latj

Oh, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Am I the only one disturbed by the fact thats not all one mountain image that we are scaling down as we scroll? its just one photo after the next and the falling into the white void with CEO letter.

NITTY!

Well, your description of him hits a little too close to home so I guess I have to give him a second chance.

Also I wrote "hawking". haha.

I had never heard of him but the title of this article is beyond a literary device- it is bait-and-switch. It is dishonest. You expect this from from shifty clickbait websites hawking beauty tips and lists of top 10 ___ "they" dont want you to know about. But you cannot take anyone serious who writes an article like this.

Anyone have any examples? Only documentation is javadoc and the examples links are all 404.

Dear human resource,

Twitter no longer requires the services of 336 current employees. Twitter must do what is best for Twitter and what will lead to optimal financial measures over the next 12 months.

The executives of Twitter chose who to fire based on the belief that the remaining employees will lead to the best products and therefore greatest profits.

HR will provide people getting fired with a list of open positions elsewhere. Twitter will give fired employees some money to help them survive and make non-fired employees feel better about their own situation.

Firing people is unpleasant for the executives of Twitter.

Please believe that you can affect the decisions that are made by executives at Twitter.

-Twitter

Yeah I agree. I would be annoyed too if people kept saying those things to me.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. The "Are you actually technical" quote is not part of her anecdote, its in the list of things "men have said straight to my face at tech events" and it is quoted directly as "Are you actually technical". There is not context or narrative that can be twisted.

Why is it wrong to ask someone if they are technical?

Programmers, engineers, scientists go to tech conferences to talk about work, projects, side interests. They dont want to get sucked into a sales pitch.

I especially dont understand why this would offend the author- the resume on her website implies that she actually is more of a marketing person / copywriter than a technical person.

Instead of telling Washington about my dissatisfaction I've decided I'm going to piss in the ocean. I suspect the outcome will be the same, except it feels so great to piss in the ocean.

You have to stop thinking this way. As technology progresses we need fewer and fewer people working. Its not just because people dont want to work-- its because they cant, because we dont need them to work. Crop yield is high. Robots build the expensive things and child slaves build the cheap things. The service jobs are still there, but we're just about to the point where taxi drivers, waiters, and fast food workers are going to be priced out by automation. Get out of your mind that you are hard working and everyone else is lazy. There is enough excess in the system to feed, clothe, educate, and care for every person no matter what they do during the day. And you can still be richer than them. You just cant be grossly-evil-rich to the point where you have to corrupt the financial and political system to make more money.

I wouldnt say that most non-college people I have worked with have been better. But I will say that some of the smartest and most talented people I've met never went to college.

High school is training you to act the way mainstream society wants adults to act- find the clique you fit into, accept your place in the hierarchy, and do as you're told.

More and more, college is the same thing except specifically preparing you to be a professional. Because competition has grown so fierce emphasis is placed on skills that will get you a job. Results are measured based on your ability to pay back your loans. You just sit and listen and sit for the prime years of your life. This prepares you for life as a professional-- where you will sit and listen and sit away the rest of your productive years.

College is what you make of it. You can make something useful out of college. But you can also make something out of spending four years on a boat drifting around the south pacific. If you are going to be a filmmaker, you can benefit from four years of film school. But you could also benefit from just making movies for four years. Want to write software for some project you care about? Guess how the first generation learned before there were Computer Science programs? Yes, some studied Math or Physics and met the pioneers of the field. But the vast majority just taught themselves-- and they didnt have the Internet!

If you already have what you need to survive and are healthy, just figure out what ratio makes you happy of FUN vs. PROFIT vs. HELPFUL TO SOCIETY and do that shit for a few years. Then, reevaluate.

I dunno, I wouldnt be surprised if Prime Video and AWS actually make money, unlike the "most valuable component" that does not. Besides, will you really stop using Amazon if it is the "Everything except a few devices store"?

Kids these days are lazy. In my day I bagged groceries at the the local family owned grocery store. They paid me a dime a day. I lived off of one nickel and paid college tuition with the other. At the end of undergrad I'd saved up enough to buy a house. Oh, and I fought a god damn war in the middle of all that!

What makes you think Detroit has "high crime". I mean, Detroit has always been "high crime" relative to other midwest cities its size. But for years now I've only read that crime has been dropping in Detroit, probably largely due to the exodus of people who left/are leaving.

http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/metro-detroit/20...

