kovac

The question is whether there was any prejudice or he mistreated his employees based on their sexuality. If did he absolutely should have been fired and fired sooner. If he didn't, he seems to have kept his personal beliefs out of his professional life which is also an admirable quality. In that case, he was judged and forced to resign purely based on what he did in his own time with his own money. If we, for a moment, set aside the right/wrong of his action of donating money for a political course, then this entire saga was based on politics that is completely unrelated to Firefox. That's too much politics for a browser vendor and it kind of sets the tone as to how things at Mozilla are going to be.

Can't speak for others but I stopped using Firefox for the following reasons, pretty much in the order of priority.

1. When I learnt about the corporate structure at Mozilla. I simply don't drust any large corporation with matters related to privacy.

2. What happened with Brendan Eich. That just wasn't cool. What someone does in his personal time is non of my business. Virtue signalling of any sort, to me, is a hallmark of the wrong crowd in power. As far as I could see, Eich refused to bend the knee which is an admirable quality considering the fact that internet privacy is an uphill battle against giants.

3. Lack of innovation and getting in bed with Google. If Firefox needed money, all they had to do was just ask. How can they, when they have to pay a CEO millions of dollars.

Now I'm primarily using Vivaldi. Sometimes Brave. I'd support a small, talented and a focused team anyday.

What constitute legal fees usually apart from lawyer fees?

For a fun demo of what they can do, check this out:

https://github.com/noahlevenson/stealing-ur-feelings

Requiring social science theories to have a mathematical founding might be a little too much to ask the social scientists because unlike Physicists, their command of mathematics is far from adequate to do any serious exploration.

I majored in Mathematics but out of curiosity I took some Psychology modules when I was in university. What I found baffling was their lack attention to details. They just seem to have an intuitive model of their subject and they were just reinforcing that intuition while overlooking any details that could have challenged it. Coming from a field where every symbol, punctuation matters, I realised to Psychologists exact details of a curve don't seem to matter much as long as the general trend made sense.

Someone who really impressed me was Dan Ariely who is a behavirol economist. Even though I didn't see any mathematics in his lectures, I loved his approach to the field. I'd be quite happy if more of social science took a similar approach even if they didn't back it up with rigorous mathematics.

I'm glad I read this article. I just did some HTML email templates and I didn't add any alt text (I'm not really frontend engineer and I didn't at all thought about a visually impaired person reading). I will add them now thanks to this article!

I think for a language to gain traction today in the mainstream, it needs to be backed by a large company. If the language is web technologies oriented, it's all the more likely. The reason is because lots of developers nowadays are working in web related stuff. And when it's backed by a big company like Google or Microsoft, kids will at least learn it to try and land a job at one of those companies. Also, these big companies will support many useful apis in that language which will attract mainstream developers as they can start building useful stuff quickly.

I wanted to learn a functional programming language and did a lot of research about which language to start with. Initially I looked at Haskell but ended up going with F# because the tooling was a lot better and the documentation from Microsoft was really good. Also, I read quite a few posts by those who worked fulltime, paid F# jobs. I loved the functional style. I think it's a shame that it's not mainstream. But then when I tried to do something non trivial, like network programming, I had to use OOP C# style types in F#. That was just fugly and made the paradigm look weak because OOP constructs could do it more easily than functional constructs.

Other than the elegance of the functional programming paradigm, it didn't seem to offer much in terms of jobs because I can't really see large numbers of people suddenly picking up functional programming (which isn't easy) and building massive applications specially with the whole cloud based SaaS stuff that's happening right now.

C-suites and layers and layers of managers are a cancer in this industry. All they do is talk, virtue signal and "strategise". Firefox needs to part from Mozilla. You put 6-10 engineers and a good technical lead together, they'll fix this madness in 6-12 months.

Like mentioned in "bullshit jobs", most of these managers (not all), are there to create bullshit and deal with bullshit created by those like themselves. It's the tech leads, engineers, DBAs, sys admins (and teachers, nurses, doctors, garbage collectors, etc) who should be driving Rolls Royces.

