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Technology

Program of the Day: Hermes

December 4, 2019 by Kee Hinckley No Comments

Today I’m going for pure entertainment.

Hermes is a Pandora player. Much lighter-weight than using the web interface. It’s simple, functional,  free, and open source. All the Pandora functions are there in a compact window that you can float on top or hide out of sight.

Station Selection

Sorted by name or date.
Hermes Station Selection

Recently Played Songs

Including viewing the song, album, and lyrics pages on Pandora.
Hermes Recently Played

Modify the Station

Add new artists and seeds.
Hermes Modify Station

Playback Settings

And set whether you’d like it to use the media keys on your keyboard, scrobble to Last.FM (does anyone still do that?), and use Notifications or Growl to announce new songs.

Hermes Playback Settings

Hermes — Pandora Client for macOS

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Technology

How we gave China the keys to our technological future

August 12, 2019 by Kee Hinckley No Comments

With the current trade war with China ostensibly over intellectual property issues there’s been a lot of discussion about how China leverages technology from elsewhere to build their own expertise. “Leverage” in this case may mean espionage, but the biggest component is, and always has been, China’s position as the global manufacturer for new technology. China is the largest manufacturer in the world, with 20% of the global market. It’s not reasonable to expect that they aren’t learning from what they build, even without government intervention.

This is hardly a new strategy, China has been playing the game of leveraging cheap labor to gain technical knowledge for a long time. In the 80’s I worked for Apollo Computer and we were eager to sell to large emerging markets like India and China. Both countries were trying to build their own manufacturing technology, so if you wanted to compete in their markets, you had to do some of your manufacturing there as well.

In India’s case, they had the technology at the time to do wave soldering and thus could build some of the boards in our computers. So we’d ship the core components and a manufacturing line would build the computers.

China did not have that ability. All they could do was assemble parts. There was no good place in our assembly line to pull out all those parts and ship them to China, so we took a different approach. We shipped fully assembled computers to Taiwan, where they were disassembled, repackaged, and sent to mainland China; there they were reassembled and sold.

From a pure frictionless market standpoint, that seems ridiculous. Why introduce inefficiencies into the process that make things artificially more expensive? But from the standpoint of two countries that were seeking to build technical expertise, those trade restrictions were brilliant moves. China used those requirements to gain expertise and climb up the supply chain. And it worked. Now they own the entire process, and every design sent to them to build becomes a new piece of knowledge they own.

It’s a little ironic that 30 years after China used carefully crafted trade restrictions to dominate global manufacturing, the U.S. is now using a trade war to try undo the results. The genie is out of the bottle. No tariff is going to keep China from learning from what they build. Nor are they going to prevent the Chinese government from slipping backdoors in critical infrastructure. If protecting our intellectual property, security, and privacy from China is the goal, then we’d be better off investing the money we’re spending on tariffs in rebuilding our own manufacturing capabilities.

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Society•Technology

All the statistics in the world won’t fix bad data

August 7, 2019 by Kee Hinckley No Comments

What is the secret to living to be well over 100 years old? It seems that in the US the trick is to have been born just a few years before your state introduced properly documented birth certificates. https://t.co/J6hfcw55KX pic.twitter.com/T5kDQZIANx

— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) August 7, 2019
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Society•Technology

Reducing H-1Bs Increases Outsourcing

July 23, 2019 by Kee Hinckley 1 Comment

What do you do when you can’t use an H-1B to hire someone here? You outsource to them there.

It’s not as efficient. But it’s certainly cheaper. Of course it means that all that money you would have been paying into the local economy, not to mention the investment in skills, now leaves the country.

On top of that, as you build teams outside of the U.S., it becomes easier and easier (and far cheaper) to outsource entire projects to them.

I really wish we hired more people locally. Especially junior resources. But companies make decisions based on cost. Getting rid of H-1Bs is just going to push the money somewhere else. And it’s not going to be hiring local.

That said, the whole “we’re a consulting company full of H-1Bs” is definitely not the right solution either. Especially since it tends to lock contractors into that company and makes it harder for them to get hired full-time, which ends up being bad for both your company, and the contractor.

