skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
'Self-serving biases' are well-studied psychological phenomena. [0]

We can expect that a Google employee working with China will be more favourable to the work, even accounting for factors like selection bias.

My money is on self-justification being at least a part of the explanation, but that doesn't preclude some amount of sucking-up to management as well.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias
We do not know for a fact that life does not exist on Venus, though.
>because that engineer was deemed to lack a moral compass

Did Google say he was fired because he lacked a moral compass?
Co-Living Buildings Going Big in Brooklyn and Bay Area
Just yesterday evening I had a quick look for old-fashioned chess computers. Who needs a chess computer when you have a real computer or a tablet? The difference is that with a chess computer you are offline.
money i guess?
> Because manufacturing our devices there does not directly enable their oppressive practices, such as political censorship.

So, it's OK to give them trillions of dollars in business because we benefit even though they're going to use those trillions to further their agenda? Directly or indirectly, the results are the same.
Google's market share in China is basically 0... But apart from that no competitors, LOL.
Director was amazing as well
Why do we feel so busy? It’s all our hidden ‘shadow work’
AudioGalaxy. So much better than Napster and all of the others around that time.
>Google could still bring a lot of good to the people.

Such as...?
Really nice! I think even the bare cuts are too jarring and don't match the pace and length of the shots. I'd prefer a simple dissolve personally.
Under oligopoly, the FAANG companies are kings. The could:

- create bilateral trade agreements that promote ethical standards (instead of finding ways around them)

- lobby for more ethical laws globally (instead of lobbying for maximum legal freedom)
There are more straightforward and less costly to the public insurer ways to die than earning the right to ride a motorcycle without a helmet.

If you're blind, you aren't allowed to drive a car. If you can't wear a helmet then why should you be allowed to ride without one?

I'm all for inclusion and respecting others' practices, but this is short-sighted.
> If helmets are in fact necessary

They're not necessary, they're just a very good idea. So good, in fact, that a lot of states make them compulsory when riding a motorbike.

But sometimes states decide that, even if they are a good idea, there are other things that take precedence. Even if that other thing is net detrimental to public health.

You can disagree with the decision. I happen to not think that religious rights should trump public health. But it's entirely reasonable to make exemptions when there is a conflict of priority.

And, in this case, there's probably enough evidence from other states that have this exemption to make a reasoned public health choice. The UK have had it since the 70s, for example.
I can't think of anyone who'd hate the CTO, it's hardly more confusing than an if/else statement.
Uber Proposals Value It at $120B in Possible 2019 IPO
Well this is kind of different thing since it's politics that is not necessary related to your business (I assume).

Here you had people leaving because of the clash between business ideology and their (as well the outsides) moral values. The company did not only advance and hire people who already had no moral values. They just found out. Now they shift people around until the compatible ones stay.
Not sure about the conditions of employment with Google, but if he has archives of emails long after he's left the company, could a lawsuit be forthcoming?
Borland never followed into the web space, people still use vim and tweak css.
China is doing something different entirely here. Denying facts to keep the population under control, for instance. That is different entirely from what the typical Western country censors: advertising illegal drugs, child porn, hate speech, etc.

https://www.businessinsider.com/words-china-banned-from-sear...
Survival bias applies to a lot of situations. For example, in a system where corruption is endemic, non-corrupt officials won’t get promoted (because they have no dirt higher ups can use against them and/or don’t bribe the right people), leaving only corrupt officials. Do non-corrupt officials exist? Yes, but they are not likely to survive to he noticed.
I typically think of this as a unique advantage that programmers have. In almost every other industry I see, I see people who never get the chance to focus all their attention on intellectually challenging tasks for hours without break, and a lot of them seem super distracted and like their brain have been negatively affected by this absence. But programmers seem like the rare species that actually do get this privilege, and this is usually the reason I prefer intellectual conversations with coders than almost anyone else (even when the topic is something other than engineering).
Thanks for summing up the must-have features for any survey tool! Great read! :)
How a Wooden Bench in Zimbabwe Is Starting a Revolution in Mental Health
I just finished my first read through of that book last night after having had it in my “backlog” for years. I’m kicking myself for not reading it earlier. It really was a fantastically intriguing read and definitely recommend it to anyone interested in the subject matter.
Why is my smart device making me feel dumb?
>What?? In chapter 4, you write your own Lisp interpreter. If they had chosen C++, would you be writing a C++ compiler?

There was a site [0] that had SiCP exercises in various other languages.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20100503233725/http://www.codepo...
From a world wide perspective, google yielding the search market to China has yet to effect them since their competitors operating there are not at all competitive.

Edited my origins comment for clarity.
There was all kind of tension and power plays between the two kinds of authority. Titles don't reveal everything. Even popular revolts (especially helped by the army), for example, would often dispose of one emperor and get another in power.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3163118?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...
Reminds me of the art of value podcast that talks all about positioning yourself to provide value, not services.

