chrstphrhrt

Given how badly Yahoo seems to be doing financially, and considering other high profile "failures" like Parse being shut down by Facebook and Apple being challenged by the state: I wonder whether these big companies can continue to extract rents after open sourcing and retrofitting everything with decentralised protocols, encryption etc.

That seems like a preferable direction from a consumer point of view than forcing society to rebuild everything from scratch, despite the fact that things like GitLab, blockchain and p2p social networks are not inherently inferior. Adoption is hard. "Charity" is the same as PR, so there might be more side benefit than the original speculators hoped for with the failed centralised business models by opening up and decentralising.

I think a lot of full time workers can still be wage slaves.

Maybe a living wage is a better benchmark. The minimum required to "thrive" with a normal list of opportunities/choices that people can be expected to encounter. E.g., car required if not living in high-density urban environment, raising children, having pets, buying simple furniture, healthy food, internet access, life and house/rental insurance etc. It's all about access to thriving, not access to luxury, and in each place and circumstance that access is different, but living wages can be indexed to all these factors. The more factors included to counter the various axes of oppression the better.

For example, in Canada we have the Canadian Centre for Policy alternatives which publishes living wage data/indexes every year for a number of cities.

A few years back I helped cofound a programming and design worker co-op with a handful of other people and we discussed using such an index to determine salaries for members in different cities. E.g. if the Montreal team gets 4x the local living wage, then the Vancouver team also gets 4x their local living wage, even if the absolute amount appears higher.

and are awesome at alliteration

I used to think this way, but what happens when they become dependent on you for emotional/financial/whatever sustenance?

I think those who are 'fun' to 'fix' are therefore at risk of dependency on that. Like a drug.

Thanks!

Wow this is really great. Interested in how the prism proxy thing can work for reversing existing (un-specced) APIs. Can you shed some light on that?

Which order were they taught in?

I had the same curriculum but was utterly bewildered by derivatives being the first topic. For the simple reason that until that point I had habitually looked at "wholes" in the external world, only then to wonder "what kinds of things progressively make it up?"

I feel like to derive something, you start with the assumption that you know what you're talking about fist. Yet the thing is actually the sum of its parts. Therefore integration seems more natural at first, and only then can things similar to it be derived with confidence.

So the teaching order seemed backwards. I wonder if anyone has felt the same way.

Okay. Then I'd be interested to know about atomism after Lucretius and before the renaissance. Who was the first modern "inventor" of it?

My comment was meant to express alarm that anyone could say there was no lost library buried by Vesuvius.

Here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_of_the_Papyri#Epicureani...

Umm what? "[Pompeii and Herculaneum] weren’t necessarily vast repositories of lost literature"

Not sure about Pompeii, but Herculaneum had the villa of Piso with tons of scrolls from Philodemus, who totally fleshed out the ideas of Epicurus, upon whose atomism all of modern science is based.

I think where the shovel/pickaxe analogy breaks down with startups is that they often think their tech is part of their secret sauce when really they're just doing standard things in an interesting vertical, but still insist on reinventing the implementation to justify using up their funding to match the target runway/projections.

I wonder if some kind of "anti-drone invisibility cloak" could be a thing. Or some kind of tiny turreted laser light that can detect a camera and point a beam into its lens. Maybe an app to detect signatures of drones approaching by their radio signals or rotor sounds.

Woohoo! This is great.

Thanks for the great feedback, you're completely right. I have switched up the language a bit.

Regarding hypermedia: I really, really want to work with someone to add first class support for it. I don't think spec is a replacement but rather a compliment to hypermedia. The difference in benefit seeming to be static vs. dynamic client generation and I fully agree that dynamic ought to be the future. Right now static is easy to implement and still quite powerful despite requiring tradeoffs about things like needing to version releases of client libs rather than them being more durable in the dynamic scenario.

Relevant: here's a reply I made to a similar question on the original post: https://medium.com/@chrstphrhrt/thanks-1b19b2e3ec09#.g493c33...

We're working on the 'winning' part with http://ramses.tech :)

The projects you listed above are just spec formats that describe APIs. In the case of RAML there are companies out there including MuleSoft that are building generators and other kinds of services around it. I believe the same goes for Swagger and the others.

Author here, the project I was referring to is a massive unwieldy Scala project using the Play framework (nothing inherently wrong with those choices). It has 177k LOC. It is a matter of months old. It is complete spaghetti and it's impossible to find what does what without learning IDE tricks.

