superplussed

It definitely is a hard problem, and I agree that there's no way that this could happen without regulation. I could imagine it being enforced across all companies that reach a certain scale. Below some scale threshhold the damage that can be done through bad actors is minimal anyway, at scale, it can alter elections.

I think another side-effect here is that it could turn the act of buying advertising into an arms race, where those buying advertising are forced to monitor their competitor's advertising buys since they know that their competitors are doing it to them.

He mentioned it during one of his podcasts, and unfortunately I listen to all of them so I'd have no idea which one he mentioned it in.

On the subject of increasing transparency, Jason Calacanis had a suggestion that I thought was brilliant. There should be a public database of all ads running on Facebook, that would simply show the ad, the ad purchaser, and who the ad is targeted to.

There ads would be filterable, so that someone viewing the database could filter based on the same criteria that Facebook allows advertisers to target. So if I search "non-college educated white males over the age of 40 in Midwestern suburbia", I get a complete overview of what these people have been shown. If I come across a nefarious advertiser, I can also filter to see what other campaigns they've run and who they've targeted.

Transparency, solved. Now the responsibility to police the ads becomes somewhat shared and it's easy to imagine watchdog groups monitoring different types of campaigns looking for bad actors.

4 years ago. It has been a pretty smooth ride, from originally getting a freelancer's Visa (pretty easily), to getting a Blue Card (even more easily).

The biggest surprise to me as an American was that I had this perception that health care is free over here, and it's not. You are mandated to pay your health insurance, which isn't as cheap as you might imagine, but it is of course pretty comprehensive with no co-pays for every service that I've ever had.

Btw, the health care system is a dream of efficiency compared to the US.

As an American living in Berlin, it's a striking feeling to live in a well-run country. It's not perfect of course, but the feeling that the system works with you and for you (even as a foreigner) is a stark contradiction to the US.

Chinese is #1 according to Wikipedia.

My big question is whether people are really noticing such a dramatic speed difference? I've tried it several times, and it seems like there is a negligible difference, if any, between it and Chrome. And I'm a guy that uses Sublime even though I like the feature set on VSCode better because I can't live with the snappiness downgrade.

I'm an American living in Berlin, and I think the problem here would be more of a cultural one than a legal one. Germans just have an expectation that once hired they will be given every chance to succeed, to the point that firings seem to come across as a shock or an implication of major wrong-doing.

"Hire fast, fire fast" is already ingrained in American startups, so I think the policy outlined in this article would be easier to adopt in the US. Americans in general view jobs as more transient than Europeans do.

I wonder if this could be the birth of the legal microdosing industry?

Man, the design of this is so unpolished that I actually find it a bit stressful to look at. The lack of grid adherence, the strange hierarchy of font sizes, it doesn't seem up to Github's normal high standards of clean and sensible design choices. But then I guess it's new and they'll refine it.

There is a concept called "fluency illusion" which everyone is susceptible to, which is when you are passively flipping through a book on some topic, and you say: yeah, I know this, I know this too, yeah yeah, I got this. And then you are stopped and asked a question about the material and it's like: gulp. Shit.

Everyone falls victim to this, but I think smart people can be especially prone.

That's mostly true, but then try living for a few years in Germany and then your perception of what it means to avoid eye contact will vastly change :)

Writing the string "Made with love in $COUNTRY" would actually be kind of funny.

Do you mean wrapping all components with a HOC?

SEEKING WORK - remote / Berlin

I'm a front-leaning, full-stack developer that is living in Berlin. I am American, and I have some conversational ability in German.

I have experience with every aspect of creating an application, from mockups and UX design, to graphic design, to the full-stack implementation, to deployment.

I've successfully built and sold a past start-up of mine, and have a great deal of insight with product development. Because of this, I'm probably of most value the earlier a project is in its life cycle.

Backend stack: Ruby on Rails, with DBs/data stores such as MySQL, Postgres, Mongo, Redis, Elastic Search.

