grappler

Reminds me of an incident from my college days. An international student association put on some sort of cultural appreciation event. Students from other countries would perform songs or dances or poems from their homeland.

This was around 2004 or so. I don't remember the political climate being very charged, or at least not at my engineering school. There were blogs but major social networks hadn't yet taken off.

So at this international student event, a guy goes up and says he's going to do a song from his home country, Taiwan. He doesn't get much farther before a Chinese student runs onstage, grabs the microphone away from him and yells into it "Taiwan is not a country!"

I've mostly done this but landed on still keeping a facebook tab on the laptop -- quarantined in its own container using the excellent Firefox Multi-Account Containers extension.

Most "friends" unfollowed except a handful of close people. Some less connected but more interesting people pop up in the feed for a bit but then get put back in 30 day snooze with their first new less-than-interesting post.

I won't interact with posts that are world-viewable, but might like or comment on some that are more restricted.

This brings it down to just one or two posts a day in my facebook tab. Something I can spend one or two minutes on in the morning or evening. I mostly see my sister's new baby, and that's fine :)

The phrasing used in the article is “the fact that mortality among the poor increases during middle age”.

Are you saying this isn't a fact?

Some food for thought regarding old people leaning conservative:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/poor-people-oft...

That looks like a nice desktop app, and that's certainly a start.

If other users are anything like me, then to really revive RSS you have to think more multi-device.

Assume the user will want to get to their feed of stuff to read from their phone, tablet, or laptop.

Assume the user will want to listen from their phone most of the time (iphone or android), but maybe their watch while exercising, their car stereo while driving, and through speakers like Echo or Sonos at home.

Get these things to sync up nicely and I bet people wouldn't mind a bit that RSS is underneath somewhere, making it go.

I've found myself in a "mid-level" limbo. I have lots of knowledge and a fair amount of skill from a lifetime of programming, but I have trouble keeping what feels like an insane pace some others around me seem to manage. I was flat-out told that my output isn't what they expect from a "senior" developer.

Thing is, I never claimed that I was a "senior" developer, whatever that means. I just seem to have been slotted into that category based on years of experience. I didn't want to mislead an employer into thinking I was more capable than I actually was.

I went job searching and specifically said to recruiters and hiring managers that I was "mid-level" and would set my salary requests accordingly. If that meant I'm held to expectations somewhere between junior and senior, and get paid somewhere between junior and senior, that would be just fine.

I found that pretty much everyone was looking for senior devs, a few places advertised junior openings, and interest in mid-level seemed rarest of all.

It's like they think everyone is either a junior who needs to be mentored, or a senior who can deliver a story every day or two. I feel perfectly capable of doing the work, but need some time to think my way through it. I don't quite understand why I'm finding that to be such a hard sell in a job market where it's supposedly so hard to find developers.

I think what you'd want here is for the tactile click to be at the actuation point. My understanding is that many or most mechanical keyboards today can't claim this.

Or maybe there is some optimal separation a key should have between the actuation point the tactile click point to account for the latency of the human's nervous system, which would do an even better job of reducing the effects of latency than if the two events were at the same point?

RSS is great, but: If I could add one thing to a standard RSS setup, it would be a volume knob for each subscribed feed.

Is a feed too noisy? You can unsubscribe. But what if you had another less-drastic option to "turn it down"? That's doable if you have some way of assigning scores to individual posts within the feed. Such scores could come from the feed publisher, other places like the reader's own social media accounts, or somewhere else. Have a user-determined threshold to determine what posts are worth showing the user.

Then by "turn it down" the user means "bump the threshold up" (and vice versa). Via trial and error a user could more or less adjust it to where they want it.

This could be built using RSS as one of the building blocks, but I don't know of anything like it.

Clearly Paul Graham is defending the Bodega vending machine here ;)

This story made me think "Maybe I want to finally sign up for an Uber account, after years of avoiding them and using Lyft?"

