compscistd

Would be cool to have an embedded typeform-type widget that compliments disqus that takes the following flow: - are you interested in meeting offline? - which country? - which city? - enter your email to get updates (or check back here)

Then when there’s enough demand, you’re shown meeting spots and times to vote with RSVPs.

The key is the widget has to be embeddable and agnostic of the content so it can manage itself based on sensible rules (only show possible events when there’s enough demand, but make the demand really easy to measure).

You're confusing a breathalyzer with a field sobriety test, the latter of which no one should agree to. It's the sort of test that asks you to walk straight, hop on one leg, allow an officer to use a flashlight on your eyes, or recite the alphabet backwards. They're designed to allow the officer to use their discretion to determine if you've failed rather than use an objective reading (like a breathalyzer).

Ask yourself why an officer would want to use a set of tests that require being subjective instead of deferring to a breathalyzer.

I’m not speaking from the startup world, but the sheer amount of small businesses that don’t do any level of revenue forecasting, financial modeling, or even formal budgeting and still make a comfortable sum (~$10m assets over the course of 10 years) based on instinct is pretty staggering. Personally it seems more stressful but that’s the leeway experience gets you.

I had to stop playing for a while because the music really got stuck in my head. What a fantastic game though, it really is so fun. The "Woooow" at some upgrades always make me chuckle. I'll definitely come back to it soon.

I think there’s a bunch of these in Miami which is fun to see because they have chimneys that will never get used

One thing the Apple Watch is missing is being able to call a Lyft or Uber. Not something I do super often but it really would let me leave the phone at home more often.

Also would have liked to see a little hole in the corner to thread a loop to.

For someone who lives in a very small apartment, my WFH setup takes an annoyingly large part of my living space. If I can build a comfortable work environment in VR/AR, I can get rid of my work desk entirely and keep a strong separation between work and my personal life (take headset off and put it + keyboard + mouse away in the closet => done with work). I get to even take it with me so I could work at any desk (in a hotel room, at my parents', etc.)

Even now, I'd love a solution to easily put up and teardown a monitor on my dinner table so I can get rid of my desk.

This would be perfect, but in English, the description on the left refers to graph points in Meters while the visuals' data points are in feet.

Heads up, the greenhouse api is returning 0 jobs so none are listed

What’s something you’d recommend to a friend as a beach read?

I read this article and a week later came across one of his works (with the signature lemon peel!) at the Met. Would not have been able to recognize him without it. I love how the NYT experiments with different mediums, like their weekly friday news quiz, their stellar cooking app, the crosswords, and now these little art explorations

Why not move hobby projects and droplets to the $4 tier when it launches? It’s cheaper and likely enough to do what you want

Why wouldn’t you? As a person with a job, are you ashamed of how much you make (either too much or too little)? Or is it a violation of your privacy? If you were a person looking for a new job, you want to know how much people are making in that company (or others in the same market) so you aren’t being undercut for the same job.

No reason why my coworkers should make more or less than me if we have the same title. Making salary information public either through averages per title or ranges (upper and lower) should naturally even out the salaries per title. As things stand, some people are privileged in all sorts of ways when it comes to a company’s undisclosed salary ranges. For example, in my last role I had a friend in the company who could confirm two separate salaries for the role I was applying and I was offered 10% lower than those two salaries. I can ask for a 15% increase in my counteroffer and be confident this is a valid number. If I didn’t have friends who were in the industry that weren’t comfortable sharing salary ranges, I’d have to stick to the Levels FYI site, but my last company wasn’t on there.

When I left, I learned new hires, who were new to tech, earned less than I did when I was at their title. It may be awkward socially to have people know how much I make (or even within a range) but it’s better than the economic disadvantages that unconnected applicants face in today’s job markets. Hope that offers some insight.

It’s hard to make people care with “bad/user hostile/privacy invading” because those terms have saturated descriptions of behavior that users are okay with. Example: tons of articles mention FB as a privacy invading or user hostile service but it continues to be used by people who don’t really care. Using the same terminology for something that is arguably worse with much higher stakes (algorithmic proctoring that “reinforces white supremacy, sexism, ableism, and transphobia”) is appropriate because it gets the reader to care by illustrating exactly what is possible with algo proctoring.

I sense you’re tired of discussions that mention the “cards in the deck”, likely because you aren’t affected by them and therefore care little for them. That’s honestly fair, but there’s value in writing that way to channel outrage into action.

It’s a rather unconvincing but mean way to discount someone. If anything, FB saying how unrelated she is to these problems absolves her of being a part of it. Focus on the documents.

Despite that, not everyone has the will to connect these dots.