Also note that tech isn’t the only industry relying on H-1Bs.

Rural Areas Brace for a Shortage of Doctors Due to Visa Policy

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Technology

How to cheat a slot machine

by Kee Hinckley 31 Comments

❝ the operatives use their phones to record about two dozen spins on a game they aim to cheat. They upload that footage to a technical staff in St. Petersburg, who analyze the video and calculate the machine’s pattern based on what they know about the model’s pseudorandom number generator. Finally, the St. Petersburg team transmits a list of timing markers to a custom app on the operative’s phone; those markers cause the handset to vibrate roughly 0.25 seconds before the operative should press the spin button.

“The normal reaction time for a human is about a quarter of a second, which is why they do that,” says Allison, who is also the founder of the annual World Game Protection Conference. The timed spins are not always successful, but they result in far more payouts than a machine normally awards: Individual scammers typically win more than $10,000 per day. ❞

That was then. Now apparently they live stream the spin to the central computers.

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Society•Technology

The Year Encryption Won (not)

by Kee Hinckley 2 Comments

At the end of 2016 Wired declared it to be the year that we won the battle for encryption. Unfortunately, as we increasingly move towards an authoritarian State, it becomes obvious that was a very short-lived victory.

US attorney general William Barr says Americans should accept security risks of encryption backdoors

This quote in particular is disturbing, because it shows a complete lack of understanding of how systems are compromised.

The risk, he said, was acceptable because “we are talking about consumer products and services such as messaging, smart phones, e-mail, and voice and data applications,” and “not talking about protecting the nation’s nuclear launch codes.”Attourney General William Barr

The way into secure systems is in fact through the individuals that have access to them. It’s that less-secure, personal communication path that hackers often use to compromise systems. Never mind the callous determination that your individual privacy, security, and financial well-being is secondary to the government’s ability to eavesdrop.

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Technology•Writings

Spotting the 10x Team Contributor

July 16, 2019 by Kee Hinckley No Comments

There’s been a lot of flak over this tweet about recognizing the mythical “10x engineer”—the engineer that is so good that it doesn’t matter if they reduce the productivity of everyone around them.

10x engineers

Founders if you ever come across this rare breed of engineers, grab them. If you have a 10x engineer as part of your first few engineers, you increase the odds of your startup success significantly.

OK, here is a tough question.

How do you spot a 10x engineer?

— Shekhar Kirani (@skirani) July 11, 2019

The list, which you can read below, goes on to describe some of the key characteristics of brilliant but broken engineers. The ones that C-Suite managers and investors love to hire, because it’s easier to spot a heroic misfit than a well-oiled team.

I’m reminded of the people who say of some misogynistic artiste, “We can’t blackball them just because they sexually harassed people—they’re brilliant!” Sure, they weren’t bad, but were they better than all dozen of the people whose careers they ended? We see the productivity of the star, and we fail to see what the team could have done if the “star” hadn’t gotten in the way and left them with to deal with all the crap.

But tearing down someone’s list is easy. What we need is a set of rules that recognizes what the right person looks like. Here’s my point-by-point rewrite.