But then I thought, well, Travis still controls a majority of the votes and he's still on the board.

Others out there who have also been avoiding Uber because of all the bad press, I'm curious how you are thinking about this.

I'd think/hope that the ultimate resting place of services that have “a fascinating piece of web history” is with the Internet Archive or similar, as an alternative to orphaning a bunch of links.

In particular, I like that screenhero gives each participant their own separate mouse pointer.

Over-The-Air (OTA) TV to me is something left far, far behind, somewhere in the mid-aughts. A wasteland of advertising and inferior content compared with what is available online or even on cable.

Kids especially, the ones who are 'protected' by regulations covering OTA TV, aren't interested in OTA TV. That's why OTA TV is programmed for demographics that are approaching or past retirement, and it's why TV companies are talking deals with Snapchat.

Or am I in a bubble?

Maybe provoking a controversy like this is an indicator that a paper in this part of academia has succeeded.

They aren't pursuing economic value or understanding of nature; they're examining the social world we're living in. If the author had missed her target, the paper would likely get no attention. Looking back at history, anybody who made claims that were ahead of their time would likely be proud to be able to say, “I caused an uproar when I said it”.

Yeah, I would wait for a judgement from somebody like Wirecutter or Consumer Reports on whether such a product is likely to hold up.

A machine with that level of quality has a lot of appeal for me. Something generally useful like a blender or stand mixer, that might be kept visible on the counter and used often, I could see dropping $400 or even $700 on.

But this thing doesn't appear “generally useful” based on what I've seen about this story. It seems to want to lock you into using food from a particular vendor.

How much less appealing would my stand mixer have been as a purchase if it were outfitted with a QR reader looking to make sure that the KitchenAid™ cookie dough I was giving it was fresh? That would be a deal breaker.

Browsers are “user agents”. Their role is to act on behalf of the user. Not the site operator. I think it really is as simple as that.

For me there is an undeniable appeal to “voting with your feet” after the result of the voting at the ballot box turned out so poorly.

I personally likely won't be impacted too badly by Trump and his supporters. I may have economic options here that are as good as or better than my options anywhere else. But I feel a need to put some distance between this country and myself now. It doesn't represent me anymore. I don't belong to it anymore. I'm not ok with the decision it made. I've even felt that it ceased to be a place worth caring about.

There are just a couple things that pull me back from this line of thinking: A broader view of history and a broader view of alternative places in the world.

History: The last election may be the biggest step backward my country has taken since I was born, but I don't get to pretend that it was so wonderful before that. Yes, we all know this. But I just relearned it even more forcefully in a piece I read a couple weeks ago: http://www.mtv.com/news/2998426/fascism-has-already-come-to-...

Places in the world: If I'm going to leave for the reasons above, I need good reasons why another place is better. But every place has its downsides. There probably is a good case to be made in favor of a number of places, but if I'm going to be honest about this, I need to research it and not move reflexively without knowing a lot about the place I'm moving to. And if I do move somewhere, I should do it with some degree of commitment to put some effort into making that place better. Otherwise any anti-immigration sentiments that exist there will probably be right about me.

Being able to chose your home, rather than having to stay where you were born, is a valuable thing. But at some point it is good to choose a home and invest in it.

That seems like a reasonable division into three strata. You could divide it into a lot more than three. Each movement upward leaves one set of problems behind and may introduce new things that would not have been realistic considerations before.

I'm 'average' in your classification, as are most people I see on any regular basis. What you've called 'poor' would describe the time I was unemployed or my college days but is now a fair ways away. What you've called 'rich' seems impossibly out of reach barring some unlikely windfall.

Within 'average' though, there are upward movements that would be nice. I've paid off all loans except my mortgage. It would feel pretty great to pay off the mortgage and not owe anybody any money.

I live in a moderately expensive city. It would be great to feel like I could just move somewhere more expensive like New York City or San Francisco if I wanted to, own a home, and take advantage of the opportunities there.

