bondolo

I hope they start deactivating drivers who refuse service dogs or otherwise repeatedly fail to abide by the agreed terms of service. Uber continues to regularly ignore driver violations and fail to comply with the results of rider class action agreements.

It has always been the case. Attending IDC in 1999 before a single device had been certified and the hardware standards and certification docs were already 3500 pages. You can only imagine how this has grown in 20 years. Bluetooth is a "giraffe" technology. It evolved in to the current form through happenstance. Nothing about it is simple or normal, instead randomly weird and inconsistent. And nobody is surprised that after 20 years everyone rightfully assumes that it barely works and is full of holes. However, since the standards are controlled by the people who build the hardware it is not been possible for a functional, non-insane alternative to appear.

A friend who worked on the charging system for the Model S reported that a few weeks before the vehicle shipped they were way behind schedule for building vehicles and falling further behind as the release date approached.

One Sunday morning the entire engineering team was on the manufacturing floor helping the struggling manufacturing team build vehicles and Elon appeared trailing a gaggle of execs. They started poking about and work started to grind to a halt. The engineering lead went over and asked what was up. Elon said that they were wanting to see first hand what was holding up production.

The engineering lead loudly told Elon to get the fuck off the manufacturing floor if he wanted any vehicles finished that day, that the engineering team didn't come in on a Sunday to dick about with execs and they would walk out if the execs didn't leave. If they wanted to talk they could schedule a meeting for Monday morning. Elon shut up and left and the team went back to building vehicles.

The engineering lead left the company several months after the Model S shipped as did most of the powertrain group. Tesla continues to burn through engineering talent, but like Apple, has a still continuous stream of bright eyed naive true believers willing to sign up.

The brightness of the UI should match the ambient light in the environment. Light UI in daylight, Dark UI at night. Brightness adjustments applied to both based on the ambient light. Some people may also prefer hue adjustments (blue reduction) for low ambient light along the lines of f.lux, Night Shift, Night Light, etc.

No less safe until it the code is running in production on a Tuesday at 3AM and a library pukes up an exception it has never thrown before and your code doesn't handle it.

I prefer exceptions to be declared, just like types. Having exceptions declared gives me more information about the operation of the code I am calling and that is useful. To treat exception declarations just as annoyance seems like lazy punting.

PDFs are an accessibility nightmare and most production pipelines are terrible at preserving the semantic structure of the document or, in many cases, even preserving the text. A PDF is in many cases as series of page images which aren't usable for anything other than human viewing or printing. "Export as PDF" generally produces much better results than print to PDF though not from every application. Many days I wish there was an alternative solution based on SVG. While not perfect it certainly would avoid many of the problems of PDF while having all of the important capabilities.

I had associated Oliver Sacks with swimming based upon this New Yorker article : https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/swimming-with-ol...

Thank you to the authors for being entirely explicit about the implementation to the point of providing pseudo code and not having any expectation that implementors or users will know anything about cryptography.

aka "Don't ask to ask, just ask" the mantra of IRC for at least 25 years.

Having the bay area terminus in the east bay was always a better idea than getting to San Francisco. Connect to BART in San Leandro, or for extra credit, get to the port of Oakland before connecting to BART. Going up the peninsula seemed like a vanity effort.

The couple of now former Apple Titan employees I know all took new jobs in the last six months. This has been coming for a while.

It would be expected that employers would quantify the costs and adjust compensation to factor that in. However, many (most?) employers use employer sponsored permanent residency as effectively an indentured servitude program and their gains from undercompensation of the sponsored employees greatly exceed their actual costs. In particular the longer the process takes the more the employee has to lose by complaining or leaving.

I am a former Oracle employee, white male from Canada, who was underpaid based on my immigration status and that continued after I became a permanent resident. This seemed routine–Oracle tries to underpay everyone and will use whatever advantages they have to do so. If you've worked at Oracle for any length of time you are probably not being competitively compensated unless you make a regular fuss. Even if you make a fuss they may still do nothing betting that you won't leave.

That said, I don't think it is entirely fair to pile on Oracle for this problem. Oracle doesn't seem especially atypical of the rest of the industry or even the bottom of the barrel. I saw much worse treatment at my first US employer for myself and others. Mid-tier employers and body-shop consultancy companies use underpaying people as a strategic core component of their profitability.

