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ljoshuaon Ask HN: What are some great “Free” services provided by IBM, Amazon, etc.?

Or likewise, Bizspark can get you the Azure credit too, along with basically an MSDN subscription.

ljoshuaon How to set up a VPN in 10 minutes for free

I've used https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/vpn/new several times to quickly set up a new VPN on a DigitalOcean droplet. Takes ~5 minutes.

Lately I had it set one up for me and have just let it run constantly since then. I effectively have my own personal VPN for $5 month.

ljoshuaon Gatsbygram Case Study

Gatsby is awesome, as evidenced by this demo and as I've learned building a site or two with it.

@kylemathews, I'd love to see a one-pager on the differences and improvements between the upcoming 1.0 release and the 0.x stable branches. Jumping around Github issues and PRs to track it is difficult.

ljoshuaon San Francisco university lays off IT workers, jobs head to India

I'm always curious about the math behind the cost savings in these types of off-shoring arrangements. I'm sure I'm missing something here, but if the HCL contract is for $50M, and they're claiming savings of $30M, that means that the expenditures for the original 97 employees+contractors would have worked out to approximately $825,000 per head, on average. ($80M / (49 + 48))

Now I know wages in the Bay Area are skewed, but even all in with benefits I'm sure that's much higher than the salaries of the replaced individuals.

Best to those being replaced, I'm sure they'll be picked up by smarter employers.

EDIT: Thanks to @jt2190 and @ar-jan for pointing out that I forgot to divide by 5, which gives a much more reasonable answer. It's a little too early here... ;)

ljoshuaon Why Do Americans Refrigerate Their Eggs?

Ah ha! I had always wondered why we'd buy a crate of 24 eggs at Carrefour in France when I lived there for two years, just off the grocery floor. I didn't feel bad not refrigerating them there, but of course must do so again now. Satisfying answer.

ljoshuaon Contact Ben Horowitz for $20

Not much, but the original question was a little severe in its tone as well. Let's all be happy folks! :)

ljoshuaon Naughty Strings: A list of strings likely to cause issues as user-input data

No, wake up!!

(For any who want to take the blue pill: https://github.com/minimaxir/big-list-of-naughty-strings/blo...)

ljoshuaon Naughty Strings: A list of strings likely to cause issues as user-input data

Line 629 is a gem!

Thank you @minimaxir, I hadn't seen this before, this looks very useful.

ljoshuaon Direct Primary Care

So I'm a little confused, because it states that you can combine DPC care with an HDHP to satisfy basic coverage and skip the penalty, but wouldn't the HDHP plan satisfy that? Or is the simple possession of an HSA combined with DPC good enough? (The second case would seem weird, since there's no "insurance" for high risk situations; it's just a savings account. And in most cases you wouldn't have an HSA unless you already were on an HDHP.)

Nothing against DPC, I'm just unclear how this works in with the individual mandate.

ljoshuaon Ask HN: As a developer, how do I get into recruiting?

You probably already have, but if not you'll certainly want to take a look at what @patio11 and @tptacek did with Starfighter and reach out to them for some interesting viewpoints on the matter.

ljoshuaon MSSQL on Linux – the details

It just barely became available as a public preview. It's not recommended for protection yet.

ljoshuaon MSSQL on Linux – the details

MSSQL is in the very new process of actually becoming available on Linux. Give'em a bit of time at least.

ljoshuaon AWS OpenVPN Endpoint Script

I also like the Tinfoil Security VPN setup, which does it for you fairly automagically using DO:

https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/vpn/new

ljoshuaon AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

I dislike ads as much as the next person (and indeed run uBlock on nearly every site), but I'd feel wrong using this because of the cost to the advertisers. It would be further lining the pockets of ad networks while increasing expenses for, at least in some cases, legitimate businesses. Sure, it's a bit of fighting fire with fire, but I'd rather not be an unnecessary expense for someone in my fight against intrusive ads.

ljoshuaon Public folders becoming private on March 15 for Dropbox Basic users

Bummer! That'll throw a wrench in many the way many people I know use to share folders of files.

