alleyshack

Honest question, as this is related to something my company's HR department is grappling with (I am not involved, I'm just a lowly engineering manager): How does this law interact with companies whose pay range is location based? I.e., the starting salary band for a Silicon Valley-based candidate would take into account SF cost of living, and therefore be significantly higher on paper than the starting salary band for, say, an Arkansas-based candidate.

Obviously it would be impractical to list all the possible geo-based salary bands on a JD. Is the intent to "shame" such a company into picking a single salary range that doesn't take geo location into account?

I feel as though that would either lead to (1) everyone being paid Silicon Valley wages (which has a number of consequences of its own, both good and bad) or (2) companies which can only afford to do so for certain positions, losing out on otherwise qualified candidates who happen to live in a higher COL area.

I know there's an argument that if the company can't pay competitive wages, then they shouldn't be in business. But it feels like in case (1), candidates who live in high-COL areas are actually getting penalized. Some of them could move to lower-COL areas and get the net benefit, but others may not be able to move.

I don't know the answer here, but I'm curious to see how others in the industry are thinking about the situation.

basically, you can move around with CMD+Arrow. Up goes up a directory, down goes down a directory (or opens the file). Left / Right go forward / back in history, like a browser.

This is really helpful to know - it's one of my biggest bugaboos about using Finder & navigating the Mac GUI.

On the other hand, I suspect this kind of obscure key-based shortcut is a big part of why Macs don't feel intuitive to a lot of users. How could I have known this shortcut exists? It's not broadcast anywhere obvious. My options for finding all these obscure shortcuts aren't great. I could scroll through a submenu in the Settings pane, hoping to find something that looks like it says the thing I'm trying to do (and then that I can figure out what keys it means, since Apple key symbology is VERY arcane). I could stumble across a mention of the shortcut in a forum like this. Or I could Google in the hope of finding something - though that assumes I believe it's doable in the first place, which I didn't in this particular case.

It would also help if Apple chose easier / more intuitive keyboard shortcuts. A "shortcut" which both is the only way to do something, and also requires pressing a minimum of four seemingly-random keys, is not a shortcut at all - it's a mental load on the user that they just have to hold in their heads forever.

I love this idea! I've kept around a lot of old sentimental value shirts with a similar, albeit more vague, idea of putting them together in some form that makes them visible. Keeps the memories and lets you actually look at/revisit them.

I would argue that men are not "simply" more interested in computers than women. Computing was originally a female-dominated field[1]. However, as computing became more and more important and presigious a field, more men entered it, kicking off the "glass escalator" phenomenon[2] and eventually pushing women out almost entirely.

Nowadays, girls are socially discouraged from showing interest in STEM[3], and women who make it past all that to go into STEM fields are still strongly discriminated against[4].

You're right that the article isn't clear about what it means by "computing skill". However, its foundational conclusion - that simple tests show no difference in basic computer literacy but do show significant confidence differences - is unsurprising and reflects what women have anecdotally reported as their experience for years.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_escalator

[3] https://www.aauw.org/resources/research/the-stem-gap/

[4] https://www.fastcompany.com/90548817/why-so-many-women-in-te...

If I'm reading both the Apple prompt details and the Twitter statement correctly, what that tweet is saying is that Facebook will not request access to the IDFA at all, and will also not allow developers using Facebook's SDK to request it. This means they won't trigger ("adopt" per the tweet) the prompt notifying the user of tracking, since they aren't using the IDFA to track anymore.

The rest of the tweet goes on to describe how to comply with that policy from Facebook, and to suggest alternate methods for developers to track users on iOS, including Facebook Login or Advanced Matching.

Do you still have to navigate? Like, click or scroll or whatever, to get between tabs? I'm looking for a UI that shows me all my tabs, all at once, no clicks/scrolling/navigation required.

