Why is 99% reliability a problem for Twitter?

I’m concerned that non-technical people might think that 99% reliability is very good, so I’m writing this to explain the real situation. This is relevant to any website or software, but I’m going to focus on Twitter.

I’ve been at early stage startups where we were stretched very thin, and we had to live with 99% reliability. We were embarrassed about it, but we could explain to our potential customers “we are very early stage” and they would accept that, at ...

Truly Agile development revolves around one-on-one meetings, not daily standups

Robin Rendle wrote a good essay “I don’t believe in sprints.” Everyone in tech should read that. My only criticism is that the title is focused on what he’s against rather than what he’s for.

I’ll focus on what I’m for: real agility involves spontaneous one-on-one meetings. I say “spontaneous” because these meetings are not planned, people simply talk when they need to. Large meetings, which often waste the time of at least some participants, are discouraged. If you’re looking ...

How to handle an engineer who lies to you about bugs

(This is an excerpt from my book.)

In 2011 I was working at a travel site that gathered up travel deals from the major air, cruise and hotel companies and then promoted them on the site. The whole tech team was just six engineers, and Sonia was our project manager and also our entire QA team.

One week, after we pushed out some new code, Sonia tested the web site – informally clicking around, looking for any mistakes. 

Sonia: I don’t think I’m seeing ...

Changing demographics in higher education

Interesting: (from the New York Times)

I’ve tried to focus this newsletter on those liminal spaces where the greater American narrative does not quite make sense. Much of this focus has been on the Asian American immigrant population, but I believe much of the analysis holds for Latino and Black immigrants as well. One area of inquiry into this mismatch between a binary way of thinking and the actual American population was education, where an increasing focus on equity has not only ...

Don’t use Airflow

The comments on this thread are fairly brutal towards Airflow:

 I believe airflow was probably the right choice at the time we started. We were a small team, and deploying airflow was a major shortcut that more or less handled orchestration so we could focus on other problems. With the aid of hindsight, we would have been better off spinning off our own scheduler some time in the first year of the project. Like I mentioned in my OP, we have ...

Everyone hates NFS yet everyone uses NFS

For more than 10 years I’ve heard people tell me that NFS is obsolete and no sensible engineer would ever use it. Nevertheless, it remains useful and so engineers use it:

After some experimentation we found that we could vastly improve performance across our Airflow environments by running an NFS (network file system) server within the Kubernetes cluster. We then mounted this NFS server as a read-write-many volume into the worker and scheduler pods. We wrote a custom script which synchronizes ...

What if something changes?

This is both funny and true:

“What if it changes?” isn’t just a question. It’s a powerful heuristic for software design that can be used to justify almost anything. Everyone should use it more. It’s great precisely because it’s rooted in pure speculation. Once you’ve freed yourself from the baggage of reality, there’s nothing easier than inventing scenarios where your special code will be useful under the new imaginary future conditions. If you encounter any pushback against your defensive layer cake of abstraction, ...

Software is making hospitals worse — a funny story

(I wrote this as an email for my friends, but then I decided to also share this with the public.)

Okay, I already mentioned that my mom was at the hospital for a week, with an infected foot, and she got lots of antibiotics, and they sent her home on Monday?

Every day I went over there for 6 hours and tried to entertain her a bit. It’s easy to go crazy in a hospital, as it is so very boring. My ...

The simplicity of skip list is the source of its power

This is a very interesting post. I wish Single Store was open source.

A lock-free or non-blocking algorithm is one in which some thread is always able to make progress, no matter how all the threads’ executions are interleaved by the OS. SingleStore is designed to support highly concurrent workloads running on hardware with many cores. These goals makes lock-free algorithms desirable for SingleStore. (See our original blog post on lock-free algorithms and our description of sync replication, by Nate Horan.)The algorithms for ...

The cost of no generics in a programming language: no way to inline sort functions

Interesting post:

The idea is that the compiler is able to emit code specifically for the invocation we use. Instead of having to emit a function call on each invocation, the compare call will usually be inlined and the cost of invocation is completely eliminated.

Java is the only one on this list that has a different approach. Instead of using generics at compile time, it is actually doing a dispatch of the code to optimized routines based on runtime types. That ...

Everyone will continue working right up to the next Hague tribunal

An interesting comment from a Russian tycoon:

With casualties mounting and Russian troops forced to turn back from Kyiv, the war is now being viewed with increasing dismay not just by billionaires sanctioned by the West but even by some members of the security establishment, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.

One referred specifically to Shoigu, who took part in the war preparations. “They all want to have a normal life. They have homes, children, grandchildren. They don’t ...

Why Tumblr is great

This is funny (I have a screenshot):

Seen on Tumblr:

i think absolutely the funniest thing about like, the adfree tumblr subscription coming with the option to turn ads back on anyway so you can see the weird ad everyone is talking about, or the new promoted post feature and everyone immediately thinking about what kind of stupid shit to put on other people’s dashboards. is that for years execs have been struggling for a way to make tumblr profitable when its ...

Why do some companies use a database that is not a relational RDBMS?

I saw this question on Reddit. This would be my answer:

I’ve worked at many companies where they used a RDBMS but they cheated massively, so in a sense it is a bit more honest to switch to something else.

For instance, when I was at PrivCo.com, they were using MySQL, but they had many tables that they were using as a cache. Much worse, they had no clear sense of which of their tables were truly canonical. Inside the tables that ...

What work can be done from home? What work needs to be done at an office?

(UPDATE from 2022-05-13 — this post made people angry. I am not trying to upset anyone. I want to emphasize, where I make a personal assertion, my experience is limited to New York City. If you live somewhere else, then you might be seeing a situation very different than what I describe here.

Some people thought I was saying that less work should be done from home, but that is incorrect. I think businesses are happy to have workers work from ...

I’ve never written a file with 11,000 lines of code, but I have often built Clojure projects like this, with everything in one file. I think I might have once had a file with 4,000 lines of code. Maybe 5,000? A complete system might be 5 apps, working together, each made of one large file. It does help with some things. Especially if I try to on-board another programmer, if they don’t know Clojure very well, using one file means ...

Does Twitter make people more extreme?

An interesting essay by Moya Lothian-McLean:

In fact, Twitter offers the perfect conditions for developing and calcifying polarised positions. It silos people off into echo chambers in which their interaction with like-minded individuals can vastly change their perception of reality. (For instance, at the 2019 election I truly thought Labour had a chance.) Twitter users are also in constant combat mode, hackles raised in anticipation of the most dreaded event: public disagreement. Dissent on Twitter is rarely ever expressed politely: it is ...

How aggressively does a manager need to manage an employee if another employee has a problem with them?

An interesting conversation on Hacker News:

I don’t think OP is advocating for having no tolerance for low performance. He’s just saying that it’s the manager’s job to do something about it when it occurs and can’t be resolved otherwise, else it negatively impacts the rest of the team. “Do something” could be training, coaching, shifting scope of responsibilities, whatever. Doesn’t necessarily mean firing people. Mentoring and leading by example are great things to do, but they do nothing to solve ...

Should a company hire fast and fire fast?

I’m on the record as advocating for hiring fast, training where possible, and then firing when someone is a problem and they don’t improve. But there is an interesting debate on Hacker News about this.

The specialization that comes with growth

Lethain’s experience at Uber. This is very good and worth reading:

When I joined Uber, the Infrastructure organization consisted of three teams (whose names were unhelpfully generic, so I’m renaming them a bit for clarity): developer productivity who worked on build and test (~4 engineers), storage engineering (~6 engineers) who worked on scaling real-time storage, and operations (~5 engineers) who did everything else to support the company’s ~200 engineers, ~2,000 employees, and ~400% YoY growth in both usage and engineering ...

The Order of Things: Jennifer Croft on Translating Olga Tokarczuk, What It Took to Render The Books of Jacob Into English

A beautiful bit about language:

The Order of Things: Jennifer Croft on Translating Olga Tokarczuk, What It Took to Render The Books of Jacob Into English

Olga Tokarczuk’s twelfth book, the novel The Books of Jacob, first published in Poland in 2014 to great acclaim and considerable controversy, kicks off in 1752 in Rohatyn, in what is now western Ukraine, and winds up in a cave near Korolówka, now eastern Poland, where a family of local Jews has hidden from the Holocaust. ...

Widespread fraud among outsourcing firms

A fascinating read:

The day at the office began with David giving a motivational speech to all the new trainees. Work hard, and the company will take care of you. He was unsure at first too, but now, he’s interviewing at Fortune 500 every day. We must have faith. We can all succeed.

To this day, I still feel that David’s speech was genuine. It felt like he was really speaking out of gratitude.

After the lecture, while eating a bowl of cup ...

Interview with Lindsey Allard and Kristen Giovanniello

more soon

Self-control is essential to pragmatic leadership

Consider this, an example of terrible leadership, an email full of non-specific anger:

Better.com CEO Vishal Garg publicly accused hundreds of staffers he laid off on Wednesday of “stealing” from their colleagues and customers by being unproductive.

“You are TOO DAMN SLOW. You are a bunch of DUMB DOLPHINS and…DUMB DOLPHINS get caught in nets and eaten by sharks. SO STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME.”

https://fortune.com/2021/12/03/better-com-ceo-attacks-laid-off-employees-blind-message-board/

As both George Orwell and Margaret Thatcher have emphasized, incorrect ...

Otwórz oczy, or Open Your Eyes, has a deeper layer that people are not talking about

Otwórz oczy, or Open Your Eyes, is a Polish language Netflix show. I’ve now watched all of season 1 three times, so I have some thoughts.

Spoilers ahead, don’t read unless you’ve seen it.

Tamal Kundu has written up a straightforward, but mistaken, view of the story. He compares the story to The Matrix. In his view, episodes 1-5 happen in a simulation, but then in episode 6 we learn the truth. But I don’t think this is correct. At ...

Our new political weblog

Kathryn Bertoni and I have launched a new weblog that’s meant to explore new ideas for a new democracy. We read widely among various history and current issue books to find insights that might be helpful in these stressful times, to assure that the future will be brighter than the past. Come and check out Demodexio.

Fire more people, fire them sooner, don’t wait, fire them as soon as you know

Anyone who has read my book “How To Destroy A Tech Startup” is aware of my advice on this issue: if one person is holding back the whole team, then it is important to fire that person before they destroy the whole team. Here is another take on the same basic idea:

3) Remove Bad Influences

People don’t like to talk about this, but one of the most effective ways to change culture is to fire people.

There’s a probably apocryphal story about ...

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Software development theories are collective fictions

I like this essay very much. The only part I disagree with is that software development amounts to a collective fiction, like religion, which represents a kind of behavior can be traced back to prehistoric times. Rather, I see the problem as radically modern: the desire to take an art and make it a science. An unrelated example would be the way universities, over the last 70 years, have opened many “Department of Political Science” and yet no university has ...

Algebra skeptics, climate skeptics

You’ve probably already heard this one, but imagine you are invited to a game show where there are 3 large curtains, and a prize behind one of the curtains. You get to keep the prize if you guess the right curtain. You make a guess. Then the showrunner lifts one of the other curtains, revealing that there is no prize behind that other curtain. Now you are given a chance to change your mind, if you wish. Should you change ...

How to give governments incentives to act for the long term rather than the short term

Interesting:

One of the most difficult aspects of designing democratic institutions is how to give governments incentives to act for the long term rather than the short term. The two-year term for House members does exactly the opposite.

In nearly all other democracies, parliaments are in power for four to five years. Political scientists view voting as primarily the voters’ retrospective judgment on how well a government has performed. Four to five years provides plausible time for that. But the ...

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Loneliness as a social illness

Interesting:

But after reading an article adapted from “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost” by Michael C. Bender, a Wall Street Journal reporter, I changed my mind and picked it up. What caught my attention wasn’t his reporting on White House disarray and Trump’s terrifying impulses — some details are new, but that story is familiar. Rather, I was fascinated by Bender’s account of the people who followed Trump from rally to rally like ...

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An unstudied problem: query optimization for streaming data

Interesting:

I haven’t done any kind of systematic literature review recently, so the directions below are kind of a random sampling of things I happen to be have stumbled over.

Exploring the plan space seems like a first step. It seems likely to behave differently than in a batch setting. For example, in a batch query when you’re joining a big relation against a small relation, you want to build an index on the small relation and scan the big relation against it, ...

The Lisp Curse by Rudolf Winestock

[Note from Lawrence Krubner: I worry about linkrot, and I worry about the disappearance of those essays that had an impact on my intellectual growth. How can I talk about certain ideas in the future if I can’t point people to the essays that shaped my thinking? For some reason, Rudolf Winestock’s weblog is offline. I’m hoping Rudolf Winestock will soon restore their blog. Until then, I’m going to temporarily host their essay, the Lisp Curse, here, as it is ...

Are workers doing well this year?

My sense is that a lot of companies are using the current work-from-home moment to push through a stealth pay cut. The thing is, many people got very small pay increases in 2020, so if they now make anything above their 2019 level, they feel like they’ve moved forward. But most of my clients are handing out large increases to get software developers who show up at the office. If the folks at home get a 10% pay increase they ...

The ethics of being a high level tech consultant (a Fractional CTO)

When A Quick Comment Is Worth $100 Million

Restarting my life

Most people are now looking back at 18 months of pandemic, but I’m looking back at 30 months of such craziness. At the end of 2018 my 90 year old mom developed pneumonia, was in the hospital and then a terrible rehabilitation clinic for some weeks, and was then released, and I was left largely alone to nurse her back to health (our society does not offer much support to families in crisis). I’ve written about this in my book ...

Über jars vs thin wars, pros and cons

Interesting:

A little history

There is a growing tendency in the industry to move away from the traditional monolithic application run on a fully tooled up application server towards running apps defined by the single service they provide, the so called microservice. Here the emphasis is reducing the application to providing independent support for one thing .

The idea behind the microservice is the microservices architecture where a set of loosely coupled microservices are used to build applications using them.

This has, in ...

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Wondrously, the archaeologists did not find indicators of wealth inequality, social stratification, or hierarchies in prehistoric Trypillian societies

I am not convinced that consolidating of the structures is a sign of tyranny. It could simply be a sign of consolidating. Humans living in the same place for a century would presumably build roads that would become more fixed over time. And if there was a dictatorship, we would see more signs of concentrating wealth, such as larger homes. Interesting:

Wondrously, the archaeologists did not find indicators of wealth inequality, social stratification, or hierarchies in prehistoric Trypillian societies – not ...

