oneJob

Agreed. If you don't make it your business to create the perfect workflow software for your coworkers, and instead learn to use it as designed, it may not be perfect, but it works well and has some really nice features. It certainly works well enough, when used as designed and only using the pieces you need instead of trying to find uses for stuff that you can do without and which will only complicate your work, and is a good tool that can let you get back to your work.

My experience also suggests that this is the real issue. Someone has to make a decision on which solution to use for their "agile" development workflow, but this someone doesn't understand that they are actually purchasing a product with a constrained, predefined version of agile. Even though it is somewhat flexible it doesn't perfectly map onto this person's version of agile and so, since they've already paid the licensing fees and gone through the office politics of getting buy in or stuffing it down the users throats, they don't want to admit that either their version of agile could be tweaked or that they should have licensed different software. So then, the mess begins. At every turn square pegs are forced into round holes and workflows are misused with consequences that are not immediately evident. A year down the road and everyone is frustrated. You'd be better off using an excel workbook. Now you have to explain to everyone you onboard why your version of agile is so much better than other versions and warranted creating this monstrosity which they must figure out how to use without documentation (which is useless at this point) and without frustrating their new coworkers with too many questions about the arbitrary nature of their system, which they hate and had shoved down their throats.

I thought for a moment this was about the propaganda "Channel 1" I was forced to watch every morning in home class in my Texan middle-school.

This is good to know. Ty. (So much for the "transparency" implications of "glass" door.)

Clearly any Facebook employee that wants to jump in here would be welcomed. There seems to be a lot of interest in what might have motivated the above comment.

I like you idea for allowing tweaking the ranking to personalize results. Kinda like the equalizer on a stereo. It's obviously subjective whether one enjoys more bass or more treble.

They don't actually do research.

Yeah, totally good idea. No idea why I didn't just think of that rather than hold Mozilla accountable to living up to their stated mission.

How about a button that lets me choose a FireFox build using 100% OSS and which includes zero built-in user data capture technology?

How about open-sourcing your product before worrying about improving other products? SpiderOak has been "investigating a number of licensing options, and do expect to make the SpiderOak client code open source in the not-distant future" for a very, very long time now. It's no trivial thing to have a closed source client for a "zero knowledge" service.

https://spideroak.com/faq/why-isnt-spideroak-open-source-yet...

EDIT: I'd welcome discussion, in addition to your up/down votes

Hmm. Sigh.

It is frustrating and saddening how often I encounter the same broken assumptions and nonconstructive disagreement on HN. I'm beginning to disengage.

I have considered many of the specifics, but yes, I was applying a broad principle in a broad manner, because it has broadly been shown to be beneficial. Even in child play, competition is good. When two children play one will almost always have an advantage relevant to the game at hand, and so the "winning" child must learn to temper their play while the "losing" child must learn to lose beneficially. When the Petronas Towers were being built the teams were placed in competition, with rewards at stake, to complete their tower first. This helped keep the project moving forward at a fast clip. Militaries of different sovereign states participate in "war games" to foster their relationships all the time. Both Russia and China have been invited to participate in the RIMPAC war games, for instance. So, if the idea of friendly competition holds for childhood development, construction, and war, I'd say it holds fairly broadly.

I'm not going to bother getting into the remaining details of your response, because you honestly don't seem open to the discussion. I've got about a 1000 things requiring my attention and energy, and so I try to prioritize those that don't require me beating my head against a wall in vain. But, as a purely "release of stress" exercise, I'd like to point out that OSS is getting its butt kicked in the consumer market. It's getting it's but kicked by proprietary software and software as a service, which is hardly unequivocally empowering to the user, which is one of the most important components of OSS. So, you hate me, you disagree with me, whatever; if you give one flying fuck about OSS, put your ego aside for one short second and realize that OSS is losing to proprietary software and enabling software as a service unabated, while always getting the scraps from the table. Stop with the cognitive dissonance already and do something about it.

So, "wall" != "moat" Some castles had a wall and a moat. Anywho. I think there is a differences in kind here that is material to the discussion.

Respectfully disagree with the phrase "infighting". I believe healthy competition would be good for OSS.

