mtbcoder

In traditional news organizations, editorial boards and newsrooms operate independently of each other and it's unfortunate when high quality reporting is too often dismissed with a quick "meh, it's a liberal|conservative rag that can't be trusted." The "editorialization" by the modern blog-o-sphere has wrecked havoc on the landscape and sewed the seeds of distrust. I don't think there is any doubt of that.

Thank you, I believe Leibovich's response provides the relevant context though.

Thank you, but in the second link, this appears to be a newsletter email from the First Draft blog on the NY Times [1]. The DocumentCloud link is certainly not verifiable as it contains only the single page.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/12/23/which...

Thank you, here is also the response by Leibovich: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/magazine/anatomy-of-a-medi...

> Not too mention that Maggie Haberman and Mark Liebovich (and probably a few others too that I'm not aware of) can be found in the Podesta emails sending over their articles to the Clinton campaign for review, prior to publication.

Can you reference the source for this? I ask because much of what I've seen between what WikiLeaks tweets and what's actually contained within the email messages is severely taken out of context. (e.g. not understanding what news embargos are [1]) The New York Times were also the ones who originally broke the story of the private email server.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_embargo

True, European cities would still have been densely populated, but I was envisioning US cities from that time period since we are talking about the American 'burbs. (I could be wrong just as well.) I currently reside in DC and the old, original suburbs as well as what used to be considered the outskirts, have long been consumed by the metro area. Where it was once sparsely populated, it is now heavily populated, heavily paved and herds of cars as far as the eye can see.

I suppose one could argue that cities in the early - mid 20th century weren't as heavily populated. I could be wrong, but I would also assume that noise levels were much lower and the streets much less congested. Looking at old pictures of city life, you often see kids playing in the streets. I don't think that would be possible today.

> I'd say the core skill of politicians is to get elected.

In the US, this could easily be mitigated with shorter campaign cycles.

I would argue this is done more as a psychological status symbol. If goods such as furniture and appliances are so cheap that your "average joe" can buy the latest appliance on a whim, the symbolism becomes diluted and your friends will be less inclined to make frequent purchases for these items. They will seek out new status symbols.

From my US perspective, I don't think anyone here believes that Sweden (or any other Scandinavian country for that matter) is some kind of wondrous utopia of social democracy without its own problems. What is going on is more of a growing sense of despair and frustration as we see other Western countries moving forward with social progress as we remain stuck in the 20th century, unable to figure out even the basics. Having a conversation regarding the "disposable culture" would not even be a blip on the radar in our political environment (mind you, this is an environment in which one of the main political parties has put forth a candidate who publicly stated that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese[1]). So, to see other countries discuss issues such as these is both literally and figuratively a foreign concept.

[1] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jun/...

> I really hope ISP naming and shaming takes over, so we can make DDoS a little bit more difficult.

I think naming and shaming would have little impact and whatever impact it did have would be short lived. Consumers tend to have short attention spans and zero long term memory. Take the banking/finance industry for example, were egregious, predatory and at times criminal tactics are par for the course. Banking institutions are named and shamed all the time, yet the Bank of Americas, Wells Fargos and Goldman Sachs of the world still exist.

> But what happens when you can't attribute meaning to anything? Do you revert to religion or suicide (Those were the three options for camus)?

Is this not the basis for The Myth of Sisyphus? If I recall correctly, Camus rejects both religion and suicide as ultimately absurd.

Where is the political bias on Schneier's part here? Perhaps you simply just disagree with his position?

To provide a quote from the article:

..two lobbyists who managed to find their way onto the five-person panel testifying. They represented the interests of traditional IT contractors, who seem to believe it is their right to overcharge taxpayers for complex computer systems that don’t work. Even though, as one congressperson at the hearing put it, those special interests are likely to view the USDS and 18F “with a jaundiced eye,” they were given the opportunity to seize on the authority issue as a way to cast doubts on the Obama tech surge.

I would say yes, as physically being on the inside gives you access to all of the nuances of a particular industry. Outside consulting companies and contractors have a hard time encapsulating these subtleties and, as such, is a major reason as to why enterprise software written for a specific industry is generally quite terrible.

Some nudie pics or vanilla porn would probably be the least of their worries. I can imagine that a service like imgur spends the bulk of their time cleaning up the nastier bits that inevitably creep their way into such a large site. How many companies really want to inherit a high maintenance mess for such little return? At least with Tumblr and Snapchat you have a strong brand. How many average Internet users outside of Reddit (or the 18-34 male demographic) have even heard of imgur?

One of the biggest culture shocks I had when I first moved to the US was the near constant push of consumerism and celebration of consumption. I had never seen or experienced this before at such high levels and even 15 years or so later, I still cannot come to grips with it (although I am a bit more desensitized to it). It permeates every aspect of American life and is quite difficult to escape. Perhaps this is a bad cliche, but the average American's status here is very much defined by his or her ability to consume. Americans may sneer more at the 1%, but idolization of being rich has never decelerated.

