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ankimal

718 karma · joined September 9, 2010

@ankimal
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ankimal··on Instagram hides Like counts in leaked design prototype
Instagram is the only large social network that does not have a "reshare" FWIW.
ankimal··on Defining a Distinguished Engineer
The call out about being "Customer focused" is key! Many engineers use the Individual Contributor path as a means to just solve engineering problems and an exit route from product teams. No matter if your customers are internal (other engineers) or external (actual clients), understanding the business is equally important.

An Engineer's goal is to solve problems. Technology is their tool to do so and the more you understand the business' problems, the more effective you become at using the right tools in the right ways.

A Distinguished/Principal Engineer's role is a multiplicative technical leader whose use of these tools in an effective manner will impact solving customer problems in a more effective and streamlined manner. Thus, building customer empathy is very important.

ankimal··on Robinhood launches 3% checking account
Are there any reasons for not moving my cash reserves from Marcus to Robinhood given:

* Marcus' interest rate is also adjustable and is lower than 3%.

* Marcus has no ATM access/debit card.

* Getting money out of Marcus requires it to be transferred to another checking account.

ankimal··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2018)
NewsCred | Lead Engineer | New York | Onsite

https://www.newscred.com/careers/?gh_jid=1412116

NewsCred is the world’s leading content marketing platform. We build software that supports marketers in content planning, creation, publishing, and analysis. We help brands speak to their audiences by providing both bespoke original content and content licensed from the world’s leading publishers. Finally, as pioneers in our industry, we provide unique professional services and leverage our best in class technology platform for all of the world’s content.

ankimal··on Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users
Its a free world and last I checked its not illegal to work for FB. Trust in market forces to take it course.
ankimal··on Hire people who aren’t proven
We recently hired an outstanding engineer who graduated from a bootcamp and previously did not apply because we had an archaic requirement around "BS Computer Science or equivalent" in our job description.
ankimal··on Hire people who aren’t proven
We have taken out any mention of "culture fit" which to me means more of the same. Instead, we measure culture addition. How will this person add to our culture?
ankimal··on Hire people who aren’t proven
We took out all mentions of prior knowledge and experience in our entry level job postings. In our more experienced posting, we only ask for prior work experience building software for X years. We list only our stack and even caveat that by saying that it can change. I can wager that most software engineer positions fall in this category.

Another relevant point here is that women are less likely to apply for positions with a predefined list of requirements even if they are only missing 1 of them as opposed to men. So why are we shooting ourselves in the foot with all of these requirements?

ankimal··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2018)
NewsCred | New York | Onsite, Full-time | https://www.newscred.com/careers

NewsCred is the world’s leading content marketing company. We build software that supports marketers in content planning, creation, publishing, and analysis. We help brands speak to their audiences by providing both bespoke original content and content licensed from the world’s leading publishers. Finally, as pioneers in our industry, we provide unique professional services and leverage our best in class technology platform for all of the world’s content.

There are multiple positions open for Full Stack Software Engineers and Senior Software Engineers, along with many others. See link above for more details.

ankimal··on Gail, not Gmail
Why not show ads and give the money to a charity or any other foundation of your choice?
ankimal··on Before You Grow
The way I understand it is:

(build -> deploy -> feedback -> build -> deploy -> feedback ..) until you reach love, when you can start focussing on growth.

The lean philosophy is to make sure your (build -> deploy -> feedback) loop is tight.

ankimal··on The sneering response to Trump’s victory reveals exactly why he won
That will not even meet min. wage requirements.
ankimal··on The sneering response to Trump’s victory reveals exactly why he won
Democracy won. Middle America made their choice based on a hope that Trump will bring back jobs to America, especially manufacturing to the Middle American Industrial heartland. What they failed to see was that the dream is, just that, a dream! One that can almost never (never say never?) come true.

This is so much easier to explain than to convince people that globalization is a reality and that the only option in many of these cases is to retrain for a high skilled economy that the US always was, and must continue be in order to be an economic superpower. No matter which party won, this section of people would be anti-establishment and unhappy with the present because nobody can break this bad news to them.

A software engineering analogy is to convince leadership that you have to refactor your stack in order for it to scale, during which new products would suffer. BUT, its easier to convince them to hire 10 more engineers who can build new product on an aging stack, which may not solve the problem, but is relatively easier to sell.