As a UX designer who has positioned himself as consultant, I now have fewer projects but charge for value provider. There is more downtime in between projects but I actually end up making more money. If I get 2 or 3 projects at once, it's really nice.

Of course, I have to decline 98% of requests coming my way but it's well worth it. The businesses I partner with realize a good ROI and everyone is happy. Just so happens this process filters out a lot of the undesirable qualities in businesses I don't want to work with.

I had to eliminate every mention of client, freelancing and rates from every piece of content I have put out, because I think the moment you position yourself as subservient to your "client" the game is over. I see it more as a business parntership.
Did they actually fire him for the reason they said?
Fun fact: While the later (PSP3000) models could, early models (PSP1000) couldn't charge via mini USB. Not too relevant but it's a common misconception.
Winamp 6, due out in 2019, aims to whip more llama ass
> I'm guessing epistemology or a similar field has pondered the "invented or discovered" question already, and if so, I want to read about it.

Any course or book on the Philosophy Of Science would cover that. Are numbers discovered or invented? Did the ancient hindu mathematician invent the number zero or did he discover it? You could argue that the symbolic representation of zero was invented ( or was it? ) but the idea of the number zero was discovered. The more you delve into it, the more you realize things aren't as straightforward as you might have imagined.

Or quicksort. Is it an invention or a discovery? You could go back and forth on it forever.
How Exercise Might “Clean” the Alzheimer's Brain
When I read SICP, I worked through the exercises in Forth. I had to implement my own garbage collector, create dialect extensions for nice list notation, build a thunk-based mechanism for closure... with the right groundwork laid, Forth can keep up pretty well. I was always somewhat dissatisfied that cute metacircular lisp interpreters leave as tautologies so many important details of their own mechanics.
I feel that "no one gets fired for choosing X" is such a pervasive non-sequitur.

A brand's goodwill (trust and so forth) is a function of its ability to deliver success for the client. Success establishes that trust. People who run projects internally, and use consultancies or agencies, still have business requirements like any other team (whether internal or external). I can't imagine a team would be immune to scrutiny of a project failure (i.e. from shareholders) simply because they relied on a third-party. The same argument doesn't make sense if Amazon AWS suffered downtime, for instance?

I can't imagine a CTO or VP of Engineering turning around to a team that failed to deliver as a result of poor partner selection, and saying "nah, you're all good, we'll blame them." As blaming a third-party doesn't re-coup the millions in lost opportunity, shareholder backlash, press, etc.
16 Key Experience Indicators: Your UX Needle
The only morality of the global economy is growth.
The SEC cracks down hard on ATSs. But it's rarely for what they do. It's for what they didn't do ... Which is be transparent and disclose. This is the case in the link and something I've observed with all these SEC actions brought against ATSs.

The flow I explained in one way these guys make money. It's certainly exaggerated. At the one place I worked we ran a $0.5bn book of this stuff. You don't always get chances to get out. So risk management is key. Your book turns over every few days.
> Right now I'm considering moving to developing on a Galaga Pro and using Windows/WSL. I've got most things setup on my desktop how I like using HyperTerm (I had too much trouble with Cmder)

Hyper's got a few critical bugs, and Cmd is just ConEmu). If you want iTerm2 like functionality on Windows, Terminus destroys Hyper, ConEmu, Alaciritty and everything else.

https://github.com/mikemaccana/powershell-profile
I can’t recommend this book enough. It is one of the most important ideas in my life. The book is good, but the ideas and observations are critical. It really helps me manage my ADHD. A lot more goes into it, but the basic notion is: more deep work hours = more productivity = moving the needle in my universe more.
I wouldn't agree, at any given time there is a lot of disagreement and non-consensus in given fields. So we need to new research to gather additional evidence. If every research paper tried to argue for a particular prior and posterior, rather than just gathering evidence, we would never make progress toward consensus either...
Caesaropapism is an old understanding of the state of affairs in the Byzantine empire, which has been abandoned by modern scholars.

In fact the link you posted admits so:

"However, Caesaropapism "never became an accepted principle in Byzantium."[10] Several Eastern churchmen such as John Chrysostom, Patriarch of Constantinople[6] and Athanasius, Patriarch of Alexandria, strongly opposed imperial control over the Church, as did Western theologians like Hilary of Poitiers and Hosius, Bishop of Córdoba.[11] Saints, such as such as Maximus the Confessor, resisted the imperial power as a consequence of their witness to orthodoxy, . In addition, at several occasions imperial decrees had to be withdrawn as the people of the Church, both lay people, monks and priests, refused to accept inventions at variance with the Church's customs and beliefs. These events show that power over the Church really was in the hands of the Church itself – not solely with the emperor."
I used to do this, too, but it eats up a lot of CPU for just a music player. For Linux music, I've moved onto cmus.
That isn’t true at all. People prefer companies that provide them the services they want at the best price. A few activists that prefer otherwise are fairly niche.

