HN user

hoov

1,039 karma

I'm a full-stack engineer and manager who has worked at Bit9, Adobe, Dropbox, InsightSquared, Evisort, and Randori.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/hoov; my proof: https://keybase.io/hoov/sigs/hm9nAgg2PANOmcuiat4cL6ujLA1r9lNsPfB59ajd9Ng ]

Posts52
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techcrunch.com 5y ago

Prime today, gone tomorrow: Chinese products get pulled from Amazon

hoov
10pts2
blog.dropbox.com 6y ago

Thank You, Arash

hoov
5pts0
homesupport.irobot.com 6y ago

iRobot removing multiple account support

hoov
1pts0
en.wikipedia.org 7y ago

Micromort – The Measure of Mortality Risk

hoov
2pts0
www.lmdb.tech 7y ago

LMDB – Lightning Memory-Mapped Database Manager

hoov
81pts22
techcrunch.com 7y ago

Cloudflare’s new ‘one-click’ DNSSEC setup

hoov
3pts0
www.npr.org 8y ago

Scientists Train Bacteria to Build Unnatural Proteins

hoov
2pts0
www.washingtonpost.com 8y ago

As Hurricane Irma bore down, Tesla gave some Florida drivers more battery juice

hoov
1pts0
github.com 8y ago

Quickly review changed functions in your Python pull requests

hoov
3pts0
www.dpreview.com 9y ago

Photographer behind 'monkey selfie' is broke after years-long copyright battle

hoov
5pts1
finance.yahoo.com 9y ago

LEAKED AUDIO: Uber's all-hands meeting had some uncomfortable moments

hoov
1pts0
www.washingtonpost.com 9y ago

This device pulls drinking water straight out of the air

hoov
2pts0
techcrunch.com 9y ago

Nvidia Announces Titan Xp Graphics Card

hoov
149pts116
techcrunch.com 9y ago

Netgear announces two new Orbi routers

hoov
1pts0
techcrunch.com 9y ago

The “Terminator” of startups says he’s seeing two to four wind-downs a week

hoov
4pts0
github.com 9y ago

Git LFS 2.0.0 released

hoov
2pts0
techcrunch.com 9y ago

Snap values itself at nearly $24B with its IPO pricing

hoov
103pts151
techcrunch.com 9y ago

Dropbox’s Smart Sync lets users open a file stored only in the cloud like normal

hoov
127pts69
blogs.dropbox.com 9y ago

Dropbox and Intel work together to protect your data

hoov
2pts0
blogs.dropbox.com 9y ago

Diversity at Dropbox

hoov
4pts0
techcrunch.com 9y ago

AWS announces virtual private servers starting at $5 a month

hoov
7pts2
techcrunch.com 9y ago

Trump transition team appointments indicate a bid to dismantle net neutrality

hoov
7pts0
blogs.dropbox.com 9y ago

Vanessa Wittman to step down as CFO and Ajay Vashee to take the reins

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1pts0
blogs.dropbox.com 9y ago

Introducing AdminX: New ways to securely manage collaboration at scale

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1pts0
techcrunch.com 9y ago

Dropbox steps up to business users with AdminX, plans device management

hoov
1pts0
hackaday.com 10y ago

The coming wide-spread use of drones in agriculture

hoov
3pts0
influxdata.com 10y ago

The Curious Case of JavaScript’s `sort`

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23pts57
blogs.dropbox.com 10y ago

Dropbox Celebrating half a billion users

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7pts0
www.insightsquared.com 11y ago

InsightSquared Closes $13.5M Series C Financing

hoov
2pts0
techcrunch.com 11y ago

Dropbox Beefs Up Its Pro Feature Set, Now Offering 1TB of Storage for $10/Month

hoov
13pts6

There's an asymmetry because Amazon can "afford" to double check everything? How?

Well, Amazon shows you the percent discount. I can't imagine that there are too many items over, let's say, $1000 that are at a 90% discount at any given time. Seems easy enough to flag those for manual review, especially if they are being sold by Amazon directly.