I used to use Firefox. After I learnt about Mozilla and their corporate structure, I changed to Brave. Now I use Brave and Vivaldi mostly.

I don't think the problem is with ads. It's with personalised ads (or more specifically how they go about showing us personalised ads).

A model where a site shows you a notice asking to opt in for personalised ads (otherwise show generic ads anyway) would be fine. But this means no site, no third party service should be allowed to track the user or collect data unless opted in.

One loophole here is that statistical/machine learning analytics tools may still be able to correlate these posts as coming from the same writer.

We should probably also use a tool that just converts our posts into a generic style and remove any personal touches like the usual vocabulary, expressions, punctuation styles someone might use. Is there anything like that out there?

Well, let me tell you how to do c++ programming with Vim. Get a Linux machine, replace the desktop with i3wm. Get a terminal emulator like urxvt and make it dark and semi transparent. Set a beautiful wallpaper. Install YouCompleteMe. Now you are in paradise :)

Yeah it is. But what I was more interested in is what an individual lawyer might be thinking in that scenario. What I asked was a more specific question. Place where I live in, first degree murder carries death penalty. So, I was wondering what a lawyer would do/think if she knew for certain that her client committed an act that qualifies as first degree murder (e.g. He confessed to her). Because then as far as the justice system concerned, the outcome of a fair trial would be death penalty and she as the defendant would be trying to circumvent that. Not sure why I'm down voted, I genuinely asked her out of curiosity.

I once asked a high-school acquaintance of mine who had just graduated with a law degree, if she knew someone committed a violent crime, if she would still represent that person in court. Her answer was that even a violent criminal has a right for a fair trial. That sounded to me as evasive as it was rehearsed. I reckoned that this is something they have been taught/justified in law school.

The way I see it, only those companies that had already been using a data oriented approach to business can really reap the benefits of ML. From a company's point of view, ML/AI should be a natural evolution of an existing tool set to better solve problems they have been trying to solve in the past using deterministic methods and then statistical methods, etc. Any other project that is diving right into ML is likely to fail because

1. There's no clear problem statement. They have never formulated one and now trying to bolt ML on to their decision making.

2. They don't have well catalogued data for engineers/scientists to work with because they never tried to do rigorous analysis of data before ML became a thing.

3. Managers have no idea how to deal with data driven insights. What if the results are completely unintuitive to them? Are they going to change their processes abruptly? What if the results are aligned with what they have been always doing? Is it worth paying for something that they have been doing intuitively for decades?

I'm not a data scientist. But the biggest complaint I hear from my colleagues is that they lack data to train models.

Go is not simple (conceptually) by any strecth of imagination. Golang has pointers bolted on as if they are a real thing. Like, what's the point of exposing pointers without the pointer arithmetic when modern languages have come up with simpler ways to think about accessing memory? So, as a Go developer are you supposed to understand pointers or not? Similarly with Go routines, people boast about them as if they are a silver bullet for concurrent programming. But then, you also have and need to use sync primitives like mutexes sometimes. So, you still need to understand accessing shared mutable state and it's challenges well to use Go which is the actually complex part of concurrent programming. So, I don't know what people mean when they say Golang is simpler. I find it an ugly, weird and a hyped up language. The languages I consider simple are C and Python. C is simple because it's a small language and Python because it truly abstracts away the low level details. Golang is an opinionated (an quite an unimpressive) language with pros and cons like any other language. Currently, with more cons than pros, IMHO.

As the customer, it would be more efficient for me to receive what I need today than after one month. I think same day delivery is more about that than optimising a company's operations. They are selling efficiency to their customers.

I don't understand how these experiments lead to the conclusion separates higher cognitive functions from consciousness. I fact I don't see anything that necessarily she'd any light into the roots of consciousness here. Can someone explain how the results of the experiment lead to that conclusion? This looks to me like, if it were a computer program, encoding/decoding of the symbols seems to be messed up for a largely contiguous block of symbols. Like you get jumbled up weird shapes when you feed the wrong encoding to a program.

