cpks

To be fair, the "true origin" story is a little misleading. A bunch of douchebags wanted credit for Stallman's work and basically threw an underhanded hissy-cow to try to undermine him to co-opt his position. There was a pile of exaggerated (or often fabricated) stories thrown at the FSF. Commercial players came in to support the attack with a whole range of motives -- from wanting something more corporate to an "arm both sides" mentality to undercut the movement.

While I agree with your point, I'm not sure the alleged history supports it very well. It's a pretty ugly piece of the movement's history.

Now, that was two decades ago, those people are gone, and OSI is a very nice, good, and friendly organization today.

Nope. Open Source is a trademark precisely to avoid this sort of misuse. It's not a "what it means to whomever" sort of deal.

That was done in part due to intentional (and damaging, if ultimately unsuccessful) efforts to undermine the meaning of terms like 'Free Software' by Microsoft back when the FSF was a fledgling movement and Microsoft was an evil empire.

I don't mean to imply negative things about the company. The license is still a heck of a lot better than fully proprietary -- I love the product in part for that reason -- but it's definitely not 'open source' or 'free software' as the headline implies.

(I don't think the company claims it is either)

For example, if the Russian School of Math, or Kumon, wanted to adopt this calculator and software (commercial use, tutoring center), they'd be breaking the license.

This license is a non-starter...

I can't speak for this situation, but I was involved in situations with corporate crime at high levels. People were very cognizant of what was in email and what was verbal.

When I considered whistleblowing -- what started as little spiraled out of control -- and looked over evidence, there was very little.

One attorney at the company was fired for putting the wrong thing in writing.

It's an interesting project, but I'd never rely on it without some idea of what the goals are. Why isn't it open source? What's the business model? Will you charge me $1000 in two years, once I become dependent? Will it stay online in two years? Etc.

There's a certain transparency lacking.

It's fine to say "It's free for now, and will be $0.50 per month once mature" or "We plan to make it free for open images and charge $5,000 for proprietary use" or whatever. Or "We'll support it by doing machine learning to find naked images and pay for it by hosing a porn web site." Or "I'm developing this until I can sell it to the highest bidder."

But there needs to be some answer as to what the goal or business model is.

I'd like to know who has endorsed racism or misogyny. Could someone point me to such an endorsement from someone senior in Trump's administration?

I like the caption: "Liberty Writers News founders Paris Wade, left, and Ben Goldman work at their apartment in Long Beach, Calif., on Nov. 14, 2016. Stuart Palley For The Washington Post"

It flows like a single sentence.

I'll anti-vouch for Route53 for personal use. I use AWS pretty broadly, but with something like DNS, I like having a little bit more support if things go wrong. Amazon won't do much without a $upport contract.

It's fine for business use with a support contract.

git and mercurial are a million times more clever than a state-of-the-art DCVS like bitkeeper. It's a new data structure. It's a brilliant data structure. It's robust in ways even distributed databases aren't. It's fast. It's simple. It's clean. It's elegant.

git made several additional breakthroughs in terms of working in terms of snapshots instead of diffsets, keeping much less data, and performing many computations late rather than early. In essence, these result in a system infinitely more flexible and expandable than prior version control systems. Adding new ways to change the source code in CVS required a whole new data format (SVN). In git, that's a minor change.

The full power of git hasn't been anywhere close to exploited yet. The data model is very general-purpose, fast, and robust. It can do much more than just source control.

If someone, of either gender, whom I was hiring as a designer, went into "advanced learning theory and the use of metaphor and semiotics along with the theoretical foundations of design patterns," my response would be to consider them non-technical and not hire them.

And "technical," for a designer, means CSS, JavaScript, HTML, and similar.

Most of the examples in the article seemed baked.

Minolta had rather astonishingly good lenses, actually. They had a number of oddballs, from an STF lens (great bokeh) to a tiny 500mm autofocus mirror lens (with very good image quality -- not the reputation mirror lenses have), and many others.

I felt dirty reading the a16z post. Really dirty. They tried to phrase screwing over the employees for the investors as somehow employee-friendly.

And conversely, I've seen people from cultures with different communications styles substantially and unfairly discriminated in the industry for not matching 2016 American business culture. I've found Germans (and Finns!) to be particularly discriminated in this regard, primarily because those are highly technical cultures, but with different communication styles. However, anyone who grew up in the inner city, in African American culture, in Irish Catholic culture, etc. is likewise stigmatized and labeled as rude due to what is a cultural communications difference.

