HN user
I am an engineering manager in Japan.
Senior management at a Japanese tech company, 2 kids, most of my daily life in Japanese here. Can confidently talk circles around most N1s.
I agree. I had plenty of strange abstractions and crutches when starting out learning Japanese, and starting in romaji was absolutely fine. While the post wouldn't benefit me now, starting out any useful mental shortcuts to producing Japanese would have been most welcome.
Many of the comments here talk about lifestyle changes, and I think those are key, but there are some, (perhaps rarer) conditions that unfortunately won't be improved.
Trigeminal Neuralgia is one of them. The condition is just... pain. Lot's of pain. More pain than anyone should ever have to go through. When I have episodes, I often feel awe that it's even possible for someone to feel such an incredible amount of pain.
Challenges in life help to shape you, make you who you are. But I do feel that this particular challenge was one where it would have been nice to have learned the same lessons some other way. I hope sincerely that treatment based on this research can help.
I don't know much about how a developer should try to build a secure application from the get-go. I don't think I've ever worked on or assessed a codebase where that plan worked.
I did the challenges years ago when you had to email in for them. Since then I can count at least five occasions where having done the challenges has allowed me to identify vulnerabilities in real-world crypto. I was usually able to recommend fixes that in theory made those codebases more secure. This is keeping in mind that I'm at best a hobbyist security researcher and just barely a professional developer.
I think there are about seven or eight people on Earth that I would trust to securely implement cryptography in their code. For the rest of us I'm happy with doing the best we can with libraries that make that easy (NaCl), and otherwise trying to find ways to break the thing. The cryptopals challenges help you do that, so that's where I'd recommend a developer start.
Not necessarily best practices, but I recommend the Matasano Crypto Challenges to basically everyone. I make all of the developers on our team do them too:
As a fellow Brit, I find your ability to appreciate sarcasm lacking :)
FYI: £26k is not average for 3 years experience. I know kids straight out of coding bootcamps that started on £10k more than that.
As an atheist ex-muslim blogger of very similar descent, I don't see how this is relevant to hacker news. I sincerely doubt it will generate any useful discussion.
This is a fantastic comment. I'd love to hear more about your experiences and any other insights you have about musical practice.
Since you program too, do you think there is much crossover? Some analogous form of practice that makes you a more effective coder?
threedaymonk behaved as a nice, well-intentioned, polite person ought to.
I work with threedaymonk and the reason that he came across this way is that he is a remarkably nice, well-intentioned, polite person.
"Nothing flies over my head. My reflexes are too fast. I would catch them".
Ah, sorry, my mistake.
I think you probably mean canon.
I'm usually working with one client at a time, but as you surmised spend considerable effort keeping the sales pipeline bubbling. Haven't had any time without work for the past couple of years unless I wanted it.*
I should probably point out that "maximising my billable time" isn't really an important goal for me as a freelancer, so we're likely talking about a different business model. You'll hear this a lot from patio11 and tptacek, but overwhelmingly, my goal is to provide as much business value to my clients as possible and charge accordingly.
You don't necessarily have to position yourself as a content marketing/CRO/Security/Sandwich-making consultant to do this, just find a way to make or save your clients buckets of cash and you can charge them whatever you want.
*: That makes me sound like some sort of rockstar freelancer, but in reality I'm a boringly average Rails developer. I get and keep clients by working really hard on sales and treating existing, long-term clients like my family's financial security depends on them (hint: it does!).
For work that actually requires me to crack open a terminal, it's as you described i.e. in the vast majority of cases it can probably wait until the next week they've booked. In the rare case that they're losing money thanks to inaction or if the problem is directly due to an error I made, then I'll fix the thing so that it's in a working state right now and work on a longer-term solution in their next slot.
I bill weekly. Clients can book time in increments of one week. Each week costs a fixed amount, though I give clients a 10% discount for pre-payment in full, cleared in my bank account before work starts.
Snarky but true: implementing this was roughly as hard as reading a comment by tptacek about billing weekly, deciding that I bill weekly, and then telling all existing clients and future clients that I now bill weekly.
Off the top of my head, sidekiq, ansible and saltstack are fully open source but also make money.
