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happypants23on 1min high-intensity exercise 3x a week improves fitness as much as 3x aerobics (2016)

People actually benefit from both low-intensity and high-intensity exercise. One is not a substitute for the other. Endurance athletes know this.

Low-intensity exercise conditions aerobic energy pathways (mitochondrial respiration) in ways that high-intensity exercise cannot.

happypants23on What happened to Firefox Send?

Its not just about the code though. Somehow that code needs to keep up with the latest standards and magically be delivered to my client device. To think that a project as complex as the Firefox ecosystem can be maintained with less than 50 engineers doesn't match my experience working on large product teams.

Here's my estimate:

* A dozen build engineers to support development and builds for X client platforms

* A dozen engineers for the Javascript VM

* Dozens of engineers to support ongoing javascript and CSS standards

* A dozen engineers or more to support the firefox core

* Dedicated teams for Android, MacOS, Windows and Linux targets

* Dozens of Team/Programme/Project managers to _enable_ devs to do their best. These folks aren't optional.

* UX designers

* Graphical design artists

* Technical writers

happypants23on What happened to Firefox Send?

If you think Firefox has stagnated you clearly aren't aware of the substantial and complex improvements that have been made to the firefox core over the last couple of years:

* Faster Quantum Engine (multi-process architecture, etc)

* Faster CSS rendering with Stylo

* GPU-based rendering with WebRender

Any Moz engineer who worked on the above will have boosted their CV's substantially. They don't need to work on tangential greenfields to do that.

Sure so extensions had to be rewritten for Quantum, but sometimes that's the price to pay for deep architectural/security improvements.

happypants23on Initial Impressions of WSL 2

Just a reminder that enabling Hyper-V (needed for WSL2) will make your computer boot your current Windows install inside a VM too. This might makes a slight performance impact.

That doesn't sound right. Hyper-V is a Type-1 hypervisor, so by definition the Windows installation would not be running in its own VM (for some definition of VM).

And its pretty much exactly the same for Qemu/KVM on Linux, where Intel VT-x or AMD SVM hardware extensions are used to implement Type-1 virtualisation.

happypants23on Google ditches its free WiFi service in South Africa, three months after launch

> The real reason you can't operate in ZA is Empowerment, and what Google probably ran into. They can only own 49% of the business the start.

There's no evidence that Google ran into empowerment (BBBEE) roadblocks here. And that assertion about 49% ownership is quite incorrect. BBBEE doesn't actually work like that (1). A lot of factors go into scoring a company's empowerment rating.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad-Based_Black_Economic_Emp...

happypants23on Google ditches its free WiFi service in South Africa, three months after launch

I'm a techie living in Cape Town and I love it. I have no plans to emigrate. We have problems down here yes, but they've been no impediment to my career.

Both Amazon AWS and Oracle OCI have satellite development offices in Cape Town, and if anything they are hiring more and more.

happypants23on Practical tips for writing inclusive job ads (2016)

I'll add one - I immediately ignore any job ad that contains anything along the lines of "Work in an exciting/agile fast-paced, dynamic environment", which pretty much signals that only youngsters need apply.

Of course, if the job really is chaotic and high-stress, then that signal should probably stay in the job ad.

happypants23on Coinbase raises $100M Series D led by IVP

Another use case is fungibility, privacy and anonymity. These are features which are for the most part missing in our current financial system.

Monero (https://getmonero.org/) is a good example of a cryptocurrency which focuses on getting these things right.

happypants23on Apple staffers reportedly rebelling against open office plan

For me, its not just about the sound. I can easily lose focus by being visually over-stimulated too, and there's no way to fix that except for cubicles.

happypants23on Why Did It Take Devuan Two Years to Replace Systemd?

> Do you really want an init system that replaces a ton of functionality poorly like dns, ntp, syslog, xinetd, etc etc etc?

SystemD is not just an "init" system. You have to look at the larger vision for it being a set of building blocks for Linux system and service management.

I think this is a very good thing. Its about time that Linux had a unified and self-consistent approach to system management and configuration.

happypants23on Why Did It Take Devuan Two Years to Replace Systemd?

The second major issue is it growing way out of the bounds of being just an init replacement, thereby violating the so-called Unix Philosophy of doing one-thing well.

I keep on hearing this overly worn "Unix Philosophy" argument against systemd, which in the absence of any non-religious technical justification, basically boils down to "its different".

All of this adds up to a storm of controversy that the systemd people mostly brought upon themselves. Had they just been more humble about their creation and waited until it was mature and well-tested and did all the wonderful things they claim it could and should do instead of stuffing what was widely seen as a broken-by-design piece of garbage down everybody's throat, maybe much of the Linux community wouldn't have been nearly so outraged by it.

Nobody shoved anything down anyone's throat, least not the SystemD developers. And the same goes for PulseAudio, DBUS, and all the other projects on freedesktop.org.

Anyway, in reality, software does not become mature and well-tested without early exposure to real users and systems. Chicken-and-egg problem there.

I feel absolutely no sympathy for those who are outraged. There are many distributions out there (including Devuan) which align with their particular vision of an OS should be.

happypants23on New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store

ConEmu with Bash/WSL has not worked out for me. I came across way too many incompatibilities, and weird behaviour. Some of these are documented in (1). That said, ConEMU was never really designed to support UNIX/VT100 terminal environments from the start. Its more of a cmd.exe replacement.

Instead, I've got a pretty good setup using Xming (2), a native win32 X server implementation.

In Bash/WSL, I set the DISPLAY variable appropriately and launch my terminal emulator of choice, as well as Emacs.

This setup has worked out to be very fast and stable for me.

1. http://conemu.github.io/en/CygwinMsys.html 2. http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes/

happypants23on Telling children 'hard work gets you to the top' is simply a lie

I don't think the author missed the mark. He does elaborate on the other factors, such as social adaption:

> I don’t see this mindset shifting, so my advice to youngsters has remained: you need to adapt yourself. You need to find the right way to speak to different people, at different times in different contexts. This is not compromising who you are, but rather adapting to the relevant surroundings.

happypants23on The woes of Windows 10

I rather like the clean aesthetic of Windows 10, and am now using it as my main OS. Sure, it's by no means perfect, and there is still work to be done. But by and large I am happier with Windows 10 than with MacOS, Ubuntu, GNOME, and so on.

Oh, and the whole "spyware" trope is becoming overworn. User analytics is here to stay, and practically every website and browser does it anyway. At least you can disable it in Win 10 if you are so inclined. Me - I would gladly give Microsoft my data to they can prioritize features for windows 10.

happypants23on A Brief History of Who Ruined Burning Man

Ha. I've gone to AfrikaBurn a few times (largest burn after Burning Man). It started circa 2007 and the old-timers are already complaining that its ruined. Also juicy politics like this: https://medium.com/@kurtsiegfried/fear-and-loathing-at-afrik...

happypants23on My Interviews with Amazon

Ex-AWS engineer here. The Amazon experience can differ wildly between teams and orgs. Best thing is to find some peers that work there and get the inside loop on which teams are sane.

I worked on some really cool stuff there, and learned a lot. But then after a while AWS grew rapidly and I ended up spending most of my time on pretty boring stuff, such as operational firefighting, endless deployments, config updates, and of course that oncall thing.

That said, in my experience, Amazon was still a bit of meat-grinder. I've come to realise though that its just part of an extremely long interview process, with the goal of weeding out those who just aren't thriving in Amazon's environment of "organised chaos". New grads who don't make SDE2 within a certain amount of time will eventually be PIP'ed, which is basically a signal that its time to find greener pastures.