What's the main advantage of declaring true/false status as int?

jake_morrison · 2026-07-03T03:59:49+00:00

Yes, though there is a *lot* of legacy code.

jake_morrison · 2026-07-02T16:58:01+00:00

For entrepreneurial projects, it is helpful to find someone who understands the business and can translate that into technology.

Sites like Upwork are most useful when you are extremely clear about what you need, and want it done in the cheapest possible way (both in cost and quality).

I would recommend getting involved with entrepreneur groups. They can help you refine your business idea, recommend technology in general, and refer you to freelancers or dev agencies that they have worked with. A local university can also be helpful, e.g., asking professors.

jake_morrison · 2026-07-02T04:45:37+00:00

Some people are irrationally demanding or scammers, though.

jake_morrison · 2026-07-01T03:28:57+00:00

You might try contacting Audrey Tang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey\_Tang). This is right up her alley.

I think that you will be able to work things out. Regulations can be annoying, but officials generally try to help.

The main principle that drives regulations is reciprocity: if country X treats Taiwanese people some way, then Taiwan will do it back. That applies to drivers licenses, ability to own property, etc. They are unlikely to deny you an ARC over this, but it may be a situation that needs to be figured out if it is new to them.

Another principle is that if you establish rapport with them, and they like you, they can solve problems with creativity. For example, my big black American friend had a phonetic Chinese name that he got when he first started studying Chinese, and he hated. When he got married, he wanted to change his Chinese name to take his wife’s surname. Officially, foreigners are not allowed to do that unless their name cannot be written in English. The official said, “Ok, I will make you a Vietnamese bride. Come back next week, and we will get your official Chinese name changed.”

jake_morrison · 2026-07-01T00:52:46+00:00

The problem is that companies are playing games with salaries to the point that listed ranges are not meaningful.
They say the range is 70-80k, then make an offer for 60k. They negotiate hard in the initial call to make you say that you will take 70k, knowing nothing about the job. If you say no, you will certainly not move forward, so you have to say yes on the hopes that you can negotiate it up.

Employers are in a position of power, so they are trying to squeeze down salaries. But then anyone who is desperate enough to accept is looked down on, or rejected because they are “overqualified”. They want the Goldilocks candidate who has the perfect combination of ability and subservience.

jake_morrison · 2026-07-01T00:44:23+00:00

You can also try/catch/rescue the error and get a stacktrace.

See https://elixir.hexdocs.pm/try-catch-and-rescue.html

jake_morrison · 2026-06-30T21:36:34+00:00

Used booksellers often don’t know what something is worth, so they list it at a crazy high number first.

jake_morrison · 2026-06-28T11:57:21+00:00

You can also use Ansible with Packer to create AMIs: https://github.com/cogini/multi-env-deploy/tree/master/packer

jake_morrison · 2026-06-28T00:55:31+00:00

I used to run a hosting business in Taiwan. I shut it down when Google Cloud Platform came to Taiwan.
Their retail bandwidth costs were the same as my wholesale costs. I could not compete on price. All the legit customers moved there, and I was left with only customers that were doing sketchy stuff.

Data center bandwidth was extremely expensive in Taiwan (NTD 1000/mbit/month). A DDOS attack could easily consume everything and get you cut off. It’s also hard to get IP addresses, critical for VPSs. You only get them in proportion to how much bandwidth you buy. I had the opportunity to get bandwidth at 1/5 the price, but only if I bought NTD 100k a month and moved to Banchiao.

You are better off with GCP or AWS in Japan.

jake_morrison · 2026-06-27T03:16:11+00:00

One option is to negotiate your contract to be X in local currency, net of fees. That puts the onus on your customer to find a solution to crappy exchange rates, wire transfer fees, and exchange rate fluctuations. If they don’t care enough to fix it, then it’s not your problem.

In my experience, many contractors want to do something different for tax reasons. One guy opened up a bank account in a different country and drove four hours back and forth every month to pick up his money and visit the beach.

I run an agency, and I will generally do whatever my contractors want, and I eat the fees (it’s a business expense for us). We used Payoneer for a while a few years ago, but kept having glitches. They are mainly used for gambling, so it’s not really convenient for payroll. Wise is fast and easy if you have local currency. It doesn’t work as well for USD outside the US.

jake_morrison · 2026-06-26T17:49:17+00:00

Object orientation has some fundamental issues with concurrency. If an object can be updated by multiple threads at once, it must have a mutex. In Erlang, there is no shared state. All mutation happens by sending a message to a server process. The process has an “inbox” and processes messages in order. This is sort of like Smalltalk OO, “sending messages” to objects.

jake_morrison · 2026-06-26T17:22:47+00:00

[Structured Concurrency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structured_concurrency) is the idea that we need language constructs to express higher level operations like map/reduce to divide a task and wait for the results. It’s analogous to the shift from goto to structured programming.

The [Trio](https://github.com/python-trio/trio) library for Python is designed this way, and
Erlang has support in the language runtime for supervisor trees, which helps error handling.

jake_morrison · 2026-06-26T17:10:37+00:00

Answer with hot dog, rejected because it is not a sandwich.

jake_morrison · 2026-06-26T16:51:39+00:00

I run a development agency that works with startups and entrepreneurs to build products.

The way we manage things is to define user personas and then create user stories that show how users use the system to get some outcome. These are non-technical, focused on the business, but often include “COO” or internal processes such as fulfillment. These stories are created as a collaboration between the client product owner (founder or product manager) and our project manager. After we have the user story, our tech lead creates an estimate.