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We found that driving true business impact is amazingly hard, plus it is difficult to isolate and understand the connection between efforts on modeling and the observed impact

This is what I’ve seen as well, large investments in what is described as AI or Machine Learning or Data Science, which break down into two things:

1.) people are actually talking about standard statistics and ordinary Business Intelligence

2.) people are talking about Machine Learning, but the results are difficult to connect to actual business needs.

Interesting:

We found that driving true business impact is amazingly hard, plus it is difficult to isolate and understand the connection between efforts on modeling and ...

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A society that had a complex governmental and economic system that executed monumental engineering projects but did not leave behind any other archaeological evidence

Interesting:

The huge dolmen at Kibbutz Shamir is just one of hundreds of enormous densely scattered structures in this region. It bears witness to the existence of a significant and established governmental system in the region during the “Middle Ages” of the Bronze Age. Archaeologists tend to interpret the past based on material finds. The absence of cities, large settlements and monumental buildings attests to the collapse of the governmental and economic systems during a “dark period” in history. The dolmens ...

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A query can only have one outer join that produces more than one match

Interesting:

Whenever you have one central table, and you want to outer join it to two separate tables, you are in danger. To see why, think through what happens step-by-step as these tables get joined. All the joins happen before any grouping, so first we make a bunch of rows combining restaurants and inspections. Now for each of those rows, we join to the employees table. That means if we have a restaurant with two inspections, we’ll create rows for all ...

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From now on, everyone should obey the law

It is odd that “respect people’s civil rights” is a new policy:

In the 1990s, for example, a deputy group called the Lynwood Vikings, described by a California judge as a “neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang,” was responsible for incidents that led to millions being handed out in lawsuit settlements, and was also the subject of a 1991 lawsuit from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The case later led to the 1992 Kolts report, which called for station commanders to “root out ...

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The conventional wisdom among social media companies is that you can’t put too much of the onus on users to personalize their own feeds

Self-serving, since they need the algorithms to target advertisements. But also interesting to think that people might sometimes want some kind filter. People pick their friends on LiveJournal, why hasn’t LiveJournal swept the world? Is it the algorithm that made Facebook a juggernaught? People seem to want control over what they see, is there a middle ground, away from algorithms designed to maximize engagement, but offering enough filters to protect people from the most boring material? How much novelty do ...

Over the years, Pinterest had to redesign its systems and retrain its algorithms to better identify and target different types of users

Interesting:

Over the years, Pinterest had to redesign its systems and retrain its algorithms to better identify and target different types of users and map their interests. Hence the question about gender when you sign up, the topic picker that gives the algorithm an initial sense of what you’re into, and the perhaps slightly intrusive (though industry standard) use of browser data that can tell Pinterest whether you’ve visited the site before and how you arrived there.

The question about language and ...

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Over 6,000 years ago, huge settlements featuring enigmatic mega-structures of obscure function arose between the Carpathian foothills and the Dnieper River

Interesting:

Over 6,000 years ago, huge settlements featuring enigmatic mega-structures of obscure function arose between the Carpathian foothills and the Dnieper River in Ukraine. Unique in European prehistory, these gargantuan settlements, which may have housed tens of thousands of people apiece, seem to have coalesced by the merger of smaller, independent hamlets.

Throughout, the million-dollar question has been how, exactly, prehistoric villages of gargantuan dimensions were managed. Now a team of archaeologists is postulating that mega-structures detected in these villages were community ...

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Alt-right rhetoric: they now compare themselves to Galileo to Jesus Christ

I record this only because, later on, it will be difficult to believe this was real. This is how fascists now describe their conferences:

This May 2020 we’re hosting HERETICON, a conference for thoughtcrime. Here’s why:

From Galileo to Jesus Christ, heretical thinkers have been met with hostility, even death, and vindicated by posterity. That ideological outcasts have shaped the world is an observation so often made it would be bereft of interest were the actions of our society not so entirely ...

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Foucault: In direct response to biopolitical attempts to control our sexual lives, struggles have been waged

Interesting:

In direct response to biopolitical attempts to control our sexual lives, struggles have been waged; these invoke the “‘right’ to life, to one’s body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs”. Foucault was critical of the pernicious effects of such power: he criticized power’s subjection of individuals, along with the forms of subjectivity that subjection engenders. In particular, he was concerned that power relations today tend to produce submissive individuals who blindly obey authority figures. More generally, Foucault ...

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Relativistic particles are heavier, and this actually shrinks the atomic radius of the heavier elements

Interesting:

Some of the properties of mercury (and of copernicium) are due to “lanthanide shielding“, and that is at least understandable in a classical mental-picture way. The lanthanides (and higher elements beyond them) have atoms with smaller radii than you’d predict from just following the trends earlier in the periodic table. But that’s because those atom sizes have to do with the attraction of the outermost electrons to the nucleus (negative and positive charges), and that attraction is partly “shielded” by ...

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Studying ancient slag, archaeologists were able to uncover a complex geopolitical situation in the year 10,000 BCE

Interesting:

Ben-Yosef’s team was exploring a concept called “punctuated equilibrium,” which suggests that societal changes comes through long-term stasis punctuated by short-lived episodes of rapid change as opposed to a slow-and-steady gradual change. To test the idea, the team examined over 150 samples of slag leftover from metallurgical technology in the Wadi Arabah region of the Levant in the Middle East, dating from 1300 to 800 BCE.

Slag, the glass-like byproduct from a metal’s smelting process, offered a perfect indicator of technological ...

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How does anyone murder 93 women and not get caught 92 times?

How does this happen?

The Federal Bureau of Investigation says the man who claims to have killed more than 90 women across the United States is the most prolific serial killer in the country’s history.

In a news release on Sunday, the FBI said Samuel Little confessed to 93 murders. Federal crime analysts believe all of his confessions are credible, and officials have been able to verify 50 confessions so far.

Not that this is necessarily about serial killers:

Dawn Wilcox adds more ...

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Netflix shows are the great hope for Poland?

Interesting:

Last month the archbishop of Kraków, Marek Jędraszewiski, issued a pastoral letter to be read out at all of Krakow’s many churches. “The next great threat to our freedom has appeared,” writes the archbishop. When a child succumbs to LGBT ideology, “for a parent there is no bigger tragedy”.

When Law and Justice was elected four years ago, she tried to be optimistic on her Facebook page: “Come on!” she wrote: “Can they really destroy everything in four years?” As bad ...

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Other members of the audience said they could help me change my sexuality if I was willing to try

Interesting:

When Mayor Ormanty took his “LGBT-free” resolution to the council in the summer, Dropek’s foundation raised some money to place a colourful billboard poster in Kalwaria’s town centre. Featuring a pair of clasped hands and a rainbow wristband, it read simply: “We’re here.” Within hours, it had been torn down. Then when she found out that the mayor had organised a conference at the community centre on the LGBT “threat”, Dropek decided to go along. The conference, predictably enough, was ...

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The huge level of state spending appears to have boosted rather than damaged Poland’s finances

Paul Krugman should be pleased:

State pensions have also been boosted. The retirement age has been lowered and the minimum wage raised. In a second term in office, Law and Justice has promised to double the minimum wage by 2023, distribute annual cash bonuses to pensioners, boost farming subsidies and invest heavily in improving transport in the provinces and rural areas.

The huge level of state spending appears to have boosted rather than damaged Poland’s finances. Levels of private consumption have gone ...

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Every good Pole should know what the role of the church is … because beyond the church there is only nihilism

“Every good Pole should know what the role of the church is … because beyond the church there is only nihilism.”

– Jarosław Kaczyński, chairman of the Law and Justice party, 7 September

—————-

This is an interesting line because everywhere else in the West the right-wing has become synonymous with nihilism. Trump is a nihilist who believes in nothing, he is a being of pure lust, greed and spite. Boris Johnson may not be a nihilist in his heart of hearts, but ...

Lordship Democracy

Given the failures in Israel and Britain and the USA, it seem the type of liberal democracy that grew out of the Enlightenment has run into circumstances which it is unable to overcome. Therefore we need a new kind of democracy, one that offers more stability, while also allowing greater systems of accountability. I know there are many people in progressive circles in the USA who are hoping for a parliamentary system in the USA, but wouldn’t it be strange ...

Used his wife and sister as collateral

For a 3 month loan? I wonder if this was considered a criminal loan at the time, or if this was normal? The only non-criminal uses of 3 month loans, that I can think of is loans to farmers right before harvest time, and then modern loans to governments.

One tablet, found in the courtyard of the pillared house, documents a land sale in the year 698 or 697 B.C.E.. The other tablet was inside a different structure and documents a ...

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The moon god Sin

Interesting to realize there was a moon god named Sin.

The Jewish Exile was real, but it wasn’t in Babylon

This is interesting. Israel had very few Jews in the 600s BC, which is actually too early to be the Babylonian Exile. So the Exile was real, but it had other causes, and then later when all of this got written down, priests blamed everything on Babylon?

In fact, the former territory of the Kingdom of Israel may have had very few Israelites left during the 7th century B.C.E., archaeological evidence suggests.

The two tablets, made of clay and inscribed in ...

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If elites are bad why doesn’t Johnson complain about Russian oligarchs buying London real estate?

If elites are bad, what about the foreign oligarchs who buy up London real-estate, drive up rents, drive up home prices, and then leave the real estate unused? Why does the Johnson government only complain about people who write?

She thinks the idea of a liberal elite is an anachronism, partly because in the age of social media and the internet, ideas are less geographically tethered and more widely disseminated. But also due to the effects of high finance.

“It’s more ...

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The identity politics of Brexit

Interesting:

The argument for Brexit was accompanied by the fantasy that Britain could compensate for the loss of access to its largest market by joining the reassuringly white and English-speaking “Anglosphere” of Australia, Canada, the US and New Zealand. This is why they talk of an “Australian-style points system” and “Canada-style trade deals” and hope against all evidence that the protectionist Donald Trump will rescue Britain.

Brexit has shown that you have to be the right type of Anglo to be admitted ...

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Magazines are gone, editors struggle to continue to uphold the culture

The end of magazines is part of the new world where everyone gets their news from social media, and where everyone reads slogans instead of essays. The resulting extremism undermines the political system. That extremism undermines the support of a tolerant society that allows diverse views. It also undermines support for the freedom of capital, what some refer to as a free market. If the free market allows the destruction of the politics that allowed a free market, then surely ...

The low-level and constant harassment of assuming people want to talk to you

Invasive, overly personal, aggressive, boundary testing. Unfortunate:

I’m 58 years old. For the most part I look 58 years old. I’m physically disabled. Yesterday I was at Costco and got a hotdog when I was done shopping. I sat at the first table to eat, and parked my cart at the end of the table. A guy about the size, shape, and age of Trump came up and asked if he could sit at my table. It wasn’t busy but ...

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26 year olds no longer live with their spouse

Interesting:

Paul Graham has become a disappointment

I first read Graham’s essays way back around 2005. Before he created Ycombinator, he used to write interesting things. But he started Ycombinator in 2005 and his writing went downhill quickly. He lost all perspective. These last few years, I’ve disagreed with just about 100% of what he writes. So for instance:

The modern day reinvention of monarchy

Interesting:

When you think of monarchy, you might think of an inbred Habsburg – the family’s distinctive jaw, how generations of rulers crippled by a variety of diseases due to their tendency to marry within the immediate family. But for Sean and other members of the subreddit, monarchism is not merely about having a supreme ruler and an inherited throne. Most members of the community deplore authoritarian regimes. They aren’t simply searching for order via a supreme leader, but a return ...

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How the young Frida Lopez established her career as a fashion photographer

[ Over the last 20 years I engaged in interviews/conversations with many dozens of female artists, and from the stories they shared with me I drew the anecdotes that went into creating the characters in the Anna Barnev book. What follows is an excerpt. ]

————–

Children accept what seems omnipresent, until the moment they realize that alternatives exist. From farmland, the smell of manure saturated the childhood of Frida Lopez, so much so she assumed the whole world shared one fragrance. ...

400 metres from the end of the eight-mile annual fitness test

I’m strongly pro-metrics and would be happy to see everyone adopt it, but if a magazine decides to use the old British system, that is their choice. But why oh why do the editors allow the two systems to be mixed in one sentence?

Hoole, of 1 Rifles, was carrying 25kg (55lb) of equipment when he collapsed 400 metres from the end of the eight-mile annual fitness test course on 19 July 2016.

On the main topic, why doesn’t the military ...

Odd place to work: Snap has bought up condos because it can not find enough office space

Interesting:

At the time I joined, the headquarters building in Venice was about a half of a mile away from the office where I worked. If you knew where all of Snap’s buildings were (and most people, even most employees, didn’t), you could walk around miles of Venice Beach streets pointing out unmarked office after unmarked office as you went along. A seemingly empty storefront here, a nondescript house there, the top level of an apartment building over that way.

The particular ...

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My final post regarding the flaws of Docker / Kubernetes and their eco-system

With a surprising number of Docker advocates, they advocate for Docker/Kubernetes in a vacuum, as if the question was “Do you want devops, or not?” when the correct question is “Of this set of dozens of devop technologies, which subset is the right one for my company?” I’m often subjected to a three part argument that’s missing its middle part:

1.) Do you want easy development, deployment, consistency, networking, security, isolation and infinite scalability?

2.) ???

3.) In conclusion, Docker!!!!!!

Some of the conversations ...

Microservices in the cloud demand testing in production and therefore maximizing observability

Interesting:

Changes to the ways these applications are developed means that the model of keeping everything running smoothly with end-to-end testing is no longer effective, especially for environments that are running at high scale and continually shipping new features. Debugging gets harder as monolithic systems are replaced by distributed systems where every API call causes a cascade of related events. Traditional monitoring tools work better for monolithic systems but fall short for modern cloud-based applications.

All of this means that developers ...

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Environmentalism can be a gateway to convert some to the far-right

Interesting:

In the midst of it, a white supremacist writer referenced the essay in an article for VDare, writing that “Hardin’s prescriptions for averting the Malthusian catastrophe—they included eugenics, an end to welfare and foreign aid, and allowing famines to take their course—were too strong for most people.” Another article invoking Hardin on stopping the “refugee invasion” by a Canadian nativist writer was reprinted on the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer which now features a demographic countdown clock on its sidebar. ...

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Adam Neumann of WeWork is a monster

Interesting:

The Narcissism of Modern Financiers

There are a few key players in this saga. The first is ex-CEO Adam Neumann, who according to the S-1 was pivotal to the company.

Our future success depends in large part on the continued service of Adam Neumann, our Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, which cannot be ensured or guaranteed.

Neumann was an untested CEO with an unlimited line of credit. As I read more stories about him, I noticed reporters dance around his personality. They call ...

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What the hell happened to Britain?