I absolutely hate tips in Lyft. I wish the service just cost 15% more. The Uber experience is just slicker. Hit a button, get in, get out, and the only impediment is rating. Tips, you have to guess amount ($1? 15%? 20%?) and it's always an extra step. I'd be 100% Lyft if they killed tips or let you opt out of tips/opt into recommended tips.

Or if they were very optional. But they feel obligatory. I wouldn't mind the ability to pay extra.

1) I really like this, for transparency, clarity, and design.

2) The actual numbers there are a little bit scary. 0.03% equity grant? That's tiny. It's basically worthless.

When did startup equity get so tiny? I'm not singling eShares out here -- just broadly speaking. That means that if eShares exits past a billion dollars, those shares won't even buy a house in the area....

Boyfriend in hospital doesn't qualify as 'sick leave.' FMLA is very narrow. I've been down a similar hole once in my life before. I was sickened and shocked. One emergency in my whole life. Nominal top employer. Senior position there. Zero support.

This was completely predicted by Peter Thiel in Zero to One. There's a common set of personality traits, a little related to Asperger's, where one works from first principles, is less influenced by what other people think, has less groupthink, and is more comfortable being outside of social norms.

This is a trait shared by entrepreneurs, engineers, and extremists. There's a high overlap between the three.

Social norms are powerful. People outside of them often see better ways to do things (or what they believe to be such). Constructively, they might start a business to fix the world. Destructively, they might blow up what they don't like.

That's a kind of short summary, but the book explains this much more convincingly and eloquently.

Anyone who runs something like WikiLeaks will be vilified. We all have something in our past -- whether a jilted lover willing to make things up about you, or a conflict at work, or whatnot. We all have some slightly unpopular political views on some subject. At the time you get into a position where you have real enemies -- which the founder of WikiLeaks does -- those become publicized and twisted. It doesn't matter who ran WikiLeaks -- the outcome would be the same.

Source: I've been in a couple of positions of minor fame, and through a divorce. In both cases, I had enemies maybe 2-3 tiers down from Julian. My past -- factually -- is squeaky clean. I know what happened to my reputation in both cases.

Footnote: Jochen Bittner is a judgmental jerk.

The license information is broken too. README says All Rights Reserved.

License file says MIT.

I saw a sheet of salaries for a random subset of employees. Pre-funding engineering hires were universally paid substantially less than post-funding hires. The way we're structured, there isn't an equity upside which would cover the difference. If this was a one-off, you could chalk it up to hiring error, negotiations, Dunning-Kruger with regards to estimate of my own skills, etc. However, even myself excluded, a few of our best engineers are being paid substantially less than people much worse than people hired later on. It was pretty universal.

Honestly, I just found out, and I am trying to figure out when and how to bring this up. It feels like there are several good timings for bringing this up:

1. When I've just delivered something of high business value

2. When the company is really needs me to deliver something of high value

3. Annual review

4. Right before quarterly/annual budgets

5. When I have a competing offer

I've asked for a raise, not too long ago, without any information in hand about competing salaries. That conversation did not lead to a pay increase. I found out -- not long after that conversation -- that the post-funding folks make substantially more than the pre-funding folks.

Salary aside, it is an excellent job. I enjoy working there, believe in the mission, and I am relatively unlikely to leave for a more lucrative offer. I think management knows that, which is why they don't feel the need to pay myself (or other early employees) market rates. Management pays the least an employee will work for.

A bigger issue is that drone power consumption goes down as they go faster. Even if 20m at 25MPH is fine, you'll actually get less than that if you go slower. Hovering uses a lot of power.

You can buy a gun. You can still (barely) buy model rockets. You can buy glass windows (which shatter into thousands of sharp pieces if broken).

I want proper insurance, liability, etc. when things fail, and good risk management.

I don't want stupid safety.

> Someone really needs to explain to me why PostgreSQL users in particular seem to always want to bash the competition in order to justify their technology choice. It's been going on for years against MySQL/Oracle first, then MongoDB/NoSQL and now SQL Server. It's odd.

I think it's less about PostgreSQL, and more about the particular products:

1. Oracle has always been a piece of crap from a technology standpoint. There are good reasons businesses use it, but they don't have to do with a robust, core product.

2. Early versions of MySQL were a joke. It's pretty good now, but for a long time, it was the butt of many jokes for good reason. It was very easy-to-use, and fast if you didn't need data consistency, but it didn't quite work right.

