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lmorris84on Apple open-sources FoundationDB

Ah I don’t believe that was available last time I used it - I’ll check it out thanks!

lmorris84on Apple open-sources FoundationDB

I wrote a java port of the python counter many moons ago [1]. Will have to resurrect it!

[1] https://github.com/leemorrisdev/foundationcounter

lmorris84on The Starfighter Low-Level Tech Tree

Yep most of the FIX connections I've seen are connected for most of the day, long outside trading hours. Tag 103 has specific error codes for the exchange being closed.

lmorris84on Things the media does to manufacture outrage

I'm always suspicious when news articles embed tweets as "evidence". The one case that sticks out for me was Tim Hunt losing his job because of his joke at a conference. I wonder if UCL also fell for media manufactured outrage in the decision to hastily get rid of him, or whether there really were tens of thousands of twitter keyboard warriors venting their offence all over the situation.

Either way, for my own sanity I now have to avoid twitter and any article that even remotely looks like it might be about someone being offended about something.

lmorris84on If the internet is addictive, why we don't regulate it?

> Should we blame Michael S for wasting hours of his life hitting a small button? We could.

Yep we could, and we should. I'm all for personal responsibility, and this feels like setting up a massive excuse for someone wasting their day on Facebook or Reddit. Unlike the Pigeons in the story, you're not locked in a box and are free to not use the internet if you so wish.

lmorris84on Test-Driven Development is Stupid

> I am against writing unit tests in general

> How often have you seen a program crash? If it was developed by a large software company, chances are it was written using TDD. Clearly, TDD is not a magic bullet. So, TDD does not "prove your code works".

> Developing software is like a painting commission

Several reasons I gave up a third of the way in. I rarely write tests first, but I can appreciate that it works for plenty of people - my brain just doesn't work that way.

It's hard to take anything in this article seriously because of the nerdrage and the dismissal of anything he disagrees with as "stupid".

lmorris84on Show HN: Interviews can be stressful – give take-home projects instead

I like the sound of this. As well as giving the candidate ample opportunity to show what they can do, it'll also be representative of the actual work they'll be doing in that role so everyone will be going into the post-probation period with eyes wide open.

lmorris84on Barren islands that countries never stop fighting over

Falklands have around 3,000 people who actively WANT their home to be a British Overseas Territory. Argentina's claim to them holds about as much water as my claim to Buckingham Palace.

lmorris84on Amazon Kind of Sucks and We’ve All Just Come to Accept It

His complaint about returns is curious, not sure if it's country specific. I returned something to Amazon a couple of weeks ago in the UK due to some missing parts. I printed out the label, put it in the box and the next day a delivery guy showed up, slapped his own label on the outside and took it away. I had the refund applied 2 days later.

I've never returned anything to Amazon before so was surprised at how well it worked.

lmorris84on Programmers: Stop Calling Yourselves Engineers

I normally just call myself a developer, although engineer is so widespread in the industry now I wouldn't mind that either. I can't look at someone with a straight face when they refer to themselves as a "software craftsman" though. I do think we need to reign in the job titles a little, many of them smack of one-upmanship.

lmorris84on Details of UK website visits 'to be stored for year'

My first reaction to this was that VPN usage will explode, but I'm not sure how a VPN server hosted in another country would work with their desire to effectively ban encryption.

I feel like the UK is slowly goose stepping its way to a Chinese style firewall.

Given the right's obsession with what I'm ordering on Amazon, and the left being essentially unelectable right now, I'm not really sure where to put my vote at the next election.

lmorris84on System shock: A story of a 25-year-old font coming back with a vengeance

Can someone who does more UI work than me explain why you would want to future proof css like this in the first place?

Even forgetting the undesired outcome and lack of testing, it's css...if browsers implement this feature, release it when the time comes. Not sure what's to be gained from adding something like this now. Feels like over thinking the issue a little.

lmorris84on Arsenal’s ‘secret’ signing: club buys £2m revolutionary data company

The problem with applying analytics to Martial is the limited dataset - he only made about 50 appearances in his career before joining United. It's looking a good bet so far, but it's definitely a punt.

lmorris84on Sensmove – open-sourced smart insole system

I'd love to see something like this available in running stores (if it's not already). I've done the treadmill + video camera test in the past, where someone looks at slow motion video of your footfall and determines whether you're under/over pronating etc.

It's always struck me as inexact though, based in a small part on the opinion of the person doing the test. It'd be far more intuitive showing some sort of heat map of a foot showing where the most pressure is.

lmorris84on Ask HN: Which recruiters do you like?

I'd be interested to see if anyone can recommend recruiters in London.

I've had nothing but bad experiences over the last few years so tend to ignore them now, but it'd be good to have a little list of decent ones.

lmorris84on Ask HN: Why is HN not mobile friendly yet?

Agreed. It's laid out in such a simple way it's easy to navigate and read.

I can fit 25 posts on the screen on iPhone 6 which is nice for browsing - ihackernews makes everything bigger and drops me down to 4/5.

Keep it the way it is if we're voting on it ;-)

lmorris84on Designing and Building Stockfighter, Our Programming Game

We solved this in a roughly similar way to a real stock exchange: the order book is persisted entirely in memory, in Go.

What happens if your process crashes? how do you rebuild the order book?

Great work btw guys, can't wait to get started!

lmorris84on How Netflix Reinvented HR (2014)

I love what Netflix are doing right now but I wouldn't ever work there. It sounds like the Hunger Games, with employees desperate to show they're "A" players.