I realize people ask this question about the USA a lot, but it’s also worth asking about Britain. All of this is far removed from the culture that the British have boasted about for centuries:

Maria Miller also insisted that Labour only had itself to blame for the Sulk’s behaviour. The real victim in all this weren’t MPs receiving death threats, it was Boris himself. He had been pushed to the edge by an opposition that was totally unreasonably blocking his ...

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Amazon Mechanical Turk workers demonstrated racial bias

Interesting:

Created in 2009 by researchers at Princeton and Stanford, the online image database has been widely used by machine learning projects. The program has pulled more than 14 million images from across the web, which have been categorized by Amazon Mechanical Turk workers — a crowdsourcing platform through which people can earn money performing small tasks for third parties. According to the results of an online project by AI researcher Kate Crawford and artist Trevor Paglen, prejudices in that labor ...

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Every deploy, after all, is a unique and never-to-be-replicated combination of artifact, environment, infra, and time of day

Interesting:

And if testing is about uncertainty, you “test” any time you deploy to production. Every deploy, after all, is a unique and never-to-be-replicated combination of artifact, environment, infra, and time of day. By the time you’ve tested, it has changed.

Once you deploy, you aren’t testing code anymore, you’re testing systems—complex systems made up of users, code, environment, infrastructure, and a point in time. These systems have unpredictable interactions, lack any sane ordering, and develop emergent properties which perpetually and eternally ...

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Hanna Thomas says Agile is feminist, but is the essay critical enough?

Everyone understands that the West saw a sweeping cultural revolution in the mid to late 20th Century, and that many of the new practices were incorporated into the customs of business. Women entered the workforce, sought higher education, postponed marriage and children. Dress became casual. Modes of address became casual, with even nations such as Germany beginning to allow address by one’s first name. In terms of business, The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented ...

New managers often experience a vacuum of purpose

Interesting:

Ideally, individual contributors enjoy building products and solving technical problems. They get to spend most of their time doing just that, and they can concretely see their output. If they’re at a well-run company, their managers have also helped them connect their day-to-day work to some broader mission or impact. This provides them with a sense of purpose. New managers often experience a “purpose vacuum,” since it’s harder to connect their day-to-day work to progress with a larger goal that ...

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Software developers often fail when they try to become managers

Interesting:

Rosie (all names are composites of multiple employees) is the strongest engineer on the team. She can navigate any part of the stack. And when people have questions about the code base, they ask her for help — after all, she wrote most of it. Sometimes she’ll patiently answer, but sometimes, if it’s faster, she’ll just roll up her sleeves and do it herself.

Rosie is fast. She gets things done. I can always count on Rosie.

So as the team grows ...

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The subversive movements that fed modern agile business ideas

Interesting:

From the article:

Aren’t these principles incredibly close to the way that we talk about Lean-Agile? Compare Rule 4 (consider everything an experiment), and Rule 6 (nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail. There’s only make), with the lean concept of the minimum viable product.

….I use these examples to serve the idea that what we now call Lean-Agile principles are principles that are already taken for granted within progressive social movements, and which are deeply necessary to succeed. One ...

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The problems of stateful data in Kubernetes

Interesting:

StatefulSet for deploying stateful Pods

StatefulSet is the abstraction that was supposed to solve all these issues. They give each Pod in the set a unique identifier, and the StatefulSet documentation says the following about them and intended use:

StatefulSets are valuable for applications that require one or more of the following.

* Stable, unique network identifiers.

* Stable, persistent storage.

* Ordered, graceful deployment and scaling.

* Ordered, graceful deletion and termination.

* Ordered, automated rolling updates.

Now we’re talking! Stable network and storage! Even ordering in ...

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Making a snapshot of etcd to backup Kubernetes

Interesting, but I worry about the complexity of what is going on here:

etcd snapshot explanation

The second command needs a bit more explaining. First of all, the idea is to create a snapshot of the etcd database. This is done by communicating with the running etcd instance in Kubernetes and asking it to create a snapshot. The reason for the very long command is basically to avoid messing with etcd running in Kubernetes as much as possible. We are launching ...

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How much longer can the Fed use QE to keep the economy going?

Responding to something on Hacker News.

People are not having many children. This has a long term effect, which will last decades. QE will become more and more necessary, as the decades go by, if birth rates remain low. Of course, we could, instead, have the government build things. I live in NYC, I would like to see the government build a new subway system. I’d like to see a system of walkways above the streets, where people can ride their ...

Fun is what I do to you

This is grim, but good:

Fun is what I do to you. You can tell because I am laughing. (I have noticed that you are not laughing.) You must consider that this is all in good fun, good harmless fun, as popping a balloon or stealing someone’s bag lunch or knocking over someone’s drink or holding down a girl until she is terrified she cannot breathe. A cheerful and salutary incident in which nothing of value was harmed or lost, when ...

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Can anyone defend Pewdiepie at this point?

This is true:

1. pewdiepie gets called a nazi because his anti-semitic and racist jokes have attracted a following of mostly reactionaries

2. to prove the libs wrong and own them he decides to donate $50,000 to the ADL

3. recieves so much backlash from his now exclusively reactionary fanbase that he cancels the donation

i literally can’t see a single reason why you would defend this guy anymore

Caroline Calloway as the unreliable business partner

I’m not sure anyone else will understand this, but Natalie Beach’s story about working with Caroline Calloway very strongly reminds of some of the business partners I’ve had. The style of writing is more personal, maybe because they were young, or because they were friends first, or because they were women, but when I say that my experience of startups has been chaos, I’m using a euphemism for events like this:

I’d always known she couldn’t arrive at the airport at ...

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Roulhac Toledano and my mom

My mom did not get credit for co-writing the Coty book, but ask Roulhac nowadays and she tells everyone that my mom co-wrote the Coty book.

This type of relationship, between the charming impresario and the quiet writer type apparently repeats generation after generation. I feel like I saw this scene with my own eyes. In some ways, I did. In particular, the way Roulhac would be feeling low and defeated, but then cheer up when my mom arrived to save ...

Caroline Calloway understood marketing

My life would be infinitely better if I’d grown up with such an intuitive understanding of brands:

Her account was called #Adventuregrams. “You can have an adventure anywhere, if you’re curious,” she told me as I took pictures of her balancing on a stone wall. “That’s what the brand is about. It doesn’t matter where you live or how much money you have. You could be a teen from Nebraska and by following me you can feel like you’re here.” But ...

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There is a lot of discrimination happening at Google

Troubling:

More than 20,000 employees around the world had walked out of the company’s offices to protest that Google had paid out over $100 million to multiple executives accused of sexual harassment in the workplace. In response, the tech giant apologized and said it would overhaul its sexual misconduct policies and that it would be more supportive of workers who raise concerns about problems at work.

But almost a year after the historic walkout, a dozen current and former Google employees told ...

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Zack Beauchamp on this illiberal moment

The West has been admired for its liberalism for 2,500 years, and yet at no time during those 2,500 years was its liberalism the dominant force in Western politics. It has always been under attack, and every implementation of it has been deeply flawed.

Keep that in mind when reading Vox’s concern about this illiberal moment:

On the right, the anti-liberals locate the root of the problem in liberalism’s social doctrines, its emphasis on secularism and individual rights. In their ...

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We all test in production

All of this is good. I touched on a small piece of these issues when I wrote “How ignorant am I, and how do I formally specify that in my code?”

Also see “High Availability is not compatible with a MVP“.

Interesting:

When we say “production,” we typically mean the constellation of all these things and more. Despite our best efforts to abstract away such pesky low-level details as the firmware version on your eth0 card on an EC2 instance, I’m here to ...

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Some relationships mean more to us than to them

So universal:

A man I used to love came to stay at my flat three months ago. What ensued was probably one of the worst things I’ve ever put myself through.

We’d had a fling three years ago. But that fling was re-flung one or two more times after the first fling ended. I fell in love. I usually preface that sentence with “stupidly,” but I know it didn’t feel stupid at the time. Those feelings, it would appear, were not ...

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Lonely people everywhere

Interesting:

When I first moved to London, my new flatmates and I held a housewarming party. I invited everyone I knew in the city. But the morning after, I totted up the number of guests of mine that had shown up: two. Thankfully, my other flatmates’ had more than made up the numbers with their own friends. I prayed that they hadn’t noticed the marked absence of a crowd of my friends.

Darkness collides with hilarity in this show and that’s ...

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Taylor Swift understands how to handle an angry public

Damn, this is very good advice:

Swift says she stopped trying to explain herself, even though she “definitely” could have. As she worked on Reputation, she was also writing “a think-piece a day that I knew I would never publish: the stuff I would say, and the different facets of the situation that nobody knew”. If she could exonerate herself, why didn’t she? She leans forward. “Here’s why,” she says conspiratorially. “Because when people are in a hate frenzy and they ...

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Why put this much energy into trying to save one member of a community?

It is frustrating that there are so many good people trying to get into tech, and not being able to, while considerable allowance if given to some other people. For an old reference from 15 years ago, see this bit about Dave Winer.

A more recent example: John De Goes and the FP community

This post is a collection of links about John De Goes that show some clear patterns of behavior:

De Goes defending white supremacists and misogynists.

De Goes attacking critics and ...

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Any consensual activity allowed, even at a professional event?

As a point of comparison, if a straight married couple shows up at a convention, and has a public and messy fight, they should assume that will affect how people think of them in the future. What’s odd is that this should be totally okay, even at a professional event:

Larry Garfield, a Drupal core contributor, was demoted and no-platformed from all Drupal events, ostensibly due to his participation in “Gor”, a sci-fi subculture which features consensual slavery (it’s not real ...

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tangled_girl asks the best question

Regarding the turmoil in the Scala community, with some super racists getting banned from a conference for their HBD views (human bio diversity, the super racist lingo that the mass murderer in El Paso mentioned in his manifesto (allegedly Patrick Crusius)) tangled_girl asks the question I myself often wonder:

genuine question: if speaking up your mind so far has cost you your friends, your employer, your professional reputation, the regard of your colleagues, your local support network, and even the gratitude ...

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What if the operating system was a database?

This idea has been kicked around for decades. I wonder why so little progress is made?

The configuration of a UNIX system is specified and controlled by a huge tangle of plain text files: /etc/hosts, sendmail.cf, syslog.conf, inetd.conf, /etc/uucp/Systems to name just very few. .INI files on some other systems are also plain ASCII. Even MacOS caved in a little with a System Folder:Hosts, although it is a very isolated example on a Mac. Note that just because symbols displayed on ...

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Tumblr is literally a social experiment

True, but why do social media companies refuse to give users what they want?

Friends with benefits

Interesting:

Everything about British politics is amazing right now

Every single day brings some once-in-a-century event, either to amuse or horrify. I’m curious, has any Prime Minister in history ever before lost their first vote?

And there is this:

There is some debate over whether all this – the prorogation, the expulsions – is a series of improvised moves born of panic or, on the contrary, a cunning plan. Within that question is a related one: is the PM’s chief aide, Dominic Cummings, an evil genius or what Marina Hyde calls ...

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Are there really 100s of thousands of unfilled positions in tech or is that an urban legend

Nikema wrote:

Are there really 100s of thousands of unfilled positions in tech or is that an urban legend? There’s a lot of gatekeeping bullshit for an industry that claims to need new people. Also, if that’s the case what’s stopping companies from providing training and financial support…

In 1998 I had an older friend who was experienced. They did freelance work for $125 an hour. Adjusting for inflation that’s almost $240 today. Today I know senior devs that get $125 an ...

A supportive community brings Clojure to the world

At some point I hope to write more about the Clojure community, for now, I link to this:

Over the last couple of years, the Clojure community has become an invaluable part of my life. It’s a space where all of me has been welcomed and accepted, since day one. The kindness, support and inspiration I have received from people in the community is boundless. My heart has been touched many times by the deep and genuine connections, old ones keep ...

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Straight pride event full of alt-right neo fascists

Interesting:

Hugo later addressed the crowd and asked for Trump supporters to raise their hands, which most did. He declared the president’s re-election would be a “shoo-in”.

Hugo criticized the Boston mayor: “Mayor Marty Walsh said there would only be 20 people here today. Look around. Not only is he intolerant, but he can’t count.”

Despite denying being anti-LGBTQ, the organization allowed several people to the mic to complain about “LGBTQ curriculums in public schools” and children being gay. People clad in Maga ...

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Laws meant to protect children are now used against them

The against child pornography was clearly meant to protect children. It’s sad to see the law twisted this way:

The decision, which upheld a decision from a lower Maryland appeals court, means other minors who engage in sexting could face similar legal repercussions.

Amidst spreading criticism, one expert told the Guardian it was “a ridiculous reading of the statute” concerned.

The ruling, by a 6-1 majority among the judges on the Maryland court of appeals, said: “We refuse to read into the statute ...

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Dominic Cummings is scum

Why get the police involved?. This man is scum, and he likes to throw his power around.

The demands for inquiries into the sacking last Thursday of Sonia Khan, the 27-year-old Treasury special adviser, came amid heightened tension at Westminster over Johnson’s decision to suspend parliament for five weeks.

… Cummings is understood to have concluded that Khan had been dishonest about her recent contacts with her ex-boss, the anti-no deal former chancellor Philip Hammond, and one of his ex-aides – accusations ...

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I finally saw a liar, a manipulator, and a coward

An interesting article, about an affair:

Did Nicola ever think about his wife? Nicola said she found it “pretty easy” not to think about her. “This sounds horrible, but my feelings towards her were a very weird mix of envy and pity,” she said. “I was so envious that she’d got there first, that she got to have him come home to her. Then pity because she didn’t know, and that made me feel sorry for her in a way.”

Asked if ...

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Success is one of the most dangerous things that can happen to you early in your career

https://medium.com/s/story/four-lessons-after-eleven-years-in-silicon-valley-d87507b7a4f6:

Success is one of the most dangerous things that can happen to you early in your career. When you’re on a so-called rocket ship, you’re likely drinking from the fire hose daily, making things up as you go along. If you’re given responsibilities that exceed your experience, you’re probably plagued by self-doubt. Then, at some point, if you’re lucky, the company you’ve helped build is declared a success. And those many bumps along the way are ironed out into a ...

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Lisp is so powerful that problems which are technical issues in other programming languages are social issues in Lisp

Interesting:

Consider the case of Scheme, again. Since making Scheme object-oriented is so easy, many Scheme hackers have done so. More to the point, many individual Scheme hackers have done so. In the 1990s, this led to a veritable warehouse inventory list of object-oriented packages for the language. The Paradox of Choice, alone, guaranteed that none of them would become standard. Now that some Scheme implementations have their own object orientation facilities, it’s not so bad. Nevertheless, the fact that many ...

