So, if you own two and one dies, what happens?
1,436 karma · joined January 17, 2016
The biggest contributors to that 20% are (1) extra admin overhead like time consuming performance appraisals and more red tape for purchases, reimbursements, time off, etc., (2) getting blocked sitting around waiting for some person/team whose priorities are not my priorities to respond to requests for info/support, and (3) additional reporting requirements in the form of meetings and extra emails/paperwork to keep other groups/managers updated on what I/my team am/is doing.
There is also a subtle productivity drain caused by the feeling of "why should I put in an extra hour today to finish this feature when release is probably going to be blocked by [some thing I cannot control]". So, I leave the work til tomorrow, but I lose all the mental context I have for the work and need to recapture that to get back to where I was, so what would have taken an hour yesterday takes 90 minutes today.
When I was on a 4 person team in a 25 person company, it absolutely felt like every extra effort I made had an impact and was noticed and appreciated, which inspired me to make extra efforts.
Now I feel like any extra energy I have should go into making sure I don't forget to get some form to HR by some important (but arbitrary) deadline or attending the latest mandatory training session my manager or IT has required me to go to or getting legal to approve use of that open source library we need.
`In the course of reviewing and acting on spam reports, an npm staffer acted on this flag without further investigating the user and removed the user and all of their packages from the registry.`
Specifically, a policy that allows removing "all of [a user's] packages" based on something related to the user rather than on the packages themselves.
Feels like there should be a disconnect between decisions made about a 'user' and those made about a 'package'.
Once the package is published, there should be an understanding that the package belongs to npm and npm's users, even if the original publisher retains some authority over it.
And if there is cause to ban a user, it should not automatically mean that packages published by the user are affected (aside from removing whatever authority the user had).
Seems like npm might want to review the policy that allows stuff like that to happen.
Even if a user violates the spam policy (which, to be clear, it seems the affected user in this case did NOT do), that hardly seems to be appropriate grounds for deleting everything the user has ever published on npm.
That is a policy that is just begging for griefing.
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is surprisingly bitter, but also a good read.
Also plenty of short stories are worth reading if you don't have time for a novel. A short amusing one about home security: https://americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/short-story...
Aside from sending a few emails, the review process is largely managed by academia, although I suppose academia may be happier thinking they are being managed by Elsevier than their peers (who tell Elsevier who to enlist for the work anyway...).
But the non-academic work is what you have to do yourself if you break the lock in.
It is not trivial and as it scales it gets increasingly complex.
There are two moats that protect Elsevier's business.
The first moat is that academics don't trust each other and perpetuate the "Publish or Perish" mindset.
In some disciplines (e.g., Liberal Arts, Math), there isn't enough money flowing through academic circles for this to be a real problem. But for the Life Sciences and some Physical Sciences in particular, there is a lot of government and industry money sloshing around, and academics seem perfectly willing to undercut each other and themselves as a group to get a bigger slice of it.
Elsevier takes advantage of that.
Maybe academics will get mad enough at them over it to unite long enough to break their ability to take advantage of them. Seems like it would be in their best interest to do so.
The second moat is that building a web platform to efficiently distribute hundreds of thousands of pages of content a year while still maintaining access to all the previously published pages is a seriously non-trivial task.
Now just providing that web platform can be done for much less money than is currently paid to publishers.
But, as I'm sure all the web developers and sys admins on hacker news would be happy to point out, hosting terabytes of data and generating consistently formatted HTML/CSS from thousands of individually created Word docs and graphics with nifty social media integrations and customized search/browse options is not a thing that can be done for free at the scale Elsevier is operating at.
Academics usually do the peer reviewing and sometimes the editing (which is almost certainly a waste of their talents as a good editor is cheaper and more efficient at editing than some Biology PhD guy).
Most of the more prestigious journals (e.g., the ones people are paying for) are supported by publishing house staff doing the sort of stuff I mentioned -- or, more likely, managing the vendors in India who are doing the stuff I mentioned.
Source: I worked in scientific publishing for many years. Happy to be out of it...
I was just answering the question about why universities don't just self publish everything.
If Elsevier is overcharging for their services (hint: they are), some startup should go disrupt them or something (hint: the problem will be convincing prestigious authors to publish in your journal rather than Elsevier's).
scheduling, organizing, communicating, file management, vendor management, budgeting, large scale data conversion (e.g., Microsoft Word --> XML, image conversions), editing, proofing, and correcting articles, not to mention running a fairly content heavy website with appropriate search/browse options, etc.
Basically, throwing 1 monthly journal (~1000 pages/year) up on a WordPress site is pretty easy (except for the part about dealing with the authors) and could probably be done by a couple people putting in a few hours a week.
Creating a useful web platform for 100s of journals is an entirely different proposition and almost certainly a poor use of universities resources.
Now, they could pay someone to do all that work, but that is pretty much what they are negotiating with Elsevier.
It is crimes like this that make me think we've got to break down the walls protecting anonymity on the internet -- which makes me sad, because I've always kind of liked anonymity on the internet...
[1]which is entirely wrong and should absolutely be stopped and as a nation we need to have a real conversation about this...
[2]I'm not a legal expert, I just have a functioning sense of morality...
One was moderately annoying as the call center menu hid the ‘unsubscribe’ option about five layers deep, although once I found it I had a brief and reasonably efficient conversation to sort things out.
For the other subscription, I had an absolutely painful discussion with a woman on another continent who kept pretending to misunderstand me and offering to “suspend” my subscription for two months.
