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jamesaguilar

7,468 karma · joined October 8, 2010

Staff software engineer at Google. I work on making infrastructure fast.

My views expressed here may not be representative of my employer's.

http://fb.me/james.aguilar

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jamesaguilar··on Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven
You know what, you're right. I saw a video of someone testing that a chip had been soldered on correctly with a multimeter, but he was testing for the lack of a connection. Testing for a connection would not be done this way.My bad.
jamesaguilar··on Five Popular Myths about C++: Postscript
There are a lot of objections to C++, but I've never seen any of the five he mentions. They sound more like strawmen to knock down than real objections by actual users or commentators critical of the language.
jamesaguilar··on Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven
> ever again

I don't understand this claim. They are still calling hot devices laptops today. Do you mean that at some point in the future they will stop, and then they will never again call these devices laptops?

jamesaguilar··on Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven
Right. And the reason why it keeps breaking? Well, the solder on the board might not have any flux left, so it might have trouble flowing properly. There could be a cold joint, etc.

If it fails again, one possible next step would be to grab a multimeter and test the resistance across each component on the board. If the resistance is infinite, that might be your problem component.

jamesaguilar··on Skiplagged sued by United and Orbitz
Thanks! I could not find the contract on JetBlue's site when I went looking last night. But here is the contract for American Airlines.

http://www.aa.com/i18n/customerService/customerCommitment/co...

As you can see, hidden city routing is prohibited, and they retain the right to assess the difference between the ticket you actually used and what you paid if you engage in the practice.

jamesaguilar··on “Selfie” Protections Among Hundreds of New California Laws
Paid by company according to http://blog.ogletreedeakins.com/faqs-on-californias-paid-sic...
jamesaguilar··on Skiplagged sued by United and Orbitz
The problem with analogies is that just because you can make two things sound similar does not mean they are.

The statement you made about airline tickets is normative, not descriptive. I'm curious about how things actually are, not how people on HN want them to be.

jamesaguilar··on Nashville police chief shares message, responds to questions
Presumably the police would maintain a minimal, unobtrusive monitoring presence and only gear up/deploy if violence began. This might delay response during a violent protest, but, in theory, would make a peaceful protest safer and might prevent it from turning violent. I don't know what to think about the proposal but it's not completely ridiculous.
jamesaguilar··on Nashville police chief shares message, responds to questions
> There are no boundaries to our "rights".

I propose you test this claim by one of the methods the grandparent suggested. The protest-by-occupying-a-random-person's-house idea seems like a good one to pick.

jamesaguilar··on Skiplagged sued by United and Orbitz
Reasonable . . . hrm. Hard to say. The surface area of duties and rights associated with an airline ticket in particular and airline travel in general are so vast that some level of clickwrap is unavoidable, not to mention the various laws that cover the industry.

Comparatively, the duties and rights regarding a physical good like a sandwich are fairly simple -- it behaves like most simple physical goods. You buy it, then you can do what you want with it. Airline tickets are unlike this in a variety of ways. Hidden city routing being prohibited would not, I feel, be qualitatively different than many of these other restrictions.

jamesaguilar··on Skiplagged sued by United and Orbitz
I wonder. Do you sign any agreement that prohibits hidden city routing when you buy the ticket? If so, on an ethical level, it's not the same as the sandwich buying scenario, where you are not signing any additional agreement.

I wonder what I would do if I were the airline. Obviously the simplest thing would be to suspend the return ticket, but I suppose that the return ticket would typically be booked on a different airline. Another option would be to collaborate with other airlines to suspend return tickets, but I suppose that would be collusion and wouldn't fly with regulators. You could also try a prisoner's dilemma-y thing where future sales to a customer that has hidden city-routed in the past are marked up to fix the difference. If all airlines did this then only infrequent flyers would be able to hidden-city route. But if any airline refuses to participate, it might be tough for the business of the airlines that engaged in this practice.

Tough situation for the airlines. Not that I have too much sympathy, but I do take it into perspective that travelling is historically extremely cheap. It's a great time to be a flyer.

jamesaguilar··on An Extortionist Has Been Making Life Hell for Bitcoin’s Earliest Adopters
It appeared that you were trying to minimize taking out a hit on someone because, to paraphrase, "the police started it." If that isn't what you were doing, my bad, but if it was, then my comment was as designed.
jamesaguilar··on An Extortionist Has Been Making Life Hell for Bitcoin’s Earliest Adopters
No enforcement of any law is completely non-violent. That doesn't in any way excuse or justify killing or trying to kill to avoid enforcement.
jamesaguilar··on An Extortionist Has Been Making Life Hell for Bitcoin’s Earliest Adopters
I'm afraid that "the police were about to find out about me through this guy" does not count as a reasonable excuse for murdering someone.
jamesaguilar··on An Extortionist Has Been Making Life Hell for Bitcoin’s Earliest Adopters
The court has to pretend that. We in the public can follow any decision rule we please, including maximum likelihood.
jamesaguilar··on The Bug Nobody Is Allowed to Understand
In reality, when this happens, the companies in question call each other up and fix it, generally speaking.
jamesaguilar··on Using the Plan9 Plumber Utility (2013)
This would be neat for linking to source locations in the terminal and in the console output of an IDE.
jamesaguilar··on Why is everyone so busy?
I am worried in the long run about automation, but it's true that labor participation right now is about the same relative to the number of retirees as it has always been. Unemployment is very low. The number of "discouraged" workers is 2x what it was before the recession, but we're only talking about a swing of 500k people -- less than half a percent of the labor force.

