ljoshua

The article didn't necessarily clarify what type of data was being reported back, which I think is key. It mentions diagnostic data (I'm assuming crash logs and such), but it says "personal data" without specifying.

I think that would be a very helpful bit to surface before a solid judgement call can be made. Anyone with more info?

Yes, I'm experiencing the same thing! I recently switched to Brave beta, and thought maybe it was something there, but I opened up Chrome for another task and was hit with the same issue.

I've got a couple common extensions running between the two, with uBlock Origin being my most likely culprit if it's an extension thing, but it's definitely annoying! Don't know why it's going on.

I've always really enjoyed the #LightTheWorld campaign, which puts the focus on service and helping others. This year it starts with a worldwide day of service on Dec 1, spends a week on serving the world, then a week on community, then family, then faith. It's an awesome way to get my kids involved in the Christmas spirit and thinking beyond themselves.

Here's a calendar download with activities/ideas (PDF): https://www.mormon.org/bc/content/assets/pdf/christmas2018/C...

And there will be videos will be coming out on http://www.lighttheworld.org, if it's the same as years past.

In general, I feel that if I can teach my kids to look for ways to serve and benefit others, then we're really getting at the core of why Christmas exists, and the core of who we are celebrating.

Silly, but putting up a no-fog mirror in the shower for shaving has been amazing for me. I used to shave after the shower, but now I can take care of it while still in the shower which means it takes less time and there's less cleanup (plus I can stay warm in the shower too!). Not a huge time savings, but definitely asked myself why I hadn't done so sooner.

Oh that's neat, I wish it were in the US as well as the UK. I'd subscribe!

Care to expand on "their business model and practices are basically same as Google's?"

As far as I understand it, it's paid placement for search engines and bookmarks [0], and potentially attaching aff links to some search results [1]. Isn't that pretty much the same model as Mozilla and Firefox? Kind of a far cry from being a data aggregator and an ad company, right?

[0]: https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/20277/vivaldi-income/2 [1]: http://www.itpro.co.uk/desktop-software/29904/jon-von-tetzch...

BAGH!!! I just got the announcement email as well. Lame.

I've really been enjoying Astro recently (https://www.astro.ai/). I was a big Newton/Cloudmagic fan before they shut down in the last month, but nearly everything I liked from Newton is also present in Astro. Unified inbox, snooze/send later, excellent keyboard support, etc.

Also has the best "less important emails" inbox implementation that I've used so far. The whole gimmick of an AI bot I could chat with is just that, a gimmick, but bot the desktop and mobile apps are solid.

Wishlist items remaining: Newton had you have a Newton account that would automatically set up all your accounts when you installed it on a new device, but Astro doesn't do that. Also, I'd love it to automatically pick the right account to send from once I type in the recipient's address, based on past correspondence, like Newton did. But neither of these are even small issues.

It's a bit of a relic from back when bank transfers only happened via paper, but I wouldn't call it a scam. Megacorps give each other the same terms all the time, so it's more about tradition and inertia than market power.

That being said, when I knew I have been a high-value member of a team as an outside resource, I've negotiated for better terms (net 15, for example).

This is factoring, not payday loans. As the author investigates, he finds this out as well.

I've done plenty of freelance work and I deeply know the pain of getting paid late, but as others have pointed out, dealing with a larger business results in net 30/60/90 terms, when things are going well. The fee you pay to the intermediary is justified.

Now if the only option to ever get paid was to pay an intermediary a cut of your salary, well then that would be a major issue. But otherwise this is the freelancer paying an intermediary for a) quicker access to funds and b) reducing the (albeit often small) risk of the client not paying.

You can "follow" accounts without becoming a follower in normal mode too. I frequently do this just to keep timelines clear.

All you have to do is add an account to a private list (without following them) and then view the timeline for that list. I really only ever interact with Twitter through Tweetbot (tear today!) or Tweetdeck, so I have one list I call "The Group" that is a highly curated list of folks I actually want to see stuff from, and a few other lists of accounts that are intermittently interesting but that I don't need to actually follow.