China has a somewhat free market, but the lack of rule of law means that the rules governing it are more complex (in addition to, or even instead of, following the law you have to be pleasing politically to the government).
You mean, you have to pretend you abide by the tenets...
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Too Many Meetings, No Result? Here’s the Solution
If we presume that the world isn't black and white, and we give some credence to the principle of "least harm"..

There's a case to be made for providing more net information while being less than 100 percent morally pure in the process.

The choice we're confronted with isn't "uncensored vs censored". It's "more information and access vs less information and access".

It's a practical call. Chinese people are very practical, they'll figure it out.
The limit of profit based entities. Capitalism today but probably as old as humans.
Tedium is actually the name of a fairly popular mailing list [0] about weird backstories to phenomena in everyday life.

[0]: https://tedium.co/
Integra Ledger Launches Tools to Add Blockchain Tech to All Legal Software
Sim only mobiel bellen is goedkoop bellen zonder abonnement
35M US voter records available for sale in a hacking forum
I read the headline as "vulnerabilities in the programmers themselves" (the humans), and thought it was just awkwardly worded. I thought it would be something about bribery and blackmail.
Hmm, really?

In a capitalist society (such as we live in, like it or not), we express value in money. IF your company isn't making money, is it adding value? If people aren't willing to pay for it, is it actually any use to them?

The notable example for this is Facebook. We don't pay for it. Advertisers do. That shows where the value is...
Are you conciously victimizing Facebook's leadership?

It makes money, but it has a net negative social effect. Do we, as a society, stigmatize, or at least not encourage greed? We don't. So you might as well say that these people are not the victims of the mythical, absolute evil, aka the devil; they're victims of our conflicted sense of value.
Because Baidu is monopolizing the search market in China. It also is especially dependent on misleading medicl searches financially. Organizationally there are reports that Lu Qi, its former CEO just lost out fighting those in favour of this business model. And CEO Robin Li is either bizarrely very delusional about the integrity of his business or extremely wicked in not giving a shit about cheating people into buying shoddy medical services. Baidu is evil pure and simple. Google on the other hand will be under special scrutiny from both the Chinese gov and overseas, though ironically for entirely opposite reasons. It’s extremely unlikely it will do anything remotely similiar to what Baidu does.
As job governmental organizations, they have little influence in this. Sure they could lobby, but the voters and government branches need to be on board with it also.
What an absurd false dichotomy. “Either let Google assist the Chinese government in censoring information or my Grandmother will die.” Seriously? It’s the government’s responsibility to prohibit false advertising, and in an environment that lacks such regulation, there’s no reason to think Google will do a better job of self-policing such ads than Baidu.
> My suspicion is that you were in a "bad neighbourhood" - ie. using a hosting or email service that didn't keep their IP's squeaky clean.

No, not really, we are using one the most expensive offerings in Switzerland. Renting dedi servers for spamming would be not only extremely expensive, they would kick you right away if they noticed. As i said we did nothing wrong, used monitoring and our invoice emails would sometimes end in the spamlist for microsoft, after trying to get it right i gave up and hooked mandrill.

if you are runnig some random internet forum, some part of your notifications ending in spam is not a big deal, but for us, invoices ending in spam box is not something you can ignore.
The new fast.ai research datasets collection, on AWS Open Data
>Why is it that so many vocal ex-employees are against censorship in china, but demand censorship in the US?

When have google employees demanded censorship in the US?
Could anyone explain to me how would an open protocol alternative to FB be more resilient to a government backed propaganda campaign like this one?
Screenhero used to be great for remote pair programming, but as its gone to premium slack only I haven't been able to use it since. I'm surprised there haven't been any copycats made since it was acquired
The Odyssey is the archetype for an entire genre of "road trip" stories throughout history. It's also, more broadly, a key point of influence for many aspects of the Campbellian hero's journey. The Iliad simply hasn't exerted the same level of influence on storytelling.
There is still http://symbolhound.com/ for search that doesn't ignore special characters but the index is probably not that big.
Yes, just like there are two gates halls/buildings named after Bill’s mom and dad. It is fortunate that the CSE building at UW is named after Allen rather than Gates, unlike MIT.

