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travjones

672 karma · joined March 23, 2015

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travjones··on How Apple Is Organized for Innovation
woah, big tyme hater
travjones··on If you see the cops, start recording
Cops may ask you not to record and even threaten you with arrest for recording. Do not be intimidated; it is your right to record without obstructing.

If you find yourself in a situation where you might be detained and thereby unable to control interactions with your device, on iPhone you can disable TouchID and FaceID by holding one of the volume buttons and the sleep/wake button simultaneously for a few seconds. This will require you to enter your passcode the next time you want to unlock iPhone. Anyone have similar instructions for Android?

travjones··on A group of ex-NSA and Amazon engineers are building a ‘GitHub for data’
I think this is a great idea. Perhaps the "Github for data" copy could use some work, but the concept of obfuscating real data for use in building systems without the overhead or concern of operating on real customer data is valuable. Of course, the degree to which the obfuscated data represents real data is important to ensuring the systems built like this are robust, but this seems possible.
travjones··on Ask HN: Academics who switched to industry, what's your experience been like?
I graduated this past semester (Fall 2018), but I started working in industry a little over a year ago. I knew in my second/third year that academia wasn’t for me. However, grad school gave me a paycheck (albeit small) + tuition and time to develop other skills that I did not have after undergrad. Further I had an awesome PhD advisor and enjoyed my research.

My experience in grad school wasn’t bad and I think it only benefited me when transitioning to industry. At my job, I thoroughly enjoy my work and team (it’s important you find your fit). The compensation bump was also nice compared to a PhD student stipend.

travjones··on Apple Entrepreneur Camp
It seems that the HN community responds interestingly to topics of discrimination in tech (or, "lack of diversity"). It seems that there is a bit of denial in this community that there is indeed a discrimination issue. This is merely my observation, it could be skewed or entirely incorrect. Just keep in mind, that discrimination occurs whether you notice it or not. Further, you might be less likely to notice it if you are part of a group that suffers less from discriminatory practices.

Nonetheless, data and personal testimonies suggest that women and minorities have a harder time being interviewed and hired for positions at tech companies. Women and minority founders typically have a more difficult time securing funding and/or resources that will help them build a successful company. This isn't an issue that is unique to tech at all, rather this problem exists in organizations of all types.

travjones··on The High Cost of Not Doing Experiments (2015)
To some extent I agree with you that behavioral science/psychology needs a unifying theory. Attempts at this have been made and are still alive and well. For example, take a look at Radical Behaviorism [1]--the philosophy of science behind (applied) behavior analysis.

The overarching goal of behavior analysis is to treat the study of behavior as a natural science. That is, to identify orderly relations (i.e., laws) between behavior and the environment.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_behaviorism

travjones··on Bayesian analysis of ego-depletion studies favours null hypothesis
Interesting. There is actually a concept from behavior analysis called "behavioral momentum." [1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_momentum

travjones··on The FCC.gov Website Lets You Upload Malware Using Its Own Public API Key
... per megabyte.
travjones··on Multiple vulnerabilities in RubyGems
>> "a vulnerability in the gem installer that allowed a malicious gem to overwrite arbitrary files"

Yeeks. Not good.

(sudo) gem update --system ASAP

travjones··on Seven years of Go
Most meaningful applications will require the use of pointers. For example, unmarshalling json comes to mind.

I wouldn't "avoid the use of pointers" if I were you. Rather, use them, run into problems, fix the problems, and you'll learn what you need to know about pointers in Go. Given your background, you code. Figuring out pointers in Go will be trivial for you, especially when you learn in context (e.g., writing something you think is cool). You got this.

travjones··on Go 1.7.1 Released
I think it would produce a runtime error and return a stack trace. Someone more qualified than me should chime in though...
travjones··on Go 1.7 is released
The link works for me. :)
travjones··on Go 1.7 is released
Wow. That's impressive. Thanks for the example numbers, Matt!
travjones··on Go 1.7 is released
Great work, Go team!

Standout points in my opinion:

Overall performance improvements:

>> "We observed a 5–35% speedup across our benchmarks."

Decreased compile times and binary size:

>> "While these changes across the compiler toolchain are mostly invisible, users have observed a significant speedup in compile time and a reduction in binary size by as much as 20–30%."

Vendoring dependencies by default:

>> "...and in Go 1.7... the "vendor" behavior is always enabled"

Context package added to std lib:

>> "To make use of contexts within the standard library and to encourage more extensive use, the package has been moved from the x/net repository to the standard library as the context package."

travjones··on Test HN: Briggs & Myers' 16 personality types
Although it is fun to try to categorize ourselves into 16 personality types, what these categories really describe are behavior, which is dependent on way more than personality traits alone (e.g., what about context? What about reinforcement contingencies?). I'm not trying to be a hater, I just want people to take the test and read the questions with a critical eye. Behavioral science has come a long way scince this test was published over 60 years ago. Your personality type does not define you and does not determine how you behave in real world situations.
travjones··on MitM-ing Postgres
Excellent post. The post doesn't detail a problem with Postgres per se, rather the author uses plain language to explain Postgres' TLS connection mechanisms and how they are applied in AWS and Heroku RDBMS services.