Guess I could have mentioned that. So actually my experience confirms the observations of Fowler about breaking up existing things rather than starting out with bunch of different services because fads.

That said, I would still start breaking up services that are orthogonal to one another in the same way as one might break up db tables. Iff the interface for writing new services is comprised entirely of a spec for endpoints and their corresponding data schemas. If instead you're thinking of how risky it would be to have a handful of separate services all with their own pile of fragmenting boilerplate to maintain, then yeah, I'd agree a monolith is better still if that's the only option.

Bahaha, nice.

Very naive question: if the tube is a vacuum with no drag from atmosphere, why should a pod design be aerodynamic?

I'd like to point out that Ramses (http://ramses.tech) has these abilities: https://nefertari-guards.readthedocs.org/en/stable/acl_filte...

Looks like we need to start marketing better :)

Whoah Kinto looks cool. Thanks for pointing that out.

I'm one of the Ramses devs http://ramses.tech and we've been working on related problems from an "executable spec" angle.

Seems backend automation is about abstracting storage/syncing and also about making development fast and accessible to different skill levels.

This looks really cool.

Do you have a gitter channel or something?

Would love to talk shop about the design decisions! Email me at chris at ramses dot tech.

(I'm one of the devs of http://ramses.tech)

Fuck ambition for its own sake. It only causes a race to the bottom and short-changes users/customers.

I have used this strategic vacuum technique as a manager to great effect before.

It brings out the best creativity and allows people who are going through apparent productivity lulls to come out of them in a healthy, smarter way. It also builds lasting loyalty and a strong team spirit.

Velocity isn't just hours spent butt-in-seat or number of commits or whatever. It's precious moments of high quality attention. To maximize that you need to be more like a conductor of an orchestra than a drill sergeant.

CAVEAT: when under a high-pressure situation with a new team it is sometimes necessary to limit freedom, demand trust, and command things for the purpose of getting through that situation. Obviously it's dangerous and the wrong kind of manager can get addicted to this kind of solution easily. These temporary command-and-control moments can sometimes be used as trust builders for the managers if, once the situation is resolved, they immediately relinquish the extraordinary power they had used and return to a more natural/creative dynamic - the team will see this as honourable since it didn't technically _have_ to happen that way.

I agree with this for almost anything too. Yeah there's talent but if you're remotely creative at all, coding, drawing and making music can all be learned by doing.

We used elastalert on a project and it did the trick: https://github.com/Yelp/elastalert

I get KHTML (WebKit ancestor from KDE browser), but what does "like Gecko" mean? Do they add some compatibility layer to render like Gecko does?

This seems intuitively obvious.

Is there any particular research on this topic that would provide some depth for the curious?

How do you go about qualifying and reviewing the abilities and performance of non-adult caretakers in a way that is also useful to their own development?

One would think so. Doing open source consulting in Montreal I've discovered that Canada is pretty backwards on average when it comes to having access to lots of forward-thinking companies to trade with. Many investments seem to be very focused on cheapness and "deliverables" with bad specs as a preferred approach to software development, when most engineers have acknowledged for a long time that working iteratively is better.

The Canadian environment is extremely fertile for exploitation by US companies though, and we're having some success working with them already. It helps that the exchange rate is favourable. I would like to see much more competition and American money around here if only to teach the crusty old guard what it means to be innovative.

I'd love to see services overtake natural resources as a main export because it would be more sustainable and it would improve the lives of regular people a lot more than, say, unrefined oil or softwood lumber do.

I like to think that some day when the main currency is energy rather than money, one of the primary things it is exchanged for is attention. Seems to me that these are the most fundamental scarce resources that need to be managed sustainably.

Attention bonds would combine perfectly with cryptocurrencies to provide a general basis for contracts. Perhaps it could make for an honest ad business!

I tend to believe that centralization of power will lead to corruption simply by making it more possible/likely.

Do you think that something like Ethereum (https://www.ethereum.org) would enable us to sidestep these kinds of problems, at least on the web?

What other ways might we design our systems to be resilient against unethical treatment?

I like using httpie for documentation, tutorials and blog posts because I feel it is more readable. I also really like how you can skip the whole "http://localhost/" bit for local development. Just "http :9200" for elasticsearch, "http :6543" for pyramid etc.

Agreed that curl is good for things that should be copied and pasted directly or for matters of distribution because it is guaranteed to be installed everywhere.

Would also love a httpie2curl converter for those times when testing in httpie and needing to distribute the requests to places without it.