In 5-10 years, who will explain to the millions of automobile drivers (taxis/trucks/uber/lyft/..) that their jobs are dying as well? Nobody. Wait for another anti-establishment election!

ankimal··on Webscraping with Rvest
I've had great success with Ruby/Mechanize for regular html scraping and phantomjs for dynamic page scraping.
ankimal··on Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test
Am I the only one who thinks that this is a terrible way to hire any Engineer, Director or not? I may have hung up after first 3 questions saying that "this does not sound like a good fit to me".
ankimal··on India’s Space Agency Hits New Milestone With Satellite Launch
Google linked link which is not subject to paywall: http://bit.ly/2cGd7E7
ankimal··on Investing for Geeks
If you dont want to invest in emerging markets, its not the end of the world.

The risks can be higher but so are the rewards. The most important thing is to not just invest in a market blindly. Try your best to understand that market and keep tabs on that market.

You don't have to diversify for the sake for diversification. You can invest domestically and diversify by industries.

ankimal··on How good is your French accent?
Credit where credit's due.

In my time travelling in France (Paris, Nice and surrounding areas), I made every attempt to say the little things in French. "Bonjour" , "Le menu pour Anglais" or "L'Addition s'il vous plait", "Parlez vous anglais?" etc. The idea was to start any question or conversation in french and then switch to English.

Never did I have a problem over my 2 weeks with anyone. Everyone appreciated the effort to speak the language and was super polite and warm.

ankimal··on We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
Great attitude and a hunger to learn >> Super smart but a pain to work with, in the long run.
ankimal··on Before Growth
If you already regret not starting a company, then start one.

Generally you would want to give this "experiment" a realistic timeline (ideally, multi years). Set goals on when you think this is or is not working, so that you can bail. This is very similar to making bets on the stock market, except that you are investing in yourself.

Now, look at your worst case scenario (failed startup). Things you will MOST definitely learn:

- How to start a company?

- What does being your own boss mean?

- Independent thinking

- Make some new friends/contacts and meet other people.

Things you will lose:

- Time

- Money

- Balanced lifestyle, perhaps

If you think, you, as a person, are the same or better, then you've won half the battle.

You need to be sure that years down, knowing the worst case scenario you dont have a new set of regrets. Also, ideas are a dime-a-dozen, its all in the execution.

ankimal··on PostgreSQL 9.5: UPSERT, Row Level Security, and Big Data
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.5/static/brin-intro.html If like me you were looking for what BRIN index is all about.
ankimal··on Show HN: Scrape the web by injecting JavaScript into web pages
Can you talk about performance? Having written both vanilla non-js scrapers (which get you far enough) and js scrapers for those pesky web pages, I can confirm that our js scrapes took 10-20x the time.

Also, I am assuming dynamically changing IP addresses when you may get blacklisted is built in?

ankimal··on Web Scraping 101 with Python
Check out casperjs, it should make life easier. Phantomjs by itself is extremely cumbersome in my experience.
ankimal··on Web Scraping 101 with Python
How is performance with Watir? With casperjs a page takes me on an avg. 5-10 secs. to process.
ankimal··on Spidering the web with CasperJS
Can you provide some insights into performance? In my experience, a single page could take between 5-10 secs. to scrape.
ankimal··on Web Scraping 101 with Python
They make scraping as easy as finding the right jquery selectors (once you inject jQuery onto the page) but can be very slow as compared to a vanilla HTML only scraper.

In my experience, a phantom/casper implementation could take upwards of 5-10 secs. to process a single page (almost 5-10x slower). This, even if you disable load of remote images and plugins.

ankimal··on Web Scraping 101 with Python
Also recommend Mechanize for Ruby (uses nokogiri under the covers).

http://mechanize.rubyforge.org/

http://phantomjs.org/ or "its easier to deal with cousin" http://casperjs.org/ for very client heavy sites.

FWIW, you can get away with HTML only scrapers most of the time, you just need to look harder to find all the data. Totally recommend using "View page source" as that would always give you the original HTML vs the possibly altered DOM (after JS has run on the page) that you might see with Dev Tools/Firebug.

ankimal··on Database management for public and private clouds
At last end to end database management. Can we get postgres support? At last I can focus on my app now.
ankimal··on Help define an awesome MongoDB GUI tool
I would love support for Postgres and MySql as well.
ankimal··on SeenBefore: A search engine for what you have seen before
Interesting idea. Some quick questions:

- How much data do you store per user?

- How do I delete certain results? (preferably after the search comes back)

- Another thing to consider is - After how much time does this just become as painful as finding that page through a search engine?

- What version of the page gets stored? The latest or the one that I saw?

I guess its one step better than Evernoting a page and adding tags myself.

Good luck!

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