cribbles

I use Atom daily for work, and I am overall satisfied with the editor and its ecosystem, in particular the mammoth improvements the core team has made toward addressing speed issues that plagued the editor in prior years. I haven't tried the new GitHub integration features in this package, but they seem cool.

That having been said - Atom devs, if you're reading this, _please_ put a priority on fixing the auto-update / 'Restart and Install' feature on macOS.[1] If it's not fixable, please remove the option and offer a workaround.

It's gotten to the point where I now simply download the Atom update in browser and manually replace the package binary in my Applications folder, knowing the auto-update will fail.

[1] https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/2860

He's been ousted as Tesla chairman and sued by the SEC for making an impulsive weed joke tweet. Does that count?

I really enjoyed the author's 2017 piece, "There's No Such Thing as a Free Watch"[1] (linked in article, also discussed in [2]). This one, not so much, and I feel compelled to explore _why_ I feel this article doesn't work as well.

First, here's my attempt at a synopsis of the article. I only read it once, and admittedly found it hard to follow, so I'm sure a few details are off.

- There are a bunch of fake-seeming storefronts on Amazon selling various products in unrelated categories at high markup. The business model seems to be basically massively automated Alibaba drop-shipping. Rather than providing a material or marketing value-add, the sellers are banking on buyers not doing any comparison shopping.

- A lot of these storefronts are connected with a shady Christian university chancellor who had profiteered off of content farming via a journalism company called IBTimes, a business that acquired Newsweek in 2013 and ran WaPo-style tactics to ramp up the clickbait.

- Separately of that, the chancellor has covertly supported the entrepreneurial ventures of his university's graduates. This usually takes the form of either 1) acquiring fledgling existing businesses, ramping up the prices, setting up Shopify online storefronts and profiteering off unscrupulous consumers, 2) creating brick-and-mortar storefronts that sell a mix of marked-up retail goods and returned items from these Amazon storefronts, or 3) some mix of 1 and 2.

- It's not clear how approach #2 makes money, since some of these brick-and-mortar storefronts are in extremely high-rent areas, e.g. Manhattan and San Francisco.

- Also, many of the businesses connected to this organization are currently under investigation for commercial fraud.

So why doesn't this article "work?" Well, to extract the above synopsis, we have to wade through:

1. A non-linear narrative about the author's acquaintance getting some goods from one of these storefronts returned to their parents' house. This has no connection to the rest of the piece. Seems like it was just a mistake.

2. A labyrinth, Pepe Silvia-style thumbtack-and-yarn exposition on a bunch of overly precise yet insignificant investigation details (storefront names, suppliers, warehouses, products) and recurring literary devices to match (e.g. "warehouse foo sells unrelated items x, y, and z")

3. An anecdote about buying some lipstick from one of these places, then returning it.

4. Some anecdotes about visiting some of the storefronts and observing that they're kind of weird and empty.

5. Some excerpts from email transaction with some of the "players" involved in this whole scheme, which don't amount to much - PR fluff basically, which could have been made up. We don't know.

6. Lots, and lots, and lots of exposition about the "journey" to figuring all this stuff out - I reverse image searched this pic, which lead me to this business page, which was connected to this trademark, etc. etc. (none of which exceeds the standard Google-fu any reader of this piece is probably capable of doing themselves, or needs to read about at length)

7. Half-baked, Baudrillardian navel-gazing divergences about how weird and dreamy and postmodern all this is.

I felt myself a little ripped off by the time I got to the bottom of the article and learned that, in fact, we have _no idea_ what the answer is to some of the core questions prompted by this piece. How do these ritsy storefronts make money? If they don't, are they just laundering money? If so, for what illegal activities? Is it connected to the IBTimes fraud? Whom exactly are they defrauding? What exactly is the relationship of the university to the IBTimes and these stores? And so on, and so on.

I feel like if the author had simply made a PDF providing a simple, linear narrative - similar to her watch story - it wouldn't have mattered that these questions went unanswered. The mechanics of the drop-shipping operation are sufficiently compelling. But the platform (a newspaper) and the piece's pretense (long-form, old school investigative journalism) demand unwieldy narrative inflation that isn't really merited by the meat of the story, and that ultimately makes it feel that much less satisfying.