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Fragile men are an epidemic

Interesting:

The most remarkable thing about most of these men and their Fabergé-egg-like egos is they’re often the first to gripe about the ills of “political correctness.”

Take Mr. Stephens, a conservative columnist who has railed against “safe spaces,” saying in a 2017 commencement address at Hampden-Sydney College that worrying about hurting other’s feelings might lead to stifling all speech: “If we want to accommodate the sensitivities of our fellow students, shouldn’t that accommodation extend not only to what we say around ...

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Leaderless groups have a natural tendency to elect self-centered, overconfident and narcissistic individuals as leaders

Interesting:

In my view, the main reason for the uneven management sex ratio is our inability to discern between confidence and competence. That is, because we (people in general) commonly misinterpret displays of confidence as a sign of competence, we are fooled into believing that men are better leaders than women. In other words, when it comes to leadership, the only advantage that men have over women (e.g., from Argentina to Norway and the USA to Japan) is the fact that ...

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Bad behavior at Google

Interesting:

Once in the summer of 2014, David came over to visit our son and we got into an argument about his one-way terms for seeing him at my house at his convenience, especially when he had his own house(s) blocks away. He sat down at our kitchen table and, using my laptop, he pulled up a year-old article from the Daily Mail about Eric Schmidt’s philandering lifestyle. He then passed the computer over to me to read. I was so ...

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Bret Stephens shows himself to be fragile to an extreme degree

An article mentioned that bedbugs had been discovered in the New York Times building. Dave Karp posted a short attempt at humor, as a tweet, suggesting Bret Stephens was the real bedbug.

This is a horrifying response, and a mark against the legitimacy of The New York Times:

Dave Karp responded:

Another response:

This situation is out of control, for sure. Dave Karp throws out a tweet and Stephen replies with a column in the NYT? And the editors allowed this?

Don’t waste $1 million on devops infrastructure that you’ll never need

Samy Dindane asked me a question:

How would you deploy a simple React/NodeJS app?

I responded on Twitter:

Deployment is a big question but I’ll try to summarize. First, ask yourself, do you need to High Availability? When I ask CEOs of early stage startups, they always say “Yes” yet I think only 10% really need High Availability.

I think of High Availability as implying multiple servers, multiple load balancers, multiple failover databases, multiple data centers, multiple regions. Lots of redundancy, probably configured for ...

Do we need AI? Can we use old technologies?

Before we get to the AI utopia, where life is supposed to be good because we finally have AI, there are dozens of common life occurrences where I am waiting to see old technology finally come into widespread use:

My mom and I went to Earth Cafe yesterday, on the corner of 97th and Broadway (Manhattan). I love the place, but some of the tables are woefully uneven. Why don’t outdoor cafe tables come with shock absorbers that automatically balance ...

The CEOs who sabotage their own companies, and keep their workers from being successful

It is surprising how common this kind of self-sabotage is among CEOs:

There is a version of the story of this company in which idealistic journalists, unconcerned with profit, are posed against ruthless business-doers, concerned about profit above all else. That would be a convenient story, pitching me and my colleagues and friends as people who just care too much about The Truth to yield before the gale-force winds of Capitalism, but it wouldn’t be a true one.

The real and less ...

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The most New Zealand story ever

Funny:

I wonder about Amazon’s algorithm

Um, what?

A bisexual does not change sexuality when they go from a man to a woman, or vice versa

Interesting:

As news of the couple’s breakup churned through the news cycle, so did photos of Cyrus kissing another woman, Kaitlynn Carter. Straight people on social media were critical of their spending time together, saying that it seems wrong to go on a vacation and flaunt it in an ex’s face immediately after breaking up, and that Cyrus was being “slutty” and “inconsiderate.” On the other hand, queer women came out in droves to celebrate having Cyrus “back,” glad that she ...

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The goal of an oligarch is to rival the power of the state

I saw this on Tumblr:

If you have $10 million then you can buy everything in life that you might find pleasant. You can own 3 houses and a bunch of cool cars and you can send all of your children to good private schools. If you want more than $10 million, then you are no longer seeking money, you are seeking power. $20 million, $100 million, $1 billion — the extra money doesn’t let you get nicer things for you ...

Why does Google always fail at social networks?

This is a pleasant summary of failed social networks. It does not touch on the subject that interests me most, which is why this space consolidated. But it does offer some interesting tidbits. In my novel How The Young Anna Barnev Established Her Career As A Graphic Designer I spend some time making fun of Google+, and I’m pleased this description of its failure so nearly matches mine:

Google’s next stab was a dreary jumble of boxes evoking a digital fulfillment ...

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The fall of Tumblr

Occasionally I find intelligent comments on LinkedIn:

If you want to go dancing in New York City, consider Silvana

First I’ll recount the events, then I’ll offer an opinion about what they mean.

——————————-

My friend K, from Germany, had her birthday on Saturday. She was turning 40 and she, with help from friends, planned several events for the day.

Several of K’s friends flew over from Germany to join us, and our dear friend Sonya, with complete secrecy, flew in from Michigan, and then surprised K, and K ended up crying she was so happy to see Sonya.

I ...

Good government means expert have the power to put their expertise to use

Interesting:

As you flick through the New European, you eventually leave Brexit behind for something that would have been unthinkable before 2016: the “Eurofile” section, a weekly paean to Europe and its glories. Another section makes for an equally odd sight in a British newspaper: pages of articles by academics, under the heading “Expertise”.

Expertise matters to remainists. They don’t merely admire it – that admiration is an important part of how they define themselves. “A lot of remainers are proud to ...

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Woman looking at horizon, a new cliche for book covers?

“A woman stares at a distant horizon, viewer only sees her from behind.” I saw this at Barnes and Noble tonight. There are trends in book covers, as in all things. I actually like most of these book covers. I don’t think this is a terrible motif, but seeing these 6 books together made me think this particular idea is being overused.

How Homakov hacked Github

Apparently I never linked to this? I was impressed with this. A few minor hacks that Github already knew about, and had looked at, and had decided they weren’t important. But Homakov found a way to link them together into a serious attack.

The struggle to moderate Hacker News

Interesting:

“From our perspective, the big surprise is how little control we actually have. We have to play our cards very carefully and very wisely, or even that control will sort of evaporate,” Gackle said. “There’s often a strong wish to solve these contentious problems by changing the software, and, to the extent that we’ve tried things like that, we haven’t found it to work. What does seem to work better is personal interaction, over and over and over again, with ...

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Please don’t touch the keyboard

Come on. This technique can be improved.

The classical HN analysis: axiomatically derived from premises that seem intuitively true but are empirically false

This sums it up:

tptacek :

I worry that this is the classical HN analysis: axiomatically derived from premises that seem intuitively true but are empirically false.

Actually true of much of the tech world, a deep and abiding distrust of experience; an unwillingness to confront those moments when lived reality contradicts theory, a willingness to take the side of theory and insist that reality must be wrong.

Why does he want to throw his reputation away?

You have to be inhumanly insensitive to try to minimize these murders by comparing them to things such as the flu. We assign moral weight to murder, we don’t assign moral weight to the flu. If I have to explain why, then there is something wrong with you.

Your shame will destroy this planet

Greta Thunberg is awesome and I wish more people were just like her. But personal shame can not save the planet from destruction. Feeling shame will not stop the coal companies from poisoning the air and water. There is no reason why people should feel embarrassed about the fact that they have a biological body that needs to consume resources so as to enjoy life. Limiting the damage done by corporations requires anger, courage and careful thought, but never any ...

Malmab, the Defense Ministry’s secretive security department, is destroying or hiding documents about the Nakba

Interesting

Four years ago, historian Tamar Novick was jolted by a document she found in the file of Yosef Waschitz, from the Arab Department of the left-wing Mapam Party, in the Yad Yaari archive at Givat Haviva. The document, which seemed to describe events that took place during the 1948 war, began:

“Safsaf [former Palestinian village near Safed] – 52 men were caught, tied them to one another, dug a pit and shot them. 10 were still twitching. Women came, begged for ...

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None of my neighbors watch porn

I live on 98th street in Manhattan and I’m lucky enough to have a rooftop terrace. I’ve put a picnic table there and I often sit there and drink coffee, late at night (I also have many parties there ). Maybe it is the warm weather, but my neighbors have had their drapes up lately. I can look across 98th street and see televisions or computer screens in perhaps 20 apartments. And another 5 apartments in the building immediately west ...

The decline of the middle class during the 1960s and 1970s

This was written in 1982:

People who came of age in the forties and fifties enjoyed the good fortune of having their expectations shaped during the worst of times and their achievements realized during the best of times—an unbeatable match. And for young professionals, starting a family on a low budget was not a wrenching experience. “When you’re moving up, even the bottom doesn’t look so bad,” says Herbert Gans. For their children, it is just the reverse. “It’s not downward ...

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Many of my Stackoverflow questions have been marked as duplicates even though they were not

I’ve written before about troubles on Stackoverflow

This is interesting:

That was when something became crystal clear: my coworkers hadn’t become monsters, they were still the kind and caring people I thought they were. The monster in this case is not one person, it was created when lots of people, even with great intentions, publicly disagreed with you at the same time. Even kind feedback can come off as caustic and mean when there is a mob of people behind it. No ...

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The Trump administration is racist

I’ve realized I’ve never said this before on this blog, and I want to be on the record for saying what is extremely obvious to anyone who can see. This has nothing to do with immigration:

We should all be afraid, because the government is increasingly seizing USA citizens and holding them without charges, for the sole purpose of spreading terror and intimidating the public. This is a government that wants to normalize authoritarian practices with vulnerable groups so that eventually ...

Inflation in the USA has been low, the increase in asset prices is not a form of inflation because you don’t lose the money you spend

I was engaged in a very disappointing conversation on Hacker News, where most people don’t seem to understand even basic economic facts.

Inflation is low, so the Fed should consider cutting rates. Lower rates means lower unemployment, which should eventually lead to higher wages. As a model for what the Fed rate should be, assume that it should always be 0% plus whatever amount is needed to limit inflation. Since inflation has been low and stable, the rate should remain ...

The subjectivity of Margaret Mead’s love life surely gave her objectivity when examining the foreign

While ending her second marriage and starting an affair with a new man she writes detailed letters to the woman she is in love with explaining her theories of anthropology. Mead was apparently lucky to be in the orbit of Fanz Boas, who put together a scene that sounds like the exemplar of the metaphor “hot house” :

A living room in Grantwood, N.J., has a good claim to being the birthplace, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, of ...

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Many of the great prehistoric monuments were built at the same time, including in Greece

Everything about this is amazing:

Although the current archaeological investigations on Dhaskalio have been going on for the past four years, it’s only more detailed examination of the resultant data over the past 12 months that has revealed the true scale of the complex, and the transport logistics and construction work associated with it.

But the remarkable nature of the site does fit into a much more widely dispersed series of monumental construction traditions from western Europe and the Middle East.

Intriguingly, it ...

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Americans increasingly hate each other

I’ve previously mentioned that my mom has resigned from the Environmental Commission. See Blanche Krubner resigns from the Jackson Township Environmental Commission. She served for 46 years, from 1973 to 2019.

It was difficult for her to resign. She has many happy memories of working with good people to keep central New Jersey a safe and happy place to live. She protected the drinking water, so we can drink from the faucet without having to worry about pollutants.

In the ...

Some natural predator must have died out because the ticks in New Jersey are out of control

I grew up in New Jersey in the 1970s and 1980s. Myself and my younger brother played outside, every evening after school, and all day on weekends. On Saturday mornings we would disappear into the woods and play games there till it was dark. When I was 10 years old it was common for us to gather up our friends and initiate a game like Capture The Flag. We were in the woods for 12 hours straight. If we heard ...

Robert McNamara tracked every statistic he could, except the happiness of the Vietnamese people

When I wrote When companies make a fetish of being data driven they reward a passive aggressive style I made the point that leaders often gather up huge amounts of information, but they focus on the wrong type of information. For instance:

Google seems like an example of how a “data driven” company can go off the rails. I’m not sure what their meetings are like, but I know that in interviews the management at Google talks about their focus on ...

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Your life will be enriched in countless ways if you host parties

This is a good question, and I think the correct answer is “Don’t waste time on dating apps”:

Your general advice about the pursuit of love always resonates: Build a life alone that you love; hold onto your belief that love exists even when it makes you feel vulnerable and uncool; if you meet someone you think you like but they’re tepid or not fully invested, go ahead and tell them to fuck off. I now read this and think, ...

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You can’t nice your way out of getting trolled

This is good:

Predators typically cannot put into words what their real motivation is, as they do not know it

I’m sad to say that during my life I’ve had at least two encounters with different kinds of predators, one male and one female. Every time I asked them what they really wanted, they had a different reason. I think they invent reasons, on the spot, when someone asks. Their real motivation is a non-rational thing that is difficult to put into words. The Greeks have the word “alogos” which can be translated “inexpressible” and which covers predators. Maybe they ...

Lisa Taddeo, sexual desire, three women

Interesting:

Lisa Taddeo

I started by going to San Francisco. I went to a couple of places that felt like they might be the nucleus of sex. I went to the “porn castle” in San Francisco, which is now defunct, but it was this wild place. I was profiling a young woman who was having sex with men while being filmed and directed by her girlfriend. I was really intrigued by how it must feel to watch your partner have sex with ...

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Do you get Coldplay? Like, really get Coldplay?

This is the opening scene of my novel, How The Young Anna Barnev Established Her Career As A Graphic Designer

—————

Spring of 2010

When they were sixteen years old, Mera traveled down to Atlanta to spend a week visiting her friend Anna. Greeting each other at the door, they both experienced the mild shock of seeing one another after many months apart. Mera could see that Anna had done something about her uneven eyebrows, while Anna could see that Mera was now ...

This woman murdered her husband, and she got away with it

I passed through Madrid, New Mexico in the year 2008. There was one main bar. If you went to that bar, most nights, an older woman came in. She was probably in her 50s or 60s. She was a regular who had been coming in for awhile. She might have also been an alcoholic. That was not unique there — that is a small town in the middle of nowhere and the people there drink heavily.

Once she had a ...

The great, unwritten poems that took a backseat to polished floors

I think of this often, the civilization that could have been, had gender relations been different:

Unlike the male artists, who moved through life as if unfettered time to themselves were a birthright, the days and life trajectories of the handful of female artists featured in the book were often limited by the expectations and duties of home and care. George Sand always worked late at night, a practice that started when she was a teenager and needed to take care ...