Respectfully, maybe it should be a (friendly) competition. Competition motivates people. It's commonly accepted as one of the central drivers of capitalist markets. Perhaps if competition were injected in open source projects in some form it'd help the open source community compete with the proprietary community.

I'm vegan. Actually.

If you do some research on the topic, I'm confident that you'll find that the air quotes were not out of order.

The International Court of Justice (a body of the U.N.), Australia, and New Zealand are among others that agree the air quotes are appropriate. Japan is defying international consensus and law by continuing to kill whales.

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/30/asia/japan-whaling-research/in...

It's important to bear witness. It's important to not look away.

"research"

Also. This is sad effin news. And that's your response?

Works if you're going to privately finance everything, forgo insurance, and are able to keep all of your operations secret so that analysts are unable to estimate your operations by proxies such as fuel, craft size, the asteroids you're mining and their composition, etc. The physics of space flight are rather precise. Mass and density of the craft before and after visiting the asteroid can be worked out fairly easily with relatively few data points. Composition of the asteroid will possibly be known prior to visiting the asteroid, otherwise, why go to the expense of mining it? Could be exploratory, but then not even the people running the mission know the value of the asteroid's ore until the last minute, and in that case the market will likely have just about as good an estimate, or better, of the risk adjusted market value of the mission. Unfortunately, it's fairly difficult to keep all of this hidden due to the regulatory environment of the space industry and the wide open nature of "space". You can't really sneak out and back just staying low and below radar or benefit from the cover of darkness.

True, but the markets prices assets at "Net Present Value" and often has long time horizons for their calculations. Think about an insurance company's portfolio. It will need assets to balance against liabilities which include human life insurance policies. Some business insurance policies can be for even longer time frames, think nuclear power plants. To balanced against those liabilities part of what you need is an investment with a similar time horizon. Now, the gold or whatever ore these companies mine may not have that horizon, but their company stock and some of their company debt certainly will. And since both their stock and debt valuations will be tied to the ore they mine and return, some of that correlation will find its way back to the price of gold, platinum, etc. But the price of gold will be impacted even more directly than that. A large percentage of precious metals are held for their store of value rather than their value in industrial uses. If, as an investor, I know that over then next 30 years the price of my investment will drop 20% or more, I plug those numbers into the NPV equation, and I get the hell out of that position untill the price comes down and is in line with what I'd pay for the metal almost at the cost of an industrial commodity. That's of course a simplified version of how it'd all play out, but the broad strokes are there.

How long would you hold onto your home mortgage if you knew that at some point, you're not exactly sure when, but at some point you're home's value will plummet?

JHU APL does tons, well primarily, highly sensitive defense contracting work. For instance, you can actually head on over right now to Linkedin and apply for their "Combat Systems Kill Chain Engineer" position. [1] Security is thus a big requirement.

From Wikipedia: "APL is primarily a defense contractor. It serves as a technical resource for the Department of Defense, NASA, and other government agencies."

There is a very strained relationship with some parts of the JHU community due to this. At the offices where they control the Hubble Space Telescope for instance there is a deli with a tip jar for, tongue in cheek, COINTELPRO.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/70728662?trk=jobs_jserp_...

I agree a discussion of a kind is occurring. My reply was specific to the comment it addressed, in that, the comment did not fully engage with my initial comment and instead cherry picked one part of it. A more fully formed response, much like yours, wouldn't have elicited my above response. Context.

When Facebook forces a user to opt-out it's acceptable to denounce their actions. How is the Pocket example different?

One of my biggest, if not my biggest, complaint about the OSS community it the lack of sympathy toward non technical users. If I was a point-and-click, non-technical user do you think I'd have any clue what you meant by 'mailing list'? Not likely.

And if I was that user what are the chances that I understand that the Pocket application was a third-party application and that my data was not staying with Mozilla? Would I understand that removing the icon did not remove the code for my install?

Bigger picture here, and the point I was trying to convey in my original comment, is that this is another instance in a string of instances that, when each taken on its own might not be a huge deal, together paint a picture. The writing is on the wall, as they say.

I'm not a Mozilla hater. But before I am a Mozilla user, I'm a citizen of the Internet. So when a participant of the Internet begins to lose their way, I figure I should do what good partners do, which is to plainly speak my mind in a manner that is respectful and open to listening. I think Mozilla is great, and I think they'd value others being constructively honest with them.

