leepowers

Schema design and UI design should both be done at the beginning and designed _concurrently_. UI requirements can inform schema design. But there's always going to be an impedance mismatch between the two: schema design optimizes for performant storage and retrieval of data - it's data that has been optimized for machines. UI design optimizes a users ability to conceptualize and use data - it's data that has been optimized for people. Code is the glue that helps mediate between these domains.

You're right the related articles stickied at the bottom is super-distracting, it draws the eye, and has to be dealt with before you can continue reading. It's an interruption plain an simple - not as bad as a layered modal - but it still introduces an element of work to the reading experience.

The really frustrating thing is it's for related articles and it's shown first thing on the page. How about giving me a god damn minute to read the article I clicked on before prompting me to read something else. Related articles are fine. But how about putting them at the bottom of the page? I guess this is an interface a team of geniuses creates when they optimize for engagement instead of content.

This is definitely an anti-pattern.

The adult response is to acknowledge the trade-offs involved and to learn to live with a certain amount of risk. A free society is always going to be vulnerable to terrorist attacks to some degree. Reasonable policies might reduce this risk by 25%, 50%, 75%, 90%, etc. But they'll never reduce the risk to zero. So the conversation can't be how do we make sure this never happens again. Instead it must be an analysis of the trade-offs involved in securing against rare events while maintaining the freedom of movement and privacy that a free society requires.

Facial recognition in the UK, the mass phone metadata collection in the US and abroad, stop and frisk in NYC; public support of or indifference to these measures depends on the perception of the trustworthiness of government. That is, for populations that perceive that government as "on their side", the tradeoffs these policies require appear innocuous or beneficial.

So what if the NSA is storing my metadata? They're the good guys trying to catch terrorists. From this perspective the risk of bad government actors is smaller than the risk of terrorism.

So what if cops go hands-on with someone walking down the street? They're finding illegal guns and contraband, and bad guys with warrants. The inconvenience of being stopped is a cost worth paying for safer neighborhoods.

But the fulcrum of government can quickly swing from trust to oppression. There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen. We cannot keep evil people from attaining power. But we don't have to give them rope with which to hang us. Privacy protections, respect for bodily autonomy, adherence to the rule of law, and the decentralization of economic and political power are all bulwarks against tyranny.

Reminds of similar stats on stop and frisk - where only a small percentage of stops actually resulted in some sort of criminal conviction. And only a tiny fraction of those convictions were related to the original reason for stop and frisk[1] - discovering illegal weapons.

From the cop's perspective they're looking for a needle in a haystack. Public pressures are especially intense when it comes to anticipating and preventing terrorist attacks or curbing violent crime. But predicting rare events is very difficult. Due to the nature of the problem it's going to be mostly haystack (false positives) most of the time.

So I can understand why the UK police remain unperturbed by 92% false positives. And why the NYPD was largely indifferent to a similarly high rate of failure with stop and frisk.

The problem though is we are the haystack. There's a bit of the snake eating it's own tail here. In order to keep you safe we need to own your privacy. In order to protect your person from violent crime must be able to search your body at any time. Whatever freedom might be I can be sure freedom is not that.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/14/stop-and-frisk...

It's more complex than that. Mobile networks are mostly hampered by latency - each additional HTTP request to a different domain requires another TCP coldstart and handshake, DNS lookup, TLS setup, etc.

Many times the 100KB of JavaScript is faster to load when minified and combined with other site code and served compressed over a single HTTP request or streamed via HTTP/2. It's almost always faster to use an existing connection than to start a new one.

Also there isn't one canonical version of jQuery. There's dozens of potential versions available[1]. So it's not immediately clear that a user will have the version a site depends on.

[1] https://mathiasbynens.be/demo/jquery-size

I agree the investment of time is worth it when you have a strong expectation of landing a high-paying job. That's one caveat to consider. Another: as long as the take-home test comes _later_ in the process, after a more traditional interview, when the company and interviewee have had a chance to evaluate each other.