No amount of engineering genius can make up for human greed. Boeing took a gamble and they lost.

There are some good points here but I think it's partly because we are too used to how it was and have a hard time letting that go. We can't assess working from home in isolation as if everything else stays the same and only this changes. It'll have to be brought about alongside a mindset change.

While it might put one at risk of getting replaced due to outsourcing, it also opens up opportunities for them to get things outsourced to them which they couldn't due to the previous setup.

While not being in the office may hamper one's career progress may be true, we also over look the possibility of having to put up with socialising and other corporate bullshit to progress at work over actually doing your job. With this kind of setup, values and skills may get more focus over charisma and just good looks.

For me it's hard to say how this will turn out. I think it'll be as boring as most other changes that happen in life where the actual impact is not nearly as severe as it looks from where we are now. Either way, I think the prospect of having the option to work from home for those who are willing and able is a positive outcome. After all, life is about having options :)

That's some guts to do the right thing. Respect.

True. Considering the level of access the hackers have gained, a case can be made that the attackers themselves fabricated the content in these user accounts.

Perhaps there's some truth to what you say if we consider couples who choose not to have kids at all. However, I think the cases that choose to have just one or two children are more common than those who choose not to have kids at all. I think financial situation better explains why people would stop at one kid rather than 3.

I'd argue that your definition of an abstraction resembles wrappers (which IMHO is the weakest form of abstraction) rather than abstraction in general. I think it's better to take it as modelling a complex system in a simple way to solve some specific problem by stripping the unnecessary details. For example, design patterns are abstractions but I don't think they all qualify as simply collecting a larger interface into a smaller one. Similarly, a virtual machine process like JVM is an abstraction for the hardware details which is also a lot more than simply reducing the size of the hardware interface. Still, a useful article. Thanks.

Doing that if one wants to is one thing. But to say we all "should" is another. Anyone who expects users to load their own css for every site they visit has lost his grip on reality.

There's Qwant, a search engine. I'm using that. It's not as fast as Bing, but it does the job and seem to be trustworthy.

You honestly think the users should load their own css?

I switched to Outlook email. I've been considering changing to Fastmail (considered a few others too), but this is the reason i thought emails are hopeless now. Most people I know are on Gmail.

You asked how and he answered. Whether it's an issue or not is a separate matter that none of us are going to agree on.

Learning an obscure tool that eventually dies is a waste of time. Think learning a language only you and a few of your friends speak. This in itself is good enough reason to be cautious about what you invest your time in learning.

Languages and specially the tool chain and the way of doing things around them evolve. If you spend like 5 years doing something else and come back to it, you'll find things have changed a lot. You may argue that it's easy to relearn this. But from a job perspective, the guy who has been using the exact same tech stack in the recent years will often be a better bet than a guy who wrote Java in version 1. This is very true for C#. Syntax, design principles, tools, method of deployments all have changed rapidly. Professionally, you want to be as up to date as possible in the area you worked in or you get rusty. You can learn new things on your time for their own utility. Flushing down 40-60 hours a week on a useless piece of knowledge is bad all round to me.

Depends on the reason for switching. If I'm asked to switch because the new stack is going to have measurable improvements plus the language is going to stay and grow (just as examples may be Go or Rust right now), then sure. On the other hand, if the reason is because the company fucked up by relying on one idiot with an elitist mindset about programming languages, then that request going to have to come wrapped with very good incentives. If I'm a great java developer with tons of jobs to choose from, you are going to have to give me a very good reason to narrow my opportunities down for you. Otherwise, I'd say no and move on and you can go hunting for devs for a niche language and pray to Gods that the hiring situation will improve for you.

Your example of Java to Python doesn't represent the gravity of switching from Java to say Erlang or Haskell. You assume someone says no because they are unwilling or unable. We are unwilling, sometimes, because of the opportunity cost we have to pay for your fuck up.