It would be interesting to see a description of many strata from someone who has researched this, and see what problems are solved and what people's main concerns are at each one.

If the same thing (god forbid) should happen with Trump, it will be pretty hard to claim that he wasn't showing authoritarian colors in his 2016 campaign. He definitely was.

Fitting that nobody is commenting here

Pocket's post about the acquisition, referring to the main value their product brings, says, “a platform where high-quality, thoughtful content and free speech can rise above the rest.”

Pocket used to have a feature aimed at surfacing high-quality content from the collection of things a user had already pocketed. They removed that feature. I was paying for their premium service before that change. After they removed it, I stopped the premium subscription because I wasn't sure what pocket's value to me was anymore.

Now they have a recommender that recommends things you haven't pocketed yet. But that just encourages the user to accumulate an ever larger collection of pocketed things, not surface the best things in that collection.

Ever since, I've reflexively kept saving things to pocket, hoping they would bring that feature back. But the only practical thing I have done with it is pull up something I just saved recently, because it will be near the top of the list.

Pocket's CEO also writes, “In fact, we have a few major updates up our sleeves that we are really excited to get into your hands in the coming months.” I hope they will bring that feature, or something with a similar aim, back.

Just imagine what classified orders are being worked on, or already signed, right now. I wouldn't hold out much hope for any of the limits that have been in place regarding surveillance, foreign or domestic, on citizens or noncitizens.

I'm sympathetic to that, certainly. But how to balance it against the can of worms that opens when an election victor prosecutes an imprisons their political rival?

If you are concerned enough about the security and privacy of the app, then you should learn how to use the app. That includes learning about the indicators provided by the UI telling you about key changes, delivery notifications, and anything else the developers considered important enough to show the user.

I approach social media (twitter in particular) this way: “try to be a good neuron”.

Meaning: social media forms a global hive mind. It determines what a lot of people see and hear about the world. Witness the flare up recently over the influence of “fake news” going viral.

A neuron's role, as one tiny piece of a brain, a neural network, or, for my purposes, a hive mind, is to take in a number of inputs and filter them, firing occasionally to convey some distillation of the inputs received.

Anyone who reshares highly inaccurate or incendiary content is being a bad neuron.

If instead you gather a range of news and opinion from a variety of sources and then, being very selective, reshare the one or two things each day (or week) with the best combinations of reputability, newsworthiness, timeliness, importance to current problems society is facing, and exploration of new ideas, then you're being a good neuron.

This in my opinion is the best use of publicly shared social media. If lots of people did this the world would be better off.

There may be career risk in sharing things related to politics, but that's a risk I'm willing to take. Without the freedom to do that, I might as well be in a repressive totalitarian society, and now more than ever that is something we should fight to prevent.

Chad and Brad are in a pretty shitty position right now as far as these things go. They have product owners breathing down their neck and are increasingly signed in as the pair chad+brad@company.com in their open-office chain gang, unable to take even a moment's solitary contemplation about what they're working on.

They were not hired to do anything other than check off stories on a task board, their “velocity” tracked by the system described in Piketty's “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”.

If one of them were to get too invested in the ideas described here, he'd be chastized by the other, or by a manager, or the rest of his team collectively, and potentially replaced.

This is at least part of what people mean when they lament that software engineering isn't treated as a profession in the manner of doctors or lawyers. Many of us may be very smart and able to weigh issues like these, but these things are not encouraged or rewarded or respected by most of the employers.

I have intelligence and programming ability, and a desire to further my career. I want a good high paying job in the epicenter of my chosen industry.

I do not want to move to a city where I can't afford to buy a good home within walking distance of my workplace.

The world should provide this for me.

Not as if I had time to do that kind of research either :)

That'd probably always hold for some definition of "like me". However, my approach has resulted in thumbs ups for people different than me in ethnicity, age, gender, and career background, which should count for something I think.

Feel free to propose a better approach...