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David Sifry failed

With the Web, it was common that the inventor of an idea failed to be the one who commercialized it. The team behind Friendster failed to build the social network that took over the world. Overture invented the idea of selling keywords for searches, but only Google turned it into a successful business. And apparently David Sifry was an early pioneer of looking for spikes in sharing:

Addendum: #David Sifry, creator of the Technorati.com, has created the Technorati Interesting Newcomers List, ...

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Appreciating the wisdom of Clay Shirky’s comments regarding the early Web and how it would end

When the Web first emerged in the mid 1990s, people were astonished at the reality that their existed a “long tail” full of more revenue potential than the “fat body”. Amazon proved this early on. At the time, a large Barnes and Noble might sell 130,000 unique items, but Amazon was getting the majority of its revenue from the millions of items that were not among its 130,000 best selling items.

When we speak of what made the early Web ...

If you are going to talk to a group, you need to rehearse your speech many times

This is advice that I’ve always followed. It’s why I’m very good at talking to large groups. Interesting:

I hope I’ve convinced you at this point that it’s not about the slides, it’s about the words you speak. My number one piece of advice to people doing presentations is “Write a script.” Know exactly what you’re going to say before you start. Improvisation is insanely hard. People spend their whole lives studying the art of improvisation, and even then usually only ...

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When talking to a group, move them to some goal, nothing else matters

Interesting:

Nancy Darling’s advice on giving a presentation is the best thing I’ve ever read on the topic. Here are her five steps to pulling together a good presentation:

Choose a goal;

Find a storyline that will help the group reach that goal;

Develop a series of activities or a method of presentation that allows you to develop your storyline. Don’t let your media determine your storyline!

Remember that your role is to facilitate the group reaching its shared goal. This is your primary responsibility!

Remember ...

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People in business often use the word passion when anger would be better advice

This is good, but I would change one word:

Passion – if you haven’t got it, kill your talk: you’re going to be mediocre. If you find the material tedious, imagine how monstrously dull it will be for your audience. Don’t settle for a subject you should be passionate about; you need to have real passion that the audience can pick up on. Software testing is the kind of thing that everyone ought to care about in the same way that ...

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This miserable way is taken by sorry souls of those who lived without disgrace and without praise

Interesting:

In Dante’s Inferno, the moral cowards are not granted admission to Hell; they are consigned to the vestibule, where they are doomed to follow a rushing banner that is blown about by the wind. When Dante asks his guide, Virgil, who they are, he explains:

This miserable way is taken by sorry souls of those who lived without disgrace and without praise.

They now commingle with the coward angels, the company of those who were not rebels nor faithful to their God, ...

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Censorship in Iran

Interesting:

Censorship comes along with traces of governments ALWAYS!

In many contries allover the world, governments tend to block their citizens to access some certain domains/ips across the internet. Some say “It’s there to keep culture and moral healthy!”. They block pornographies and so. Even in US we can find certain domains which are blocked and cannot be accessed like those which contain CP or wild anti-humanism contents.

But in Iran (and most other countries) that’s not the case!

They block many things. We ...

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Book review: His Majesty’s Dragon

I just got done reading His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik.

This is a novel about the Napoleonic Wars, but with England and France also fighting it out with dragons, in the most steampunk way you can imagine.

The most fun part of this novel is the recreation of Evelina and Jane Austen manners and etiquette. Here is a scene that shows the best aspects of the novel. The background is that Will was a ship Captain and much admired, but ...

There must be a universe where we made it work right

I often think like this about the romances in my life, the permutations, the which would have been better. Interesting:

In one universe, we wake up next to each other every day for 50 years. In another, we don’t know heartbreak or the ripping pain from crying all night. We call each other every night, and you send me flowers. I see you in everything except real life but we’re content. This may be my favorite universe. In the fourth universe, the miles between ...

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Anaxagoras realized that the moon was a rock, not a God, and the public banished him

Interesting:

Anaxagoras also wrestled with the origins and formation of the moon, a mystery that still challenges scientists today. The philosopher proposed that the moon was a big rock which the early Earth had flung into space. This concept anticipated a scenario for the moon’s origin that physicist George Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, would propose 23 centuries later. Known as the fission hypothesis, Darwin’s idea was that the moon began as a chunk of Earth and was hurled into space ...

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Ethereum is dangerous and Pact offers a much better blockchain smart contract language

What strikes me is how carefully they’ve thought about the problems with Ethereum, and other blockchain technologies. They deliberately make sure that Pact is NOT Turing complete, so they can avoid some of the hacks that took place with Ethereum. They emphasize a declarative style. And yet they also make it so the contracts can be fairly upgraded.

This is from the article:

However, the added versatility offered by Solidity smart contracts comes at a great cost in safety and complexity, jeopardizing ...

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You know you’re getting older when…

You know you’re getting older when you can remember what it was like to have thoughtful, intelligent Republican friends. No member of the younger generation can relate to the experience.

An unusually stupid political metaphor

Jesse Watters of Fox News cheated on his wife, via an affair with a 25 year old associate producer, which was eventually discovered by the wife. Last year they finalized the divorce.

Yesterday he went on Fox News and said we should love America the way we love our wife:

“If you love something, you don’t radically transform it,” he told Fox Friend Steve Doocy. “Like your wife. She doesn’t make you love ballet. She doesn’t make you grow your ...

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DNA tests prove his father was not his father, and his grandfather was not his grandfather

As DNA becomes more common, people are finding big surprises about who their real parents were. In this case, a researcher finds out that his mom had a brief affair with a neighbor, who turned out to be his real dad, and his mom’s nominal father was not, in fact, her father. That is a lot of lying about parentage in just 2 generations.

Identifying my biological father was a key first step in overcoming my sense of being untethered. ...

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The worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world

Trump is correct. AOC and others come from a country where the current government is “a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world”.

The centrists versus the progressives

Interesting:

As Ocasio-Cortez notes, Pelosi’s attacks aren’t taking place in a bubble; they’re taking place in a media environment where the rightwing have put a target on the Squad’s back. On Tuesday night, for example, Fox host Tucker Carlson launched a racist attack against Omar that could arguably be seen as an incitement to violence against the congresswoman. “[Omar] has undisguised contempt for the United States and for its people,” Carlson told his 3 million viewers. “That should worry you, and ...

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This is what a confident woman looks like

Interesting:

While a man who has never, knowingly uttered a modest statement about his vanishingly small talents squats in the White House, Rapinoe’s victory utterance triggered howls of protest from Donald Trump’s supporters. “Obnoxious”; “rude”; “egotistical”. On it went. The you-go-girl end of American positive thinking was never, actually, intended to unleash the female ego in this way but rather to act as a piece of marketing designed to remind people – women in this case – that there are no ...

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The prisons we chose to live inside are based on fantasies we promote even when they hurt us

Interesting:

The main thing that changed between 2004 and 2019 is that a lot of hidden pain became unignorable.

In What Do We Need Men For?, Carroll writes that since her encounter with Trump in 1995 or 1996, “I’ve never had sex with anybody ever again.” Mr. Right, Right Now came out in 2004, nearly a decade later.

Read in this light, Mr. Right, Right Now is not only exhausting, it is heartbreaking. All this effort, all this labor, all this single-minded focus ...

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How does an author know when they are done with a series?

Interesting:

Eva Chen In your two series, [To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and The Summer I Turned Pretty,] who do you think are the most underrated characters?

Jenny Han Oh, whoa! No one’s ever asked me that!

Eva Chen I am a good interviewer.

Jenny Han It’s hard to say, because I feel like all the characters are very appreciated, and everyone has their own favorites.

Eva Chen Okay, so let’s go the other way. If you had to play favorites —

Jenny Han So my personal favorite characters? From ...

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Learn another language

I am trying to learn Polish, so I resonate with this:

Aside from the stupidity of this view, which seems to assume that all international travel and immigration to and from the UK will cease as soon as the Brexit drawbridge goes up, there is also the fact that having another language is never useless. As a Welsh speaker I have encountered a fair amount of linguistic ignorance: people saying that Welsh is pointless because it is a minority language that ...

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The worst project manager ever

Let’s start by talking about terrible project managers. I was working at a web design agency in 2006 and the project manager was not very intelligent, though he was a spiffy dresser. Stylish shoes. If I looked down at his feet I almost always felt envy. He traveled in Europe, and acquired a collection of fantastic dress shoes from various fashion capitols. But he was a bad manager. His disorganization would come across in conversations like this:

THEM: Hey, uh, you ...

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The right way to do Agile

The best implementation of Agile that I’ve seen was when I was at ShermansTravel.com and Mark Herschberg was CTO. The system went like this:

Herschberg reckoned that each developer could get 5 hours of real work done each day (the rest of the day got eaten up by email, conversations, research, and other incidentals). We had a crew of 5 programmers, so we had 125 hours a week of real programming. The sprints were 2 weeks long, so we had 250 ...

Moderation on Hacker News

On a thread about Thomas Jefferson, my comment got flagged by “dang” who is the moderator. I was trying to remind people that Jefferson was a rapist.

I was responding to this fellow, who felt we were too critical of historical figures:

As a side note, his home town, Charlottesville, canceled the holiday celebrating Thomas Jefferson’s birthday[0][1]. It seems to me that our society is too focused on condemning historical persons for their flaws than celebrating them for their noteworthy deeds.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jul/2/charlottesville-drops-thomas-jeffersons-birthday-h/

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/07/03/as-trump-predicted-charlottesville-cancels-thomas-jeffersons-birthday/

...

Neanderthals were smart, used glue to build good tools

Interesting:

The beeswax compounds, along with diterpenes from a scraper and a flake from Grotta di Sant’Agostino, showed signs that the resin had been heated. The Sant’Agostino samples contained compounds derived from methanol, which is usually given off by heated wood. That’s a perfect fit with what we know about working with resin. It tends to dry and harden when it’s exposed to air, so the Neanderthals at Grotta del Fossellone and Grotta di Sant’Agostino would have needed to heat it ...

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Watching Euphoria

Trying to fall asleep, I decided I’d try to watch Euphoria, a new show on HBO. There are 3 episodes so far, and I watched them all. The first episode is not great, it feels like its from the 1990s but trying to pretend it is current. I wasn’t won over till the 3rd episode, when the show starts to live up to its own idea about itself. The acting deserves applause:

Hunter Schafer as Jules Vaughn is really outstanding.

Barbie ...

Kelly O’Donnel: flat, non-hierarchical organizations do not work

Thesis: Every time an organization claims to be flat and non-hierarchical, it is actually hierarchical, but the chain of command is invisible and based on the personal charisma of particular people, or sometimes based on their ability to bully and manipulate others. An organization without a formal structure will have an informal structure made up of various cliques. Is this better? Formally hierarchical structures can be frustrating, but they are transparent about who actually holds power, which is an important ...

An ugly claim by Fram that he would not be misracing a black person by calling them the n-word, only being racist

I often wonder why these kinds of people become so self-destructive. I suspect that this is a mild kind of burnout. When you find yourself defending the use of the n-word, it’s time to take a break and maybe find a new hobby.

Much of that blame fell, perhaps predictably, on a woman and a transgender editor. In 2017, a fledgling Wikipedian accused Fram of monitoring her activity on the site to such an extent that felt like harassment. The editor, ...

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When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez met Greta Thunberg: ‘Hope is contagious’

More interviews like this please:

AOC From there I learned that hope is not something that you have. Hope is something that you create, with your actions. Hope is something you have to manifest into the world, and once one person has hope, it can be contagious. Other people start acting in a way that has more hope.

I remember the first day I was school-striking outside the Swedish parliament, I felt so alone. But I was hopeful GT Yeah. I know ...

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Um, err, uh, I guess this isn’t a terrible review?

I love Kathryn Bertoni to pieces. She was an editor on my last book. She completely re-wrote entire scenes of the book. She is more like a co-author than an editor. And she just wrote a review of the book on Amazon.com. And she, uh, gave it 4 stars instead of 5? So let’s give her points for honesty, right? Here is what she wrote:

I am one of the credited editors of this, Lawrence’s second, book. It was a privilege ...

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The accelerating decline of the USA

I sometimes think that a lot of focus is given to Silicon Valley so the public won’t notice how much the USA has declined:

In the early 2000s, the telecom equipment market began to recover from the recession. Lucent’s new strategy, as Mottl put it, was to seek “margin” by offshoring production to China, continuing layoffs of American workers and hiring abroad. At first, it was the simpler parts of the telecom equipment, the boxes and assembly, but soon contract manufacturers ...

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Reasons to learn Arabic

I don’t know Arabic, but I love reading how different languages handle things. This jumps out at me:

3. The writing system

The Arabic writing system is exotic looking but easy to learn, which is a rare combination. The language uses a straightforward alphabet, but because letters change their shape depending on what their neighbors are it is quite impenetrable to the uninitiated.

For exmaple, here are some “words” consisting of a single letter repeated three times:

ككك تتت ععع ممم

…

6. The Feminine Plural Formal ...

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British politics was ruined by the democratic election of party leadership

Kenneth Clarke clearly understands politics in a deep way. He is philosophical. If were to claim he read Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham and reached his own conclusions, I’d believe him. I love this article:

Regarding the promises made by Johnson and Hunt in the Conservative leadership election, Clarke said both Labour and the Tories had been pushed towards more fringe views than those of their MPs after altered rules involving party members electing leaders.

He said: “Both parties were doomed, in ...

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Blurred lines. Ambiguous commands. Awkward social engineering.

I wrote about the general topic in Ambiguity is the mood coming from California Modern business culture seems to love blurred lines. Awkward social encounters tend to work out for those at the top, not those at the bottom. Here is a specific instance:

A few days after I hung out at babe.net’s offices, the staff went out to drink together to toast departing team members; Rivlin, the CEO, had decided to shutter the U.S version of The Tab, in order ...

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How I recovered from Lyme Disease: I fasted for two weeks, no food, just water

I was bit by a tick and I got sick. No doctor could figure out what was wrong. I tested negative for Lyme. I took antibiotics (Biaxin, aka clarithromycin) and 3 months later I was fine. I stopped taking antibiotics. Within 2 months I was sick again. I took Biaxin for 6 months. I felt great. I stopped antibiotics. Within 2 months I was sick again. I took Biaxin for a year. I felt great. I stopped taking antibiotics. ...

The rightward shift in left parties since the 1960s

All the Western nations have been shifting to the right since the mid 1960s. I plan to write more about this later. I’ll post this as an example, in this case, the rightward shift among the Labour party in Britain.

The former Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell failed in his attempt to implement Crosland’s message by abolishing Clause IV of the Labour Party’s constitution, which pledged it to the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. But Gaitskell’s ...

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Ambiguity is the mood coming from California, especially Silicon Valley

Blurred lines. Ambiguous commands. Awkward social engineering.

