softwarebeware

I am skeptical that the claims made are accurate. I am sure that there is crime in San Francisco, however, SF is a large city, and it doesn't add up to me that a large company would completely move out of an entire city over the issue of crime.

It sounds like a clumsy PR play tbh.

If it becomes the only thing we talk about, then it will sound like hysteria, and taking action will get lost in the noise.

Oh man! I remember reading awhile back that the same thing happened at eBay. eBay actually performed the same experiment and found that people were not finding eBay through ads. At least not enough to matter. If anyone has a source for this, let me know. I can't find the link I had on it.

Here is why: extraverts who need constant hyperactive human interaction are the only people psychopathic enough to ascend into the leadership tiers that make decisions about remote vs. in-person.

So they just can't, and I mean CAN'T, handle the idea of all-remote.

At all.

Sorry to see this. In 2004, I worked for a major national non-profit in the US. We built our own internal web portal that is essentially what Friday is. Since then, I've seen a lot more interest in this space. Microsoft SharePoint is one of the main ones but, I think, only because it's from Microsoft and integrates well with Windows networks. From a product standpoint, SharePoint is just not very good.

Someone is going to come in and own this space one day for sure. The need is always there.

Why not? As long as we're not locked in, if a product is good and we're early adopters we're getting the benefits from it that other people who are afraid to dip their toes in the water aren't getting.

I bet those engineers who interviewed you appreciated the simplicity, though. It probably seemed like a breath of fresh air.

> A page can be terribly designed and render as typewriter text in 80-column ASCII monospace, and readers will still read it, even if they complain about it.

Ha! I would never complain about that. I'm a programmer!

I also am having trouble following exactly what you mean, but if you want to check out a classic books about the marriage of product design and technology give Alan Cooper's The Inmates are Running the Asylum a read. It's a short one and still has a lot of relevant insights today.

> nobody got an award and praise for choosing the simplest thing that could work

Well, if that's true, that's where young software engineers have gone wrong.

The giants among us used to talk specifically about the power of doing the simplest thing that could possibly work: https://www.artima.com/articles/the-simplest-thing-that-coul...

I interpret the problem a little differently. I don't think the reason people want to copy Google is out of a misguided delusion that their app is going to have the same scale. At least not most of the time. The reason is that software is so bad. Plain and simple. Google is one company whose products seem to be reliable. Most software is a soul-sucking exercise in futility to use them. They error out and do unexpected things randomly. In contrast, Google does a great job in providing a quality experience. People naturally want to know how they do that so well. And to do so at such high scale just adds another layer of impressiveness.

This is why I think we should require ethics courses for Computer Science or Software Engineering degrees. It _is_ a complicated topic without many easy answers. I think that far too many software engineers don't even ask the questions to begin with. Most are complicit in a system (like Facebook) under the assumption that the ethics of the work is someone else's responsibility.

Was Yeats thinking of sleeping "dreams" or future aspirations, though? I also wonder if the brain's "self-cleaning" process (which is what dreams are^) would function any longer if you had conscious control over it. Maybe that would actually turn out to have harmful side effects to your health? I've thought of this before when my brother-in-law talks about lucid dreaming.

^ https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/how-sle...

I guess that means we should absolve ourselves of any responsibility for it?

How do we apply that idea to our involvement in building future tools? Should we go ahead and build "sentient" autonomous weapons because "any tool can be turned into a weapon" anyway?

How will we grapple with the fact that our community created web and mobile technology with the goal of providing more transparent, more available factual information but instead we watch it get co-opted as the world's most-powerful propaganda machine?

The writer of this is a great written communicator. That was some good technical writing that described the problem well and even gave a good business case for fixing it. If product wouldn’t make space for that fix, then they should rethink their career.

I feel you should instead look for paying jobs contributing to existing blogs that have high readership. Baeldung.com for one example.

> Adding timestamp to JSON . . .

What are you talking about? JSON is a format for exchanging data of any kind. It doesn't have types beyond a set of primitives to that it can remain as a _notation_ that allows you to pass any type you define and want to send.

Nothing is stopping any library or language from implementing an object or String for dates or times (or both) and tons of them have done so.

It wouldn't be JSON's place at all to start defining anything like that.

Most devs who have been in the industry a long time will have this reaction:

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Because the "what is agile" debate has been happening for thirty years.

April Fools! I love it!

> Ethereum cofounder Gavin Wood suggested the Ethereum blockchain become the foundation for a decentralized web.

Here is the problem. The web already is a decentralized construct. Anyone suggesting that their product or technology become the foundation for decentralization is a snake-oil salesman.

Their twitter thread on the vote: https://twitter.com/amazonlabor/status/1509934286727749675

One other small thought I have is about the name. It's common to use "xit" in popular JavaScript test framework like Mocha and Jasmine to indicate an excluded test. Could cause some ambiguity or an unwanted association.

Oh come on! This isn't a legal document. It's a press release.

What an awesome read! It brought back some nostalgia. In high school, I owned a 1976 Datsun 280Z which had some, shall we say, electrical problems. The ignition went out but somehow I had ascertained that by placing the blade of a screwdriver across two fuses it would (for mysterious reasons) turn the starter over and that was the only way to start the car.

This is really cool. I am endlessly fascinated by the proliferation of "productivity apps" when I find the same thing as you: that they are quite unnecessary.

My approach is similar. I already take notes via a Bash script. I configure a particular "label" for any todos and (essentially) just grep for them, excluding those that are crossed out (with Markdown tildes). This approach works great for me as a Staff Engineer in a large tech company. Reference: https://github.com/scottashipp/noted/blob/main/subcommands.m...

I also wanted to mention there are several related ideas / movements around the web. One of the biggest is todotxt. In case you hadn't heard of it: https://github.com/todotxt/todo.txt

Tell me more. I would think that everyone with a TOP SECRET/SCI clearance is really clear on what it entails. I can't see someone thinking they could copy it to personal email and send it to someone without a clearance.

Or Peopleware

What about Debugging Teams?

I've worked at companies that don't write at all and companies that write a lot. Both can be bad. The real trick is knowing what is important to write down, and how to communicate it efficiently and effectively.