nemild

Your view might be from spending lots of time on HN and around engineers? I spend time with both, and I can see issues on both sides.

From the business side, here are examples I've seen:

- Have to use this technology, everything else is old, anachronistic, and unperformant

- System has to be scaled this way from the start (in startups, often, no it doesn't)

- Tension in how you trade off new features with clean code (there's a balance, and each environment requires a diff tradeoff)

- Building feature a certain way because it's easier for them, while ignoring what's appropriate for the customer/user

- Unwillingness or inability to explain technical topics to non-technical audience

- Making decisions solely on technical appropriateness, rather than broader appropriateness for the company (say, availability of other engineers to work on it)

There's lots on the managerial and business side too, but I'll save that for another thread.

P.S. A favorite quote of mine from Chinua Achebe (old proverb): Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

Any group we spend our time around will show itself in a good light. Even more so when we are a member of that group.

This is a great list. I've been reflecting on this drive for microservices in early stage companies for the last four years, and you hit all the major points.

One additional one I'll add is the marketing objectives of containerization and infrastructure companies.

And a good time to resurface Martin Fowler's Monolith First:

https://martinfowler.com/bliki/MonolithFirst.html

I took a Master in Margarita class in college during my study abroad, with each class physically exploring a key Moscow scene from the novel. Our first class started at Патриаршие пруды (Patriarch's Pond), near where Anushka drops the oil:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarch_Ponds

Now years later, I do data analysis to show how media can give us a skewed view of the world — and can be used to manipulate our beliefs:

How Media Fuels our Fear of Western Terrorism https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html

Today’s biggest threat to democracy isn’t fake news—it’s selective facts https://qz.com/1130094/todays-biggest-threat-to-democracy-is...

And write a media literacy guide on Github:

Hack the Media https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README....

Lots more examples in my media literacy guide:

https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media

Search for Access:

If useful, I asked a similar question a while back — with some great responses:

Ask HN: Senior developers, what would you tell a younger you?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13168798

I write a media literacy guide, and this is the key takeaway. Engagement is king, and social media seems to exacerbate this effect.

https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media

Julia Angwin was one of the key people who shed a light on GNU Privacy Guard's precarious funding, helping OSS dev Werner Koch get donations from Stripe, FB, and others:

The World's Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who is Going Broke (2015)

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-worlds-email-encrypti...

Partly for this reason, I’ve written a media literacy guide:

https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README....

There’s also one specific to the tech industry:

https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/softwar...

I really liked the Tao of TMUX.

I also made a very succinct cheatsheet for tmux (along with a list of all the other key CLI commands for full stack engs):

https://github.com/nemild/cli_for_full_stack#user-content-tm...

Here's my data analysis justifying Dobelli's thesis:

How Media Fuels our Fear of Western Terrorism https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html

The deaths that are most covered are a tiny fraction (<1%) of the way we die https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html

There's also a fair bit of psychology research on how news coverage of vivid deaths increases PTSD, you can see one link in my first piece above.

This coverage makes sense when you are focusing on newsworthiness and engagement — but is very flawed for good decision making.

I write a bunch about this. There is often a sense that the more news we consume, the more informed we are. My research shows the opposite, where where news gives us a deeply biased view of the world ( https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html ).

For many of us, we use media to make important decisions — and a lot of the coverage isn't well suited for that purpose.

In this social media era especially, so much of the news you see covered is a function of what will get engagement. It even applies to things like which wars will be covered in the US (one NY Times reporter makes this point in coverage of Yemen vs Syria).

Here's a media literacy guide I wrote:

https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media

(BTW, media literacy is esp critical for engineers, given how much thinly disguised marketing well funded tech companies put in front of engineers, esp in cryptocurrencies. See this media literacy guide for software engs: https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/softwar... )

Simple. Lousiana has a big oil and gas industry:

https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=LA

I call it the truth distortion field when any large industry impacts what politicians say. Here’s some background:

https://www.nemil.com/tdf/introduction.html

The Today's Paper link is also a good way to scrape for data analysis (the API isn't great), such as this piece I did looking at their coverage over a decade:

The deaths that are most covered are a tiny fraction (<1%) of the way we die

https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html

In many ways, though, this is a content and social play. It's debatable if most bike manufacturers have that DNA.

In light of what people are paying for Soul Cycle, etc., this makes a lot of sense, regardless how good the UI or bike is.

FYI, the cofounder of this website/product (Cake) is also the author of the post. So this has some similarities to content marketing.

Anyone have tips on some good US flip phones that work with modern networks (4G)? In a perfect world, with GPS (but not required)?

One reason this has been discovered as of late in tech circles is Bitcoin.

Professor Arvind Narayanan at Princeton cited this in May 2015, as the Bitcoin community was having debates about decentralization and what it meant for governance.

See the fifth footnote in this blog post entitled "Bitcoin faces a crossroads, needs an effective decision-making process ":

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/05/11/bitcoin-faces-a-cro...

Also, this tweet:

https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1005151684807610368

I write a media literacy guide for engineers:

https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer/blob/master/READM...

The key thing this post is missing, is it talks about this as journalists could do better, as if these issues are simply a moral failing. Instead, the key issue is reader and economic incentives (like how tech journalism monetizes through conferences — and the importance of page views and virality).

