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mockon Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries

This has changed quite a bit. There are a strangely large number of companies (both startups and a-bit-older-than-startups) doing various large data analytics type things. Also plenty of adtech related startups.

mockon Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries

Please do. Everyone I know is hiring. We're hiring.

http://www.viatec.ca/job-board/11521

mockon How I cracked my neighbor's WiFi password without breaking a sweat

download.com does not make me trust you. It's a red flag that makes me think you're even more likely to be malware. Especially given this: http://insecure.org/news/download-com-fiasco.html

mockon Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.android.ke...

Works just fine with version 1.x files

mockon Ask HN: I loved Snow Crash and Daemon. What should I read next?

I quite enjoyed Simon Morden's Metrozone trilogy - which has a lot of similarities to Snow Crash and Daemon (main character is essentially a hacker, run-amok AI, cyberpunkish dystopian future...)

http://www.simonmorden.com/books/equations-of-life/ includes an excerpt from the first book.

mockon Ask HN: Victoria Startups

Derek over at http://www.biospace.ca/ and http://makerspace.ca is trying to do some of that sort of thing.

mockon Ask HN: Victoria Startups

Actually, that's another good point. There are a lot of people working remotely here, as it's relatively quick to get to both Seattle and Vancouver (under an hour by float plane, and float planes don't have bullshit security lines). You can even give a little bit of a discount vs NYC or SV wages and come out ahead of what you'd do locally. I did that for a while, and I have a couple of friends doing it now for whom it's working out well. Once again, it's a matter of waiting for the good opportunities - unlike bigger hubs, there isn't the same sophistication in knowing who and how to hire in employers, nor the same raw demand for talent that lets someone walk out the door and be hired before they hit the street.

I'd definitely be interested in some sort of meetup, if such a thing were going to happen...

Also, don't get me started on local angels (both Victoria and Vancouver)... :-(

mockon Ask HN: Victoria Startups

I agree, there's definitely a problem with salary, and I don't dispute your characterization of it. However, my observation is that you need to be able to wait for the well paid senior positions to come available. If you need the work, you're in the unfortunate position of having to look in the places that can't tell the difference between fresh grads and senior devs. It gets better if you mostly get work via word of mouth or recruiters. There are a few developers that have ended up following me when I've moved jobs because they know I only work for places that pay and have interesting work. Likewise, I recommend them, because I've worked with them before, and I know they're good senior developers who are worth the money.

I've been making noises about organizing some other developer focused thing to make up for how crap viatec is... need to find sufficiently round tuits first.

As for health startups, it has at least one that I know about (and I'm not talking about genologics).

mockon Ask HN: Victoria Startups

The retirement community aspect has shifted somewhat; downtown is now younger and a bit more vibrant with all the condos that have gone up (and continue to be built). $300k will get you a tiny condo - $500k will get you something you actually like. Houses within walking distance of downtown (north park, which isn't the best neighborhood, but isn't the worst either) go for around $600k. Most young families are buying in Langford or further out where money goes further than that.

Victoria is definitely doing more tech-wise that Campbell River or Courtenay, in that there are more tech companies, more startups, and more tech jobs. As with anywhere outside of a major hub, you're going to have to do a lot of leg work to find those jobs - and to find ones that pay well.

mockon Ask HN: Victoria Startups

While it's true that salaries are by default depressed, anyone who's a pretty good hustler should be able to at least get within 5% of Vancouver. The real problem is that you're competing with all the kids who get out of UVic, don't want to leave the island, and are willing to work for peanuts.

On the other hand, if you're a high level/senior marketing, sales, or developer, there are opportunities at more reasonable pay levels - assuming you can find a position (it is after all, a relatively small community, and senior spots don't crop up all that often). One of the primary annoyances is that http://www.viatec.ca/ (the local tech community group) is kinda worthless for finding work - or for that matter, for finding talent when you're hiring. My experience is that hiring tends to be by word of mouth or via recruiter. Two of my last three Victoria jobs have been through recruiters, one was through word of mouth, all were reasonably well paid (at least as well as I did in Vancouver). There are strangely a fair number of startups, mostly in the mobile advertising and sem/seo space - and all the regular caveats about working for startups and startup wages apply as they do anywhere else.