This is so great! While at Adobe, to solve some technical issues, I wrote a microservice that sat along HAProxy, providing a REST interface to manipulate the configuration, validate, and then do a graceful reload. The fact that this is now built-in is amazing, and a lot less clunky. I wish I had this in 2012; it would have saved me and my team a lot of work. And, I'm sure this solution is much better than the band-aid we built.

It's a little more complicated than that. Even with a riving knife, you can still get kickback if your blade isn't aligned properly -- and most cheaper saws need a tune-up before being used.

This is really nice, especially all the integrations. I've been using slides.com for a while, and I may switch to this. But, one feature that would be amazing would be the ability to upload to an S3 bucket. Bonus points for creating a public bucket configured correctly to view the slides. It's annoying to have to carry every possible type of dongle and fight with A/V issues at random places when you need to show a deck on hardware that you don't control. I always make sure that the content I need to show is available on any machine with an internet connection, but it takes a lot of effort sometimes.

Difficult, but possible. We did this with Buzzword at Adobe. The hardest part was the UX, honestly. Most knowledge workers need some hand holding, to say nothing of teachers and students (we had success selling to high school teachers).

I'm not a fan of this.

First of all, requirements.txt is for development requirements. Runtime ones belong in setup.py.

Also, the "extras" feature is already in setup.py via extras_require.

I see no need to use this nonstandard tool when the standard tooling works.

Unfortunately, I bet there are a bunch of regulations, both federal and per state. For example, the 7k memory limit is a state-by-state thing: "Memory sizes greater than those permitted in any specific correctional facility will be rejected at the facility property room" -- from the vendor's website.

I am just starting out in web development and am looking for any tutorials on Phoenix/Elixir/Erlang.

While I like Elixir a lot, I'm not sure that it's the best place to start. I'd find an ecosystem that is more stable and has more reliable resources available. Try starting with Rails or Django, maybe.

Explain Shell 9 years ago

It clearly doesn't cover "unix and unix-like" shells, since fish shell syntax isn't supported. It seems to be trying to be bash-compatible since it uses bashlex under the hood, but as another commented noticed, the bash parsing isn't perfect.

This is pretty big news. I know that when I was at Adobe, the only reason that Perforce was used for things like Acrobat, is because it was simply the only source control solution that could handle the size of the repo. Smaller projects were starting to use Git, but the big projects all stuck with Perforce.

I bought a house a year and a half ago; Zenstimates are consistently ridiculously low for my area. I was looking for single family homes in Somerville, MA. There is so little supply that every home goes immediately after listing and most likely with a bidding war. If you look at the Zenstimate for my property, it looks like I over-payed by almost 30%, but I guarantee I could flip for a profit tomorrow.

Amazon Go 10 years ago

This sounds lovely. I live near Boston, Massachusetts and have a distinctly different experience.

I don't mind waiting in line for 3 minutes. Or 5. It's never longer than that, even if the cashier discusses the latest news with the old lady.

If I go to the Stop & Shop, I spend about fifteen minutes in line on average, and the cashier is consistently rude.

That being said, when I go to the more "local" stores, I have similar experiences to what you've described.

Gwen Ifill has died 10 years ago

Are you familiar with her work? I think she's was breath of fresh air compared with other baby boomers in the industry. I, for one, will miss her.

I've been thinking about how to respond to this for a little while, because I'm a bit biased and I don't want to give away to much information about Drew's personal life.

I lived with Drew through college and a bit after. The thing that grew into Dropbox was started in an apartment that I lived in while Drew and I were working at a different startup.

While I would say that I regret not being in the financial position to quit my job and help Drew out early on, I don't think he was able to do it because of his privilege. I also want to call out that I'm struggling justifying that last statement, because I know what a privilege being white, straight, and upper-middle class in America is. That privilege totally helped getting into MIT (by virtue of going to a good high school and so many other things). But, I'm pretty sure he didn't rely on his parents for cash. He probably just stole my leftovers out of the fridge. :)

The fact of the matter is that he's scrappy and smart. During college, we were both presented with an opportunity to make some side cash. Drew took more advantage of it than I did, and it was smart of him. He banked his own cash and lived cheap. Maybe he graduated with less debt than I did, and maybe that helped, but I think that would be the only leg up that he had.