This is of course fine for white people visiting from overseas that don't look like they should know what they're doing.
There are some types of non-muslims (open apostates) that would be putting themselves in real physical danger by entering your average mosque in Islamabad and praying. We have a local ex-muslims meetup in London and stories of threats + actual physical violence from family and "community" are more common than not.
It also goes without saying that if there's no women's section and you have a vagina, you're shit out of luck.
I'm about as militant an antitheist as you're going to meet (even for the UK) and wish we had something like this to organise e.g. BHA Humanist meets/community.
Hope you find it at least partly valuable. Please feel free to get in touch if you have any specific questions.
Hi there, I get this line of questioning a lot from new programmers in my local Ruby community so I wrote a little book about it getting your first programmer job. You can get it for free here: happybearsoftware.com/kickstart-your-developer-career
Bill weekly, offer a 10% discount for 100% pre-payment or you take at least 50% of the initial engagement up front. That cuts out clients for whom you've either a) not demonstrated enough value to or b) weren't going to pay you anyway.
That always confused me too. In the UK Asian typically refers to South Asian. In the US I think if you called us South Asians and what you're currently calling Asians East Asians it might make things a little less confusing.
This is surely satire? I refuse to believe that they're actually doing this seriously.
OT, but if you ever find yourself in London I'd be happy to introduce you to some places where my wife cheats on the whole of her native Iwate prefecture[0][1]. They're pricy, but nowhere near as pricy as the local chapter of Nobu.
[0]: Sakana-tei 11 Maddox Street, London W1S 2QF
AppointmentReminder by patio11 relies pretty heavily on Twilio AFAIK.
I'm not much of an old timer, but here goes...
I make my money primarily by building software for small businesses and startups. I charge about £2500 a week for this, and am booked about 50-75% of the time. This is supplemented by the occasional workshop where I teach developers about web application security through the lens of RoR applications, which net me about £5k a pop depending on how well they sell. I have one employee who I'm training up to take on some client work for me so that I can focus on drumming up new business and building products that will provide a sustainable income that isn't linked to the amount of time we put in.
I do work part time as a developer in a start up and can't help feeling i'm building a dream for someone else.
Some people are bitten by this bug and some aren't. I know perfectly good career developers who are content to turn up, do a good days work and get a regular pay check at the end of every month. If you ever do start your own business and go out on your own, you too will long for the days when you could do the same and have guaranteed monthly cashflow.
but i can't help feeling that the current university paradigm of work hard, good grades, get a job seems to be bit of a misnomer unless you're happy building things to make others wealthy whilst you earn £30,000 a year?
In this market, after a few years you'll be doubling to tripling that salary. I know a guy who's been on the job two years and cleared £65K. That's not at a city IB, just a plain old startup. It was only a matter of time before London developer salaries caught up with what you might get in the states.
I've accidentally run into Andrew at various points in my career, he's a very smart and capable guy, I always come away having learned a lot from him. He already knows basically everyone in the London startup scene, so I'd wager that anyone who has a burger with him will have more to gain from an hour of his time than the other way around.
Git is described as not being crypto
Git has plenty of crypto in it, namely GPG (for signing tags), SSH and SSL (for transport). Using off-the-shelf crypto like this doesn't strike me as "inventing your own crypto".
people assume it is resistant to malicious attack
Exactly what's the threat model here? I can't conceive of a malicious attack that exploits gits reliance of on SHA1 as a message digest that doesn't also require write access to your filesystem.
I think your argument stems from the fact that SHA1 is deemed insecure and therefore anything associated with it must also be insecure. As I said in the previous thread, git doesn't use SHA1 to make any of the guarantees that cryptography is typically used to make.
It's usage is to prevent accidental corruption in the everyday usage of git (the sort that mercurial appears to have been prone to in the past), not to protect against a malicious adversary with write access to the filesystem.
Not saying that Patrick endorses this but just in case you need any inspiration I'm just going to leave this here...
https://watsi.org/profile/d619049fdda6-mathayo
I put in a $100 this morning, let's get little baby Mathayo's head fixed :)
Sure, I think I was referring to time scale rather than accuracy. cstross in particular complained on twitter recently that plot elements of novels he's working on annoyingly started to appear in the headlines.