Since I'm a developer, I mostly keep an eye on who's hiring in that space. Amongst non-startups, you might try perforce (I know they were looking for a front end guy, they might not be any more), neverblue (definitely looking to hire a couple of intermediate devs, probably a front end person too if the right one came along), and abe books.

Hope that helps.

mockon Canada’s vanishing tech sector

I live and work in Victoria, and have for the past 5 years. I currently work for a company that is hiring, and know of several others that are as well. Booming is, of course, relative, and probably refers to the difficulty everyone has finding talented devs (and wages are starting to rise due to that), rather than a direct comparison to the number of companies or size of the market. It's definitely not comparable to Seattle, or even Vancouver (and certainly not SV).

Wages aren't exactly the greatest, expenses aren't exactly the lowest - and there's a real lack of depth in both talent and places to work. On the other hand, there are plenty of people doing start ups because they don't want to leave - you just have to know where to look.

(also, sent you an email)

mockon Mosh: SSH for 2012

I wonder how easy it would be to hook this up to dns tunneling software such as http://code.kryo.se/iodine/ in such a way that after the the initial ssh auth step, you would have a useful terminal that would be accessible even behind captive portals and the like?

mockon Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (April 2012)

Neverblue - Victoria, BC, Canada

We are a full-service advertising brokerage that specializes in online customer acquisition and lead generation. We deliver millions of profitable customers to clients from all over the world, including members of the Fortune 1000™.

We’re looking for developers (We have a fulltime position as well as contract work) and a QA person to work on-site in our Victoria office on our advertising, mobile, and tracking platforms. We use a fairly heterogeneous stack: Mostly PHP and Python on the server and the usual suspects on mobile - with zeromq, rabbitmq, postgres, couchdb, and whatever-gets-the-job-done. We expect you to have a solid background with at least one dynamic language (PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby) and some experience with the usual grab bag of web/database technologies.

You can apply on our website http://www.neverblue.com/welcome/about-neverblue/careers email careers@neverblue.com or talk to me directly at will.whittaker@neverblue.com if you need more details.

mockon Perl on Heroku

What's the right perl module to use for queue based worker stuff these days? I like rabbitmq, but unless there's something I'm missing, AMQP support in perl seems a little sketchy. Is STOMP the way to go? Or should I just build 0mq workers off mongrel2 and roll my own solution with POE or something? I kinda feel like Perl is falling a little behind in this space, but maybe I'm just not seeing what everyone else is doing.

mockon Why UberCab is in trouble. This is the webpage of the S.F. taxi cartel

There are limo services advertised, and a courtesy phone that will reach them in the SFO airport right after the baggage pickup. I used one 3 weeks ago, and it took 5 minutes for my limo to arrive.

mockon Metasploit 3.4.0 released

At least a few given the number of times stuff from here gets posted on facebook by various infosec friends.

mockon Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

If someone has interesting work, and wants to pay me to learn COBOL, then absolutely I will. Actually, I have another startup in the works that probably will require learning COBOL at some point anyway...

mockon Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

Bad legacy code is certainly unpleasant. I'm currently working with a large code base that was mostly written about 10 years ago. It's not even particularly bad code, it's just big, and old, and crufty. But we can refactor that code a bit at a time into something clean and new, using modern perl. And we can do that without having to rewrite the entire thing in one shot. And that's one of the many advantages that being a good perl developer gives you. Another one is that that giant legacy code base still runs on a modern perl binary, because perl is (with a few well documented exceptions) a very very stable language. Most of the big modern perl changes are just modules. And they're backwards compatible with the old stuff too.

mockon Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

I haven't ever had problems hiring good perl people for the startups I've founded. But that may just be the area (Vancouver has a bunch of really good perl people). Also I try to only do cool things and treat people well. ;-)

I see your point about talent though. There are quite a few really good perl programmers, and a lot of "I once wrote a script in that" types, but not many in the middle. In some ways this is a strength - if you're programming in perl these days, odds are you've stuck with it because you actually like the language, so you're probably pretty good at it. On the other hand, it's not taught in school, so unless folks learn it on their own or on the job, there might be a real lack of new talent coming up the ranks.

