HN user

jmccree

436 karma

http://jmccree.com

Posts0
Comments240
View on HN
No posts found.

Close in CAS means close in proximity to friendly troops. Before smart munitions this required the aircraft to also be in close proximity to hit the enemy force without hitting friendlies. Now an orbiting bomber or drone can deliver a targeted strike while flying high in the sky miles away.

I love the old warthog, but in the days of drones, I can't see much of a use anymore.

It seems like you are invoking the No true Scotsman fallacy. There's a lot of companies that do "Agile" and "Scrum" that are exactly like he describes. When Feature X has to be done this sprint because it's already been sold to (Board|Client|Investors|Other Dept), there's not much time to think about "How?", it's more like "If I'm going to be working Sat and Sun again?".

I'm sure there are organizations out there where Agile/Scrum is working fantastic for them in practice, and developers are happy with their work and career prospects. I just have yet to encounter one in the wild personally.

As at least one study and plenty of anecdata has shown, music helps a lot of people with their work performance. The ROI on that $10/mo should be pretty good for your average developer. Spotify radio and playlists make easy to discover new music or listen to music you like without spending any time curating playlists etc.

If you think of the time spent to find and buy 720 songs, at just one minute each, that's 12 hours spent just buying songs. The value of spotify is wasting no time or money on acquiring or managing a music library.

ThinkPads are incredibly easy and quick to repair, most repairs could be done quicker than you could drive/transit to the nearest hardware repair shop. There are access panels for hard drive, memory, etc labeled with icons next to the screw holes. Not to mention if you have kids, perfect time to teach them a little about hardware.

Except the macbook pro ergonomics are horrible. After an hour or two of use my wrists looked like I had been trying to cut my wrists with a plastic knife all day. Apple rounds every single corner/edge on the laptop except the one you're most likely to come in contact with. Thinkpads round that corner aggressively so you're not likely to even come in contact with it.

It's my pet theory that it's only a small percent of the population that faces issues with the macbook pro hurting their wrists due to a ratio of (long)arm length to (short)torso length. Never the less the common response is to blame the users (and google macbook pro wrists to see they are many), instead of realizing people don't always get to work in a perfect ergonomic setup.

As I've gotten older and have less free time and there's so much more content out there, one practice I've come to accept is reading the wikipedia page and plot synopsis for a book/movie before starting watching something. In the same way I read HN comments before deciding whether to read the original article often times. Before wikipedia I would read the last chapters of books first.

I'm more worried about my time being spoiled than the plot being spoiled, and after all a good movie/book is even better the 2nd time around. This has allowed me to commit to watching or reading things I never would have before as I'd get bored (read: worried this is a waste of my time) 10 minutes into a slow moving movie.

There's something awesome about the way you really get "into the universe" when you spend hours reading a book or binge watching a tv show. All of the events and characters are fresh in your brain and you see the connections you may have missed if there was a night's sleep and a day's work in between.

I can't imagine an all remote team that relies on email. I've worked remote my entire career and chat is the lifeblood of a remote company. In essence, the chat server becomes the virtual office. When people sign on in the morning, you know they are there. People say bye before signing off (leaving the office). There's a #watercooler channel for people to have idle chitchat. A project manager can ask a question in the project chat room just as they would the teams open office room, etc.

Believe it or not, I've found sitting at the bar at restaurants/pubs to be on of the best places to work when you're feeling that need for socialization. You don't have to consume any alcohol, just go for lunch, and a lot of places actually have coffee with free refills (tip your bartender well). This may vary depending on your city, but in Atlanta it's not uncommon to see 3-4 people on laptops at the bar working during the time between lunch and dinner rushes (1pm-4pmish) when restaurants are mostly quiet.

The first option could be legitimately said by someone who doesn't want to talk or be subpoenaed. It's the difference in occupy style protesters saying "They'll have to come arrest us." and "Please come arrest us.". Though in both scenarios there may be some that get the desired end result, the first option places the responsibility for the end result on the third party.

Of course you should never ask to be subpoenaed. You inform the Plaintiff that "I would never would willingly testify about all the illegal things I saw at former employer, you'd have to subpoena me to get me to talk!". You can then answer that question honestly with "No, I told them I'd never talk, but they subpoenaed me and forced me to."

Chick-fil-a is known for this. One of my family members called the store to let them know they left out one sandwich on their order. The store manger drove immediately to them with 2 free sandwiches and some coupons. That's just insanely good service for fast food.

How Google Hires 11 years ago

Pick an open source project that interests you, preferably one you personally use, and become active in their community. The issue/bug tracker of almost any open source project has a list of feature requests and bugs to work on. You get to add open source contributor to your resume, and become a "subject matter expert" by virtue of that.

Verizon (and ATT, and CenturyLink) are Tier 1 transit networks for peering operations. If Level3s peering traffic ratio are off balanced by netflix's traffic, I see no reason why Verizon shouldn't do the exact thing Level3 did to Cogent back in the day. Also, keep in mind Netflix is using Level3's CDN service, so you have a scenario on the flipside where Level3 has become a transit network and ContentProvider also.

