Tom (and Fenn) had rockstar status back when I was involved in university CS+Entrepreneurship clubs in Melbourne around 2009/2010 (mostly led by fine students at UniMelb, but I was helping spread the word at Monash) because they were the first(maybe one of the first?) Aussies to be accepted by YC. They always generously gave their time and advice at these student events, even dropped by the SiliconBeach networking meets to share their experiences and turned out to be exceptionally kind human beings in person. Definitely the right choice for moding this community!
I remember those days (and your username) very fondly. Great to see you still here.
We were the first startup to be Australian-based then move to the U.S. for YC.
Omnisio was an all-Australian team from the year before us but they were already residing in the U.S.
The first ever Australian-originated co-founder of a YC-backed company was Jamie Cameron. He co-founded Virtualmin, a commercially-supported fork of Webmin for virtual hosting, which Jamie first released in 1997. It looks like Virtualmin is still active today, which is awesome.
It just so happens that Jamie and Fenn used to sit next to each other in the software development team at Pacific Internet in Melbourne, where we all worked in the early 00s. Jamie's brother, Michael Cameron, was a co-founder of Rome2Rio, which was based at Inspire9 along with us from about 2011-12, and became one of the most successful consumer travel startups out of Australia.
Just like the author, I wanted to read and write more. As I'm taking a year long sabbatical, I just started writing (badly) at https://www.gaurav.io/blog/. The idea is to write a post every weekday (excuse the last 2 weeks – it was Diwali) even if I think it's a terrible post. The value is in getting the post published, not publishing something great, at least for now.
I'm doing something similar with reading – 50 pages minimum everyday. I've read more books in the last 4 months than in the last 4 years by just keeping the streak alive.
Unclear if they had these rules in place already but I'm curious... If the rule permits writing when the userid matches, presumably there is nothing stopping the write operation to change the userid value, to your point.
Which then leads me to the next question, what is the practical way to write rules against that operation?
In my limited experience, I've seen it handled by adding the user's ID in the path of any resource that belongs to a particular user, so that the user ID from the resource path can be compared with the authenticated user ID as a security rule condition.
Congrats to the Laravel team, and Accel too! I feel they've got a winner on their hands.
Laravel has single handedly made PHP development cool again, and the way they did that was offering an integrated developer experience focused on ease of starting and quick productivity.
They flattened the learning curve of other "full" frameworks (like Django/Rails) by offering recommended (and official) tools and services out of the box. This cuts down a lot of the analysis paralysis faced by junior developers and they have an easy way to start adopting necessary complex tooling when it becomes relevant for them.
Have a look at the `Ecosystem` mentioned at https://laravel.com/ – Django doesn't have an official local development GUI or Rails doesn't have an official APM – which is a boon for power users that know how they want to setup their local development environment or what they want in an APM service, but they're exhaustingly complex choices for a web developer just getting started.
I've observed Laravel gain a tremendous following with developers here in India, I believe because of this ease of getting started and being productive quickly.
I don't even feel like the funding amount is ridiculous. For comparison, have a look at some of the funding raised by smaller frameworks/libraries (CMSes, "JAM Stack", etc) without such an extensive set of revenue making services, in the JS world.
If they continue to pour the money on expanding their ecosystem while staying true to their value proposition to developers, they will do great. I, for one, am looking forward to this next generation of PHP/Laravel-powered web (maybe even mobile with this funding?) products.
Can someone please explain why this is a high quality welding job? In India, welders are not paid handsomely and are rarely rigorously trained but I'm unable to distinguish between a welding job done by them compared to these photos.
The photos don't do a great job of showing it, and a lot of the skills in welding aren't immediately visible.
Welding joints that look good as-welded, instead of passing over it with a grinder and a coat of paint to cover up any imperfections? That needs decent skills.
Welding thin material, and not having the heat of the welding process just melt a hole right through? That's needs skill.
Welding thin material to thick material, where it's easy to blow a hole in the thin part before the thick part gets up to temperature? That needs skill.
Welding complex shapes where some of the work has to be done upside-down and you have to control what's going to happen to that molten metal under gravity? That's a special skill.
Doing continuous welds around complex shapes, where you have to keep the weld puddle in the right place and moving at a constant rate while completely repositioning your body and moving your feet? That's a special skill.
Because of thermal expansion/contraction, to get precision results you don't just put the parts in the desired location and weld them - you need special 'fixturing' that anticipates the inevitable change of shape due to the heat of welding. That's a special skill.
Welding joints where, to prevent contamination, you need to get shielding gas not only at the front of the joint but also at the back? That's a special skill.
Welding unusual metals, like special high temperature rocket nozzles might involve? That's a special skill.
And most importantly, if you're welding a part that takes 40 hours of welding and 39 hours in you slip on the pedal and ruin the part, you've lost loads of work. So a part that needs 40 hours of welding requires exceptional consistency too.
Of course none of this stuff is impossible. But for sure it's skilled work, and not easy to hire for.
didnt read the article but I am assuming it is the material they are working on. copper and iron are easy to handle but aluminum is a bit harder and then there is stuff like titanium which recuire very high skills… and all those cases with titanium with steel or whatever. they need to know what they are doing. …. got my information from my ex roommate who welded bikes with titanium and he was a highly skilled enthusiast.
