vain_cain (u/vain_cain)

vain_cain commented on Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job? · Posted by u/jessehorne

vain_cain · 2 years ago

A couple months after I started studying software engineering in 2017 I made a facial recognition desktop app that was just a few open source projects bundled together. It would just write the name and age of the person that was standing in front of the camera if it recognized the person. It was very unimpressive, but what got one of my professors attention was that I managed to scrape the college intranet web app for pictures(with names, surnames and year of birth) of pretty much everyone who ever attended or is attending the college(including all the professors). I was inspired after watching "The social network" movie where mark scrapes the yearbooks for pictures of students.

When it was finished I showed it to a few colleagues, one of which told the professor. I showed it to him and he got me a interview with a friend of his who was looking for an employee. We went for a coffee and he offered me the job right away which i took. A few weeks later i quit college, and I'm still mostly working for the company that gave me that first job, but I have my own company now.

vain_cain commented on Hackers claim they breached T-Mobile more than 100 times in 2022 krebsonsecurity.com/2023/... · Posted by u/mikece

londons_explore · 3 years ago

> those instances _should_ be easy to trace and prosecute

I suspect that the employees aren't merely doing a sim swap attack with their work login credentials. Like you say, they'd clearly get fired/prosecuted for that.

Instead, I suspect criminal X buys a nice thing delivered to employee Y's house. Then, criminal X phones the helpdesk repeatedly till they get connected to employee Y during working hours. Then, they claim to own the phone number of victim Z, but have lost the phone, their id and everything else. But they manage to tell employee Y the answer to two of the secret questions "What is your gender", and "Did you use the internet in the last month?". The employee uses this, together with their judgement to proceed, according to company policy, and issue a new eSIM.

Later, when anyone finds out, the call is listened to, and the employee can legitimately say they were just following policy.

vain_cain · 3 years ago

Out of high school I've worked a couple of years for A1 telecom(in Croatia) in customer service. When someone called, all I was required to ask is their OIB(Personal identification number) and they could literally ask me for anything if it's a residential user.

Want to cancel 20 numbers that still got 2 years until the contracts expire? Sure, let me do that for you. Want to change sim? Sure, just give me the new sim number. Want to add 5 tariffs to your plan? Sure, do you want phones with that?

That was 6 years ago but I still got friends I talk to there, and not much has changed.

vain_cain commented on SkillzTruth - Proof of concept demonstrating how to cheat on Skillz apps skillztruth.com/... · Posted by u/_yrbh

vain_cain · 3 years ago

git repo for this:

https://github.com/brianhama/SkillzTruth

vain_cain commented on Learning Is Remembering saveall.ai/blog/learning-... · Posted by u/p-christ

cloogshicer · 3 years ago

There is a difference between remembering something (like a fact) and a deep understanding of a concept.

Let me give you an example in programming: I sometimes have to google for the names of functions I've already used a hundred times. Sometimes extremely simple functions (just a while ago it was list.size() in Java), only because I can't remember the name of the function, but of course I understand the concept - the length of a list/array. I just can't remember if it's length(), or size() or count(), or whatever.

This deep understanding feels quite different from simple memorization. It feels more like something in my body, similar to muscle memory or like playing a piano piece. It's something I feel I will never forget.

I'd love to learn more about this kind of understanding. For years I've tried to find good reading about it, but much has been disappointing.

vain_cain · 3 years ago

I immediately thought of the book "Thinking, fast and slow" from reading your comment. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it talks about two "Systems" that guide our thinking. From the description of the book: "System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical."

The more you do something, or think about something - the more it becomes a "System 1" operation(fast, intuitive). Like typing on a keyboard for example, when you first started using a keyboard you had to think about every letter you want to hit, but now you probably don't even think about it for a millisecond. I guess what I'm trying to say is: Intuitive understanding = Action * Repetition.

Read the book if you haven't, it might be the kind of material you're looking for. I'm not a big fan of psychology and I think it's 90% mumbo jumbo, but this book hit a few nails for me.

vain_cain commented on What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020) retool.com/blog/erp-for-e... · Posted by u/antonyl

NikolaNovak · 3 years ago

It's possible you might not have worked in erp space, especially sustainment / maintenance (as opposed to implementation) long enough to see true customization price. I certainly didn't my first 5 years - to mis paraphrase, I was excited at all the things I could do, so I didn't bother to truly consider whether I should :). ERP's lifetime at large company is frequently decades, and their roi vs cost is similarly long.

Every. Single. Customization. You make, which makes so much sense to seemingly eagerly satisfy the user during implementation, will be a massive pain, forever, with every patch and upgrade and new functionality released by vendor in perpetuity, and will inevitably cause performance and failure issues eventually. And will only be getting more expensive and painful to maintain exponentially over many years.

