ispivey

Joined 18 years ago

Karma
351
Submissions
60
Member since
Oct 18
on a very long break

previously cloudflare, dropbox, bebop, simpler, tinyco, macquarie, ibm, mit

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Recent submissions

Comment · 11 years ago
Now that's what I call selling pickaxes!
Comment · 11 years ago
Understood! I'd looked at Keyczar in the past as a component of a system to manage secrets/keys, but I see it's actually providing about 0% of what Keywhiz does.
Comment · 11 years ago
I'd love to hear from some of the team who built this about differences between Keywhiz and Keyczar, which to my mind was the best-practice open-source cross-platform solution to date (i.e. if you're not relying on things like AWS Cloudformation config or Heroku config vars to "manage" secrets).

Obvious pieces to me appear to be (1) roles and auditability (2) end-user front-end (3) filesystem interface & associated ease of access for various services. But I'm not an expert!

Comment · 12 years ago
The advice on min-width vs min-device-width strikes me as controversial:

  Therefore, you should avoid using *-device-width, since the
  page won’t respond when the desktop browser window is
  resized.
GMail, Facebook, New York Times, and lots of other smart folks don't show their mobile-web versions if you make the browser viewport very small. Their sites have min-width ~980px when viewed on desktop.

I imagine this is because (a) their mobile sites use different interactions that require different DOM and JS, not just different CSS styles, and/or (b) those different interactions might not be appropriate on desktop even if you shrink the viewport and/or (c) it's confusing for the site to work differently when you resize your window and/or (d) they don't want to send unused JS/DOM to devices that aren't going to use it.

Any thoughts, kinlan?

Comment · 12 years ago
This is probably a new HN record in mistakenly ascribing bad intentions, which is pretty impressive.

Perhaps people are interested in watching some awesome founders speak.

Comment · 13 years ago
Comment · 13 years ago
There's a bunch of research suggesting that using "he" as a neuter pronoun makes women feel excluded: - First experiment/study I found: http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=12... - Links to more research on the subject: http://alyx.io/educational-resources/gender.html#generic-mas...

Douglas Hofstadter wrote a good piece of satire explaining why it's oppressive by s/man/white, etc: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html

Contrary to what you say, "they" was used as the singular neuter pronoun for a long time, until a concentrated effort to force it out of use in the 1800s. Some examples from a previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6824352. Some history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

Given it's possibly (likely) ostracizing and there's nothing categorically wrong about using "they" as a singular neuter pronoun, I think you're on the wrong side of this.

People should certainly stop fighting; the answer is to just roll with "they".

Comment · 13 years ago
We're used to looking at a pronoun's antecedent to determine its subject. In the sentence, "Jacob finally published a post he'd been mulling for a long time," we don't object that it's unclear whether "he" refers to Jacob. I don't understand why "The user receives the data they requested" is so fundamentally different. You still look to the antecedent; it's still clear.

I grew up taking great pride in "correct" English usage, but I now think insisting on gendered pronouns causes harm without any tangible benefit.

Comment · 13 years ago
In the most meaningful way, it could be Android for consoles. It's "freely licensable" for hardware manufacturers, so companies will be able to build new consoles without building their own OS -- the same innovation that led HTC and Samsung to become two of the world's leading phone manufacturers.
Comment · 13 years ago
Imagine being a single mother with a young child. You're a great programmer. But you spend 90% of your time outside work raising your kid, so you can't make the time to make significant contributions to OSS.

...

You can't get a job that requires a Github OSS history. You're severely disadvantaged in job hunting when OSS contributions are a major metric.

If people tested your suitability for a job by pair programming with you, or looking at code samples, you'd look just as good as someone who contributes to OSS. But because OSS is an important metric, you're disadvantaged.

Does this make clear how it's discriminatory?

Comment · 13 years ago
A few suggestions:

- Use Vagrant and some bootstrap scripts (or Docker) to make giving them a dev environment easy

- Get them to use a git GUI like SourceTree (free & good: http://www.sourcetreeapp.com/)

- Build a workflow around pull requests / review branches a la github/bitbucket/gerrit so you can have them submit changes but an engineer reviews/verifies before it's merged.

In general, empowering them to do this is an investment in the future and well worth it.

Comment · 13 years ago
That investment amount seemed low, as it suggested you weren't exercising your pro rata rights.

If the initial $400k bought 10% of the company, USV would need to buy 10% of each subsequent round to maintain their ownership, which would be ~$12.5M. That's ignoring varying definitions of pro rata rights, other dilution but probably a good lower bound.

If the initial $400k bought 20% (more likely for Tumblr in 2007), USV invested ~$25M to keep their ownership stake.

Fred seems like the kind of guy who always does his pro rata, so I'd imagine those numbers are closer to reality.

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