jackowayed

Some of what 1password provides is a synergy of security and convenience.

1password's browser integration can save you from phishing, because it can tell g00gle.com from google.com every time and not offer to fill in your google.com login, whereas if you're used to just copying from your password manager, you have to make sure not to mess that up.

Lack of convenience means manual work, which means chance for error. This is the same reason we recommend coding using trustworthy high-level crypto constructs instead of implementing it yourself; it's more convenient and harder to mess up.

If you read the caption, the real issue here is a horrible abuse of the rent control law. When the renter signed their lease, the unit was covered by rent control, putting very tight restrictions on rent increases and evictions. However, the landlord then essentially destroyed the other unit in the building so that they could reclassify the building as a single-family home instead of a multi-unit building. Single-family homes are not covered by the rent control law.

This should obviously not be legal; if you're going to have a rent control, you can't let landlords take a unit that should have rent control and make it not rent controlled. At the very least, these kinds of changes shouldn't allow the landlord to escape an active rent control obligation to a current tenant.

Definitely worth looking into http://esofund.com/

That's another advantage of Bus Rapid Transit over trains. It's much cheaper to run one bus than one train, and the vehicles are generally smaller, so they run more of them for the same usage, meaning you generally aren't scheduled to wait as long. Of course, things can still go wrong.

VTA's rapid bus (the 522) runs every 15 minutes at rush hour, and the non-rapid one runs every 11. Off-hours is every 20-30 for each, but that's still 2-3x as often as Caltrain.

The point is that the incentives are such that it's not necessarily rational for a young startup to ensure their product stays perfectly secure.

Startups are so precarious and need so much attention on other areas that for most types of startups, security holes are not the biggest existential threat.

And those incentives partially come from users who are more than happy to sign-up for a website someone threw together in a month without any thought about whether it's secure.

Looks like total units: http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty....

Though I was actually surprised it was so high. That's units, not bedrooms, and it's only a city of ~800k people. I guess there's a lot of 1-person households to bring down the average despite all the families and twenty-somethings in 2-4 bedroom units with at least as many inhabitants as bedrooms.

Per hour rate seems somewhat misleading given the split shift. There's 15 hours between the start of their work and the end of their work, and the gap in their day is short enough that they often can't make great use of their break. If you were to consider all of that hard-to-use time as time on the job (since the job is the reason it's being underutilized), it would cut their effective rate almost in half.

Imagine someone hired you for a job where they wanted you 10 minutes out of every 20--10 minutes working, 10 minutes off, repeat. You might have a day where you clock 6 hours, but it would essentially be a 12-hour day at a job with a lot of stops and starts. Whatever rate they claimed to pay you would be inflated by two because they were only paying you for half of your time.

I'm guessing something that granular is illegal, but the split shift acts similarly; there's a big difference between working a 9-hour day straight (say with one 45-min meal break) than working a 9-hour day with a 6-hour gap in the middle, so the latter should be more highly compensated.

And so it's not necessarily an economic conundrum. There's no magical market law that says there is no bus-driving labor that could be worth more than $20 per active hour driving. Bus drivers want better compensation (or at least accommodations that make the gaps more useful to them, such as bunk beds). Facebook is surely willing to pay some amount more than they are now to continue the bus service (evidence: increased costs such as SF's new pickup fee have not stopped bus service from growing). So Facebook could pay more due to increased driver compensation or accommodation cost, the drivers could in turn be paid more or be better accommodated, and everyone would be getting more out of the economic deal than they're putting in.

The union would do what unions always do--shift some of the economic surplus that the company is currently enjoying (paying less for the bus service than the value it provides) to the workers.

For most changes of habits where it's possible, taking a hard line is much easier.

When I went vegetarian, I went cold turkey. The first two weeks, I wanted meat all the time, and it was hard to resist the temptation to eat it. The next month or so, I still wasn't sure I'd be able to keep it up, but it was easier.

Since then (years), I sometimes want meat, but it's gotten far easier.

I sometimes think about loosening up--I've considered rules like eating it once in awhile if I know it was humanely and environmentally raised (as much as possible), or bringing seafood back, or even eating meat that I know will otherwise go bad (which basically ends all my ethical objections).