After several attempts to be reasonable and being treated like a fool, I had to raise my voice and express some anger before she suddenly became able to understand me. :(
Any future subscriptions of mine will be through a trusted third party like amazon or only with services that have proven they don’t suck at customer service.
`for managerial tasks like client onboarding, signing NDA and requirement collection right from their personal website`
would read better as:
`for managerial tasks like onboarding clients, signing NDAs, and collecting requirements right from their personal website`
Copyediting is largely getting eliminated as an 'unnecessary' expense in the world of web content publishing, but when the life of your business might depend on some marketing copy, good professional copyediting is priceless.
--edited for alliteration, grammar, and oxford comma
But if you make it annual standard operating procedure, then you are paying people to create spreadsheets and documents rather than, say, do something useful.
And the money will funnel to the people who are awesome at creating spreadsheets and documents rather than the people who are good at doing useful stuff.
Effective oversight requires understanding the domain and being motivated to continually improve things.
Dramatic? Yes, but legitimately so based on the narrative and the presentation.
His style and interests won't match everyone's taste, but he is providing a high quality product.
The browser creators, people paying for websites, and (many) javascript developers all seem happy with this, unfortunately.
Also, it is one of the better examples of a type of visual/minimalist/free verse mid-20th century american poetry that is super approachable and understandable (read some of the Wallace Stevens stuff for the counter examples).
Plus, it is great for having "Wait, is this really a poem? What is a poem??" discussions in English 101 classes.
And, to be fair, if some random person wrote it, it would get almost no attention at all, but Williams really was a quite good poet. And while this little poem doesn't have much to it, what it has is nicely wrought.
Just my $0.02...
Most of the first 3 weeks of the class was focused on writing Ruby programs to do different sorts and searches, and to model and manipulate different objects (suduko boards, battleship boards, etc.).
I left with a good practical knowledge of working with arrays and hashes in Ruby and when I would prefer one structure over the other, but what I mostly learned was how to model data objects for a SQL database and set up a web app to manipulate those objects (and how to integrate w 3rd party APIs).
But if you asked me anything about a Linked List or a Trie or when it was better to use which one, I would not have given you a very satisfactory answer (still might not, about Tries at least...).
And, yeah, getting a job was tricky. Partly because I still had a lot to learn (still do), but also partly because there is a lot of knowledge that every computer science grad has learned backwards and forwards and then forgot about that most bootcamp grads have only barely been exposed to.
Did DBC give me an education equivalent to a computer science degree? No.
Did they teach me everything I need to know about data structures and algorithms? No.
Did they help me get my first programming job? Sort of, but not really.
But I did learn an enormous amount of practical knowledge in a very short time (basically: "How to build and deploy a database-backed CRUD app with a reasonable UI while working as part of a small fast paced team" and "How to research stuff you don't know the answer to and figure out how to do it on your own").
They taught me what I needed to know to teach myself the rest of what I needed to know to get where I wanted to be. And for that, it was worth it for me.
But I do have mixed feelings about the bootcamps in general.
They can be really helpful for people in certain circumstances (in my case: career changer who needed to jumpstart the learning process and get some practical guidance), but they sell themselves as something else ("Learn to be a computer programmer in 6 months!").
Sorry to hear they are shutting down. I suppose it was Kaplan's decision and the space has become so crowded that there must be pricing pressure on the programs and a limit to how many graduates the job market can absorb. Will have to go look into this some more and see what I can find out.
And it usually isn't anything as sane as half in the store and half in one other place.
It's like 70% in the store, and 5% in component#1, and 8% in component#2, and 16% in component#3 (duplicating some stuff from component#1 and sorta duplicating some stuff from component#2 with some notes that someone should refactor all this and move those to redux) and the rest of it is only god knows where.
And then there is some hard to track down UI bug because using setState() turns out to be really much slower than you think it is going to be.
But Redux is so boilerplatey and heavy handed that it made sense in each individual case to the original coder/reviewer to not use it.
So, an HTML/CSS/Javascript test proving that you know how to make an api request, play with data, and set up event handlers.
Which is fine, I suppose, except it was with a 2 hour limit and you had to code everything via a web interface (hackerrank maybe?).
I found it super annoying to work outside of my editing environment without any of the linting tools that I'm use to working with and without even source control to record good commits to jump back to if things went wrong.
The task itself was not particularly hard, but I had to work very fast, didn't finish the last filtering options, and had no time for design -- everything was default html with a few primary colors thrown in here and there.
I don't mind a time-limited coding challenge, but not letting me use the tools I use every single time I code (and would use if I were hired to work there) was very frustrating.
Turns out that for a lot of victims wiping their old computer was deemed less expensive than the cost, nuisance, and risk of paying criminals through some shady internet fake money thing to possibly avoid having to wipe their computer.
For anyone with a recent backup of their data, I can't think of why they'd pay.
When that doesn't work any more, start prefixing names with 'get': getmochaly, getasyncly, getunderscorely.
After that, you need to start requiring at least 2 numerals, 3 capital letters, and 1 punctuation mark: geTBab3!lY9, Ge!ax1OSly2, g3tW%b4acKlY.
What could be more natural than npm install --save-dev getBAB3l-prese!-sta&e-0ly ?
At first I was perplexed by the boilerplate and the awkward way it seemed like I had to update 5 files just to toggle a view element -- but I figured I just didn't understand yet and one day when I did it would all make sense.
Well... after about a year of working with it, I'll admit I understand it and there is some sense to it, but there really is nothing elegant or likeable about it.
I too have never felt happy working with Redux.
I've got a side project I've been working on and was planning to use Redux since that's what I use at work, but I think I'll take this as an opportunity to try out something else.