cubes

Curious, where did you source the data from? Did you just scrape the invidividual bank web sites?

The authors of that article got pictured on the cover of the New York Times for finding that security issue: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/technology/researchers-fi...

This brought me back. I was a member of the UC Berkeley Computer Science Undergraduate Association (https://www.csua.berkeley.edu) in the early aughts. Through the CSUA I came across a job posting for a sysadmin job at Skotos Tech (https://www.skotos.net/), the multiplayer text games company Christopher Allen founded after his work at Consensus Development/Certicom to develop the SSL/TLS implementation for Netscape. It's been a long and strange road.

This article would be more accurately titled, "Why you shouldn't try to build a venture capital funded business." Of course, my suggested title is not nearly as compelling and edgy as the actual title, and would be less likely to make it to the front page of Hacker News.

The content in the article isn't inaccurate or misleading per se, but it's also basically repackaging well understood information about the economics of startups and venture backed businesses.

Further, the author asserts that, if you're trying to optimize your personal economic outcomes, you should not pursue venture funding. But this wrongly assumes that money is the sole motivator people have for starting a business. Further, it ignores the massive economic value that the venture ecosystem has created.

Some people want to retire early. Some people have bigger ambitions. Neither group is right or wrong, but, if you're starting the business, you should know which group you're part of.

Cool, I'll reach out, and let you know if he's interested!

I have a friend that's super smart, currently works in biotech, and studied computer science, would you be interested in chatting with him about possible applications? Happy to make an introduction if you like!

Are launch congratulations in order? If so, congratulations! I'm super excited to see where you take this, and I hope you're able to find a solid business model to support you and your work.

I love this little deep dive!

+1 for use of Conventional Comments. It's a simple lift for a noticeable improvement in clarity, and guidance on what to do next.

Let's not forget his latest project, https://datasette.io/

Where's Fucked Company when you need it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company

NB: Do not navigate to fuckedcompany dot com, it's squatted.

Hard agree.

History is littered with dead startups that designed for scale before they had enough usage to justify it. Within reason, having users knock your site over resulting in failures like the Twitter Fail Whale is a good problem to have.

With that said, you need to be prepared to scale up quickly once you have this problem. There's a reason Facebook counts its users in the billions, and Friendster is a footnote in internet history.

Yes, I partied with Nick Weaver. The lottery scheduler was implemented in the late 90’s, but soda’s kernel ran with the lottery schedule well into the aughts.

I agree that shell accounts weren’t as important by the aughts, but the culture was still going strong in the early aughts.

I respectfully disagree. There was a vibrant community on soda well into the early aughts, even if it was running FreeBSD on x86 vs. some older more esoteric hardware architecture.

It's good to see that the CSUA encyclopedia still exists somewhere, even if it's not hosted on soda anymore: https://www.erzo.org/shannon/writing/csua/encyclopedia.html I had the good fortune to meet and work with the primary author at a small games company called Skotos Tech during my later undergraduate years.

Yes, that is correct.

Hi! I think that, in my cursory reading, I misunderstood what the code is doing. I thought it was importing the module you're trying to analyze... I'll have to read more closely when I have some spare time.

True. Is soda still a thing? IIRC, soda also allowed non-root users to use the wall utility?

Neat, I'll take a look! I thought I was going to need to write something similar!

This looks really neat. One thing I noticed on reading the source code, it appears to actually import the modules:

Quoting the docstring on the `track_module` function:

    """This function executes the tracking of a single module by launching a
    subprocess to execute this module against the target module. The
    implementation of thie tracking resides in the __main__ in order to
    carefully control the import ecosystem.

Source: https://github.com/IBM/import-tracker/blob/67a1e84e5a609e52e...

Here's the actual subprocess call: https://github.com/IBM/import-tracker/blob/67a1e84e5a609e52e...

    # Launch the process
    proc = subprocess.Popen(shlex.split(cmd), stdout=subprocess.PIPE, env=env)

I think this is clever, and maybe even necessary, but feels risky to do on unaudited third-party Python libraries.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something?

Love Figlet, we used to use it frequently on the shared unix machine where members of the Berkeley Computer Science Undergraduate Association (CSUA) would hang out: https://www.csua.berkeley.edu/

Robotech, specifically Macross. I know there have been a couple attempts, but I haven't seen one that scratched the itch. I want variable controls depending on the mode of the Valkyrie/Veritech.

1. The job of an employee at a for-profit company is to create business value. This is often lost on engineers and other technically focused startup employees. Working on a project that you consider interesting or of technical merit is a waste of time if it's not creating business value.

The wrinkle here is that it's not always obvious what projects will create business value. Unfortunately, if you're not in an organization with deep pockets and a long time horizon for projects to succeed, it's almost always a better business decision to work on projects that have a direct link to creating business value.

2. Using a technology because [insert large successful company or startup here] uses it well at scale is almost always the wrong decision for a startup. What works for Google, Meta, Uber, etc. will likely not work for your startup until you reach a certain critical level of scale.

3. Headcount is vanity metric. If a company is proud that they have a large team, you should probably run. Employees cost money and employee salaries count toward OPEX vs. CAPEX. What matters is revenue per employee, but many startups are pre-revenue.

4. Scaling your organization or technical stack before you have product market fit is a waste of time. Silicon Valley history is littered with dead startups you've never heard of that burned through their runway building over-engineered systems designed to scale to meet the demand of users that never came. The same is true of startups that built out massive sales departments before they had a product that people wanted to buy.

I've used both Markdown and RST extensively. I feel RST has a steeper learning curve than Markdown, and that can be an obstacle to a successful documentation culture at an organization.

As a former colleague liked to say, "The bar to authoring documentation needs to be so low you can trip over it."

This seems reminiscent of the (in)famous R.I.P. Good Times deck that Sequoia distributed to there portfolio companies back in 2008: https://articles.sequoiacap.com/rip-good-times

I've been there.

What worked for me was talking to my manager, and arranging to unplug by taking a significant amount of time off. For me, this was two weeks initially, which I extended to three. IMO, three weeks is the minimum I would consider taking if I get into this state again.

If your manager is a good one, they will support you. If your organization is a healthy one, your team will understand and empathize.

Burnout is real, and, in my experience, it's unlikely to resolve by staying the course.

Python 2 and 3 or 3 only? I looked for this on the linked site, and it wasn't immediately obvious.

That's super helpful. I'm currently at Eventbrite, and we're probably in the same order of magnitude.

How fast does Pysa typically run? If I want to run it as part of my CI system, how much additional time might I expect it to add? Obviously this varies from code base to code base, but I'm curious what the experience at Instagram is like?

> So how do you get into the habit of creative thinking? > > Well, the best way is to just do it!

Such actionable advice! Much wow!

Congratulations Todd and team!