Modern startup culture is, to a small degree, being defined in a number of dynamic centers, such as Stockholm and Berlin and New York City and Austin. But the current culture of startups, and the jargon around them, is disproportionately being influenced by the culture of California, especially Silicon Valley. A number of influential books have come out of California business culture, and certainly all the main innovations of VC finance.

One thing that strikes ...

Technology is the new inescapable geography

It is possibly a bad look for me to link to someone who is praising me, but in this comment is a truth that has nothing to do with me: that technology has become the new inescapable geography. The implication is the business leaders of the future can ignore tech only about as much Caesar or Napoleon or Rommel could ignore geography. Tech is the battlefield that future businesses will fight on, it can not be treated as a minor ...

We should emphasize the obvious: Boris Johnson will be the worst Prime Minister in history

Out of fear that there is someone, somewhere, who doesn’t yet understand this, we should emphasize that Boris Johnson will be a disaster for the United Kingdom. Interesting and worrisome:

There is room for debate about whether he is a scoundrel or mere rogue, but not much about his moral bankruptcy, rooted in a contempt for truth. Nonetheless, even before the Conservative national membership cheers him in as our prime minister – denied the option of Nigel Farage, whom some polls ...

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British politics has gotten itself into an unusually bad spot

What’s happening in Britain is unusual, and we should note how unusual it is. The Fixed Term law suggests that the Tories can sack Theresa May and appoint her successor, without asking the public to weigh in. 150,000 Tory members, mostly older and wealthy, will choose the next Prime Minister. I’m unclear why the Queen would agree to this. Are they even asking the Queen?

The Tory members mostly support Boris Johnson, who will clearly be the most incompetent Prime ...

Climate change has been under discussion for a century

Interesting:

Anthropogenic climate change is usually portrayed as a recent discovery, with a genealogy that extends no further backwards than Charles Keeling sampling atmospheric gases from his station near the summit of Mauna Loa in the 1960s, or, at the very most, Svante Arrhenius’s legendary 1896 paper on carbon emissions and the planetary greenhouse. In fact, the deleterious climatic consequences of economic growth, especially the influence of deforestation and plantation agriculture on atmospheric moisture levels, were widely noted, and often exaggerated, ...

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The Grace Hopper division of Fullstack Academy helps create some amazing programmers

(If you like this post, check out my new book, One-on-one meetings are underrated; group meetings waste time.)

Last year I joined a team that was building software for Avis Rental Car. We already had a team, at an external company, that was working on the backend API. I needed to build a team that could work on the frontend code for Android and iPhone phones. So I hired one of the best known frontend programmers in New York City. He ...

A real life problem with our Docker use that cost us 3 days of lost work

Sadly, no one saw this because I originally posted it as an update to “Docker protects a programming paradigm that we should get rid of” but just now, on Hacker News, steve_taylor wrote:

docker-compose up -d

What’s not easy about that?

My response? This is the sales pitch for Docker:

docker-compose up -d

But this Slack conversation is the reality (we lost 3 days before we were able to fix the issue, a complex interplay of the Docker cache and the way the Dockerfile ...

I was completely wrong about the continuance of innovation in the tech sector

Back in 2010 I wrote “Excessive praise marks corporate peaks” and I was taking aim at Facebook. I wrote:

Circa 1991/1992 there were articles about how Japan was taking over the world and nothing could ever compete with them because they were relentless. But the early 90s marked the beginning of global retreat for many Japanese companies (with a few exceptions, like Toyota).

In the late 90s nothing could stop Microsoft, yet the late 90s marked the beginning of the era ...

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An interview with Kelly O’Donnel, theater director

(This interview also appears in the book How The Young Anna Barnev Established Her Career As A Graphic Designer)

Kelly O’Donnel is one of the co-founders of the Flux Theater Ensemble in New York City.

The following interview was conducted on January 18th, 2019.

Krubner: I’ve done a lot of these interviews, as part of a larger project, and I’m so excited to talk to you. I’ll start off with some personal questions, because even though I’ve sort of known you a ...

How does your frontend know the id of a document if you’re using an async architecture? Rely on UUIDs.

Building an async system is more complicated than building a sequential system, but it can offer competitive advantages. For instance, you can build mobile apps that work offline, and later sync their data with your system, and this ability to function to work offline can enable uses that your competitors don’t have. This is what allowed Handshake CRM to thrive, even though they started after the CRM market had seemingly consolidated down to a handful of winners. Given the dominance ...

Caches are cheap, build a lot of them for the frontend

There was a stretch, maybe from 2005 to 2015, which will be remembered as the era of simple Ajax uses. The era started when Sam Stephenson released the Prototype library, but it really got going once jQuery was released. It was an era of Javascript fetching data via Ajax, and relying on the backend code to decide what data is sent in response to each request.

That era is evolving into something different. Frontends are now complicated enough that the ...

Life in San Francisco in 2019

This is part of the history of our era:

Why are software developers confused by Kafka and immutable logs?

Simplicity. Why is it so hard to keep things simple? There are many concepts that we use in software which arise from common sense which we then encumber with needless complexity. Why?

For instance, logs. It’s great to have a record of things. If you’ve built some software that gathers information, it is often very useful to know the order in which information arrived in your system. That is, it is insightful to know the history of events that built ...

A mother regrets her career choices

an excerpt from How The Young Anna Barnev Established Her Career As A Graphic Designer:

——————————-

On the lucky side of things, Anna now had several commercial design gigs: an ice cream store that wanted a font that looked frosty, a financial startup that wanted a logo that looked reliable to the point of stolid, opening credit fonts for a documentary about the spirituality of an aboriginal group of Guatemala.

On the less lucky side of things, each of these gigs paid poorly, ...

Will Machine Learning and AI improve advertising’s ability to target people?

Despite much talk about Machine Learning and AI improving advertising results, what I’m seeing is getting worse and worse. Despite billions invested, the ads shown to me are much less relevant than that ads that I saw on the Web 10 years ago.

Check out this disaster on Vox:

or how about this at Goodreads:

I hired 3 developers from Fullstack Academy. They were all great, so I went and checked out the website, curious about the curriculum. And now, every website ...

In a bad situation, where do young people find advice?

I wonder how common this is, where people find themselves in bad situations, and don’t have a local friend to ask, so they turn to an online community for support and advice?

Is television harmful to us?

Are children spending too much time on their phones? One response I hear is “The same concerns were raised about television, but we all grew up watching television, and we turned out just fine.”

But is that true? Did we turn out just fine? Let’s say the children born around 1960 were the first children to ever be raised with television, this cohort went on to become:

1.) the first generation in USA history to see lower real male wages than previous ...

Social norms and cell phones

Interesting:

A small part of the celebration was focussed on the younger ice hockey teams, including the Finnish under-18 women’s team, who came third in their world champsionship this year. Each player’s name and number was called out, and one by one the girls walked out onto the stage, to applause from the audience.

I kid you not, more than half, and maybe as many as three quarters, of the girls were *on their phones* as they walked on stage, and stayed on them for the entire ...

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The new authoritarians: a blend of Orwell and Huxley, cruelty and entertainment

This is true:

We are living with a new kind of regime that didn’t exist in Orwell’s time. It combines hard nationalism—the diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatred—with soft distraction and confusion: a blend of Orwell and Huxley, cruelty and entertainment. The state of mind that the Party enforces through terror in 1984, where truth becomes so unstable that it ceases to exist, we now induce in ourselves. Totalitarian propaganda unifies control over all information, until reality is ...

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Bringing up your own pain endlessly is emotionally fraught work

The recent revival of progressive movements, after 50 years of dormancy, have also revived the reality of the progressive movement having fractures. The one that I knew nothing about, until this last year, was the fracture within the LGBQT community; in particular, the conflict between lesbians and transexuals. This is a subject I’m still learning about.

Interesting:

honestly we need to stop engaging in good faith with people who have no respect for the suffering that lesbians have historically gone through/are ...

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Why are women still pleading for their humanity?

Interesting:

Why are women still pleading for their humanity over everything tbh. Saying women will die if we outlaw abortions doesnt matter to the men in charge because that’s not their priority. They literally see women as incubators doing their duty, as subhuman or different and less important than men, etc. How are you going to appeal to humanity when they dont see you as fully human and deserving of the same autonomy and rights? How are you going to appeal ...

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The idealism that defined the early Silicon Valley is now dead

From the 1930s to the 1990s, Silicon Valley generated a lot of slogans that suggested a certain kind of idealism that inspired hopes of a better future. Think of early Hewlett Packard, and the phrase “management by walking around.” There was an emphasis on informality, there was a doubtfulness about bureaucracy, there was the belief that a company could do the right thing and also be profitable. All of that now seems to have died.

Interesting:

Stapleton is a marketing manager ...

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Facebook versus Tumblr

So true:

The end of the union of conservatives and libertarians

I once ran a libertarian blog, but I am happy to see a split between libertarians and conservatives, because not having religious and moral conservatives speak up in defense of their values leaves too much of the culture exposed to the idea that consumption in the marketplace is a moral choice equal to any other.

As I said at the top of this piece, the debates over libertarians and conservatives, Sohrab Ahmari and David French, are really about a very ...

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USA journalism failed to describe the rise in violence in Central America

At one point in my life I followed news in Central America closely. And at one time, this used to be easy, because there was more mainstream coverage of it. When Reagan was President, there was a lot of focus on the Sandanistas, which incidentally meant there were a lot of journalists in Central America, writing about it.

Apparently, things have gotten bad in Guatemala and El Salvador in recent years. I knew nothing of this, till this year. Now ...

Taking care of one’s parents

I’m taking care of my mom. My grandparents are from Eastern Europe, but my parents were born in the USA. We are Americanized, in most ways. Still, I am taking care of my mom.

Here is an immigrant take on the subject:

My husband and I never really discussed the fact that I’d be supporting my parents. It was just a given. I never hid anything. I was open about the fact that my parents had no money. They speak ...

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Queer advice that works for straights too

Seems like straights should also keep this in mind:

When I was 18, I engaged in a intensely unpleasant threesome with two of my classmates and learned two things about myself because of how it went wrong. I’m not okay being ignored for extended time during play and I will not play with someone who’s not willing to give me aftercare. Now, anytime I get with someone new, I ask myself “is this someone I trust with my body, feelings, ...

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Nils Meyer: there are advantages to containers, but fairly easy to get wrong

Here is a comment that Nils Meyer on LinkedIn, in response to something I said. I can agree that I would see some use to Docker/Kubernetes in a non-virtual world, the irony is that I’ve only seen Docker/Kubernetes used in virtual setups.

I would agree that using packer and treating the VM like a container (or rather a pod in Kubernetes Parlance) is the easier approach. It’s also somewhat bizarre that a tarball of multiple tarballs and shell scripts concatenated ...

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Rainbow Rowell didn’t set out to write YA

Interesting:

But such nebulous (and, frankly, elitist) labels are not useful in explaining Rowell’s appeal. Her voice is welcoming and inclusive; she’s primarily interested in interpersonal relationships, but she’s also strongly influenced by genre writing and fan fiction, and has been vocal in her admiration for YA mega-franchises like the Harry Potter and Twilight books — both of which had a pronounced influence on Carry On.

Rowell’s success is indicative of the changes mainstream young adult fiction has undergone in the past ...

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Why not have more non-white female security guards?

There is truth in this:

though Karine Jean-Pierre had both the reaction time and the situation-defusing skills of the Dora Milaje, she NEVER should have had to put herself in that situation.

and:

I’m all for Karine Okoye Jean-Pierre but the first emotion I felt was terror. That nut job got too close too fast and security didn’t do shit for a long ass time.

and:

I love me some Karrine Jean-Pierre. She does not think of herself; she steps up to protect her sister ...

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Socrates says that Trump is unhappy

A reminder:

First, he describes how a tyrannical man develops from a democratic household. The democratic man is torn between tyrannical passions and oligarchic discipline, and ends up in the middle ground: valuing all desires, both good and bad. The tyrant will be tempted in the same way as the democrat, but without an upbringing in discipline or moderation to restrain him. Therefore, his most base desires and wildest passions overwhelm him, and he becomes driven by lust, using force and ...

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Pretty Much Screwed, by Jenna McCarthy

I just got done reading “Pretty Much Screwed” a novel by Jenna McCarthy, a novel set in Florida during the period 2010 to 2015. It is interesting to read this novel right after I read Eliza Kennedy’s novel “I Take You” (read my review of I Take You). The central characters could hardly be more different. Lily Wilder, from I Take You, is sexually adventurous and full of controversial opinions. By contrast, Charlotte Crawford, the main character of Pretty Much ...

I Take You, by Eliza Kennedy

I recently read “I Take You” by Eliza Kennedy. There are many strengths to this novel. Sadly, there are also some real weaknesses.

(I also recently reviewed Jenna McCarthy’s book, Pretty Much Screwed, which makes for an interesting contrast.)

In my own writing, I lean heavily on dialogue, so I liked that aspect of the book. Many novels use dialogue as a bit of garnish on top of the real meal, but this book uses dialogue as the main course. And ...

Blanche Krubner resigns from the Jackson Township Environmental Commission

You might recall some of the drama of my mom’s reappointment in 2009, which I’ve linked to before. When the Republicans gained power, they were anxious to push my mom out:

The issue surrounding Krubner came to the attention of the public several weeks ago when Reina did not reappoint the longtime Jackson resident and former teacher to the environmental commission or to the Planning Board.

The mayor said at the time, “Like all other towns, things have to change, and we ...

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The collision of capital and idealism over a technology

This is a good article, but is it appropriate to say that a technology is simply going through some growing pains when the technology is 25 years old? Doesn’t the long history suggest the problem here is a complex one, with a long history of its own? Python was a dying language until Google decided to make large investments in it. Now it is the main language for Data Science. This is a language that started off with a certain ...

Drama inside a fandom

Interesting:

Then the girl with the Destiel shirt was being villainized all over the place. I felt bad for this poor girl (little did I know I’d soon take her place). She has something she likes. It got noticed. Lots of people feel the same way. [Just to be clear, I neither ‘ship’ Destiel or Wincest nor am I homophobic – it seems you are one of those three in this fandom]. She got called all kinds of ...

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Billions were wasted on Hadoop startups, and the same will eventually be true of Docker

The hype over Hadoop has died away and many of the investments now seem to have been terrible investments:

MapR Technologies Inc., one of the troika of unicorn startups that emerged from the early days of the big-data movement, may cut up to 122 jobs and shut down its Santa Clara, California headquarters if it can’t secure additional funding.

The company, which raised a total of $280 million in financing since it was founded in 2009 and whose market capitalization once ...

