leepowers

When you bill by the hour, what you’re really saying is “I have no idea if what I’m doing will have any value, and I honestly don’t care — all that matters is that I am not exposed to risk for even a single minute of my time working for you. I get paid for every minute.”

Yes, that's the point. As a software freelancer you have no responsibility to take on risk for a client company that you have no ownership in. You'd be a fool to do otherwise.

Every hourly billable contract I've signed has included a detailed scope. Contracts that very clearly delineate responsibilities and compensation. Both parties are agreeing to the value the freelancer is providing. You'd be a fool to hire a freelancer without understanding the value they provide. And as a freelancer you'd be a fool to sign a contract without clearly defined responsibilities.

The author seems to believe the method of compensation determines the value provided. But these things are orthogonal. I've worked with multi-million dollar agencies that bill by the hour. They provided a lot of value, they knew precisely the outcomes they were responsible for, and delivered those outcomes.

Blog posts like this come along every so often, usually when a freelancer discovers that there are circumstances where they can make more money on a fixed cost contract. For instance "This project will take me 40 hours. If I charge $100/hr I'll gross $4000 total. Or I could quote a fixed cost of $5000 total, and net an additional $1000".

The downside is estimating software is hard, mostly because the end product is almost always a moving target. Generally speaking, clients have a good idea of what they want. But "what they want" almost always changes as a project progresses.

The upside for the freelancer is that if the scope can be nailed down, and a client is predictable, a fixed cost model allows the freelancer to capture any additional value/profit from their productivity.

Which is why savvy businesses are fine with paying hourly rates. They want to fully capture the value of the freelancer's productivity.

In my experience, from a freelance point of view, it tends to be a wash. There are many fixed cost projects where you will come out ahead. But there are always projects with tons of scope creep, and cost increases are almost always more difficult to negotiate on fixed cost contracts. But YMMV, and there's no single correct answer.

In this particular case the author is using a controversial headline to drum up attention for his business, which he plugs about 2/3rds of a way through the article. I think web developers in particular are more familiar with SEO and web-based sales and are more likely to write about software in an attempt to funnel eyeballs towards their software business ventures.

Jonathan Grey, a current US intelligence official at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (Nasic), confirmed the existence of “exotic materials” to the Debrief, adding: “We are not alone.”

...

Grusch said it was dangerous for this “eighty-year arms race” to continue in secrecy because it “further inhibits the world populace to be prepared for an unexpected, non-human intelligence contact scenario.”

“I hope this revelation serves as an ontological shock sociologically and provides a generally uniting issue for nations of the world to re-assess their priorities,” Grusch said.

A conspiracy spanning the better part of century should have more high-level whistleblowers than Grusch and Grey. If their claims are proven out the names Grusch and Grey will be immortalized in history. We still talk about the Gutenberg printing press. Centuries from now people will still talk about Grusch and Grey, and how they kick-started a new era of human knowledge.

Are we to believe that over the course of eighty years, comprising hundreds if not thousands of individuals, many of whom would have access to the same documents and materials, not a single one of these individuals, motivated by either honor or ego, decided to make this world historical disclosure?

The story seems engineered to appeal to the conspiracy theorist. A brave iconoclast bucks the system and exposes a massive coverup - a truth that just happens to confirm all the poorly sourced and speculative claims made by the true believers. Wait, why haven't we seen any miraculous technology derived from alien tech? Ahhh, this tech exists, but it's hoarded by a secretive cabal who may or may not themselves be aliens/reptiles or blood-drinking elites. Etcetera, etcetera.

On the other hand ... it would be apropos if bureaucratic inertia led to a world-shattering disclosure. And the conspiracy theories could be 95% b.s. and 5% truth.

For all those reasons I'm not really convinced. Are Grusch and Grey convinced because the evidence is that overwhelming? Are they seeped in online UFO conspiracy culture, and reading a very slanted interpretation into the intelligence documents they have accessed? Are the analyses the military has run on any recovered materials sufficient to determine an origin in non-human intelligence? Have any experts outside the military examined and tested these materials? Does there exists genuine recovered craft ala Independence Day or are the "craft" large meteors that, if you squint, kind of look like a spacecraft? Have they recovered biological material?