As a programmer for hire, I can't complain about the wages. As an entrepreneur, I know where to find the good people, so it's not really a problem for me.

(I would also point out that any good programmer or intern/recent college grad who wishes to become a good programmer should always be willing to learn a new language on the company's tab. If they aren't, that probably says more about them than the language).

mockon Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

You might just not be in the right echo chamber. In the last few years I've been in several startups where perl is the primary development language. Most of the people we hired were in their mid twenties to mid thirties, which seems about what you'd expect for startups. HN seems to be a hangout for lots of python (and lisp, and ruby) people, but less so for perl and php people. Obviously I do hang out in the right echo chambers, which is probably why my experience differs.

mockon "Piracy" sounds too sexy, say rightsholders

There is no debate. Copyright infringement is not theft. Copyright infringement is also not murder, arson, or vandalism. Words mean something. That's why we have different words for different things. When someone says "Copyright infringement is theft", they're making a rhetorical point by conflating two different things, just like when someone says "All property is theft." This does not mean there is any debate that "property" and "theft" are the same thing.

mockon Regular Expression Matching can be Ugly and Slow

In perl you can use http://search.cpan.org/~abigail/Regexp-Common-2010010201/lib...

The entire Regexp::Common namespace is basically a cookbook of the "right" way to use regular expressions. Worth stealing and porting to other languages...

mockon Ask HN: What payment gateways do you use for your app?

I've used e-xact for a few different projects. Never had any problems with them, and they're relatively developer friendly (I wrote the Business::OnlinePayment::Exact module on CPAN).

mockon Canadian Government removes tax barriers for startup VC

He just seems kind of ignorant really. My experience is certainly limited to the west coast, but I've been around for a while both as a founder and early stage employee in plenty of startups, and I've yet to see one that didn't eventually take US based investment. Our biggest problems is that there aren't enough local angels and the local VCs aren't all that great - which is why everyone past a certain stage goes south to raise funds.

And this is great news, as it will make pitching those investors easier.

mockon Canadian Government removes tax barriers for startup VC

If you have a degree and a job offer, as a Canadian you can apply for a NAFTA visa at the border - it's not a sure thing, but it usually isn't that much hassle.

mockon Canadian Government removes tax barriers for startup VC

There are close to a dozen US angel investors in a company I co-founded in Canada - to my knowledge (and I'm pretty sure it would have come up) none of them had to go through anything particularly onerous in order to give us money. Two of those angels also sat on our board, and were pleasantly surprised to find out the difference in liability as board members between Canada and the US.

Previous startups I have worked for in Canada have all gone south of the border to raise either VC or Angel funding, so I suspect that this problem is somewhat over hyped. That said, everyone likes to remove friction (and accounting/legal costs) from raising money, so the change in law is a good thing.

As another aside, a Canadian company can multiply investment (certainly at the level of Angel investment) by as much as three times thanks to various Canadian R&D programs (IRAP and SRED), and Canadian investors usually qualify for the lifetime capital gains exemption, which can make an exit even more appealing (who doesn't love a tax break?). So there are some good reasons to invest up here.

mockon The Expedient, Desirable Product

Apparently. I've been talking to Dorian about this stuff for the last year or so, and I think he's got some real insight in places. Especially around figuring out what to build and how long that might take.

mockon 4chan's moot takes pro-anonymity to TED 2010

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9CJdBugDxE

mockon [Ask HN] do anyone of you knows a website which offers standard agreements?

You might want to keep an eye on http://lexpubli.ca/ They're slowly building up a library of contract templates available for use under CC.

mockon How To Safely Store A Password

I'm no cryptographer, so maybe this is a silly question... Any reason why I shouldn't just reimplement it in the high level language of my choice and release it open source?