This is why you self-host all project dependencies.

This is still returning the error for me:

https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.2.1.min.js

Delete the Facebook app. It drains your battery and drains your attention.

I use the Mobile Basic interface to check FB once a week or so for messages or events:

https://mbasic.facebook.com/

I've had the same experience. There's a bright line separating people who want to learn from those who want to offload the hard work of learning onto someone else.

The latter almost always ask simple questions serially - it's obvious they're looking for a sequence of steps to follow instead of sussing out the problem on their own. They want to use your problem solving abilities instead of developing and using their own.

The former usually ask pointed and precise questions - and after they get an answer they usually go away. I say this not to be anti-social (even though I am) but to simply note they go quiet because they're actually working the problem.

This is true for people who make Peterson the end of their intellectual journey. _But this also holds true for any and all philosophies._ Whatever stink you're detecting on Peterson's followers doesn't necessarily translate to his ideas. Terrible annoying assholes can still speak the truth - we have to evaluate Peterson's ideas on their own merits, which at the very least the NYT article attempts.

All that being said I don't really "get" Peterson. I find his YouTube videos to be rambling and incoherent as he wanders and flits between topics that appear to be only tangentially related. (Though occasionally I'll detect some interesting nugget of an idea).

Initially this seemed to my mind to be a weakness and flaw but now I think it's actually the core of this appeal. His style requires listeners to make the connections on their own, to bring themselves into the lecture as active listeners. A searching young man primed by ennui will make those connections and will self-initiate into Peterson's philosophy, the listener will take ownership of the ideas. This contributes to the perceived clannishness of Peterson adherents.

> Today, even the most powerful elites often cannot effectively convene the right swath of the public to counter viral messages.

Let's imagine this was implemented. For every post on Facebook, Twitter, et al, a counter-point from the other side was included. Would this change anything?

Maybe not. The narrative right now is that the social giants are forcing people into media bubbles because this drives engagement. Including counter-points would burst the bubbles and we should expect a drop in engagement on the major social media sites. But would it lead to a drop in engagement overall? Wouldn't people still seek out the news that reinforces their pre-existing views?

The narrative should be inverted: the reason Facebook is massively popular is because it allows the masses to construct personalized bubbles. If Facebook loses it's "bubbleness" users will simply construct their bubbles on different platforms or in different ways. The space will fracture. You'll have a conservative Facebook clone, a leftist clone, a libertarian one, etc.

> After the meeting, I found myself wondering why otherwise smart people so easily slipped into this kind of business bullshit. How had this obfuscatory way of speaking become so successful?

Because there's no solid link between inputs and outputs. For most management techniques it's almost impossible to measure the output of a given management function. It's unfalsifiable. Like any other domain of human endeavor when operating in an unfalsifiable space you can neither confirm nor debunk a particular technique. The only thing you can do is _assert_ and flit from one fad to the next.

The paradox here is that while management seems to be required for corporate structures to function properly so much of it is fluff or outright BS. I have to wonder if a properly trained ML algorithm could replace 90% of management decisions by cutting out the cruft and ambiguity.

> Yet I’m clearly making an error, one that reveals a deeper decision-making bias whose cumulative cost is sizable: Like most people, I conduct relatively few experiments in my personal life, in both small and big things.

I think this is related to learning. Once you've learned a particular task (say, writing a unit test) you don't "relearn" it every time you want to execute the task again. Instead you "reenact" it - it's more automatic and can be done more quickly and with less focus and concentration. Each unit test is unique - but the tooling and concepts that surround it are already there.

Reenacting vs. learning may be one reason behind brand loyalty and habit. It simply takes more mental effort to re-evaluate and re-learn than to coast off a previous decision. It's more work, even if it's something minor like trying a different brand of soda. We can only "spend" so much attention and care during our waking hours.

The value of a habit is that you make a decision once and project it into the future as an automatic response. The notion that these automatic responses are somehow flawed or need to be optimized away, or optimized to produce some economic advantage, is suspect.

