brianpgordon

Since I closed my BoA account I've been using privacy.com for temporary credit card numbers. It "just works" - for me at least - and I haven't been charged a dime. They make their money from interchange fees.

Companies do not magically become exempt from needing to behave ethically just because they're participants in the economy. If, for example, some government is committing human rights violations, companies have an ethical obligation not to enable it, even if the services they offer aren't under specific legal sanctions. This idea of a company just doing business with no social or ethical responsibility to anyone other than stockholders is an ancap fantasy.

And Gitlab isn't some unconcerned third party passing judgment on morality for the rest of us. We're not talking about your local Dairy Queen franchise gratuitously taking a position on Brexit for no reason. The only power Gitlab has is to withhold their own service. If you're going to argue that their service is so important for society to function that withholding that service constitutes being an "arbiter of morality for society," to the extent that's even true it only increases their responsibility to make sure its products aren't used for evil. A Dairy Queen franchisee doesn't have much power so they don't have much responsibility, but a Google or an IBM has enormous power to make a difference and therefore they have enormous responsibility.

I fundamentally don't agree that corporations should be given carte blanche to use any legal options to maximize profit with no regard to the consequences. The political process and legislation/regulation is probably a better way to address companies behaving unethically, but given that in many cases our political process has failed to put those laws in place we need to hold corporations accountable ourselves.

I'm not very familiar with Haskell - is this still a useful first tutorial or has the language changed too much since 2007?

PG&E paid $798 million in dividends in 2017 and $925 million in 2016.

"The shutoff, potentially lasting from Wednesday morning until Thursday afternoon, is meant to target fire-prone areas only"

> You receive a job offer from a startup currently valued at $10m, with a strike price of $2.5m.

Isn't backdating employee stock options like this kind of sketchy/illegal? If the company is worth $10m and you accept a job offer and get an option grant, you don't get options priced as if you accepted the job offer back when the company was worth $2.5m.

They realized that something was off, obviously. They were just saying it was confusing at first because without the context of knowing who Barr is, "AG" is a nonsense word. The only remaining parse is a soft-drink company.

I think briefly it was considered cutting edge to have your page content be delivered as an XML document, with an accompanying XSL or XSLT file to mechanically translate the XML into a full-fledged XHTML page suitable for rendering in a browser. I even saw it once on some public website, I think maybe for a Blizzard game? The content XML looked great; very intuitive. The XSLT stuff for translating into XHTML, well, not so much.

I mean, I doubt that many UK natives know the name of the US Attorney General off the top of their heads. It seems like a reasonable mixup to me.

I worry about the legacy we're leaving gen Z, and all of the people just coming online in developed countries, for whom mobile is their native computing environment. We can put our phones away and retreat to our "real computers" to scratch our tinkering itch, but that's not accessible or appealing to everyone. When I was a kid, just clicking all the things opened up new vistas of topics to explore, like clicking "view source" in Netscape Navigator leading to getting a book to learn about HTML. There's no "view source" option in Chrome or Safari for mobile.

How is that even relevant? The parent was specifically saying that you should be able to sideload apps so that even if an app was removed from the official store, you could still install it.

Your point about deadlines gets to the heart of the issue I think. Scrum and agile are flawed in many ways, but generally you can bend the methodology to at least mitigate the issues. The one totally unsolvable existential problem, though, is the impedance mismatch between a team trying to be agile and a customer who's almost invariably not.

The idea that your team can work on an open-ended basis with the customer to add functionality a piece at a time and dynamically adjust expectations as you gradually pin down the requirements and get a better idea of how much work they'll take, is, unfortunately, a fantasy. Somewhere up the chain, someone is going to want to know how much it's going to cost to get the features they want. The very best you can hope for is to estimate (ha ha) how long the milestone/project will take and then attempt to conduct scrum within that time box. But it's farcical and demoralizing because you end up structuring your sprints with what you know you need to get done instead of just what you think you can reasonably get done. The "agile" nature of it fractures the very first time you get behind your guesstimated schedule.

I think the process could work if you win the lottery with a customer who's actually enthusiastic about embracing the uncertainty of agile, or if you work in a type of org that sets its own release schedule. But unfortunately I think those situations are rare and for most of us the fundamental mismatch between agile developers and non-agile stakeholders kill the whole idea.

Collections of words like this really amuse me for some reason. I have my own collection of animal names which are also verbs:

https://gist.github.com/briangordon/e64d58b6b9abab346014ff05...

I don't know what the downvotes are about. I'm right. This stuff isn't magic. The mechanism of grapefruit-drug interactions is well-understood.

There's no need to guess; you can look up specifically whether CYP450 enzymes metabolize your medications (and its metabolites). If not then the answer is almost certainly that you're safe.

There might be technical reasons why browser extensions are particularly problematic and it might make sense to phase them out in their current form, so, to be clear, that's not what I'm getting hung up on. But there seems to be a broader acceptance of Apple's vision for a nice walled garden where users are safe from everything, especially themselves, and criticisms of this are just "bitching" from people who need to see the bigger picture. I'm sorry but I don't accept that.

Mobile is the primary user environment for a whole generation of kids and millions of people coming online in developing countries around the world. What we're bequeathing them is worse than anything in early-2000s Slashdot's worst paranoid nightmares. Billions of iPhones only load OS images signed by Apple and jailbreaks are aggressively patched as urgent security issues, guaranteeing vendor lock-in. Third-party code is too dangerous so users have to get it from a vendor-controlled app store and sideloading is forbidden for security reasons. You can't have browser extensions because they can see too much, so now you have to hope that Apple implements an API for whatever you were trying to do. There's a weird double standard where the tech literati are fine with things on mobile that they would never accept on their desktop. I guess it's because we have the luxury of putting our phones away and retreating to our "real computers" to scratch our tinkering itch. Not everyone has that privilege, or inclination. If the freedom to tinker means anything to you then mobile shouldn't be an exception.

