TrevorAustin

I did! One of the best shows I have ever seen. And Ngaujah had to have been the hardest-working man on Broadway during that run. Just an incredible performance.

I don’t care at all. For what it’s worth, yes, Harvard and other elite universities should be more welcoming to conservatives. But turning to the federal government to enforce “viewpoint diversity” is just an obviously bad idea.

I don’t want the government deciding what viewpoints need representation. And again, if you think about beyond the immediate case you may have a personal emotional investment in, I don’t think you do either.

I don’t want a future administration trying to enforce “viewpoint diversity” on oil and gas companies, investment banks, or rural family farms either, regardless of what federal contracts or subsidies they have. Exxon, Goldman Sachs, or an Iowa hog farm would be insane to submit to that.

Also, a mask ban enforced by suspension is just plain stupid. That’s not even viewpoint diversity, it’s just partisan chum, and it gives away the game on whether this exercise is in good faith.

Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity; every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity.

Insane

Harvard must implement a comprehensive mask ban with serious and immediate penalties for violation, not less than suspension.

Insane

reducing the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship

Is even insane if you think about it for two seconds; nobody wants the government deciding what counts as activism and what counts as "real" scholarship. A good heuristic: do any of the proponents want a Bernie Sanders or AOC wielding this authority?

A demand letter that said only "Harvard may not use race, gender, or national origin as criteria for admissions and hiring" would be a lot more defensible, and much harder to oppose.

But the government's list of demands includes all kinds of stuff that would be mildly insane even if offered in good faith. And we have seen enough already that any independent organization would be very irresponsible to assume good faith.

I would go so far as to say that any institution trying to make decisions based solely on merit is required to resist this kind of pressure very forcefully. There are many examples of the administration using "DEI" as a buzzword when firing meritorious women and minorities, all the while promoting totally meritless white men.

-JD '08

I tell my web development students that typography is Lovecraftian cursed knowledge. You can't delve too deep, or it will drive you mad.

Reminds me of http://programming-motherfucker.com/, but which is maybe 20-30% parody instead of this 80+%.

To be fair, Homebrew is great product design, but actually pretty janky software engineering. Anyone who's had it wreck their PATH a couple of times isn't going to be an automatic yes vote on a technical screen.

And here Oblong itself is the NGO, so mysubdomain.obl.ong isn't that crazy.

"Oblong" is kind of an awkward word though. Anyone want to set up a fork at .bi.ngo?

Dang, now I'm going to be thinking of .ngo and .ong domains all day...

It sounds like this isn't a Southern phenomenon at all, and is just framed that way to rile up the Fox Business audience.

Having a strong regional accent, or more accurately, being unable to turn off your strong regional accent, is just a class marker.

The article says that the wage penalty applies to people with "strong regional accents," and that Southern is the fourth most likely accent for job seekers to try to suppress, with New Jersey being #1. Framing this as specifically Southern inverts the actual finding, and is just culture war chum.

Ironically Larry the Cable Guy's accent is itself affected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_the_Cable_Guy#Stand-up_c...

A sweeping vista miles into the sky, above an alien world, through a break in the deadly clouds? Hell yeah I'm stepping out on my Venusuvian balcony.

Without having dipped into the code before, how hard would it be run a fork of Chromium that did this?

You would have to be foolish to. However much value may be created, Musk has shown he will try to wriggle out of deals he made when he thinks he can get away with not meeting his obligations to his counterparties. Delaware courts wouldn’t let him welch on the merger, and I expect the execs he fired “for cause” will successfully hold him to their agreements in the end. You, as the employee in a closely held private company, will have no such leverage. Musk could promise all the upside in the world, but even if everything works out he’ll just screw you out of your share of it.

Some PMs at my company have been agitating for a switch from Asana to Jira, and now I (as VP Engineering) can guarantee that will never, ever happen.

As a legal matter, no, though copyright terms should be shorter.

As a civil society matter, I think we should agree that making a secret album so that it ends up in the hands of a hedge fund criminal is uncool. It’s appropriate and even good for us to say that while that’s something allowed by the rules, we accord it no honor.

The tech didn’t exist at the time, but honestly wouldn’t it be better for the world if Wu-Tang had issued a single exclusive NFT of the album, and then made the actual music freely available?

I mean maybe not, maybe the songs actually suck, but I would certainly like to hear them.

I'm a hiring manager and while I despise Facebook/Meta (https://twitter.com/search?q=%40trevaustin%20facebook&src=ty...), there's no denying that it's a positive qualification on a resume.

It's not what you want to do with your life, but I've had jobs at suspect places while I was getting established (Palantir) and lots and lots of others have too. It's better than having worked somewhere people haven't heard of (ie above replacement value) and much better than having worked somewhere with a reputation for doing poor technical work.