Because following an account is akin to an endorsement or at least a weak association in a way, this method is also interesting when it would be useful to stay updated with an account without strictly associating it. (Some will immediately think of political accounts or counter-culture accounts; I actually use it when following companies that I might need to see news from like my utility but that I don't want to say "Hey spam me with your PR!")

Not sure exactly what you're getting at here, but I tend to overanalyze many things (especially things like purchases and options, researching endlessly). I read a great article in the NYTimes about FOBO, Fear of Better Options, that really resonated.

I can't find the original link right now, but here's a Medium piece that is nearly the same content: https://medium.com/swlh/fobo-fear-of-better-options-is-the-r...

Nooo! Newton is my favorite! This is a sad day for me, and of course even more sad for the team.

Alright, what is everyone's favorite cross-platform mail client these days then?

Here's a great explanation from Jen Simmons that really helped me understand the differences and respective strengths and weaknesses of each:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs3piaN4b5I

I also really liked Sam's comments at the end:

> The bottom line is that $10-$80 is perfectly fine for an unmonitored monolithic setup. But once you need to start talking SLAs and need to know this thing will be rock solid and survive random failures… well costs start mounting.

I've run sites that do tens or hundreds of thousands of uniques a week with base-level VPSes like Linode or DO, spending just $10-20/mo on it. But if you require high availability or must meet strict SLAs, you start hitting the Pareto principle pretty hard. You end up needing to pay a lot for that increased certainty, even if you are only squeezing a few more minutes of uptime or flexibility out of it.

HP had their TC1100 back in 2004, and I loved it. It was a tablet XP computer with a separable keyboard and pen, and while not iPad/Surface levels of smoothness it was still amazing at the time. It wasn't MS hardware, but XP went to pretty great lengths at the time to make pen input a thing, so I guess that can count as part of their "pioneering" legacy.

Interestingly, here's a piece comparing the TC110 to the Surface Pro 3: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2363252/ten-years-after-hps-...

"But why???" is the question I keep asking myself after reading each entry.

The flight path of landing planes is often directly over my home. How many times I have wished during the final approach that I could hop in an personal landing pod or sky dive out, landing in my driveway, than take the extra hour or so that is required to deplane, get to transportation, and drive home... Slip air travel anyone? :)

What the what?? That is one of the most intense things I've seen in a while! Three full color screens on a keyboard... woah.

> The best marketing we've done has been to launch, over and over again.

That's my favorite takeaway from the article. Seems like a difficult thing to do in practice, but also something I've been considering lately.

Anyone else have experience with doing repeated launches that they'd be willing to share?

Yes, they would be just fine. “Southern hospitality” really is a thing here, and our cities are much more diverse than what one might think if you haven’t visited. On my street where I live in my very affordable single-family home, we have virtually every major ethnicity represented, and everything from blue collar workers to doctors and software engineers.

Texas is different politically than California, but it is just as good a place to live for anyone coming to the Melting Pot. And in the end, both states face many of the same problems, the major cities are very similar, and the rural areas are also very similar.

Disclaimer: I live in Texas, and have lived in many other less cowboyish states, as well as living several places internationally.

Or to put a more fine point on it, if I’m writing SaaS-style web applications, which as most do are CRUD implementations, where do FP languages and concepts help me out? That’s the question I haven’t seen addressed well in the beginner materials, despite the presence of langs and frameworks like Elixir, Phoenix, Clojure(script), F#, etc.

I’ll bite. I haven’t done huge dives into it, but I’ve definitely gone through the Learn F# interactive tutorial and spent some time working through some Scala lessons a while ago. I would love to be doing more FP work just because of the testimonials of others in how it has improved their craft.