[1] http://www.jennyodell.com/museumofcapitalism_freewatch.pdf

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15154934

The topic was the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima by the USA being "a horrific crime against humanity."[1]

Your response was "what about Japanese war crimes?"

Please stay on topic.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18540748

I agree with you. This list actually had the opposite intended effect on me.

Yeah, Reader should have stuck around. But half of these I've either never heard of or only faintly remember. And the ones I do remember seem like reasonable axes.

Google Video, for example, seemed to serve the sole purpose of making me think "dammit, why doesn't the 'Video' tab just take me to YouTube?"

So Google's huge and had to cut off some redundant services over the years. So what. In view of privacy violations, military tech collaborations, and so on, EOL-ing a couple dozen services is hardly a cardinal sin.

What's "really going on" is the media taking notice of one of its own being butchered by the Saudis.

As you correctly observed, there is no political will in the US/UK/SA bloc to draw attention to Saudi-borne atrocities. This percolates down to major news platforms, contingent upon an implicit truce between Saudi Arabia and the media class. This was frustrated (although likely not severed) by the Khashoggi affair.

To address your larger concern - I am sympathetic to the argument that the most 'advanced' nation-states are no less complicit in 'barbaric' acts, war crimes, systemic violence, etc etc than those which more often receive scrutiny.

Even in this light, the Saudi example is exceptional: it's an explicitly anti-democratic hereditary autocracy with a medieval justice system having no concept of codification (other than deference to the Quran and Hadith) or legal precedent (rulings are inconsistent and case-by-case). Essentially any investment capital or financial dealings with the SA, the state, is directly debited to or from the Saudi royal family.

This is different from China and even Russia, for which one could make also the case that the state is insufficiently democratic, has arcane/draconian laws, etc etc, and that the money is likely to be siphoned off to oligarchs or state accessories. In fact, to your point, business with these countries _is_ often criticized - some would say to not a great enough degree. But drawing an equivalence on the basis of questionable state actions alone is, well, equivocating in this case.

We're inching ever so gradually toward idlewords's 2016 piece "Benjamin Button Reviews The New MacBook Pro".[1]

[1] https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/10/benjamin_button_reviews_the...

Yeah, big typo there - should have said hundreds of thousands (as indicated in the sources cited, including the OP) - but too late to edit now :)

I'm not sure even World War II had a death toll that high.

Saudi Arabia's artificial famine in Yemen has been subject to a worldwide media blockade for well over a year.[1][2] This has taken the shape of systematic under-reporting, preposterously low accounts of the death toll - usually treating the hundred of millions of children dead from famine as collateral damage, or avoiding the subject entirely - whitewashing of the motivations of the conflict and obscuring of its trajectory.

As Gary Brecher pointed out earlier this year, it's not that these stories don't sell. Mainstream news media was rife with accounts of starvation in war-torn Syria in years past:

> But the hundreds of thousands of verified, real famine and epidemic cases in Yemen get very little coverage. There’s nothing subtle about why not. The Syrian Sunni jihadis were de facto allies of the US/UK/Saudi/Israel/UAE bloc. So their suffering needed to be amplified. The Shia Yemenis can be slandered with one word: “Iran.” Anything touched by Iran, for Anglo media, is inherently evil, and anything done to those so tainted needs no further justification. The “Houthi,” i.e. the Shia of NW Yemen, are allegedly puppets or proxies for Iran, the Shia Mister Big of journalistic imagination, and therefore legitimate targets for even the nastiest war of extermination (such as by hunger and disease).

Now, at this late date, we have the New York Times's first real reckoning with Saudi Arabia's crimes. Not only that: there's meta-reporting on the story's traffic on Facebook[3], a self-lauding post about the NYT's audacity in shedding light on the tragedy[4], and an op-ed from Bernie Sanders[5]. All in the course of a few days!

What changed?

Consider this rare moment of introspection from the New York Times: "The tragedy in Yemen did not grow out of a natural disaster. It is a slow-motion crisis brought on by leaders of other countries who are willing to tolerate extraordinary suffering by civilians to advance political agendas. And yet somehow the vast catastrophe has failed to catch the world’s attention as much as the murder of a single man, the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul."

