You respond primarily with non technical means, making a giant stink that a hotel that generally lives and dies on corporate money is man in the middling their WiFi.
exactly. I have at least some trust in Mulvad, but I'll be damned if I'm getting on the hotel WiFi in a US hotel chain without VPN. Let alone while travelling in foreign countries.
I frequently access my bank info etc. on such trips. With a VPN at least I have fewer random threat vectors to consider on a network.
I've frequently (especially outside the US, but even in a major hospital system here in San Francisco) come across WiFi networks that force access web through a MITM proxy. Yes, HTTPS will help me detect it, but if I need to actually get through, a VPN is helpful.
"bank info" in this case being anything from logging in to check my balance, pay bills or even contact them via their secure messaging because I'm disputing a transaction.
It doesn't eliminate all threats, but I'm not a secret agent ninja that needs 100% hardened communications. I just need a modicum of assurance.
I had heard from square, but never bothered to look up what they exactly do. I've been surfing through their wikipedia entry and website (very nice design!), and it looks very intriguing.
Now the question is of course, who has had some experience with it? Is this confined to SF, other american cities? Does it work as elegantly as it looks? Paying with a credit card at a restaurant always seems to take forever, I'd like to be able to spare some hassle.
> Paying with a credit card at a restaurant always seems to take forever, I'd like to be able to spare some hassle.
I don't think Square is confined geographically, at least within the US, but I have my doubts will help with the "processing at restaurants takes forever" problem. Most restaurants who plan to take cards already have merchant accounts; Square is most helpful if your problem is "I'm a person or small vendor and want to accept credit cards from other people, perhaps even on-the-go."
if your problem is that you haven't been able to find a workplace environment that's sufficiently uncircumspect about its place in employee's lives and the world.)
I guess Square could be used creatively to solve the processing time problem: a restaurant could hand out mobile devices to all servers and just process customer payments at the table. There might even be incentives to do that: moving people faster means you can server a higher volume of customers. Whether that'd be enough to overcome Good Enough+Inertia is the question.
> I guess Square could be used creatively to solve the processing time problem: a restaurant could hand out mobile devices to all servers and just process customer payments at the table.
Pretty much every even slightly classy restaurant in Canada has mobile POSes the server brings to your table and you use to punch in your credit card PIN (or it prints the receipt for you to sign, if you have an ancient or American card).
It still takes too long and I wish the limit for RFID-authorized transactions was higher so I could tap rather than PIN, but at least the card remains in my sight at all times.
Using Square is faster and more convenient than cell-based (Nurit,
Verifone) processing: enter total, swipe, sign screen with a stylus or
finger, and, only for customers who have never paid with Square on that
card before: receipt via SMS or email (or none)? and enter phone number
or email address. Customers often got the receipt by SMS before leaving
the shop.
Using a Nurit meant total, swipe, wait for connection &
authorization, print paper receipts for merchant & customer, get
customer to sign and return merchant receipt, make sure merchant &
customer end up with the right bits of paper, credit card, and pen.
It may sound like a trivial difference in reading the steps, but when
dealing with a flurry of customers the ability to spend more attention
engaging with customers while still handling payments correctly is an
important difference.
We are on our 4th credit card processing technology in 8 years
(paper imprinter, pay by cell & numeric entry, Nurit, Square),
and Square is the best so far at making payments a trivial part of
the sales process instead of a minor hassle.
It's not just a Valley thing. A local corn maze was using iPads with them last year as the POS terminals for what would have previously been a cash-only affair.
We use square for somewhat large (10k-15k) rental transactions. They have always been really accommodating and even when we were newly using them released our funds far faster than anyone else would. Great service.
First of all, I very much doubt that she actually worked 130 hours per week with any regularity. That comes to 18.5 hours per day, including sundays. Even assuming that she could survive with 3 hours of sleep per day (yeah, sure), it leaves almost no time to eat, commute, or god, even going to the bathroom.
And why in the world is she giving advice on burnout?
Not to sound condescending, but use a little common sense here. Even people that work 40 hours a week aren't on task 100% of the time.
In a given day I'll take a couple coffee breaks, maybe go outside for a couple breaths of fresh air, and use the restroom at least twice, in addition to my lunch hour.
That said - those 40 hours that I am in the office aren't hours I am free to use however I please, so it is customary to say that you work 40 hours a week, not 35.8 hours per week, etc.
It's not hard to conceive of a situation where it just works out to be easier to be in the office every waking hour, particularly working on startups. This doesn't mean you don't stop to watch a funny youtube clip or set up a good music playlist- it just means its time fenced off from any other major commitments.
I can't speak for Marissa, but I certainly did pull one or two 130-hour weeks "back in the day". They _were_ productive. I did pay a huge price for them, both in terms of reduced productivity for weeks afterwards, and in terms of health. (I always get a horrible cold after exhausting myself that much)
There are two things to keep in mind:
1) These weeks were rare. I'd expect they were rare for Marissa too. You can't do that anywhere close to regularly. And you don't. Those are heroic efforts to meet a particular deadline.
2) That was "back in the day". Late 20's, early 30's. As you get older, those efforts are much harder. (Damn it, all the old people I knew needed next to no sleep. Can I please finally be old enough for that? ;)
There _are_ deadlines that are worth it. Putting in the extra hours so the decision demo to the VC guys is smoother? Uh, yes. Same goes for e.g. working on reducing network traffic before a spike will hit, if that reduction will save you a million or two.
In all cases, make sure the payout is commensurate with your effort - i.e. unless you own equity or there is a large bonus attached to that, IMHO you should tell the powers that be to go pound sand.
And putting in those hours because your manager didn't listen to your estimates in the first place? Hell no.
There _are_ deadlines that are worth it. Putting in the extra hours so the decision demo to the VC guys is smoother? Uh, yes. Same goes for e.g. working on reducing network traffic before a spike will hit, if that reduction will save you a million or two.
Yeah, definitely agree. I was more referring to employee positions without significant equity, which you touched on in the rest of your post.
I don't doubt that they were productive. It's just that such long hours are frequently a way to cover up lack of productivity rather than increasing your productivity.
I agree that this is probably a bit of an exaggeration, but probably not too far off. My brother who was a key part of mp3.com in the late 90s, was more or less working constantly for a couple of years. I lived with him for part of that time. He always got home later than me, left earlier, and rarely sat down to eat. He'd be up at all hours of the night working or checking servers, etc. He was wildly passionate about his work and was driven to make the company successful.
I've looked around a bit, but I didn't find how do you configure the layouts. Is it with a config in a particular language, a la XMonad, or something else?
"if someone wants to track you, they will find a way."
true, but the key thing is how much effort does it take. If NSA-like resources are needed, well then you are pretty damn safe. But if some guy can find you in two minutes by using just Google, that's something you might want to check.
nothing. I've discovered I had the same pwd for the panel and for the ssh access, although I almost never use the ssh one. Time to check every password, it seems ...
It would also be very, very, very cool if Dreamhost (since they have a list of old passwords) would, say, make that list all invalid for future use.
We're doing some tough client love right now on security practices, and having a nice hard wall to push off of, namely, Dreamhost being assholes, in a good way, would be a very Good Thing[tm].
We, well, I, have been using sshkeys for access. We actually had one of our accounts request sshkey access as well, which was freaking wonderful. Most are so technically backward that this can't be rolled out globally, though I'd love for it to be.
What are you waiting for to write those posts? I'd love to read how you manage to change your country of residence, and about all the small things that you have to consider.
And the blog is not coming until the MVP is done - I'm guessing they're not waiting but prioritising effort on their startup and the Minimum Viable Product.
