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930 karma · joined March 28, 2008

https://github.com/erik-megarad
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subwindow··on DNS-over-HTTPS Policy Requirements for Resolvers
This has negative implications for security. For instance, one reason why DNS resolvers might block or modify requests is to blacklist domains used for malware operation (botnet C&C domains). Other things like DNS sinkholing and poisoning are also frequently used as tools to disrupt malware communication.

In addition, collection and analysis of below-the-recursive DNS traffic is one of the primary ways in which security researchers discover the infrastructure of botnet networks.

Overall DoH is probably a net positive, but I don't see downsides like this being discussed.

subwindow··on When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
Why would you _want_ 10 acres? What are you going to do with all of that space?

I like walking to the grocery store (or bar, or restaurants, etc). I like biking to work. I live within walking distance of literally 6 parks, so it's not like I'm starved for green or open space.

I don't understand your point of view to the exact same degree that you don't understand mine.

subwindow··on When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
I have, and instead took the job for almost half that at a startup. It's not that tough of a decision if you properly weigh the quality of your time.

Keep in mind that you spend roughly half of your waking hours at work. It's important to do what you love during that time. I'm personally not a fan of spending my life to make tiny increases in some ad placement algorithm.

subwindow··on When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
If you're asking questions related to "raw algorithmic skill" you're filtering for people who either: 1) Have had a computer science education and happen to remember the algorithm at hand. This is also a function of recency so senior engineers are less likely to remember any given algorithm. 2) Study algorithms so they can do well at job interviews.

Neither one is something you want to be selecting for. Some of the best engineers I've worked with haven't had a proper CS education. I've known extremely strong engineers with Neuroscience, Mathematics, Physics and Public Policy degrees. I've got a business degree.

Unless you're working in certain extremely hard (and extremely rare) areas you do _not_ need to filter for algorithmic skill. Most ML doesn't count. Neither does Data Science. In 99% of engineering jobs it's more important to be diligent, rigorous, and organized. (Of course, filtering for those is another issue altogether)

subwindow··on PostgreSQL Query Optimization
Postgres offers a variety of session-based tunings for their genetic query optimizer. See items such as geqo_effort. Note that postgres caches query plans, so the query planning cost for a well-constructed query will only be paid once(ish).

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/runtime-config-que...

subwindow··on A negative captcha
I tried to be pretty explicit about that in the README. However, the project is now 5 years old and I have yet to hear of a single case where this approach has failed to weed out the vast majority of spam submissions.
subwindow··on A negative captcha
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your post, but that's exactly what this does.
subwindow··on Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?
Excellent insight, Mr. "Account Created 66 Days Ago".

Reading HN is not the be-all-end-all of technical knowledge. In fact, at a certain point it most definitely becomes negatively correlated with productivity (and subsequently value/salary).

subwindow··on Fixing the computer guy posture [pdf]
This all looks unnecessarily complicated. I had really bad posture for most of my life and I fixed it with two things: deadlifts and cable rows. After the major muscular weaknesses are corrected (and those two exercises will correct them), it's just a matter of habit correction- stand while you work, walk with your stomach tight and shoulders back, don't let yourself slouch when you sit, etc.

This ain't rocket science. You don't need to spend an hour a day with 10 different exercises. You can fix the muscular weaknesses in 30 minutes, once a week.

subwindow··on Is Sugar the Next Tobacco?
Why was this article suddenly de-ranked? It was on the front page, and literally 10 seconds later it is on page 3. Is there some kind of rule that this article violated? Who makes this decision? Why is there not any transparency on if an article is de-ranked and why?
subwindow··on Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie (2011)
I'm 29
subwindow··on Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie (2011)
Individual caliper readings have a pretty high margin of error- I've noticed up to 3% swings from week to week. But when the readings are done regularly and applied as a trend, it's pretty clear.

I've also changed my diet significantly- I eat way more protein and fat and almost no carbohydrates. I think that has as much to do with my fat loss as the exercise.

subwindow··on Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie (2011)
It's 40 pounds of muscle, give or take (at most) a couple of pounds of increased bone mass. I take weekly caliper-based readings of body fat percentage, which has fallen by over 10% in the last 6 months. Overall I've gained 20 pounds while losing 20 pounds of fat.
subwindow··on Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie (2011)
I read this article around the time it was first published, and it has changed my life. I know it sounds corny and cliched, but it's true. This article was the first seed in my head that I needed to change the way I was doing things.