Ultimately we won't be able to make a true determination until we get some actual evidence. First, reviewing any documents that supposedly contain these extraordinary claims. Second, interviews with other intelligence officials who have spoken with Grusch and have had access to the materials. Third, getting these materials into the hands of relevant experts, to determine if non-human intelligence is the most likely source.

"But I Have No Choice!"

I see this argument pop-up frequently when taking to design leaders or developers. I call bullshit on this excuse. You absolutely have the choice to avoid implementing bad designs - that's your job! Either you're not fighting hard enough against those pushing for it, or you're just trying to build a "pretty" portfolio.

sigh I'm so tired of this absolutist, ranty way of thinking. Its indicative of Twitter-brain or social media outrage brain. Design is almost always a collaborative process. You literally have no controlling choice on the outcome, because the choice itself is being made by multiple stakeholders, be it your customers, your coworkers, your clients, etc.

Also, the author lists himself as the "UX Designer & Front-End Engineer @ Donorbox." Their web site at https://donorbox.org appears to be using a hamburger menu on mobile. I hope he isn't beating himself up over it.

It's hard to move away from established UI patterns like a hamburger menu because stakeholders expect it, and I suspect users look for that little hamburger icon as well.

OP is working in a dysfunctional workplace and has conflated that with "developer estimates are bad":

1. Give a very wide estimate with a lot of padding 2. Get pressured to be more accurate and to bring the estimate down 3. Get pressured to work unpaid overtime to meet that estimate 4. Watch management get congratulated by upper management for running a tight ship

Imagine I had plumber at my house and he gave an estimate of 3 to 4 hours to replace a rusted pipe. And I responded with "I think it should only take you 1 hour". He would look at me like I was crazy. That's because trying to substitute my layman's estimate for a professional estimate is crazy.

OP is providing estimates - that's a reasonable ask. The problem is management is ignoring the professional estimate and using their position to substitute in their preferred estimate. OP is being used to launder management's expectations. So of course they're patting themselves on the back. If the plumber ignored his own professional experience and only charged me for 1 hour of labor I would think of highly of myself as well, even though in reality I had no idea what I was talking about.

The solution is to set estimates that you can explain and justify. If management ignores your professional opinion you need to make it clear it's their decision and not yours. If you don't respect your own opinion no one else will.

The Big Bounce[1] hypothesis is a model that "suggests that we could be living at any point in an infinite sequence of universes". So while our current universe may not be infinite there may be some yet undiscovered infinite/eternal natural process that gives rise to universes.

Olber's Paradox[2] and the inability to reconcile it with our current astronomical observations seems to disprove that our current universe is itself infinite.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bounce

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27_paradox

DoIT estimates the project will take at least 5 years to make the necessary changes resulting in a total state general fund cost of approximately $1.47 Billion .... Total Annual Cost $293,894,620

The Department states historically the cost of implementing a new application, whether replacing an existing application or implementing applications where none existed before, is three to seven times the cost of purchasing the software licenses. [1]

Do the people of New Hampshire believe so strongly in using non-proprietary software that they're willing to take on this extra cost? Is there widespread support and understanding of free or libre software amongst the population?

My experience has been that people have a transactional relationship to software, not a values-based one. Which is the main reason the various free software movements have yet to gain wide spread traction. People don't seem to care about how software is created and how it is licensed but whether it meets a particular need. (I need to file my taxes. I want to listen to music. I want to book a reservation, etc.) The challenge is not necessarily to "make software free" but to first get people to view software through a holistic, non-transactional lens.

The hurdle for this legislation will be convincing legislators to spend $1.47bn on a software replacement that doesn't add any additional features. I mean, are citizens really going to care that the web-based interface they use to file their taxes is no longer using proprietary software under the hood? If they're viewing software through the transactional lens then this plan will seem wasteful and non-productive.

[1] https://gencourt.state.nh.us/lsr_search/billText.aspx?id=188...

