joecot

Once a company takes VC funding or a buyout, or makes an IPO, any ethical promise they've ever made is null and void. Later when choices are made outside of their control, they wash their hands and say it's not their fault. But the founders break those promises at the time they take that money, when they willingly gave up their control. And the point of VC funding is always a buyout later, where all founder control will be lost anyway.

Once you take VC, the goal of the company is never to make the world better or empower their employees. The goal is now solely to make money, by any means it can. The funders will allow you to do that ethically, at first. When you're not making their return as fast as they'd like, which you never will, the ethics go out the window.

Relatedly, never, ever do this. "Someone I know" works at a company who hired a guy to help manage their ad accounts, including Adwords. Between Google's account managers and Adword's helpful suggestions for optimizing campaigns, over the course of a month they managed to crater incoming ad traffic, and optimize for spending on cheap keywords that sent junk traffic. Clicking on one of those helpful auto-optimize suggestions can make hundreds of changes, and there's no good revision history to revert changes back.

We can just build more housing. Landlords and home owners in California are addicted to their continuously rising property values. To the point where there was a thing called a "California Refi" where people would just refinance their house once a year to take more cash out because the property value would have gone up another 50k.

Many Californians acknowledge that there needs to be more housing built, but many of them are also NIMBYs who don't want multi-family housing built in their areas, because it'd lower their personal property value if there was more housing available.

This economic perspective was not updated for the advent of office and technological jobs. If you're running a factory, reducing total work hours by 20% would reduce output by about 20%. If you're writing software, doing desk job work, etc, this would not be the case.

For example, how active is Hacker News during what would be expected to be work hours. How many people are taking time out of their work day to post on facebook, reddit, twitter, or here? People aren't doing 8 hours of technical work for 5 days a week. They have a certain amount they're expected to produce over the course of a week, and they spend their time accordingly. If they had 4 days to do it instead of 5, with the same length of a day, they would spend more of those 4 days doing productive work, and enjoy their 3 days off more, without feeling guilty during work hours about "slacking" when people really can't stay this technical, or creative, productive for 40 hours a week.

This is also why tech CEOs and managers are so paranoid about people working from home. They know that the job doesn't really require 40 hours of work. They just want to make sure they're getting 40 hours of captive time.

Because the things he says are contradictory, often very vague, and often extremely naive, either intentionally or unintentionally, regarding how hard it is to moderate content. As numerous industry leaders have pointed out, people on the Left think the Left is getting overly censored, people on the Right think the right is getting overly censored, in actuality it's an extremely complex system and the site admins just want people to stop threatening each other. Musk, however, has made it very clear that he feels the Right is being censored, and he will fix that, which doesn't bode well for people on the Left.

I'm hoping that if Musk actually does end up buying twitter, it leads to larger uptick for Mastodon.

This might surprise you, but some of us care about other human beings whether or not they're citizens of the United States. My issues with ICE have nothing to do with census numbers and everything to do with them separating children from their families and literally losing them, then destroying the records of them doing so. Canada is just now digging up the bodies of indigenous children who died at re-education camps, and it'll be decades before we get an actual death toll of ICE's actions.

Asking for sources and explanations of completely obvious things is a great way to exhaust people on the internet. Which I assume was the point given the "both sides"iness of the response.

I just double-checked with my peers and it turns out it's possible to protest two different things at once, and that petitioning at multiple sources of the problem is often more effective at getting things done.

I agree. And I would argue that the CIA should also get the boot. Probably about half of AWS's GovCloud should. But all the other heinous stuff that the US government agencies do abroad someone (that's not me) could argue is in the furtherance of national security. ICE is absolutely, clearly, not. There is no justifiable defense of the things ICE does, which is why it's the one most targeted.

This is most certainly targeted towards AWS being used by ICE. And not just in a generic way of them hosting ICE servers, but with ICE using Amazon Rekognition to identify undocumented immigrants (and allegedly AWS had meetings with ICE to convince them to use the service). The human rights violations come up when you talk about kids being separated from their families and then straight up lost, and the various other immoral things ICE does.

This isn't something Amazon isn't aware of, I went to the AWS Summit in NYC a few years ago and every few minutes the Keynote got interrupted by another protester yelling "Cut ties with ICE" and getting dragged out of the room. I don't think I was the only one quickly googling on their phones to figure out what they were talking about. I couldn't move my previous company off of AWS, but I moved all my personal servers and I steered my new company away from them.

Fun story. I showed up at my current company, and some frontend dev had convinced everyone that everything should be written in Elm. Their phone client, the frontend website, everything. Then, their lead dev left and so did the frontend dev. Lucky for me, only one part of one page actually made it to production. But this was around 9 months of multiple developers' time just flushed down the toilet. None of it was usable, none of it was worth learning Elm to finish.

There is also this, and it's one of the things that propped up Bitcoin at the beginning. A large chunk of the Chinese drug black market ran on bitcoin. In many ways the cryptocurrency boom was the 21st century's opium war.

I would call it something besides a pyramid scheme if the people who got in at the bottom didn't then turn around and endlessly proselytize for crypto -- not because they think it's actually great, but because they can't take their money out unless some other poor sucker buys in. At the point where crypto bros are paying Matt Damon to say you're not a real man unless you buy their crypto, it's a pyramid scheme.

As soon as it was clear that Bitcoin was going to be a commodity instead of a currency (why use it as a currency to buy a pizza this week when it could buy you a car next week?), it was clear it was now a pyramid scheme. That's why I didn't invest in it. What I hadn't counted on was how gullible people were for pyramid schemes.