I went to UW in the 90s when Allen library was brand new and the new CS building was just a dream.
How about delayed effects? I can't read the article, but does the article mention what the natural decay rate of these pesticides is?
1/5 still use old Symantec certs (Certificate Transparency scan)
That's the standard short-term vision: Oh this won't affect us this year so we don't need to care...
They probably failed due to bad product management.
I agree. So why have so many programmers in Silicon Valley? Why don’t they leave and demand independent contracts? Perhaps that kind of “unbundling” of technical talent is the future.
Also, people in positions of potential power to steer a company back on the right course leave in protest at the most cruicial moments, opening a spot at the wheel for a yes-person.
Securing your users' authentication
Spreading behaviour is so important. Which means it's important to make it "cool" to be environmentally conscious. I think people sometimes underestimate the cool factor when it comes to spreading ideas.
This. I still have the CS6 installed and use it often.
Communism Might Last a Million Years
> If Google doesn't move in, someone else will eventually fill the vacuum. Who?

This is eerily reminiscent of arguments that people have used around Project Maven (cloud compute for drone footage). At this point I am starting to wonder if this style of argument has a fundamental weakness. E.g. if immoral act "X" is going to be done by someone, is it logical that the most moral actor "A" must do this? In the limit, this has the most moral actors doing the most evil. In fact, it has the most moral actors being the first to jump in to do evil, before anyone else even gets a chance to. That seems totally backwards.
4. Global consumerism is built on global labor arbitrage (read: exploitation of the poor). People are somewhat aware it but politicians only care about large companies making big profits.
Of the successful founders that I'm acquainted with, and this may not be representative, I'd say that an incredibly competitive nature is pretty common.

Oh, and definitely not patience. If anything, they've been some of the least patient people I know.
On microcontrollers, you might as well change to lookup tables if you are trying to do something real-time with more than 100 operations per millisecond.

This varies by microcontroller obviously.. this comes from reimplementing GLSL shadertoy samples for a neopixel grid.
Just to pick on the example a little bit (understanding it's not your main point).

A scrum consultant would have most likely failed at the first step anyway, because a consultant is going to sell scrum as a tried and tested, repeatable offering, and all it takes is to implement the framework.

That's not how 'organisational transformation' works at all, but the process piece is easily marketable and looks exactly like a checklist you can tick off item by item: standup? check. Sprint review? check. Jira? check. Self-empowered teams and servant leaders? Errrr, that's not on the list! Retrospectives? Hesitant check.

It takes a lot more effort to shift habits, empower teams, and reframe leadership expectations, and you need coaching and mentorship to make that happen. That's where the real work is once you've read the scrum framework instruction manual.

So on that level I can understand why scrum might seem so dreadful. I've dealt with enough of that kind of crap myself and it's stressful, but I've seen it done brilliantly too and it's been a fantastic way to work.
Such as the 99.9% of human knowledge that isn't politically objectionable to the CCP?
I don't think you're understanding.

Let's suppose that you had open protocols. How would that stop the spread of false and incendiary information about the Rohingya in this case? I mean, these people just happen to use Facebook to spread that information because Facebook is available. Who's to say they wouldn't just use the open protocol servers to spread the information if Facebook had not been available?

This sort of thing is simply a consequence of being able to spread information. So Zuckerberg can run, we hackers can come up with open protocols, and whatever else, but this problem would still exist.

This is just my opinion, but I don't think open protocols solve this problem, because this is a human problem at its root. The problem is the people, not really the tools.
Thank you for this essay, it is truly magnificent. It reminds me of pg's "What You'll Wish You'd Known" [1].

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html
We (OpenStateFoundation) scanned 15070 Dutch (.nl) Symantec certificates that are in the Certificate Transparency via crt.sh, which are valid for 45822 different domain names (including wildcard certificates), which of 26971 are below the .nl-tld (and of which 19648 unique names, if www/non-www and * are normalized to the plain domain), which resulted in 3801 that still needing replacement (the scan in the article is based on a CN scan, later I also did a scan based on the valid DNS names in the cert).

On average 1 in 5, probably other TLDs have a similar score.
If you turn off the "show the best tweets first" option in your content preferences you get a chronological timeline back. (They made this change a month or two ago)
I was already assuming that was the goal here. Not talking about seeking creative control, idealism about a job, etc.
yeah but with consistent design ;)
The fact that such a service is necessary is a bad sign for Twitter's UX.
Here is what I think. Do you have something you really want to achieve? Writing a book? Learning something new to advance your career? Whatever it is you must carve our deep work time for it. Waking up early, etc.

How to select your “whatever it is”. Don’t start small. Think about it every day. I think this will prime your brain to help you find it. Keep a journal focused on this. It probably won’t take too long. If you are still hit by analysis paralysis some times you just have to flip a coin and force a decision. This catalyst will often make the right choice clear (e.g if the coin flip lands on a thing you aren’t as excited about).

Final thought, practice deep work at your job. Prime your colleagues for when you will be in deep work. 2-3 hour stretches are a minimum IMO. Really entire days are ideal, but 2-3 hour stretches are good enough if they are truly distraction free.
It wouldn't.

The reality is that this is not a technology problem. It is a human problem.