But inflation has to do with the supply of money, not the supply of goods, right? Genuine question

So why did vaccinations suddenly become a huge problem with people today? Are these people who were never going to go to college but would have caused a fuss if the school demanded vaccination records? Or is it the right politicizing a health issue with misinformation? Maybe it’s even the left pushing vaccines that suddenly has people reflexively twitching their combative muscles?

Interestingly, this thread has got me surprised that there are so many vaccine skeptics or people that have such a deep mistrust in these vaccination incentives.

You do have a right to choose. This isn’t a vaccine mandate. It’s the vaccinated asking to be separated from unvaccinated individuals in high risk places of recreation (restaurants, movie theaters, gyms, and large venues). Meanwhile, mask mandates will likely stay in place for places where it isn’t possible or important to separate the vaccinated and unvaccinated (grocery stores, MTA, healthcare settings, the great outdoors). To avoid antagonizing the unvaccinated and reducing spread for high risk individuals that don’t have a choice, grocery stores are requiring masks for everyone still.

So what are people so in arms about? Overreaching? This isn't (legal, ethical) overreaching, this is using data to drive the economy forward without killing people in ways that have been supported by the courts for almost a century. The more we reduce cases, the less likely we get a variant that’s worse than Delta.

While we’re discussing gripes, the states that were in staunch opposition to mandatory vaccines (*and masks*) are the ones that reopened the earliest and with the highest cases. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Read stories from people who are on their death bed from COVID, some ask for the vaccine (it’s too late), others still deny that it could have saved their lives.

To enable offline mode, I had to turn on airplane mode on my phone before logging in.

Spot on that I am bringing the national discussion around the California drought into context while reading the article.

On costs: > Some California farmers who pay for the service, however, say it often provides a cheaper alternative to traditional methods, such as hiring a geologist or prospector.

He planned to charge at least $1,400 for his visit. A geologist had quoted the same site at a minimum of $6,500

On desperation:

(The Subtitle) Amid California’s drought, desperate landowners and managers are turning to those who practice an ancient, disputed method for locating water.

His busy schedule is a sign of the desperation of ranchers, vineyard owners and land managers as California reels from a crippling drought that has depleted aquifers, shrunken crops and forced some farmers to sell off their water rights.

“There are economic issues, personal beliefs and desperation factors going into the decision to try dowsing,” Ben Frech, a spokesman for the National Ground Water Association, said in an email. While the group understood that despair could lead to “exploring all options,” ultimately, he said, the method was a waste of time and money.

On the flip side, although one manager claims that they’ve never hired a geologist, they didn’t claim geologists “don’t know what they’re talking about”. Instead, they allude to the success of dowsers, which is later explained as a product of luck, the multitude of underground wells in California, and that “years of experience in the industry would also have developed a familiarity with the landscape”. I don’t think this is a case where vineyards and farmers are rejecting science, they’re welcoming what they see as a viable cheaper alternative to find water before they drill. It’s easy to read between the lines and think that these vineyard managers are the kinds of people who would reject science altogether, but that’s not in the article, it’s importing context.

This isn’t both sides treatment, this is reporting on the desperation of vineyard managers in a drought that would shell out around $1000 (when geologists charge several times that) for bogus services. Other commenters have problems with the NYT including the personal wacky views of some dowsers and vineyard managers but what’s the alternative? Omitting them? I want to know as a reader the people behind throwing money away for these dowsers and why, and I got that information instead of being babied by a reporter.

Not once does the article mention efficacy of geologists or dowsers because I didn’t think that’s what the article was about. It read more like, “Hey some vineyards are hiring crazy people and here are some of their claims that are widely disputed. Weird world right?.” An example is when they contrast the different feelings dowsers get: one feels hot like a battery, another feels cold chills, and yet another just swings a pendulum on a map and marks it with a sharpie like a magic spell.

People who read this and think they want a dowser will find another article or blog to succumb to confirmation bias anyway. Let’s not take our frustration with misinformation out on normal reporting.

Some perspective from someone who has worked in hospitality: Some brands have fought back in creative ways.

An essential part of being listed on Booking or Expedia is to agree to never advertise lower prices anywhere else, including your own website. That means you can share a $100/night rate on your own brand's site (with no commission) and you can't tell Booking or Expedia to show rates over $100. Thus, users have no advantage in going to a hotel's own site, which only shows their own brand's hotels. Expedia/Booking on the other hand show you all the hotels in the area and you can be confident in price-shopping (the one exception is loyalty points, but if you're a price-conscious, non brand-loyal customer, that won't matter to you). Worse, competing hotels can get better visibility by sharing even lower rates and promotions on these aggregators, and it becomes a race to the bottom, really hurting hotels long-term just for visibility.

