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jaaames

407 karma · joined July 24, 2015

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jaaames··on Terraform 1.0
Can't agree enough.

Declarative programming makes sense for lots of things, React is a great example.

With such a big dependency graph for infra, adding loops and variables and templating to be able to achieve the same thing as Pulumi in a "declarative" way is ultimately just harder and worse than using a familiar powerful language with an SDK.

jaaames··on Don’t pay for 95% (2016)
It's not. Australia calculates fully loaded car costs at $0.72AUD/km. If you add up depreciation, registration, insurance, servicing, fuel, repairs and amortize it the numbers check out.
jaaames··on SARS-CoV-2 Is an Unrestricted Bioweapon (The 2nd Yan Report) [pdf]
Here is another community compiled document regarding plausible origins https://project-evidence.github.io/
jaaames··on Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent
"Meanwhile, 90 percent reported they have been trying to negotiate their leases, but their landlords wouldn’t budge."

This is alarming. It may seem like just another statistic lost in a bigger article, but it's symptomatic of a ticking time bomb in NYC, and commercial real estate more broadly.

Louis Rossmann had an excellent breakdown of why the landlords won't budge on the leases https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdfmMB1E_qk

tl;dr - the loans on these restaurants are all bundled into commercial mortgage backed securities (sound familiar?) and sold to wholesale investors, and the landlords are unable to change the terms of the lease, or the banks will revalue the underlying asset based on a multiple of the rent, and the owner will either essentially get margin called, or end up with negative equity, and default on the loan.

Can someone from Wall Street please add their thoughts?

jaaames··on I suspect many task deadlines are designed to force engineers to work for free
Very few, and I don't think it's a reasonable parallel.

I don't think 8 hours of cognitively demanding, yet physically sedentary work, is part of our human nature.

If you frame it in the sense that we are just monkeys in shoes, it wouldn't be at all reasonable to expect someone to crouch in the grass and be highly alert for hours at a time.

The corollary would be a job that's physically engaging (read, not demanding) but cognitively basic, e.g. moving boxes in a warehouse, gardening.

The difference is one form of labor has leveraged output (writing code), vs linear output (moving boxes).

jaaames··on AWS IAM is having issues again
I guess I'm going outside today.
jaaames··on Just because it's there doesn't mean you should use it
What do you do when you see this lying around?

http://www.fiftythree.org/etherkiller/img/etherkiller.jpg

jaaames··on Design Doc: Use JavaScript instead of TypeScript for internal Deno Code
He's referring to https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/release-notes/t... rather than boolean coercion.
jaaames··on Ask HN: I just started my first real workday, any tips?
Whatever role you're in, don't underestimate the value of relationships, communication, and soft skills in being able to influence the impact and value of the work you can deliver.

If you can persuade a product manager to drop a bad feature you might be able to ship a more valuable feature at a higher quality.

If you can persuade a procurement office to change a supplier you might be able to ship a better design faster.

If you can get involved in the hiring process you might be able to pick the team you work with.

Always make friends with the admin person, accounting that pays you, and stay on the right side of HR.

jaaames··on Ask HN: Have you had the Corona virus?
I had 3 days of tired/weakness from 7-10 Jan, and a severe dry cough for about two weeks after that.

I strongly suspect I caught it from a friend that had travelled all over Europe and back the previous weekend and we were in close contact.

Unfortunately no way to rule out if I indeed had it or not. Would be super interested when an antibody test comes out to see though.

jaaames··on U.S. Government official: Coronavirus vaccine trial starts Monday
I am extremely bearish on this whole global situation, but given the gravity of the situation, we're going to see the world's best institutions and minds working on vaccines and treatments with essentially unlimited funding and top priority.

Even during our darkest times, we're going to see the most remarkable science and engineering capabilities exposed in the coming weeks and months, for the sake of humanity.

jaaames··on Little known features of iTerm2
Pushbullet (Chrome extension) might work for copy/paste to/from your phone.
jaaames··on Little known features of iTerm2
Yeah - I use this workflow and love it. cmd + esp (with caps lock remapped to escape) to toggle a full screen terminal from any application. Means don't have to cmd + tab and hunt for it, it's always one shortcut away.
jaaames··on Pay up or we’ll make Google ban your ads
https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/7520318?hl=en

Locksmiths are now a restricted business as grey hat marketers figured it was an industry with a high ticket price and autonomous demand, and the search term was always "locksmith <city>" - so they set up sites that would flood the results, demand payment upfront for a call out, and then have a virtual assistant forward the business on to an actual locksmith in the city - essentially scooping hundreds of dollars for doing nothing but obfuscating who the real locksmiths are and forwarding the leads on them.

jaaames··on 20th Century Fox Uses ML to Predict a Movie Audience
This could be a HN demographic thing. The comment definitely piqued my curiosity, too.

Interested in others thoughts. I think the sibling commenter may have got it right with the fact people make a conscious decision to go see a movie beforehand as an outing, rather than turn up at the cinema and see what's on.

jaaames··on An Honest Living
Can anyone that has been in the industry for a significant period of time comment on this feeling?

I'm 5 years deep professionally, 15 years as a hobby, and no longer enjoying software, at least in it's form consumed by a customer.

Similar to a sibling poster, I'm envious of the landscaper, school teacher, or electrician.

Has anyone left software and felt better off for it, or regretted it?

Interested to hear any anecdotes or insight.

jaaames··on Whitespace killed an enterprise app
Try vimium, I've been using it for years - as long as the HTML is semantically correct a surprisingly amount of the web is navigable.
jaaames··on Something mysterious is blocking car key fobs from working in an Alberta town
Keyless start cars (e.g. Volkswagen) have a way to start with a dead fob.

If you hold the dead fob against the little key symbol on the steering column it'll power the fob by induction and you'll be able to start the car.

You're right, older fobs that just do keyless entry may not be able to start the car though.

jaaames··on Show HN: Apprise – A lightweight all-in-one notification solution
Looks great, not having a go at you, but instantly reminded me of this

https://youtu.be/8wfG8ngFvPk

jaaames··on Advent of Code 2018
Firebase has ergonomic free auth that does all this out of the box.
jaaames··on Advent of Code 2018
I'm going to do Rust.
jaaames··on The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40
True, but consider some folks are content with a 38 hour week, may have automated large chunks of their job, and find the demands of working for a big public sector organization far less than that of a similar role in a private sector tech company.
jaaames··on Announcing flicker-free boot for Fedora 29
Perfect description of that color, thanks.
jaaames··on Create React App 2.0: Babel 7, Sass, and More
Thanks for the release regardless!
jaaames··on Create React App 2.0: Babel 7, Sass, and More
Yeah these guys follow quickly, I've used this multi times and can highly recommend.
jaaames··on Mmm, Pi-hole
Highly recommended, incredibly easy to set up and use.
jaaames··on Qutebrowser – A keyboard-driven, Vim-like browser based on PyQt5
Lack of Vimium stopped me from even attempting to switch back from Chrome to Firefox.

Can't live without Vimium.

jaaames··on JavaScript Equality Minesweeper
As long as you feed parseInt it's second radix parameter you can :p
jaaames··on Try OCaml
I believe there was/is a stage 0 proposal for pattern matching in ECMAScript
jaaames··on Update on Taking Tesla Private
It's disconcerting this is written in the first person from Musk and not from a communications team as a public statement from the company.

I think it's rather Freudian about his world view and behavior. He seems to have an opinion on everything and disregard experts left and right.

I certainly wouldn't be comfortable with this personality running a company this size. Some CTO/engineering role, sure, CEO and board member with everything that entails is a time bomb.

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