3. Stonebraker aside, I haven't heard much bashing of NoSQL. It's used in many places where it's the wrong tool for the job (JOINs are useful), but it's great where it is the right fit. It's just that MongoDB, in particular, isn't great if you have data integrity or performance requirements you care about.

4. I don't even know where to start on SQL Server. Seriously. The only reason to use that dog is if you're tied to a Microsoft-only shop.

There are lots of great technologies out there -- Cassendra, Google's Bigtable, memcached, modern versions MySQL, etc. -- which I've never heard people mocking. Conversely, users of most of those tend to make fun of the broken databases just as much as PostgreSQL users do. It's just that you see the PostgreSQL users doing more mocking simply because there are more of them out there.

Footnote: I'm developing on a MySQL+MongoDB stack right now. MySQL is great, but MongoDB is a bad joke.

That's not exactly the sort of team where you'd expect MIT Ph.Ds to work. It's precisely big teams of mediocre people who run into issues based on not knowing exactly what the database is doing and how it's supposed to work that lead to data corruption due to misuse. It's almost always a boring problem (e.g. retail business software). It's almost always a clunky commercial "enterprise" solution (e.g. Oracle). It's almost always a big team. I'm not sure if I even need to go into application engineers -- you put your best and brightest into the core product, and solutions typically gets those that can't quite cut it there.

Regardless, your comment was about PostgreSQL, not Oracle. Oracle is a giant piece of software written by a corporation with over 100,000 employees. Something like that is bound to have bugs, and it has bugs indeed. Data corruption with Oracle certainly happens. PostgreSQL is written by a small, ultra-elite team. It's a much smaller codebase, so an expert developer can understand how the whole system works. There's a big difference in robustness between the two.

Of course database bugs can cause corruption. I've certainly had MonogDB eat my data. But the level of robustness of different databases is very different. There are many databases which are essentially bug-free. If you're losing data with PostgreSQL, odds are you're the one losing the data, not PostgreSQL.

You misunderstand the results. PostgreSQL behaves as expected, and indeed, the only way it can behave. That's the Two General's Problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem). There is no way to solve it. PostgreSQL does as well as theoretically possible.

I understand you lost data with Oracle and Teradata.

1. Most big corporate vendors do not have systems which are very well designed. (1) The sale is made at a business level. (2) Most Oracle customers are not very tech companies, and have mixed quality employees. As a result, there is little pressure on building a robust, correct product, rather than one which meets a feature checklist. In addition, Oracle doesn't really recruit smart people (I know people who work there). It's just not very robust compared to something like PostgreSQL, which was written by Stonebraker, a legendary computer science professor and entrepreneur.

2. Still, more likely, the reason you lost data is because you didn't know what you were doing. Words like Eventual Consistency, ACID, Two-General's Problem, etc. are not just abstract. They have strict, formal meanings, and you need to understand what they do and do not guarantee. Otherwise, you will lose data again.

I didn't say Eventual Consistency. I said Occasional Consistency. MongoDB is has hard Occasional Consistency. Indeed, it is the most occasionally consistent database I know of. I once wrote a few million records into Mongo. It was consistent before the write, but never again after.

Great for sub-linear time algorithms! At that point, all my algorithms ran at less than O(n) on the size of the data I had written in.

From a business perspective, Occasional Consistency is also a very nice property if you are storing audit data for certain types of organizations. It gives complete plausible deniability about rule compliance.

People really underestimate the value of Occasional Consistency. Occasionally Consistent databases, like MongoDB, are great for approximation algorithms, sublinear time algorithms, and similar applications.

It depends on context.

First-order:

* At a computer ==> Text * Commuting ==> Audio/video

Second-order depends on things like type of content, cognitive load, etc.

Projectile vs. rocket.

The calculation is entirely correct -- we cannot shoot a projectile into space. There is no sensible way to get something to go fast enough to make it to space from Earth with no further propulsion. A better argument, actually, is about acceleration. In order to not be utterly crushed, a projectile would need a massive vertical track to be shot into space. Earth's escape velocity is around 10km/s. g=10m/s^2. If we assume maximum acceleration of 10g to not crush the pilot, to get out, we'd need to accelerate at 10g for 1,000 seconds. During that time, we'd travel a few thousand kilometers. Accelerating faster -- as with a nuclear explosion -- only exasperates the problem.

We solved the problem by having propulsion the whole way up. We can fire a rocket into space, and it can take it's sweet time to get up there.