HN user

ChrisCinelli

1,172 karma

I like building things that feel cool and work seamlessly. I like to work on things that make a better world, not just a fatter wallet.

I self-taught myself programming and wrote my first program in BASIC at the age of 7. Learned assembly x86 at age of 9, C at the age of 13, C++ at the age of 14.

Proper education and genuine curiosity taught me the rest. I am passionate about both technical tactical and business strategic stuff.

I am a generalist. When I can, I like to iterate on the frontend UI/UX and build nice smooth products, but I end up often touching system architecture, backend, databases, cache, servers etc. I strive to reduce complexity, increase cohesion of code modules and make things easier for the CPU and for the human beings.

I like to keep myself update and experiment with the latest technologies but I like to make pondered decisions on what the company should use.

Looking for a smart co-founder!

http://www.linkedin.com/in/criscinelli

Posts66
Comments363
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github.com 2y ago

GPT-Pilot: a scalable dev tool that writes entire apps from scratch

ChrisCinelli
1pts0
arxiv.org 2y ago

Tech: Text-Guided Reconstruction of Lifelike Clothed Humans

ChrisCinelli
2pts1
bscdesigner.com 2y ago

Bad KPIs: Why Does Misuse Happen and How Avoid It

ChrisCinelli
2pts0
hubblesite.org 2y ago

Neptune's shifting cloud linked to solar cycle

ChrisCinelli
1pts0
twitter.com 2y ago

Why room temperature superconductors are a big deal

ChrisCinelli
1pts0
www.mindvalley.com 3y ago

Mindvalley AI Summit 2023 for entrepreneurs: thrive in the new age of A.I

ChrisCinelli
1pts0
techcrunch.com 3y ago

OpenAI intros new generative text features while reducing pricing

ChrisCinelli
15pts0
arxiv.org 3y ago

How to train deep neural networks without backprop

ChrisCinelli
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Ask HN: Who sees being laid off as an opportunity?

ChrisCinelli
7pts4
www.neardth.com 6y ago

Pam Reynolds near death experience is well documented

ChrisCinelli
1pts0
smartech.gatech.edu 6y ago

The Largest Unethical Medical Experiment in Human History

ChrisCinelli
1pts2
medium.com 6y ago

GraphQL Mesh – Query anything, run anywhere

ChrisCinelli
3pts0
www.buzzfeed.com 6y ago

Covid-19 counter-disinformation unit needs 2x the manpower if we included Trump

ChrisCinelli
1pts0
lab24.ilsole24ore.com 6y ago

7.4% (and growing) death rate in data from corona virus from Italy

ChrisCinelli
3pts3
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: Substantial delay in security patches in open sourced Android

ChrisCinelli
1pts0
github.com 6y ago

Node 10.19.0 fixes a critical vulnerability

ChrisCinelli
2pts0
ww2.cs.fsu.edu 6y ago

WiFinger: Leveraging commodity WiFi for finger gesture recognition (2016) [pdf]

ChrisCinelli
28pts6
www.theverge.com 6y ago

Google’s third era – What’s next now that Sundar Pichai is CEO of Alphabet

ChrisCinelli
2pts0
github.com 6y ago

Isomorphic UI Framework Benchmarks

ChrisCinelli
1pts1
9to5google.com 6y ago

OnePlus 7 Pro update adds August patch ahead of Google Pixel

ChrisCinelli
1pts0
www.forbes.com 6y ago

The Encryption Debate Is Over – Dead at the Hands of Facebook

ChrisCinelli
3pts0
cyberlaw.stanford.edu 7y ago

Security Risks of Government Hacking [pdf]

ChrisCinelli
1pts0
www.lawfareblog.com 7y ago

A Roadmap for Exceptional Access Research

ChrisCinelli
1pts0
www.lawfareblog.com 7y ago

What If Responsible Encryption Back-Doors Were Possible?

ChrisCinelli
3pts0
medium.com 7y ago

Do not protect your website from scraping

ChrisCinelli
3pts2
www.salon.com 7y ago

Is Apple a privacy-first company?

