Recent submissions

Comment · 6 years ago
Reminds me of the viral video where a dad asks him children to instruct him on how to make a peanut butter sandwich. If they were vague, he would exploit any ambiguity in the instructions against them - like "rub the knife on the bread" before it had any peanut butter on it :)

The military knows how to do this - and has a strong reason to. If your documentation cannot survive the death or resignation of the man, team or department that wrote it, you can't build generational knowledge. Look up the mil spec for chocolate cake (skips my mind where it is in my library) for example.

Comment · 6 years ago
+1 for wrangjangling.
Comment · 6 years ago
This is the second engineer I respect leaving Mozilla, not through their own choice.

I'm hoping I'm wrong, but this is possibly the point of no return for them.

Comment · 6 years ago
You know the Nazis had side projects that they made the Jews do.

(Please get the reference or this just sounds weird out of context)

Comment · 6 years ago
Great to see another Keralite on here!

5G will not make this better. The problem for your (our) part of the world is coverage, and that needs to be dealt with using more cell towers. A 5g transition will possibly compound this problem, by needing more towers for the same coverage area, and by making those towers and the infrastructure for data transport to them more expensive.

IMHO 5G is a great idea for cities, ideally mini building-as-a-city size projects, where you can provide coverage to a lot of people really fast. But for penetrating and providing reliable coverage for wider areas, 5g isn't the right thing. Hopefully the next iteration works towards that.

It's also been interesting to see Kerala change over the last decade - I see things change as snapshots everytime I'm there, so I feel it more keenly. Speeds are a lot faster when they're available, but tower-to-tower and carrier-to-carrier handover is still a massive problem. Part of it's hardware, with the signal just not reaching you. The other part is still software, where some towers just won't let you go, or refuse to upgrade you. I've sat next to people who were getting 4g on the same carrier, same phone, while I was getting 3g and had to restart.

Comment · 6 years ago
Same problem - and it's a shame, the article seems well written and decently insightful - still couldn't finish it.
Comment · 6 years ago
Scrolled to the article, finished reading, looked at the URL and wondered if insurers had gotten a lot more serious with their tech writing :)

Honestly though, thanks for this. I had wandered into Firebase a number of times, and always found hydrant not ball. After reading through and using it for a bit, the same problems you mentioned (why is 1MB the limit? Why isn't that abstracted away with gracefully degrading performance?) ran fast and ran far.

Did not know there was a better one. Would you say it's worth building on, still? Or is it at risk of cancellation by the Cube?

Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
How do you have case-insensitive passwords? Does it all get smooshed to lowercase before it's salted and hashed?
Comment · 6 years ago
Looking forward to it!
Comment · 6 years ago
Postico is amazing. I recently moved out of MacOS, and I can honestly say that it's the only tool that keeps making me want to move back. pgAdmin is a right pain.
Comment · 6 years ago
Thank you! I was halfway to building JSON escaping as a tool for myself. I'm working with AWS SES templates at the moment, and the manual steps to - validate handlebars, inline CSS, escape JSON, upload and then see what failed is killing me.
Comment · 6 years ago
Honestly the first and sometimes last step is to just not be afraid to break things.

If the author had been as afraid as me of reverse biasing the circuit, he might not have gotten started. Try things, and if something breaks there's still something you can learn from that behavior.

Comment · 6 years ago
I was just about to comment with the suggestion of adding a low pass filter for nyquist transformation, but reddit beat me to it!

Still amazing that it's a self-contained audio device, no actual addressing or protocol needed. It would be interesting if (as the author thinks) these were custom ASICs with built in songs from the factory, or some combination of EEPROM and decoder/driver chip. Does anyone remember what they sold for way back?

Comment · 6 years ago
I'm glad that logic programming isn't completely dead. I think once gradient descent has filled it's niches well and the AI summer quietens a little, we might see a return to knowledge engines and decision trees as a useful complement (if not a supplement) to solving the class of problems not well served by neural nets.

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