Thanks, but I'm looking for something that doesn't require scrolling - where I can see all my open tabs at the same time, no scrolling, clicks, or other interaction required. I toggle between tabs a LOT, and having to scroll or otherwise navigate to find the right tab is a hard no for me.

I want to switch to Firefox, but of all things, its tab management is keeping me away. On my last try, I gave up after five minutes because I couldn't see all my open tabs at once (had to scroll). Does anyone know of an extension or setting I can use to force Chrome-like tab behavior, where all tabs are shown at once regardless of how small they become?

I'm curious what metrics are driving that behavior by Instacart shoppers. In my (entirely amateur/armchair) opinion, it would seem like the time you'd save by making an unapproved substitution wouldn't make up for the potential for negative reviews, which could get you driven off the platform entirely.

Maybe a majority of customers don't care enough about unapproved substitutions to review poorly? Though reading through this thread suggests otherwise. Maybe there's some other internal metrics which shoppers or Instacart have access to that incentivize poor substitutions in the name of speed?

Honest questions - I don't know anything about this business and it's interesting to me that it appears to be such a pervasive issue.

They don't always respect this. I've had multiple Instacart shoppers replace items without marking them as replacements, including replacing some of them with things I explicitly indicated I did not want as replacements.

I'd strongly recommend looking into the Aesthetics of Play[1][2]. It's a framework that talks about eight primary reasons why people play video games, and only one of those reasons is "Challenge" (i.e., beating a goal). Games like Gone Home, Animal Crossing, The Sims, Minecraft, etc all reflect different play aesthetics, and are intended for people who enjoy different things than pure Challenge.

[1] https://youtu.be/uepAJ-rqJKA

[2] https://theangrygm.com/gaming-for-fun-part-1-eight-kinds-of-...

Oh yikes. Mine's been iffy, but looking a full week out I've usually been able to find something. I suppose I should consider my area fortunate for that.

I don't know if either of my other suggestions are of any use to you, but I genuinely wish you luck in your search.

You don't specify why Instacart "became less usable", though if your experience is like mine I'd guess it's a combination of delivery windows being a full week out and the results being somewhat unreliable between replacements/out of stock. What's been working for my household is to make the Instacart order knowing it won't be delivered for at least a week, and use that time to fill out the order as needed. We're not to this point yet but I've also thought about doing a rolling window (i.e., make one order with a delivery window of next Saturday, then start another one in two days with a delivery for next Monday, etc) so there's always something coming in.

Another suggestion, which I have not tested yet personally, would be to look up small grocers in your area. If you're willing to drive to pick up your shopping, a small grocer may be willing to prepick your order and have it ready for you in the parking lot without an intermediary.

A third option would be to check for local milkman deliveries, since many of them deliver more than just milk. A quick search for the Bay Area brings up "Bay Area Milkman" and "Milkman SF". Again, haven't tried them so can't vouch for them, but I'm keeping similar options in my own back pocket if/when we need them.

What do you think 80% normal will look like? I'm currently planning a small (30-50 people) event in October and I'm trying to figure out if I need to postpone/reschedule.

Yep. "I think this way, therefore everyone else thinks this way," is an incredibly common human fallacy.

As an Xoogler, my experience is that one thing changed, and one thing didn't.

The thing which changed is that Google operates on a much, much larger scale than anything imaginable back in the late 90s when they first started. In 1999, nobody had any inkling about the cloud and SaaS revolution that was about to come. Nobody knew that everything was about to move into web apps and cloud services, which permit and require(?) tracking in ways, and on a scale, no one had thought possible. (Require with a question mark because - ad tracking aside - what little I know of frontend development includes that they need to be able to see certain information, like your browser type, in order to provide effective services.)

The thing which didn't change is the mindset of the engineers building the services. On average, Googlers tend to be much less concerned with personal privacy than an equally educated consumer, and much more interested in the features and services they can build for themselves and others which happen to require huge amounts of personal information to function. In other words, a typical Googler is more likely to think, "Oooh, having a personal digital assistant is great! If I give Google access to my email inbox, it can suggest tasks, automatically add calendar invites, and do other cool things."