There are lots of ways Detroit can be rebuilt.

I've had a day dream of a group of tech savy anarchist bakers gathering their artist and programmer friends and all agreeing to move in and take over a neighborhood. They have startup meetings about how to start your own startup meeting. They open unicycle repair shops and community centers with classes on mustache grooming and DIY toilet bowls. Tony Hsieh comes to visit and is jealous. But then they have kids and realize their Montessori school run by "Uncle Randy" has failed to teach their children how to add. The sewer lateral line running from their DIY toilet bowl to the city line is leaking shit, there is no insurance, and it doesnt matter, because the city lines are leaking shit too. And, they are sick of taking three buses to get to Trader Joes which takes up the whole Saturday they could otherwise spend being in an adult kick ball team.

More likely, the real estate keeps dropping until a developer gathers a group of Chinese investors to buy it. They lure in a big employer near by and build a big depressing mega-business-plex. They talk the state into giving some funds and other towns are ok with it because they're hoping it will lure "urban" people back to the city.

But in my heart I hope it is allowed to decay and that the ruins it leaves behind are beautiful and remind us of a time when we needed all the humans to work.

Someone else mentioned this in a comment but I remember reading years ago that libertarians were trying to organize a movement to New Hampshire where they could become the majority. Is this a thin that is known to people who live in NH? Does it ever come up?

My favorite clip is of the police who said something to the effect of, "When we asked him what it was, he only said it was a clock he didnt tell us why he brought it to school..." so they arrested him for a hoax bomb.

That statement reeks of a story made up after the fact. You can imagine them sitting around their police station after they let the kid go.

Police A: "Oh shit, this kid was just bringing in a clock to show his engineering teacher. There are several witnesses who heard him tell us it was just a clock. And now everyone in the world is watching. We're fucked."

Police B: "Nothing's fucked, bro. Be cool. Think. Think. Wait, he never told us whhhhy he brought the clock to school."

Police A: "Why does that matter? he told us it was just a clock and it is just a clock! Did we even ask why he brought it?"

Police B: "I didnt ask why. Did you? Even if you didnt, its still somethin' you could say."

Police A: "That is so stupid."

Police B: "Still, you know... it is somethin' you could say."

Police A: "That is so stupid. You are stupid. And, we are fucked!"

...later at press conference

clears throat

Police A: "...he told us it was a clock buuuuut, he never told us whhhhy he brought the clock..."

glances over at Police B who has the stupidest grin on his face

I have never used slack. How is it different than IRC?

I agree. Obama's record is quite clear when it comes to drone assassinations as a cheaper alternative to dragging people in for their day in court-- his own constituents included.

Perl did a lot of things right a long time ago. For me a few of the big ones arent technical-- CPAN as you mentioned, was the most useful repository of any programming community. Another one for me is that Perl documentation has conventions and one of those conventions is a tiny "synopsis" at the top of each page that shows actual code using the thing that page is describing. I dont think people understand how much this has helped-- and its been that way for 20 years. Of course, in Java to show how any simple library works you'd have to show the contents of at least 8 separate files but hey- who's fault is that? ;)

Now that I think about it, the documentation in general (in Perl) was light years ahead of its time. perldoc, the included documentation is pretty comprehensive. The camel book came out when a lot of hacker news readers were a twinkle their father's eye. Perl was a big part of Oreilly's good ole days and it set Perl apart as a community that had really good accessible books available that werent CS textbooks but also werent "Learn how to programmer in 24 minutes".

I dont use Perl much these days. Most of my peers are afraid of Perl or were told to hate Perl. They dont know much about it other than when to laugh at a Perl 6 joke. A few point out that python has come of age and greatly out performs Perl. Still, there will always be plenty of perl in ~/bin.

I still like bitbucket

Lets say you are that artist. You have practiced, trained, studied. You have worked hard and have a rare natural talent. You sang the songs and played guitar. Now you have "this summer's big record". Two million children want to listen to your song (without paying any additional costs) 50-100 times over the next 3 months, and then never again.

How much is that worth to society? How much money should you make from that?

Consider an elementary teacher tasked with teaching 28 children to read and guiding them to becoming active participants in democracy rather than repeat offenders. $50k/yr. Compare a state university computer science professor who will teach dozens of new jacks this year how to measure and optimize algorithms-- setting them up for a life of full time employment while all their friends tread in the sea of shit and unemployment around them. $90k/yr. Consider a bus driver, a construction worker, a civil engineer, anyone who didnt have a chance to finish high school or College and still goes to work every day. Or those who went to ivy league colleges and resisted the urge to go into finance. Productive people.