ChrisCinelli
1pts1
blog.google 7y ago

New Policies for Chrome and Drive

ChrisCinelli
1pts0
onezero.medium.com 7y ago

Don’t Use a VPN at Home

ChrisCinelli
2pts0
techcrunch.com 7y ago

Unpacking Pinterest’s IPO expectations - What it means to be an 'undercorn'

ChrisCinelli
1pts0
arxiv.org 7y ago

Privacy Loss in Apple’s Implementation of Differential Privacy (2017)

ChrisCinelli
59pts8

So you do not have need of innovation?

Usually a company with software need to develop new features, reengineering to reduce infrastructure costs and improving performance bottlenecks, maintenance, etc. Do not you have that in your company? And if you do, who is leading those initiatives?

Did you use this for due diligence to verify that the data reported by the entrepreneur in the pitch was good or you were looking at some companies in a specific space and checking the company that has more orders?

Sure, "good person" may sound generic. But he is still a good person trying to do the right things. To me it sounds like the board is afraid of being sued and needs to clearly appoint a scapegoat.

Well, they must have believed that leaving Sam as CEO was a bigger risk for the company (or the members of the board) than having him leaving in the spot. The board may have had their hand twisted.

Well, they must have believed that leaving Sam as CEO was a bigger risk for the company than having him leaving. Or the board had their hand twisted. What is easier the case?

I suppose there is a need of a trusted 3rd entity that runs the service.

Otherwise anybody could run the service and pretend that anybody else signed any documents they want at any time they wanted.

I am not familiar with DocuSign internal but it looks like people are identified by their email. So only if you can click the link received in their email, it can be them.

I guess a problem with DocuSign is still that anybody can sign up for a new email and pretend to be anybody they want.

If it is RED blood, it is a vein that breaks when the your stool passes. Most likely hemorrhoids.

The problem is when you have BLACK blood in the stool. That may be an internal bleeding.

Regulation seldom proves to be the ultimate remedy.

The true catalyst for change lies in cultivating informed consumers who wield their purchasing power to support manufacturers committed to security.

If a law has to be put in place, ensure that every marketing advertisement and article concerning a device explicitly states the duration for which it will receive regular updates.

Openwrt is not the best example. Community sucks, some routers are full of bugs and the security is not great either.

In general even if I like open devices and having the option to use my own software, this is not a solution for most of the consumers.

It is not a solution even for the enthusiast that know how to flash their own firmware. Because even if they may do it a few times initially, eventually they stop doing it.

You need a system that can update automatically even when you are busy in another project.

Making "x years of security updates" mandatory is likely to end up in a warning disclaimer every time you turn on the TV after x years: "This device does not receive any more security updates. You may be at risk."

That will either make a large part of consumers paranoid or annoyed. So they will replace a TV that is in perfectly working conditions with a new TV.

Samsung, LG and the consumerist economy would love that!

Probably more in the 90s since the 80s were all about total quality management.

But "companies became a lot more interested in making their shareholders happy than they were in making their customers happy" is the BIGGEST problem with modern capitalism. That is why US is approaching 70% obese population and other dramatic social problems.

It sounds you have a lot of experience under your belt.

Is it pride and self doubt your problem?

Do you want to be the CEO of a successful company? What do you consider a successful company?

By SV standards a company with 1-4M in profits is a "lifestyle business". Would you be ok with having this kind of business and maybe selling it for an EBITDA multiplier?

Have you consider buying a small company, optimize it and sell it?

Corporate dynamics make shiny object raise up even if it fool's gold.

The real gold is in improving what in bad need of improvement.

The companies that stay afloat are often those that are abundant in people that know what really matter and find a way to do it regardless what the middle management thinks.

When you give people a target and it is the ONLY thing they care about, people find a way to hit it.

So be careful what you measure and you reward.

For every company cash flow and profits are undoubtedly the most important metric. It is almost impossible to argue that maximize those numbers should NOT be a goal.

At the same time when that becomes the ONLY target that matters, the consequences are dreadful.

At least in US, that is how we ended up with appliances that only last a small fraction of time that used to last 40 years ago.