I had prospective employers directly say that they were pleased they could use my immigration status to pay me less, specifically that they would offer employer sponsored permanent residency application instead of paying me competitive rates, bonuses, promotions.

If you want to end the abuses decouple visas and permanent resident applications from the employer or make it much easier to maintain or continue status and applications when moving between employers.

Yes, it is a port wine stain birthmark.

I'd love to see what it does with my face: https://avatars1.githubusercontent.com/u/250420?s=800&v=4

I was one of the students in those classes and appreciated having someone with more technical depth in the class. I ended up making notes in every lecture of questions to ask the real experts during the breaks. I remember questions to Randy produced tangential stories rather than answers.

What are your life savings for if they can't be used to save your life? Every other use is fortuitous but until you have more money than you could spend to save your life then that is the purpose of that money.

Certainly not new. I learned this technique from a self hypnosis book in the early 1980s. It does work. My mental recitation is "One. One. One. One…" I used to use this for naps but found I wasn't as rested than natural sleep for a quick nap. I now use it only when I need a full night's sleep. The quality of sleep doesn't seem to be affected for full nights the way it was for naps.

I have a similar story about Brad Templeton's C64 Assembler. It was the first development tool I ever bought and, at the time, very expensive for me as a high school student. I later came to claim that I would always pay for any software that I used for more time than it would have taken me to earn the money to buy it. Quickly that became everything I used as my earnings were a lot better.

I had the opportunity a couple of years ago to thank Brad for C64 Assembler and the role it had in forming some of my ethics around fair-use and paying for intellectual property.

The $140M being "alleged" is the most blockchain part of the title

I left a Canadian university in 1989 without graduating because the opportunity to do a startup was more aligned with my career goals than the dated CompSci program that was preparing me only for working for government, banking or an oil company in 1970s style data processing environment.

If the startup failed I planned to go back to school elsewhere. The startup was a success though and 6 years later I found myself looking for a job. I searched in Canada but given a choice between moving 5400km and 2 timezones to Ottawa where I knew no-one to work for Corel and moving 2200km and 1 timezone to the bay area where I knew a couple of other expats and colleagues. I chose silicon valley and the bay area.

I haven't regretted this choice though I have looked casually every couple of years for opportunities in my then current field. It has never been fruitful; the opportunities just aren't there. Before I left Canada I interviewed a guy who had been on the software verification team at Intel for the 486. He was desperate to move back and was willing to take almost anything to do so. I assumed that one day I would be in the same position. I am now probably less than a decade away from retirement so my main focus now is getting over the finish line in the most efficient way possible. That probably means staying put in the bay area.

I do know that sure as fuck that I won't be retiring in the bay area though; I'd have to work 5-7 additional years to afford it. This place isn't worth that. At all. I have considered Vancouver but honestly the expense of moving to the most expensive market in Canada from one of the most expensive places in the US just to try it out is also not worth it to me. I don't know where I will end up living. Maybe Hawaii.

I do think it is essential that Canada do more to develop the domestic technology and software industry and more than just international offices for Google, Amazon, etc. Canadian universities are offering much better programs (which is part of the problem!) Entrepreneurship and access to capital has come a long way in Canada in the last 30 years and it is a lot easier to attract international talent to Canada than it was. Provincial government incentives for hiring and market development would help a lot. The federal science and technology R&D tax credits helped our startup significantly. The tax credits for export market development were inaccessible to startups and/or companies which sold intellectual property which hurt.

I follow with interest the C100 and other efforts to advance Canadian technology though I wish there was more focus on funding these efforts domestically rather than coming hat-in-hand to SV for venture capital.

Spellcheck had indeed "corrected" the spelling of his last name from "Minow" to "Minnow". Now fixed.

Martin Minow liked to tell the story of the time he got a call from Steve Jobs right after Steve's return to Apple. Martin was working on Copeland which hadn't been cancelled yet.

Steve called out the blue one afternoon and said "Hi Martin, this is Steve." Martin had worked with Steve in his early days at Apple before Steve's departure. "Hi Steve." "Look, we know you've been sending emails to Henry Norr who works at MacWeek. We can't read them because they are encrypted, but you better have an explanation of why you are talking to journalists." "He is in my running group. That's it." "That's it?" "Yep, that's it." "OK, make sure it stays that way." and Steve hung up. Martin was flustered by this call so got up and left his office. In the hallway were his manager and a couple security goons just standing around. "Hey." "Hey." and he went off to the restroom. When he came back the goons were gone. It never came up again.

