mechanical_fish

14 ms·

61.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Highly recommended reading if you are ever tempted to take advantage of an apparent scam in progress: David Maurer's The Big Con , the hundred-year-old story of swindlers who stole tons of money by setting up fake stock scams, then
62.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Yeah, I go back and forth on that one. The problem is that the key management is crucial. Slip up and lose your key and your data is toast. Obviously this also applies to Amazon, but they have more resources, better incentives, and one mill
63.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
If the password is in the email in cleartext, you don't need an active login for their email. All you need to do is be looking over their shoulder in the cafe, once, when they bring up the email on their iPad.
64.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
This is why, for example, Amazon S3 has a little checkbox on each bucket to encrypt the contents of the bucket. At first glance this might seem a little silly. Amazon has the key. (You don't even get to see the key yourself.) So Amazon
65.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
(I love this question. I have a Ph.D. in the making of semiconductor devices, and I once worked as a troubleshooter in a factory that was making transistors with a twenty-year-old process.) The first fallacy that's tripping you up is m
66.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Why not use the git SHA? Because you want your version numbers to make semantic sense. Your entire team intuitively understands that version 4137 is more recent than version 4134, that version 3527 is in the distant past, and that going f
67.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
The traditional high-availability method is to run the database servers in pairs, and redeploy using the failover-failback method. You have DB servers A and B, with A as the primary and B mirroring A. 1. Promote B to primary and switch the
68.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
<tedious_exposition> This is a reference to a film from 1976, Logan's Run : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film) This reference is aimed at least a decade over the head of a thirty-year-old, w
69.
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Critiquing this article's approximation of a field-biology study would be a great exercise for young science students. I envision a roomful of kids shouting "where is your control group"? I know nothing of mosquitoes and I ha
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by mechanical_fish 13y ago
Yes, the clerk almost certainly turned you in. The alert went out within a week . Do you really want to bet that was a coincidence? He may not have turned you in, by name or by face, and he may not have turned you in specifically to you
71.
by mechanical_fish 13y ago
Fortunately, burglaries are pretty rare. I presume it has since occurred to you that, if anything had gone missing from your building during the critical week, you'd have been down at the local police station in handcuffs, making a pho
72.
by mechanical_fish 13y ago
This is all true, but the Grand Old Order of Locksmiths hasn't evolved this line of patter for no reason. Many people of my acquaintance are terrified of the possibility of burglars, even though home intrusions are very rare. Boosting
73.
by mechanical_fish 13y ago
"Client" and "server" are overloaded words with multiple meanings. Let's break this down a little. The important distinction is between "a machine that runs code you control" and "a machine that runs
74.
by mechanical_fish 13y ago
So, you're not running Docker in production at this point? Are you putting the whole stack in one big container and running one container per Vagrant VM? Or are you spreading a client stack across multiple containers?
75.
by mechanical_fish 13y ago
I don't think the historical evidence supports this. PHP was invented as a templating DSL for C programmers. I'd propose: PHP (version 0): C is not an HTML templating language; Perl and Python are too heavyweight as embedded templ
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by mechanical_fish 13y ago
Vivid post-mortems are valuable if they serve their purpose: Motivating action that prevents future post-mortems. But post-mortems themselves are not valuable at all. Quite the opposite: Every post-mortem signifies that something has died
77.
by mechanical_fish 13y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane's_Fighting_Ships Or if you're lazy you just Google up this Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_of_t... The USA has
78.
by mechanical_fish 13y ago
Perhaps you should read a bit farther down that Wikipedia page: Anyone can register an org second-level domain. Although org was recommended for non-commercial entities, there are no restrictions to registration. There are some instances o
79.
by mechanical_fish 13y ago
Assume you are dealing with rational actors, be a good judge of character… You work for corporations, right? It's never a good idea to bet big money that a human being who is rational and classy today will remain so for months or y
80.
by mechanical_fish 13y ago
The book The Paradox of Choice could just as easily have been titled The Paradox of Trader Joe's . They have the same thesis. TJ's succeeds by having, to first order, zero to one brand of everything: If they stock it at all, it
81.
by mechanical_fish 13y ago
It's even worse than the phrase "finding the rightsholder" would suggest. Most authors pass away without clearly designating a single literary heir, so the rights often get split among heirs, which is bad enough when it happe
82.
by mechanical_fish 13y ago
On the one hand, I agree that the idea of needing to engage with blogs and conferences in order to succeed as an engineer is way oversold. The whole point of engineering, after all, is to create artifacts that speak for themselves. On the o
83.
by mechanical_fish 13y ago
I have, uh, pretty convincing evidence that $750/day is in the ballpark for the fully-loaded cost of a devops engineer in Boston. It certainly doesn't buy two days of an engineer in Boston. But Boston is Boston, and SV is SV, a
84.
by mechanical_fish 13y ago
Surely you didn't mean to type "physical". Even if Amazon did nothing else, they'd still order, receive, unpack, assemble, rack, stack, power, cool, and network their servers with an economy of scale that I can't po
85.
by mechanical_fish 13y ago
The $750/month savings cited here is not real†, but for the sake of argument let's pretend it is. Is $750/month a significant amount of money for the company? In the USA, this is perhaps the cost of one engineer-day, and on
86.
by mechanical_fish 13y ago
The percentage of US workers with access to a retirement-benefits plan is 71%. 57% of all US workers participate in such a plan. (Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2009 National Compensation Survey, http://www.bls.gov&#x2F
87.
by mechanical_fish 13y ago
You and the IEEE are sampling different universes. Specific parts of the universe of "devs and related trades" currently have high demand and rising wages. However, as a Ph.D. holder in quantum optics and semiconductor manufactu
88.
by mechanical_fish 13y ago
Agreed. You've got food and shelter and clothing and a job, which is more than a lot of people can say. Now focus on being happy. Go out and be around people. Tune up that guitar. Get one of those pets that you don't have. Level u
89.
by mechanical_fish 13y ago
There are degrees of independence. Yours is a fine one to aspire to. Having a positive net worth is a nice feeling.
90.
by mechanical_fish 13y ago
It is the case that every comment is copyrighted by its original author. This is actually a big deal, because it is not entirely clear that (for example) someone is allowed to republish a comment thread in an altered form (like a book or ma

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