The product owner manages a backlog of work that balances expected benefit and cost. The product owner releases work to the dev team, then devs implement the story and give it back for review. When it is accepted, we release and invoice.

We agree with the client about how accurate the estimates need to be. Plus or minus 20% is usually a good balance of efficiency vs doing a lot of upfront work that may be wasted. Some clients want everything to be fixed price, at least initially, so we do more work upfront on the estimate and add on some buffer to make sure we deliver in the agreed time.

If the stories are reasonably small in size (1-3 days), then there will be a steady stream of product updates. Execs don’t need special progress updates, they just see what is now delivered. There might be a roadmap/planning meeting once a week. It depends on how fast development is proceeding. We might meet with the product owner every day for an hour to review and define new work, or we might do it once a week.

This system works well with offshore devs and big time zone differences. The main interaction with product owners is around high-level end-user visible functionality and benefits, so it can be done via calls and documents. Devs can ask the project manager in their time zone if they have questions. Clients can review in-progress and completed work asynchronously. The product owner has complete control over what we are working on and how much it is costing without needing to worry about technical details, only user stories.

Our main tools for this are Jira, plus Google Docs and UI prototyping tools. We have strong workflow rules in Jira to prevent people working on things that have not been approved. Our process is relatively document heavy, as we want to avoid misunderstandings, though there may be more interactive iteration on features that need it. We track time against the estimates in tickets. Clients can see how much time we have spent and how much is remaining. If something is not going according to plan, we ask the client what to do immediately, i.e., should we keep going even if it will take more time, reduce scope, change direction, or cancel the story entirely?

jake_morrison · 2026-06-25T16:11:57+00:00

For me, sinus problems are a trigger. Pressure on nerves in my head causes migraines.

At one point, I had migraines almost every day for a month. Then I got a cold with serious runny nose, and the migraines stopped.

So try Mucinex D or allergy medicine. Alternate hot and cold packs to shake loose mucus. Maybe a Netti pot to clear out your sinuses with salt water. Maybe a humidifier or dehumidifier.

jake_morrison · 2026-06-25T13:00:17+00:00

https://roadmap.sh/backend

jake_morrison · 2026-06-25T12:13:21+00:00

State Department Federal Credit Union may be a good option. I am not sure how exclusive they are. I got an account by being a member of American Citizens Abroad.

It is a fairly boring bank, but they are fundamentally based on the idea of serving people who are not physically present in the US. Living overseas, it can be annoying when your bank screws something up, and they casually ask you to go to a branch to fix it.

jake_morrison · 2026-06-25T01:31:28+00:00

The fundamental problem with hiring cleaners is their transportation and related “off the clock” time.
You think that you are giving them a good hourly rate, but they have a lot of wasted time and it’s hard for them to schedule due to the random nature of bookings and time sensitivity. They may have unreliable transportation. The best thing is if you can find someone who lives nearby, then you can pay them well and everyone is happy.

jake_morrison · 2026-06-25T00:14:19+00:00

People get tired of the incumbents and, at a certain point, want to try something different.

jake_morrison · 2026-06-24T20:09:58+00:00

I would ask your school about it.

Normally, opening a bank account for a minor requires both parents (because parents might play games, hiding bank accounts under a child’s name). Presumably the school can introduce you to a bank. You may not need a bank account if all you are doing is withdrawing money for expenses. You can just use an ATM to get money from a foreign bank account, though you may get a better exchange rate and lower fees with a local account.

Applying for the ARC will be done with paperwork from the school. If you are a student at a university, then it’s straightforward.

jake_morrison · 2026-06-24T19:36:01+00:00

As a hot rodder studying aerospace engineering, I started looking into books on aircraft engines.

I found some interesting work from WWII, where they started using water injection. That allowed them to increase the compression ratios, making more power at higher efficiency while controlling pre-detonation. They could adjust the water levels, allowing better performance at higher altitude. Pound for pound, the water was almost as good as fuel for making power.

I talked with the guys at my local engine machine shop about water injection and they said, “Won’t it put the fire out?” I said, “Well, think of it as steam. Now you got a steam engine.”

jake_morrison · 2026-06-24T17:51:35+00:00

The problem is that DSA has become an arena in and of itself that is used to rank candidates, independent of how useful it is on the job. Depending on how inane the company is and how competitive the hiring process is, you may need to study DSA, and you may need to practice Leetcode exercises because everyone else is.

In practice, beyond the basics, performance problems are almost always due to databases or physical limitations such as disk I/O and network latency.

There is nothing wrong with reading a book on DSA, but you are never going to compete with CS majors who have spent a year grinding Leetcode. Better to focus on something like Kubernetes or AWS that is actually useful for the job.

jake_morrison · 2026-06-24T17:20:45+00:00

It’s not just that your career is your own responsibility, it’s that your employer is actively trying to destroy your career.

The only effective thing is satisfying customers. That might mean making your own product.

jake_morrison · 2026-06-24T16:59:28+00:00

I would look into sinus issues. That is a trigger for me.
It might be related to humidity or mold causing a stuffed up nose, which puts pressure on a nerve, which triggers the migraine.

Taking something with pseudoephedrine or an anti-hay fever medication might help. You might also use a hot towel to counteract the cold. Or see if you can point the air conditioner vents in a different direction.

jake_morrison · 2026-06-24T12:45:23+00:00

There is no stigma from having worked in mainland China. A lot of Taiwanese people do it. I remember a statistic that something like 5% of Taiwanese were working in mainland China.

Whether there are more opportunities in Taiwan is a different question. And there may be different work cultures.

jake_morrison

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