Can someone explain point #9 in the gist? How’d they know part of the two factor code?
Readit Newsphilfreo commented on A phishing attack involving g.co, Google's URL shortener gist.github.com/zachlatta... · Posted by u/zachlatta
philfreo commented on Show HN: GUI for editing Mermaid class diagrams docs.mermaidchart.com/blo... · Posted by u/knsv
I spent some time playing around with this recently and loved it at first. I also realized ChatGPT is pretty good at generating Mermaid diagrams (didn't try your own AI features).
However after getting into it some I ran into some significant frustrations. After creating a medium-complexity diagram, I was excited to see the Whiteboard feature to drag things around / improve the layout manually. But it really started breaking, it just wouldn't let me organize/drag things where I wanted, and I couldn't get things to not overlap. I also wished more diagram types supported Whiteboard (I noticed some didn't).
Also I some confusion between the capabilities of mermaidchart.com and mermaid.live. Are these competitors? Variations of similar apps. I was confused. Also "Playground" vs "Live Editor" is confusing.
Overall glad this exists and hope it continues to improve.
philfreo commented on How a four-day workweek works, from the companies pulling it off wsj.com/lifestyle/careers... · Posted by u/lxm
At Close we have been offering an 80% salary / 4-day week option for engineering roles for a few years now. This originally was mandatory during early 2020 COVID-19 economic uncertainty as a way to cut costs without doing layoffs. Quickly it became optional – most people moved back to 100% but some people decided they enjoyed it and wanted to continue that arrangement.
What's interesting about 4d weeks is that it's 20% less work but 50% more days off, which can be very impactful for folks.
Our 80% option is a flexible thing, as in you can choose to do it for the summer but not the rest of the year. We try to adjust workloads accordingly. I've taken advantage of it myself for a period of time and it gave me more free time to be with family and also work on side projects.
Some people really love taking our 80% option / 4d and others absolutely don't want to.
Companies offering flexibility in work hours can really help retention IMO, and is a natural progression after (a) remote / freedom of location, and (b) freedom of specific work schedule.
I know a few companies offer "4-day week summers" to everybody or even "everyone always does 4-day weeks". But I like the "fairness" of giving people an option, since different people are in different life situations at different times where working more vs. less can be especially helpful.
philfreo commented on Facebook open sources Lexical, an extensible text editor library lexical.dev/... · Posted by u/crousto
Is this meant to be a good drop-in rich-text/WYSIWYG editor?
What is the format that it creates that you could then persist in a database? Does it just save its state in HTML or some JSON format or what?
philfreo commented on Ask HN: How to get back in employment market after working on side projects? · Posted by u/logicallee
As a hiring manager at a startup-ish SaaS company:
I love seeing side projects, both because
- it shows you have entrepreneurial skills (care about and able to think about more than just code)
- as well as the technical side (shows you’re able to build from scratch, probably work across the stack, etc.)
Show off as much as you can:
- leave the websites up even if the business isn’t viable. Better to be able to see and play with a side project versus just seeing a line on a resume and having no idea how significant or good it was.
- open source what you can. It can be very helpful to point to code from real projects you wrote, especially if you have a gap in employment.
Try to foster great references. Even if they aren’t recent, you will do better if you have a few raving fans.
Unless you had a lot of management experience, I suggest trying to find a job as an IC. More open roles / people seem more desperate for developers. If you’re good, it won’t matter much if you have a gap. Personally I prefer to hire ICs who have a little management experience because they tend to be better employees as well as are more likely to be someone who can eventually lead/manage with us as well.
Overall: the biggest thing is you want to show that you have been doing good technical work over the last few years versus just some unemployable person who had “projects”.
I’m hiring frontend/React and backend/Python engineers: phil@close.com
philfreo commented on What Working At Stripe Has Been Like kalzumeus.com/2020/10/09/... · Posted by u/yarapavan
I mean this in the most constructive way possible.
As a stripe customer for 6 years, I effectively only care about reducing transaction costs. Period.
Stripe's core business is being a part of a "credit card sales tax" that is substantial. Much of this is the fault of Visa/Mastercard/Amex, but that is the problem-space they exist in. Payments are transferring bits, and should be effectively free. If they want to "make the world better", that is basically the only problem that matters in their space, and I never see any recognition of this fact in anything Stripe puts out.
They do a LOT of work to try and make me feel better about the tax (e.g. your money goes towards book publishing!). None of it works, it just seems like the "your tax dollars at work" road signs.
Now maybe people at Stripe are working on ways to reduce the tax on businesses/consumers. It is not a technical problem, its societal. I hope they are, and they will announce something amazing and I can worship at their feet.
Please Stripe, work on reducing the costs to transact online by 1-2 orders of magnitude, where it should be.
As a customer of Stripe too, I almost[1] couldn't disagree more.
Running a global online/SaaS business is hard. So much complexity everywhere. I wish Stripe would handle MORE problems & complexity and would happily pay for it.
Just a few examples Stripe could handle:
- Checkout + Portal is a great start, but it still takes too much (expensive) design+dev brainpower to create the entire experience of a high quality trial-to-paid and existing-customer billing management in a SaaS app.
- Running a SaaS company at any scale is full of Support headaches that Stripe Dashboard simply does not handle well - stuff like tweaking a billing date, and doing combination (e.g. wire transfer + credit card) payments, "can you re-send my invoice but with my VAT ID on it this time?" and many more. At any scale, lots of effort is spend on custom billing support tickets and building internal tooling even if you use all of Stripe's features.
- Are you a SaaS company selling all over the US? Good luck being complaint with all 50 states in terms of sales tax reporting without expensive legal/accounting help. Did you hire any remote out-of-state employees? Good luck -- now your financial compliance got even more complicated.
Stripe doesn't do any of these things well today. And if they did, it would likely be much cheaper than the in-house solutions everyone is coming up with instead. I think Stripe should handle 10x as much complexity for a SaaS company than it does today, and of course they should get paid for doing so.
[1] I agree it would be amazing to see Stripe come up with smoother flows for supporting payments that bypassing the expensive card network's fees.
philfreo commented on Show HN: IPOs.fyi – Missing Out on IPOs Was Frustrating, So I Fixed It ipos.fyi... · Posted by u/jkaykin
I'd suggest putting the information directly on your site (at least the IPOs coming up in the next X days) and charge for the deeper access + email notifications. But that way people have a reason to visit your site even if they haven't decided to pay yet.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.visua...