Yes, you should customize erp for your very specific edge cases that you a absolutely need. But:

A) number of processes Bob from accounting or Fatima from HR believe are absolutely crucial and immutable and special and unicorn and mandatory, is way way higher than processes which actually are special and must be preserved. Personal inertia is huge. More often than not, special ways of doing things which are not your core business are an unnecessary cost, whether through erp or not.

This may seem like I'm a traditional grognard IT head who disregards users and their needs, but it's quite the opposite so let me clarify with

B) The threshold of customization at which erp no longer makes sense is in fact very very low.

If you actually, really properly are a special snowflake of a company and your convoluted hr or finance or pay processes are your key immutable competitive advantage, then don't get an erp. Other name for erp is cots, commercial off the shelf, which strongly hints as to how its meant to be used. With erp, customizations should be fought tooth and nail on every level,and that's a largely accepted industry wisdom.

vain_cain · 3 years ago

>It's possible you might not have worked in erp space, especially sustainment / maintenance (as opposed to implementation) long enough to see true customization price.

I haven't, but some of my colleagues have been in the space for 20+ years.

>Every. Single. Customization. You make, which makes so much sense to seemingly eagerly satisfy the user during implementation, will be a massive pain, forever, with every patch and upgrade and new functionality released by vendor in perpetuity, and will inevitably cause performance and failure issues eventually. And will only be getting more expensive and painful to maintain exponentially over many years.

Wrong. Upgrades almost never break your customizations, because in the ERP space backwards compatibility is verry much a thing with the exception of a few extreme cases now and then. I've migrated customizations from a 2004 version of NAV to a 2022 version of Business Central - even the name of the software changed, and the language in which it is written, but the customizations were almost plug and play after running the code migration tool provided by Microsoft.

>A) number of processes Bob from accounting or Fatima from HR believe are absolutely crucial and immutable and special and unicorn and mandatory, is way way higher than processes which actually are special and must be preserved.

I never said employees wishes should be blindly followed, you still have to do the consulting part of the job...

>B) The threshold of customization at which erp no longer makes sense is in fact very very low. >If you actually, really properly are a special snowflake of a company and your convoluted hr or finance or pay processes are your key immutable competitive advantage, then don't get an erp. Other name for erp is cots, commercial off the shelf, which strongly hints as to how its meant to be used. With erp, customizations should be fought tooth and nail on every level,and that's a largely accepted industry wisdom.

Wrong. The benefit you get on the accounting side, and the all data being in one place side(reporting) outweighs almost any customization that needs to be done - because, good luck making those 2 things from scratch. And good luck living without those 2 things if you're a mid/big company.

vain_cain commented on What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020) retool.com/blog/erp-for-e... · Posted by u/antonyl

ineedasername · 3 years ago

>should adapt their business processes to their ERP, and in my experience they are wrong

That depends. I’ve seen a lot of adaptation to processes that are legitimately & measurably better in time & accuracy ignored in favor of costly customizations out of nothing more than “not created here” syndrome. If a customer doesn’t like that then an off the shelf product is the worst choice they can make unless they are prepared to hire a significant in house dev team.

Otherwise, if you have been adapting your current business processes to deal with the limitations of a legacy system first deployed in the early 80's then there's an excellent chance that at least some of those things can be done more easily in a more modern system. (Though SAP may not always be the best place for that to actually be the case).

vain_cain · 3 years ago

>If a customer doesn’t like that then an off the shelf product is the worst choice they can make unless they are prepared to hire a significant in house dev team

Correct. This is the problem my company solves. We are ERP consultants/dev's who also know web development. Through the years we've made 50+ web apps to extend Microsoft's ERP, most of which can be used in most companies with similar needs with slight modifications.

And, of course you don't blindly follow a process. There's always some improvements to be made to the process before developing an app for it.

EDIT: Drastically changing workflows for employees within huge companies will ultimately almost always cost you more... It all depends on the company of course, but we have to generalize a bit.

vain_cain commented on What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020) retool.com/blog/erp-for-e... · Posted by u/antonyl

IceDane · 3 years ago

> and in my experience they are wrong - with the exception of accounting

> I don't work with SAP ..