You don't need to rely on cookies anymore to identify someone online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_fingerprint

Facebook recently recommended to me a "friend" who was a person that worked at another company which was a client for my previous employer. The only means of online communication I've had with this person was through my old work email. My Facebook account uses a unique email address used only for Facebooking, I've never friended anyone from my previous employer, my demographic information is all made up (except for my name), I've set privacy controls in Facebook to be as strict as possible, I run uBlock Origin/NoScript on all browsers, I clear browser history/cookies/etc on exit...yet, here is this person being recommended to me. The lengths that these companies go to fingerprint you online is incredibly scary and creepy.

I don't think anyone is arguing against "Excellent colleagues trump everything else." As someone else mentioned, statements like these are simplistic truisms. However, I think that treating employees like adults is also recognizing that there is more nuance to people than simply defining them in static terms such as "A players" and assuming they will always remain in neat little categories. Given how quickly things in tech change (or life for that matter), one day you may be an "A player" and the next you may be a B or C. People are dynamic, events happen; how you treat your existing employees when things change matters.

> WP isn't bad per-se

From a data standpoint, yes, WP is bad. Really bad. The poor quality code base of WP is only one half of the equation. The other half is the downright awful, novice database schema that ships with it. I've never seen a database schema that is so tightly coupled with the parent application that it essentially hijacks your data into always needing itself simply to extract and render data. WP takes the "relational" out of relational database and flushes it down the toilet. To add to the mess, instead of fixing the rot of its database schema and data handling functionality, WP developers, in their infinite wisdom, merge a woefully incomplete, faux-API system into WP's core, thereby further sealing the door of ever having a clean, thoughtfully designed database that one can access outside of WP and PHP.

I doubt it (perhaps smaller players might get hit though). Google apparently measures for page speed but I don't see any evidence that the worst offenders (e.g. major news sites) are losing page rank for having "heavy" pages. It seems that if you have a powerful brand, you can operate above what Google suggests webmasters do. At least that's how I see it from my perspective.

If Facebook were to do this, I would agree, but traffic from the vast majority of subreddits and pages is not as substantial as you may think. Some publishers might take notice but I do not think it would stir any kind of immediate action response across the news world.

> It removes the hard floor.

In the US, we could already make great strides with removing the hard floor by simply implementing universal, primary health care coverage, free/low-cost higher education and wages that keep up with inflation. I feel that BI in some form is inevitable and the next logical step of civilized society, however, given the incredible resistance to providing universal health care, I do not see BI happening in my lifetime.

Their slogan certainly seems to indicate that.

Are you saying Verizon has a moral responsibility to provide jobs to Mexico, the Philippines and the DR?

> The commitee factor is a problem in anything provided internationally to millions of users, as well as in anything sold for hundreed thousands of dollars to single customers.

As with anything in life, things are never black and white but filled with grays. For example, I'd much rather my banking software or the avionics of a plane that I am about to board be designed and built by committee rather than the local hotshot cowboy coder who wants to rebuild everything from scratch with whatever happens to be the tech stack-of-the-month. Great software is often boring and un-sexy and not everything can be built by two developers in a bedroom.

> You can't expect everyone who wants a Website with Basic functionality to have dedicated ops Teams, that would make it unfeasible for the majority of companies to run their own websites.

I don't and the very first thing I mentioned is that content management is a very domain specific problem. In some cases, WP may fit the bill, in many cases it does not.

If you are in the business of content and your mission objective is entirely driven around delivering content to your users, you will have a dedicated development and operations team. Your users are the customers and they demand content delivered to them in any number of ways and means. WP's shortcomings increase exponentially when you operate at scale.

> This leads one to your conclusion that because they aren't doing some parts of their job particularly good, they shouldn't be considered.

When it comes to content, your data layer is not just "some part". It is a fundamental component and critical aspect to get correct for sound, scalable content management. WP's database schema and abstraction layers fail miserably at anything beyond the context of a basic blog. I understand WP bills itself as a CMS, but its data handling and architecture says otherwise.

> The risks of being technologiclly dependent on the few people that wrote your custom CMS just arent worth it for the customer.

If your CMS is written in Django, RoR, Spring, etc, you aren't anymore dependent than when you are leveraging Wordpress. No WP installation is without heavy customizations to finagle it to become a poor man's CMS and some group will still have to manage/maintain the mountain of technical debt you've left behind by deploying WP in the first place. Furthermore, the landscape of quality software developers in WP land is bleak to say the least.

Exactly, the correct solution is to utilize a transactional mail system for in-application sending that's not tied to your physical mail servers used for personal/business email. Amazon SES, MailGun, SendGrid, etc are all excellent tools to use if you do not wish to run/maintain your own system.