jarrett

52 ms·

391.
by jarrett 13y ago
I would agree that we engineers often treat the field of marketing with some suspicion. That's probably because--despite it having plenty of legitimate practitioners--it's also the natural home of countless snake oil salesmen. How
392.
by jarrett 13y ago
Whenever I hear this, I think: Is this just meant to be advice for the elite, gifted few? Or does the author mean that nearly everyone should eschew wage labor? If the latter, then who will do all the only-mildly-interesting things in our w
393.
by jarrett 13y ago
> If Sold decides my product would work best on eBay, then is there the appropriate configuration options so that I can define minimum bid and user reputation? I don't know if this is the case, but I'd hope they would completely abstrac
394.
by jarrett 13y ago
Yeah, I haven't sold anything on eBay in a while. The fees I could maybe deal with. But the fraud was what really drove me away.
395.
by jarrett 13y ago
For me, the biggest hurdle to selling my personal items online is flaky and/or malicious buyers. On Craigslist, buyers tend to be extremely flaky. Every time I've sold something there, I've wasted substantial time with people who arrange m
396.
by jarrett 13y ago
Most of what I see in my house is made from a fair number of parts, each of which took some rather complex tooling to manufacture. Even the simple-looking stuff took a lot to produce. Those plain sandals on the floor? They needed three diff
397.
by jarrett 13y ago
I once tried offloading rendering (Blender to be exact) to Amazon EC2. It turned out to be extremely costly. Rendering a 3-minute video at 1080 would have cost me $60. Yeah, peanuts for Pixar, but remember this is 3 minutes at 1080, not the
398.
by jarrett 13y ago
I'm not an expert on how the GI algorithms are parallelized. First, it's worth noting there are a lot of them, so the strategy probably varies. But here's a guess for a popular one known as photon mapping. With that technique, you bounce ar
399.
by jarrett 13y ago
Yep! Rendering is very parallelizable, thank goodness. And at more than one level: You can assign different regions of a single frame to different processors, and you can also assign different frames to different processors. It's one of tho
400.
by jarrett 13y ago
For a bit of background: The article talks a lot about global illumination. Here's what that means. First, you have to understand the cheaper alternative, which is called local illumination. With local illumination, for each pixel, you figu
401.
by jarrett 13y ago
Wouldn't the random tokens also be vulnerable to a replay? If I copy a session cookie from one client to another, regardless of how that cookie authenticates itself, won't most servers accept it? Seems to me that once the client has been co
402.
by jarrett 13y ago
Good point. I'd word it something like this: A Word of Warning This library exposes a very complex API. It is intended for expert users only. If you have any doubts about your knowledge of the underlying cryptographic primitives, we strongl
403.
by jarrett 13y ago
After having this debate with you two or three times now, I'm starting to realize that we both want the same thing: Good libraries like Keyczar that just do the right thing by default. I would argue that there is a second side to the solu
404.
by jarrett 13y ago
> Just write upfront on the signup form, "we don't hash or protect your passwords in any way. Do not reuse passwords from other sites. Create a unique password and retrieve it using a password manager." For one, I'd consider that bad bu
405.
by jarrett 13y ago
I've seen a fair amount of both. The former ("don't build your own crypto") is clearly correct. The latter ("don't use crypto") is what I disagree with. One example of this meme comes from the OP, who ends his article with: "Save yourself t
406.
by jarrett 13y ago
Few do, but I genuinely thought that the OP was, so no semantic debate was intended :) (And I have actually seen people say that elsewhere.) While the OP didn't mention random numbers specifically, his prohibition on using crypto seemed gen
407.
by jarrett 13y ago
Sure, but then what are they saying? "Dont use cryptography" is a quotation taken verbatim from the OP, and I've heard similar statements all around in the last few years. A reasonable person reading that statement would interpret it at f
408.
by jarrett 13y ago
> I don't think people should be afraid to deploy password hashing. Neither do I, but the whole "don't use crypto" meme says the opposite. > Just use HTTP Auth and a long random credential Yes, that is a viable alternative. But it i
409.
by jarrett 13y ago
Yes, that's what I'm driving at: You have no choice but to learn the crypto libraries and use them. I've argued before that authors of crypto libraries have a sort of professional duty to document their libraries well, including info on all
410.
by jarrett 13y ago
This argument keeps coming up, and while its premises are valid, its conclusion never sits right with me, namely: "Don't use cryptography." That advice isn't practical for developers. There are plenty of systems we have to design where cryp
411.
by jarrett 13y ago
I've often had this thought. But I keep coming back to this idea: HTML and CSS are actually a really nice way to describe an interface, for a few reasons: 1. Reusable styles plus case-by-case overrides--very important in a world where graph
412.
by jarrett 13y ago
Indeed. We (the folks on HN) are mostly the good guys in this fight. We'd like to help, and I'd like to think we support the right political causes in the ways that we can. But there comes a point where you're doing what you can given your
413.
by jarrett 13y ago
Blaming the rules of the game is sometimes appropriate, but not in the case. This is a free market for entertainment if there ever was one. Much freer than TV or movies. The high-volume clicks that the author reviles? These consist of milli
414.
by jarrett 13y ago
That's very true. And it's kind of comforting, because you know that by earning well, you're creating positive externalities. This is why I'm happy to pay my taxes. (I don't necessarily support everything they're spent on, but everyone has
415.
by jarrett 13y ago
I don't mean to be harsh, but that sounds a little hand-wavy. Could you elaborate on what types of businesses you have in mind? I don't think education and income inequality are the real issue here. For the long-term homeless, it's not that
416.
by jarrett 13y ago
This article leaves out an important point: Most, if not all, programmers I know do care about these issues, but we can't solve them. We would if we could, but it's not what our profession is good at. The title of the article, "come here
417.
by jarrett 13y ago
Yeah, that's kind of what I thought--a money issue. I have no idea whether Aaron Greenspan has money to burn on something like this. The fact that he was bringing suit on behalf of his computer company made me immediately imagine a monied p
418.
by jarrett 13y ago
Did anyone read the part where he explains that he is not being represented by a lawyer? ("REQUEST FOR CIVIL LOCAL RULE 3-9(b) EXEMPTION AND RETIREMENT.") That seems a very unusual decision indeed. Does anyone have any idea why he would do
419.
by jarrett 13y ago
I see it from another perspective: Mentioning that kind of stuff suggests an appreciation for the finer points of the trade. No, I don't want to work with people who are all theory and no practice. But I do want to work with people who tr
420.
by jarrett 13y ago
After reading your list of professional habits--writing tests, contributing to open source, reading lots of technical literature--I think you're head and shoulders above a lot of employed programmers. I've been the technical interviewer bef

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