10x Engineers (the original)
  1. 10x engineers hate meetings. They think it is a waste of time and obvious things are being discussed. They attend meetings because the manager has called for a “Staff meeting” to discuss the features and status.
  2. Timings in the office for 10x engineers is highly irregular. They tend to work when very few folks are around. If there is a crowd or all-hands meeting, they are not visible. Most of them are late-night coders and come late to the office.
  3. 10x engineers laptop screen background color is typically black (they always change defaults). Their keyboard keys such as i, f, x are usually worn out than of a, s, and e (email senders).
  4. 10x engineers know every line of the code that has gone into production. If a QA or support folks alert an issue, they know precisely where the fault (or bug) is and can fix the same in hours vs days
  5. Most of the 10x engineers are full-stack engineers. For them code is code, they don’t care whether it is front-end, back-end, API, database, serverless, etc. I have rarely seen them doing UI work.
  6. 10x engineers can convert “thought” into “code” in their mind and write it in an iterative fashion. Given a product feature, they can write that entire feature in one or two sittings of 4 to 6 hours with a caffeinated drink without distraction.
  7. 10x engineers rarely look at help documentation of classes or methods. They know it in memory and can recall from memory. They write code at the same ease as writing English. No breaks, no pauce, just type.
  8. 10x engineers are always learning new frameworks, languages ahead of everyone in the company. They are not afraid of anything new. If there is something new (e.g. blockchain) they gobble up, setup, experiment before anyone is getting started.
  9. 10x engineers are poor mentors as they can’t teach others on what to do OR parcel the work. They always think “It takes too long to teach or discuss with others, I would rather do it myself.” They are also poor interviewers.
  10. 10x engineers don’t hack things. They write quality code and know exactly how the code has to evolve, and have a mental model of overall code structure. They write at most one design document, and the rest is in the code.
  11. 10x engineers rarely job hunt or move out of the company. They move out because you make their life miserable with the process, meetings, training, and other non-value-added activities. If you come across them, hold on to them. Celebrate them.
10x Team Contributors…
  1. …make sure all their meetings have clear agendas and well-defined action items. They prep attendees with email. They take detailed notes and communicate any decisions to the people who weren’t in the room. They value people’s time and make it clear when they will and won’t attend.
  2. …make sure their schedules overlap with their colleagues in multiple timezones so that people aren’t stalled waiting for them to make a decision.
  3. …know what development environment works best for themselves, but they make sure it’s compatible with the tools everyone else in the company uses.
  4. …have a clear understanding of the architecture and implementation of their products that lets them quickly identify problems and point to solutions. And when they don’t, they know who does.
  5. …know what their strengths are, and know when to let experts in other domains work to their strengths. They’re very aware of the importance of UX, and the fact that dismissing UX as unimportant is often a veiled attack on women, who stereotypically work in that area.
  6. …understand the importance of documenting their thought processes so they aren’t the only people who understand their code, and they know the importance of taking breaks and having others review their work and ideas.
  7. …use Stack Overflow just like everyone else. In fact, because management over-relies on them for multiple, completely different, projects, they probably end up using it more.
  8. …try to anticipate what tools others will need, and test and set standards for the use of them ahead of time. However, they resist the “object model of the month” club, which results in a lack of a stable development platform.
  9. …know that a strong team is one where everyone has a voice and everyone can work to their best potential. They mentor, they listen, and they go out of the way to support and promote their colleagues ideas. They know that everybody is bad at interviewing.
  10. …document their plans, and document what they did. They code for the future. If they have to hack, they document it even more. And they don’t let management forget about the resulting technical debt.
  11. …like all other people, work best in a supportive environment that values and celebrates all employees.

There are certainly more characteristics of a good hire, I just wanted to address the original list, feel free to add your own characteristics in the comments. And here’s another good list for ideas (h/t Nila).

10x engineers

what are they? how you spot'em? pic.twitter.com/38EBjiWamT

— Sten 👨🏾‍💻🤷🏾‍♂️ (@stenpittet) July 13, 2019

—Kee Hinckley. Jul 16, 2019 in La Conner, WA US.


I thought I’d add an addendum here after an interesting discussion with someone who has worked for Shekhar and had very good things to say about his management abilities. He followed up to the tweet with this:

I am surprised by extreme views on 10x engineers. They are great individual contributors. They may not be good with teamwork. So what? They can be phenomenal in the early stage of the product cycle.

Find the best in each & get the best out of them. That's what good managers do. https://t.co/gO109wfMkw

— Shekhar Kirani (@skirani) July 13, 2019

And I wonder here if the real issue isn’t the difficulty people have in finding and recognizing good managers who can properly handle both teams and mavericks. Ineffectual managers (fine when things are going well, but useless when things are difficult) are endemic in the industry. I’m still dubious about some of the qualities listed for 10x engineers, but I’ll grant that a great manager can make a huge difference in channelling the various skills and styles of different engineers. Perhaps what we really need here is a description of how to recognize a 10x manager.

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Technology

My wife just got one hell of a targeted scam. Spearphishing level.

February 13, 2019 by Kee Hinckley 13 Comments

My wife just got one hell of a targeted scam. Spearphishing level.

