patrick_haply

It looks bleak, but 99.99% owned by 1000 people is deliberately misleading.

> 99,99% of world wealth is held by less than 1000 people.

Citation needed.

Nice, this is perfect timing for me to see this actually. I've been slowly building out a little cli tool that I use to track .env files (and other files that you don't want to check into source) in a git repository that is parallel to your project's git repository.

The way it works is you identify a file that you don't want to check into source. The cli moves it to a parallel repo, commits the file to the parallel repo, and symlinks the file back to the original location.

From then on, you get all of the normal source control features like local changes, revision history, etc... that you get with every other file in your project. I basically got fed up with "crap what was that value I was using before? Let me dig through my credentials store" or resorting to commenting out old lines just in case I needed to revert.

So far, I've just been keeping those parallel repositories local for lack of an encrypted remote to push to. Definitely checking this out.

> I can't explain exactly why I think those factors make it suspicious, however.

I think I have an idea of why, though I haven't been able to articulate it properly yet.

I've been thinking about it a lot recently because I co-work with a bunch of digital marketers, and some of them have affiliate marketing sites with domains that follow the pattern http://yourexactsearchterm.com.

The best I can come up with is the Uncanny Valley of SEO, where it feels like a website was made and over-optimized specifically for people making my exact search query. Maybe this is unfair or confirmation bias, but I feel like those websites are the most likely to be low quality content farms (e.g. paying content writers pennies to regurgitate content they have no experience with and/or don't understand). Either that, or they are outright scams.

Do any digital marketers here have opinions about this?

That's actually a really awesome idea. I wonder what the threshold of adoption would have to be before that signal is widely understood. Maybe that should become a necessary safety feature of driverless cars to replace the "feature" of being able to see what the driver is paying attention to through the window.

Also, it looks like there are multiple (??) patents on that idea: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=pts&hl=en&q=vehicle+front+...

Should we stop hurricanes, even if we can?

Yes, hurricanes are destructive, especially to human settlements, but I'd be surprised if there aren't massive ecological benefits to hurricanes in spite of (or possibly because of) the destruction. Forest fires, for example, have well-documented, long-term ecological benefits. Unfortunately it looks like hurricanes aren't studied as much as forest fires.

Just doing some cursory researching online [1] [2], it looks like they basically act as dramatic "flushing" mechanisms:

- end droughts

- distribute heat from the equator towards the poles

- seed dispersal

- redistribute soil/sediments along coastlines and inlane

[1] https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/hurricane-landfall...

[2] http://sciencing.com/positive-effects-hurricane-4462.html

Was? Are you saying you don't hold that opinion anymore, or do you just not use it?

Time logging. I use one piece of software to track my time, then fan those time logs out into the various pieces of software that need to know about them.

I imagine it's probably a decent way to practice it though, assuming you have enough working knowledge of the language to still get around your phone.

Edit: Well, except for the part where they admitted they just started to use their phone less.

For anyone else who has never heard of greenwashing like me two minutes ago:

> Greenwashing is like whitewashing with a green (environmental) brush: companies and organizations making themselves and their products sound or look like they’re really helping the environment. And they lure you in — creating the perception that you can help, too. In some cases you are helping. In some cases, it’s greenwashing.

Source: http://greenwashingindex.com/about-greenwashing/

Out of curiosity, how did Ember and Meteor burn you so hard and why are you so averse to "all-in-one" tools as a result?

> i'm fine letting Chrome function simply as a dev tool and actually browse with Firefox, Opera, Servo, etc. w/uBlock Origin & uMatrix

I'm definitely in the same boat. That makes me wonder if it would be a bad long-term move for Chrome. Just guessing here based on personal anecdata, developers are more likely to use ad blockers, which could alienate the developer community. If that's true, I wonder if we would see a resurgence in Firefox and other browsers.

You must have a really good internet connection. I pay close to $200 USD/mo for a wireless, 10Mbps max connection, and that's literally the best I can get unless I were to personally invest in running a fiber-optic line to my house.

