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mrchess

709 karma · joined September 9, 2009

Très lent, Contemplatif

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mrchess··on Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
Dalton needs to fire up App again!
mrchess··on Permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump
When I saw the cryptic 1 sentence tweet that he wasn't going to be there, the first thing that came to mind was that he was telling his supporters indirectly that they could do whatever they wanted since he wouldn't be in harms way.

So perhaps it is a huge stretch to some, but we need to remember it is also not a stretch at all to many, especially given the recent events. Therein lies the danger.

mrchess··on Stripe Will Pay Workers $20k to Leave New York and San Francisco
Agreed on this one. I was with a company, since the beginning, that ended up blowing up.

In the middle of its growth, I had to move, and ended up becoming a remote engineer.

Since the acquisition, all my colleagues (who all started at the same "level" as me) have greatly surpassed me in terms of title, responsibility, and salary because "they were there".

I'm not upset or anything, and in fact happy we all won in our own ways, but just echoing the idea that being nearby matters for career advancement!

mrchess··on Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service
Do you have a plan for when the anonaddy.com domain is added to the blacklisted emails? For example, I know on some websites will just straight up reject addresses from Mailinator or Sharklasers. Is there a way to prevent this from happening to you as well?
mrchess··on WeWork Files for IPO
For me it ended up not being worth it because I don't go in every day. In my case, the point of me WFH is so that I could get my commute time back, not just spend it going to a "different" office. With that said, I found myself only going in about 2x a week, which made it not worth it for me.
mrchess··on WeWork Files for IPO
You summed up perfectly my experience with WeWork and co-working spaces in general. You have to pay for the month, but I was only using it 2-3x a week -- I mean part of a WFH job is to get back your commute time! Those few visits felt pretty empty. I also made no friends from the events, as it seemed people had friends already.

At the end I just opt'd to save my $400 monthly payment and go back to coffee shops, and have some extra cash.

mrchess··on WeWork Files for IPO
Why do people like WeWork? Here in Singapore, a hot-desk at WeWork is $400+ USD a mont. Am I crazy, or is $400 a month a lot of money for a hot-desk with decent internet?

Or is it one of those things where all their money is in the big rentals, and the hot-desks are just for show?

mrchess··on Slack confirms it has raised $427M at a post-money valuation of over $7B
Someone tried to run this investor scam on me during Slack's funding process. Replace Google with Slack, and the scam was nearly identical in execution. Be careful out there! http://mobile.nytimes.com/2004/05/10/business/con-artist-exp...
mrchess··on Does Life End at 35? (2013)
fwiw that translation is wrong. 大器晚成 means "The bigger the cauldron/pot, the longer it will take to cast/make [the cauldron]."
mrchess··on Show HN: Painless1099 – automated self-employment taxes
Fwiw I use and am actually quite impressed with Quickbooks Self-Employed version, and I've never had a problem with 1099 management. They keep tax estimates for you in the upper-right corner so you always know around how much you will need to pay, and you can pay the quarterly taxes online through them via. eftps. While they don't auto-save for you, I'd argue you should be responsible enough to do this yourself. They were a bit buggy when they first released, but their support was pretty good to me and they have fixed all issues I've reported.

That being said, I'm not sure what this product can do for me over what I'm using now.

Actually, I just looked at their FAQ and they don't track expenses or anything... things you can do with Quickbooks.

Now I'm not trying to down this company, but just am pointing out to others that a mature version of this product already exists (minus the auto-save) and that I can't identify "why" I should switch over to Painless.

mrchess··on React Armor: Protect your DOM from third-party tampering
Great example of security theater.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_theater

mrchess··on How dire is Singapore’s engineering ecosystem?
One of the most interesting things I noticed when living is Singapore last year was that a lot of engineers, especially computer programmers, fall under the IT category.

There was no sense "software engineer" or "systems administrator" or "solutions engineer", etc. not in the way how it is in the US.

They all just looked at me and said, "Oh, so you work in IT?"

Then we talked about banking.

mrchess··on Study: Staying off Facebook can make you happier
I used this for a while but noticed it greatly slowed down my Facebook in general. Ended up uninstalling it after a few days. Wish they had a lighter weight one.
mrchess··on YC Fellowship
The "Save Draft" feature does not work on Submittable. FYI
mrchess··on Ask HN: Is it normal for founders of startups to not sleep?
To me it's normal. When I obsess over things I get very little sleep. But to brag about it, to me, is immature. It reminds me of college kids who would brag about waiting last minute to study and pulling all nighters for their tests the day before and being proud of it. Well... if you were more responsible with your time maybe you wouldn't have to cram like that?