She’s a sociology grad student. She got email apparently from her department head, but a faked addr (name.org@my.com)

“I am in a meeting right now working on the study of the development of children of same-sex couples, based on data from the US Census. That is why I am contacting you through mail. I should have called you, but calls are restricted during the meeting. I don’t know when the meeting will be rounding up, And i want you to help me out on something very important right away”

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Technology

Fire (and lots of it): Berkeley researcher on the only way to fix cryptocurrency

February 5, 2019 by Kee Hinckley 1 Comment

Fire (and lots of it): Berkeley researcher on the only way to fix cryptocurrency | Ars Technica

❝ “For all of those who say ‘blockchain will solve X,'” Weaver said. “The only thing it solves is you now know the person knows nothing about X.” ❞

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/researcher-counts-the-reasons-he-wants-cryptocurrency-burned-with-fire/

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Society•Technology

What Happened to All the Good Jobs?

October 28, 2018 by Kee Hinckley 1 Comment
94 percent of jobs created in the last 10 years were “nontraditional” employment, and one-third of Americans now do some form of contract work. More often than not, it is far from a liberating option: In many cases, the pay is measly—after operating costs, Uber drivers in Detroit would have made more working at Walmart—and stringing together hours can itself be a struggle.

Louis Hyman’s new book, Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary, shows that this shift in work did not happen on its own, and that it began long before the founding of Uber or TaskRabbit. In this persuasive and richly detailed history, Hyman traces a decades-long campaign to eliminate salaried positions and replace them with contract work. Between the emergence of the first temp agencies in the 1940s and the growing power of management consultants in the ’70s, American business adopted a new set of principles and began to squeeze not just blue-collar workers but also middle managers and top executives. The unmaking of the good job, Hyman argues, followed not from technological advances but from an organizational breakthrough, as executives at companies like Manpower Inc. and McKinsey & Co. convinced businesses to add and shed staff at a moment’s notice, with little regard for their employees’ well-being or the effects on society.The Nation

https://www.thenation.com/article/what-happened-to-the-steady-job/

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About me

I’m Kee Hinckley (he/his). That’s my wife Mollie Pepper on the right. I’m a senior software architect at TiVo Corp (I get the metadata from point A to point B) with a BA in Anthropology. Mollie’s a sociologist with a couple Masters and a PhD on the way; she specializes in borders, gender, and violence. I have two kickass daughters. Shireen Hinckley is a film editor and documentarian currently working on a movie on refugee resettlement, Home Is Where the War Is. Shadi Fotouhi is a QA automation expert at Wayfair (and formerly at robotics firm Jibo), and an amazing artist.

Home is Where the War Is: Taster

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nazgul @ twitter

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MikeElganMike Elgan@MikeElgan·
15m

BREAKING: Trump pardons Anthony Levandowski, who was found guilty of stealing self-driving car secrets from Google before working at Uber.

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nazgulDr. Pepper’s Husband (Kee Hinckley)@nazgul·
16m

"involvement in a political project"

AKA defrauding Trump supporters of money to pretend to build a wall.

I'm surprised Trump pardoned him. I would have thought he'd have been pissed that he hadn't thought of it himself.

What a fucking world.

Eli Stokols@EliStokols

Full clemency list from the White House is 143 people (73 pardons, 70 commutations). Broidy and Bannon are listed back to back.

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BoutrousTedTed Boutrous@BoutrousTed·
2h

Trump pardoning a guy indicted by the Trump Justice Department for defrauding Trump supporters over the fake Trump wall is a fitting ending to the Trump presidency.

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cableknitjumperAmy, 2022 Mothman Festival Queen@cableknitjumper·
3h

please support my kickstarter to construct the forbidden sandwich

4
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nazgulDr. Pepper’s Husband (Kee Hinckley)@nazgul·
45m

I must have. But the only one I remember is mumps.

Katie@KDWRenoGirl

Did you ever have chickenpox?

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Program of the Day: Hermes

December 4, 2019

Another La Conner Sunset

August 25, 2019
How we gave China the keys to our technological future

How we gave China the keys to our technological future

August 12, 2019

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