Is the second problem domain web perhaps? So people can learn that <script> tags can not be self-closing, and so they won't break the JS includes so bootstrap.min.js doesn't load and their burger menu in mobile-view actually works!
Judging from http://hillbrad.typepad.com/blog/2014/02/trusted-proxies-and... it looks like opportunistic encryption is not meant to convey security, but rather add obscurity to in-transit plain-text traffic from the perspective of any in-between listeners (and he has no qualms pointing the finger at governments there).
Sadly he now seems to have changed his mind about the validity of this approach, mostly because users and devs alike dislike complexity in their decision process as to what is secure and what is merely obscured.
Don't stop, thanks to the two public programs you've run so far I've:
* Got into Ruby and Go (trying to get a feel for what language felt most comfortable for bit manip.)
* Got into assembly (for fun so far)
* Got a good appreciation for bit-level operations
* A bazillion more little facts and insights that help in daily work life
I bet if you polled how it's helped other people there'd be all kinds of great examples. For work, I'd say the best impact has been a personal drive to pentest our own product, resulting in a lot of bugs found and fixed. That included managing to root our servers via a product flaw, which was scary and amazingly fun.
So yeah, thumbs up, don't stop now (please).
As for the above catering to newcomers, sure but it ramps up incredibly and pushes some boundaries if you've never touched that stuff before.
What kind of experience does the average applicant have? As a 27 year old dev the process you've described sounds as terrifying as it does exciting.
For instance on the challenges I liked that you put (largely paraphrased here) 'If you breeze through these we might want to talk to you.'. Having ploughed/struggledto set 5 now it's almost daunting to think people DO breeze through that. Granted, the stats you've published so far indicate those people are far and few between. It kind of puts you in your place, but the exciting part comes from knowing there's so damn much to learn still.
Agreed, unless you have some extremely appealing concept going you're not going to get interest with below-market salary offers even with average equity offering. I'd put it more brusquely: "You pay peanuts, you get monkeys".
When we have jobs - infrequently mind you - at slightly below-market salary we always offered a phased increase to slightly-above market salary over the 6 month trial period.
That being said, I'm seeing a lot of mentions of single week or single month trials. Is this a US trend? Across the pond here, in the UK, I've certainly not seen them.
Crazy, we're used to probation periods here with a short notice time, that protects both sides. I assume you have to negotiate any notice period for being fired, or do you simply get no statutory notice period?
Usually, there is no notice required from either side except in the case of mass layoffs (two weeks are expected out of politeness, but aren't legally required). That can be changed by a contract, but that usually doesn't happen for anyone but high-level executives.
If you need to ask why it is bad to route traffic through an untrusted third party over HTTP, for the love of god stop building web applications. This is not the right tool for the problem it's trying to solve.
* I've never beaten my dad in a game in 20 years
* I took up the offer from a guy in a NY park and got my ass royally whooped (not to mention the 20 dollars heh)
> no system can ever be secure as long as the host has some way of intercepting messages.
Erm, that's only the case for systems that use cleartext in transit. If you encrypt and decrypt (and we assume you're doing it right) at the endpoints then the intermediate can't do anything with the content.
Your 'no matter how' bit is correct, and it was flawed to rely on SSL for transit only and hope the law would protect the keys. Hence tqbf's point that using cleartext in-out is just plain bad to begin with.