Frontend stack: I have experience with other frameworks, but at this point I strongly prefer to work with React. I use current tooling (even with Rails projects) such as ES6, babbel and webpack. I prefer MobX to Redux, but can work with either. I am well-versed in current best practices, can build responsive mobile-friendly websites, and code pixel perfect CSS and HTML5.

I'm also a graphic designer, which can be seen from viewing past and present work on my portfolio.

Portfolio: http://eatingthe.com

Most Recent Project: http://seedlang.com

Github: https://github.com/superplussed

Email: jeremy@superplussed.com

I thought the same thing when I saw this.

As a programmer who is working on a language learning startup, I've thought alot about how and why these two disciplines are different. And I believe that learning a spoken language is actually much harder than learning a programming language for the following reasons:

* In order to strengthen your spoken language skills you must engage in what amounts to a performance in front of experts, akin to getting on stage as an raw amateur and performing jazz music to a crowd of experts. Programming can be learned in the quiet and safety of your home.

* Speaking a language is a synchronous activity, programming is asynchronous. You need full command over an enormous amount of new material when speaking a new language, whereas with programming you can always pause things in order to look something up.

* Learning to speak a language has a slow feedback loop compared to programming. You learn concept or word A, and by the time you first need to deploy that word or concept in the wild, it has been forgotten.

* Learning to speak a language has inconsistent feedback, with native speakers giving contradictory or unclear advice. Compilers, not so much.

* Speaking a language requires relearning muscoskeletal behavior that has been ingrained since birth.

* Speaking a new language badly is an act of courage that often penalizes introverted or perfectionist personality types. These types thrive when learning computer programming.

I could go on... :)

It isn't, but it's amazing that it's the number one result on Google for "Mike Pence".

At least it was clear that it was clickbait before even clicking it. But yeah that is a cynical article that is really scraping for an angle.

I have a domain: fooker.com. Brandable, awesome. Don't need it. Wanna sell it.

I'm an American that has lived in Berlin for over 3 years now, so I'm very used to the language (if not exactly fluent). And one of the early surprises for me was how soft and beautiful it can sound when spoken by a woman.

An example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEJDJnnfRc8

And this is more of a joke video, but it shows how most of the reputation of German being harsh comes more from its typical usage in movies than anything fundamentally harsh about the language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLvL7a8Y0pI

Are you saying that you only look at 10s of websites or 10s of pages? As a (frontend or full-stack) web developer you end up looking at many 100s of page views a day, and those extra seconds matter. Both in maintaining a semblance of flow, and in real cumulative time. I switched to Chrome the very first time I tried it, very soon after it was released, and never looked back because it made me happier and more productive.

Yes, the exploitation inherent in these events is the biggest turnoff to me. I value my time and expertise too much to give it away for free.

Of course both are acceptable, why is this an audacious claim?

I predict a reputation system that impacts the cost of the ride. Nowadays the reputation system is unidirectional from rider to driver, but in the future perhaps it is unidirectional from the car to the passenger. Bad behavior dings your reputation, a dinged reputation costs you money.

The amazing thing to me is that my 10 and 8 year old nephews have a PSVR, and Xbox, and an iPad, and all they want to do is play the iPad. They use the Xbox sometimes, and the PSVR collects dust. It seems nowadays low friction is the killer feature.

It actually has lead to confusion before when I assumed that someone I was talking to knew what this usage of "serverless" meant. And it was only 15 minutes of talking that we realized our conversation had wildly diverged and neither side knew it.

Top-down hirings for the sake of culture change don't really work, though do they? It seems like the inevitable outcome is exactly this, a bright-eyed, and then soon-disenfranchised new hire, butting up against an resistant and entrenched culture.

"Welp, €100K is not setting the bar that high folks. I can prove that by demonstrating two different examples where I didn't pull a salary of €100K from a European company."

This is usually delineated by wisdom vs intelligence. Intelligence is raw horsepower, and wisdom is the ability to make good decisions.

In the context of older developers, I don't think you can really assume wisdom has been an outcome of all of those years of experience. Wisdom grows with a certain affinity for introspection and self-correction, and not everyone has those traits.