I miss Martin.

edit: [Spellcheck corrected "Minow" to "Minnow" and I failed to notice. You should find plenty more hits on "Martin Minow"]

I have never used Windows 10 nor made significant use of any Windows version since Windows XP. Nonetheless my parents asked me to look at some issues they were having with their laptops. The trend of increasing clutter that has plagued Windows since XP seems to have accelerated. The user experience appears to have been designed by a hoarder. I spent a significant amount of time asking "Do you know what this is? Do you use it?" to be able to remove some of the many goo-gahs that had been helpfully installed by either Windows or one of their devices. It made me sad that my parents just accepted that this was how computers are because they were unaware that the crap-strewn-everywhere experience was a deliberate choice for the Windows ecosystem.

The iPad I use for watching cartoons in bed is a minimum spec 1st generation iPad. It runs iOS 5.1 and hasn't updated in about 5 years. Most of the apps are no longer supported. I can still use NetFlix, Amazon Prime Video and Crackle. I am not sure about Hulu, CBS, or HBO Go as I am not currently subscribed to these. I can watch YouTube and some other video sites in Safari, which frequently crashes because it runs out memory.

Originally I used to charge it every 10-14 days. Now I must charge it every 3-4 days.

As a video watching device it is still fine. I would be happier if the utility degraded a little more gracefully. I can't think of a good reason why AdultSwim or CartoonNetwork shouldn't be supporting legacy iOS versions for their video players. Their target audiences are more likely to be using older hand-me-down devices. On the other hand, this device is also now the only device I can use to still play older 32-bit AdultSwim games like "Monsters Ate My Condo" and "Mole Attack" that no longer run in iOS 11.

It is working in my community. http://www.berkeleyside.com/ has run a (very modest) profit for the last two years and continued to expand. Their focus is the greater Berkeley area; a population of about 350,000. It is a more educated and well-off population than national averages. The revenue split is 65-35% between supporters and advertising. They've also recently done a direct public offering of stock allowing for $800K in investment.

Local news, supported locally is possible.

I've been using a 100cm/39" Seiki 4K for about 3 years and wish for a physically smaller 4K screen. Using eye glasses with progressive lens I have to move my head too much with this screen and after long periods of use I find that I have neck strain.

I love the 4K pixels but 100cm/39" is simply too much surface area for a monitor used for primarily small text. My next monitor will probably be a 69cm/27" 4K and hopefully OLED if they fix the burn-in issues that make OLED unsuitable for computer use.

Location: Sunnyvale, CA; Big Island, HI

Remote: possible for some positions

Liquid Robotics (A Boeing Company) builds a marine robot, the Wave Glider, an autonomous, unmanned surface vehicle (USV) that operates individually or in fleets delivering real-time data for up to a year at sea. The Wave Glider is being used in defence, maritime surveillance, environmental monitoring and oil & gas applications worldwide.

Sr. Mechanical Design Engineer (http://jobs.jobvite.com/liquid-robotics-inc/job/oFm24fwR): Electro-mechanical and mechatronic design for marine robotics

Sr. Software QA Engineer (http://jobs.jobvite.com/liquid-robotics-inc/job/oIBo5fww) : Lead QA team for robotic marine vessel

Staff Software Engineer (http://jobs.jobvite.com/liquid-robotics-inc/job/oPep3fwf) : Java, JavaEE, Linux, Docker, MongoDB, GIS

HR Director (http://jobs.jobvite.com/liquid-robotics-inc/job/otLi5fwl) : Lead HR team and programs for entire company reporting to CEO.

This seems like it could be very useful for accessibility applications.

Liquid Robotics Inc | Sunnyvale, CA | Maritime Robotics https://www.liquid-robotics.com

Staff Software Engineer | http://jobs.jobvite.com/liquid-robotics-inc/job/oPep3fwf | ONSITE, REMOTE

Java back-end in linux/docker/cloud environment. Zookeeper, NoSQL, JavaEE. Domain will be vehicle fleet control and management.

Sr. Director, Quality Assurance | http://jobs.jobvite.com/liquid-robotics-inc/job/onMT4fwQ | ONSITE

Lead Hardware and Software QA organization