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johnpmayeron You Must Try, and then You Must Ask

This is great advice, and very difficult advice if you have a ego that dislikes not knowing the answers. It's also something that is doubly important for devops - don't let production issues sit idle because you're afraid to ask how to fix something! I know that I still struggle, but I'm getting better and am much better than when I started.

johnpmayeron The Government Shutdown on the Web

Also paramilitary purposes

johnpmayeron Sonus silentii fallacy

Also known as criticisms of the Law of Excluded Middle.

johnpmayeron Facebook first level interview for Linux admin position

I'm sure if you just said SIGCHLD you demonstrated the knowledge they were looking for. If you gave your extended answer, they would probably be additionally impressed.

johnpmayeron The Free Software Foundation is even more relevant now than before

> I also realize that free software is not a panacea and that closed source, commercial software is a necessary complement to the existence of a healthy ecosystem.

Necessary? Is that just because it pays salaries?

johnpmayeron What killed Blackberry? Employees started buying their own devices

I think that's a little unfair. Admins' responsibility to keep everything running, all the time, is their top priority. As an organization scales, it pays off greatly to enforce some homogeneity - especially as the ratio of non-technical users increases. Not everybody can manage their own browser/office suite/mail client, but they always need it to do their work.

If you want bleeding edge software across the organization, admins need to have enough extra free time to coordinate the rollout and get the training to support it. Recall the administrators "prime directive" - fix what's broken. If the admin team is swamped with tickets all the time, you'll be stuck with legacy stuff, because they don't have enough time to adapt.

We have a joke at work that new stuff gets done during our "infinite amount of free time".

johnpmayeron CoreOS: Boot on Bare Metal with PXE

Bare metal is a common term used to describe running directly on the hardware. Such as a non-virtualized operating system, or a program running without an operating system.

Or yeah, we could just downmod everybody.

johnpmayeron Writing an Nginx authentication module in Lua and Go

Maybe you could instantiate every string in a global radix tree?

johnpmayeron What People Like About the Plan 9 OS

So that's what an operating system is!

Tanenbaum considers it an extended machine and a resource manager [MOS 1.1]. So I think that calling something an OS even though it's not on the bare metal is still cromulent.

johnpmayeron Mesh Networks

I think you'd need to add the following constraints.

- Non-compromised endpoint hardware - In-person public key exchange - Onion routing

johnpmayeron Myth: Select * is Bad

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/MetaHDBC

Does exactly that. Runs your SQL against the database at compile time to get type information, which it injects into the program AST.

johnpmayeron Use two-factor authentication for Persona with your own domain

This looks really cool, but I'd prefer a personal tier option that I can host myself - this is auth after all.

johnpmayeron How Flow-Based Programming Could Save The Sanity Of Web Developers

Elm could do this, and it would also benefit from a graph editor that knew about the types

johnpmayeron Docker 0.6: Events API, registry improvements, expert mode, security updates.

It's worth pointing out that there's now a digitalocean pre-configured image with Docker.

johnpmayeron Intern’s death puts banking culture under microscope

Not every STEM major can write a quality, detailed, qualitative analysis, with proper jargon.

johnpmayeron EVA 23: Exploring the frontier

The ability to think quickly during a crisis seems to be this universal, superhuman trait of astronauts. It's why the kid in me will always see them as heroes and an inspiration.

johnpmayeron Reshaping New York

This shouldn't be down voted. It's significant that it's not "Mayor Bloomberg". "Title Lastname" is the format that it used to refer to candidates.

johnpmayeron Docker interactive tutorial

Honestly, playing with this tutorial for 5 minutes answered that question for me.

johnpmayeron JavaScript right on the hardware

Moreover, not everybody working with hardware needs to or should be dealing with low-level details.

johnpmayeron The Belt CPU Architecture

Very interesting that the architecture has no condition codes, or any global state for that matter. Also, that the belts are logical, in that there really isn't a chunk of memory where the belt lives, but the members of a belt live where they live and know "which belt" they belong to and "where on that belt" they are.