The problems we're seeing now come when the engineers working on advertising products have that mindset and access to Google-scale information. They don't consider it a problem or a violation because they don't mind targeted ads, they don't mind giving up their data in exchange for services, and they don't (want to) understand why people who aren't them might object.

It's a lot more complicated than that because Google, while the largest and arguably most effective, is not the only player in this game. There are a lot of other corporate and social influences at play. This is just to answer the question about what changed at Google.

From the article:

The extent of tracking makes it impossible for us to make informed choices about how our personal data is collected, shared and used, says Finn Myrstad, director of digital policy in the Norwegian Consumer Council.

The Council's point is that the average consumer is not capable of meaningful consent due to the extent and obfuscation of the tracking involved. Much of contract law, afaik, requires a person to be capable of consent at the time of signing for a contract to be valid. The Council's argument, therefore, is that even if technically a consumer has "signed away" the right to process their data, the contract is not valid because the consumer is not able to, and/or cannot get the information required to, make an informed choice when signing.

This is exactly why I'm one of the (probably many) silent switchers away from Fitbit now that this acquisition has happened. Whatever Google says now, in one or two or ten years, that could change, and my data will still be there.

I'm sure there will be a number of "incidents" in which teams were given approval to use the data in unsavory ways.

This is my other concern, closely related to the first. Data companies (Google included) have a very different idea of what is "savory" w.r.t data usage. Not from a place of malice, necessarily, but innocence/privilege/not thinking about the consequences.

Let's say the engineers are building a data-using feature, such as one which takes Fitbit health data and links it to your medical record to recommend tests or interventions that might benefit you. Those engineers may only think about how many lives this will save - the benefits of sharing this data. Because there are some benefits, for some people, in that use case. The problem is when those engineers do not consider all the many ways that sharing could go wrong, and how many other people could be hurt. Discrimination, denial of insurance, stalking, etc.

Personally, I think it would be incredibly beneficial for most software engineers to spend time learning hacking and adversarial thinking. Teaching the people who build these features to think about how the features could, and will, be misused would likely help them build better, safer features. (/soapbox :) )

I'm an Xoogler who worked on the privacy team a few years ago. All of this is true, and at the time I worked there, I made the conscious, considered decision to buy in to the Google data collection ecosystem because I trusted the people I worked with to protect my data.

Several years out, I no longer trust Google - not because I trust my former (immediate) coworkers less, but because the direction the entire advertising/data science industry is taking as a whole is deeply concerning to me. I disagree with almost all of it on principle, and am no longer comfortable supporting it by allowing unfettered collection of my personal data, regardless of who is doing the collecting or how much they promise not to sell my data.

(Companies were never "selling" data anyway - they were using it themselves, sharing it with their partners without an explicit sale, and otherwise doing things with it that I don't approve of which do not meet the strict definition of "sale".)

There are definitely hardcore adult gamers in the speedrunning community, who have day jobs and families. I'm friends with a world-record-holding speedrunner, and he treats it like any other hobby. He enjoys spending his free time practicing, and will attend speedrunning events for fun.

This is my biggest concern. One of my favorite mobile games (high stakes, I know) was originally produced by a small indie dev with a strong privacy policy. A year or so ago they sold to Zynga. I've not updated the app since then because I don't want any Zynga apps on my phone. If this forces me to update to the privacy-invasive, user-hostile Zynga version, I'll have to uninstall one of my favorite games. :(

This is exactly what I do, and it generally has good results. I don't have to worry about being rude, because the greeting - usually a simple "Hey!" - is there for those who care about it, and my question is also right there. Makes Slack turnarounds MUCH faster.

Xoogler here. Individual contributors are aware of it, but have very little to no power to change it. I left when I realized I would never make career progress due in large part to this incredibly restrictive advancement model. My partner, also an Xoogler, left for the same reason.

