brandontreb

Oh man, I wish I had enough karma to downvote this comment! (I’m in NM ;))

Ahh, this is a great tip. I’ll have to double check now.

Thanks.

It's crazy that companies are still using SMS for 2FA. TOTP solves this problem is a much more elegant way and is immune to such attacks.

I'm assuming you are talking about ARGOS tags (more sophisticated tag that actually transmits GPS (last comment was talking about pet tags (which are RFID)), but it's FAR from microscope / injectable via needle. I get it, people's lack of understanding about technology is what fuels the conspiracy theories. They don't realize that no company NEEDS to track them as they have already traded all of that information away years ago.

I have some close friends that subscribe to such theories and no amount of tech discussion will convince them otherwise.

People will believe what they want :/

That's a 'dumb` RFID chip. I don't think folks are too concerned with offline chips that require close proximity scanning (for power). RFID also doesn't 'track' dogs. They contain information about the dog to get them back to their owner. The info is static and contains NO location data.

I can't understand the 'microchip in vaccines' issue. You mean to tell me that my iPhone can't last a full day on a battery charge, however we have microscopic tech capable of tracking location data and relaying it somewhere and doesn't need charging once injected into the body?

I'll take my microchip in space grey please.

That title font is hard to read.

And he didn’t even provide an affiliate link! I’m impressed.

We have a mix of employees / contractors but usually hover around 9-10.

As far as asking questions, it’s about the long game. I aim to build relationships with people and establish myself/my team as an authority on software dev.

Almost none of my meetings are “sales” meetings, in fact we never do advertising at all. All leads come from people who eventually want work or refer their colleagues. Some meetings pan out and others don’t.

"I don't have a ton of networking skills"

Work on this. I have built my consultancy over the past 6 years and it started with me doing freelance and now we do over $1m/year in revenue.

I attribute the majority of success to networking. Here are some of the things I did early on (and still continue to some extent).

1. Local meetups. Great place to show off, hear about leads, etc...

2. Find influencers / networkers in your area and buy them coffee. Ask tons of questions and end with "Who else do you think I should be talking to?"

3. Build stuff - I decided I wanted our team to be known locally for doing crypto dev, so I just started building cool stuff and showing it off at the local dev meetups. Now we have tons of crypt contracts!

Whatever you do, come at it with the attitude of wanting to contribute to the community using your gifts/skills. The work will follow.

Best of luck!

So, code updates from the server doesn't matter as we can hook all of the audio recording APIs at a system level. Their _only_ defense IMHO is to NOT do it on Jailbroken devices. You are right, it's super easy to detect jailbroken devices.

Interesting. So you are suggesting they may have already considered this and may have some defensive programming around it?

See my response to the other comment about them using private APIS. Basically, we would have to try and guess which APIs they were accessing under the hood.

But you are right, this would def be a considerable effort for someone not in the jailbreaking space. I would love to hack it up, but unfortunately haven't dabbled in JB dev since 2011.

That's why I posted the comment to HN. In hopes it might inspire someone in that space to build it. Might also be worth jumping in the theos IRC channel. For someone with the toolchain already set up and a jailbroken iOS device, the code is actually pretty trivial.

It is, however when building a mobile substrate tweak, you have visibility / access to the headers of every single system class. One could theoretically hook into any number of audio recording mechanisms (assuming they knew where to look ;) )

I did quite a bit of Jailbreak/tweak dev in the past, and I was curious if you could just hook into AVAudioRecorder and show an alert any time it was invoked.

So, I did this sort of thing years ago when I wrote a tweak for the InPulse smartwatch (later became Pebble) https://github.com/brandontreb/inPulseNotifier .I was able to hook into the system messaging, forward it to a custom bluetooth stack (sending it to the watch) and forward the message up the stack to be displayed by the system.

It would stand to reason that the same sort of process would be effective for catching Facebook invoking audio recording. Once you hook into the AVAudioRecorder's interface, you could theoretically observe the following:

1. Open the Audio Recorder app and hit Record - An alert should show to prove your tweak is working.

2. Open the Facebook app. If you receive a similar alert at some point, you could at least prove that FB is invoking the audio recorder at some point without the user's expressed permission.

Am I crazy or could this test actually work?

This must be a common joke amongst programmers. We often joke that we should all become potato farmers. Being outside, watching things grow, working with something physical. I totally get the appeal.

I have that exact same regret.

Make sure to subscribe, that post will be in my upcoming series :)

I believe that it played a huge role. Although, I feel that you could still start a successful iOS blog today, you would have to bust your butt to even come close to sites like http://www.raywenderlich.com. Believe me, I've tried on my blog a while ago, but it's extremely hard to keep up a relevant and popular iOS tutorial site, especially with how fast Apple is moving.

That's not to say that you can't grab a piece of that market. When I was blogging there were only a few thousand iOS developers, now there are hundreds of thousands. So there is more demand.

Great question. Yes, you can be fired for just about anything. Companies also love to give you very few reasons as it lowers their risk of a lawsuit. (i.e. if you say "You are fired because of your lack of professional dress". I could argue that it's part of my religion to wear sandals and tank tops and sue. It's a very tricky area.

I will say I got a 2 week severance package though.

Thanks for posting the link. I would have put it up, but Hacker News penalized me last time I linked in the comments of my own post.

I love this and it's precisely why I wrote this post. I just looked at what others were doing and realized "These guys are no smarter or riskier than I am. The only difference is, they just did it".

Thanks for the comment.

I totally agree.

I generally solve this issue by paying the developer for the programming challenge. Usually, it's something that benefits the project that I'm working on. Then, if I hire them, it's a pretty easy transition.

So what if I find a bad dev or two and lose a bit of money. The good devs way more than make up for the investment in the bad ones.

Weird this article fell like a stone from #2 to 20 in seconds. Crazy

Congrats and good luck!

It depends on the project. I seldom do fixed bid projects as I'm a big fan of agile. I'll give a rough estimate but bill on time and materials.

Depends. Early on i was putting in 50s. During the summer it was closer to 20 ;) now I'm between 30-40. Family time is super important to me so I make sure to be off by 5 (I'll still take calls and address issues at any hour when/if needed)

That's a great point. I couldn't agree more. I should have given some more intro, however if you follow the link at the top of the post, it provides much more context.

http://brandontreb.com/what-i-learned-in-my-first-month-bein...

On my iphone right now, but if I get a chance I'm happy to post more backstory here in the comments later today.

Thanks for the feedback!

Ahh, perhaps that wasn't obvious. I do all of my time tracking inside of Freshbooks. That way there is no discrepancy when I bill the clients.

Hey Scott,

I totally understand your perspective. However, this is Hacker News. It's all about the community and helping other hackers out. To be honest, there is such a huge sea of work out there, I would be happy if others would take some of it on.

I have to reject a few contracts a week due to the volume that seems to be coming in. Also, you might not have guessed it, but posts like this help bring me more work than anything else.

I would definitely worry about what you are saying if mobile development was a race to the bottom and only about getting the cheapest price. Then I would be screwed. However, if you hone your skills and are at the top of your game, you should never have issues competing for contracts.

Cheers!