troupe

I thought the idea behind Google Reader was that they would be able to show you ads. They bought Feedburner which was supposed to offer an easy way to put Adsense in your feeds, but it never really took off.

Just laying off 10% of your employees is easy. If a company can identify the 10% of their workforce that isn't contributing anything, that would speak very highly of their management processes. And in any sufficiently large company, there are always 10% that are either adding nothing or are creating negative value.

In addition to spy photography, pigeons were being trained to guide missiles at one point by pecking on a screen. Project Orcon (for ORganic CONtrol) was the name of the program. It doesn't appear to have been used for any actual bombings. The trainers said their biggest issue was just getting people to take them seriously. The project was canceled as electronic controls became available.

It feels like this product isn't a good fit for people who have a free mail client that they are happy with. The probably describes a large portion of HN readers. But there are people who will be happy to pay $3 per month for something that does exactly what they need.

> "we're X people valued at $YBILLIONS" is a weird way to open and detracts from the message.

The most common argument against simpler architecture is, "but that won't scale and we are going to grow to be a valuable company." So the idea that they aren't a $10 million company does seem somewhat relevant.

Yes, but you are still dealing with situations where other teams are deploying code that you are responsible for. With microservices you can always say, "our microservice wasn't deployed, so it is someone else's problem."

But I think you are pointing out one of the reasons most places don't get benefits from microservices. If their culture doesn't let them do as you describe with a monolith, the overhead of microservices just bring in additional complexities to an already dysfunctional team/organization.

> How do you square that with the fact that shit usually hits the fan precisely because of this complexity

The theoretical benefit may not be what most teams are going to experience. Usually the fact that microservices are seen as a solution to a problem that could more easily be solved in other much simpler ways, is a pretty good indication that any theoretical benefits are going to be lost through other poor decision making.

My experience with stones seems to indicate that they come in an almost unlimited variety of sizes. There are boulders that are so large no human can lift them all the way down to stones that can be lifted by a small child or even a dog. You shouldn't have any trouble finding a stone with a weight appropriate for whatever level of difficulty you want to target.

I find it helpful to give myself permission decide NOT to do something. The to-do list is a bunch of things that I thought were important when I wrote them down. If the next day I only do half of them, but feel those were the important ones, then I have success. If I decide that half of them aren't worth doing, the doing those would be failure.

The goal of the list isn't to beat you up, but just a tool to make sure that at the end of the day you did the things that were important to you and YOU get to decide what that means.

Ah ok. So maybe one of the early Panaplex segment displays instead of bitmap displays that came later.

Probably not a plasma screen in the 70s. It looks like a bunch of individual characters. They are probably vacuum fluorescent like what was on calculators and the Speak & Spell educational toy from that period.

How many teachers are there and how long do they usually stay at the college? It seems like it would be hard to sustain much of a faculty at that size.

The most effective use of taking notes is to actively engage with the content by figuring out how to organize it and what to include and what to leave out. Even though the author says to just capture everything, if you are doing it by hand, you are making decisions on what to write and what to skip simply because you can't write as fast as someone talks. One of the reasons taking notes on a computer isn't as good for retaining information is because you CAN probably keep up with how fast a professor talks and capture everything--so you don't end up actively thinking about what is being said.

Agreed, and if security is an issue, creating network connections between every single piece of your application seems to exponentially increase the attack surface.

My preference is to get the raw details I need. I'd rather see a stack trace than, "We are sorry but there seems to have been some type of error."

However, I can also see a case for the other point of view. In working on large enterprise systems that are being used by users who are not technical, the "we" helps reinforce the idea that things aren't outside of the users locus of control. There is an whole group of people employed by the organization behind the scenes that are part of the way the overall system works. So the "we" emphasizes that the system, the error, the people who write the system, the person trying to use the system, are all part of whatever they are trying to do together.

Not disagreeing entirely, but don't forget that you used to be able to type ftp://example.com and gopher://example.com into the url to access sites. I think there were others as well. Most browsers have removed those protocols.

If someone adds a reference to XSLT template to their RSS feed's header, they can style the page however they want. I rarely see anyone doing that, but if consumers of podcast RSS feeds were asking for something different, it is fairly trivial for the producers to style it.

Blockhead has definitely been hurled at innocent people as an insult.

Yes the report sounds like Dartmouth is trying to do a good job of weighting the scores based on things that matter for college success--meaning not the race of the person.

The point I was trying to make was that it appears many colleges may have an incentive to NOT require ACT SAT tests if they want to continue to use race or proxy for race and avoid what the report from Dartmouth is suggesting. Dartmouth looks like they are considering ACT/SAT along with the students background / opportunities, but specifically NOT treating people differently based on the color of their skin.

Dartmouth is assuming that they will get racial diversity just by getting better at selecting the best students instead of trying to penalize or reward people for the color of their skin.

A. People who attend poor high school and get a 29 on his ACT are admitted over students to went to a college prep private school and got a 32.

B. People who are of a certain race that get a 29 on their ACT are admitted over people of another race that get a 32.

It sounds like Dartmouth is doing A. The recent court cases had to do with schools that were doing B. If a college requires SAT/ACT tests and continues doing B, then it is pretty easy to see they are doing so based on objective data.

I believe those court cases are one of the reasons schools are moving to test optional--not because the SAT/ACT isn't useful to predict success at college, but because they see it as a liability in their acceptance process.

Honestly I think their is more free test prep resources than funds for people to pay for the test. A student is never going to have enough time to use all the test prep tools and sample tests that are available for free.

Harvard, Yale, etc. could set a particular standard and increase enrollment to accept everyone who met that standard and (if logistics allowed) that could possibly be a good thing. In some ways the massive online classes seem to be piloting this idea.

However, if you go spend some time teaching at a community college, I don't think you'll walk away with the idea that somehow getting all those students pushed into a university would improve things for the community college students or for the ability to educate kids at the university.

Increasing enrollment might be beneficial, but past a certain point it is going to be detrimental to education.

If a school asks for SAT or ACT scores but, hypothetically, wants to discriminate based on race or some other characteristic, doesn't requiring the ACT/SAT make them more likely to be liable for discrimination because there is an objective standard to show that they are treating some groups differently than others? I thought that some of the recent rulings against selecting students based on their race hinged on the statistics showing that some groups were able to get in with lower ACT/SAT scores, while other groups had to have a much higher score to be admitted.

Imagine if Cloudflare went to IPV6 only. Yes, Cloudflare's customers should know what that means, but the end users that are using the service may not be and if the error in anyway says Cloudflare, then it gives Cloudflare a bad reputation.

While AWS is a bit (just a bit) more removed from the end user than Cloudflare, there is still the potential for it not being good PR.

My guess is that going IPV6 only for load balancers would make it break for enough people that AWS thinks it would reflect poorly on their service.

What snet0 suggested might be your best bet. You can use pandoc markdown but then slip into LaTex if you need to do something more complicated.

In the early days of digital photography, the type of equipment you had mattered a great deal. Most phone cameras are now so incredibly advanced that the hardware is rarely the limiting factor in creating incredible pictures

Simple, but it seems unlikely, and it is also the scenario that the government would be mostly likely to be up front about sharing.

Right, so either the airport is running something that can break TLS, or snapchat is feeding a stream of private messages to the government with location information provided.

I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum. I can't imagine how a typical family could get by without having a printer to handle basic educational, correspondence, and hobby needs.