jake_morrison

8 ms·

31.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
I feel the same way about "advanced" shell scripting techniques as I do about "cutting-edge" accounting techniques: someone's probably going to jail. I have written some big complex systems in shell and regretted it
32.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
This was cool back in the early days of the web. It was used by Philip Greenspun, who wrote the classic "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing": https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/
33.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
I have been thinking about using the Erlang concurrency and messaging model for brower-based applications. UI components operate in separate threads and communicate with the back end by sending and receiving async messages. Back-end compone
34.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
As a real engineer, I ask what the practical problem is that they are trying to solve. Seems like the practical application of this is to quickly disallow strong memorable passwords of the form "correct horse battery staple". htt
35.
by jake_morrison 4y ago
A similar piece of advice for entrepreneurs is, "don't work your feels, work your list". Don't wait until you feel like doing something, work on things that need to be done in order of impact and priority.
36.
by jake_morrison 4y ago
I have done a lot of work with IoT-ish data, e.g. sending location and telemetry data from vehicles and remote sensors over unreliable cellular networks. I need the ability to queue data on the device to deal with patchy connectivity and so
37.
by jake_morrison 4y ago
I have been using Duolingo for years. I find that you can't really learn anything, you can only practice something you already know. You won't learn grammar, it's only useful for sentence translation drills. And those drills
38.
by jake_morrison 4y ago
My parents were English majors, and they met in Anglo-Saxon class. My father described speaking Anglo-Saxon as being like cursing all the time. Everything is basic words like "shit" and "blood".
39.
by jake_morrison 4y ago
I went through a Kafkaesque experience with PayPal's Know Your Customer verification process. They screwed something up internally and decided that my company was in a different country. https://www.cogini.com/blog&#x2F
40.
by jake_morrison 4y ago
Some writers were attracted to Medium because it was easy get started. It was frustrating to me as a reader, because I was getting enough links there each month to hit the limit. I wished that writers would just set up their own site, which
41.
by jake_morrison 4y ago
In the 90s I worked on a project to digitize land registration in Taiwan. In order to record deeds and property transfers, we needed to enter people's names and official registered addresses into the computer system. The problem was th
42.
by jake_morrison 4y ago
Sounds like bitC: https://web.archive.org/web/20160529063027/https://www.bitc-... It was basically a lisp syntax for C, which enabled things like lisp macros. It died when the author went to work for Mi
43.
by jake_morrison 4y ago
Multiple inheritance can be confusing, but it's also powerful. There are generations of Java programmers who have decided that because Java doesn't have multiple inheritance, it must be bad. People mostly use frameworks these days
44.
by jake_morrison 4y ago
I did one of these after a long day spent deep in the guts of the web framework (Elixir/Phoenix) trying to optimize performance under DDOS on an ad-tech system. They gave me a codebase with a "REST" API for their mobile clien
45.
by jake_morrison 4y ago
Python's OOP is not superior to CLOS. CLOS is very full-featured. Python's OO does support features like multiple inheritance, which makes it more sophisticated than e.g. Java. One CLOS feature that is particularly interesting is
46.
by jake_morrison 4y ago
One of the most interesting things is that Sears shut down its catalog business in 1993, right before Amazon was started. They could easily have been the dominant e-commerce retailer instead of Amazon, if only they had strategic vision and
47.
by jake_morrison 4y ago
Mobile support comes from the chips (SOC) that the phones are using. Hardware codec support is a major differentiating factor for mobile chips. It has a huge impact on power usage, e.g. decoding video or audio in hardware could be 10x more
48.
by jake_morrison 4y ago
In the .com days, I was active in the e-commerce space, using public-key cryptography to solve problems. We had digital certificates, digital signatures, etc, which we used to solve various problems like authenticating and securing access t
49.
by jake_morrison 4y ago
That's partisan nonsense. China was pressuring the manufacturers, i.e. "Taiwan is part of China, so you should sell to us and we will give them to Taiwan." Then they tried to pressure Taiwan for concessions to get the vaccine
50.
by jake_morrison 4y ago
I have been living in Taiwan through the pandemic. The response has been exemplary. Life has been normal, other than the need to wear masks and scan QR codes when entering shops to enable contact tracing. There has been very little actual r
51.
by jake_morrison 4y ago
The majority of the costs associated with universities is for facilities, administration, and housing, not related to teaching. If students attend classes online while living at home, then the costs go down dramatically. You are left with p
52.
by jake_morrison 4y ago
Imagine a physics class with the budget of a Mythbusters episode. The result is pedagogically sound content, the best presenters, and a budget for graphics and special effects. With enough students, the cost per class is very low, less than
53.
by jake_morrison 4y ago
I have built ad-tech systems which get large amounts of traffic and continuous hacking attempts/DDOS attacks. In 10 years, the servers have never been hacked. I went to the trouble of enabling SELinux and locking things down. Not sure
54.
by jake_morrison 4y ago
The best use of free tier is to allow engineers at big companies to try things without having to get permission from someone. There can be a lot of abuse, though.
55.
by jake_morrison 5y ago
Apple needs to fund a proper package repository.
56.
by jake_morrison 5y ago
AWS has a fine stack for deploying "cloud native" apps on top of EC2 instances. Build a base AMI using Packer and launch it to an Auto Scaling Group behind a load balancer. Deploy code to the ASG using CodeDeploy. Use RDS for the
57.
by jake_morrison 5y ago
I have worked with a lot of developers who I only communicated with over text/email/Jira tickets. It's pretty common in remote/international consulting. If you find a company that is doing async remote, then you would be
58.
by jake_morrison 5y ago
A model I like is that founders need to earn their equity, i.e. everyone gets restricted shares. So you determine what work needs to be done and the value of doing it. If you do that, you get your shares. If people don't deliver, they
59.
by jake_morrison 5y ago
In consulting, I have had to train myself to not give specific answers in a sales call. Any number for cost or delivery date that you give a customer will become stuck in their head, and you will have to fight to change it to match reality.
60.
by jake_morrison 5y ago
I ran a web hosting business. We had a word for people who wanted to pay for servers with an untraceable currency: criminals.

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