The biggest reason I haven't is that it would be way harder and probably make my life worse overall. At this point, being vegetarian is super easy. I only sort of remember what most meat tastes like, I'm very used to not eating it, and I know I can do it.

Critically, it's never a decision I have to make; it's a given. If I made the line blurrier, then every time I saw meat that looked good, I would have to make a decision. The cognitive load of being a vegetarian would skyrocket, and I would probably have more of a feeling of missing out because I would think more about the possibility of not missing out.

Exactly. Think of them like a television network.

A major television network (eg. CBS) airs both in-depth news coverage, trashy reality shows, fictional comedies/dramas, and sports. More and better timeslots go to things other than news, those shows are advertised more, and the most successful non-news shows have more viewers than the nightly news, but the presence of those other shows doesn't mean that it's fair to say CBS doesn't do journalism.

This could have so easily been phrased much more nicely and more substantively.

What is Tanenbaum's legacy? What microkernels are in use?

He doesn't put his name on everything. Apparently he's contributed to over a hundred buildings and could have had his name on many of the if he wanted to. I heard that he didn't even want his name on the new dining hall, but someone convinced him (which may be why it's "Arillaga Family").

If it was developed for the CIA, why aren't the resulting patents owned by the government?

I hope they're keeping statistics on how long people are on the line before hanging up.

They're actually dealing with recruiter spam on the other side. "I see you need people, I have 'great candidates' for the roles that I would love to setup for interviews."

And they said some go to the lengths of calling the mobile number of every engineer at their company. So basically the recruiter is just an extremely persistent salesperson who distracts the entire company in hopes that they'll find a way to sell their product.

The reason is that the Bay Area is far more of a unit than originally, so things grew up independently basically in each county.

San Francisco, the city, has one main municipal system, Muni. Caltrain grew out of commuter rail that's existed for about a century and was originally private I believe.

BART was put together as an East-Bay-centric commuter rail that hoped to kind of unify everyone, but Marin (across the golden gate from SF), Santa Clara County (Silicon Valley/San Jose), and San Mateo County (between Santa Clara and SF) didn't want to pay the taxes required to be part of it.

And then there are other county bus-heavy transit agencies like Samtrans, VTA, AC Transit; it wouldn't make sense for Muni to run these since they're meant to serve other counties.

It's a giant mess, but each one largely sprung up on its own back when it was much less normal for someone to regularly travel all the way between Mountain View and SF.

Let's save the word rape for literal rape.

But it also makes sense to hedge against the market to some extent, right? Have some amount in safer things (bonds, even money market and/or some t-bill equivalent), things that sometimes go in different directions than the market (eg. commodities). What's a good way to find a balance for that?

It's worth pointing out that the chocolate pictured is $8+ for a 2oz bar.

It's small-batch, handmade in the nice part of the Mission with carefully-sourced beans. Basically as San Francisco as it gets.

Seems like the cost would add up, but I guess they hope most riders won't partake.

http://www.dandelionchocolate.com/

One issue with that is that it gives government incentives to keep people in their vices. As an imperfect example, police departments that plan on funding a significant part of their budget from speed tickets aren't encouraged to educate people against speeding or fix unreasonable speed limits.

It's also not that stable of a form of government revenue. Vices tend to be inelastic, but luxury spending will often drop precipitously in a downturn.

I'm not sure how important of a mindshare property it is. I would guess most users don't even realize that Microsoft owns Skype.

They already do tax laundry. At Facebook and Palantir, last I heard the laundry is paid for by the company, but it's considered a fringe benefit, and employees who use the service have to pay the taxes on that extra income.

Avast is pretty bad given that they make virus protection

If I were in your shoes, I would frame the rest of the time as professional development, which is likely a positive sign that might convince them to give you high rates that at times grow.

"I aim for about 25 hours/week of client work so I have plenty of time for professional development and personal projects where I can focus on learning instead of delivering the best results for my clients."

If phrased right, you can make it sound like you're already an expert at what you're doing for them, which is why you don't necessarily learn as much from it, so it's important to spend time honing your skills in new areas so you can expand your offerings.

Yep. Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System is cited in basically every distributed systems paper ever, and the ideas in it are behind, among other things, Amazon's Dynamo.

It's also fairly accessible. One of the first systems papers I read, and while I certainly felt in over my head, I got the high level ideas

This guy may need therapy. That's not her problem.

