throwaaskjdfh

Recommendations and referrals strike me as one of the ways that groups with an unintentional diversity problem end up persisting it. The composition of the group gets carried forward as people vouch for each other.

The summary mentions "scroll[ing] their LinkedIn connections", but relying too heavily on this sort of thing puts people with no connections at a disadvantage, and actually makes it more difficult for a cohort trying to address a diversity problem to do so.

Are we expected to be available 24/7/365 to act on Google's unforeseeable impulses?

Almost all software nowadays involves some back-end with 24/7/365 availability, which means that unplanned outages can occur at any time. It sucks, especially for small or one-person operations, but it's the game many of us are in.

Pi comes from logic, not nature.

What if logic is different in different universes? Logic is universal... but is it multiversal?

Why is the startup trying to be a consulting company? This doesn’t sound like the story of any visionary startup I know of.

Why does a successful software business need to be a "visionary startup"? Taking on consulting work and discovering the product by listening to customers seems like a reasonable approach.

It's not really a WTF. In any disagreement about intellectual property, where some part of Amazon is working on a game and it happens to conflict with some other employee's personal project, Amazon wants all the leverage. It makes sense to have something that says "in a pinch, we're going to use what we use, even if you say it's yours".

If an employee expects to do something interesting or profitable with a personal project, then it's a "no", but it's not a WTF.

EDITED TO ADD: This is why we need laws that protect personal projects and make it impossible for companies to demand this. But in the absence of such restrictions on companies, they're going to set themselves up to win in any kind of dispute. It is not a WTF.

...not eat and litter during the show.

Historically in US movie theaters, there's so much popcorn grease and spilled soda on the floor that your shoes actually get stuck to it while you're watching the movie.

EDIT: Wow downvotes? It's true! Maybe they mop them now but back when Diller was in the movie business, your shoes actually did get stuck to the floor because of all the spilled snacks. I haven't been to a movie theater in many years, but the grime was an essential part of the experience. Someone should open a throwback 80s theater.

Moreover I don't see how free a society would be if cryptocurrencies became widely accepted and early adopters began to pass cryptocurrency inheritances from one generation to another. The descendants of the early adopters would be a new type of landed gentry, with a mathematical moat. It doesn't seem like a reasonable way to organize society.

When you want to do something simple but you have to bring the entire philosophy of CSS into consideration to figure out what the right way to do it is.

As a meta-point, I'm kinda surprised how attitudes among programmers have reversed in the last 20 years, from phoning home being suspicious under any circumstances, to telemetry being indispensable. I suspect the two sides of the argument map pretty closely to age.

The tone of the post from the Musescore developer at [0] is so bizarre I wonder if the people who manage the company's policies and communications even know about it.

Along those lines, this was an interesting statement:

"You should learn how to use these commands, but they shouldn't be a regular part of your prod workflows. That will lead to a flaky system."

It seems like there's some theory vs. practice tension here. In theory, you shouldn't need to use these commands often, but in practice, you should be able to do them quickly.

How often is it the case in reality that a team of Kubernetes superheroes, well versed in these commands, is necessary to make Continuous Integration and/or Continuous Deployment work?

What would make someone think that this applies to Audacity, the program, and not Audacity, the website?

Because the first full sentence of the policy at https://www.audacityteam.org/about/desktop-privacy-notice/ specifies that it applies to "our desktop app Audacity".

I think it was a reasonable point. Inter-generational wealth transfer is very durable over time. Whether or not someone inherits "house money" (and can plan their lifestyle and tolerance for risk according to that expectation) still corresponds to closely to race in the US.

A family history of slavery might not necessarily be the cause, but having ancestors who were allowed into the property club, at a time in the past when there was still headroom to pump appreciation faster than inflation, makes a difference in what people inherit.

I suspect the Great Filter is that sufficiently intelligent life has no interest in expansion, and doesn't communicate at all.

An approach that combined "no code reviews" with "continuous deployment" would be similar to coding on the production server, but with a better audit trail and consistent deployment across machines.

If we're moving past pure reason into useful tools and tricks to diminish people's standing...

Without getting into the "cancel culture" aspect (which seems like a red herring), in order to even get to a point where "pure reason" comes into play, you have to force your adversary to engage on that level.

For instance, a powerful politician isn't going to take the risk of engaging in any argument unless there is something that makes ignoring it costly. If anything, they'll especially ignore a well-reasoned argument against them if they can get away with it. They're not going to get into a debate with someone because their points seem interesting or insightful; they're going to avoid engaging altogether. It's not worth the risk.

Insults are one of the tools that can create enough negative publicity to diminish their standing, and to force them to engage, in order to avoid further diminution.

Why does it seem like C++ is constantly replacing its subtle hazards with even more subtle hazards? It's like they never go away, they just turn into something more obscure.

What about the self-censorship of our neo-cortex telling us not to insult other people? Is that bad too?

Sometimes it's bad. Insults are an occasionally useful tool, and can be wielded to diminish the standing of adversaries who might otherwise be more powerful.

EDIT: speaking of insults, this is on the HN front page right now:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27595429

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_of_the_Zaporozhian_Cossa...

Amazon’s decisions seem hard to explain. We should let it remain a mystery

This gets back to what I disagree with. If Amazon's decisions seem hard to explain, the decisions should be brought to the public's attention and Amazon should explain them. There is no reason for it to remain a mystery. And they'll never explain it unless there is a price to be paid for not explaining, e.g. being perceived as wasteful.

The report would be a lot more useful if there were some context for this data.

I disagree with this, or at least the implication that there should have been more information gathered before publication.

If the data is surprising against a common-sense set of expectations, it's Amazon's burden to provide a context for interpretation where the surprising information makes sense, not the report.

Assuming the report's facts are in order, reporting accurate facts and leaving "contextualization" to someone else is good journalism, especially if the facts themselves are not widely known or actively hidden.

I mean map which companies use this SME acronym and which don't, similar to how "soda", "pop", and "coke" map to different regions of the USA.

Same here, 25 years writing software, never heard it, even working in the Bay Area.

I got a pretty large number of upvotes on the three-word post above so I think the term is common in some circles, unheard of in others. Someone should map it somehow.

What's an SME?

Anyone can make a mistake. I think it speaks to their professionalism that they test with straightforward content in the email instead of having "underpants gnome alert" or a bunch of swear words in there.

We just got a peek inside HBO's technological kitchen. Seems all right.

Because if Tether is defying gravity now, there's no way to be sure it won't defy gravity even harder before it collapses.

With a short, you can't just be right in the end, you have to find a way to not blow up if things get more irrational in the meantime.

It was not easy to see that the market would move incredibly higher over the course of the pandemic. Not in January 2020, nor any time since then. People can't even explain it after it has happened.

It still takes effort to sort support requests into those he wants to handle and those he doesn't. If he thinks that the manner in which is work is being used is going to bury him with requests, whether he takes them or not, it makes sense to try to avoid the situation altogether.

I don't think there's a way to actually do that with an open source project though.

I agree; cryptocurrencies are a scam. But in general they're not Ponzis, with some exceptions e.g. the situation the parent poster describes where VC investors get "early coins" which are sold to later buyers.

This is good to know. I don't care at all about using the latest iOS; if my iPhone 6S was still running the original version it shipped with, I'd never know the difference.

But I do care about security updates.

With that clarification I agree that it would be a Ponzi scheme. If the project is mainly accepting money from new buyers and routing it to early participants who are selling, then it's a Ponzi.