HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

ryanong

352 karma · joined July 21, 2011

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/ryanong; my proof: https://keybase.io/ryanong/sigs/gR6cuz0XjfnyoB8aald81Llv6oPd4-V8JjvW-a1hLwA ]
submissionscomments
ryanong··on Custom telescope mount using harmonic drives and ESP32
This post reminds me of the beauty of open source. Well done build and a great project summary!
ryanong··on As private equity dominates wheelchair market, users wait months for repairs
The problem isn't regulation, the problem is that the regulation isn't simple or cheap enough for small companies to get regulated.
ryanong··on Choosing the Right Audit Trail Approach in Ruby
Oh neat I haven't heard of console1984 or the package that allows for auditing. A lot of my previous companies have been looking for something like this
ryanong··on Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
This also make sense how one can hijack someones brain into believing something even if they don't understand why it makes sense
ryanong··on TC Energy scraps Keystone XL pipeline project after Biden revokes key permit
I would not have been revoked if it wasn’t illegal.
ryanong··on Cheerleader’s Snapchat rant leads to ‘momentous’ Supreme Court case on speech
Being harassed/doxed is different than being cancelled

It is important to disambiguate the two

ryanong··on Whistleblowers: Software keeping inmates in Arizona prisons beyond release dates
that doesn't sound bad to me if we are dealing with people's life or people's freedoms
ryanong··on Ruby 3.0.0 RC1
Love the move to gemify standard library. This is a perfect mix of batteries included but also makes it easy to upgrade bits of the standard library over time between releases. Great way to prevent stagnation.
ryanong··on My Life Countdown (2007)
I the past year I have been convinced the desire to get things done is a partial root of my unhappiness. I have been working a lot on learning to just be and perhaps do also.
ryanong··on How and why GraphQL will influence the Sourcehut alpha
addressing #7, graphql queries are dynamic and not stored on the server
ryanong··on Apple aims to sell Macs with its own chips starting in 2021
pro audio tends to be a lot more low level to prevent any kind of stuttering or delay, so it may not always be compatible across stacks. It also tends to not get updated very often. You create 1 plugin for ableton, then the creator has moved on to the next project.
ryanong··on Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down
IRC was the chat server. Freenode was THE OSS irc chat server.

There wasn't any other game in town that could scale well enough that was free.

ryanong··on KafkaHQ
I used Kafka at my last company. One of the places that it failed us was trying to use it as a queue. Don’t do that.
ryanong··on The Real Class War
Marching is the first necessary step to get people organized. It is the lowest bar for starting to organize and to participate. It is where people can drum up support, awareness and donations.
ryanong··on Caesarean babies have different gut bacteria, microbiome study finds
It can be eating too
ryanong··on Tesla has applied for a patent for a new electromagnetic windshield-wiper system
This! A friend actually used to work on those systems. Hilarious amounts of complexity figuring out auto wipers
ryanong··on Software was eating the world – now landlords are eating everything
Capitalist dystopian dreams. Nyc has mostly unregulated real estate and it is still horrible. Large development corporations create artificial scarcity that rise the price of rent. Everything just rises in cost including minimum wage and just tracks whatever the developers can extract out of the economy.

If the solution doesn’t including bringing everyone along I don’t want it.

ryanong··on On Being a Principal Engineer
I would call it more of a plateau than stagnation. The senior title is a pretty beautiful spot, well paid and always more to learn but the value to the company is limited to the work you get done. You may be able to get it done faster and better than anyone else, but there are diminishing returns on speed and quality of an individual. I miss being a senior sometimes. Being able to go heads down and pair with someone all day on a problem was a great feeling, but I enjoy how much I help my coworkers/friends.
ryanong··on On Being a Principal Engineer
This rings true to my experience. I'm a Staff engineer and of my 40 hour week about 10-15 of those hours are interviews, meetings, and answering questions. Questions about technical feasibility, architectural discussions and planning, long term strategic planning, and lots of one offs from other developers.

I enjoy the soft work I do, a lot of emotional labor for other developers, soft sells for tech/feature work around the company, process strategy and such. I never expected this to be such a large part of my job, and how much value comes from it.