It took me about 18 months after reading it to actually buckle down and start lifting, but it's no doubt that the journey started here. I ended up reading "Starting Strength" and started up on the program. It's been about 6 months now and I'm stronger than I've ever been in my entire life- by a significant margin. I've gained 40 pounds of muscle. I feel confident, capable, and strong.

The only downside is that I cannot fit into regular clothes anymore- I have to buy clothes made for fat people and just deal with the extra room in the midsection. I also eat an incredible amount of food, which can get tiring and expensive (I eat $40 a week in steak alone). Overall, though, I'm thoroughly satisfied with the path that I'm on, and wish I had started years earlier.

subwindow··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2012)
Damballa is hiring in Atlanta, GA or possibly remote for the right candidate.

Damballa offers a line of security appliances for enterprises and ISP customers. The appliance identifies unknown and hidden threats long before traditional security solutions by monitoring network communications and doing a wealth of analysis and correlation on this data.

We're looking to hire multiple people for each of the following positions:

- UI/UX/Front-end engineer. Javascript (CoffeeScript), CSS, Rails. Designing and implementing customer interfaces. We have many challenges with distilling huge quantities of information down into digestible bites.

- Back-end engineer. C, Ruby. High-performance deep packet inspection and analysis.

- R&D Developer. Ruby, Clojure, C, Python, Java. Working with processing, storing and analyzing huge quantities of information using Hadoop, Couch and Cassandra.

- Also hiring for DevOps, Technical PM, Malware Researchers and more. Read about them at https://www.damballa.com/company/employment.php.

Email me if interested at epeterson@damballa.com. I'm an engineer, not a recruiter or HR person.

subwindow··on Ruby 2.0.0-preview2 released
Just a reminder that the spec for refinements continues to change radically: http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/4085

As far as I understand it the current spec is to have "using" be available only to main and only apply in the file scope. IMHO this makes the feature nearly useless.

subwindow··on Botnet Responsible for 18% of World’s Spam Knocked Offline
Some of them do, notably Zeus. It takes quite a bit of work to make a botnet take instructions in a peer to peer fashion, so only the most sophisticated pieces of malware offer that feature.
subwindow··on All Rockstars Went to Julliard
Amen. Almost.

I was in a startlingly similar position a few years ago- I graduated from Georgia State. I went there not because it was the best school, but because tuition was paid (HOPE scholarship) and the classes were offered at flexible times so I could work while going to school. I had to turn down an acceptance from Tech because of that.

While it hurt my career initially, I think the value of education is drastically diminished in just a few short years. By the time I was 25 what I'd accomplished professionally mattered far more than where I went to school. Sure, I was still in debt from school so starting a company is difficult, but open source contributions and side projects are a signifcant part of my "resume" and far outweigh my schooling.

subwindow··on Wunderground.com sold to The Weather Channel Companies
It's pretty good. Last time I looked (3-4 years ago), the hard part was getting decent radar data/images.
subwindow··on Medical devices: A ticking time-bomb
I wrote software for medical devices for 3 years. Saying 'just use NTP' is all well and good, except that getting Internet access inside of a hospital is usually impossible. So of course we offered a configurable setting so that they could use an internal or firewall-allowed server. I think one hospital took advantage of that setting. Everybody else was just wrong.
subwindow··on A review of RubyMotion
The real benefit with Ruby is the creation of DSLs that make working with these UI elements much easier.

It's only a matter of time before someone creates a DSL that looks something like:

  window = screen.main.new_window(
    frame: true,
    key: true,
    visible: true
  )
 
Or something like that. I'm not an iOS developer, so I'm not really sure what parts of the insanely-verbose method calls are actually necessary.

(As an aside, I have Vim rigged up to do autocompletion with Ruby. I'm sure it would work with these Cocoa libraries as well)

subwindow··on The demise of the low level Programmer.
I don't think that knowledge of low-level systems programming is ever going away. The order in which we learn it is merely changing. In the past, everyone had to understand the absolute basics first because the higher level abstractions were very leaky. Over time the abstractions have gotten better, performance has become less of a problem for most cases, and low-level systems are no longer something everybody needs to know in order to get by at the higher layers of abstraction.