And even worse it is how we ended up with the food industry creating more and more addicting food resulting in 70% of the population be obese. And it is how we ended up with a heath system that costs multiples of what costs in any other country in the world, that, instead of healing people for good, make them "less sick" addicting them to a few pills for the rest of their life. Because there is no money to be made with a healthy person.

When you build KPIs, make sure you "think a few moves ahead" and you put other correcting metrics and checks in place. At least make sure who establishes the metrics has a way to become aware of the possible shortcomings and plan corrections in a timely manner.

Maybe you are jumping to a conclusion too quickly.

How do you know what was really going on?

"He created a requirement that every developer commit two new tests to the code base every workday" seem a stupid requirement if you do not control the quality of the tests.

The same big corporation I wrote above had a goal of 80% code coverage reported on dashboards.

I saw people writing tests just to run lines of code, without effectively testing anything.

Others people were "smarter" and completely excluded folders and modules in the codebase with low coverage from coverage testing.

Code coverage percentage numbers on a dashboard are a risky business. They can give you a false sense of confidence. Because you can have 100% code coverage and be plagued by multitude of bugs if you do not test what the code is supposed to do.

Code coverage helps to see where you have untested code and if it is very low (ex: less 50%) tells you that you need more tests. An high code coverage percentage is desirable but should not be a target.

The real problem is again the culture.

A culture where it is ok to have critical parts of the code not being tested. A large part of the solution here is helping people to understand the consequences of low code coverage. For example collecting experiences and during retrospectives point out where tests saved the day or how a test may have saved the day so people can see how test may save them a lot of frustration.

But again, when you give people a target and it is the only thing they care about, people find a way to hit it.

Without an outstanding company culture, most KPIs are almost useless.

While working at a big corporation we had a velocity initiative supposedly aimed to lead the company toward continuous integration.

"How long a PR stays open" was one of the KPIs in a dashboard.

I said: "Be careful with that!"

People started to close PRs and reopen new PRs with the same code.

Middle managers and sometimes the person in the division that was the point of contact for the velocity initiative were asking to do that.

The script measuring this KPI was improved to look at the branch name and the code diff. Result? People changing branch name and a change of EOL encoding in the new PR.

Learnings? B and C players with questionable ethics screw companies quite rapidly.

In this climate KPIs and aligning them with company values is futile.

While working at a big corporation we had a velocity initiative supposedly aimed to lead the company toward continuous integration.

"How long a PR stays open" was one of the KPI in a dashboard.

I said: "Be careful with that!"

People started to close PRs and reopen new PRs with the same code.

Middle managers and sometimes the person in the division that was the point of contact for the velocity initiative were asking to do that.

The script measuring this KPI was improved to look at the branch and the diff of the code. Result? people changing branch and EOL encoding in the new PR

Learnings? B and C players with questionable ethics screw companies quite rapidly.

If you do not have an outstanding company culture, KPI and aligning them with company values is futile.

The reason HN is a bubble is because people here actually get and interested in real tech news.

If a journalist would explain these news to the masses AND the news has a way to reach the masses.

These days these kinds of news do not make it to broadcasted news and most people do not watch the old broadcasted news.

The news currently get people attention from the news feed on Android and Apples phones. Those feeds recommend only the kind of content you usually interact with. No many people gets tech articles. And you can even argue that there is some extra filters on what news get on the feed in first place.

DuckDB 0.8 3 years ago

This is the first time I heard about DuckDB. Why someone would use that instead of a mature engine like SQLite?

This is my experience:

Being co-located in the same building has a few advantages especially from a company culture and relationship prospective. But finding great talented people around the HQ becomes a big constrain and it is expensive.

If you run the company "remote-first" so everyone remotely has the same experience, you may argue that the pros are largely outweigh the the cons.

Hybrid is more difficult to make it work but not impossible. The challenge is to keep everything "remote-first" so the remote people are not left behind in any manner.

Starting a company/team "remote-first" since the beginning is easier because workflow can be built remote-first. Transitions to remote-first present more challenges.