Always a letdown when a company decides it has to make money. ;)

ljoshuaon Ask HN: Best current model routers for OpenWRT, DD-WRT, Tomato, etc.?

I have a TP-Link Archer C7, and while it has generally been pretty good, the last six months or so it will simply drop all connectivity and require a reboot. Pretty frustrating (happens 2-3x/week) and has me looking for another replacement. This is with stock firmware though, so I would hope, but haven't tried, that alternative firmwares would fare better.

ljoshuaon How I Work from Anywhere in the World

My first response upon reading the title: "Answer: I have no dependents." ;)

Enjoyed the article though, Karma was new to me and looks interesting.

ljoshuaon “Ultrasonic cross-device tracking” embeds inaudible tones in advertisements

I wasn't aware (and would be surprised if) iOS apps with microphone privileges could listen all the time, even while in the background, which is really what would be required in this situation.

Is that really the case, or is the Ars piece suggesting I would be walking around with the advertiser's enabled app open all the time? (And I'd guess Android is in a similar boat.)

ljoshuaon Show HN: I made a Chrome extension that helps battle impulsive procrastination

It's not exactly the same thing, but Rescue Time is awesome for this (especially when you get the reports about your wasted time).

ljoshuaon Uber self driving car drives on the wrong side

> “I couldn’t see any of the damage,” says Jason, the Uber driver, who requested Quartz withhold his last name because he feared being deactivated by the company.

Difficulties of self-driving tech aside, fearing that you will be "deactivated" by a company sounds rather dystopian...

ljoshuaon Apache Arrow – Powering Columnar In-Memory Analytics

Is this similar to how QlikView's in-memory engine works?

ljoshuaon Wagon Acquired by Box

> Enterprise sales are 60% trust, 20% pricing, and 10% product.

Wow, now I know that's just anecdotal, but that feels about right, and very interesting to have written down. Thanks for that, it's good food for thought.

(Now I'm just wondering what the last 10% is... ;) )

ljoshuaon Dropbox prompts password resets

> Our security teams are always watching out for new threats to our users. As part of these ongoing efforts, we learned about an old set of Dropbox user credentials (email addresses plus hashed and salted passwords) that we believe were obtained in 2012. Our analysis suggests that the credentials relate to an incident we disclosed around that time.

Sounds reasonable. I wouldn't be surprised if hashing techniques have changed since then, and this would be another way of upgrading users to the stronger scheme.

ljoshuaon How Millennials Became Spooked by Credit Cards

Huh, that's weird. I fall into the age bracket mentioned in the article, but use a credit card for nearly every single purchase for 1) the fraud protection benefits and 2) points. With the anecdotal group of people I know most people are fine using CCs.

On the other hand, I pay off the statement in full every month, and therefore never have revolving debt that extends beyond 30 days. The article wasn't clear whether or not such credit would have counted in their analysis or not.

ljoshuaon Ask HN: If you found an easy way to factor large numbers, would you tell anyone?

Oh, I'd be fine!

ljoshuaon Upthere raises $77M to put a new spin on personal cloud storage

Sounds similar to Bitcasa's original approach, or Dropbox Infinite, just without the option of what you manually sync. I wonder what it's like in practice.

ljoshuaon Introducing Google Cloud Natural Language API, Speech API and New Data Center

On the other side of the NLP spectrum, what players out there are involved in NLG (natural language generation)? I've seen Arria and a couple other small projects, but I'm just starting to investigate the space and haven't found a whole lot yet.

ljoshuaon Nightcode 2.0.0 released

Best. release notes. ever. :)

ljoshuaon I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011)

Whew, I'm pretty sure I only want to be able to do 205 MPH if I'm in the sky! ;)

ljoshuaon I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011)

> I’ve been programming for 18 years now. Only very rarely have I had to come up with a complex algorithm.

This. I am sure it is dependent on the type of work you do, and that Tesla and Google Search engineers probably need to excel at algorithms, but very rarely do I come across any need to solve those types of problems while developing software.

I would much prefer to see problems that resemble "You have Service A, which needs to grab data from Service B and feed it to Service C. Show how you could integrate them." That would be much more representative of a larger body of typical work. Some companies out there like Starfighter do this, I wish more did.