jasonrhaas

Coinbase should have to follow the same rules as everyone else. They are a commodity exchange, plain and simple.

The old Death & Taxes rule still applies, even for Bitcoin.

I'm a freelancer. And, like other have said, the hardest part about freelancing is finding good clients to work with. Also, your value prop is at odds with the priorities of new freelancers.

When you first start out freelancing, you likely have no clients or only a few. You really don't need an assistant, automatic call scheduling, NDA generation. Also -- don't the clients provide the NDA's, not the freelancer?

With your existing product I think your target market is the experienced, established freelancer, not someone brand new to freelancing.

Does anyone have a preference on what server the VPN connects to? For example, I'm using AirVPN, and you can select specific countries that you would like to allow the VPN to use. From there it just goes out and connects to the "recommended" server.

If I don't make any preference, it will connect me to a server in Canada. It's very fast, but a bit annoying because now I get all the Canadian search results in Google.

Is there any downside to using a VPN server in the same state or country that you are in?

BTW, I have been using AirVPN for a few days and really like it. Super minimal UI (which I like) and gets the job done. Also, I like that they accept BitCoin as payment if you so choose.

Regardless of whether or not they are doing it purposely, the capability is certainly there. But the other data they have from cross referencing other web traffic, financial data, etc is probably much more powerful than what they could get from listening in to our conversations.

However, I still turn off microphone access for facebook and instagram. It's probably not fool proof, but it can't hurt.

I mean, Tech companies are not your friends just like GE, Boeing, Procter & Gamble are not your friends. The four horsemen of tech (Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple), are VERY large companies, and they should be treated that way. I don't think they are _evil_ as this article sort of implies, but they are not above the laws or regulations that other big companies face.

We just need to admit that in the end they are companies, who primary motivation is profit (like all companies), and we cannot implicitly trust them just because they make cool products. We need to have a healthy skepticism about what they are doing and what their goals are. I'm not saying anyone should avoid using their products, but just be aware that nothing really comes for free.

Yea this is a bummer. Especially when new applications are being written in Python 2. At least write them so they are forwards compatible with Python 3 and save yourself some headaches later.

The word count example has... 8 classes. To count words.

I think that some people don't like the Spotify Discover Weekly because they don't want to admit that they like crappy music. Its kind of like when you hear your voice on a recording, you're like... "do I really sound like that?"

Just face it, the algorithm has you pegged.

Oh, hell no. I've held off on getting an Alexa or a Google home partially for this reason. My main reason for not getting one is because I think they are actually pretty useless and I find it kind of annoying to have to pretend to be a robot to get them to understand me.

But -- I also realize that they literally can (and clearly do) collect your audio data 24/7. In this case it was a "mistake" on the part of Google, which they quickly worked around by commenting out some code in the firmware. But all it would take is probably a few lines of code and an automatic update to turn on 24/7 audio collect for all Google Home users.

My theory with Amazon's Alexa (and probably Google Home) is that they lose money on these things, because they don't actually care about making a profit on them. The whole idea is to collect as much audio data as possible to improve their machine learning models.

It's a race to see who can collect the most data on their customers, and ultimately develop the best and most comprehensive speech recognition model on the market.

Exactly correct. But having Alexa's and Google Home's around isn't helping anything. It's just yet another vector that can be used to inadvertently collect your data.

Like some others have said, I think that the specific tools they mentioned for "model based programming" are not the be all, end all, solution. However, I agree with the very high level premise of this article, that programming will continue to evolve to higher levels, and eventually "writing code" may be abstracted all together.

We have already been moving towards this approach for quite some time, even though the author doesn't mention this. If you are going to build a web app or API today, do you just start writing code wily nily? No, of course not. You look for frameworks and proven/established ways of doing this. We're practical, we don't want to re-invent the wheel (unless its a side project).

I've recently built an event based API for a client, and much of the work is not "writing code", but figuring out the right tools for the job, based on the requirements of how I believe the tool should work. A lot of it is plugging in frameworks and tools that already exist (and are established), which mitigates (but doesn't solve completely) the question of using complex/untested code. For example, most people use take advantage of TCP or HTTP for a web app. Do we test that low level code? Of course not... its already the most tested code in the world.

I think there is a danger in writing a lot of "custom code" as I like to call it, because then you really are introducing brand new functionality, that potentially has never been tested before. You can and should test your code, but often that will fall short, because you (or your team) cannot possibly test every imaginable scenario the code will face.

My general belief is this: the programming of the future won't involve much programming at all, it will be more like "system architecture", where you pick and choose the tools to meet your requirements. In the world of open source and AWS -- all the building blocks are there, but its your job to figure out how to put them together.

I think I must be in the test group or something, because I saw no change from my current GitLab instance (cloud hosted).

