ejlangev

I worked with Rails for a number of years and generally agree with the ideas in this post about finding callbacks to be confusing. Our guideline was to only use ActiveRecord models for direct validation and attribute manipulation and never as a way to hold logic. We also found that it greatly simplified things to move the behavior into service objects.

It's worth noting, however, that not everyone agrees with this approach. DHH thinks that it's clearer to use concerns and callbacks than service objects in most cases. Worth watching his "Writing Software Well" video series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1jOWu7woKM) for an alternative perspective where you can look at some real, production Basecamp code and see how his viewpoint looks in practice.

This just in: People who have some experience doing things in general tend to be better at doing those things.

In my experience of working at startups they are generally too focused on "disruption" and tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Sometimes existing industries do things for valid reasons that you just don't understand yet and you need to in order to change them. Instead the community looks up to those fortunate (often just lucky) enough to be successful and tries to derive a signal about why they succeeded in the first place that doesn't really exist.

Experience in business or an industry gives you understanding of things it might take years to learn and helps you avoid making simple mistakes that can ruin your company.

A lot of this issue seems to be people operating in bad faith. Airbnb wants the narrative to be that most of their business is regular people renting out a spare room to make some extra money. Certainly that's a component of their business and one I think, and think most people would agree should be encouraged. Airbnb unfairly plays up this angle while ignoring the fact that many hosts are larger businesses that are taking up housing stock to run an unregulated hotel. There are also plenty of people holding multiple leases (especially in NYC) to rent one place out on Airbnb where you can easily make more than the rent per month. This has some socialized costs in that it reduces the housing supply which drives up rent for everyone else which cities may want to avoid.

Hotels and some city people want to focus on the fact that there is unfair competition going on but also seem to recognize that the model is a threat to their bottom line. They seem to want defensive regulation to block all of it rather than just the part that is truly unfair to them some of which is fixed now that Airbnb collects and pays taxes. Not sure if they're at full parity with the hotels in terms of taxes and feels like they should be. Of course a city always has the option of removing these fees for everyone if they think it's unfair.

There's plenty of hypocrisy to go around here.

Social credit imposed by corporate rather than state power isn't any less of a bad idea. Perhaps there are reasons why every decision a person has ever made shouldn't follow them forever such that they need to show it to their future employers.

A better system would be to just force people to wear their overall positive rating percentage visibly on their clothes in large red print. We can call it... the scarlet number.

Seems like you've re-invented the concept of frameworks here.

Color me extremely skeptical of this. Uber can't seem to get taxis right and now they're going to dominate an entirely separate business with established competitors? And the evidence for this is that they launched a credit card when they could have just bought the transaction data from some data provider and tried to de-anonymize it instead like other tech companies do. Something isn't adding up.

Rousseau's work is very interesting to read even if it's a bit hyperbolic at times. He was quite ahead of his time on a lot of issues given he was writing in 1750. Regardless of whether you agree with his overall premise I think you have to admit that he scores some points. Definitely worth reading some of his work if you haven't before particularly "First Discourse" and "Discourse on Inequality."

This article (in addition to being somewhat dystopian) is also fairly dumb even for something trying to predict future technologies which is a very low bar.

Not sure who they think is going to replace all the world's showers with ultra efficient ones or all the worlds houses with smart ones and integrate the two together.

> You will be more connected than ever before, though advertisers will find clever ways to influence your behaviour, based on the same biometric technology that monitors your health.

Read: There will be nothing private left in your life and people without your best interests in mind will use technology to control your behavior and biology. What could go wrong?!?

I think that's a valid point but certainly not for kindergartners. Learning about business is potentially useful but needs to be balanced against the fact that most people don't want to be entrepreneurs and that you need to not learn something else in order to learn that.

> In her own family, she said, “there are no lines” between work and life or home and office.

This line also stuck out. Seems horribly dystopian to me and yet is presented without comment. Sad that these people are considered "thought leaders" and that viewpoint is presented with anything but scorn.

> “In my book, there’s no reason why children in elementary schools can’t be launching their own businesses,” Rebekah Neumann said in an interview.

That's really one of the saddest things I've read from the tech community in a long while. Truly beyond parody. The reason is that they're fucking children and part of being a kid is being sheltered from some of the realities of the world. Training kids to focus on business from an early age which, since there are limited hours in the day, must come at the expense of something else is just sad. Let them develop in peace at least a little bit before being ravaged by capitalism.

My university didn't have classes on ethics in technology as a requirement for a computer science degree. In retrospect after working in the startup world for a few years I wish they had. People need to be given the tools to evaluate questions of technical ethics themselves otherwise they'll just sign on to the employer arguments about "tech is neutral" or "think of all the people this helps" while ignore all the people they (or someone else using what they created) may hurt.

Glad they did something to create consequences for that kind of behavior. Does sort of feel like it was slipping in quality anyway and maybe should have been canceled regardless. Last season was just too ridiculous.