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Is it bad to be a serial killer?

Remarkable how comfortable some people are referencing the love of Villanelle as an aspirational relationship goal, without regard to her profession.

Could client side Java make a comeback?

Interesting:

Gluon has always been very active in the Java Mobile Enterprise area. One of the big benefits of Java on the mobile and embedded client, is the fact that 12 million Java developers can use their skills to create mobile and embedded applications. In the past, the runtime for mobile platforms always lagged behind the runtime for desktop.

When we announced GluonVM, we said we would aim to bring Java on mobile at the same level as Java on desktop. We ...

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Why are video game companies so awful?

This would be a bizzare exception in most industries, but the video game industry seems rife with abuse. Very concerning:

Bundschu estimated he had three drinks, adding that he remembers everything that happened. (“I want to be clear—I remember this so clearly. I wasn’t so drunk that my memory is impaired or anything.”) Barrera moved to the end of the table, Bundschu says, and then asked who wanted to go to the dance floor. Bundschu volunteered, and then, he says, things ...

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Moby did not apologize

Moby wrote a book and said he dated Natalie Portman when she was 18 and he was 33. She then responded and said no way, he was just an older creepy dude and she was polite to him. Now he has “apologized” but he does not actually retract the claim that they dated:

The winners of globalization will now fight it out in the political sphere

Interesting:

First it was the left, now it’s the turn of the right to fade from the French political landscape. We have a new faultline: one that separates “progressives” from “populists”. This realignment is no accident, but the result of the political world catching up with real changes in society. The traditional left-right divide is giving way to one that reflects a fundamental class conflict that will define the west in the 21st century: the working classes whose livelihoods have been ...

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Computer says automobile is stolen, innocent people arrested

We continue to pay a high price for our increased reliance on broken software:

In 2017, Magalie Sterlin also rented a car from Hertz and found guns drawn on her at a checkpoint. The cops told her that the car she was driving had been reported stolen, which was news to Sterlin because she had rented it. She got arrested and was held for half a day. In her police report Sterlin told officers “she did not return the vehicle despite the ...

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Single women are happier

It takes a lot of religion to keep people from seeing this:

We may have suspected it already, but now the science backs it up: unmarried and childless women are the happiest subgroup in the population. And they are more likely to live longer than their married and child-rearing peers, according to a leading expert in happiness.

Speaking at the Hay festival on Saturday, Paul Dolan, a professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics, said the latest evidence showed ...

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Anna Barnev, examples for the book cover, design by Leah McCloskey

My new book is out! Check out “How The Young Anna Barnev Established Her Career As A Graphic Designer“.

In chronological order, starting in January of 2019, these were the designs that Leah McCloskey came up, to try to capture the spirit of the Anna Barnev story.

Here was the first batch, which she sent to me on January 14th, 2019:

Of these, I liked the hand drawn version of Anna, because she looks confident, and I thought it was important to have ...

If a company is serious about security, then who in the company is serious about security?

[Originally from a longer essay]

Let’s talk about EquiFax. They were hacked and data regarding 145 million people was leaked. When the CEO was hauled before Congress to explain himself, he emanated a nonchalance that offended people. John Oliver had a nice take down:

After this disaster was well known to the public, EquiFax hired ReliaQuest to manage their server security. I have friends who work at ReliaQuest, and I know it is a great company full of great people. If ...

Whatever happened to This Chick Digs Chicks?

I previously linked to a blog on Tumblr called this-chick-digs-chicks. The woman behind that blog wrote a lot on the subject of an appropriate relationship between transexuals and lesbians. Others called her a terf, but she made good points about the need to have a movement of those whose lifetime experience was that of being a woman. Almost everything I’ve read on the subject I learned either from her or from the stuff she linked to.

But now it looks ...

YouTube is the ultimate reality TV

Somehow modern reality TV reminds me a bit of the explosion fake religious leaders that happened during the English Civil War. In 1649 the English people were acting without precedent — there had never been a political revolution in which peasants rose up and executed a king. The public could only understand it in religious terms, surely this cataclysm must mean that the Second Coming was near? And then more and more people began coming forward who claimed to be ...

Nicholas Sparks helps oversee a homophobic school

Given the kind of emotionally manipulative and retrograde fiction that he writes, this isn’t a huge surprise:

And now for a bit of news as predictable as his novels: Per an extensive report from The Daily Beast, prolific heteronormative romance bro Nicholas Sparks- who also co-founded and runs the Epiphany School of Global Studies in North Carolina – is currently embroiled in a legal battle for an alleged pattern of discriminatory behavior that took place in his school. If you feel ...

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No longer the best and the brightest

It’s often said that Gordon Liddy was a symptom. He was not the illness himself. He was a minor character. But the fact that he was tolerated at all teaches us something about the kinds of people who were attracted to President Nixon.

Likewise:

Louise Linton, Baroness of the United States Treasury and Hermés scarf owner, was recently profiled by Los Angeles Magazine. You might ask: Why is the Treasury secretary’s wife being profiled by a magazine for retired sit-com stars? ...

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Jeff Franklin accussed of misogyny and creating a toxic work environment

Interesting:

THR obtained a copy of the sworn declaration, intended to support Behar’s attempt to have Franklin’s lawsuit thrown out. It reveals that Warner Bros. first received a complaint about the Full House creator back in 2016, well before the allegations against Weinstein were made public. The studio launched an investigation into “Franklin’s handling of pregnancy-related requests for time off for doctor appointments as well as concerns about equal treatment for male and female writers for the show.” Though Franklin received ...

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Peaceful and safe

Interesting:

What does it mean for a young person to become an adult in 2019?

There is truth here:

Why doesn’t lasciviousness hurt Trump?

For any other President, this photo would have ended their Presidency:

It is gross to see a married man flirting with a younger woman so openly. But this photo did not hurt Trump, and likewise, when he was caught on tape bragging about assaulting women, it did not hurt him. I am curious why he is so utterly insulated. There is roughly 40% of the country that is willing to follow him no matter what. There is absolutely nothing he can ...

The lust to blame on Tumblr

A lot of modern politics is being shaped by little moments such as this:

“oh man, remember how john green has a This Machine Kills Fascists sticker on his laptop despite never in his life even thinking about doing anything subversive ”

I’m so over the dumb shit with this cursed dead-end site. He and his brother provide free educational videos contradicting white-washed/cis male-washed history and science. He has always listened to reasonable critique on his work and apologized for anything he ...

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they aren’t your fictional ships and they aren’t you representation quota

Well said:

Why is Meghan McCain famous?

Meghan McCain is the daughter of John McCain, the great war hero. One thing that bothers me, intensely, is when someone tries to claim someone else’s greatness as their own. I’m curious what has Meghan McCain done that justifies her national reputation? Being the daughter of John McCain is not, itself, a qualification.

This is interesting:

McCain’s response to this polite, reasonable, question was to go on an outraged and borderline incomprehensible tirade in which, in between splutters, she continued ...

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Trump is bad at golf

Amazing that this is so important, and yet it is:

Well, this story isn’t in the book but it’s wild. While Trump was meeting with Kim Jong Un in Singapore, a club championship was held at Trump International, the course Trump built near Mar-a-Lago in Florida. So later on, Trump’s back on the course there with the Secret Service and the SWAT team guys and all that stuff. And he sees Ted Virtue, who was involved in the financing of the ...

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Battle Of Winterfell

I just watched this while falling asleep last night. While I agree that the battle could have been shorter, I also feel that every single episode of Game Of Thrones could be shorter. I’m constantly stunned about the amount of extra footage that any competent film editor would normally remove, but which somehow makes it into this show. Is this done to pad the time? Is the goal to stretch the show out as long as possible, because it is ...

High heels

Interesting:

Brennan circles around the shoes from all angles, and her brief chapters add up to a kaleidoscopic view of feminine public existence, both wide-ranging and thoughtful. She describes the high heel shoes she wore for her own job at the United Nations, and she describes falling down stairs in the course of doing her job while wearing them. There’s another short chapter about the tall tale that expensive high heels don’t hurt, only cheap ones do, so if you’re in ...

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She has some lovers along the way

A comment from a friend regarding some fiction I wrote. This is the nicest thing that anyone has ever said about my writing. I can’t even imagine a comment that would make me happier than this one:

That’s about it. Really, Lawrence, I think it is very strong. There is a lot of humor and a lot of great discussion about art and the building of a career outside the “mainstream” process. I love how her various lovers ...

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Why explain dialogue?

From my friend Kat:

First, just an overall note about what irritates me in terms of some writers’ dialogue – it bothers me when writers write a scene with a certain tone and then also explain that tone through exposition. So, for example a character says something sarcastically and then the author explains that they said it sarcastically

I feel exactly the same way. Every one else who reads my novels gives me the opposite advice, and I thought perhaps I was ...

Men gawking at the gym

This is from the year 2005:

At first, I couldn’t figure out why there were so many old geezers on the Stairmasters, or why everyone else in the gym was clustered down at the other end. About a minute into my workout, it became obvious. The fitness center is directly opposite the swimming pool, separated by a pane of glass. Olympic synchronized swimmers on one side, old geezers on the other.

As far as they were concerned, it was like being at ...

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The rise of sincerity as a progressive answer to the alt-right

Interesting:

Wholesome circa 1998 was the ’50s. Wholesome was father knows best. Wholesome was a mother vacuuming in pearls and high heels.

And for most of the ’90s and the ’00s, “wholesome” and “pure” were nearly synonymous with sexual chastity, with wholesome family values and evangelical Christian purity. Girls would put on purity rings at purity balls, which were a “wholesome event” for fathers “bringing up daughters to live in purity and in truth.” Daughters would pledge to remain virgins until marriage, ...

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When you accidentally put your database on a public subnet in AWS

This feels like a very easy mistake to make:

Here’s an example where you can get into trouble. Digging through some infra code, reviewing with a new devops hire, we were going through everything with a fine toothed comb. We found that the RDS instance was being deployed in PUBLIC subnet, instead of private.

Alerted to the problem, we first checked to see whether it was accessible from the internet at large. It wasn’t, because we had not exposed a public facing ...

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Anna Kucirkova: the history of computer programming languages

This article misses all of the Lisps, and focuses mostly on Algol languages, but it does a nice overview of that branch of computer history, and how that branch gave us the syntax of modern popular languages like Javascript.

1883: That’s right, the first programming language was born in 1883. The algorithm for the Analytical Engine was created by Ada Lovelace for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. This is widely considered to be the first computer programming ...

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The cult of complexity

Interesting:

Writing the same dull CRUD application over and over is boring. But what if you could figure out a way to get all the simple CRUD applications to talk to one another? That’s a nice and juicy puzzle. This perhaps explains the complexity fetish I see in so many “Enterprise” architectures and applications. Some of it is accidental complexity, accrued from years of piecing together parts that were never meant to work with one another. But I don’t think accidental ...

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Serverless architecture uses servers, requires work, and is a stupid name

For all of you who continue to close your eyes and refuse to look at reality, here is another post pointing out the work involved with “simple” setups:

Also:

A task definition defines the actual container you want to run. The problem I ran into immediately here is that this thing is insanely complicated. Lots of the options here are very straightforward, like specifying the docker image and memory limits, but I also had to define a networking model and a variety ...

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The rising importance of fanfiction

Interesting:

The Archive of Our Own has had a fundamental role in altering the way we think about fanfiction

That empowered attitude arising among fans who built and used AO3 would coincide with a sea change in the way we think about fanfiction.

The creation of the AO3 in 2009 happened parallel to the rise of social media. This was a highly significant coincidence for fandom. AO3 was formed as an independent, fully non-corporatized community just when the internet was dividing into venture ...

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The irony of Tumblr banning porn

The first startup that I founded ran from 2002 to 2008 and it was focused on weblog software. I spent that time writing code and adding features because I thought we would win by adding features. Towards the end of my time at that startup, in 2007 and 2008, Tumblr emerged. Tumblr boasted a lack of features, which is to say, they were proud of their simplicity. I was irritated to realize that this could be a winning move.

Over ...

Another fanfic doing well

Almost any story about fanfiction doing well makes me happy. Although, I wonder why the stories tend to lead to bland movies? Is that because of the young demographic?

In 2013, a 25-year-old named Anna Todd self-published her work of serialized fan fiction on Wattpad. It blew up almost instantaneously and reached over one billion reads. After became a success largely for its steamy scenes, which drew comparisons to Fifty Shades of Grey—and because its male lead, Hardin Scott, was stylized ...

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Women are tough

Here is an odd article from the Russian press. It seems to be saying that Western feminism is wrong because women are actually very tough:

There’s a railroad in Siberia that my grandmother and other Soviet women built. Married twice and twice divorced, she was always so busy at work that she didn’t have time for her own children. At the age of 17, her daughter, my mother, moved from a small city in the north and went to Russia’s ...

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There was this logo on a red bus, saying our money should remain in the UK — that’s why I voted for Remain

This is a priceless story:

The day after the Brexit referendum in 2016, I went to Romford. I was keen to talk to people in one of the highest Leave-voting constituencies.

In a pub on South Street, I chatted to an elderly lady who was sitting at a table next to her two sons. Both had voted for Leave. She had voted Remain. Why? I asked her.

“There was this logo on a red bus, saying our money should remain in the UK. ...

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The recurring cycle of online communities now catches up to Facebook

All online communities die, but Facebook’s slow obsolescence seems entirely self-inflicted. They could go back to have a simple Wall, which is all that people actually want. But that would mean accepting less money for advertisements. Apparently that is not an option? Remarkable that they will chase the money straight up to the moment they are doomed.

Interesting:

Instagram is designed to be used as it is actually used: as a posturing tool.

On Facebook you could share a moment with friends. ...

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Brienne and Daenerys

I love this:

The difference between conspiracy theories and conspiracism is the first tries to explain an event, whereas the second simply invents events

Suppose you believe in an evil force, such as Satan or Communism of aliens from another planet. You believe this evil force wants to take over the planet and destroy the entire human race. And you believe that I am loyal to this evil force. Is there any reason why you should then respect my right to vote? If my side wins the election, is there any reason you should feel the election was valid?

Promoting conspiracies about the rising ...

What if we kiss in your Paris apartment after I stab you in the stomach?

I admit, I really like this show. I don’t allow myself much time to watch television shows, but I will make time to watch this one.

The cat named Brexit

Very good:

Some have responded with humour. Nathalie Loiseau, France’s Europe minister, said recently that if she had one, she would call her cat Brexit: “It wakes me up miaowing because it wants to go out. When I open the door, its sits there, undecided. Then it looks daggers at me when I put it out.”

Why can’t all books be like this, I started thinking midway through, just 280 pages of pure human relationship?