Here's Nick Bilton talking about the things that influence tech journalists:

>“It’s a game of access, and if you don’t play it carefully, you may pay sorely. Outlets that write negatively about gadgets often don’t get pre-release versions of the next gadget. Writers who ask probing questions may not get to interview the C.E.O. next time he or she is doing the rounds. If you comply with these rules, you’re rewarded with page views and praise in the tech blogosphere. And then there’s the fact that many of these tech outlets rely so heavily on tech conferences. “If you look at most tech publications, they have major conferences as their revenue,” Jason Calacanis, the blogger and founder of Weblogs, told me. “If you hit too hard, you lose keynotes, ticket buyers, and support in the tech space.”"

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/05/theranos-silicon-val...

A related quote from this fascinating interview with Jonathan Tow (media researcher)[1] on FB research:

> Often, these companies [like FB] are open to research partnerships and things, but it’s always on their terms. If you do research with them, you’re dealing with IP issues, you’re signing over the rights to the research. It has to be reviewed completely and vetted by their legal process. They often handpick researchers that help them and help their purpose and help their cause — they maybe throw in some sprinkles of criticism. I understand why they would be hesitant to want to work with people like me.

[1] http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/news-in-a-disintegrating-re...

That's fair. I was mostly reflecting on the time that most bootcamps spend on a student (2-3 months) relative to other programs.

But I agree that no matter the program, security best practices are rarely taught.

I made the same seat belt point to him, and here's the section with his response:

> I do have concerns when 10gen explicitly targets junior developers ... What [Eliot, MongoDB CTO] says makes sense say 20 years ago, but with 25% of new software engineers coming from coding bootcamps with non-engineering backgrounds, I worry that defaults matter ever more in dev tools (and even seasoned engineers may mess this up, if they’re coming from a database with different defaults). We discussed analogies like seat belt lights versus the responsibility of passengers to know better. He also argued that waiting to get all this right - not just auth - would impact database innovation, while I think there’s a balance that gets us a lot of the low hanging fruit (like security).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14804765

I'd be interested to know which version of MongoDB this was.

This "no auth" was a default choice for MongoDB through at least 2013 (in this case, it helped to find nefarious actions).

For more background, I wrote a three-part MongoDB[1]. These are the notes on auth behavior from the interview with MongoDB's CTO:

> - Defaults: I feel like it’s playing with fire to set bad defaults in a database - with numerous data breaches due to 10gen’s early decisions on authentication, remote login, and encryption (see for example, https://snyk.io/blog/mongodb-hack-and-secure-defaults/ ). For auth, Eliot argues that developers need to take responsibility for exposing MongoDB on public servers - and that the SLA for a self-hosted instance is different than a managed instance (at minimum, I have issues with users having their data exposed to the world through no fault of their own). He disagreed with 10gen’s decision to turn on auth by default in later self-hosted versions once MongoDB ignored remote connections by default (but thought this was the right choice for the managed Atlas service). (But before 2014, the default behavior was no auth - and accepting all remote connections, see https://snyk.io/blog/mongodb-hack-and-secure-defaults/ ; Eliot notes that this took a while because changing the default would have caused issues for existing customers)

( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14804765 )

[1] https://www.nemil.com/mongo/

In 2018, we can finally use our advances in data science and social network design to precisely target outrage and make it maximally engaging.

Re: financial support, have you seen Nadia Eghbal's Lemonade Stand for a whole set of ideas:

A handy guide to financial support for open source.

https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand

The PDF has a few slogans that you can Google.

Some more links for you:

Buy Facebook propaganda posters: https://www.wired.com/2016/11/buy-facebook-propaganda-poster... (there are 20ish here)

Google Image Search for Facebook posters: https://www.google.com/search?q=facebook+posters

Look at Facebook's Analog Research Laboratory's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/analoglab/?hl=en

See Wired article: https://www.wired.com/2012/05/analog-research-lab/

See Little Red Book excerpts: http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-facebooks-little-red-b...

Anything particular you're looking for?

This has some posters at Facebook:

http://fredturner.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/Turner-Art...

For more on Facebook's art focus, see their Little Red Book (2012) given to every employee:

http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-facebooks-little-red-b...

At Stanford, Professor Fred Turner has written a critique of Facebook's art culture (both the Analog Research Laboratory and the Artist in Residence Program), putting Facebook in the context of art programs that came before. Excerpt:

"First, the Lab’s posters have linked calls for labor to calls for self-transformation. In the industrial era, a motto like “STAY FOCUSED AND KEEP SHIPPING” would represent a straightforward professional exhortation: DO YOUR JOB. But set in the same type as a poster reading “WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOU WEREN’T AFRAID?” and placed in the same sorts of locations, the corporate slogan can become an answer to a request for self-discovery."

http://fredturner.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/Turner-Art...

I think the dichotomy was the language Facebook used to discuss their mission, not as profits but as a social company solely doing good. For example, in 2012, a book they gave to all their employees read:

"Facebook was not originally created to be a company, it was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected."

I wrote a tweet series critiquing this:

https://twitter.com/nemild/status/1006533287378968576

At the time, all the pundits thought it ($1 BN) was insane.

They'd compare revenue and time since founding to acquisition price, and used it to dismiss the Silicon Valley bubble.

There are still downstream effects with this. Exchanges, financial products on top, all have to deal with this. And this also goes against decentralization.