I have a call center. We call consumers who signed up on our site, put them in a conference room, and then if they're interested we transfer their call over to a client who pays for the warm transfer. Additionally we receive incoming calls which we need to put into a hold queue and pull from.

I'm glad there is work on open alternatives to twilio, but I want to either confirm some features are missing or find out where to learn more about them.

Is there any solution for:

* Conference calls

* Call queues

* Call recordings

The Poison Pill plan was from the Board, to stop Musk from following through with a hostile takeover. But Elon reportedly convinced numerous large shareholders of his plan[1]. Even if the Board isn't a fan of it, the Board of a publicly traded company is ultimately beholden to their shareholders, so if the shareholders are convinced, they need to consider it.

1. https://www.reuters.com/business/exclusive-twitter-under-sha...

Firefox mobile supports extensions, including Dark Reader or Greasemonkey (which would allow user styles)

Dark Reader works so well I'd actually forgotten I had it on for HN until I saw this post.

And wants them to mostly move to Florida, so they have even more reason to care about Florida politics.

Importantly, Disney's initial reaction was quite lukewarm. Disney employees were rather upset by the noncommittal bill's response from their CEO, and started staging walkouts. Disney employees slated to be relocated from California to Florida (so Disney can stop leasing such expensive offices and has room to expand) were starting to reconsider their relocation plans. So their CEO Bob Chapek gave a more direct rebuke of the bill, which caused this reaction from Republicans.

I deal with the same problem with fullname@gmail. My name is very common, surprisingly so if you're not Italian. I get emails for:

* A Joe who runs a lego engineering team at his high school

* A Joe who goes to bible study in Utah

* A Joe who is building a house in Victoria Australia (I'm so familiar with him/others screwing up his email that I can forward it to him and his wife easily.

No idea. I'll note that the original post was to /r/Advice, and the removed update was to /r/relationship_advice. No idea why they switched subreddits, but I expect that was part of it.

r/BestofRedditorUpdates is probably my new favorite sub, and I appreciate the legwork people put into gathering the pieces of posts into a coherent and satisfying story.

Here's the same post in /r/BestofRedditorUpdates, which includes the update that was removed by mods

https://reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/u6a3qp/o...

I run a Dell XPS Developer Edition with Ubuntu preinstalled. I have had 0 problems with it. The only additional thing I did was disable the touchscreen because I never used it, but it did work.

I think you're likely going to encounter some faulty equipment from any vendor. I have enough family who swear by macbooks to know that the grass isn't much greener from their side and their hardware breaks too. I would be hesitant to switch ecosystems over 2 bad experiences.

The answer is to talk to recruiters.

The job ads that catch your eye are specifically tailored for those results. They're usually posted from flashy startups who are high on their own supply. I had many an interview with those types of places, and nothing you could say would be good enough for them. That's why those job posting are always open.

What worked for me was happenstance -- I applied to a job that was posted by a recruiter, and once I was in that recruiting company's ecosystem, they started passing opportunities my way. The opportunities were interesting and had "boring" and relatable tech. If I looked up the job ads for those opportunities, the posting itself sucked and lacked the detail I'd expect. I'd have never applied without a recruiter talking to me about it.

There is a massive demand for developers at small and medium sized businesses. Those businesses have no idea how to effectively market their postings, which is why they use recruiters. The startups that know how to effectively market their postings on WeWorkRemotely and such have the applicant pool to be insanely choosy. If you're having trouble landing something, apply to jobs that are close to what you're looking for, but definitely posted by a recruiter. The recruiters will talk to you, and if they like what they hear, the interviews will pour in.

Because it's a comic. Comics involve both illustrations of characters and those characters speaking, so he draws characters instead of just text.

If you follow SMBC this is a pretty normal setup for him, and many of the comics are the same panels with different text. This happens constantly, with the most notable example being two girls hiking up a snowy mountain. He's not quite as egregious about it as Dinosaur Comics, where literally every strip is the same with different text.

This comic was posted here because the text was particularly interesting this time. And it's not just talking heads, he also gives the illustration of the intersection as another visual metaphor.

I greatly miss Hipmunk, and would really like a successor. But I'm confused as to why this needs to be a browser extension instead of just a website. Even if you provide extra features as an extension, show comparisons if I'm flight sites, etc, I'd still like to just have a website I can go to to search flights, not requiring a browser extension to use.

Probably because Bitcoin is significantly more volatile than any reasonable currency. It's far more like a stock than a currency.

The issue dispensaries have is that they can't open bank accounts. If the issue was just with only paying in cash they could just accept the cash and deposit it at the bank. If they could use bank accounts they could accept bitcoin and immediately sell it for money deposited in the bank for that value.

Instead they have cash, safes full of cash, and they pay their workers in cash. If they accepted bitcoin they would have to hold their capital in bitcoin and pay out workers in bitcoin. They're not going to do that when bitcoin can crater in value day to day. On the same token they could just accept shares in GameStop for transactions. The problem is that tomorrow they could double in value or be worth nothing, which is not very comforting when you're a business with bills to pay.

I went to try the Pidgin Facebook plugin, and I couldn't login. There's no more app passwords as the plugin suggests, if you try to login without the 2 factor Facebook sends "Is This You?" notifications every time, but doesn't let you login if you say yes.

There's github issue[1] for it and no resolution, except a weird python script hack to do 2 factor which may or may not be reliable.

1. https://github.com/dequis/purple-facebook/issues/526