From a Saudi standpoint, there was nothing out of the ordinary about Khashoggi's murder. The Saudi Arabian legal system is not codified and has no system of judicial precedent; royal decree trumps the system as a whole (so long as it putatively follows Sharia Law); capital and corporal punishment are both common - beheading and flogging in particular. Freedom of speech and press are anathema.

From a worldwide media standpoint, Khashoggi's kidnapping murder was exceptional. He was one of their own. With his murder, the Saudis broke the devil's bargain they had maintained with worldwide media for years - the one that had (bafflingly) cast MBS as a great reformer and Saudi Arabia as an emerging Silicon Valley of the middle east. The question now is whether this contract can be rehabilitated - and if so, how.

The social dynamics of the reporting on this tragedy should serve as a warning to all of us. Stories like the OP don't get published in a vacuum.

[1] https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/06/war-nerd-anglo-ameri...

[2] https://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/11/yemen-having-lost-the-...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/business/facebook-blocks-...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/reader-center/yemen-photo...

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/opinion/bernie-sanders-sa...

Why not just provide a hash for each version of the document?

One effect I haven't seen mentioned yet is that EU data subjects can permanently delete their Facebook accounts, along with all associated data. (Previously you could only indefinitely 'deactivate'.)

My first thought (before seeing this comment) was that it reminded me of my first programming language, the TI-BASIC that shipped with Texas Instruments graphic calculators in the US. :)

> This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions.

> I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people’s emotions and respond appropriately.

This is completely disingenuous. It's clear from Linus's persistent and cruel personal attacks that he acutely understands many emotions: anger, fear, shame, etc. He attempts to exploit these when he coarsely insults his maintainers. Framing his actions otherwise is a form of deflection.

> Gmail engineers had to worry so much about Internet Explorer's poor garbage collection algorithm that they'd need to manually hoist string literals out of for loops to avoid GC pauses.

What does this mean in practice? I know about variable hoisting and function scoping, but not about old JS GC algos.

You can't. US cities are uniformly car-centric. The exceptions to the rule are too expensive to buy property in anywhere close to city center.

Aside: I lived (and grew up) in several small-to-medium sized US cities prior to settling in Berlin. None come close to offering a similar range of cultural infrastructure to the typical medium-size European city, and quality of life is totally incomparable - again in Europe's favor.

This directly contradicts the parent post, which suggested that the root cause was neoliberal economic reforms and divestment from the public sector.

This is the thesis of the linked article.

For those unfamiliar, Salon.com is a new media company that publishes articles on current events from a left-leaning perspective - for example, "Bitcoin could cost us our clean-energy future" [1]

[1] https://www.salon.com/2017/12/06/bitcoin-could-cost-us-our-c...

This is a razor-thin editorial drawing a tenuous connection between arguments against the EU's global agricultural trade policies to pro-Brexit parochialism. The author is "a Research Executive at Get Britain Out." The host publication receives hundreds of thousands of dollars of funding from the Koch Brothers.[1] The first thing that loads before the article is a full-screen modal advertising an Ayn Rand newsletter.

From the HN guidelines:

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Ideological or political battle or talking points. [2]

How do stories like this keep making it to the front page?

[1] https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Foundation_for_Economi...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The author of the post you are responding to questioned the approach of relying upon paid testimony from self-selected defectors as an objective account of the DPRK as a whole. This is not irreconcilable with a critical view of the DPRK, and only indirectly addresses the point you are making here.

It is facile to observe that any form of society can 'produce a good life' for some subset of its citizens. You have not persuasively argued that conceding this point means agreeing to the bizarre equivocal statement that 'there is no reason to chose liberal democracy over totalitarianism.'

It occurred to me 'why not set the timer to reset automatically within rand() of 5 minutes if no one's pressed it, collecting whatever loot gets deposited'.

Two reasons: 1) auditable code 2) transparent deposits and withdrawals

I'm generally skeptical of smart contracts' real-world use but this is a rare case in which an immutable, trustless public ledger is essential.

