lbarrett

"Kafkaesque" suggests people standing in very long queues. It doesn't seem unreasonable as a name for very long queue software.

It's possible to host a web app letting you view old Slack messages from an export, e.g. https://github.com/hfaran/slack-export-viewer or https://github.com/srid/Taut . I wonder if that can help in these use cases.

I get out of sorts when other cyclists break the law. How can we cyclists ask drivers to obey the law, to protect us, if we won't even do it ourselves?

I'm right handed but I use my left hand to mouse for RSI reasons.

I learned to knit. It helps keep me from getting distracted during video meetings. (I apparently need to fiddle with my hands a lot, and a fidget spinner or doodling doesn't cut it.) I got a lot of help from my wife, but learning it was pretty straightforward.

If you do the take-home problem, do you get to skip the interview? My understanding was that it might, at most, replace a 1-hour whiteboarding interview. The one time I did a take-home problem for an interview, I spent a whole weekend day on it (which felt hard, given that I was making my wife watch our child all day), and then I still had to spend a whole day on in-person interviews.

And then they didn't even ask me any questions about my take-home solution--it was just ignored. It felt like a pure waste. I'd much rather do whiteboarding.

This reminds me so much of Vernor Vinge's story "Fast Times at Fairmont High". It's set in the near future, and one plot point is that high school tests cover this skill--to read through the manuals quickly and get things done with new tools. I recommend it, and the related book "Rainbows End".

I think they can easily hedge prices (via futures), but hedging production is much harder (because your weather & production might be different from others around, and with insurance the incentives can get bad; see moral hazard).

I worked for a company that tried to insure farmers so they'd be profitable even in bad years, but the reduction in profit on good years (i.e. cost of insurance) was too much to sell well.

When I read it, I see that the "The data subject shall have the right to ... erasure of personal data ... where one of the following grounds applies: ... the data subject withdraws consent...."

I imagine that HTTP logs associating URLs and IPs are personal data because they associate users with activity, so they would have to be removed.

It's pretty hard to destroy individual log lines (they're often aggregated in zipped files, for instance), and logs show up in lots of places: your load balancer may log, your web server may log, your application may log, those logs may be backed up to tape, you might have debug logs captured for analysis from any of these systems, and those debug logs might be present on developer machines, not on servers or long-term storage.

That basically means that if any user asks to have their data erased, you have to figure out whether they owned that IP address at that time (so they can't ask for others' information to be removed), then delete all those logs, potentially rewriting your whole tape archive(!), potentially having developers destroy the debugging info they were using to track down a memory leak or whatever (on laptops, or in the ticketing system, or in heap dumps, or wherever it might be).

It's pretty easy to say "don't keep logs of IP addresses", but that's one of the major ways people detect malicious traffic, e.g. spam, denial-of-service attacks, and break-in attempts. It's hard to live without that.

Am I reading something wrong? Is there something I missed in that section that makes it easier?

Is "so we can look for malicious traffic" enough of a legal ground for processing to keep personal information around indefinitely even if the user asked for it to be removed? I can't imagine that's so, as that would be a pretty big loophole.

No. I have fast cellular internet but pay $10/GB, and I consider that a pretty good deal (total for me + wife is $45/mo, including cellular and data; in Portland, OR). Your 4G internet is cheaper than most people's wired internet here in the US.

If you play the classical guitar, you may receive different advice. Long nails can have practical uses.

I also let my spouse unlock my phone. It's not so much "being an open book" as it is "I trust her not to snoop, and sometimes it's convenient that she can open a map on my phone." That meets your definition of trust: not having to know what she does because I know she'll do the right thing.

I posted a comment! Hooray for participation in government.

I think one thing that causes conflict here is that there are a lot of things that aren't blatantly racist, but rather subtly racist. For instance, casually assuming that a minority student is less capable than a white student is the sort of thing someone might do without thinking of themselves as racist, but it is still actually racist and harmful. Subtle racism like this still needs to be identified and opposed, and I'm interested in how that can be done without making people feel so uncomfortable and judged.