What _is_ valuable is understanding that these automatic responses are as much a part of human cognition as our deliberative attention. We should be re-evaluate them periodically and try to understand the effect they have on the trajectory of our lives.

Do you have an API? Even if WARC isn't something you feel comfortable tackling an API or webhooks would enable other enterprising developers to add this feature.

Some commenters are knocking PageDash for being a cloud service, and that's understandable. You'll have an easier time on-boarding HN users if you make it easy for them to access and control their data.

> state-run media pipeline

I have similar concerns but I think municipal would win out:

1) The First Amendment protects us against government interference with free speech. It does not apply to private companies like Comcast - they face no such constraints. This is especially true with the current FCC, where they're considering excluding internet utilities from common carrier rules. It's far more likely that Comcast would be granted monopoly or duopoly status by a local government, and then use that privileged position to control or censor speech or net traffic it unilaterally deems unacceptable, with no recourse or restraint that the First Amendment provides.

2) With municipal broadband citizens can always go to the ballot box and elect new leadership to increase transparency, accountability, and service level. What rights does the citizenry have to monitor and audit Comcast's decision making process? Zero. It's a private company beholden to shareholders - a situation that's often orthogonal to free speech and individual rights.

3) The public utility models works extraordinarily well for gas, electricity, water, sewage, garbage, streets, and other essentials for our modern life. Internet access can also thrive under this model, as like other utilities it is a natural monopoly.

> the page is 3.1 MB in size, makes about 460 HTTP requests of which 430 are third-party requests (outside of its parent domain) and takes 20 seconds to fully load on a fast 3G connection

That's a lot of ad-tracking and ad delivery code. More than that, it's also remarkable that so much of this code is essentially duplicated. It's all user tracking and ad delivery but with each separate company loading it's own "stack" to accomplish the same thing.

It's part of a larger trend from content-centered and user-centered to advertising centered. The problem is not centralization per se but business built on advertising revenue. Facebook is an extreme example - the news feed algorithms are optimized for generating ad revenue and not necessarily favoring news reports that happen to be true.

That's a false choice. No competent sysadmin is going to say "well, I was going to setup a public key but I spent all my time changing the SSH port number, so screw it".

Also when securing a box with public key encryption you should be configuring sshd to disable password authentication and disable root login. Editing an extra line in the config file isn't going to throw your schedule.

Seconding this. It very much depends on the purpose of the image. If an image or any other tag is extraneous in a screen reader context use the `aria-hidden`[1] attribute to exclude it.

A good example is an image used as an icon next to a text label. Imagine a link/button that contains the words "Save" and a floppy disk icon. There's no need to have an alt of "Save" on the icon as the text "Save" is already present. So it would look something like this:

    <a href="#"><img src="save-icon.png" aria-hidden="true">Save</a>

Though in this case you'd probably be using an icon font like FontAwesome.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31107040/whats-the-diffe...

> ....the Postal Service is working on an approach that it hopes to make available to the public in January 2018 which would allow USPS to send written notification to addresses when someone at that residence signs up for Informed Delivery.

Written notification is good. In addition they should implement mail-based authorization, where an activation code is mailed to the customer, and the code must be entered on the Informed Delivery web site to confirm participation in the program.

One large factor the author misses is the staggeringly high rates of murder and violent death in non-state societies, in some instances reaching as high as 60%[1]

This is the core of Hobbes' description of pre-state societies as "nasty, brutish, and short". Prehistoric life was incredibly tough and brutal as there simply wasn't much room for error.

If someone is able to steal from you or mistreat you without repercussion you immediately become a target for every other bad actor in the tribe. In this environment reciprocal violence is rational. A neutral state actor with a monopoly on violence tips the incentives towards non-violent resolution of disputes.

In modern times if you are unemployed for a month you can collect a check from the government and move on with your life. In prehistoric times if you go a month without successfully hunting or collecting food you get to watch your children starve to death. Again, very very little room for error.