Google is big enough, and appealing enough as an employer, that it appears to be comfortable accepting this turnover as part of how it does business. Anyone who wants to change things leaves, or is "encouraged" to leave, and only those who buy wholly into the model stick around to get promoted. Then, since that method of promotion worked for them, they entrench and encourage it, and the cycle continues.

The article title is somewhat misleading; the point of the games described isn't simply to "cut stress".

Rather, the games variously work to raise awareness of mental illness; help people with mental illness cope by giving them protagonists and storylines they can relate to; provide role models and story structures for overcoming challenges related to mental illnesses; and improve overall mental health in a variety of ways from dancing in VR to mindfulness exercises to encouraging conversations with therapists.

edit: a word

My jobs have ranged from heads-down engineering work to constant meetings, phone calls, and impromptu chats. For all of them, I much prefer a private office or at least a private cube. I can't wear headphones for an extended period of time due to physical pain (yes, I've tried lots of form factors; no, none of them have helped), so open office plans where the "solution" is to just tell people to wear headphones and blast music are nonstarters for me.

I also hate with a passion having people walking around behind me where I can't see them. It's not a question of having things on my screen that I don't want people to see; it's a question of feeling safe and not being constantly startled/on edge.

I'm 34.

Not OP, but Slack/IRC/IM of some kind is the answer to most of your questions. I've bounced around between shared office, private office, cubicle, private bullpen, and open office my whole career, and by far the least productive I ever was was in the open office. In all other situations, my team communicated mostly over instant messaging, or if it was really important, by wandering down to their office and knocking.

Since most team communication happens over IM, it's easy for anyone to read back on what they missed. Most teams also do daily stand-ups or other meetings, to catch the larger group up on anything important.

This requires a lot of things which aren't obvious:

1) the person to realize the site is broken because of something on their end (as opposed to the site being broken because of something "on the internet")

2) the person to realize the cause of the breakage is ublock

3) the person to be able to find the ublock logo (not always obvious; some browsers hide extensions, sometimes people don't know where to look, sometimes they don't know "the little red shield" == "the ad blocker causing my problems")

4) the person to understand what the big power symbol does - if you only click the ublock logo, it's not obvious to a layperson that the power symbol is a button

5) the person to be comfortable clicking the button, and not more afraid of "breaking the internet" than they are desiring to fix the issue

I do informal tech support for family members who could not get past steps 1 or 2, even if I've explained it to them. We who spend our lives on the Internet take a lot of the things we grok about it for granted, but someone who only occasionally uses a computer won't necessarily have the foundation to make the connections we do when faced with a problem like this.

The flag workflow is the closest I've seen on any platform to Tumblr's submissions, for sure.

The concern about people not wanting to use reddit is definitely a big part of this. Reddit has a very different culture than Tumblr, and I agree that it's likely I'd fragment my readers and lose most of them. As much as I love my blog, I don't think the effort of trying to make the switch to reddit is worth the harm and disruption it would cause.

Automod is an automatic moderator, not a curator unfortunately, which is what we really need.

Tags are in the same general family as flair, but they're distant cousins of each other. Reddit generally expects one flair per post, and for flair to be short. My blog uses a minimum of three tags per post, with around 95% of posts having four to seven tags. A couple of those could go away due to the difference in how flair and tags are used, but that would still be at least two flairs per post on most posts. It also still doesn't solve for very long tags.

Like I said in the original post, a transfer to Reddit is not impossible, but it would be a significant effort, and it would definitely kill the blog's personality. Even if the curation team comes along, even if the submission numbers don't skyrocket beyond what the team is capable of handling, Reddit lacks a lot of other small features that give the blog personality. If/when Tumblr goes under, I'd prefer to allow my blog to end gracefully rather than trying to port it over to a platform that isn't quite a match.