Yeah.. that's just it. Your experience doesn't matter. Adjusting your business to fit SAP nearly as much as an unspoken requirement. It's not just a smart bit of wisdom people throw around. It's literally what you have to do if you want to have any hope of implementing SAP successfully, because it is such a colossal, messy charlie-foxtrot that there is no hope otherwise. Not even SAP's own people understand their own mess.

vain_cain · 3 years ago

You're right, for some reason I just assumed all ERP's are as easily extendible as Microsoft's. It just makes sense they would be oriented that way due to the complexity of the world. I often hear horror stories about SAP, and can't for the life of me figure out why it's so popular(except it's more oriented than other ERP's to non-tech savvy people).

vain_cain commented on What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020) retool.com/blog/erp-for-e... · Posted by u/antonyl

lqet · 3 years ago

My mother works for a fairly large textile lab. For decades, they used an internally developed system for lab reports (they had a few programmers and admins they called the "nerds" that did nothing else than extend and maintain the system). The company switched to a SAP solution a few years ago. Chaos ensued. The SAP solution missed so many edge cases that a huge number of lab reports were either inaccurate or completely wrong because information was lost in SAP translation between different labs. Sometimes clients (huge international players) noticed the mistakes, which then led to costly product delays. It became so bad that communication between labs eventually had to be done on two levels - within SAP, and "informally" by mail, telephone, or by simply walking to the other lab, adding a huge time overhead to every report.

SAP removed virtually every automation advantage of the old system, and added the additional complexity of navigating the SAP GUI. Because of this additional workload and the reluctance of the company to hire more people to counter it (after all, SAP was implemented to streamline everything!), employee turnover suddenly skyrocketed. Everytime I talk with my mother, she complains about the system and tells me that another colleague has quit. She only stays because she only has 2 years until retirement.

vain_cain · 3 years ago

I see a lot of comments here saying a company should adapt their business processes to their ERP, and in my experience they are wrong - with the exception of accounting(Good luck trying to customize accounting modules within ERPs to fit your process).

I don't work with SAP, but I've been working with Microsoft's ERP(Dynamics NAV/Business Central) my whole professional career(almost 5 years).

When it comes to shipping, manufacturing, HR, supply, sales, planning, quality assurance etc... every big company is going to have a million edge cases which are impossible to cover with the standard functionality of an ERP. And most importantly - hundreds, or maybe thousands of employees that have gotten used to working a certain way.

When you try to make your process fit to a standard ERP functionality you are fighting two dragons:

1) Working your way around edge cases - with the right consultants/developers this doesn't have to be a big pain.

2) Getting your employees to change the way they have been working for years, or even decades. And in addition giving them an overwhelming UI - I've never seen this work as planned. This is also probably the reason the company your mother works for had so many pains.

On the other hand, if you try to make the ERP fit to your processes, there's only one dragon you need to slay - extending the ERP's functionality.

I can only speak for Microsoft's ERP, but everything that is impossible or hard to extended within the ERP itself can easily be extended through an outside application. And by doing so, you can probably even make the employees job easier by keeping the process the same, but giving him an UI that isn't overwhelming.

vain_cain commented on Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate? · Posted by u/DanUKs

The_Colonel · 3 years ago

> Get a job at smaller to medium sized non-tech company. Every company, in any industry, has computers. They need you.

I personally had the worst experience at such jobs. Small/medium sized non-tech companies don't value technology and don't understand its importance. If it works, you're invisible and just a cost center, if it doesn't you're to blame.

For work/life balance I've found big tech corps the best (not FAANG). I haven't worked on Saturday/Sunday in the last 10 years. I've seen people negotiate reduced hours/days successfully.

vain_cain · 3 years ago

> Small/medium sized non-tech companies don't value technology and don't understand its importance.

I work closely with IT departments within such companies through ERP implementations/localizations and can coroborate this. In my experience 9/10 non-tech companies with their own IT departments(1+ person) don't value and especially don't understand what their IT department does.

On the other side, the people working within such departments are in my experience just terribly bad at sticking up for themselves, and explaining what needs to be explained. They don't draw lines where lines need to be drawn and they see themselves in the same way as the management/leadership does.

vain_cain commented on Spending more on retaining developers reduces the cost of hiring developers blog.devgenius.io/keeping... · Posted by u/signa11

stackbutterflow · 3 years ago

Starting a sub thread for underpaid developers. How do you feel reading about this "white hot market" on a regular basis while not experiencing it?

Be it because of geography, not having the right experience, or working on techs that don't pay well.

vain_cain · 3 years ago

I'm in my mid 20s and have been working for a small 5-person company since I started developing professionally 4 years ago. I know through my peers and offers I received that I could get at least twice as much compensation if I switch companies, and it doesn't bother me one bit.

At my current company I'm in touch with everything. From setting up servers, developing on every part of the stack, deploying and maintaining applications to working with clients on understanding their needs and business processes and then working out a solution for them. I get to argue about estimates and negotiate. I got to understand how manufacturing, sales, shipping, accounting, calculating employee payrolls and second incomes works. And as a bonus the people I work with are some of the best people I've ever met.

The amount of experience I'm getting here is definitely worth getting payed less.