kfullert

Bytemark (a UK hosting company) have an anonymous hiring process which they've documented at https://careers.bytemark.co.uk/full-process which gives them as much confidence as possible that if you make it to the interview stage, you've done so based on your skills rather than your CV, gender, religion etc.

Disclaimer: I don't work for Bytemark but have been a happy customer for many years

Related, but Nissan have been running the GT Academy which takes online racers and turns them into real ones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GT_Academy - the first winner of GT Academy in 2008 competed in the 2011 LeMans 24 in the LMP2 class, and finished 2nd in class

Ah, I was getting a loop saying "You need to subscribe to Workspaces" which would then take me to choosing a subscription which after selecting the Basic (free) one would take me back to saying "You need to subscribe to Workspaces" but it _appears_ to be fixed now :)

OK, so Workspaces appeals to me (C# developer for a small company, no IT team, working from home) as redundancy - at present, if my laptop goes bang everything is backed up in "the cloud" (be that Azure, S3, somewhere) but it's the time getting everything restored like the multiple Visual Studio versions I need, the connectors for SSRS report designer etc. that I can see Workspaces working out for me (laptop goes bang, borrow my wifes one, connect to Workspace, carry on as if nothing happened until I can get a replacement)

However ... Workspaces looks like it needs an Enterprise AWS subscription ($15k/month?) so what alternatives are there for someone like me, where someone takes care of providing a Virtual Desktop, making sure it's running, backed up, connectable from anywhere (obviously with me responsible for ensuring off-site backup of any code/deliverables as I am at the moment) or is it best just to run up my own VPS with Win2k12 or similar and use that?

EDIT Ignore that, I was getting a weird redirect where trying to subscribe to WorkSpaces was taking me to the Support Subscription page, and just would not let me subscribe to WorkSpaces, but it appears to have sorted itself out now

Was it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11673058 (My url isn't your url) ?

My personal choice at the moment is Ruby with Roda[0] and whatever ORM meets my needs best, or even skip the ORM and use the DB adapter directly if it's something quick and simple

[0] http://roda.jeremyevans.net/documentation.html

A better replacement in my opinion is Dynamics CRM (biased as I'm a Dynamics CRM consultant) ... speed of development is quick, runs everywhere with just one set of code (web, desktop app, mobile app, mobile web) and if you need to do something outside the standard functionality it's really quick and easy to write a C# plugin or custom workflow activity to do what you want.

Yes, I'm in IRC channels for a LUG (general social chat) and a hosting provider (low-priority support things, plus more technical-based chat), plus I idle and am in the top-10 "idlers" for IdleRPG (#G7 on Slashnet) http://idlerpg.net/

Lanyrd was developed while the founders (Simon Willison and Natalie Downe) were on honeymoon, and was subsequently accepted into YC (Jan 2011) and has since been acquired by Eventbrite.

The story of the site is well worth a read - http://blog.natbat.net/post/61658401806/lanyrd-from-idea-to-...

For personal use, I use BigV[0] and for a pet project which deals with reasonably large datasets I picked up a Hetzner dedicated for $cheap in their Server Auction[1] with 32Gb RAM which is fine for playing around on :)

[0] https://bigv.io/ [1] https://robot.your-server.de/order/market/country/GB

Bytemark (an incredibly awesome UK hosting company) actively discourage working overtime and state it in their employment page https://www.bytemark.co.uk/company/employment/

DISCLAIMER I don't work for Bytemark, just been a customer for 10+ years and love the work they do and service they provide

Clickable: http://breakmates.co.uk

Personally I just use Account Tracker on my iPhone to keep track of expenses and seeing how much money I'll have left at the end of the month (it's by Graham Haley on the App Store)

It's working with the Schedule data from National Rail (under their Open Data - http://nrodwiki.rockshore.net/index.php/SCHEDULE) - the "full" file for initially populating your database is around 2.3Gb uncompressed JSON (nightly updates range from 1Mb to 31M looking at the files I've got here)

Ruby at the moment - my original (monolithic Rails) v0 version takes about 5 hours to process it and create database records with ActiveRecord - that's about 600,000 records - the microservices are using Oj for the JSON parsing and raw pg queries for database (so not a real comparison at the moment)