I've been a fan of GitLab for a while, and I like how they continue to iterate and improve it. As far as being a full suite for software development, GitHub and BitBucket can't match it. GitLab seems to be charging ahead faster than the others, and for that, I salute them.

viagogo.com is a great example of user manipulation. They take what booking.com has done and 10x it. I've bought tickets on there (and got ripped off because they told me the wrong pickup location), and its a total shit show. They make it seem like there are all these real time updates going on, and really pushing you to BUY NOW, but I'm pretty sure its all a scam to urge you to buy as quickly as possible.

Woo hoo! I love ST. I think the biggest thing lacking now is a solid package manager. I like how on VSCode and Atom you can kind of see the "stars" or popularity of the package before you install it.

I just meant that I use Sublime and Vim as my primary text editors. I do use the "vintage" mode in Sublime also, which mimics some of Vim's functionality.

I've tried all the editors, when it comes down to it I always end up going back to some combination of Sublime + Vim. I prefer to do most things on the command line rather than set up IDE configurations, so a plain text editor suits me just right.

I like the customization of Sublime, and I've got it setup just how I like. In a way, Vim is similar... once you get it customized perfectly, there isn't going to be another text editor that beats it.

VScode is nice, but I don't really see any pros to it that would make me switch from Sublime, other than the Debugger maybe (which I never use).

Hahaha, some coder had a field day with this one.

If I have to get on a "sales call" just to see what the product is or demo it, I am not interested. Let me try it for free, and tell me what it does... I really don't have time or patience for sales calls.

While I'm at it, I may as well offer some other feedback as well:

Pros

- UI is top notch

- Love the built in features (pipelines, CI/CD, docker registry)

- Private repos, free stuff

Cons

- Performance is improving, but still seems a bit slow at times

- Pipelines could be a bit faster. The build and test times seem to vary a lot per commit.

- Better documentation on pipelines and the .gitlab-ci.yml file. It seems a bit fragmented and scattered over a few documents.

- Maybe offer to add a default .gitignore in the repo, and a basic README (like github). Cloning an empty repo makes me sad.

I am using the new navigation, love it.

I have been using the free hosted plan for about a month now, which includes the "Silver" tier features. I'm really happy about their Early Adopter program! They are keeping my current Silver capability for free for another 12 months.

I have to say, I really like gitlab.com. The UI is slick, and you get a ton of features right out of the box (for free). Bravo gitlab.com, keep up the good work!

Is MongoDB the leader in NoSQL? I stopped using them years ago because of scaling issues. With things like Elastic Search and Dynamo DB, I see no reason to use MongoDB anymore.

Seems like a somewhat similar idea to AWS Aurora.

I'm leery of Chrome Extensions. They are basically just a plot to collect your usage data and sell it to marketing companies. I have disabled almost all Chrome extensions and locked down my browser. I got tired of the super targeted, annoying advertisements that were being thrown at me.

Check out the privacy policy before installing any Chrome Extension.

https://www.whatruns.com/privacy

Of course we are due for a pull back in the stock market. Stocks are historically overvalued by many metrics, the most simple of which is the P/E ratio. Check out this website -- http://www.multpl.com/

The question is not if stocks will pull back, its when. Bull markets can run for a long time even if they are over valued. The boom of the early 2000's and 2007 went way higher than average, and crashed hard.

Meh, kind of a generic article about how you should prioritize lifestyle over building a startup. I guess this is nothing new to me, I did the digital nomad thing with Remote Year for a year and change, and now I'm still working remotely in Austin, TX.

I do miss the constant travel, there is always something coming up to look forward to. When you are in one place, not constantly traveling, you have to make your own fun. Which is why I've taken up other things like riding motorcycles, brewing beer, and speaking at my local Python meetup.

All that year I was working full time as a Python Developer while traveling constantly. Every weekend was an epic adventure. It's an amazing lifestyle if you can pull it off, but its not for everyone can definitely will wear on you after a while.

Why is this markdown editor better than Medium's? It probably has a few more features but the design and UI looks like a clone of Medium.

nooooooooooooooooo

I recently got tired of all the creepy targeted advertising, so I hit the nuclear option. Turned off all targeted ads on all social networks, cleared all cookies, all search histories, and installed the Disconnect Chrome extension. Also disabled all images in my email to stop those email trackers. I've always used an ad-blocker but I don't think that stops the data collection aspects of it.

I've always known this is happening and previously I didn't care because you figure if you are going to get advertised to, why not make it relevant, right? Well, it's more complex than that, here are the problems I have with this kind of data tracking:

1. Data can we used against you in ways you might not understand or have considered. 2. It's a waste of money and resources. Think of all the extra bandwidth, server space, human time, that is spent on just trying to sell people more shit. 3. I don't like the idea of people making money off my data without my knowledge. 4. Targeted ads might distract me and cause me to waste extra time online.

Bottom line -- I have a moral objection to the whole idea of it, and will do everything I can do stop it.