However, that doesn't mean that people aren't learning it anymore. They're just starting with a broad set of high-level knowledge and drilling down into the parts that are important to them. For instance, recently I've been toying with compact string representations of big integers (using bit shifting: how topical).

The end result is that you end up with developers who have broad knowledge of the higher layers of abstraction but incomplete and specialized knowledge of the lower layers. That seems perfect to me.

subwindow··on Did everybody see what just happened? The pendulum has swung.
It's true that a YC company is more likely to succeed, but it still seems wrong to use someone else's filter instead of your own. Maybe this is just a result of the high competition to fund YC companies- they simply don't have time to use their own filters for this prefiltered subset. I'd argue that it probably won't be in their best interest to do this in the long run, but then again I'm not an investor.
subwindow··on Did everybody see what just happened? The pendulum has swung.
This seems a little crazy. I think it should be hard for a company to raise money. Bad things always seem to happen when the money chases the startup. Frequently when money is hard to come by, the bad startups die early and everyone is better for it.

Maybe that's just because I've tried several times and failed (3-6 years ago), and I'm being a grumpy old dude who thinks it should be this hard for everybody. But I'm not even that old (28) or that grumpy. I just have the wisdom of hindsight to know that my ideas and execution weren't that good, and it would've, ultimately, been a bad thing if they had gotten funding.

subwindow··on 60 minutes: Is sugar toxic?
Don't give cocaine a bad name by comparing it to sugar.
subwindow··on OSX For Hackers
Moom is great. Having to use a pointing device to manipulate windows is silly. It kind of sucks to pay $5 to get features that really should be part of the OS, but the end result is good.

Shortcuts that I can't live without: Cmd+Shift+Up = Maximize. Cmd+Shift+Left = Move to Left Display (my big monitor). Cmd+Shift+Right = Move to Right Display (my laptop monitor). Cmd+Shift+PgUp/PgDown = Move to top/bottom of screen. Etc, etc.

subwindow··on Why You Should Be Excited About Garbage Collection in Ruby 2.0
Not really excited. Sorry. To me this is an incremental improvement to a method of GC that is just not going to cut it.

Rubinius uses Generational GC. There are definitely some parts of Rubinius that are (currently) slower than MRI, but memory management stands to be one of places where Rubinius will demolish MRI in the long-run.

JRuby/JVM uses (from what I understand) a Generational-first hybrid GC. There's been so much work and analysis done on the JVM that there's no way in hell any mark and sweep GC is going to compete.

Honestly if MRI is going to remain competitive it needs to completely rethink the way it does GC.

subwindow··on Yammer CEO won't hire anyone from Yahoo who doesn't quit in next 60 days
It's not this particular issue. I don't care all that much about patents. It's mostly that Yahoo has been a zombie corporation for a long while and has key symptoms of not being able to foster creativity or innovation.

There may be interesting things going on inside Yahoo, but I'm not aware of them. Every single thing that I found interesting about Yahoo has withered or completely died in the last 5+ years.

subwindow··on Yammer CEO won't hire anyone from Yahoo who doesn't quit in next 60 days
I have no idea where you got the idea that I want people to be burned like charcoal. I'm absolutely not in favor of that. Work hours are the least important factor in why I wouldn't hire the theoretical employee you described. It's the lack of ambition- the lack of enthusiasm towards the field.

In a startup you can't have unambitious employees- regardless of how talented they are. You have to have people who challenge the way things are done or the company will grow stagnant and won't seize opportunities to pivot.

I think people should care. If you spend half of your waking life at work, you should be proud of what you do and the people you work with. Pride in your work is one of the single largest contributors to happiness (more so than family, but that is largely tangential to the point).

Quite frankly I don't think that most of the people left at Yahoo care. If they cared, or had ambition, or had enthusiasm towards the web, they would leave.

subwindow··on Yammer CEO won't hire anyone from Yahoo who doesn't quit in next 60 days
To be fair to MS, there's lots of interesting stuff going on there. I have a friend who's working on the .NET CLR, and it would be foolish to think that he's not working on extremely awesome stuff.

At the same time, I don't know of anything like that at all going on at Yahoo. And he doesn't go home at 5pm.

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