Not fully (ie in production) however a new side-project I'm working on which has many processes I'm building each as a micro-service, with RabbitMQ handling the messaging, Bunny to handle message processing and Sinatra/Faraday for where the messages are too big to send via MQ (ie when I process a 2.3Gb JSON file, I send the filename to a queue, which triggers a Faraday request by the worker to a Sinatra app to download/process the actual file)

About the only thing I need to really work on is directory/registration (at the moment I'm using .env files with the URLs to different micro-services in each micro-service, mainly as it's PoC and I'm running it all on a single box)

If you were UK I'd plug Bytemark - they provide bare-metal servers where they look after the hardware, you look after the OS/software (https://www.bytemark.co.uk/hosting/dedicated/)

I've been a customer of Bytemark for 10+ years now with different products over time, and I'm continually impressed with the service (and what they give back to the community) time after time

At the moment, just manually typing it out from the official price-list

Hi,

This is related to an Ask HN I posted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8464118) - to summarise, I'm a primarily C# dev working on extending/customising existing off-the-shelf CRM systems, but I want to expand myself and learn more diverse technologies.

I built this as I sell on eBay infrequently, and the Royal Mail price-finder (http://www.royalmail.com/price-finder) assumes you know off the top of your head whether what your sending is a small parcel, medium parcel, large letter etc. so this way you just enter the dimensions/weight and it works out what the different services would cost (and automatically excludes services which aren't available for the dimensions/weight of your package)

I put this together over about a day to start to learn AngularJS (it seemed to have the lowest barrier to entry and my JavaScript skills in general are novice level) - the next step for me now I have something that _actually_ works is to learn how I should re-factor it to make it more maintainable and implement testing of it, so that when the prices update I can be sure I've not broken something.

If anyone has any feedback as to how/where/what I should be looking at doing with it to refactor it to be more maintainable/testable that would be greatly appreciated.

Lastly, all the data it needs is currently stored in the controller (such as the points for different parcel sizes and postage costs) as I was hoping to make it available offline and potentially package it in something like PhoneGap and have it able to run even if there was no network available.

Interesting ... does this do any kind of store and forward or relaying? Say I send a message to a friend who happens to be out of range, but there was another GoTenna user who neither of us know, but who is in range of us both, will it relay the message via this 3rd party (encrypted) or is it purely a direct connection between sender --> receiver?

Yes, I use Symbiosis from Bytemark and run it on one of their BigV machines - Symbiosis wraps exim and dovecot for one of the easiest to manage virtual mail systems I've ever run - all the Symbiosis "wrappers" around the various products are all open source as well.

What platform? We sell and use Qlikview on Windows which lets our customers run all sorts of revenue/business queries against data (which is populated from .csv into MSSQL and then we have processes which load the data from MSSQL into the .qvw documents so the users can download and use it offline on the train or in meetings with clients etc)

Bytemark for 99% of things (now all on bigv.io, their cloud platform) and single machine for backup MX/DNS etc. at DigitalOcean

I work remotely and it would require at least a 100% pay-rise for me to work in the office every day

Thanks for all the comments, regarding why Ruby and not .NET, it purely comes down to the fact that a) I like Ruby as a language (and have been using it for various "toy" projects since probably 2005/2006 time) and b) hosting costs (I already run a few Linux servers and am comfortable running it, whereas the cost to run a Windows server + associated admin time/costs are slightly prohibitive to me at the moment

First thoughts ...

1) Paid support/install/configuration assistance for users (ie they get priority support but the normal support still continues albeit at perhaps lower priority)

2) Paid consultancy (perhaps there's a certain feature users would like, where you're paid to develop but it gets added to the open-source version

3) Premium version (I'd suggest not removing any features already in the open-source version, but adding new features to the premium version first)

No idea what your uptake would be on any of those ideas but that's the most common ways of monetising something like that I can think of.

I think they need to store your "memorable name" in plain-text for DPA purposes (so they can confirm they're talking to the account holder) but passwords for e-mail/billing etc. online have no need to be plain-text

Do you have an e-mail address for a "technical" team as the Contact Us pages make it difficult to actually find out things like that

I've asked them to clarify if they store them as plain-text, or if they're encrypted (and can be decrypted by CSA when needed) ... if it is plain-text, then I'll be taking my ~£80/month Virgin Media services elsewhere

I used to work for a business ISP (PSINet) who had a DC near the foot of Mt Geneva in Switzerland - not sure what happened to it after things wound down?