It's possible the complaint is using a trivial example to illustrate the type of argument plaintiffs want to make during any trial. A 200-line example is too unwieldy for non-programmers to digest, especially given the formatting constraints of a legal brief.

Look at paragraphs 90 and 91 on page 27 of the complaint[1]:

"90. GitHub concedes that in ordinary use, Copilot will reproduce passages of code verbatim: “Our latest internal research shows that about 1% of the time, a suggestion [Output] may contain some code snippets longer than ~150 characters that matches” code from the training data. This standard is more limited than is necessary for copyright infringement. But even using GitHub’s own metric and the most conservative possible criteria, Copilot has violated the DMCA at least tens of thousands of times."

Does distributing licensed code without attribution on a mass scale count as fair use?

If Copilot is inadvertently providing a programmer with copyrighted code, is that programmer and/or their employer responsible for copyright infringement?

There's a lot of interesting legal complications I think the courts will want to adjudicate.

[1] https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/pdf/1-0-github_complaint...

But ... the examples on the right are short, concise, and effectively communicate the problem. The left examples contain no actionable information, wasting the time and attention of everyone in the channel/thread.

Maybe working in an adversarial or dysfunctional work environment is what leads to misinterpreting a detailed message as hostile.

Or the team needs to learn to use communication tools effectively. Slack messages should be concise. But a bug report doesn't always fit neatly into a few lines of text. Use an issue tracker for detailed reporting and Slack/email for informal conversations.

Either way the point of the blog post stands - everyone needs to communicate clearly and avoid ambiguous language. If I send an ambiguous message to 10 people, I've just increased their mental overhead and frustration, ultimately distracting the team and slowing them down. Instead, I should take a moment and try to look at it from their point of view and try to communicate what they need to hear and not what I want to say.

So, Middle Earth had coal, but did it need coal? I don’t think so.

The author focuses on energy sources for machine power. But what about generating high heat for metallurgy? Coal burns longer and hotter than wood, and releases fewer particulates. Also coal is more energy dense than wood, making it easier to transport.

On Firefox 97.0 (64-bit) macOS 10.15.7 (19H2) - pressing "/" opens up "Quick Find"

You'd have a point if it was just git. Issue tracker, PR interface, wiki / documentation tools, actions/webhooks, etc. - that's where Github demonstrates its utility.

Hmmm...Maybe I just tune out the business stuff, but I mostly see topics relating to programming, science, and technology, with a smattering of pure business stuff and product/startup announcements.

I think this may be a taxonomic problem. Consider this topic:

Facebook's own data is not as conclusive about teens and mental health [1]

The article is about Facebook, so its definitely a business article. But it also an article on technology and society, and about the science that describes how social media consumption effects mental health.

HN would lose something if it focused purely on technology. While its essential to understand how technology works, and what changes are on the horizon, the beauty of HN is it also explores how science and technology interconnect with business, government, society, culture, etc.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28813041

Super Mario 64 and The Ocarina of Time elevated open-world 3D game play. So much of gaming to this point, even 3D gaming, was dungeon crawling, or traversing linear paths and story lines, or killing opponents in a closed arena. SM64 and Ocarina really transported the player into a whole new world.

The camera work was almost perfect, and the subtleties of the system were revolutionary. The Wikipedia article[1], and this picture in particular[2] provide a good description.

25 years later I think of SM64 as the Citizen Kane of video games. Citizen Kane provided a glimpse of what the medium was capable of; it changed peoples perception of what a movie could be. Virtually every movie since has either been directly inspired by CK or has internalized its zeitgeist. Super Mario 64 played the same role for video games.

Or - it could that since I grew up playing SM64 I've anchored to it and feel it's influence more deeply than history warrants :D

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_64#Influence

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_64#/media/File:Sup...

She thinks they’re taking it down because they don’t want people to know the truth.

1) If they take false content down that will reinforce her beliefs.

2) If they leave false content up, she will keep consuming it, which will reinforce her beliefs.

3) So - when it comes to changing her mind (and the millions like her), 1 and 2 are a wash. She's adopted an unfalsifiable position. There is no policy Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et al. can adopt to reason her out of this position. She will have to reason her self out of it at some point.

