Hacker News: mike22

New comment by mike22 in "YAGRI: You are gonna read it"

mike22 — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 20:27:41 +0000

But it happens to be that product managers know (or at least about) and keep tabs on the relavent regulatory environment. I think it’s not scalable if every SWE in the team is going to legal to understand things. Like why we actully do need to hard delete data when customers click the Delete button.

New comment by mike22 in "FTC Report Confirms: Commercial Surveillance Is Out of Control"

mike22 — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 11:49:31 +0000

The value prop of Plaid, Yodlee, et al is that they can do this with one(-ish) API surface for tens of thousands of financial institutions. In their efforts to ensure Bob down the street won’t be sold any data, they do treat each customer (of the API, not the end users they pull data on behalf of) as an isolated tenant.

New comment by mike22 in "Avoid ISP Routers"

mike22 — Sun, 28 Jul 2024 13:00:34 +0000

Great in concept, especially if you know what you’re doing. In my non-North American locale, I ordered a fiber hookup, and specifically asked to use my own router.

Supposedly they will give you an ONT in SFP module for free, and then rent you a media converter ~3 USD/month, and then the rest is up to you (assuming it supports PPPoE). Some friends have done this a while ago successfully.

Reality on install day: technician grabbed the white-label ONT/router combo from the truck and refused anything else :( And unrelated, he found a “defect” in the existing fiber drop (clear as day with the visible-light tester), so I had to pay for pulling a new drop from the street :(

New comment by mike22 in "I don't want to fill out your contact form"

mike22 — Sun, 05 May 2024 10:07:32 +0000

Where I live, CS is all chat bots that are simply text representations of the phone tree. You can Whatsapp the company! And get the nicely formatted menus.

New comment by mike22 in "Ask HN: Is it really so dull to work in huge company?"

mike22 — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 20:17:03 +0000

Anecdotes from my experience, in a large US bank (millions of customers), specifically in a product with active investment:

Yes, processes for getting things done are dull and frustrating. Team leads often urged minimizing time spent on them by using political clout with the gatekeepers to expedite them.

Tech was not too exciting, all the open source stuff used were mature, vetted by security folks/scans, and possibly had in-house layers built on top of it.

Did get to see where my projects fit in end to end, including contributing to data shown in a widget high up on their mobile app’s dashbord, and also to several thousand internal users who are movers and shakers.

Standing up a new REST API and exposing it to the internet required much upfront design and lots of approvals. But at the end of the day it’s to ensure minimal risk while making maximum impact on the tremendous customer base.

Pay was not approaching the FAANG stratosphere. Had two WFH days per week. Office had a section of a floor reserved for the group, and hotdesking with “soft” reservations based on history of actual desks used.

Overall did learn a lot about tech, business, and leadership, but the cog feeling was still definitely an undertone.

New comment by mike22 in "The Windows desktop is dying"

mike22 — Sun, 06 Aug 2023 22:13:54 +0000

Also at a very big BigCo using Citrix Workspaces; experience is decent. Got an 8 core/64 GB RAM VM and it’s pretty snappy for most dev work. The portability is nice compared to lugging a work laptop, and connection doesn’t need a janky VPN client. Using Zoom for VDI with the VDI plugin on my home machine is even smoother than same thing on the thin client in the office.

New comment by mike22 in "Monitoring Is a Pain"

mike22 — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 18:19:02 +0000

In Java, Lombok @Slf4j on a class is very convenient. Adds a static field for the logger.

New comment by mike22 in "New York City will charge drivers going downtown"

mike22 — Sun, 11 Jun 2023 13:30:38 +0000

How do you get the $1 price for kids in 2023? Currently the rule is “Up to three children under 44 inches tall ride for free when they’re with a fare-paying adult.” https://new.mta.info/fares

New comment by mike22 in "Ask HN: Why do many CS graduates lack foundational knowledge?"

mike22 — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 02:24:04 +0000

It’s great to write carefree SQL, with the DB platform totally abstracted, until there’s a massive spike in query latency. Then hash joins vs nested loops and full table scans is useful knowledge which is a) mostly vendor specific b) requires a good prod-sized dataset to test on.