Obviously the web3 use case that gets the most excitement right now is the ability to speculate on unregulated securities, but I do think there's something interesting with letting users keep control of their data and writing API contracts you can't renege on later. I'm not totally persuaded that blockchains are a better way of doing that than some clever legal work like Creative Commons is, but it's worth playing around with. I hope that part of the space gets explored more.

The piece isn’t about high gas costs. The conclusion:

Those are just a few ideas from someone who’s new to the field, and people are working on all of them already. But my basic point here is not to forget transaction costs. Lots of transaction costs aren’t paid in dollars — they’re paid in seconds of effort, in the mental cost of attention-switching, and in the hassle and stress of keeping things in mind. Web3 should focus on stuff that allows people to pay fewer of those costs, rather than stuff that forces them to pay more.

Do you mean this story about dark patterns? https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/technology/e-commerce-dar...

Because the author (who does not control how NYT subscriptions work) does mention that in the story:

About 30 sites made it easy to sign up for services but particularly hard to cancel, requiring phone calls or other procedures. The Times requires people to talk with a representative online or by phone to cancel subscriptions, but the researchers did not study it or other publishing sites.

And highlighted it on her social media promotion of her work: https://twitter.com/jenvalentino/status/1143531833147240449?...

This conspiratorial take is a decade out of date. New York Times coverage of tech has gotten more skeptical, but so has public opinion generally as their size and impact has increased dramatically. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/06/28/public-attit...

Meanwhile, the Times did take a huge beating in the 2000s during the transition from print to digital and with the collapse of classified advertising. But today they're up 1000% from their 2009 low and flirting with historic highs. They're a category-defining digital media company with millions of digital-only subscribers that's on a tear buying up smaller players. https://www.google.com/finance/quote/NYT:NYSE?sa=X&ved=2ahUK...

I’m actually in the market for an EV or PHEV that seats 6 or more, and my search started with the Model X. But I’ll probably wind up getting a Volvo XC90. It’s around $30K cheaper, which is nice, and more importantly, if I ordered a Model X tomorrow, the expected delivery date is January 2023.

Also, those SPAs are loading the React literary off of a CDN. It’s not inlined into the page.

For fine art, maybe? For music, writing, theater, film and television, video games: seems like it's mostly about the enjoyment the patron gets from interacting with the art. The social signaling part strikes me as kind of squicky.

Maybe NFTs turn out to be a way to redirect that gross status-seeking impulse, to turn it into incentives to create art and income for artists without copyright, DRM, and associated ugliness. That would be a pretty cool hack! There's a decent chance it works.

Ha, just as a small example, this post as typed concluded with a single U+1F61D: https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html#1f61d

Hacker News is the kind of place that strips emoji from your posts, because they're kind of frivolous. I love that. Because I am a weirdo.

Everything about NFTs is irritating. They're pure positional goods, with no real utility beyond signaling social status. They're subject to intense, irrational financial speculation. They attract insiders, hypesters, and scam artists. Their fans are prone to wildly overstating their capabilities and importance. The pieces of art they point to very often demonstrate almost no technical skill. They're built on technology with objectively terrible performance characteristics.

But I've thought Facebook was stupid since 2004. Experience has taught me that I'm a weirdo and my aesthetic objections are usually anti-correlated with a project's success. I am the George Costanza of social media. If you're reading about Non-Fungible Tokens on Hacker News, I suspect you are too. These things are here to stay.

Meh, if the boosters are right, it’s very very early in the space, and we see turnover in frameworks, languages, and operating systems in regular tech all the time. Ethereum has a big first-mover advantage, but at least when I dabbled in Solidity a couple of years ago, didn’t seem very well-run?

ICOs disappeared because the SEC stepped into what had been a kind of legal gray area and said “Lol, no. All of this is illegal.” They didn’t really go away on their own.

Legally, there’s nothing stopping you. The only thing that would make “A” the canonical NFT for “X” is social convention. I imagine that where the original creator of the artwork is involved in the minting of X that convention can be pretty strong, but I also expect lots of boundary-testing. This is the art world after all, and a particularly weird slice of it at that.

It’s weird to keep using the Mona Lisa, when there’s a much more apropos metaphor intimately connected to crypto: NFTs are like naming rights.

Crypto.com did not buy the Staples Center, and doesn’t have the right to charge admission. They bought (leased, really) the right to have their name associated with it. Some of that has the force of law, but a lot of it is social convention too. Here in Chicago, the Willis Group owns the legal naming rights to a large building downtown, the building itself is owned by Blackstone, and locals actually call it the Sears Tower.