It was more of a lack of abstraction than anything. The server reflected more or less what the OS presented -- an add and a delete rather than a move. Putting the pieces together later to present better information to the user was difficult. Not sure what they do today, but I remember many talks about ways to put that abstraction in place as close to the OS as possible. Reconstructing multiple, quick, renames/moves after the fact proved to be somewhat difficult from the frontend, which Aston worked on.

That's not quite what I was trying to say. What I was saying is that there's many splits in the Python community. I work on large distributed systems, and have zero experience with quantum computing or advanced maths.

But, I'm a curious individual. I'd love if the academic Python community (to try to put a label on it) would all write code that was "idomatic". I know that "idomatic" is a problmatic term, but specifically I'm asking for people to follow PEP-8 and generally follow the ethos of `import this`.

Once we're speaking a common vernacular, we can better share ideas.

I respectfully disagree, but I suspect this might be a disconnect between different Python communities. I find the code extremely difficult to parse. Even ignoring the egregious PEP-8 issues (and, I know that PEP-8'ing existing code can obfuscate commit history), there's too much logic on many lines. I strongly subscribe to the adage that "Code is read many more times than it's written".

I was thinking the same thing and then some. I ask a version of this as an interview question, and this doesn't pass my muster. That being said, I do think that implementing a URL shortener is a really good exercise, and I commend the author for that.

InsightSquared | Boston, MA | Full Time | Onsite

InsightSquared is a well-funded Boston startup. Our SaaS app helps businesses make data driven decisions by pulling their sales, marketing, financial, customer service & other data from APIs like Salesforce, QuickBooks, and Google Analytics and presenting over 400 beautiful visualizations and powerful analytics.

We assemble in small product teams that work fast, have fun, and ship often. Your team of engineering, product, and creative peers will drive the operational and strategic decisions needed to move forward. We build on a modern platform (Python/Django). We ship code to production not just daily, but a dozen+ times per day. We test quickly, learn fast, iterate fast, and focus on code that matters.

We're hiring three engineers:

  - Software Engineer
  - Senior Software Engineer
  - Systems Architect
http://jobs.insightsquared.com/

mperry at insightsquared dot com

I'm pretty damn angry right now, but I'm sure that in a few days I'll get over it.

I run the tech side of a decent sized startup right now. Having joined ~4 years into the venture, one of my immediate concerns was the lack of visibility into how our system works. Keeping tabs on the performance of several hundred ETL pipelines is not super easy. I decided to double down on InfluxDB, changing the road-map of my infrastructure team.

Then, InfluxData introduced the TICK stack. I can get monitoring and alerting as well? Let's double down again!

I bought hardware, set up a cluster (painful), we filed bug reports, learned what sorts of queries not to run, and we were in good shape. I purchased tickets for a training session and a flight (out of pocket; we don't have travel budget). And then I saw the blog post last night.

All along, I knew that the promise of all of this great technology for free was too good to be true. There was always a little voice in my head asking me about how they actually made money -- I knew that a paid offering + professional services was not sustainable.

I'm angry, but we'll be fine. We're going to break apart our cluster and shard. We've already got code written to do a backup/restore that actually works (slowly) from one cluster to another. If we hit the point where sharding doesn't work, then it'll also probably be financially viable to pay the $399/month (on top of server costs). I'll still go to the training, but I'm not sure what I'll get out of it. The reason why I was going to the training was the section on "Cluster Administration".

The only thing that I'm raw about is the lack of apology. You have to make money, and you had to do a bait-and-switch as a result. I totally understand, but the tone of that blog post was too defensive and unapologetic.

XSA-108 Advisory 12 years ago

I believe that "dedicated" means that it's dedicated to your account. So, there can be more than one guest, but those guests are your EC2 instances.