checkout

Have been using Checkout on https://deployer.vc and https://zoned.io - it's absolutely excellent: very easy to integrate, and looks really good. Will be switching over the other products as well over from PayPal.

rson Webhooks Level Up

xp-dev.com has had webhooks since 2010-ish:

https://xp-dev.com/docs/d/user-guide/repositories/webhooks

rson Put.io

Looking at whois of their IP address, looks like Leaseweb, who are a fairly large hosting company.

rson Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2014)

XP-Dev.com - Remote - https://xp-dev.com

XP-Dev.com does version control and project hosting (in the same market as Github, Bitbucket, etc). Profitable and bootstrapped.

Looking for backend and frontend engineers who would like to get their hands dirty in Subversion, Git and Mercurial. You will be working on new features on the platform that may involve work on the whole stack. You will be liaising directly with real users. Deployments are really quick, and you get to see the impact of your work almost immediately.

Stack:

  - Nginx, Apache
  - Java (Core, Wicket, Hibernate)
  - Python (mainly for scripting)
  - Linux
  - AngularJS, JQuery
  - MySQL
  - Redis
  - RabbitMQ
  - Fabric

There are other products in the pipeline - most of which are akin to xp-dev.com (hosting/productivity platforms). So, there is plenty of room to switch products and try out new things.

What we're looking for:

  - Self starters
  - Sound understanding of programming
    you don't need to be a Java/Python/JavaScript guru

Benefits:

  - No keeping track of holidays
  - Flexible working hours
  - Flexible working conditions (see below)

Position location is remote. You'll need to factor in working from home or from a shared space near you (all will be paid for).

To apply, just drop a short cover email describing yourself and your CV to rs@exentriquesolutions.com.

rson Ask HN: Should I remind users that their card is about to be charged?

You should send a reminder, even if it's just a few days before you take the charge. It's not just a Good Thing To Do, but it will even reduce the risk of charge-backs.

As your business grows and you take on more payments, you will find there are a small group of your customers who will look at their credit card bill at the end of the month (or months) and just call up the credit card company to charge back items that they don't recognise (due to them not recognising the charge (innocent mistake) or they genuinely didn't use your service and feel "cheated")

On a side note, why do you take CC info at signup ? I've done about 4 SaaS currently live, and not a single one takes CC information upfront, but rather send them a reminder to pay an invoice as their trial reaches it's end.

rson Spotify position in support of systemd in the default init debate

Ubuntu LTS tend to backport a good number of packages. For example, if you wanted a fairly recent nginx, you will find 1.4.x built for 12.04 LTS https://launchpad.net/~nginx/+archive/stable

rson What I learned from getting my side project acquired

If no one notices your project but it is genuinely interesting, just blog about it until they notice. I posted Asterank Discover on HN and it got 5 points. Then I wrote a blog post about it that made the front page. Go figure.

I think this might be that people tend to prefer reading about stories on products rather than a product landing page ?

rson T-Mobile to offer free unlimited international data, texts

Think the trick to overseas is to get a local pre-paid SIM card, and use that number locally. As pre-paid SIM cards are getting more pervasive around the world, normally this works out as the cheapest option. Naturally, there are some countries where purchasing a pre-paid SIM is near impossible, or costly enough that sticking to roaming with your current provider works out cheaper.

rson AngularJS Tutorial: Learn to Build Modern Web Apps

If I'm not mistaken, instead of splitting into:

  controllers/
    users.js
    teams.js
  models/
    user.js
    team.js

Just have:

  modules/
    users.js
    teams.js

Where model and controllers for each function is defined within a single file.

I've switched to this convention as well - less context switching of files.

rson Introducing Stripe UK

Stripe has flat pricing:

https://stripe.com/gb/help/pricing

Paypal has tiered pricing:

https://www.paypal.com/uk/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-receiv...

So, it depends on which tier you're on for PayPal, it may go either way. However, I suspect most people are sitting on 3.4%+20p on PayPal will find Stripe cheaper.

rson Ask HN: I'm lost. Please help

Exactly. Just because you've spent the last year barely making ends meet, it doesn't mean that you have to spend another year in a similar situation.

Reassess what's important to you and go for it. You need to ensure that your own personal needs are taken care of first before others, and if that means leaving the startup behind, then so be it.

rson The other side of working for yourself

If you're lonely working from home and missing human contact, co-working might be suitable. It does come at a cost compared to working from home entirely, but it does help remove some of the loneliness.

If you're in London, there are a few places that offer co-working arrangements - you can even do it part-time, rather than having a full-time desk.

rson Datomic Free Edition

How is that revolutionary ? Time series databases have been around for years (have a look at KDB as an example).

rson Xip.io - a magic domain name that provides wildcard DNS for any IP address

I created a clone of xip.io which doesn't have any the DNS faults:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4085522

rson Show HN: NIP.IO - a wildcard DNS for any IP Address (xip.io clone)

Hi HN,

I created a clone of xip.io using PowerDNS and a simple custom PipeBackend using a single Python script.

After the initial discussion[1] and the glaring DNS mistakes[2] done on xip.io, I spent about 5 hours this afternoon to create nip.io which does exactly the same thing, but without most of the DNS mistakes.

Feedback welcome!

Thanks

rs

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4081591

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4082017

rson Loading half a billion rows into MySQL

That's one reason why switching auto-increments to bigint does help (a lot):

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/integer-types.html

rson Why cheap customers cost more

The "dummies" reasoning seems pretty sound. But I've got two comments on the "costs" which have to be factored in to the "total cost" and decide whether "cheap customers really do cost more":

1) Costs should really be calculated relative to your margins. I.e. I would hazard a guess (due to economies of scale) your cheapest price plan would have higher margins than your larger price plans.

2) The actual cost of support issues - I've found (running xp-dev.com, which mind you, should really not have that many "dummies") that while the cheapest customers do submit more support requests, these requests tend to take much quicker in resolving, than say the larger customers.

So, I think its not as easy as saying "Cheap customers cost more". I think its better to say "cheap customers request more support"

Just a thought ...

rson Malaysia government to draft insane Act for Computing Professionals

Sigh, read this a little more and its very dysfunctional.

Basically, they're setting up a list of accredited computing professionals and companies, and the kinds of services that they can perform. This is a public register, and anyone can look at it.

Imagine you've just started a project, and you're qualified for Java and some database. In the project, you end up using a bit of Python here and there to help with some scripting because it is pragmatic and it makes sense. If someone notifies the "board" that you did this, you could get into trouble. And the "trouble" may put you behind bars for up to 3 years.

Take another situation: I end up hiring a bunch of Ruby developers, all of whom are on the register. Along comes a client who needs some work done in PHP, which naturally, being good Ruby developers, they can pick it up quite easily. But to conform to this new "Act", I will have to turn down the business as I don't want to risk going to prison.

Where's the sense in all of this ?

rson Malaysia government to draft insane Act for Computing Professionals

I'm Malaysian. I was going to setup a development team in Malaysia.

Now, I'm thinking twice.

After reading the draft Act, the people responsible for this are still leaps and bounds behind the curve, by the sheer fact that something like this can even reach a "draft" stage.

rson OCZ scales up SSD Production in response to hard drive shortage.

Well, once the factories in Thailand are back online next year (read somewhere, can't find the link, sorry), wouldn't it make the scaling redundant ?

rson The End of the Credit Card? New Square app: Card Case

> Go to an ATM.

Exactly, and you end up using a "card" anyway