So, the robots/automation replacing jobs explanation doesn't really float for me right now. First, it's not clear that there's a phenomenon that needs to be explained at all. People have a feeling that there are fewer jobs, but that doesn't actually seem to be true. And, as you said, this has always been a go-to complaint. I'm sure it will be accurate someday, but it doesn't seem to be today.

jamesaguilar··on Why is everyone so busy?
Sometimes I meet people who feel obligated to work late because they're told to. Since I'm in the privileged position of never having been asked to do this, I can't fully know what my response would be. But I'd like to think at some point I'd simply tell my boss that I would not be working any more, and trust my daytime productivity to keep me my job.

In theory, the company would not take negative action as long as my productivity less cost to employ was positive. In fact, in an ideal world, you'd even continue to be promoted as needed to retain your services. But what would actually happen? I've never had the chance to run the test, and, surprisingly, I haven't been able to convince my friends to experiment with their careers either.

By the way, I upvoted you, but I also wanted to actually say "thanks" for these links. They are very interesting.

jamesaguilar··on “Warning: Do Not use my mirrors/services until I have reviewed the situation”
Re: his edit, thank you for your compliment, but I just think there are more constructive ways to approach most conversations than accusing people of talking out of their ass, or calling them losers. :( If you truly were banned for arguing with someone important, that's unfortunate, but I saw two good reasons to ban you in your most recent three comments. Maybe I just caught you on a bad day.
jamesaguilar··on Days of the year when Americans are most drunk, visualized
People drinking more in the winter should surprise no one. Bad weather displaces other pastimes, and people simultaneously feel more depressed because of the lack of sunlight.
jamesaguilar··on “Warning: Do Not use my mirrors/services until I have reviewed the situation”
With good reason, based on his posting history. It's pointless to warn someone like this that they are hell-banned. Any new account they make will suffer a similar fate within a small handful of posts.
jamesaguilar··on Facebook blocks Russian page supporting Navalny, Putin's biggest critic
On some level, that might be preferable because of the additional outrage it might generate.
jamesaguilar··on Autism link to air pollution raised
I would like to propose a new hypothesis. Autism rates are linked to the incidence of people non-ironically drinking fruit juices to cleanse themselves of "toxins."
jamesaguilar··on Theater Chains Decline to Show Sony’s ‘The Interview,’ Citing Threats
Likewise, the response will be muted the tenth time this plays out.
jamesaguilar··on Air Traffic Control Simulator
Don't you lose points for that? The tutorial says when planes pass too close, it hurts your score.
jamesaguilar··on Ask HN: How much screen time do you let your kids have?
This article contains a variety of citations about screen time[1]. And here's some stuff about the benefits of reading[2], from the reading-to angle. There's tons of stuff like this if you care to look in to it in more detail.

Nothing in here is definitive. I am not saying that negative effects of screen time are proven beyond the shadow of a doubt. Personally, what I care about is what's most likely to be true, so I can act on that for the sake of my son. I think it is more likely than not that >2 hours of screen time per day is a negative factor. I think it is more likely than not that reading is a positive factor. I'm not going to wait for something to be 99.99% proven before I act on the information.

[1]http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2014/08/28/343735856/kids-and-sc...

[2]http://www.parents.com/fun/entertainment/books/the-brainy-be...

jamesaguilar··on What Is Fatigue?
Huh. I wonder if I should put up a bunch of positive and encouraging signs and images in my home gym to exploit this effect.

Also, my lifting buddies and I often joke around with each other with certain phrases. Some of those, like yelling, "light weight" after a particularly tough set, seem to cut with the grain of this article. On the other hand, phrases like, "no pain no gain," or talking about "this heavy ass weight" (not that the weight I'm lifting is really that heavy) cut against. I wonder whether changing our terminology/"battle cries" would have a positive effect on the work we can accomplish.

Very interesting link. Thanks for posting, iKenshu.

jamesaguilar··on Ask HN: How much screen time do you let your kids have?
Difference is, reading of all kinds has positive effects on outcomes, whereas screen time has the opposite.
jamesaguilar··on Ask HN: How much screen time do you let your kids have?
My parents and most of my friends' parents limited our screen time when we were kids in the 90s. I wouldn't say we grew up with "free tech" in the sense that you seem to believe we did.
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