Neolithic life had it's own set of challenges namely famine, disease, and inter-state warfare. But over the long term it provided more cushion for common mistakes and the foibles of human nature. It enlarged the margin of error for survival compared to prehistoric peoples.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-e...

> and "appeals to traditional values" do not seem to be improving the lives of these people very much.

There's a few things going on here:

1) Many in these communities see success and virtue as intertwined. The idea here is that a person with the correct traditional values plus hard work and faith will have a good economic outcome. If God is present, and God commands us to act in certain ways, surely he will reward us for our faith in all aspects of our life (including the economic dimensions).

2) A person living in an economically depressed area won't have money to hold onto, and his life is usually just a few ticks away from financial ruin, losing his home, losing his car, major health episode, etc. It's an ugly and chaotic state. Traditional values provide constancy and a psychological anchor. I may be in a chaotic state but God is in control, even if things go horrifically bad. The trade-off here is that God sets the rules that everyone has to abide by.

To be pedantic - that would only show that consciousness is non-neuronal. Max Tegmark has this idea of "consciousness as a state of matter"[1] - that neurons aren't particularly special - what matters is are particular patterns. These consciousness patterns can be composed of neurons, but they could also be composed of computer circuits, or rain drops, or any other particles.[2]

To be pragmatic - the absence of a physical cause for consciousness does not preclude any other causes. Whatever environment consciousness exists in that environment must have rules, laws, constants, and symmetries that define that environment. So all we're doing is trading the laws of the universe for the laws of some ethereal no-material realm or supernatural realm. We're not actually performing any useful work, we're just shuffling the problem around.

The hard problem of consciousness, the questions of determinism and free will - these problems will challenge any consciousness that finds itself in a rule-bound system.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzCvlFRISIM

> Manzotti: However, the essential underlying idea here is simply that neurons produce consciousness. It’s as crude as that. We are simply asking the brain to do what the soul once did. Of course, what neuroscience has actually shown is how neurons consume chemicals, absorb other chemicals and release them, produce and fire off electrical charges, and so on. In many situations such activities occur in strict relation to certain experiences we have. But then, so do the activities of many other cells in the body. And so do the external things we experience.

This strikes me as disingenuous. Consciousness is correlated strongly and solely with the brain. Meaning, if you cut off my hand I can still think and feel and reason. If you remove a fist-sized volume of tissue from my pre-frontal cortex I'll never have another thought again.

I guess I'm missing the point Manzotti is driving at. Experience is something that needs to be accounted for. I can deny many things but I can't deny that I'm experiencing some thoughts and feelings and sense perceptions right now. Even if the self and experience is illusory there must be something causing that illusion to exist. If consciousness exists in this universe then it must be explained by the laws and constants of this universe. If it's not neurons that produce consciousness then there must be some other physical phenomena that generates experience.

Same here, no more phone app.

But I do have the basic mobile site bookmarked:

https://mbasic.facebook.com

Instead of getting notifications and getting pulled into the app I can visit the site when I have downtime, or have something I actually want to accomplish on FB.

This underscores an error that many conservative thinkers make - that "values are everything." I think values are an important part of achieving good outcomes, but values don't exist in isolation. The war on drugs criminalizes behavior that could be better treated through rehabilitation. Then it compounds this error by imposing large externalities, like felony records that make it impossible to find a job, excessive mandatory minimum sentences, etc.

Values multiply positively with other factors. So it's not "bourgeois values" + "economic opportunity" == "success". It's more like "bourgeois values" * "economic opportunity" == success (multiplication instead of addition). When "economic opportunity" = 0 values will have no impact. This is an idea that a lot of us in the U.S. grapple with, that you can be virtuous but still end up with a bad outcome.

> .... inner city blacks are incompatible with an advanced free market economy.

We must have read different articles because that's not what I saw - I think you're so focused on detecting a dog whistle that you're missing the key point being raised.

