oregondan

Related site on Slack/messaging etiquette: https://nohello.net/

Same (re: master / slave)...

At a previous job, a coworker presented a compelling argument for removing "whitelist" and "blacklist" terminology from our codebases / jargon. Even though the etymologies of the words don't describe them as being based on race / racial judgments, their first recorded usages were in the 16th-17th centuries, when mass enslavement was in full swing. Setting aside the historical context, they also help reenforce the idea of "white is good, black is bad" [0].

At that job we moved to terms like excludeList, allowList, denyList, etc.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6148600/

This doesn't directly answer your question, but there's a nice SMS interface framework available for Django called RapidSMS[0]. It's been a few years since I've played with it, and never got around to testing "in the wild" / with a real phone, but, it makes the Request/Response <-> SMS gateway mapping pretty easy to navigate

[0] https://github.com/rapidsms/rapidsms

I wasn't coding when Altavista was around, but I totally agree that Google is terrible for searching code snippets etc.

Fortunately, there's SymbolHound [0], which is designed for just that! Check it out

[0] http://symbolhound.com/

That's exactly the point of the question, though: when/how did sloths transition from "ancient" to "modern"? If ancient sloths were massive and formidable prey, as per the article, what happened? Were there always smaller and/or slower sloth varieties, and we just killed all the giant ones?

EDIT: As always, Wikipedia comes through [1]. There were species of different sizes, with tree sloths always being smaller than ground sloths [2], the giant of the article

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloth#Evolution [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_sloth

...demographers say it will take decades for the ramifications of the bulge to fade away.

heh

A Universal History of the Destruction of Books is a really good book on the topic by Fernando Baez. It is historical, but it almost reads like a collection of short stories.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Universal-History-Destruction-Books-M...

It's in the section on Famine [1]. Main article [2].

Although actual harvests were reduced, local officials, under tremendous pressure from central authorities to report record harvests in response to the innovations, competed with each other to announce increasingly exaggerated results. These were used as a basis for determining the amount of grain to be taken by the State to supply the towns and cities, and to export. This left barely enough for the peasants, and in some areas, starvation set in. A 1959 drought and flooding from the Yellow River in the same year also contributed to famine.

During 1958–1960 China continued to be a substantial net exporter of grain, despite the widespread famine experienced in the countryside, as Mao sought to maintain face and convince the outside world of the success of his plans.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Famine

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

I forget where I got it from, but I have this JS snippet saved as a bookmark--it gets around the WSJ paywall by 'redirecting' from Facebook.

  javascript:window.location.href='https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u='+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href);

That's funny, Apple pulled a Microsoft and skipped 9 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This definitely sounds like a service a lot of people could benefit from, and I wish you the best of luck, but my mind went straight to White Christmas episode of Black Mirror...

What??

This seems like a road that only leads to technical debt brought on by people who, as you say, know nothing about the code they're working on. Why would you feel that's acceptable to a company?

Fortunately software development (often) has little direct impact on matters of life or death, but can you imagine an architect or construction worker who successfully cheated their way through school being brought on and having zero idea of how to weld, or how to predict the weak points in a structure?

Also, I'd argue that using frameworks is different than 'not writing code,' though I do agree that the JS community has become framework-obsessed...

So, JavaScript and its earlier version — Java are already becoming mature enough to use it for more than just programmatically finding good place to eat burrito.

:( this guy...

Woah, you also made Photo Find? Hell yeah

Apparently Ladino was used as a trade language throughout the Mediterranean/Adriatic, and Wikipedia lists it as being "native" to Italy [1]. There also are regional Judeo-Italian dialects, including two from Corfu [2].

My internal map of Italy isn't very good, but given the 'size' of the populations that must speak or have spoken these dialects, I'd guess there was a dialect specific to Sicily.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaeo-Spanish [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeo-Italian_languages#Dialec...

It is a bit of an anachronism, yeah. Soon, though, we'll have template literals [1], and this example will just be out of date.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

I just discovered that PhantomJS has a built-in web server that serves generic WebKit-based dev tools (basically identical to Chrome's)[0].

It's obviously not helpful in terms of seeing the layout of the site, but it's a helluva lot better than writing Phantom scripts, running it, seeing it's failed for some non-obvious reason, modifying it, running it again, having it fail, etc. If anyone has any other suggestions for avoiding pure trial/error workflows with Phantom, I'd love to hear it.

[0] http://phantomjs.org/troubleshooting.html#remote-debugging

There's also noti (https://github.com/variadico/noti), which I use. Just add noti to the beginning of a command you run (i.e. "noti eb deploy"), and you'll get a notification when it finishes.

I recently discovered the Photo Find app for iOS, which does the same thing:

https://itunes.apple.com/app/id939480376

The country's (and the author's) claims of "sound democratic leadership" are also disputed.

Levitsky and Way, in Competitive Authoritarianism, (https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=NZDI05p1PDgC&oi=...) describe it as a stable authoritarian government. Although the country does hold nominally competitive elections, the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) has held power since they gained independence. That the country's diamond industry has thrived over the last 40 years is no coincidence.

I've had this thought for a long time, as someone who used to use exclusively PCs, and now lives in an Apple-centric household.

I'm no lawyer, but the only reason I can think of why Apple hasn't been sued for this is their market penetration: With ~91%--92.5% of all desktops using some version of Windows (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...), any small changes made to the default software bundle could affect billions of people. Apple's market penetration, on the other hand, is a little over 7% (in the PC space).

I feel like it's only a matter of time before Apple has to confront the reality of anti-trust legislation in the US and EU, which could be very detrimental to their vertical integration, their restrictions against running OS X on any non-Apple machine, bundling of apps, as you say, and more.

Hey everybody. Earth Class Mail is currently running a promo (OUTBOX2014) for people feeling aimless in the wake of Outbox's closure. It'll give you two months free and waive your sign-up fee. Shameless plug, I work there. I can vouch for the service, though; it's legit, and we're working really hard to grow the company.