Interesting:

Even if we can’t picture them, the characters are wildly, freakishly attuned to every sensation they experience, surveilling their emotional and physical reactions and analyzing the gestures and comments of everyone they encounter.

In fact, there is so little external physical description that when it comes along it functions as a mental speed bump, drawing attention to the artifice. The spell of the book is broken, temporarily, as if Rooney has remembered to insert some description of rain “silver as loose ...

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Bad writing in Game of Thrones

Funny and true:

There are sentences we hear in our lives that stick with us and grow deep, strong roots in our souls. We remember these idioms because they are poetic and resonant, disturbing and brilliant. They become mantras, guiding lights. We seek these phrases in times of joy or need. I myself hold onto one of these sentences: a beautiful sequence of words that has rattled around my brain since 2015 when “Mother’s Mercy,” the season five finale of Game ...

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Curse words in Scientific American?

The world is getting more and more informal, but I’m still surprised that Scientific American allowed this use of “fucked”:

Beyond that, the historiography of science in the 60s and 70s centered on distinctions between the “internal” history of science, or the internal logic of scientific ideas and their disembodied development over time, and the “external” history of science, or the grubby social and institutional contexts in which serene natural philosophers built on the work of their predecessors. What fucked Kuhn ...

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Abuse on Wikipedia

Interesting:

In countries where it is more dangerous for L.G.B.T. individuals to be open about their identities, harassment on Wikipedia can be particularly virulent. Once, an administrator on a Wikipedia page blocked an editor simply because that person’s username suggested that the editor could be gay, said Rachel Wexelbaum, a Wikipedian who works to improve L.G.B.T. content on the website. Eventually, she said, Wikimedia’s Trust and Safety Team got involved, and the administrator was blocked for those actions.

In some spaces, the ...

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Abusive people know they are abusive

Back in 2001 I had a friend who needed to hear this, and I told her, many times, but she did not listen to me. She kept writing long letters to the guy who abused her, hoping he would understand what he had done. My feeling is he always understood, he did not need anything explained.

Can anarchism be commodified?

As the big tech firms increasingly consolidate their hold on the Web, they are increasingly trying to clean it up and make it look presentable. For instance, many of my favorite LGBQ writers on Tumblr have recently been banned, presumably because they occasionally post photos of a sexual nature.

Google is having a problem with YouTube. Too many of their content creators are creating stuff that advertisers don’t like. So Google is now promoting conventional work from television. And the ...

The sexualization of Brexit

Apparently this is a real quote? If so, I’m horrified.

As far back as last year, Boris Johnson was casting himself as the man “to put some lead in the collective pencil”.

Whatever happened to Britain? For centuries it was regarded as one of the sanest places on Earth. It will be a long time before anyone regards it that way again.

All of this makes me sick:

Happily, not one of them feels miscast in this hypersexualised action hero role. “How ...

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Stream remote file via Aleph to AWS S3?

Interesting:

What I’ve got to do is to get a file stream from a remote HTTP server and then upload that stream into AWS S3.

I query a URL with http/get, parse Content-Length header to know the file size and pass that into AWS PutObjectRequest as follows:

(aws/put-object aws {:bucket-name bucket :key key ...

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The big shift in USA politics

I’m glad this is happening, but I wonder why this is happening now? My parents were heartbroken when the nation began to shift to the right after 1968, and I’ve been waiting my whole life to see something like this:

For the generation born in the 1960s, the American dream has undeniably vanished

Interesting:

The declining prospects of America’s working class are widely discussed and hotly debated these days, from the anthems of Bruce Springsteen to the “deaths of despair” research of Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton.

A recent paper from the Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute explores this downhill trend for less-educated men and women by comparing life outcomes of two cohorts born 20 years apart. It shows that for the more recent generation, the American dream has undeniably vanished.

“The Lost Ones: ...

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It’s astonishing that a Democratic backbencher could get this much attention and get so famous at the beginning of her first term

So true:

The Washington Post’s Phillip Bump analyzed Fox News segments between January 1 and February 15 of this year, comparing the number of segments mentioning AOC to those focusing on at least one of the Democratic 2020 presidential candidates. It turns out she got more coverage on Fox than any candidate save one, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who is also a right-wing boogeyman. Ocasio-Cortez got significantly more Fox News coverage than fellow democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders.

It’s astonishing that a Democratic ...

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Groups is the thing that all social networks need

If there is anything that would cause danah boyd to “Just say no” it is probably collapsing contexts. And that is something that Google+ got right:

Google plus had circles

… so unlike with twitter I didn’t have to spam everyone to reach those two followers who’d actually care about that topic.

Example: I could add Norwegians I knew to my “Norwegians” circle so I could share links to Norwegian pages only to people I knew could read Norwegian.

Facebook has this as groups, ...

No p-value can reveal the plausibility, presence, truth, or importance of an association or effect

I don’t understand why this started, 100 years ago, why it lasted as long as it did, or why right now it is coming to an end. I’m pleased to see this nonsense end, but I’m very curious why it happened at all. I suppose this was an expression of some aspect of the class war during the 20th Century, the rising importance of a certain group of professionals?

Scientists should stop using the term ‘statistically significant’ in their research, ...

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A new “fandom is broken” article and the ensuing avalanche of responses is only the latest iteration of a familiar cycle

Two comparisons occur to me:

1.) to the extent that fanfic suggests the amateurs who can undermine the power of the professionals, there is an echo here for the criticisms that journalists made, over and over again, when the blogosphere existed, during the period from 1999 to 2008. That conversation when the blogosphere was destroyed by Facebook and Twitter.

2.) to the extent that gender is a factor in the hysteria of the reaction against fanfic, there is some overlap between ...

South Korea has gone crazy because 552 refugees

So very disappointing:

It is easy to be disappointed at this response coming from a liberal administration, one that was born out of the heroic monthslong protests that resulted in the impeachment and removal of the deeply corrupt and authoritarian President Park Geun-hye. Yet polling reveals the dispiriting reason why the Moon administration is at least partially pandering to anti-refugee sentiments: The issue potentially poses the greatest threat to the administration’s stability yet, as it strikes at the foundation of its ...

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Does reality exist?

The problem in this paragraph is the use of “we”:

Morris, who calls his philosophy “investigative realism,” writes, “I feel very strongly that, even though the world is unutterably insane, there is this idea—perhaps a hope—that we can reach outside of the insanity and find truth, find the world, find ourselves.” Kuhn, for all his faults, goaded Morris into writing a brilliant work of investigative realism. For that, if for nothing else, he, and we, should thank Kuhn.

If we replace ...

The ongoing Young Adult wars are about power—about who has traditionally wielded power in publishing, and how that balance is shifting

The subject that is very much at the forefront of my mind nowadays:

The YA book world has gone through a few high-profile controversies in the past few months involving authors who pulled their books shortly before publication after a group of angry bloggers accused them of racism. Each cancellation sparked a slew of hot takes, but this New Yorker piece from Katy Waldman is by far the most nuanced and careful one I’ve seen:

The ongoing Y.A. wars are about power—about ...

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Creating Personas for User Experience Research — these need to be very specific

I really like this video (created by friends of mine). It makes clear that you have to be very detailed when you talk about a persona that you want to design a product for. The goal is to create empathy, within your company, for this persona.

These people are bent out of shape by their hidden selves

I’ll have to track down whatever her best book was and read it:

These people are bent out of shape by their hidden selves. There is something of another contemporary, Henry Green, in Johnson’s invigorating harshness. As Elsie passes on her way to school, Parsons ‘gave her a sidelong glance, sniffing up the hairs in his nose. Sidey little runt, he thought.’ Elsie, abruptly adolescent, is in love with her art teacher, Miss Chavasse, who is having complicated thoughts about her ...

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Parents unthinking use of social media

Parents who embarrass their kids is a phenomena as old as time, but doing so on social media means a larger audience, and the possibility the incidents will remain public forever. Parents should really think twice about this.

There, for anyone to see on her public Facebook account, were all of the embarrassing moments from my childhood: The letter I wrote to the tooth fairy when I was five years old, pictures of me crying when I was a toddler, and ...

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Almost readable Greek

As sometimes with the Russian alphabet (and for similar reasons) I can sometimes almost read a Greek word, and it always surprises me. Here is an alphabet that is clearly different from Latin, yet so tantalizingly close to Latin that I can almost read it.

When will Apple get its act together regarding iPhone development?

Anyone who has developed for both Apple and Android is aware that the process tends to be easier on Android. But why is this? Apple has a vast pool of money, so they could invest some of it to make iPhone/iPad development easier. And this is a well known path for achieving software dominance. One of the things that allowed Microsoft to win, back in the 1990s, was their focus on building tools that made it easy for developers to ...

Misogynist morons misogynize Captain Marvel

Interesting:

In February, as Captain Marvel’s first pre-release screenings were held for press, the movie became the subject of several negative user reviews posted to the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes by people who hadn’t even seen it, blasting Larson’s performance and trashing the movie itself. Although, to call their assessments “reviews” is generous, as they primarily complained about Larson for being sexist against men, expressing anger that seemed to stem from Larson being vocal about the lack of diversity in ...

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What is the biggest open problem in NLP?

Interesting:

Natural language understanding

I think the biggest open problems are all related to natural language understanding. […] we should develop systems that read and understand text the way a person does, by forming a representation of the world of the text, with the agents, objects, settings, and the relationships, goals, desires, and beliefs of the agents, and everything else that humans create to understand a piece of text. Until we can do that, all of our progress is in improving ...

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biLSTMs will solve all of your NLP problems

Interesting:

Using pre-trained models

We have several different English language pre-trained biLMs available for use. Each model is specified with two separate files, a JSON formatted “options” file with hyperparameters and a hdf5 formatted file with the model weights. Links to the pre-trained models are available here.

There are three ways to integrate ELMo representations into a downstream task, depending on your use case.

Compute representations on the fly from raw text using character input. This is the most general method and will handle ...

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ELMO representations are deep, contextual and character based NLP

Interesting:

ELMo is a deep contextualized word representation that models both (1) complex characteristics of word use (e.g., syntax and semantics), and (2) how these uses vary across linguistic contexts (i.e., to model polysemy). These word vectors are learned functions of the internal states of a deep bidirectional language model (biLM), which is pre-trained on a large text corpus. They can be easily added to existing models and significantly improve the state of the art across a broad range of challenging ...

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Senator Martha McSally talks about her sexual assault in the military

Interesting:

Sen. Martha McSally, the first female Air Force fighter pilot to fly in combat, said Wednesday that she was sexually assaulted by a superior officer, and later, when she tried to talk about it to military officials, she “felt like the system was raping me all over again.”

The Arizona Republican, a 26-year military veteran, made the disclosure at a Senate hearing on the military’s efforts to prevent sexual assaults and improve the response when they occur. Lawmakers also heard from ...

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While describing their “unruly” intellectual style, Israeli scientists often employed an emotional “language of fire” in contrast with German cold cognition

Interesting:

Cultural misunderstandings like this are growing as campuses internationalize. In recent interviews with scientists at Harvard, M.I.T., Boston University and other institutions, I found that respondents embrace diversity in their workplaces but also raise concerns about puzzling behaviors of their international students. They say that cultural diversity in research settings is crucial but point out that some international students are “too obedient” or “hard working yet lacking in originality.” Without training in cultural sensitivity, they are often surprised and occasionally ...

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The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible

Interesting:

“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible, ”Albert Einstein famously once said. These days, however, it is far from being a matter of consensus that the universe is comprehensible, or even that it is unique. Fundamental physics is facing a crisis, related to two popular concepts that are frequently invoked, summarized tellingly by the buzzwords “multiverse” and “uglyverse.”

…With the advent of the multiverse, this has changed: As unlikely as a coincidence may appear, in the ...

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What makes for a heartthrob?

Interesting:

When Beverly Hills 90210 first aired in 1990, producers miscalculated. They thought Brandon Walsh was going to be our heartthrob. It was an easy mistake to make: Jason Priestley had eyes like the sea, capped with a gossamer mane you just wanted to reach up and push back. The problem wasn’t Priestley. It was Brandon.

Brandon Walsh plays basketball and might have to be home early to study for his trig final. He had a paper route back in Minnesota, where ...

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Strict churches are strong?

Interesting:

Jennifer, a young mother and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in northern Virginia, is honest about the challenges of being Mormon in America today. “It’s not an easy gig,” she says. It’s not just the expectation that you will adhere to strict religious standards when it comes to dating and sex. Or the 10 percent tithing requirement. The prohibition on caffeine or alcohol. It’s the time, she says. “My husband and I teach Sunday school ...

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Why are large companies so difficult to rescue (regarding bad internal technology)

Why are large companies so difficult to rescue?

Studying a bloated, sluggish, rigid behemoth helps you understand what your real advantages are when you’re small. In particular, moving at high speed requires a team where every member trusts the other members. This is possible when everyone in the company fits in a single room, but it is impossible when you have several thousand people spread across multiple countries.

I worry there is a lot of glib, superficial rhetoric ...

An overview of different approaches to NLP word embeddings

It’s interesting that the simple approaches do fairly well:

Smooth Inverse Frequency

Taking the average of the word embeddings in a sentence tends to give too much weight to words that are quite irrelevant, semantically speaking. Smooth Inverse Frequency tries to solve this problem in two ways:

Weighting: like our tf-idf baseline above, SIF takes the weighted average of the word embeddings in the sentence. Every word embedding is weighted by a/(a + p(w)), where a is a parameter that is typically set ...

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Matrix math in Clojure

This is a really great series of articles:

The second shift that women work

Interesting:

A safe space is exclusive

Interesting:

unpopular opinion: safe spaces have to exclude some people to be safe spaces because otherwise those the people in that space need to hide from can literally just enter at any time. An all inclusive liberal “safe space” isn’t safe at all

The decline of the USA standard of living

Interesting:

Do MBAs help business?

Interesting:

We found no statistically significant alphas — despite testing every possible school with a reasonable sample size. MBA programs simply do not produce CEOs who are better at running companies, if performance is measured by stock price return.

We ran similar regressions controlling for industry and found that — even after controlling for industry — elite MBAs did not produce positive statistically significant alpha. Elite MBAs did perform relatively well as CEOs in healthcare and consumer staples, but relatively poorly in ...

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Gendered on-ramps are important to get women into software development

A year ago I wrote “Why are women being pushed away from the tech industry?” Women made up 35% of all software developers in 1990, but are only 26% of all software developers now. Women are getting pushed out of the tech industry. There are lots of articles explaining why, and I link to some of them in that earlier essay.

But why did women’s participation in software development peak at the end of the 1980s? I know at least ...