But I am also at this weird point where I am not sure if the title of "staff/principle" can be transferred to another company. A lot of the value that I add now is because of the historical knowledge I have. What we have tried as a company, what we haven't, why we built some things the way we did, how things work currently, how the politics works and the trust I have built.

In the past year, I have seen less than 5 job posting for a staff engineer.

ryanong··on Rethinking how we interview in Microsoft’s Developer Division
I feel like these have been standard practices in most of the startups I have worked with over the past 10 years. It is interesting to see that this isn’t the norm already.
ryanong··on JavaScript Equality Minesweeper
"So yeah, in practice the confusing rules of JS equality comparison don't really matter all that much."

I run into this all the time. Plenty of junior devs I work with do this. Unfortunately we haven't implemented typescript yet. Yea === solves this problem but I wish there was a deprecation path for ==. Why can't we figure out as a community how to deprecate horrible javascript apis? Why can't we as a community figure out how to have a good standard library?

ryanong··on Oxy – A Security Focused Remote Access Tool
From my current understanding adding random noise doesn’t affect most timing attacks because it is averaged out. I may be wrong though
ryanong··on Oxy – A Security Focused Remote Access Tool
I thought timing attacks only matter for clear data to encrypted data and back part of the library, and as long as they didn’t write any data parsing that is content specific pre or post encryption their encryption and didn’t write their own encryption then there shouldn’t be any major holes.
ryanong··on Show HN: Whiteboardfree – Developer Jobs at Companies That Don't Whiteboard
At plated we do two coding interviews. The first is concrete, we have a library that is poorly written and their job is to implement a new feature and refactor it. This is a great interview to understand core skills. The second interview is a modeling exercise where we build an app from scratch with escalating amount of complexity but only asking for what the database and api endpoints would look like.
ryanong··on Pivotal Software S-1
Ex-Pivot here. The kool-aid was amazing. Would drink again.

Best communicators I have ever worked with.

ryanong··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2017)
Plated | New York City, NY | Full-time | mostly ONSITE | https://www.plated.com/careers

Plated is the meal kit for people who love food. We are writing software that puts good food on customers tables and we're passionate about making that software a delight to work with, super effective at solving business problems, and easy to maintain in production!

Technology:

* Android Engineer

* Full Stack Developer

* Infor M3 Systems Administrator

* iOS Engineer

* Senior Site Reliability Engineer

* Senior Software Engineer

* Systems Administrator

Data & Analytics:

* Data Analyst

* Data Engineer

* Data Scientist

Product:

* Product Manager

More info at https://www.plated.com/careers

ryanong··on Faster Coding Interview Prep Using Interactive Visualizations
I always hated algorithm interviews when it came to applying for web development jobs. I've been a developer for 8 years now and I have only had to use any algorithms once in my career. I get it that for facebook, google, and what not these could be representative of the work you do but I don't think this is a good interview.

I tend to look for developers now that have a better sense of modeling and api design. One interview that works really well is modeling a chat app and going through all the edge cases. Also a fan of Rob's Pairing Interview that is executed by pivotal. Build an array or perhaps a set from scratch and pair on building it where the interviewer is a driver and the interviewee as the navigator.

ryanong··on Towards a JavaScript Binary AST
Yea I remember that versioning but few browsers implemented it.
ryanong··on Towards a JavaScript Binary AST
This is some amazing progress, but reading this and hearing how difficult JavaScript is as a language to design around makes me wonder how many hours have we spent optimizing a language designed in 2 weeks and living with those consequences. I wish we could version our JavaScript within a tag somehow so we could slowly deprecate code. I guess that would mean though browsers would have to support two languages that would suck..... this really is unfortunately the path of least resistance.

(I understand I could use elm, cjs, emscriptem or any other transpirer but I was thinking of ours spent around improving the js vm.

ryanong··on Split user stories ruthlessly and get value earlier
The most important part of agile is the feedback cycle and non rolling release products don't have a very good feedback cycle. it can still help if you figure out pre-release feedback loops but sometimes they are poor representatives of actual results.
Page 1 of 2Next →