This is a non-reputable, rail-thin analysis by a Koch-funded right-wing think tank (the Manhattan Institute) citing another Koch-funded right-wing think tank (the Heritage Foundation) for supporting data. It is peppered with weasel words ("Some observers blame leftist professors...") and worn-out ideological canards ("helicopter parents," "snowflakes", "illiberal activists who reject open debate and a marketplace of ideas").

I'm seeing a lot of comments pointing out that the thesis of this argument rests on a confusing conflation between "socialism" and "Scandinavian-style social democratic policies." I actually think the article gets this right. American news media and mainstream politicians have spent the entire lifespan of most millennials arguing that the US can't have basic first-world social programs because those programs are "socialist." Whatever one thinks of socialism proper, this is a deliberate rhetorical confusion meant to draw an equivocation between modern European social democratic states, South American socialist states, and communist states like the DPRK. The article reproduces this rhetorical device, then asks why "today's kids love" policies in the massive ideological grab-bag now encompassed by that term. No wonder!

I'm still signed onto AIM - through Pidgin - whenever my personal laptop is open. It's the primary way I stay in contact with friends I made through the early-2000s internet.

Of course we're also connected to each other on more 'modern' social networks, but there's a certain - undeniably nostalgic - appeal to the AIM chat, continued unabated over the same protocol with the same handles for 15+ years.

Funnily enough, just a couple of nights ago someone I hadn't spoken to in at least _10 years_ signed on and messaged me out of the blue. We reminisced on our friendship on a now-forgotten AOL message board back in 2001, and discussed the myriad ways our lives had since changed since then. A surreal and touching exchange that's been running through my head since.

If you once had an AIM account and haven't signed on in a while - which, gauging by the reactions to this thread, seems to describe most of us - log on and see if anyone's still around. Your Buddy List hasn't gone anywhere.

This is very similar in content and sentiment to the item linked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14831918, so I'd like to echo my comments from that thread:

> Two specific coding bootcamps that 1) had been acquired by for-profit education conglomerates and 2) underwent relatively rapid expansion into second and third tier tech markets went out of business.

> As evidence of a larger trend, this article cites a single quote from the CEO of "a private lender and an alternative accreditor for the fast-growing boot camp sector." This is unpersuasive.

This article quotes Ryan Craig of University Ventures vs Rick O'Donnell of Skills Fund, to nearly the same effect.

So: big name closures of two bootcamps with similar pain points and acquisition contexts, vs. seemingly healthy expansion and unchanged placement rates for schools like Flatiron (mentioned in the article), Hack Reactor, App Academy, General Assembly, and so on. Further consolidation in the field wouldn't surprise me, but are we really observing a trend worth reporting on?

They aren't. Two specific coding bootcamps that 1) had been acquired by for-profit education conglomerates and 2) underwent relatively rapid expansion into second and third tier tech markets went out of business.

As evidence of a larger trend, this article cites a single quote from the CEO of "a private lender and an alternative accreditor for the fast-growing boot camp sector." This is unpersuasive.

The alt-right is a small fringe movement with outsized presence in election post-mortems due to their visibility on digital platforms used by journalists and bloggers.

Trump voters were (mostly) Romney voters.[1] Clinton lost by failing to galvanize voters who turned out for Obama in prior elections[2] and neglecting to campaign in Rustbelt states.[3]

[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/behind-trump...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/omribenshahar/2016/11/17/the-no...

[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/trumps-...

Uber bolsters its fleets in part by offering predatory loans to drivers who are effectively indentured to work full-time with the company.[1] This is a core aspect of its growth strategy and is not incidental to its operating economics.

Regardless, the ability of a company to provide transitory part-time labor should not be considered as an end in itself. A part-time worker whose earnings are subject to change at the whim of Uber's fare adjustments is even less likely to make major financial commitments than a part-time worker in a low-wage service position. This has a negative effect on the growth and security of the economy as a whole.

If anything, we should encourage the transition of these contract positions into "just another jobs." Those gigs on Craigslist will be available in any case.

[1] http://www.citylab.com/commute/2016/06/uber-subprime-auto-le...