Values are race, gender, and class neutral. A value or system of values can be adopted by a person regardless of their race, gender, class, sexual orientation, etc. Values are the only way we can find common ground with others, they are the only way we can be unified as a society. Imagine a white supremacist. Certainly if his skin color was magically changed to black overnight he would no longer be a white supremacist. But that's not a possibility - a white supremacist cannot change his skin color. But he can change his values.

We all agree that a stable family life is very advantageous for children. Most often this stability is achieved via marriage. Examining it along this axis we can then say that bourgeois, pro-family, pro-marriage values are measurably better than others.

We can also imagine an inner city black who has a choice between two value systems - a bourgeois value system or a hedonistic "gangster" value system. Which value system should he adopt? The bourgeois one, as this one will have better outcomes for him, for his family, and for his community.

Now there's a possible danger here: that we assume that all inner-city blacks have a gangster value system. That by dint of skin color and geographic location a person must necessarily have a certain value system. So let's not make that error.

Additionally, I would be very surprised if a majority of inner-city blacks held to some sort of gangster value system. While I don't have the data or surveys on hand, I would assume that most of this population already agrees with and holds most of the pro-family bourgeois values.

If these bourgeois values are already widespread yet poor outcomes remain then we can't pin these outcomes on a person lacking correct values. There's another factor in play. It may be that bourgeois values are hostage to other social, economic, and cultural factors. That they might yet bloom into something positive but are missing other essential ingredients. Wax fails insofar as she assigns too great a weight to the impact of bourgeois values.

Fair points. I was being a bit hypercritical. It all depends on what you negotiate up-front.

A contract will not necessarily inoculate you against a charge of fraud.

It's legally dicey to represent that you personally will be performing work and then sub-contract to another person. Usually the client won't care. But if things go sideways (especially on a big contract with a lot of money at stake) you are opening yourself to a large amount of legal risk.

Always be upfront and honest. And always negotiate in good faith. The best legal strategy is to never engage in behavior that will require a lawyer to defend.

An agency is a middle-man that primarily adds value via management. It abstracts away to costs and headaches of managing a project. As with any successful middle-man your agency will need to position itself in a nexus of supply and demand.

First, you need the demand. Ideally where the demand for your type of services is above your current capacity to deliver. As in you're literally declining well-paying work with reputable clients because you simply don't have the time to build all the projects yourself.

Second, you need a supply of talent. A network of other developers who are dependable who you can call up on demand or hire outright.

If you lack either of these the agency is going to have a rough time, and probably going to fail.

Third, as an agency you will make money on the margins. Revenue will flow through your business and you will capture some percentage of it. This is very different from consulting where you capture almost 100% of the revenue, less some minor expenses.

The reason for this is simple: labor.

Let's say your rate is $100/hr. Since you're a consultant operating in a global free market that $100/hr is competitive within the market, and is mostly inelastic - there's not much room to go up or down. Another developer with your same skill level is going to cost $100/hr.

So where's you're margin? You can find margin by hiring a less-skilled developer at $75/hr. But then the quality suffers (and so can your reputation, reducing demand). Or you can attach a $25/hr "agency fee" to every hour worked. Or you can find a sucker who doesn't know the true value of his labor, and underpay and overwork him. (This last option is how most agencies operate).

Instead of making $100/hr consulting you're making $25/hr for each hour your sub-contracted developers work. This can work out nicely if you have a high level of demand, and if your developers are responsible self-starters who don't require a lot of management work on your part. But you would need some multiple of your current workload to earn the same amount of money.

My advice is to _not_ fold your current consulting into an agency. Instead, start an agency as a side-project, incorporated as a completely separate business. An agency needs to be marketed very differently than an individual consultant. Find other developers and marketing people you can partner with, agree on a compensation structure, and see if the company can land some big contracts. You can even sub-contract the project work to yourself individually at your normal labor rate.

It will be difficult to find partners who are comfortable with this. It's very difficult to work on a margin basis when your partner is working on a labor basis. But if you can earn $100/hr on the open market why would you work for your own company for less? This is one reason why many consultants end up making less money when they start an agency - they undervalue their labor because it's their company.