I don't think the walled garden is even necessarily good for the ill-informed or careless users we're trying to protect. Checking out the "Advanced" mode is how users learn. While it may be dangerous for a casual user to be able to run a command or make a tweak they found recommended on some website, it also can be incredibly helpful - software doesn't always work correctly or the way that you want it to, and there's not always a nice button that does exactly what you need. And there's a real danger of the browser and the other public API surfaces calcifying to only permit what Apple thinks about ahead of time, smothering innovation that could have genuinely benefited users. Imagine if computers followed this philosophy from the beginning. I doubt users would enjoy an app store where user input (text only, of course) is sent securely into the app's stdin and output is text fed securely from the app's stdout to the screen, with no interference permitted by potentially insecure code attempting to provide things like scrollback because it could see all of the user's activity.

So yes, protecting users from the worst malware can be a thing but it's not as obvious as you make it sound that this should necessarily entail removing agency from the user. By aiming for the lowest common denominator user, Apple is depriving everyone else of real advantages. And, I would argue, producing a sterile and stilted experience that's best for no-one.

Fantastic article. The diatribe against estimation reminds me of this old article from 1996: https://web.archive.org/web/20140604112011/http://www.thomse...

> It is our belief that over the 30 plus years of commercial computing has developed a series of sophisticated political games that have become a replacement for estimation as a formal process.

Unrelated: can we not do this thing with the whole left side of the screen being one static image? It's really distracting.

It makes the BBC article ridiculous, but not the academic article. Check it out; it's fascinating: https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/800591

All the more reason for employees to be excited about the opportunity to finally see liquidity for their shares.

Yeah I'm also pretty critical of their narrative of how centralized currency came about. Their timeline is wildly wrong. The author makes it seem like states started minting coinage in the middle ages, when the advantages of a standardized coin with a mandated-by-fiat face value (possibly different from the actual value) were well-known - and famously used to great effect by - even the early Roman Empire.

Then there's this sentence, which is just nonsense:

> All money was borrowed from the central treasury, at a rate of interest set by the king.

Hang on a second, since when are we this paranoid about installing software? I'm capable of deciding whether I trust a browser extension with the privileges I'm giving it, just the same as I'm capable of trusting any of the daemons running as root which could just as easily steal my personal data.

Sure, if all else were equal I guess I would trust Apple slightly more than an open-source extension developer, but all else is not equal - Apple is taking away the flexibility of arbitrary code and dictating that if you want to block ads in the browser then you have to use their regex-based declarative adblock API. I'm surprised to see such a warm reception on HN to a classic Apple "we're taking this away for your own good" kind of move that has historically not been very popular with enthusiasts.

What are you saying is the privacy advantage exactly? Regular adblockers also block requests before they happen - there's no "phoning home."

He's pointing out that there's a link to a full-size PDF sample of one of the templates on the landing page if you scroll down a little bit.

My eyebrows went up when I read "It was early 2017." I'm pretty sure I remember chatting about this at work in 2013 or very early 2014 and even then my understanding was that it was too late and that automated cross-exchange arb trading had already been done. It's exceptionally difficult to squeeze any profit out of this kind of very crowded trade. There have even been Twitter bots that have come and gone which automatically identify opportunities and broadcast to the whole world how an aspiring entrepreneur can lose a lot of money trying to make fractions of a penny if they act now.

> On Tuesday morning, the NY Fed launched what's called an "overnight repo operation," during which the central bank attempts to ease pressure in markets by purchasing Treasuries and other securities.

It was my (perhaps mistaken?) understanding that the Fed operates an overnight repo facility regularly - like, every night. It reads like CNN is reporting this like an exceptional emergency maneuver. Is the newsworthiness in fact just the size of the liquidity injection, and CNN is a little confused about what the ON repo does? Or am I mistaken about the Fed making overnight repo agreements regularly?

This is incredible. The various emergent behaviors are fascinating. I remember being amazed a decade ago by the primitive graphics in artificial life simulators like Polyworld:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyworld

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m97_kL4ox0&t=9m43s

It seems that OpenAI has a great little game simulated for their agents to play in. The next step to make this even cooler would be to use physical, robotic agents learning to overcome challenges in real meatspace!

Just a suggestion: I think it would be a good idea to showcase the variety of your available designs up-front, without requiring a signup. I imagine that a big reservation people will have is that they won't want their resume to be recognizable as "one of the three templates offered by that resume generator." You don't have to show a full PDF sample, but just a gallery showing that there is a large crowd of designs one can blend into would go a long way.

Technically we don't know for sure what the punishment was for. Especially given that he's said much worse things in the past without resigning, it's possible that these resignations were forced because of some yet worse comments which haven't become public. And even if all of the relevant material is public, it seems likely that this is just the culmination of many issues and the FSF board and supporters simply ran out of patience for rms's antics at last, and that the tone-deaf and bizarre defense of Minsky was just the last straw.

https://gfycat.com/negligiblesmugfirefly

Direct link to the document:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6405929-091320191420...

> Scholars have proposed various theories about the carvings' meaning. Svetlana Savchenko, a researcher at the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum, suggested that the decoration tells the creation myth those who carved it believed in. Other researchers at the museum have suggested that the markings could have served as a navigational aid or map. Professor Mikhail Zhilin, an archaeologist at the Institute of Archaeology in Moscow, guessed that the statue could depict mythological creatures such as forest spirits. Archeologist Peter Vang Peterson, of the National Museum of Denmark, speculated that the idol could serve as a warning not to enter a dangerous area.

So are they just literally making things up? This reminds me of Motel of the Mysteries. http://sultanaeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Motel...