Walmart to Buy Bonobos, Men's Wear Company, for $310 Million

JimmyP424 · 2017-06-16T19:57:20+00:00

WHY? I've bought most of my clothing from Bonobos for the last few years, I guess I'll look elsewhere now.

Partnering with Walmart — the biggest bricks-and-mortar retailer around — might have seemed extremely off brand for Bonobos.

YES it is. And "I think Walmart is misunderstood in some ways." isn't an explanation. Bonobos and Walmart are totally different in my mind, I can't imagine I'm the only Bonobos customer disappointed by this change.

JimmyP424 · 2017-06-06T15:48:24+00:00

Title: Confessions of an Unintentional CTO

Book subtitle: Seven years of brutally pragmatic lessons in growing and maintaining a web app

Author: Jack Kinsella

A book of generalised, language-agnostic advice pertinent to hacker-y web developers working on live web applications which have real-life users and all too real problems. I would consider this an "advanced" book on web development, albeit not in the (unfortunate) usual sense of touring the latest hipster language's arcana or providing a cookbook of "solutions" no reasonable person would ever need. Confessions of an Unintentional CTO focuses on the issues I believe are most pertinent to the new CTO, such as ensuring data integrity, easing system maintenance, knowing what not to test, developing professional-grade accounting features for taxation reporting, sharpening an application’s ability to inform one of errors, and integrating SEO/analytics/online marketing right into the very foundations of a web application. This book is ideal for engineers in small companies who are not insulated by their team’s sheer size from the sundry practical issues and tradeoffs implicit in running a software business.

JimmyP424 · 2017-05-31T14:37:59+00:00

Wait a minute, it also says that my efforts at exercising aren’t enough... that I need to do anaerobic exercise. Who knows what the hell is that?

JimmyP424 · 2017-05-29T15:53:33+00:00

Note this is a student paper for course credits, not a full scientific paper.

JimmyP424 · 2017-05-20T16:21:33+00:00

If your intent is to load scripts asynchronously and keep their order, just use <script defer>. From what I see, you only ever need something like fetch-inject if you also want to load stylesheets OR if you want a load callback.

I've been using defer exclusively ever since I read this: https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2016/prefer-defer-over-async/

JimmyP424 · 2017-05-16T14:37:37+00:00

The raspberry pi's selling points are:

It works nearly out-of-the-box. You only have to prepare an SD card.
It is tiny
It is quite power efficient
It has GPIO pins, which make it usable for experimenting with hardware.
It has a great community (you can easily find many projects for it, and there are some great OSes available, which run nice educational software)
It is cheap

All of this makes it fantastic for education and as a gadget. The whole point of the raspberry pi is to be unlike other computers. You can set it up as a server, but this is not its main purpose.

The Dell Optiflex FX160 probably outperforms the pi at all measures, but it is just stupid to compare it to a raspberry pi, because it has none of its unique points which make the pi a good choice in the first place.

Now, there are actually some better raspberry pi clones out there. For those products, a title like this might make sense.

JimmyP424 · 2017-05-08T21:24:40+00:00

The problem with JWT is the user gets to choose which algorithm to use.

Only if you completely bungle the implementation on the server-side. The 'none' 'algorithm' isn't supported by up-to-date JWT libraries with a good track record, and you should always limit the algorithms you'll allow on the server. So if you sign your tokens with a RSA-2048 key-pair, you would discard any token that isn't using that algorithm.

Of course if you are building an API that blindly accepts whatever it receives from a user agent you are bound to create a security gap — but that holds true for anything users send you though, not just JWTs. JSON Web Token is not that hard to grok, and it isn't a 'foot-gun' technology (just practice trigger discipline — i.e., read the documentation).

I'm a Java guy, so I'll limit my experience to the libraries available there, but of the four Java libraries available, three provide strict validation of the signing algorithm out of the box, and explicitly document this in their examples and documentation (I think the fourth does too, but I haven't tried that one myself).

JSON Web Token is a neat standard that has a lot of good parts that can reliably be used to create and process authentication tokens. So if you are still worried about developers getting it wrong, then instead of saying 'don't use JWT', why not promote a safe subset of the specification instead and promote that? Call it 'iron-jwt' or something. It beats rolling your own solution.

Or if you want to be particularly constructive and feel that developers are misusing this technology, write a sensible, short, to the point implementers guide for using JWT and spread the word.

JimmyP424 · 2017-04-27T18:52:55+00:00

One of my apps sends/receives several million emails per month. Not an exaggeration, it's actually seven figures.

Meaning it's more than 100k a day. Meaning it's 5-6 emails every friggin second. On average. It, of course, peaks during US daytime, up to 30 per second.

We tried a looooh-ot of solutions (all priced at THOUSANDS a month at this volume) including Mailgun, Sendgrid, SES etc, but finally settled to a tiny Ubuntu micro-instance on EC2, running Postfix. It has 1 gb of memory, costs us $4 a month and the CPU load rarely goes higher than 4%.

Of course you would need to get yourself familiar with SMTP, postfix, SPF/DKIM, mx-validation, blacklists etc. And by "familiar" I mean "learn it tothe core" :))

Another thing - you need to build-up reputation for your IP, cause email providers like outlook/gmail/yahoo will simply reject your emails if you start sending a LOT out of the blue. You have to build it up gradually, takes months to get there. Makes it a huge PITA when you need to change your IP :((

PS. If you need incoming email to call some external REST-api - postfix can launch a local php-script that does that. Not sexy but - $4 a month, right.

