krstck

I wish phone numbers could work this way. When my personal data gets leaked or sold, just revoke access to that particular token.

Ah yes, because who doesn't want to return to the days of AOL's "channels".

I think you're completely right, btw. After AOL, it only took a few years for websites to become rapidly Flash-based. It looks like we're going back to that again (not Flash, but same thing - black boxed).

Their nonprofit accounts are designed for "nonacademic" orgs. If there's an account type that's applicable to university research (not just students) then I'd be thrilled.

> At Bay Area prices isn't that about 5 minutes of developer pay per month?

I work for an academic nonprofit. Asking to spend any money is like pulling teeth, and any purchase I make has to go through many layers of bureaucracy who don't understand or care what I do and have no incentive to make my life easier. I don't want to leave Github, but now I have to, because I just won't get the approval to spend hundreds a year. But I know that's nothing to Bay Area companies, so the rest of us will just go kick rocks or something.

My understanding is that transportation is actually a small factor in total food emissions. It seems that promoting "local food" without paying attention to whether that food can be optimally produced locally, might be more environmentally unfriendly than simply producing it wherever it is most efficient to produce and then transporting it.

Denver has so many wonderful things, but this undercurrent of "I hate all the new people" is so gross. I've encountered it in situations where I'm literally handing money over to someone who is bitching about people moving here.

This brouhaha about gender identity requires some 'fixed points' about gender that I thought we progressives had all already agreed were nonexistent!

But I don't think the point about the author's personal experience of not "feeling like a girl" proves anything - see "cis by default", or http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender.... It's possible that there are people who do feel strongly that their body doesn't match what their mind is telling them, and it's a cause of suffering. As I understand it, it really is all about sex in this case (which makes the author's quip about her "true self not having arthritic knees" irrelevant).

Mint is logging in on your behalf, unless you have a different service than I do.

I've been dreaming of a standardized banking API for as long as I've been using online banking. It crushes my soul every time Mint makes me send them my actual log in credentials just to scrape transaction data. Really hope this catches on, but I think too many orgs have a vested interest in being the gate-keepers of your banking data.

As I've entered the more intermediate stage as a Rails developer, I've noticed that the "magicalness" that allowed me to do so much so quickly as a beginner, is often actually getting in my way. Perhaps when I reach the "advanced" stages, I'll learn to love the magic again, but I'm in this awkward stage of knowing what I want to do but not knowing how to tell Rails to do it (or stop doing it, as the case may be).

I'm particularly sad about the evolution of the word "troll" to mean "anything someone else doesn't like".

The idea of "flamebait" has also completely disappeared, and we've lost the ability to roll our eyes at it.

The "Most Recent" sort is not at all obvious, at least on my Facebook, and it also quietly turns itself off. It's quite user-hostile.

Agreed. Facebook's great sin isn't that they have an algorithm to serve the content they believe is the best, it's that they don't respect my decision to turn that off.

His experience might be a lot different from mine, but I've found TDD enormously helpful when tackling legacy systems. Maybe that's not "test-driven development" and more like "test-driven refactoring", but working on complex legacy systems where the original developers are basically all gone is scary, and TDD has helped me make some sense of it and feel a lot better about making changes.

> They're basically arguing that you're better off going to a school in the middle of nowhere because "hey, for being in such a crappy location, you did pretty well!".

Well, no, not exactly. It's a subtle distinction, but what it's actually ranking is how well that school exceeds expectations, not best outcomes. This is not necessarily a list that will give a student the best school to go to, but rather (what it says on the tin) a scorecard for how well those schools are doing, given their resources.

Adding sugar reduces the water activity, which inhibits microbial growth.

PewDiePie - just one Youtube channel - has almost 40 million subscribers. Even if a very small percentage pays the $10/mo subscription fee, the numbers here are still huge.

> And as for "exclusive YouTube content" it makes zero sense to have the same monthly fee as Netflix and somehow think that PewDiePie is going to compete with Orange is the New Black or House of Cards.

The (mostly teenage) audience for Youtube celebrities is massive, and is probably mostly invisible to you if you don't know any kids. I don't know whether they'd be willing to pay for a subscription service, but regardless of whether you think Netflix is higher quality than Youtube, there are many millions of people who get their entertainment mostly just from Youtube.

Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_anymore

What (or who) are you currently reading?

I basically agree with you, except I don't think there are many cases where the usage of "literally" makes the meaning ambiguous. It should be clear whether someone's head literally exploded (are we having a conversation about an industrial accident, or is a person simply becoming angry?). I treat "literally" and "literally" as two words that are spelled the same but have different meanings.

Cost of living.

Yeah, I'm sure they aren't directly comparable. I'm just trying to describe my general feeling of "life as we know it" will somehow always manage to make itself more and more expensive, no matter how many productivity gains we experience. I'm skeptical of how a basic income can address this - wouldn't living off of the BI be equivalent to the frowned-upon practice of living off of welfare? I need to research this area more.

This seems to be the case as long as consumption continues to scale. I think you can come close to approximating a circa 1950's standard of living on very little income.

A (non-tech) company I used to work for hired temp workers as a way for HR to hit some kind of "low headcount" performance bonus. It was terrible for everyone else, including the temps themselves.

Is that number including all of the contractors in their warehouses? I believe they make heavy use of temp services.

There are articles on how horrible the warehouse conditions are. (For example, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-f...). Note that I'm not trying to condone that perception, just merely observing that it exists in tandem with Walmart's (whose problems are well-known).

One interesting thing is that Amazon is almost approaching Walmart's bad reputation in terribleness for employees. (Maybe not software devs, but perhaps warehouse contractors.) Is this kind of ruthlessness essential for such a huge company to be so profitable?

Also, Bezos has far more influence (and responsibility) over Amazon than the Waltons do over modern-day Walmart.

Web of Trust does something similar, but seems to be geared more towards spam and malware. Would be nice to have something to keep track of all the sites that I forget not to go to (e.g. Forbes).