It might be. But what about the discussion? Is focusing on a native mail application not inline with their mission statement, given all the privacy issues of late? And your point doesn't address the issue of implementation. Firefox is one initiative out of many initiatives in Mozilla's portfolio. And the web is not the browser. So I, personally, would say no, focusing on a browser to the exclusion of all other aspects of the Internet is not inline with that mission. But, I'm one of many users, and without open dialogue, it's impossible to say whether other Mozilla users agree with me.

If this was an open source "project", rather than a "foundation" whose mission is to build a better web for its users, I'd say it was their call and that's the beauty of OSS. This is not that.

This is another decision in a long string of decisions which are either not in their users' interest, questionable, or poorly communicated and implemented.

If I were to give the benefit of the doubt here over the question of whose interest this is in (Mozilla or its users) it is still being horribly communicated (otherwise one might better understand why it's in one's interest) and horribly implemented, to the point which I'm beginning to question whether Mozilla, as an organization, is up to the task of building a better web for its users.

Why not more discussion around Pocket, the new tab page, Thunderbird support, etc. Why pop these decisions, fully made, on their user base? And why not, in the case of XUL, incrementally replace features or develop in parallel until a drop-in, validated solution exists.

To me, one of two things is going on. Either Mozilla is not acting in the best interest of its users or this is amateur hour. Both scenarios suck.

It used to be called a "hobby", but now it's a "side project"?

Or not even geniuses, just talented individuals. A very small percentage of people have the luxury to do 1) what they enjoy and are motivated by or 2) what they are good at. We are all, as a society, worse off when we keep massive swaths of people living on the margin.

So, thanks for bringing to my attention this NewSQL thing. I work in Baltimore and do my best to keep up, but it's a dessert out here. While I've been shopping around for a new gig, I've had to explain what data science is, even to my contract company recruiter contacts, who claim to work at a tech centric company. They'll think I'm making words up if I bring up NewSQL.

During the period being discussed, the constituency of the communities participating in the Internet has completely changed. The percentage of non-paid contributors has drastically declined; the percentage of professional contributors has drastically increased. The percentage of active or contributing participants has greatly declined; the percentage of passive or consumer participants has greatly increased. The norms, laws, and conventions are increasingly made by politicians and bureaucrats and less and less by community members. The majority of interaction and activity on the Internet is now mediated and tracked by commercial interests. Even if you disagree with one or two of my points, I think you'll grant me the general point.

In a strange twist on things, where in the traditional body-politic one says, "It's the economy stupid", in Internet-politics it's actually the politics. Who participates. What are the power relations. Who makes the laws or enforces the norms. I think this is because, where as in traditional economies money and goods are scarce and so we must have a healthy economy to eat and have shelter, in the information economy scarcity is fast becoming a thing of the past and so a democracy is being replaced by a do-ocracy. Whoever builds it, makes the rules. The law is always two steps behind. So as corporations and governments increasingly hire and direct all the professionals and bureaucrats that produce the Internet, it is created in their likeness or in their interest. So participation, power dynamics, and participant empowerment become foundational.

Unfortunately, the tech industry often superficially dismisses traditional politics. When it does engage it often claims the ideology of libertarian or plays the part of technocrat, seeking purely utilitarian approaches. Libertarianism, you'll please forgive me for phrasing it this way, is rather sophomoric. It's rather like that guy in college that had the Che Guevara t-shirt, but really didn't know what it was all about. Like it or not, we're in a highly coordinated, interconnected, interdependent society, and just as fully realized communism was a very romantic notion but would never get the job done, libertarianism just won't get the job done. We need each other, and we need participation from each other. And this is, in a nutshell, a political issue. Technological, disruptive, efficient "solutions" will not solve this problem. Or worse, the tech industry might engage purely to satisfy its commercial interests. Think about the idea that, a start-up creates a product, and then hires lawyers to "legalize it". Then the start-up claims that it is libertarian or not participating in politics.

We need the equivalent of "The Federalist Papers" for our time. Something contemporary, but grounded in history. Something academic, but pragmatic. Something plain spoken, but inspiring. Instead, we've created the TPP.

Well, not so much.

Yes, it's really unreasonable.