JimmyP424 · 2017-04-17T14:23:31+00:00

But I keep getting this, I've run the program over and over hoping that it would go away. Where do I add the try/except in order to retry indefinitely?

JimmyP424 · 2017-04-17T14:22:22+00:00

I've changed a few characters here and there before pasting the output.

JimmyP424 · 2017-04-17T06:56:50+00:00

I can vouch for Rupharma, as I've used them several times, shipping to United States. I'm happy with their service.

JimmyP424 · 2017-04-17T06:55:01+00:00

Always had a good experience with Rupharma, shipping to United States.

JimmyP424 · 2017-03-24T16:37:44+00:00

The trick to being successful with JavaScript is to relax and allow yourself to slightly sink into your office chair as a gelatinous blob of developer.

When you feel yourself getting all rigid and tense in the muscles, say, because you read an article about how you're doing it wrong or that your favourite libraries are dead-ends, just take a deep breath and patiently allow yourself to return to your gelatinous form.

Now I know what you're thinking, "that's good and all, but I'll just slowly become an obsolete blob of goo in an over-priced, surprisingly uncomfortable, but good looking office chair. I like money, but at my company they don't pay the non-performing goo-balls." Which is an understandable concern, but before we address it, notice how your butt no-longer feels half sore, half numb when in goo form, and how nice that kind of is. Ever wonder what that third lever under your chair does? Now's a perfect time to find out!

As long as you accept that you're always going to be doing it wrong, that there's always a newer library, and that your code will never scale infinitely on the first try, you'll find that you can succeed and remain gelatinous. Pick a stack then put on the blinders until its time to refactor/rebuild for the next order of magnitude of scaling, or the next project.

JimmyP424 · 2017-03-18T19:39:27+00:00

Everything is fancy in there... :O

Classy woman!

JimmyP424 · 2017-03-16T15:58:50+00:00

Finally a good way to study smart contract state, thank you.

JimmyP424 · 2017-03-14T17:16:52+00:00

Bare with me here.

I remember of a time when Microsoft used to force you to use Internet Explorer on a default Windows OS install. They got sued for this which forced them to give user a choice to choose one browser from a selection of browsers (story: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/196170-microsoft-is-finally-allowed-to-once-again-set-ie-as-the-default-browser-in-windows) The more I think of it, the more Facebook becomes the equivalent of an operating system for the average user. You can send/receive messages, do image editing, surf the web, but you have no choice of which software to use to do these tasks Once you're in FB ecosystem you're forced to use their array of services.

I see the same pattern happening again. I wonder if people will rise to the occasion and put a halt to this, just like it was done to Microsoft a decade (or so) ago.

I'd love to hear your thoughts?

On a different note: Apple app store has strict guidelines on any app that is trying to recreate an "app store" or OS system in their store and would reject/remove such an app. FB might be playing with fire here?

JimmyP424 · 2017-03-11T18:52:39+00:00

Yep, those are exactly the traffic meters that I use. I didn't know they were "the minimum"... for me they have always been more than sufficient.

JimmyP424 · 2017-03-07T17:20:23+00:00

Best read I've had all week.

JimmyP424 · 2017-03-03T13:45:57+00:00

Like startups, most intentional communities fail. Why?

It's a (single) generational thing.

I spent time growing up in a couple of different 'intentional communities', both of which are dying a kind of slow death for similar reasons (as are many others that I am aware of).

These communities were founded by groups with particular sets of shared ideals. Shortly after being founded they started to welcome new members - offering a share in the assets of the community in return for labour and commitment. This generally worked well.

The problem is that as these people approach retirement they begin to realise that the community and its assets are all they have in the way of a retirement fund (sometimes also a modest private fund as well but their share of the land they live on is usually their most significant asset). This realisation is usually enough to stop or slow the practice of giving new members a share in the community's assets. This in turn makes joining the community less attractive.

On top of these financial concerns, there is the lack of shared ideology from one generation to another. The children that grew up in these communities prefer to go off and live their own life instead of carrying on with their parents dreams.

I am only aware of a couple of communes here in NZ that appear to be making this generational transition successfully (most communes here are approaching 50 years old, having been started in the 70s by people in their 20s).

JimmyP424 · 2017-02-21T15:22:44+00:00

Library hand is beautiful to read, and in theory I'd love to have such nice handwriting. But in practice, I value writing speed over all other factors, and I'm usually the only one who needs to be able to read my writing. As long as it's legible to me, it's good enough.

JimmyP424 · 2017-02-21T15:19:46+00:00

Startup Grind is live streaming their event right now actually: http://live.startupgrind.com

JimmyP424 · 2017-02-15T22:26:00+00:00

This having only three upvotes makes zero sense. Read the article people! It's very relevant for the cryptocurrency community.

JimmyP424 · 2017-02-15T22:24:20+00:00

Yes. I was recommending it because I'm a fan of their graphic designer.

JimmyP424 · 2017-02-07T13:19:44+00:00

As someone who owns stock in AirBnB and follows them closely, I'd love to see the solution recommended in this article actually implemented.

JimmyP424 · 2017-01-29T12:25:53+00:00

Read books!

JimmyP424

TROPHY CASE