There's still a lie by omission with the Yemen story though. You don't hear news outlets saying the truth which is that the Saudis are bombing Yemen with U.S weapons that we sold them knowing full well what they would be used to do.

+1 it's a great piece of software that delivers tremendous value to users and continues to add amazing features every year. Cheers and thank you to all the maintainers and contributors.

This article is very poorly argued. While there are some questionable things happening among some Fintech firms they're still far too small to harm the overall economy and could simply go out of business without too large an impact. Mt Gox isn't a good example because it did precisely that, and they felt the need to overplay the total loss by quoting bitcoin prices as if they were lost today rather than 3 years ago.

Seems more likely that crises from sub-prime auto loans or student loans could cause the next real issue. Attempting to compare total size of risk from massive wall street firms and banks to relatively small fintech firms seems like a fools errand.

Seems like their long track record of shady and irresponsible behavior continues to catch up to them. I hope authorities throw the book at them to discourage other people from behaving this way. Sad!

Good tips in here. I've found that other than not knowing how, the next biggest reason people don't write good code is that they consider doing so to be too costly. It's simple to justify that viewpoint if you just define all code other than the way the programmer feels like writing it as prohibitively difficult. Everything becomes an insignificant nit or "not worth doing right now" and the result is a death by 1000 cuts. It's easy to use these ideas as a shield against being diligent and paying attention to detail.

27 million russians died because of the Nazis. I'd be surprised if they tolerated that sort of content very well only a short while later.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Total_...

Yeah I definitely think there are some good ideas behind it I just think the focus is a bit too individualistic. Overall I liked it.

He handled the situation poorly IMO. Didn't consider the consequences of what he was saying true or not and didn't present it in an appropriate way for how sensitive the issue was. Ultimately that's a self defeating way to get your points across.

Showing up to a photo shoot in a Goolag shirt also just undermines him as a person. It's totally hyperbolic and ridiculous and will further discredit him in other people's minds because it's an insane overreaction to make that comparison.

He doesn't have a monopoly on truth, that sort of presupposes that he was completely right and handled the situation perfectly. Perhaps he'll feel differently when the dust settles as another commenter suggested.

> it surely made more effort than the many internet discussions, which we don't find fault with.

I wouldn't say he made significantly more effort, and people certainly (and correctly IMO) find fault with them.

> Fault as in he regrets it?

I don't think he should regret publishing it, but I also don't think it led to much productive discussion about the issues here. People on both sides just chose to ignore and distort what other people said.

I don't think it's fair to say he made a good faith attempt to engage with the other side's position and fit it into the context of his beliefs. Instead he just presented his ideas and I don't think that does much on its own to advance the discussion. Predictably led to both sides digging in rather than finding some common ground.

> "When I first circulated the document about a month ago to our diversity groups and individuals at Google, there was no outcry or charge of misogyny."

Kind of meaningless though, could be he only sent it to people who agreed with him or who were men.

"Goolag" shirt is pretty on the nose, I guess true hardship in Silicon Valley is losing your well paid tech job for... another well paid tech job?

It's funny that he refuses to admit any fault in what he said even in a limited way when ideological rigidity and refusing to entertain other people's ideas in good faith is exactly what he's complaining about in others. Doesn't seem like this experience has resulted in him rethinking much of anything. Suppose it's true that whatever you accuse the other side of is exactly what you actually do.

Seems the author's intentions are good but it's such an odd way to frame it. He outlines that many companies are explicitly designing products in such a way as to exploit ("hack") people's brains at great detriment to those people. But his response is to frame it as that we should place blame on our own brains rather than on the people doing these things or the social structure that rewards them. Feels like he could think a little bigger here.

> you have a technology boner that is lasting longer than 4 hours and you should see a doctor.

10/10

Imagine thinking that "high-speed self-driving cars, electric airplanes, and maybe even Hyperloops" are viable solutions for transit problems of today when none of them exist in any real viable form and have major obstacles to overcome in order to exist. Reminds me of the craze with pneumatic transport in the past. It too was the way of the future and NYC even had a model pneumatic subway line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach_Pneumatic_Transit. Lost out to the normal train by a long way.

Yeah totally agree, raised too much money and won't be able to live up to the hype. Probably could have been bootstrapped into a modest company instead.

Good luck living up to that $600 million valuation with sponsored gifs before running out of money. Seems they raised 55 on 300 in February 2016 and then 72 on 600 in October 2016. Seems like a lot of money to be burning for a gif search engine.

It's a shame it took 6 months of terrible PR for them to make these changes which actually do sound like they will be good for drivers. Can't help feeling like it would have taken relatively minimal effort to do these things in the past. Drivers have been complaining about lack of tipping for a while now. Seems to come from a place of wanting good PR rather than caring at all about drivers. Will see what the rest of the 180 days bring, maybe they are turning over a new leaf. I wouldn't bet on it though.