ern

two young siblings... earn a combined $100,000 a year as influencers, working with brands such as Amazon, Disney, Louis Vuitton and Nintendo. Arabella, who is 14, tweets under the name Amazing Arabella.

But her Twitter account — and her brother’s — are boosted by thousands of retweets purchased by their mother and manager, Shadia Daho, according to Devumi records.

The idea that dubious businesses are possibly skimming money off big brands (or even more disturbingly, possibly with the knowledge of those brands) by using fake followers is interesting, and newsworthy. Add widespread identity theft into the mix, and it’s even more newsworthy.

Unfortunately, there has been a parallel explosion in Accidental complexity (over-complicated architectures, cargo-cults, crazy-complex auth frameworks...).

I'm beginning to wonder if developers (especially consultants, as others have mentioned here) are trading one form of complexity for another in order to keep their billable hours up, or improve their job security. Cloud vendors also seem to be contributing to the problem as well.

Have things changed this much since 2014? What would happen if the exact same scenario happened again (airliner switches off all transponders and veers off course into an ocean) in 2018?

The discoveries of these chemical weapons did not support the government’s invasion rationale.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Bush insisted that Mr. Hussein was hiding an active weapons of mass destruction program, in defiance of international will and at the world’s risk. United Nations inspectors said they could not find evidence for these claims.

AND

American government issued a detailed analysis of Iraq’s weapons programs. The widely heralded report, by the multinational Iraq Survey Group, concluded that Iraq had not had an active chemical warfare program for more than a decade.

The justification for the invasion was an active weapons program, which didn't exist. When people refer to the "WMDs" they refer to this non-existent program, rather than rusty old munitions.

Finding the balance between pointless over-engineering and rigidity on one hand, and good software design on the other, consistently, is what seems to distinguish great programmers I’ve worked with, from those who are “just” very good.

But, like I said, it often isn’t worth the trouble fighting about these things, even when we see them, and getting on with the job is more important than ensnaring oneself in religious debates on projects.

Once people start exhibiting excruciating pedantry in designing their APIs, I'll switch off somewhat.

I agree with this. When I end up on a new project and I'm not the lead, and there is a lead who is pedantic regarding how they want their URLs crafted (or wants to implement a complicated query pattern, or introduce an extra layer of objects to satisfy an abstract notion of purity), I'll just go with the flow. Accidental complexity, pattern seeking and cargo-culting are personality traits of many programmers, and I've come to the conclusion that its best to accept this, and get on with the job of actually delivering value.

The donations to the foundation are disclosed, and the foundation is run for a well-defined charitable purpose, subject to strict governance, and is it not a personal slush fund (especially not this one, which is probably the most scrutinized in the US, for obvious reasons). The fact that it accepted donations from tyrannies is indeed unsavory, but it was well documented and voters would have been able to make decisions based on this. Voters could have made the same sorts of judgements on the international dealings of the candidate’s opponent (tax returns aside). The idea that these sorts of personal/business dealings (by both candidates) are equivalent to a hostile foreign power undertaking covert activities to influence the outcome of the election and sow internal discord is incongruous, to put it mildly.

Who would be held guilty in this case? Would the USA government try to use extradition treaties to get a foreign national onto USA soil if they bought adverts for a candidate

I’m sure that, once the current political climate calms, there will be severe consequences, with bipartisan agreement, to make it clear to foreign entities that this sort of activity is unwelcome. Also, I doubt FB’s implicit mea culpa in TFA would have been produced if they weren’t terrified.

I’m guessing it may just be cultural differences though

Yep. I am aware that in many countries, private political funding is entirely opaque, campaign finance laws are non-existent, and the lines between party and campaign, and party and state are non-existent. Fortunately the United States is not (yet) one of those countries.

I feel compelled to fact check this. There article you linked to discusses the Clinton Foundation, not the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

There is some measure of transparency in politician donations and ads. However a foreign government covertly working to influence an election would be interpreted as a hostile act in most countries (and yes, the fact that US does this does smack of hypocrisy). Incidentally, your link doesn’t mention foreign donations to the election campaign of the candidate in question (these things are carefully monitored in most first-world democracies), and if there was any evidence of money being funneled from the foundation to the election campaign, I’m sure it’d have been front page news already.

How’s this for a root cause: the Electoral College means that carefully targeting propaganda at a few voters in swing states can have an outsize influence on the outcome (a reverse “law of large numbers”?) Traditional controls on political advertising were ignored by foreign propagandists buying ads to sow division and political strife. It’s ironic that the US, despite its massive geostrategic advantages, allowed an enemy into its heartland in this way.

The Electoral College isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and, regardless, solutions have to found before something worse happens (a faux social-media movement that, say, triggers a Constitutional Convention that leads to the breakup of the US would probably be a wet dream of foreign rivals).

I’d like to buy into the “nothingburger” case on Russian interference,but how do you explain the growing weight of released evidence that the Russians actively worked to interfere in the election? Were the Russians wasting their resources trolling? Is all the evidence fabricated?

Whether Trump won because of fake news or because of Clinton's weaknesses as a candidate, or because of his own agenda, surely it must be interesting to ponder why Russia felt the need to expend so much effort in creating a sophisticated fake news operation to attempt to sway the election. They certainly thought they'd accomplish something by doing so, right?

That’s the definition of insanity.

Would you be able to explain why a foreign government felt the need to expend enormous resources on trolling operations in support of Trump when Hillary was going to lose anyway?

[1]https://caniuse.com/#search=Wasm

You may be mistaken: There was a well-known incident back in 2005 where Microsoft published guidance for TDD that was flat-out wrong (or at least not fitting with the mainstream understanding), and they had to retract it (in fact it was so far-out that they had to expunge the article from MSDN).

http://codebetter.com/jeremymiller/2005/11/18/microsoft’s-re...

One person who worked there for over 20 years told me that "the peak TDD" at Microsoft was right around time of Win ME release

Of course, Microsoft is big, and the broken guidance may not have reflected practices elsewhere in the company, but it seems unlikely that they were early TDD pushers if they hadn't grasped the concept (as commonly understood) by 2005.

I believe IBM was responsible for the Australian census debacle in 2016. Hardly a ringing endorsement of their reliability, and not the only high-profile instance of them messing things up.

"No one ever got fired for choosing IBM" though.

Angular 4, you mean (or just "Angular").