When quickly iterating on software, I must admit I don't always consider configuring a root cert for the db. This nuanced look at Postgres' security options gives me much to consider for real production work.

tl;dr: configure a root cert for your Postgres db and use verify-full in your connection string.

travjones··on HTTPS for GitHub Pages
Cloudflare's free plan includes one-click SSL for custom domains. That's what I use for my github pages sites.
travjones··on WebGazer.js: Eye Tracking on the Browser
I think this is impressive work. My lab does eye tracking with really expensive equipment locally. It would be interesting to conduct visual/face processing studies through the web and include eye tracking data with this library. Granted the accuracy is low compared to specialized equipment and predictions are highly variable, other contributors could enhance its accuracy. I suspect that the variability in shape, size, and structure of human faces contributed greatly to the high variance/low resolution predictions issue. Maybe categorizing the user's face shape a priori would enhance predictions. That is, the library would first estimate the "type of face" and use those data to inform the eye tracking. This might not make sense--just a thought.
travjones··on We Only Hire the Best
DHH back at it again, dropping truth on the dev game. This was a timely post because my friend and I were just mocking the phrase "we only hire the best" this past weekend. If you like DHH's writing, check out one of his other recent posts: RECONSIDER [0].

I think pointing out some of the absurdities of software development culture and startups is fun. It's unfortunate that Startup L. Jackson hung up his hat :/.

0: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3972-reconsider

travjones··on Ask HN: What font do you use while programming?
Source Code Pro
travjones··on Why ContentEditable Is Terrible, Or: How the Medium Editor Works (2014)
The medium-editor project is pretty good. It's not a "true" clone of the medium editor, but it gets development up and going pretty quickly with a contentEditable editor. We used medium-editor for http://www.doctant.com.

As others have noted, it's really tough to compete with text editing/rich text applications (e.g., Sublime, Vim, Word, etc.) on the web. So far, the real Medium is the only app that I've used that isn't a pain to write in even though it's contentEditable.

Another promising project is draftjs from Facebook. Check it out: https://facebook.github.io/draft-js/.

travjones··on MALTO (Nike SB and Apple)
An inspiring and succinct documentary about the recovery of professional skateboarder, Sean Malto. Directed by Ty Evans. Sponsored by Nike SB and Apple.
travjones··on Now: realtime Node.js deployments
This looks very promising for the node community. I was wondering which cloud infrastructure service they went with to power this. According to the FAQ, they don't rely on just one. Very cool, and if implemented correctly, more resilient.

  Multi-cloud.
  We don't depend on a single specific cloud provider, but abstract them instead.
P.S. Is the markdown parsing broken on the FAQ? Or is that part of the look they're going for?
travjones··on The Trouble with CloudFlare
Original Cloudflare blog post that this is a response to: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-trouble-with-tor/
travjones··on Microsoft Cognitive Services
I guess it's kind of a semantic argument. I stand corrected. It seems the culture accepts "cognitive" in AI according to the wikipedia link you provided. Although, I question the degree to which the use of "cognitive" in marketing materials contributed to this acceptance.

On the topic of "processing," it's very difficult (sometimes impossible) to know what humans or nonhumans are doing covertly when they "process" stimuli. Thus, I'm not sure how you can determine that "they [animals] categorize differently than us."

A dog that is trained to sit when his owner says, "sit" must be "processing human language" when the dog sits. Right? I know this is an oversimplified example, but I'm just making a point that calling things "cognitive" and referring to "processing" doesn't help explain what is really happening. Sometimes these terms obscure a description/explanation. Skinner [0] makes this point a lot better than me.

[0]: http://carboneclinic.com/portal/conferences/files/IESCUM%20D...

travjones··on Microsoft Cognitive Services
Oops, I forgot to add them at the end--updated. Thanks.
travjones··on Microsoft Cognitive Services
I disagree. Basic research in behavior analysis has shown that nonhuman animals can perform visual (and other sensory modalities) discrimination and categorization among a number of trained and untrained stimuli ([0] and [1] are just two examples). I don't think these APIs do anything that is uniquely human or "cognitive." Nonetheless, this API still has enormous value for developers and users. I'm not discounting that.

UPDATE:

0: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1334394/pdf/jeab...

1: http://kops.uni-konstanz.de/bitstream/handle/123456789/20501...

travjones··on Microsoft Cognitive Services
Maybe this is nit-picky, but the use of "Cognitive" in the name seems odd. This service relies on applied maths (e.g., machine learning), not "cognition." I guess it was a marketing decision?
travjones··on One Year on HN
Author here--feel free to leave feedback or comment.
travjones··on Microsoft and Canonical partner to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10
I agree. I use a VM for Windows as well. It's probably safer to keep Windows sandboxed away in a VM. I know this doesn't work well for everyone, but any app I use in Windows is not that resource-intensive. I haven't tried WINE recently, but due to headaches years ago, I tend to avoid it and just fire up the VM.
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