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jomkr

158 karma · joined January 2, 2017

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jomkr··on BBC Weather app bug suggests hurricane winds in UK
It's still showing hurricane force winds.

I guess they've decided it's better to show the correct forecast data + bad wind data than take down the page entirely.

jomkr··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2024)
Not looking but great to see Bristol represented!
jomkr··on Ask HN: Where to learn Big Tech engineering, without working at Big Tech?
I'm not affiliated with him in any way, but I quite like the tweets from http://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz

He has a book that I've not read, but could be worth getting https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/

FWIW I've worked at FAANG for 5+ years.

jomkr··on Ask HN: Suggestions for working effectively with junior devs?
Asking questions is helpful.

Knowing when it's fine to let them go with a 80% perfect plan

jomkr··on Inside Pornhub
At-least this persons email to jeff@amazon.com triggered a ? email.

https://independent.co.uk/money/amazon-underpaying-workers-e...

jomkr··on Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers
It doesn't, a bad manager (allegedly) did. Having said that, having say 50% fewer commits than your peers is probably a reason to dive-deeper...it could be a good thing, maybe you were unblocking tasks and writing docs, or tackling the thorny issues...but also could be you are less productive.
jomkr··on Ask HN: Which books made you the most money?
Kill Everyone: Advanced Strategies for No-Limit Hold Em Poker.

Never turned much of profit at the poker table, but the life-lessons in that book have been invaluable.

jomkr··on Ask HN: Ever worked with a service that can never be restarted?
I'm not sure that 55 months of up-time indicates it's more or less likely to go down in the next month, but I'd guess more likely.

Surely there are options, have you tried de-compiling the source from the binary?

>but the physical config was accidentally overwritten and there are no backups

Any old dev PCs lying around somewhere? It's worth reaching out to the old developers to see if they have a copy, in really old legacy systems it's fairly likely someone will have a copy somewhere.

jomkr··on Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?
At Amazon you literally can't get promoted to Senior Engineer (SDE3) without showing influence outside your team.
jomkr··on Test-driven development: A great idea hiding behind a terrible implementation?
Development is the ability to deliver/ship the things that increase your business metrics, consistently.

Sometimes the right thing to do is TDD, sometimes the right thing to do is to ssh into a production server and modify a Perl script.

jomkr··on Facebook, Instagram go down around the world in an apparent outage
Nothing worse then the page on Friday night, oh there goes my weekend.
jomkr··on Ask HN: How to get web development career on track from being homeless?
Do Facebook not use it?
jomkr··on Ask HN: What's your 'Why should i hire you?' response?
I would never ask a candidate this, and I'd never dignify it with a response.
jomkr··on Getting any Facebook user's friend list and partial payment card details
I work at one of the other Big4 and to be honest it's not that impressive. This kind of report would be a high severity ticket, the person on-call for the given team would get paged, and wouldn't stop working/escalating until it got fixed.

Obviously not all companies behave this way, but they should!

jomkr··on Ask HN: Why are we addicted to getting rich?
I have a desire to be free. I'm working towards never having to look at a fucking computer again. Hopefully by the time I'm 30, I'll have enough to do only need to work about three months year. The rest of the time I'm going to be surfing or rock climbing.
jomkr··on How We Bootstrapped Our SaaS Startup to Ramen Profitability
I may be in Madrid next week, fancy a drink/bouldering sesh? I'm a 25 year old Amazon SDE from the UK.
jomkr··on Almost half of tech workers worry about losing their jobs because of ageism
I'm 25 and got turned down by a start-up for being too old.
jomkr··on The High Price of the Nocebo Effect
I haven't read the article but Dr Ben Goldacre has written some great stuff on this. Incidentally he was the first person to get me engaged in science as a teenager, and I love his catchphrase: "I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That".

http://www.badscience.net/2009/11/all-bow-before-the-mighty-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1Q3jZw4FGs

jomkr··on Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies
We're in an industry ten years behind so we're just getting into Big Data. Obviously the issue that we can't write working normal software hasn't been addressed but we'll see how it goes. I'm actually relatively optimistic.
jomkr··on How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC
I'm that guy but instead of leaving I hung around, god knows why.

After three years, I'm interviewing and getting offers of about 60% salary increase.

From £32,200 -> £55,000.

jomkr··on How the Bitcoins Were Stolen from Mt. Gox [video]
He's essentially more of a brother to me, and yes it wasn't the nicest experience for anyone involved but he didn't lose his life-savings.
jomkr··on Ask HN: Which is the best laptop for programmers under budget?
Not OP but I'm in the market and need:

- Windows based as I do mostly .Net

- =< £500

jomkr··on How the Bitcoins Were Stolen from Mt. Gox [video]
I was in BTC from very early on. Ironically I didn't make much money but that's another story.

I'm shocked, absolutely shocked that the Magic The Gathering Online Exchange wasn't suitable dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars.

The signs were obvious that it was being run by amateurs for anyone that spend five minutes doing a google search.

When I heard a friend had deposited more money than he could afford to lose on MtGox, I immediately jumped in the car and drove 2 hours to his house. I convinced him, basically at the point of physical violence to take his BTC out of MtGox and store them in a wallet on his computer, encrypted and backed up on several cloud sites.

One month later MtGox was hacked. I received an apology and a very nice bottle of whiskey from my friend.

jomkr··on Ask HN: How to choose the right university subjects for a career in IT
It doesn't really matter too much, within reason. Do what you think sounds interesting.

Do internships.

Play sports/some form of physical activity to a relatively high level.

Start reading Cracking the Coding Interview now and do chapter a month, if you want to get a job at FB/GOOG etc after graduation.

jomkr··on Billionaire Brothers Want to Build a Cheaper Rival to Slack
IRC is by far and away my favorite method of communication. I'm only 25 so it's not because of a sense of nostalgia.

IRC in general is such an under-used resource. Everyone automatically goes to SO, which is fine for trivial problems. They don't realise they could go on IRC and get an answer from the actual dev team of whatever they are having issues with.

jomkr··on Kaspersky Lab Has Been Working with Russian Intelligence
I got drunk with one of their employees at a conference in London and he started loudly singing "The Internationale". It really annoyed the yanks, I found it quite funny.
jomkr··on What Goldman Is Telling Big Money Clients About Bitcoin
It was fairly big news in the UK when somebody announced he had thrown away a hard-drive containing 10,000 coins. He considered searching through the dump but didn't bother in the end.
jomkr··on How to find a remote job
I haven't made any money like this and it hasn't got me a job. I did put that disclaimer in the original comment.

I suspect the time would be better spent elsewhere, probably face-to-face networking if I had to choose one thing.

jomkr··on How to find a remote job
Here's what I do. Find employees using LinkedIn, find their GitHub profile and any projects they're doing that I find interesting. Create a good pull-request.

After it's accepted, I send a follow-up saying I'm looking for work and asking if they'd pass on my CV.

I only do PR for projects that interest me anyway, so it's not time-wasting as I'd do Open Source work anyway.

This approach hasn't actually got me a remote-job yet, but I think that's more down to my lack of interviewing technique.

jomkr··on Hacking Voting Machines at Defcon
Not in the UK you can't. All boxes are sealed until "the count" which only starts after the election has ended.
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