Really great point. Wish it has occurred to me.
1,665 karma · joined August 6, 2011
Talk about "misuse of power" and you lose the attention of the very people you are trying to convince. It might just be the trivialities (and peoples desire to protect themselves from them) that create more fury and action that talking about the real issues.
I think it is smart of Snowden to take the tact that will resonate with the most people. It might be a sideshow, but it is a useful sideshow that might move the ball forward on the big issues.
I for example, would like a multiplier based on my backlog. I might start at 20 cents an email -- but if I have 1,000 messages waiting for me to read, I would increase the price to contact me to $20 an email -- because at a certain point I can't keep up and the value per email drops to 0.
Meaning, it would be easy for me to emulate 10,000 slow computers with one powerful one, doing 2 minutes of work 10,000x parallel (claiming each of these computers is very weak) and that completely bypasses the "beautiful" solution.
Sending BTC works because it isn't gameable (at this point). I like the idea of a ฿0.0001 (or even ฿0.001, 20 cents) fee for each email sent to me. It is a little over 2 cents US -- would absolutely stop spammers (most it cost prohibitive for them), but hopefully would not stop normal users.
My understanding of the Feynman Algorithm was that it was basically a joke by Gell-Mann. Gell-Mann was pointing out that no one else on earth (even himself, a Noble prize winner) could work the way Feynman did, the joke being that he only needed three steps: (1) Write down the problem. (2) Think real hard. (3) Write down the solution. It was about the absurd brilliance of Feynman, not intended as any sort of useful model to follow.
My point is -- Unlicense doesn't do too much to minimize license friction and actually creates complicated international issues. I don't use it -- because I don't want to have to hand out "special" licenses based on where my users live.
I would just point out that you owe zero loyalty to what you thought yesterday (or 30 seconds ago). Maintaining views despite new information and logic is just dogma. Once you make things dogma and they conflict, you can either be a hippocrit (which at least makes you self-aware) or create ridiculous tortured logic to try to self-justify (which seems to be what you are asking for help with?) -- both are problematic, and IMHO harmful.
Using it to dependably route billions of messages a day is not some crazy off the wall "adopting a pet language" -- it was picking a language that had already been proven (and explicitly designed) to work in a very similar problem domain. It was a smart, reasonable, sane choice that they then pushed to awesome extremes.
> How do you teach people then?
You can't really, teach to the best of your ability and try to send students out with an ability to learn. It is MORE harmful to PRETEND you know what is going on than to openly admit you don't and are attempting to learn. False knowledge is worse than real confusion.
> Where can i learn how to do my job correctly?
In this field, it is a young and crazy field, maybe you will be the one who pioneers a way to actually do things more consistently... maybe you will just serve up another nonsense silver bullet.
> can you imagine medical students being taught "yea just try something and see what happens, hopefully your patient doesn't die and you'll learn something for the next patient."
Doctors kill patients all the time via mistakes, it is actually one of the leading causes of death in the western world... the half-life of medical knowledge tends to be less than a decade, so a decade out of school, a lot of what they know is wrong, or worse... actively harmful. We turn doctors into gods because it COMFORTS US, not because it has any connection to reality.
For a few decades medallion holders won, taxi drivers and taxi riders lost. Competition in a market that has been free of it for a long time will always be extremely disruptive.
> I think it's not reasonable to blindly obey over-aggressive and unfounded requests
which is a perspective that will LITERALLY get someone killed if they believe it. That is why I used uppercase, because it is actually really important, not everyone takes the time to properly research what rights they have (and don't have).
> But what if Brown wasn't attacking the officer but defending himself?
We actually got into a bit of a debate at dinner discussing if you have the right to defend yourself against an unjust arrest -- short version: "nope". In 1900 there was a case that went that way, but since then it was been reversed... and even more specifically overruled in various state ordinances. Even if you did have the right to physical resist (again, you don't, so don't resist arrest) an "unjust arrest" ... you aren't informed of the reason you are being arrested at the time of arrest, you don't have enough information to even claim it is unjust.
> If Michael Brown is struggling to get free after being unnecessarily assaulted by Wilson and then sees Wilson draw his gun then of course he is going to strike the officer trying to flee.
This is put forth as factual "of course". But, it isn't the common case -- most people when assaulted (justified or not) by a police officer surrender, and if it escalates to having a gun drawn... they... you guessed it, surrender. The vast majority of police officers make it to retirement without firing their weapon while on duty.
> First, I'm sure most people believe that if a police officer tells you to do something you do it. That might be really good advice, especially if you have brown skin, but I think it's not reasonable to blindly obey over-aggressive and unfounded requests just because the person has a badge.
You can think what you want, but you have NO RIGHT to EVER resist arrest, that is the simple fact, there is no law on your side, and it will end horribly for you. You submit, you get arrested, you offer NO resistance and then you take action AFTER the fact (sue, try to get them fired, take it to the press, whatever).
Compare that to this post, it isn't about the posters personal experience or testimonial, they claim none, it is objective points, not a personal testimonial about how "Uber saved my life 7 weeks ago..."
http://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/press-rel...
... so I stand by my initial point, when you CAN have a rational debate, DO have a rational debate. When you can't -- you are right to call astroturfing, no way to argue with how people feel or unsubstantiated personal claims.
Additionally, Uber is exploding in popularity because taxi's did a horrible job, abused their government granted monopolies and basically made life miserable for people... the first person in my peer group to start using Uber regularly did it because of the challenge of getting a cab while black late at night.
What they wrote would be exactly as valid or invalid as it is now. Account age (education, job title, etc) does not magically validate (or invalidate) ideas, they have to stand on their own.
The song sung by old engineers who refuse to learn new technology, so they try to make knowing few a positive (it isn't). The classic "It's not a bug, it's a feature!"
I don't think the core of a good developer has changed much since the early 90s. You still want people whose skill-set is T-shaped... You want them to go deep on at least a few domains, but you want them to have broad experience in lots of them. The broad experience makes for developers who are better than the sum of their parts, can adopt solutions from other domains and can communicate better.
I generally won't consider too seriously a "senior" engineer who has only a single "class" of knowledge. I realize that sometimes they have limited control over this (the jobs they happen to get, yada), but I just want the best developers... and in my experience they find a way to follow Norvig's advice and at least toy with some of the major flavors: DBC, functional, class, syntax, declarative, concurrent, parallel...
As a contractor working on laptops for years, it never become my "normal" keyboard.
I experimented with god-mode, which seems like a good middle, but I am a highly competent 2 decade vim user, the vim keys are virtually hard-coded into my brain.
Once you get used to using them, you will only use / or : when the search or command you want is absolutely simple and straightforward.
:normal lets you use normal commands at a command line, often used for automation or scripting stuff... so you can do :normal 5j to go down 5 lines.
C-n is just normal complete
Slack has a lovely web client and both XMPP and IRC gateways -- meaning most everyone can use their favorite interface.