4) The purpose of taking down false content is not to change her mind, or change the mind of anyone else who has adopted an unfalsifiable position. The purpose is to stop the spread of false and untrue information. If there's 10 million people who have taken the unfalsifiable position the goal is to prevent another 10 million from adopting the same viewpoint.

5) However I can't be sure #4 will actually work. Its very difficult to lockdown information and prevent its spread.

6) And can these platforms moderate edge cases with accuracy? If they bungle the job users will lose trust in them as an information source. But - since these platforms are the main driver of misinformation, then discrediting them as information sources would be a net good.

7) So - no moderation means we continue the status quo of information and vaccine hesitancy.

8) Requiring moderation might combat hesitancy by a) preventing the spread of misinformation and b) discrediting platforms in the eyes of the hesitant or hesitant adjacent.

9) Because these platforms are public and performative they are ill suited for mea culpas. Rarely do people relish engaging with ideas that might prove you wrong, especially in a public setting. The work of helping people reason themselves out of unreason will be done outside these platforms.

I was, again, technically stronger. A thousand-string pull request was littered with 200 comments, not leaving the person even a faint hope in his competency. Great.

That's way too much feedback. It makes it very hard determine which problems are critical, and which come down to aesthetics or personal preference. On the flip side, if I was churning out buggy code at that rate, I'd want to know about those bugs in detail.

There's also an opportunity cost of evaluating code so tightly. Not only does it take up more of the reviewer's time, it also eats up developer time that could be spent on other features.

The reason for these angry code reviews is obvious. As part of the team, I bear full responsibility for the project’s code base. I have to work with it later, after all. It’s a source of many issues for the business. The code doesn’t scale, can’t be tested properly, is littered with bugs. Support gets more and more expensive. It can’t be open-sourced or used to lure new developers.

Premature optimization? The mistake here is trying to optimize the legacy of your code base, possibly thinking too far ahead.

Love the concept. My only blocker for adoption is being able to import bookmarks from Firefox into Bonsai.

Feedback and ideas:

1) On macOS Catalina - can't Cmd+Tab out of full-screen.

2) Bookmarks import.

3) Search somewhere other than Google. Would love to be able to define a set of URLs to hit, instead of being limited to https://www.google.com/search?q=...

4) Search within pages. In addition to search engines. So if I export my bookmarks to an HTML file, I could search that file. Or if I could search within local documentation that's not online.

5) Collab workspaces. A team could share a workspace that defines the same search engines and documents.

6) Window size other than fullscreen.

Sharing freely and embracing open source has been an unalloyed good for encouraging the development of software; so there is some insight to your comment. But participation in open source is voluntary. And right now any artist or musician can make the voluntary and free decision release their work under a Creative Commons license. It would be a degradation of individual liberty to require all workers in all creative fields to open source their work. That's not a choice you, or me, or the government should get to make on behalf of another person.

One might argue that some regime of publicly funded remuneration could be just compensation for the public seizure of all creative output. But that's orthogonal to the point. The seizure itself is the problem.

Does it though? It seems instead the incentive might be to create broad and accessible works that will appeal to the widest audience. Marvel movies are produced and performed with a high level of quality; yet the stories are simple, unchallenging, and easily accessible.

It's also possible to create content that's more experimental and creative, by focusing on more niche audiences. This is evidenced by the current golden age of TV and streaming, with a wide variety of dramas, comedies, documentaries, etc.

I've always been fascinated by people who spend huge chunks of time creating and maintaining Wikipedia articles. Are they driven by a simple love research and curating information? Or maybe knowing their articles could potentially inform and educate millions of people.

I wonder how driven content creators would be if they believed no one would read their articles; if the information they carefully curated was mere bot food, digested and summarized on a Google search results page. The summaries may have greater utility for search engine users. Yet at the same time the ecosystem as a whole would be degraded if the incentives for creating rich detailed content are degraded.

