gedrap

Also, it really depends on the environment, the nature of secrets, etc. It's never great, but the level of badness varies dramatically.

If you have a team of 2-3 people, where everyone has access to everything anyway, and the secrets can't be used from outside the company (i.e. you need access to servers in the first place to authenticate with whatever service is configured), then it's one thing. It's bad, but it sure beats 'let's really carefully update it on all machines manually'.

I just really, really don't like blanket statements such as 'you shouldn't do that, full stop, context is irrelevant'.

> storing my.cnf in VCS is a better idea than updating it in prod.

Eh, 'but we can't store things/API keys/passwords in VCS! It's bad!' is a pet peeve of mine. No, let's not 'just update it manually when we need it'. No, if outsider getting your DB password (somehow) poses existential threat... Chances are that you have way more concerning problems.

I get you, wrong wording, it's not exactly a standard unit test, etc. But it doesn't change the meaning and intention of it - treat infrastructure as you treat code (I guess that also includes debating whether something is a 'unit' test or 'other' kind of test).

Also, having a file on a container (which is probably the easiest test to perform) often is _the desired behavior_ of a command or something else.

My pet peeve with all these time trackers is that... It's just a wrong metric, unless what you're doing is an assembly line equivalent, where you just need to put in the hours. And don't get me started on such trackers having 'leaderboards' where you're 'competing' with colleagues.

Good to see this. I think that hiring remotely and paying Bay Area salaries (or very close to it) does indeed open up access to talent that might be harder to reach otherwise. Especially, if hiring globally remote.

Win-win for everyone involved.

I've been working remotely from home for the past 7 months, I live in Vilnius, Lithuania (so the local job market is way more limited than in SF, London, etc).

I think that it largely depends on the company. Because remote work doesn't Just Work -- it requires plenty of regular effort to make that happen. Some companies excel at that, and others, well, suck at it. So if you consider doing, ask a lot. Ask a lot about processes, how decisions are made, why the company decided to go remote, etc. There, you can't really generalize everything under 'remote work is good for you' or similar. Just like working from an office doesn't automatically mean that it's good for your career.

If the company went the remote path in order to access untapped talent from around the globe, communication is heavily written and async, that's great. Ask for specific examples, as pretty much everyone says 'yeah, we are all about written communication!'. If the company provides money to setup your own private home office for maximum comfort and productivity -- even better. That shows that they really care. After talking to a few companies and comparing them, it's easy to tell where a company falls on the 'good for remote' spectrum.

Is it sustainable long term (7+ years) is a whole different matter and I don't have an answer to it. Probably completely depends on the person.

To answer your questions

Especially if the team is a mixture of remote and co-located people?

I work in such environment and I'm very happy. But I understand how in some cases it can end up really badly. So just do your research.

How have you tried to mitigate that?

Just do your best to pick the right company. Because if you join one which isn't great for remote work, then it's unlikely that you'll be able to change how it works.

This is my personal experience so far:

Pros: * More available jobs, especially for something which is not full-stack web-dev (SRE side of big data/analytics is my niche). Which is great for developing my technical skills and adding some lovely things to my CV; * I feel overall more positive about work and life in general, which is a result of good time flexibility, not having to commute anywhere, setting up a solid home office, etc. While not directly related to career, this huge! It reduces chances of burning out and similar negatives as well.

The main and very obvious con is non-existing serendipitous networking with people. But that's largely due to my own choices - I could go to a co-working space, etc but I chose not to. Living with my gf helps with having decent social life. That works for me.

So all things considered, that's a solid net positive.

And, I guess, obligatory plug, we're hiring :) https://heapanalytics.com/jobs

I've tried both Google and HERE maps when traveling to a number of countries, and found HERE significantly better offline. It was constantly able to detect my exact position and update it as I kept walking, while Google Maps were quite inaccurate.

I like iStat for this purpose https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/

This whole thing looks rather silly. Like, you either find a decent exchange, expect it to be legit and that includes cooperating with IRS and other parts of the government when needed. You know, like you expect responsible financial institutions to do. Or just find some maybe less legit ones at your own risk.

Coinbase can't be both legit and 'oh look we resist The Man'. Urgh.

What would be a feasible alternative?

That applies to other kinds of reliability testing too, especially everything that goes through a network.

It's easy to handle when something is completely unavailable (i.e. instant error), but when something, be it a database or some endpoint, is available but horribly slow, that's a whole different thing.

I don't think that anything new could be said about bitcoins right now, and it's been like that since summer, really.

Some people do indeed believe in them, whether for technical reasons or for simply being invested, while others just keep thinking that it will crash. Both sides have a point, and majority of the people are convinced that they are right, but there's no way to predict the future.

Let's just see what happens.

Yeah I'm pretty disappointing in the quality of this article, especially considering its coming from the Economist.

The Economist is not really written having crypto enthusiasts or HN crowd in mind. The article is a decent summary of the current state of affairs to someone who's just curious about what the hell is bitcoin.

I guess quite likely? In this scenario, it sounds like the goal of Series C was just to get some, any return. And getting back your initial investment sure sounds better than getting nothing back.