Too bad they can't release their emulators/simulators, but I sympathize with their desire to be first-to-file to protect what sounds like years of work.

johnpmayeron Hyperloop lets you travel on a resonant acoustic wave?

(experienced body boarder/body surfer, novice actual surfer ;-)

I think the point is that, regardless of which wave you decide to catch, whether it be the first or second one, at some point to need to sync-up. If you miss the first one, then you still have to speed up or you're going to miss the second one too.

There's definitely an optimal timing that takes the minimum amount of energy to accelerate and synchronize with the "sweet spot" of the wave; beginners need to paddle early and paddle hard, whereas an expert has a better feel for it and will exploit his or her experience with the timing to expend less effort catching a wave.

When you surf, paddling up to speed and the timing will make or break catching a particular wave - which is very important is the "good waves" are rarer. With an acoustic loop, it's may be more predictable, but you still probably want to get it right the first time, while you're still in the main accelerator section of the tube.

johnpmayeron Math, Science Popular Until Students Realize They’re Hard

I was only responding to the "GPA matters for nobody after a few years" comment, by demonstrating that for a select subset of university students (pre-med) it's simply not true.

johnpmayeron Math, Science Popular Until Students Realize They’re Hard

> Does anybody care about GPA after the first job?

If you're trying to get into medical school, that's not really a fair question. Your college GPA directly affects your med school prospects, which greatly affects your residency prospects, and in turn your lifetime career earnings. If you're getting B's in level 1 & 2 physics and chemistry, you're not getting into Harvard.

johnpmayeron Make DuckDuckGo your Chrome default search engine

Part of me thinks those are cool, but the rest of my shouts "why should I have to do that?!".

johnpmayeron Warrant Canary

Say I'm a hosting company. I doubt that the authorities can compel me to lie to my customers in the form of not terminating the canary. Moreover, I think I have every right to choose to terminate any running process on my machine. The implications of the "canary understanding" between me and my customer should have no bearing on those fundamental facts.

johnpmayeron How Engineers Are Building a New Railroad Under New York City

I think there's a fair amount of "sorry that we were the first adopters, and sorry but it would ruin commuters to make these upgrades all at once"

johnpmayeron JavaScript is Web Assembly Language and that's OK.

> We need a real bytecode for the web, we need it to be standardised and we need to push for browsers to support it.

We had one. It was called Java. Actually, we still have it, but it just has such a bad reputation now; users don't trust it because of "security" and developers don't trust it because of "public static cruft()" and "Oracle".

But it is still quite capable. Did anyone else first play minecraft in a web applet? It worked incredibly well for me. So I argue that we do have a viable bytecode, we're just ignoring it.

johnpmayeron Bright Explosion on the Moon

Starting from rest at a distance infinity, any object (regardless of it's own mass) necessarily undergoes a minimum increase in kinetic energy due to the gravitational potential of the mass of the target object (in this case the Earth, which has a known mass and so this is calculable). So I think the assumption is that the object isn't propelling itself away from the earth, and the object hasn't experienced any major competing gravitational forces inside the radius of the Moon's orbit.

Also, 11km/s isn't terribly quick on the celestial scale, I'd imagine.

johnpmayeron Grimwire: A RESTful Browser OS that does Peer-to-peer over WebRTC

> The backend is written on NodeJS and Redis, and will include Web APIs for users, permissions, email, and application storage with the remoteStorage protocol.

Is grimserver a hard dependency, or just an implementation of some example APIs? Could one disconnect the client and depend on different providers for auth, email, chat, etc.?

johnpmayeron How zsh is more useful than bash

I much prefer ksh myself, in particular for scripting. Fun fact about how bash is broken:

  export a=0
  cat $file | while read line
  do
    a=$(expr $a + 1)
  done

Bash will fork the while loop as a separate process, inheriting (copying) its own environment, and the variable will only update locally, not in the parent process.