The issue is really that the idea of transit providers in general are becoming obsolete. So much fiber was laid, with DWDM and further subdivision abilities, it costs comparatively nothing to get a nationwide network these days. That was Cogent's entire business model, buy cheap fiber, sell transit for almost nothing to content providers, practically (in some cases, actually) give away transit to ISPs/businesses to keep their traffic ratios as balanced as possible.

Now, we're in a situation where it's not technically or financially hard to have a presence in every regional peering point. The major content providers don't need transit providers (or in the case of Level3's CDN, are already provider) except out of convenience and their access to settlement free peering. The major ISPs have no need for transit providers(or are already providers), as all the content providers wants to peer with them, and most of them have nationwide networks to do so. (see comcast: http://business.comcast.com/images/default-source/about-us/t... )

Unregulated peering has lead to the cost of transit plummeting to almost nothing. ( http://drpeering.net/white-papers/Internet-Transit-Pricing-H... ) We've just hit an interesting point where 2 contentproviders (Netflix and Youtube) are half of all internet traffic, and the eyeball networks are all basically tier 1 transit providers. There's basically unlimited choice for transit providers for ContentProviders, but each eyeball only has 1-3 ISPs to choose from.

My thoughts are rather than attempting to regulate transit/peering, regulate that last mile network and let people choose their own transit provider. Back in the DSL days, I used a local ISP that provided cheaper/better service than our telco. If I could pay a flat $x/mo for 1gb connection to a transit provider of my choice, I'm sure Google or Level3 would offer cheap uncongested access.

Verizon acquired the Tier 1 transit network of UUNet/Worldcom. It has a huge transit/datacenter business. ATT(SBC+BellSouth) has Tier 1 transit network of the old ATT long distance. Centurylink has the old Qwest Tier 1 network. One of the things overlooked in the peering disputes is that many of the ISPs ended up merging/buying Tier 1 transit networks.

Netflix is one of the first ContentProviders to be pumping so much traffic that they will imbalance the peering traffic ratios of any almost any Tier 1 they buy transit/CDN from, except for probably Google, which ended up doing what Netflix is doing now: paid peering.

For an example of this, in GA last year a bill was passed that allowed people with weapons carry licenses (who have to be fingerprinted, background checked, etc.) to carry weapons into unsecured government buildings. Immediately local governments began complaining about now having to install metal detectors and have police officers to screen people for weapons before entering their buildings.

Local government officials said they didn't "feel safe" with the new law, even though by virtue of being an unsecured building, nothing prevented a person with illegal intentions from entering with a weapon before or after the law. The law just exposed the faulty thinking that a "no guns" sticker on the front door would keep bad guys out.

North Carolina has company police[1] that are required to go through the same state police academy training as all other officers. This seems to be one of the fairest models amongst the states for private police.

I first found out about this at the famous Biltmore Estate where they have their own company police dept. It made sense when explained that the estate is 8000+ acres and it could take 30+ mins for the nearest deputy to respond and find where they were needed. The company police are already on site and know the estate in and out.

In almost all states there are private police statues for rail roads, universities, FedEx[2], etc. Of course every government agency or authority wants it's own police force leading to things like FBI Police[3] or Georgia World Congress Center Authority Police[4].

It seems clear to me that any time you have a large private space, be it a mall, theme park, college campus, etc., there will be need for private police. What happens when there is no company police statute is that businesses hire off-duty local police, leading to things like the NYPD Paid Detail Unit[5].

It's far more worrying to me to have public police working off duty for private interests, than having private police who's jurisdiction are limited to their private property.

[1] http://www.ncdoj.gov/getdoc/cda6467e-77ce-4f5e-bb46-502e15c7... [2] http://www.semissourian.com/story/132255.html [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI_Police [4] http://www.gwcc.com/about/Safety.aspx [5] https://www.nycpba.org/archive/nydn/03/nydn-030810-ot.html

I was initially skeptical of Keybase, but I was happy to see the comments on HN of letting people use keybase without installing the CLI client were listened to. Seeing how many of my friends are on keybase now, that never had gpg setup before, I can't help but think it's filling a need that's otherwise unserved.

I searched that study and found no references to chat rooms. It's my theory that private offices and enthusiastic chat room use has the advantages of both.

I suspect there may be a generation gap in familiarness of asynchronous instant communication. The avg 18-24 year old sends ~100+ txts a day, 45+ goes to 10-15. [1] People who've grown up up using txts, face book chat, IRC, AIM, etc. seem to see chat as a "default medium" for communication, where as those without that experience (not necessarily just an age thing, plenty of 30+ who spent decades on freenode etc) some times have a view of "being forced to use chat" instead of just knocking on someones door.

[1] http://www.pewinternet.org/2011/09/19/how-americans-use-text...

From a quick google image search, it appears that at least some EU checks also follow the format of putting the currency symbol before the numerical amount. It makes sense on the face of things that $200.00 is harder to alter than 200.00$ .