I agree that rational debate is good, but in this case the rational debate has to include judgment because the one side of the debate is arguing that the other side (say, racism), is evil. That prevents it from being a perfectly calm, rational debate because the other side ends up (accurately) feeling judged and condemned. That's exactly the thing the author dislikes here--that the people supporting the non-mainstream views on these issues feel that it's not socially acceptable to have those views, so they feel they can't speak up.

So, how can people argue that bigotry is unacceptable and wrong without making it harder for bigots to speak up?

Let's be clear--right now, there is this discussion. Now, when some people promote racism, others explain that they're wrong, and why. This is exactly the thing that the article argues against--the author wants to remove all this censure, and have that majority stop arguing that being racist is wrong, so that racist people will feel comfortable expressing their views without any fear of chastisement.

So, you're suggesting that we can argue that racism is bad without making racists feel judged for being racist? Please, explain to me how we can do that.

So, let's talk about the really basic case: calling people out for making racial slurs. If someone uses the n-word on my friend (or "faggot" or "jewed" or "gypped" or what have you), then me saying to that person, "Please don't say a mean, racist thing like that," fights against racism, by helping enforce a social norm that racism is not okay.

How would you recommend handling a situation like that? How would you work to stop a racist behavior, without making someone feel uncomfortable for doing it?

The important question about this perspective is, I think, this: How do you fight against harmful, unjust beliefs such as racism without making it socially uncomfortable for people to express them? The author says that racism is a big powerful force that should be fought but then argues only for weakening our social defenses against it.

I recognize that this could seem like an attack, but I'm really not calling the author racist. What I want is to know, how can we have greater agreement that racism is bad, and more diversity of expression about racism, at the same time? It seems contradictory.

So, deregulate ISPs, but regulate some sites on the internet? Sure, tha will lead to good outcomes for everyone.

The overuse of antibiotics in large-scale animal farming is particularly terrible; many are given low doses of antibiotics as part of their food [1]. This gives bacteria lots of time and selective breeding to become resistant, and it's probably the worst thing we could do for the long-term health of humanity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock#Un...

One of the complaints is that it runs stock Android, without "enhancements." Personally, having had a Sony Android phone and a Nexus, I think stock Android is way better: stock is a feature, not a bug.

Moral of the story: we should all wear body cameras, just in case we're involved in some sort of altercation, involving the police or not.

But satire is covered by fair use, right? So I think the neo-Nazis aren't hampered by the copyright.

I think that almost none of us will be able to retire comfortably at 62.

You should plan for living expenses through your whole life, and you might well live to 100--and you pretty much have to plan for that, because being 90 and running out of money would be very unpleasant. But if you work from 22 to 62 and live 'til 100, then you'll have worked for only 40% of your life, so you have to cover all the expenses of your entire life during that short period.

If, on the other hand, you work until you're 72, then you have an extra 25% of time to save and a 17% decrease in non-working time. The math gets much better.

The results of this math get worse if you believe we'll see improvements in life extension during your life. If you live an extra 10 years, you probably need to work at least another few years.

In summary, saying people should retire at 62 seems short-sighted to me.

What a wildly anti-union article.

"Deregulation has worked well. ... Before deregulation ICC-regulated truckers paid unionized workers about 50 percent more than comparable workers in other industries."

I understand that cheaper trucking is helpful for some industries, but cutting workers' income is definitely a negative, not a positive.

I'm confused why "Pay the US tax" is not being seriously considered. I guess no one would even hope that a corporation would do the sensible and legal thing when there are loopholes to be abused.

He seems like a bad man in many ways, but I'm glad he's working on doing the right thing in this case.

I'm not an expert, but I think...

Your ref can't be unassigned. There are no null pointers.

Isn't following a policy like that at all a fault?

Yeah. The irony I see in all of this is that the government did this to themselves. Government overcollection of information led to public need for encryption, which in turn led to the fact that the government can't collect information when it does have a legal mandate to do it.

The best answer here is: the government should obey the laws and not spy on citizens, and maybe then the citizens won't seek refuge.