Google relies on free and open access to a vast sea of information. Most of this information exists due to the labor of other people. If any company wants to use this information to create a free and open source search engine, voice assistant, etc., I say more power to that company. But when a company uses free and open data to power proprietary walled gardens, we should consider the regulatory implications and the effect on the ecosystem as a whole. And Google is large enough that when it creates a walled garden (keeping visitors tied Google properties and products) that it could have a significant negative impact.

Another possibility is that chances of advanced civilizations developing are extraordinarily rare. It could be so rare that even if anatomically modern humans exist for one to two million years, the species only establishes advanced civilizations once or twice.

It could be the case the cyclical pattern is 1000k years of pre-history - then 1k years of advanced civilization - followed by 1000k years reversion to a pre-historical state. We could be the outliers in a cycle that is far more ancient and far more vast than Graham Hancock imagines.

And the criticisms of Hancock are well founded. He looks at a site like Gobekli Tepe. He ignores the most parsimonious explanation - that this is a temple site for observing obscure and long forgotten religious rituals. Instead Hancock engages in flights of fancy, asserting that GT is akin to a university, a place used to teach the long-forgotten secrets of a lost civilization. The criticism is not that he's positing a cyclical a view - but that he's making fantastical assertions without the evidence to back them up.

...its also entirely plausible those predecessors didn't discover or take advantage of fossil fuels making it very easy to not leave any traces of there existence

Or it could be the case we don't see any evidence because these ancient advanced civilizations didn't exist. We can infer non-existence from the lack of evidence. What we can't do is make an unfalsifiable claim without evidence and assert that ancient advanced civilizations existed. It's entertaining to speculate, or to listen to GH read the tea leaves. But it doesn't prove anything.

We have evidence of populous and vibrant civilizations existing in Africa, the Americas, the Mediterranean, and many other places in the past 20,000 years. We have essentially zero evidence for advanced civilizations during the period before the Neolithic, the long era of pre-history of our species.

Note - this method requires the element have a height defined; or a height derived from a declaration like `aspect-ratio`

That's because `inset: 0rem` is equivalent to `top: 0rem; right: 0rem; bottom: 0rem; left: 0rem;` - which is a well know technique to force 100% height.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/inset

[2] https://codepen.io/leepowers/pen/KKmgpwB

Noticed no problems today, west coast, I have their web mail interface always running in an open tab

It's a false equivalence.

Here's the AOC quote being referenced:

"The whole point of protesting is to make ppl uncomfortable. Activists take that discomfort w/ the status quo & advocate for concrete policy changes. Popular support often starts small & grows. To folks who complain protest demands make others uncomfortable… that’s the point."

Where in this statement is there any incitement for rioting or violence?

Now let's take a look at Trump's actions on Wednesday[1]:

"You don't concede when there's theft involved. Our country has had enough and we will not take it any more"

"And we fight. We fight like hell and if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."

This is how Trump described the rioters:

"These are the things that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long."

Contrast this with Pence's response:

"This attack on our Capitol will not be tolerated and those involved will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law"

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-trump-in-final-weeks-inc...

For months Trump has asserted that mail-in voting is intrinsically insecure and fraudulent. He's also been parroting baseless lies and conspiracy theories about the election. Telling his supporters their vote is being suppressed by all the parties that refuse to go along with his insane demands. These parties include: state and federal governments, private companies that build voting machines, poll workers, Republican secretaries of state, state and federal courts, a complicit press, and now even the vice president.

If you believe what Trump says then you must believe that the entire system of democratic representation has broken down. Under this mindset it makes sense to resort to violent action and storm the capitol - what other recourse do you have? That's why rioters left a "WE WILL NOT BACK DOWN" note on Pelosi's desk. And when Trump says the loves and supports the rioters, that's the mindset he's reinforcing and encouraging.

When Trump says everyone should go home - why should we treat that statement as normative? When virtually everything else this man has said agitates and encourages insurrection, why should we glom onto this one positive statement?

The shocking events of the last 24 hours clearly demonstrate that President Donald Trump intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden.

The account bans are not just because of this one video considered in isolation. The bans are happening because of the systematic anti-democratic and seditious behavior of the president and his campaign.

This is an extraordinary step for YouTube to take.

But we live in extraordinary times; or a least, this is an extraordinary circumstance.

