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harshaw commented on Open, free, and ignored: the afterlife of Symbian   theregister.com/2025/07/1... · Posted by u/mdp2021
harshaw · a month ago
I did Symbian programming back in the day. IIRC the Sony-Erricson P800. It was not developer friendly. The memory management model was hard to program and could crash easily. Also did some work with Nokia on the N60. I was working at Orange at that time and we had hired a contractor to integrate push to talk (because for some reasons Orange though push to talk would take off in Europe, lolol). I got a couple of free trips to Tampere to theoretically help Nokia debug this third party push to talk app. I seem to recall Nokia not being too enthused to work with some pushy American hacker who wanted to open a debugger and fix things. I remember that we had some nice reindeer dinners.

Early mobile is littered with dead operating systems. not really that surprising. PalmOS, Symbian, SaveJE, windows mobile, etc. not worth crying over.

harshaw commented on Frequent reauth doesn't make you more secure   tailscale.com/blog/freque... · Posted by u/ingve
harshaw · 3 months ago
My problem is that there is a reauth FOMA that gets copied with the most trivial of applications. A good example is the Electrify America charging app. It's job is to be available so you can charge. But they log you out frequently - and they want to do second factor with email. Guess what - that doesn't always work. My wife was trying to charge the other day, was logged out, and couldn't get the email verification to go through. So I had her login with my credentials and I answered the email verification and gave her the token over the phone. super annoying.

But more importantly- mobile phones already have good security mechanisms. It's like all these shitty apps copied web based auth mechanisms with timeouts when they could do something better (and probably are built on web technologies with cookies instead of using the trusted store on the phone).

There are precious few apps out there that tell you ahead of time that reauth is happening (Zoom does this - kudos). But even so - I don't think it's necessary most of the time.

harshaw commented on The side hustle from hell   blog.jacobstechtavern.com... · Posted by u/jakey_bakey
harshaw · 4 months ago
This isn't so much about the Author's story but the space. He is correct that marketplaces are hell, and especially auto repair market places. I was one of the several devs that went through trying to make Openbay work (a US based market place for auto repair). We actually did have service providers signed up and we did have a way to acquire customers who wanted auto repair. So you had the illusion of product market fit - but the problem is that it's really really hard to get people to actually click "buy this brake job" and then, more importantly, they have no reason to come back to your app because 1) you don't need brake jobs all that often and 2) they can just go back to the service provider. And many shops are happy to still take phone calls as their default way of booking work.

The reason the company existed is the rich founder was upset that a shop wanted to charge him a fortune to get his BMW M5 repaired. He wanted better quotes. So we built a marketplace to get better quotes. But that's not what real customers want (because most people have Toyotas not M5s). And also we didn't do the customer development / research to understand how repair shops work. You want to know how my repair shop manages their repair schedule? They have a paper calendar and write down your phone number and the job. sure there are better ways to manage the work - but this paper mechanism has worked for them for years and why change it? And you know what - I go back to the shop all the time because I trust them. Ultimately people tend to have a fairly personal relationship with their local mechanic. You can build a leadgen product but the ultimate relationship is between the customer and the repair provider.

TLDR - everyone should understand the lean startup. /working backwards model and relentlessly focus on the customer.

harshaw commented on Feds help health insurers hide their dirty secret: denials on the rise   nypost.com/2024/12/12/opi... · Posted by u/mancerayder
garciasn · 9 months ago
I was just denied a colonoscopy as not medically necessary by UHC, coincidentally three days before their CEO was killed, because they don't want me to have anesthesia to do it; they argue I should be awake.

When I called to refute the denial, which was denied, I asked them to find the person, if it was a person, who denied it and shove a tube up their ass without anesthesia and then reassess whether it's medically necessary to have a colonoscopy without it.

I'm 45. Colonoscopies are a thing. I had a friend die at 52 two years ago after he was diagnosed with stage IV during his first colonoscopy. I spent many of his last days watching him struggle to survive; I don't want that to happen to me just because UHC charges me $2000/month in premiums and denies basic service because they need to pay their executives too much money.

harshaw · 9 months ago
They should make anyone who denies anesthesia for a colonoscopy drink that awful orange flavored drink you take the night before. This is just like... basic care.
harshaw commented on Egoless Engineering   egoless.engineering... · Posted by u/mcfunley
harshaw · 9 months ago
Random comment: slide 10 talks about using Twisted and then adding a twisted middle layer. 2010 me (or earlier) liked Twisted a ton but not sure I would have foisted this technology on a development team. As a single dev doing all kinds of crazy shit it (sort of) worked but was pretty hard to debug or understand.
harshaw commented on Launch HN: Regatta Storage (YC F24) – Turn S3 into a local-like, POSIX cloud FS    · Posted by u/huntaub
senderista · 9 months ago
If this product is successful, what prevents AWS from cloning it at a lower price (perhaps by leveraging access to their infrastructure) and putting you out of business?
harshaw · 9 months ago
There is room in storage for many kind of products with different sets of tradeoffs. And don't underestimate the ability of a startup to move much faster than AWS.
harshaw commented on Working from home is powering productivity   imf.org/en/Publications/f... · Posted by u/rwmj
azemetre · a year ago
This is the case for the city of Boston. The city derives the vast majority of its budget from commercial property taxes, it's why residential property taxes are so low in the city.

Use to work for a company that was literally told by the city that if they don't have X amount of people in the building they will lose their tax incentives they got for having the company there. The company slowly mandated hybrid then RTO everyday in about 6 months. Got out 2 weeks before it was implemented. My coworkers were extremely jealous that I got a WFH job.

Doubt Boston is alone in these propositions

harshaw · a year ago
What company?
harshaw commented on Working from home is powering productivity   imf.org/en/Publications/f... · Posted by u/rwmj
mvanbaak · a year ago
This might be the nr 1 reason.

The hidden layoff round is also high on that list if you ask me. They call everyone back to the office, the people that dont want/cant will not adhere, and thus be fired without the companies having to pay severance.

harshaw · a year ago
As an amazonian, this has come up during the five day RTO discussion. As a manager, I can't imagine a more obvious way to destroy the service that I help run and then really risk losing customer trust.

I we are all cogs at some point but I really have trouble being this cynical.

harshaw commented on Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week   cnbc.com/2024/09/16/amazo... · Posted by u/jbredeche
nextworddev · a year ago
"Everyone I know at Amazon is over-worked and stressed out" is the biggest myth.

Practically the majority of middle management I knew at AMZN didn't do anything.

Source: ex-AWS

harshaw · a year ago
maybe. In my case my big project was cancelled and my engineers borrowed to work on an away team. So yeah, not super productive after that. But other times it was very busy and rewarding.
harshaw commented on Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week   cnbc.com/2024/09/16/amazo... · Posted by u/jbredeche
progforlyfe · a year ago
i don't agree with the mandate but at the very least, if they're going to do this they should absolutely exempt workers from returning to office during the periods they are on-call!
harshaw · a year ago
we already do that on my team- you can hardly respond to a pager in 10 minutes if you commuting. I suppose it's an unofficial policy but we never got any pushback from it.

u/harshaw

KarmaCake day841October 10, 2010View Original