New comment by mike22 in "GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices"

mike22 — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 03:04:08 +0000

Then there’s the times people update the bug-tracker-table-in-a-Confluence-page, and Confluence sends an email alert about the edit to those “watching the page (which is everyone who ever edited it). In Outlook the scroll bar literally shrinks before my eyes as it renders the email from top to bottom.

New comment by mike22 in "The UK’s PSTN network will switch off in 2025 (2021)"

mike22 — Fri, 06 Jan 2023 00:39:18 +0000

In the US, Verizon offers (sometimes includes for free) a battery backup unit for their ONT for FiOS service, in the name of providing only the phone services during a power outage. In general there’s nothing stopping any customer from using an off the shelf UPS.

New comment by mike22 in "How we slowed the subway down"

mike22 — Sun, 01 Jan 2023 02:04:35 +0000

Anecdotally, CBTC is a greeat improvement in many scenarios. On long and straight stretches between express stops, trains now fly along (probably at least 40mph; never got to see inside the TO’s cab). And upon approaching an occupied station, they slow down to a crawl but keep moving until about 25-50 feet before the station, instead of being stuck several fixed blocks back before the station. Thus there is much greater track capacity = more (potential) trains per hour, and generally more reliable trips.

New comment by mike22 in "Things I want from Devs as SRE/DevOps"

mike22 — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 01:18:34 +0000

We can argue about exact implementation, but SRE demanding all apps (assuming non-interactive ones run on servers) log to the same channel (with enough tagging info to ID the app/server) is a good thing. In my case we are automagically configured with a Splunk appender for Logback (and the platform also sends the stdout/stderr to Splunk under a different sourceType).

New comment by mike22 in "Generating PDF invoices using Lago"

mike22 — Sun, 31 Jul 2022 15:48:45 +0000

I’ve never used Jaspersoft, only seen the marketing pages of recent years on Tibco’s site. But much of that developer experience sounds like my 4-ish years with BIRT: differing versions of the designer GUI in Eclipse breaking things; debugging a report required starting up our entire monolith app.

How much better is SSRS in these aspects than the aforementioned Java-based solutions? Or I guess “paginated reports” in Power BI nowadays.

New comment by mike22 in "Plaid but for Healthcare"

mike22 — Sun, 31 Jul 2022 14:29:02 +0000

This token based approach is slowly arriving. Don’t know if Plaid does it yet. Yodlee and Intuit have already implemented it (OAuth and FDX) with at least and handful of banks.

https://www.yodlee.com/envestnet-yodlee-and-charles-schwab-e... https://developer.yodlee.com/resources/news/yodlee-and-jpmor... https://media.chase.com/news/chase-intuit-to-give-customers-...

New comment by mike22 in "Guest WiFi using a QR code"

mike22 — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 14:22:20 +0000

Now they make you manage the very limited subset of router options (essentially SSID and WPA passphrase) from their web portals. Then they push the updated configs to your router via remote management protocols. How many vulnerabilities do those open?

New comment by mike22 in "Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction"

mike22 — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 01:22:43 +0000

If it’s a reasonable company, they will be willing to move your start date upon (polite) request, justified by the delay. In my recent job change, there were a couple of things that moved the timelines (only a couple of weeks, not months like your case), and the recruiter adjusted my start date like it was SOP.

Re resigning: make sure you have some concrete evidence of passing all contingencies in the hiring process (even go so as to ask the recruiter if any steps remain). Only after that, give your notice.

New comment by mike22 in "Last public payphone removed from Manhattan streets"

mike22 — Sun, 29 May 2022 23:29:26 +0000

Ah, iDEN has gone the way of floppy disks. My old Moto i955 for Boost Mobile (MVNO of Nextel, later carried along with Sprint on CDMA) is a quite heavy and rocky solid paperweight.

New comment by mike22 in "Ask HN: How do you keep track of software requirements and test them?"

mike22 — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 17:18:11 +0000

In the world I live in (big org using Jira), that sounds like an epic, with lots of stories underneath. Some stories are defined early on, more can be added as the business comes up with new reqs or devs find things that need more work.

New comment by mike22 in "Inside the longest Atlassian outage"

mike22 — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 01:49:03 +0000

It’s been a self-hosted products for over a decade in the form of Visual SourceSafe and then TFS (wonky TFVC not withstanding; Git support was added a while ago as well), now living on as Azure DevOps Server.