The president is unwilling to concede his loss. He baselessly claims the election was stolen, alleging massive fraud with no supporting evidence.

This claim of a stolen election is a form of government propaganda. It's a lie issued by government officials: the president, his administration, and his allies in federal and state offices. This propaganda is designed as cover for a naked power grab. Either to keep the president in office; or to radicalize his base to support further restrictions on the franchise, which aids minority Republican power.

Censoring government propaganda is the right thing to do. Especially this most noxious type that is designed to attack and destroy democracy. The failure of the president and his allies to respect democracy means this responsibility must fall on other actors, such as YouTube. Or at the very least these actors should refrain from promulgating the government's destructive propaganda.

Taibbi's concern that this will lead to more radicalization is exactly that: a worry and a concern. Yet the uncritical spreading of these government lies is causing damage here and now, in real time. It's bizarre that Taibbi is so focused on theoretical downsides, yet seems to discount the damage that has been done and will multiply should the lie fester.

What about free speech?

First; Free speech does not exist for itself. The purpose of free speech is truth. Free speech is a guarantor of discourse, of our ability to have free and open conversations that reveal some truth about our universe or about ourselves. And the ability for us to agree or disagree about what the truth is, what is right and what is wrong, and what is true and what is false.

Propaganda and bald-faced lies are anathema to free speech. Trump's claims are baseless self-serving lies. They shed no light, they are designed to mislead, and they hide the truth. The national discourse now centers on this big lie. In this context lies are bad not just because they are lies, but because they narrow and constrain the discourse. I'm not talking about lies that come from misinformation or misunderstanding or mistake - the goal of free discourse is to correct these kind of lies. Instead I'm speaking of the deliberate lie designed to achieve some goal, the knowing lie. If the goal of discourse is to uncover truth, the goal of the knowing lie is to preempt discourse, and by extension the truth itself.

Second; Free speech has always been bridled. Consider holocaust denial and the flat earth hypothesis. Both have approximately the same amount of supporting evidence (none or close to zero). But only holocaust denial is banned from YouTube. Why? Because there is a nexus of holocaust denial, anti-semitic violence, white supremacist groups, and racism. Flat earthers are benign by comparison (unless they start blowing up NASA buildings). Holocaust denial is dangerous because it's part of larger violent white nationalist movement.

Trump's lies about the election are of this latter type; not that they are white nationalist; but that they are part of a larger effort to subvert democracy. And have already stoke death threats an calls to violence. Individuals and corporations (like YouTube) should actively rebut and censor these lies.

Why bind a database to a local socket and not to a network port? Because it reduces the attack surface area. It doesn't mean the database is "secure": access permissions could be configured incorrectly; it could be missing security patches; etc. But closing off the port still increases security because an attacker has to compromise another system, or find a more obscure pathway to get at the database server. An attacker incurs an additional cost when trying to compromise the database.

Why move SSH to a higher port? Same reason - it reduces surface area.

However - does changing the SSH port _really_ add that much of a cost? For naive attackers - yes. A well configured firewall which detects and tracks SSH login failures, port scans, etc and issues IP bans is more robust. But even this only goes so far, especially for attackers who can orchestrate a large number of IP addresses.

Happens to me all the time with ads loading when reading an article on mobile. Very annoying!

I was just thinking this. It sort of gives you a home base to return to, regardless of how weird/spiffy the rest of application is. Additionally "Help" is always to the right of the other menu items. And there's a search box under "Help" that you can use to search menu items. Which can be extraordinarily useful, especially in applications like Photoshop that have complex menus and panel systems.

About that:

Hosting a lecture in a university physics department [Oxford] without inviting any physicists is, at best, an unforgivable oversight. As my colleague Subir Sarkar put it, “It’s surprising that the organisers did not invite the particle physicists to attend – if indeed the intention was to have a discussion.”[1]

If the theory is to be anything but a dalliance he really needs to engage in conversation. Weinstein may be right, or his ideas may very well stimulate other ideas in the field. But the hard work of debate and discovery comes first, afterwards the headlines.

[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23595-weinsteins-theo...