To answer your question, yeah it's normal to send things at odd hours, but immature to constantly talk about it as if you deserve some sort of special treatment for it.

mrchess··on Show HN: Slack Meets GitHub Issues
My feedback:

1. No idea what this does, even after logging in and clicking around.

2. It wouldn't load for me at the start/seems VERY slow. Saw some comments about a 5MB file... maybe that is it?

3. "Slack meets github issues" means nothing to me! Who is your target audience? Those both seem like dev tools, but it looks like you're hitting consumers?

Good luck!

mrchess··on Show HN: Slack Meets GitHub Issues
Is there supposed to be some sort of content on this page? I don't see anything?
mrchess··on YC for Hardware
You are correct. I though Bolt == Lockitron Bolt. I did not realize they are two different companies. I will delete the original comment since it is inaccurate.
mrchess··on Lockitron Announces the $99 Bolt, a Deadbolt You Can Unlock with Your Phone
After a 2+ year shipping delay for a defunct product, this company will never see a penny of my money ever again.

    Fool me once, shame on you;
    fool me twice, shame on me.
mrchess··on Ask HN: What's left for early startup engineers as the company grows?
Eerily close to an experience I've had in my career. Nobody is looking out for your career except yoursel and as the company grew, they left you behind, that's that. I'd attribute this to poor management, as you typically want to keep the core members, but sometimes this does indeed happen.

I suggest you leave and take this experience with you and be more aware during your next professional engagement. At this point, being in the company is holding you back.

mrchess··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2014)
Cambridge, MA. Co3 Systems. Our CTO is THE Bruce Schneier!

We build products that help with incident response (when databases get breached, and similar things). Looking for entry-mid-advanced JS engineers, and mid-advanced Java engineers. Good learning opportunity to work with one of Cambridge, MA hottest startups. Our JS tech stack is Backbone/Marionette, backend Hibernate and other stuffs.

Send resumes to me with a brief cover and your github, stackoverflow, links, etc. fwiw I value the links and cover more than the resume. Looking for casual people, who are looking for a fun gig and want to hustle the cyber-security industry.

Email: jho@co3sys.com

mrchess··on I’m tired. So I’m selling my game that just went viral
If only it was as simple as using personal time and emotion invested as a large part of the equation that determined a softwares value... we would all be rich :)
mrchess··on Alfred Wins TechCrunch Battlefield SF 2014
> "Alfred will head over weekly... and replace supplies... like putting new paper towels on towel holder"

I find it funny that this is considered a problem these days.

mrchess··on Hardware Case Study: Why Lockitron Has Taken So Long To Ship
Yep, this was the comment. It made it sound like the product was in use for a long time and functioning well.
mrchess··on Hardware Case Study: Why Lockitron Has Taken So Long To Ship
This article is just like all the e-mail updates they send. Long winded excuses with no results. "X is broken, we are trying to fix it so that we live up to our high standard. We are excited to see what is next and will ship soon."

They have been singing the same song for 2+ years.

Personally I could care less about their delays. My beef with the company is that EVERY update they lead on customers, saying "We're almost there!". No, you're not.

I cancelled my order after the 4th delay.

mrchess··on Hardware Case Study: Why Lockitron Has Taken So Long To Ship
The only reason I bought this initially is because the YC team made a comment like "we've been using this for a while and it's awesome". It made me believe they had already done a lot of testing on the product, and that it was in production use.

After the first year it became clear the Lockitron was just an idea. I have no idea why the YC team made a testimonial for it as if it were a finished product.

The second year the e-mail updates were constantly "X is wrong and we are fixing it. We want to make the best product possible." Blah blah. Yeah, whatever.

What it comes down to is that Lockitrons entire campaign was misleading, from their website, to the YouTube videos, to the Kickstarter -- the entire company is smoke and mirrors. The company is really good at explaining why things are wrong, but is terrible at actually fixing them. My frustration stems from them constantly promising things, but missing their deadlines by months, and in this case, years. Not once, but several times.

I cancelled my order a while ago, the Lockitron brand is destroyed in my mind, and I have been hesitant to back any hardware projects ever since.

I really wanted to believe.

mrchess··on Show HN: Font Awesome to PNG
Please do this with Entypo! I've been wanting to use their library forever, but it doesn't work on some machines. http://www.entypo.com/
mrchess··on The new VirginAmerica.com
Lost me at date picking, and then got even more confused when choosing "flights" -- incredibly hard to read the flight table.

Not a fan of this refresh.

mrchess··on Mkdown
mkdown does private. Gist.io does not support private. +1 for mkdown!
mrchess··on The Worst Part of YC
Out of curiosity, the 3rd time you applied (and got accepted), did you have traction?
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