It's terrible that anyone should experience what he put her through. (Regardless of the founder's wife stuff, he produced an exceptionally hostile work environment by actively undoing her work, plus likely made her fear for her safety when he did not immediately respect her requests to leave after professing his love.) It's problematic that women in tech are much more likely to experience this than men (because of gender ratios and men tending to be more forward), and that the power dynamics and implicit threat of violence will also tend to be worse when women are the recipients of the attention.

Given this, having your first response be to ask her to be empathetic is ridiculous. Do we ask the victims of shootings to empathize with the perpetrators who had mental illness, had absentee parents, grew up poor, etc? Sometimes these issues come up in the wake of tragedies, and they are an important part of understanding the problem.

But the victim is the absolute last person to ask the be empathetic. She has an unquestionable right to feel personally safe and to do her work without others hostilely inhibiting her. When someone infringes on that, she's already being unfairly burdened. It's completely unfair to further burden her with an imperative to be understanding of what lead him to be the kind of person that would do that, rather than take every measure to remedy the situation, and to call out GitHub for failing to adequately do so.

Yes, it would be great if everyone empathized with those who wrong them. But until it becomes commonplace for people to show understanding toward people who mug them on the street because anyone willing to risk their safety and freedom for a few hundred dollars has likely hard a very hard life rather than reporting it to the police and seeking their imprisonment, let's focus on big, clear concerns: What he did to her was completely unacceptable, and if GitHub failed to quickly take action to end it and ensure it would not happen again, they deserve to be publicly shamed.

Most DB systems will be tremendously helped by having far more RAM than that to cache, and also usually by having fewer nodes than you get when only having 20GB total disk space per node.

The main place where I could see this being appealing would be complex analytic jobs (since they're more CPU-intensive), but even so, if on 512MB nodes it has to spill to disk because there isn't enough RAM (or transmit a bunch of data across the network because it split the job over two nodes) and on a bigger machine it didn't need to, you probably would have been better off with the bigger machine.

I just git clone old projects into a Dropbox private folder. I can easily keep the whole repo history even if there are multiple branches, but it doesn't take up GitHub usage at all. Of course, if you had Issues or the like, none of these solutions really work.

I do wish GitHub had a way to deactivate projects to save money. Maybe put it in a read-only state, still count it against your disk quota, but you'd have to make it active to actively work on it and update it. I feel like a lot of systems do similar things (eg. charge per user but allow deactivating users in case they go on leave or quit but may return--pause paying for that user without losing the data in case you want to reinstate.)

Pretty much all CS departments don't want solutions for most assignments (open-ended final projects excepted) on GitHub for a simple reason: they reuse assignments term to term because it is incredibly difficult and work-intensive to develop an excellent CS assignment.

While it might be possible in some courses, in many, it would be impossible to develop new assignments every term at the quality that they currently use now.

While most schools do employ quite good plagiarism detection technology (eg. MOSS) that will catch if someone turns in an assignment done by a previous student, they'd rather not have to report multiple students every term to judicial affairs, and they can't catch smaller academic dishonesty like looking at others' code to get ideas for design decisions.

For example, the Operating Systems assignments I did in university[1] are spectacular. The starter code is great, they're intense, they don't make you waste time on stuff that's not too educational. I learned a ton from them. They've been in use for years, done by probably thousands of students, and there would be no easy way to seriously change them yearly. I'm very glad my professors were able to invest in developing a great assignment set once and then reuse it year to year.

1: http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs140/projects/pintos/pintos_1...

"Unemployment rate" is usually defined as (number of people looking for employment) / (number of people employed or looking for employment). So if you're not in the labor force (student, have given up looking for work, on disability, stay-at-home parent, etc), then the calculation ignores you--you count toward neither the numerator nor denominator.

This came up the recent US recession because at the beginning of the "recovery," a significant portion of the drop in official unemployment rate came from people who had stopped looking for employment and resigned themselves to being out of the labor force for the time being.

MSR is very well-regarded, rather autonomous from Microsoft's product division, and likely larger than any university's CS department. It's not much easier to get a principal researcher there than a professorship at a great university.

They're not as broad as most universities, but they pretty reliably have the most papers in top systems conferences like OSDI and SOSP.