I'd be terrified of having a couple of weeks as a "B+" player and being let go, then having to come up with a creative reason why I spent 4 months at Netflix when I went for my next interview.

The way they dealt with Laura also sounds like they were pretty disloyal to her. They want loyalty from their employees when it comes to "what's best for the company" but seem to give zero in return. How about training Laura up and helping her get her qualifications so she's then able to contribute as you'd like? easier to just show her the door.

This seems to do the rounds every few months as some sort of brag, but I think treating people like this is nothing to be proud about.

lmorris84on What does it take to make Google work at scale?

I believe Google Spanner obsesses over timestamps quite a lot to deliver distributed transactions with something called TrueTime [1].

[1] http://research.google.com/archive/spanner.html

lmorris84on Amazon Sign Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May

It'll be interesting to see how Amazon respond to the inevitable complaints when Clarkson does a "Clarkson". The BBC used to fall over themselves to apologise and give him another final warning - you'd have to assume this was discussed by both parties. Personally I hope Amazon just stay out of their way and let them get on with it.

lmorris84on New Horizons: Nasa spacecraft speeds past Pluto

Does anyone know how they colour correct these images?

I'm guessing there isn't a robotic arm holding up a test card in front of the camera :-)

lmorris84on How I do my computing

I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing that I give so little thought to many of these things.

I have a Spotify subscription, I'm watching the Football on Sky Go which uses Silverlight, I'm using a browser rather than emailing myself web pages.

A lot of this is just bizarre and I just don't see non-free software as inherently evil.

lmorris84on A command-line weather app built using Elixir

Should be called "temperature" rather than "weather". 21 degrees and...raining? sunny? any cloud?

Wouldn't call it beautiful - the ascii art is really distracting.

lmorris84on Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

Presumably many institutions would have other sources of pricing data too - I know this is the case in many sell-sides, not sure about everywhere else. I've worked in a few sell-sides and you see bloomberg screens all over the place, but usually alongside front office trading systems like Fidessa which are powered by direct feeds a lot of the time.

Probably a much bigger issue for everyone who doesn't have exchange connectivity, but you'd also hope they have some sort of fallback for exactly this scenario. I.e. reuters or something.

lmorris84on No Longer an Inspiration

I've often thought the same thing.

On the other side of this, according to the NMC[0] only 10.69% of Nurses in 2008 were men (UK). I've personally never seen anyone highlight this as a diversity issue. This is just a guess but I'd say men in general aren't as interested in nursing as women, or just don't consider it when deciding what to do with their careers.

I think specific instances of sexism or discrimination should be stamped out, but I don't think we should be "helping" anyone to a specific career - I'd rather credit everyone with a little intelligence and assume if they want to be a nurse or work in tech, then they will strive to do so without the artificial leg-up.

[0] http://www.nmc.org.uk/globalassets/siteDocuments/Statistical...

lmorris84on Ask HN: How do you do home security?

We have 4 internal cameras that use motion detection, and a house alarm that calls us if the motion sensors go off, or goes nuts if it detects movement at night.

We were broken into last year while we were asleep. We were only alerted after a few minutes when one of our Dogs freaked out and started barking. They ran away.

The cameras will be useful in terms of potentially identifying future burglars, but it's also more about feeling violated. They actually made off with very little considering what was just lying around but I'd love to know exactly what they were doing while they were inside. Pretty scary with a newborn sleeping upstairs and we were non the wiser.

lmorris84on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (April 2015)

Location: London, UK

  Remote: Yes

  Willing to relocate: No

  Technologies:

- Java - Spring (core, MVC), Guice, Javassist, Hibernate, Akka, JGroups, Maven, Gradle, JUnit, Netty, Jetty/Servlets, Apache Camel, groovy, Jasper reports, JMS

- Low latency performance work - i.e. using off-heap libraries such as chronicle, or high performance libraries such as disruptor. Also comfortable using JProfiler to diagnose performance and memory issues.

- Source control - Git, Perforce

- Continuous Integration - Jenkins, TeamCity

- Databases - MySQL, Oracle, NoSQL (FoundationDB)

- UNIX - CentOS/Ubuntu

- Some experience with C#, Python, Javascript (including NodeJS) & Bash scripting

  Résumé/CV: uk.linkedin.com/in/lmorris84/en
  Email: leemorris2006@gmail.com

lmorris84on My first experience at working from home

Agree with many of these points. I've worked from home for the last 3 years and I love it, but it definitely has it's downsides.

I think the worst for me is not being able to switch off at 5pm. Without the journey home to empty my mind a little, I do find myself thinking about work for the rest of the night.

lmorris84on How not to advertise for a job in London

This is either really good satire or really depressing.

It's like every HR buzzword has been shoved into a single requirements doc, and then some bizarre ones added for good measure (it's a bonus if you like to wear headphones apparently?)

I'm going to print this out and stick it on my wall - no matter how bad my professional life gets, I will be reminded at least I don't work here.

lmorris84on Britons: You Have 72 Hours to Stop the Snooper's Charter

Well no, I'm saying society has become hyper-sensitive to anyone expressing a view that isn't fitting with the current trend.

spew, bigoted, hateful - emotive words that illustrate my point exactly (as does the downvote). Even a discussion about a discussion about gay marriage is enough to incur wrath from some.

My real argument would be that in many cases rational discussions should be possible without social justice warriors trampling all over freedom of speech.