Long term HN user @ezekg also runs this https://keygen.sh/ if that might suit your needs (i.e. if you want to separate out licensing logic from the payment logic)
I work for a globally remote organisation, so I voluntarily took the on-call rota for the last week of the year. This way, my colleagues can enjoy Xmas with their families without any pager anxiety, and they made sure I could have the same experience this past month over Diwali ;)
Personally, I have learnt I do not have a moral compass strong enough to outweigh the consequences that come with being a whistleblower. I'm very grateful such people exist, though.
Vindman is a perfect recent example of how easily this protections are skirted. He was a “key witness” in Trump’s first impeachment.
His career was largely derailed, and his post-retirement second career options are most likely severely limited.
To be specific (and iirc):
- He was not kicked out of the military. He retired due to “bullying” and a big congressional kerfuffle that was about to happen because of his delayed promotion to full bird.
- Iirc, he was told that he could remain in his career, but he would have to move from a hot shot track he was in to something like being commandant of a nowhere base in Alaska so he could lay low. Note that moves like this happen when being promoted to full bird, but I got the sense that this was not his trajectory pre-testimony.
- His post-retirement options probably exclude working at any organization that is pro-Trump and most that are pro-Republican, which is a not small number of DoD contractors (common landing spot for retired military).
- Note that his lawsuits were dismissed. This type of discrimination is fairly easy to do in such a way that makes it difficult to sue successfully, usually due to something like “documented personal opinion or discretion” that the discriminator had. Note that I have personally seen this knowingly done several times —- it was super creepy to see in action.
How would you protect someone like Vindman from that kind of retaliation? Would you force the MAGA crowd to wash his feet? He's also benefited- I was surprised and delighted to see him on an episode of Curb your Enthusiasm
We were talking about protections from prosecution which Snowden absolutely had.
> How would you protect someone like Vindman from that kind of retaliation?
Realistically, there is nothing rule-based that I can think of in the US that would protect someone like Vindman. He probably knew that.
The protection has to be from a system of shared beliefs about what is ethical and appropriate.
Trump’s whole campaign and strategy (love it or hate it) was to completely dumpster that idea.
There could be an interesting discussion about the merits and demerits of disrupting the existing system of shared beliefs that was in place when Trump was elected (I would actually welcome that), but Trump mostly (if not entirely) just used the opportunity to feed his narcissism.
> Would you force the MAGA crowd to wash his feet?
Totally uncalled for.
A simple solution would be things like:
- Don’t block his career for petty politics. The problem is that Trump specifically was all about retaliation and petty politics. I think most of the folks around him gave guidance not to do these sorts of petty things, but that was his style.
- Own your mistakes. Again, I don’t think this was Trump’s strong suit.
- Factor in the bigger picture when making decisions. Vindman, if my read on his career is correct, is precisely the type of person we need more of in the upper officer ranks. Tanking his career was bad for Vindman, but worse for the country, imho. That’s just short-sightedness.
That was his choice. He could have chosen the legal avenue and would have been afforded whistleblower protections. Fleeing the country with classified material doesn't afford you protection.
Copying from another comment, to prove how stupid is to expect that a secret service will pet you on the head for talking out against them:
"Thomas Drake did everything you say is the right, he paid the price:
| The first is Thomas Drake, who blew the whistle on the
| very same NSA activities 10 years before Snowden did.
| Drake was a much higher-ranking NSA official than
| Snowden, and he obeyed US whistleblower laws, raising
| his concerns through official channels. And he got
| crushed.
| Drake was fired, arrested at dawn by gun-wielding FBI
| agents, stripped of his security clearance, charged
| with crimes that could have sent him to prison for
| the rest of his life, and all but ruined financially
| and professionally. The only job he could find
| afterwards was working in an Apple store in suburban
| Washington, where he remains today. Adding insult to
| injury, his warnings about the dangers of the NSA’s
| surveillance programme were largely ignored.
I'll have to read more but it seems that he didn't use proper channels he went to a reporter (with only unclass material, he claims). They raided him probably expecting classified material to be involved. Thanks for sharing, I hadn't heard of this instance.
I'm saying they're not trustworthy. And when your life is on the line, you can't trust a bunch of people who care more about doing what's politically advantageous instead of doing what's right.
This reads like that one time I put in my 2 week notice, and my boss called me into his office to ask why I didn't "let him know I was thinking of leaving" when he gave me a big bonus a month earlier.
Like, why would anyone ever paint a target on themselves like that?
Tom (and Fenn) had rockstar status back when I was involved in university CS+Entrepreneurship clubs in Melbourne around 2009/2010 (mostly led by fine students at UniMelb, but I was helping spread the word at Monash) because they were the first(maybe one of the first?) Aussies to be accepted by YC. They always generously gave their time and advice at these student events, even dropped by the SiliconBeach networking meets to share their experiences and turned out to be exceptionally kind human beings in person. Definitely the right choice for moding this community!