Choice Hotels had an interesting response a couple years ago: they show a "member-only rate" on their website. In the above scenario, technically, their public rate is $100 so Booking would take around $20 leaving $80 for the hotel. But Choice might also show $93 as an option on their website only for members (which is free to join, only takes an email/password). This way, technically their members-only rate isn't being advertised for just anyone so they don't run afoul of their Booking/Expedia agreements while only losing $7 as opposed to $20.

Last I checked, Booking and Expedia didn't like this and they docked Choice Hotel visibility in their searches because even if it didn't run afoul of the agreement, they still have discretion over their search ranking.

These aggregators don't need to disappear. They just need to lose some of their leverage over hotels. If all hotel brands banded together to offer their own "members-only" rate and customers became aware of what's happening, I'm sure it would really help out hotels long term.

By "references" does he mean "cherry-picked people from my life who will say only good things about me"? No one I provide as a reference to a job at Apple is going to say something mean about me or a book they may or may not have even read. The only "due diligence" that seems to be demanded here is reading candidates' books (imagine a recruiter actually going through the effort of picking up a book and combing through all of it for just a single candidate) or looking through public social media posts (but the problematic ones may have likely only been shared in a private network).

I do think AGM's comments should disqualify him as a candidate to work in a diverse work environment. But I don't want hiring to be more exhausting than it already is on either side, so aren't situations like this the reason we have work at-will arrangements anyway? What could Apple really have done here to prevent this? "Sign here attesting that you haven't ever said anything that could point to you being a prejudiced person in the work environment". If it turns out you did say something pretty bad, then too bad you had to relocate for this job because the offer is withdrawn.

I'm sympathetic, I _know_ I've posted really stupid "edgy" things on social media some time between the ages of 12-15 that's likely buried in a set of redundant servers somewhere in the world. Stuff that would get me fired immediately if I said and believed them today. How do you convincingly demonstrate to an employer _and_ to your coworkers that the person from then isn't you anymore?

I think FOMO fuels a desire to stay attached to screens (or fuels a rejection of mind-calming activities), which in turn increases FOMO when 90% of social media is about productivity life hacks, boasting about doing fun things, impressive personal projects, and side hustles making money. People expect a public health solution to this problem but I suspect there is none besides increasing access to tools like therapy or digital sabbaticals.

If you think OSX is user hostile because of intentional vendor-specific keyboard keys, note that Windows computers have a “Windows” key. Is that an international standard?

I think most commercial keyboards (just about all laptops) are terrible and If there really are international keyboard standards, they’re not great design. I personally think all keyboard layouts are ultimately wrong because the underused caps lock is in prime real estate and should be replaced by the CTRL key (check out the ADM-3). As for Macs requiring a certified keyboard, that’s just plain wrong.

The ultimate gripes come down to key placement and window manager shortcuts, both of which can be modified on either OS.

Our server went down for a couple of days and if we could "run our system on localhost", I'm positive we would have been back online very quickly as opposed to the multiple days it took to track down stored procedures not in version control. Front-end was left twiddling their thumbs during the outage because the server wouldn't run on local and our frontend wouldn't run without a server (we neglected updating our frontend model mocks for years).

Did we learn our lesson from the outage? A big _nope_. I suspect it's because being able to run a somewhat complicated system on local requires thinking in brand new ways with benefits that aren't very obvious from the outset. After that experience, I sympathize a lot with the author's points and hope to work in an environment (ha!) where spinning up a docker container is all it takes to have a _full_ dev environment.

So when I want to go to a developer conference and I use money from the education budget, Google needs to look over all 100+ speaker slides to pay for it? In this case, they need to look over n videos in the LinkedIn library? Sounds unreasonable when, as a company, I want to promote employee autonomy when it comes to individual learning.

The very first line is quite different from the title.

After a public relations fiasco, Coca-Cola has effectively conceded that some of its employees participated in a public LinkedIn Learning seminar that advocated that some of its employees be “less white.”

So if I work for Google and out of a bunch of options I take this publicly held LinkedIn seminar using company time, “Google is training employees to be less white”?

Instead of asking that we stop use terrible reporting to reconfirm our own very biased views of the world, I’ll instead ask we do the bare minimum and just stop sharing terrible reporting.

It seems like the participant since they have to proactively signal they’re in a lucid dreaming state with deliberate sweeping eye movements (LRLRLR) before answering questions.

It definitely matters because it implies we are consciously aware of ourselves during lucid dreaming but we’re asleep!. The memory of the dream is the only part that’s fragile. It’s another blow to the view that brain activity during REM is just randomly firing neurons rather than a creation of our consciousness.

Unless they interfere with scheduled meetings, I can’t see why this would bug you as a manager. Pair programming, counting hours for clients, or sprint planning are the only other things that could possibly conflict with last minute personal days. It doesn’t really seem to bug the managers at my organization if there are no calendar conflicts.

If there are calendar items that have to be rescheduled, I think the onus is on them to find an alternative time