Out of curiosity, does anyone here use tig[1]? I've been wondering if it's worth learning.

[1] https://jonas.github.io/tig/

Just looking through the Chrome settings, I get linked to this help article: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/173424

> You can set Chrome to show all settings and menus in the language you want. This option is only available on Windows and Chromebook computers. > On Mac or Linux? Chrome will automatically display in the default system language for your computer.

Obviously it's different for different OS and browser combos, but the important thing I think is that it's a browser setting and not something that needs to be configured on every site.

> The main roadblock is the current lack of a way to ask the visitor for her language of choice in a way that does not involve words nor country flags

The whole point of the blog was that the browser already has asked the user that question in the sense that it defaults to the system language setting, i.e. the first things you do on a computer when you open it for the first time.

> but even a partial success is better than having an automated way force a broken choice upon the human visiting the website.

I don't understand. What you're proposing as a solution (asking visitors their language on first entry) is essentially the fallback scenario for guessing incorrectly.

I try to think of the number of different websites I visit and thinking of every single one asking me for a language preference makes me feel not good about using the web. Right now, the worst case scenario is when chrome automatically detects that the website doesn't match my language and gives me a popup asking me if I want to translate.

Serious question: how do we know for certain that their DB hasn't been stolen yet?

That looks similar to the Kenyan Matatu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matatu

Or even better, the sticker for a competitor to your actual system.

Just because something else was more shit doesn't make it any less shit.

> Oh and Wellington is the windiest city in the world. This is not an exaggeration

Seriously. I agree that it's a beautiful city in so many ways, but just spending a week there made me wonder if I would want to live in such a windy place.

> You can't write a good blog post without having already written some number of bad ones.

To add to this, I'd say: if you don't have a writing habit, the barrier to actually writing something when you do finally have something useful to say will be incredibly high.

I am willing, however, to give the GP the benefit of the doubt because they said "Engineers should blog publicly when they have something to say", not "Engineers should blog when they have something to say". Practicing writing does not mean that you have to publish everything.

> If the only way to remain objective about the populace is to remove one's self from public

Well, the opposite is true as well, and more likely I think: By removing yourself from public, you lose any true bearing on what it's like to be a member of the populace. How can you be objective about something you don't understand? How can you be objective about a society you have no real understanding of?

I started adding serifs to my writing back in engineering school to help me decipher my own equations. I some moments where I couldn't figure out if I had written "+t" or "t+", or "is that a 2 or a z?!", and realized I had to create a script for myself and slow down a bit when writing.

Particularly troublesome characters that I remember were:

t vs +

u vs v

2 vs z

s vs 5

i (imaginary vs subscript marker)

g vs q (might seem silly, but prior to that, my handwriting didn't distinguish between them much)

o/O vs 0 (zero gets a slash, but never had situations where I was dealing with upper and lowercase o at the same time)

d vs ∂

I use both UO and privacy badger, and the site worked fine for me.

To be honest, and not that I ever would, but, if I stole your laptop, the moment I would become interested in your online accounts would be the moment I found your paper with all of your passwords on it.

Or my favorite: life forms that have spent millions of years decomposing and transforming into oil are drilled out of the ground, refined, hauled somewhere, turned into plastic, hauled somewhere else to be formed into a spoon shape, hauled halfway across the globe to reach your table/store/restaurant... just to be thrown out without being used.

This is actually exactly how I do music discovery. I create seed playlists with maybe 5-10 songs and start the radio from that. Any songs that I like from the those stations get added to a separate playlist, unless I explicitly decide that I want that song to influence the future selection of songs.

Thumbs-up or thumbs-downing songs in a radio playlist will change the songs that show up, but I find just having a seed playlist is more reliable and repeatable and easier to fine-tune.

What I often find is that artists will have have everything on Spotify except their latest album, at least for a few months. Fair enough, they want people to buy their albums; it's just one area where I find Spotify consistently incomplete.

The KGB spy from the article itself wasn't even an engineer, but a chemist.