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tallship

25 karma · joined April 30, 2017

On the Beaches of Super Sunny Southern California!

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/tallship; my proof: https://keybase.io/tallship/sigs/egpOm4dxJsMGgx4DhSKQnioKqbcyyL9DibEVyxKk8-Y ]

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tallship··on How our vibe coded website looks like a designer made it
I think, many of the folks commenting below, mentioning that the OP hasn't actually studied in a design program in school, also fail to mention that the attorney, and later U.S. President, Abraham Lincoln also had no formal education in learning to read.

The latter, in his path toward literacy, and eventually a J.D. (That's what attorneys are nowadays anyway) was largely due to his stubborn autodidactism, the same mettle that the OP himself chronicles and showcases in his blog.

If you put most people participating (or lurking) here on Hacker News through this scrutiny, you really shouldn't be surprised that this is generally the case with anyone who's been working in data processing, Management Information Systems, Information Technology, or WhatEv we're going to be calling it in the next decade.

Nowadays, when I think of n00bs, I don't think about the computer illiterate, I think about the motivated neophytes who spent two years grinding along in an IT track in college at the snails pace of semester courses and now they can consider themselves entry level python programmers with an extra semester where they took "Introduction to Java - CS-107".

If you're going to survive in this industry, you already have an insatiable curiosity for everything under the hood and morbid obsessions with break/fix - emphasis on 'fix' :)

If it looks like Yakko (the OP of this thread) went through two semesters (that really is a freakin' year in trad educational systems) of design school, but in reality really didn't... You would be wrong. He just did it on his own and at a pace he was comfortable with, arriving at the same dock to berth his ship as someone who actually spent a year being forced learn it at a snails pace.

Not everyone can be a network engineer, or a systems administrator, or full stack developer, etc., but those who thrive upon the work are almost always exceedingly autodidacts in those disciplines...

You literally cannot keep up with the pace of evolving technologies if you're doing so in a legacy educational institution.

Interview question: "Tell me about a nightmare scenario you were faced with when you were without the knowledge to fix the problem and yet, did so anyway - how and what did you do to rise to the occasion, and how did that make you feel like when everyone was back online again?"

tallship··on Gitlab Dedicated – our new single-tenant SaaS offering
> neither of which so much as blinked when we quoted a price much higher than what they could get otherwise

And therein lies the business model of throwing good money after bad, and that's not even taking into consideration the enormous cost benefits of self-hosting with one's own physically colocated hardware infra and a meager full time staff.

Not batting an eye, or rather, "...so much as blinked", as you said, are bourne of business models with factored in wreckless budget kruft that may at first be acceptable until one merely scratches the surface of cost savings.

Even with a full time staff, and carrier hotel fees, the reliability and overall cost savings of self-hosting would likely not even exceed 15% of what the fully managed SaaS hosting package would cost - and two more points as well...

* Response time of support staff would be under 5 minutes.

* Dedicated support staff would actually need to "dedicate" very little actual man-hours to support functions, freeing them up to have their budgeted labor resources allocated elsewhere in the company most of the time.

This is a wonderfully stark and typical example of how to sell vendor lock-in for a FOSS solution... brilliant!

tallship··on Show HN: An open source alternative to Evernote (Self Hosted)
Hello @vivekweb2013, and thank you for creating this wonderful git based note utility.

I'd like to draw your attention to issue #59 and in the meantime I'll be posting a short Fediverse article, basically just an announcement at this point, with a much more in depth article to follow once the FOSS based git support enhancement is released.

.

tallship··on “Setting the record straight on Freenode” [pdf]
So, how many servers loaned to you by other parties have revoked those loans.... besides the email server you're whining about?

How much of your network is actually left standing and operational after what? two days?

Over ten thousand channels have been recreated on the network that is the successor to yours... in one day.

How does that leave you feeling?

tallship··on “Setting the record straight on Freenode” [pdf]
I recall just a few months ago when Amazon yanked the plug on hosting a company's infra with little more than 24hrs notice.

So I guess that's precedence for something like that, and yet, that company held a contract with Amazon to host their infra.... no such scenario in this case ;)

tallship··on IPTIA Fidonet/Usenet Message Archive
Indeed they/we do.
tallship··on Ok-Cancel versus Cancel-Ok
Well years ago at a convention I came across a little company that made Key caps out of Tempe, Arizona.

I bought a couple of bags of just two keys. Red panic buttons "Panic", and, "Any" keys.

We replaced the escape key cap with those when we sold new systems.

The "Any" key was a big hit and quite popular with the n00bs back in those AT (286) days.

I think I may still have a few of those around lolz.

tallship··on RIAA: ISP's Interest in Piracy Phishing Scam Is a 'Fishing Expedition'
Yeah not kewl at all. From some of the folks who brought us DRM.
tallship··on 100% serverless realtime file transfer
This is a pretty interesting resource. Kind of like a pastiebin for quick and relatively candid file sharing
tallship··on Ask HN: Is it safe to publish sensitive data in public if encrypted?
Considering that you don't know whether you can be sure that you've used a secure implementation, then the answer is a resounding, NO! It is not, by your own admission, 'safe' to publish any data that needs to remain secure in a publicly available setting.

Once you can answer yes to:

<snip> How can you be sure you've used a secure implementation? No idea </snip>

Then you will be able to ascertain for yourself whether your encrypted data, placed in a publicly available location, is "Safe Enough", "Secure Enough" for your needs.

It would be naive to assume that any data placed somewhere, encrypted or not, is stored with a completely invulnerable method.

That having been said, one must rise to the occasion of determining how secure something needs to be, and then availing oneself of the means to achieve that level of security.

I hope that helps, but in reality, there really isn't a cut and dried YES|NO answer - only relative levels of reasonable assurance in securing your data and communications.