We are all productive and we all add value, and we are underpaid. Our kids will have varying access to good education. We have less access to inferior healthcare. We spend too much time at work and not enough time with our kids. The lowest of us live in poverty and violence, relegated to feeding our children less healthy, life shortening diets. And thats just in the U.S., one of the wealthiest states on the planet.

Now how much is that song you sang worth?

Artists should be about art. If you dont like the fact that Apple wants you to be their slave, then distribute your music yourself. If people dont want to pay for your music, then keep doing what you want to do and starve or start doing what they want you to do and make money. But dont try to be about the art and say the faceless evil corporation should pay you more. It is disrespectful to the productive workers of the world.

>Unfortunately, at this time, it only works with PostgreSQL and every time we show it to PostgreSQL people they love it but want it to be open source. Obviously, we had hoped to sell it so that's a big disappointment.

Just because you make the software open source doesnt mean you cant sell it. At its rawest form open source just means that you are going to share the source code.

If a business is big enough that they have staff who can integrate your open source project would they have been a customer of yours anyway? And if they arent going to be a customer, why not have them as a tester and potential contributor? And if they are a serious company, they usually want a service contract for crucial pieces of software.

You could even have a license that allows using and modifying your software but limits redistribution (i.e. selling) although I wouldnt recommend it.

If you create a cloud database service, will it be better for the customer?

Honestly, I get the feeling that part of your business comes from the fact that your customers arent tech savy and dont have the staff. If butthurts-access.com were a thing would they be able to integrate it into their business or would you still have to send out someone to install for peanuts?

It sounds like you are saying the solutions you are providing work for the customer but you want to make more money?

Why not try to automate out as much as you do between jobs so that each job becomes less effort. And, consider charging more. Consider the value you are providing their business.

The list of people who took the offer was posted internally. I imagine it must be out in the wild somewhere by now as well.

Besides managers who are looking to jump ship and pretend to do work somewhere else, a lot of professionals are on the list- lawyers, accounting people. I imagine some of these people will show up on Amazon's roster in the near future.

When I was a kid we used to try to guess the computer science teacher's password. (This was back when a mischievous computer science student would be made to do some manual labor around the school-- not sent to federal prison.)

After too many attempts it would lock us out and we'd have to wait to try again. One day when our teacher was trying to start class he found that he had been locked out. We all started laughing and he knew why.

The next day there was a sign on the door telling us that the class had been moved to a new room. When we arrived we found that the classroom had no computers. The work was the same. The lessons progressed. But we wrote all that Pascal on paper. We only had one chance to turn something in and I remember going home and trying to remember all the code to type into my home computer to see if my program would compile.

Anyway, I would suggest someone sending this guy a copy of The Little Schemer. Anyone can read that book and gain great confidence in a short amount of time while starting to think the way a programmer ought to think.

Google didnt shut down translation API. They just started charging for it and people who were used to getting it for free considered it dead.

Personally, I would prefer that Google charge for its services. Its certainly better than advertising or trying to monetize users' data.

>Engineers at startups make $100k+, sometimes much more. I don't think people are being asked to subject themselves to unreasonable financial strain.

Is $100k enough for a person to live without roommates within 20-30 minutes commute from said startup? Eat healthy food? Pay student loans? Have health insurance and build savings?

I'm not from the Bay Area- this is a serious question.

The point of their website is to make censored content available to Chinese users.

China is attacking them to prevent Chinese people from reading the website.

Your suggestion is to make the site unavailable to China.

Do you see why it is not a solution? You are basically setting up a market for censorship-- the attack doesnt ever have to end-- depending on how much China is willing to pay to keep the website offline.

EXERCISE.

Study something with the goal of mastering it.

Get involved in a non-profit that does something you think makes the world a better place.

Teach your kids to grow up and live their life knowing that "the normal way" (go to school for 20 years, then sit in office majority of week days until you die) to live life isnt the only way to live life.

Gaining experience in technology is absolutely exhausting. Everyday there are posts, "New Shiny X!" and then six months later "Introducing No-X". Then a year later "New Shiny Y! Like X but without sesame seeds on the buns!"