The most difficult thing thus far has been that I haven’t seen where many of the more interesting FP concepts fit into my daily programming efforts. I am most frequently working on LOB applications, mobile apps, or backend APIs. It’s very much the world of take a model, do something to it, and return it. I know that it comes with practice, but often times the cool chaining and currying concepts, FP modifiers (except for map and a couple other simple functions) just don’t seem to apply when I think about the problems I’m trying to solve. The tutorials often lack any real-world examples, focusing more on math problems or “not real data” uses.

That being said, one of the biggest things that I have taken away is the idea that, given the same inputs a function should always return the same outputs, and be free of outside state. That has definitely helped me improve my coding.

There are solutions like that out there, and they work pretty well, but tend to also be pricey.

See Red Gate's SQL Compare: https://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-compar...

That all seems pretty reasonable, mainly geared towards reducing coordinated amplification of content and not just about taking down bots. The original Twitter dev post [1] lays it out quite clearly.

I run a single bot for myself [2] that takes the tweets of one (hilarious) account and either retweets them or slightly modifies the original content and tweets that out. This seems to fall in line with what Twitter is now recommending: retweet instead of copy and paste content to multiple accounts, and do not massively coordinate across many accounts.

[1]: https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tips/2018/au...

[2]: https://github.com/jlyman/CleanIve

The book, "How Will You Measure Your Life," by Clayton Christensen is easily on my list of Top 5 Most Important books, I cannot recommend it enough.

Interestingly, Kent seems to have focused in on hygiene-motivation factors more than anything else, while the large takeaway I brought from the book is more about relationships than money/freetime options. While it is important to be locally maximizing the balance of those two, I found the message of the book to be about focusing outward, more away from one's self and career, and more towards others in ways that you can positively effect them.

Not saying at all that the content is wrong (because it's not, it's a fun engineering way of looking at it), but for those curious it also represents a subset of the book.

I'm sorry, but I don't feel the tone of the letter represents how any compromise or progress can occur. If you are completely banned from associating in any way, shape, or form with someone who espouses views different from you, because of an accusation that by so doing you are tacitly endorsing those views, puts every single person and issue at an impasse.

If you ever want to affect change, you have to talk to and interact with people you don't agree with.

There may be other issues at play here, but accusing someone of endorsing all of the viewpoints of an administration when said person has expressly disavowed those viewpoints shouldn't be ignored. Bill Nye is trying to move forward one point (promoting NASA and space exploration), and I don't think he's in a position to also move forward every other political and social issue mentioned in the letter.

We can all do better, but I don't think we do better when we attack others.

For those of us still trying to wrap our heads around the value you described here (btw I do like the level of simplification you've introduced), can you explain how the coin would effectively be used in the cloud-storage protocol you suggested? I'm just not connecting the dots yet.

GitHub actually straddles the line a little bit. You'll note that when browsing around through folders in a repo on GitHub that you get the faux loading indicator along the top, and then it shows the contents you're navigating to. Same with switching between code and issues, for example. But switch to a different repo and you get a full page refresh.

For my company's product, we're much more on the side of a traditional server-side app, because users will send off a batch of information (their customers to open a line of communication with), and then wait for the responses to roll in. But the dashboard page where we show responses is a partial-SPA, similar to GitHub: new responses are loaded asynchronously, and you will soon be able to switch to different views of the data without a reload. It's a good balance for our application.

I realize it's not answering your question about how to measure it, but hopefully it provides some anecdotes.

These are fantastic technical reasons when considering a SPA vs. a traditional server-side app, but to me the largest consideration, outweighing other technical decisions, is the overall experience the end customer is going to need and expect.

Migrating from a desktop-based application to a web version? That desktop version was likely extremely responsive, and full page loads may feel like a step backward.

Does the application require constant, fast interaction, such as data analysis, frequent order entry, or highly dynamic UX? That's the domain of the SPA. But if the situation is more of a request/response scenario, then a traditional server-side set up works wonders.

The technical difficulties surrounding SPAs vs traditional are for the most part solved. It does require more overall work, but that gap is shrinking. Therefore, IMO the largest deciding factor should be user expectations, and that can go either way.