Same. Might be a cultural thing or something but I'd absolutely hate the idea of being pinged about work things on personal channels (whatsapp, messenger, etc), especially after working hours. I know because I used to work at a place where I'd receive feature requests and bug reports, after working hours, on facebook messenger. Nope.

That's pretty much my reaction the first time I went to SF. My first BART experience was 16th and Mission and that left... quite an impression. It's surprising how people get used to it.

Maybe I'm just unlucky but the vast majority of all 'awesome lists' that I've seen are just massive dumps of links, of extremely varying quality (I mean the links themselves), which isn't that helpful.

Working from home is often touted as a solution to all problems but it's just not that simple, and many people who do actually work remotely will tell you that.

Allowing remote work is not enough. It requires effort from both parties. The company needs to provide money for home office setup, and the employee needs to spend time and though setting one up, which might be tricky in places with insane real estate prices. Working from sofa is not really sustainable for long.

Although work from home eliminates distractions such as constant movement of people (although this is not unique to working from home and same could be done with private offices), it opens a plethora of new distractions, be it running errands, playing with pets, or just goofing off instead of TV while keeping an eye on instant messenger.

And the list goes on. But that's not the point. Sure, working from home has a lot of advantages and at the end of the day I am very glad that I made the switch. It's just not as simple as some might make it appear as.

TransferWise captured the UK<> Poland corridor and expanded from there.

Close! They started with UK <> Estonia, both co-founders are Estonians. IIRC in the very very early days, the whole settlement was done by users themselves over a Skype group.

Neat project! I did something similar a couple of years ago in python: https://github.com/gedrap/xs-vm these toy projects are really good to try new things and, you know, just build something :)

GOOG, FB, AMZN

A tiny nitpick, but what's with the trend of using stock symbols in non-financial context? GOOGL isn't much shorter than Google, same with AMZN and Amazon. It just looks... annoyingly out of place.

Regarding the article itself, the topic of Facebook/Amazon/Google domination is much spoken and written about and this post doesn't really add much new. This issue is well known for a quite a long time, especially in the HN and similar social circles. What most of the posts are missing is how do we escape this? But that might be too late.

I'm a monthly bundle subscriber since inception. I don't check the monthly bundles regularly (more like two-three-four times a year), but always find games that I enjoy and wouldn't have discovered otherwise. For $150/year, that's a pretty good value for a very casual gamer like me, i.e. someone who doesn't follow the gaming industry and just spontaneously decides to play something from time to time.

Best of luck to them.

I locate and bribe/extort your main influencer/s to push your project into the ground (block work, object to everything, whatever) or in my preferred direction

How's that any different from the current state? Execs of current companies are humans with power to run the company into the ground. You can extort/bribe them like that as well. How does it change anything?

All is good when it's working well, but when something's not right... well, you really wish that you had that monitoring.

The truth is that most load balancing solutions are capable of handling _a lot_ of traffic, way way more than the majority of the people need. So performance is not a huge concern, typically.

However, if you are at the level where it does actually matter and want to use nginx, chances are, you'll have no problem paying for the premium version.

Sure, definitely impossible to put random person's picture and some generated name under it...

Totally agree. I am a fan of Test Pyramid model, where at the top you have a very small number of long running, complex tests (usually e2e), and at the very bottom you have a lot of small, isolated and very fast unit tests.

Testing everything in a browser/e2e provides a rather poor cost/benefit ratio, especially as the project grows and more features and tests are added, so it should be reserved for cases where it is really important.

I like having e2e tests that cover the very core functionality and involve multiple parts of the stack. For example, if you have your rather typical app with a login modal, it's probably good to have a test that clicks on the button, makes sure that the modal is visible, and the user is redirected to the expected page after logging in. But testing if error message is displayed if email address is invalid? That's too much.

Maybe good enough is just good enough for some business owners?

If you are making good profit already, which more than covers your needs, why bother looking into improved efficiency, automation, getting better gigs, etc? It's not that you can just flip 'efficiency' switch and things are more efficient.

In some cases, sticking to doing things in a familiar way and which works well enough is a rather reasonable decision in the grand scheme of things.

Yes, `wp-contents`, `wp-includes` and basically anything else prefixed with `wp-` is a very clear signed that WordPress is behind the site.

Just treat adults as adults, show a little bit of trust.

I don't like strict schedules, where you have to just sit through the required number of hours, or show up at some specific time for no reason (i.e. it does not affect other people). Don't force people to sit in a crammed open space office, all day every day, no matter the weather and other factors, because 'collaboration' or whatever. Commuting to the office when it is -20C definitely sucks. If someone wants to setup their ideal working environment at home - perfect, win win. Most of the time it doesn't even cost much.

Sure, making it work requires some effort from both parties. But it's too often ruled out for no reason (or some BS reason).

I made this switch and that's one of the best things that happened to my quality of life.

if you're downvoting me for this comment then you don't know what you're talking about. Happy to debate!

Well, it's just that it's fairly obvious what is meant by the headline given the events of the past couple of years and your comment doesn't add anything.