nrook

Indeed. The Pokémon Company is running a children's casino: it's hard to imagine a business model less ethical than that.

My favorite stupid Google April Fools joke was when they put out a "customer" blog post bragging that Contoso had switched to Google Apps.

https://cloud.googleblog.com/2011/04/contoso-has-gone-google...

In a previous startup's offsite, we were attacked by a bear.

While this did lead to a significantly increased esprit de corps at the office, the risks are such that I wouldn't necessarily recommend it.

There is a well-known strategy by which employees can exert influence over their employer and change the decisions it makes. It is called a union. Unionization has been slow for various reasons in the tech sector; when it comes to rich, well-known companies, people don't want to go through the effort to unionize and get more money when they already are being paid a lot. But if workers want to influence decisions like these, they're going to have to organize.

This is wrong. Speed cameras save lives. A lot of research confirms this, for example: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/86567/1/sercdp0221.pdf

The best way to save the lives of pedestrians and cyclists from the predation of motorists is to eliminate cars in urban areas. The second-best way is fast, sure, automated enforcement.

There's an insight here I haven't seen elsewhere. Everyone but the most blind ideologue knows 100% test coverage isn't a good use of your time. But it's hard to care about increasing coverage from 89% to 90%, or to feel justified in objecting during a code review because the change under review would decrease coverage from 90% to 89%.

The solution to this dilemma is to make it easy to mark code as "OK not to be tested". It's annoying to have test annotations in code, but I'd expect mostly entire modules will be exempted, so it's not that big a deal. And this way, the coder has to either write tests or make a specific decision not to.

It's because there is a wide distance between these two positions:

(a) People who publicly support white supremacy should be imprisoned by the government.

(b) Businesses should not make money by hosting or providing services to people who publicly support white supremacy.

It's very easy to think that (b) is true, but (a) is false; this is a popular position among free speech advocates who know the law.

Er, you definitely don't need to bulldoze everything. You "just" need to upzone everywhere and build lots of public transit. Upzoning has negative price (since you get more tax income). Public transit is expensive, and building new subway lines is even more expensive, but it could be less expensive if the US could build transit lines as cheaply as they are built in Europe.

It is hard, but it's mostly hard due to a population of motorists who have confused the privileges granted to them by the state with rights.

I don't think I agree with your premise, but even if I take it as true--- it's the unit tests of the other modules that help me out, by ensuring I haven't managed to totally bust the module I'm working on.

Some people argue that a unit test of a module should mock out its dependencies and not rely on them. For unit tests like that... well, I endorse the article.

Surprisingly, the article doesn't engage with this argument! Unless I missed it, the author never mentions that unit tests can make refactoring other code easier.

In my experience, after code is checked in, unit tests have two main purposes:

1. Checking that functions aren't completely broken in dynamically typed languages (i.e. a check so basic that a static type checker can do its job) 2. Allowing programmers to refactor code without being terrified it will break something far away in the execution path

And like, that's it. That's enough to make them useful to have around.

One possible fix would be to increase the requirements for car insurance. Currently, minimum car insurance requirements are nowhere near enough to cover a catastrophic accident. If car owners had to buy enough insurance to cover $1 million in injury damages, that could incentivize them to buy cars which are safer for pedestrians.

Does anyone here have good research on the difficulty of getting into elite schools as a transfer student? I tried to do a little research and found this page:

https://www.collegetransitions.com/transfer-admission-rates

Which seems to indicate it's slightly harder, but not by much. But, I'm concerned that your average transfer student looks a lot different from your average freshman, so I don't really believe the stats; for example I could imagine that your average transfer student has somehow "failed to launch" at their current institution, implying they're a weaker student than your average freshman application. Or, I could imagine the other way around; they've already succeeded at a community college, so they are actually stronger than your average freshman applicant and these stats are underrating how hard it is to get a transfer.

There are only two options here— either you can root against Tesla, or you can be indifferent to the death of Walter Huang. Tesla has been irresponsible with their rollout of self-driving technology, and someone has died as a result.

There's nothing wrong with rooting for other entrants in the self-driving technology space, like Waymo, which aren't willing to grease their path to market dominance with the blood of innocents.

I've always been curious if the internationalization of political discussion was behind the changing definitions of the word "liberal" in US politics.

In the 1990s, "liberal" was used as a synonym of "leftist"; a "liberal" politician would support expanding the welfare state, for example. My understanding is that the European definition of "liberal" is different, and implied a light touch in business affairs; the Economist is a "liberal" publication.

In 2019, this definition has spread to the United States as well; members of the Democratic Socialists of America don't identify as liberal. The European definition is only used in some circles: conservatives tend to stick to the old definition, and would describe somebody like Bernie Sanders as "liberal". I was always curious if this was because US political activists were talking to European ones on sites like Twitter, or Internet forums before it.

Meanwhile:

https://sf.curbed.com/2019/4/10/18304717/shadow-housing-sf-p...

San Francisco can either have housing, or it can have homelessness.

I support the First Amendment wholeheartedly, and believe it's important that the government refrain from shutting down speech it doesn't like.

You may note that Cloudflare is not a government.

Before you register your domain with Cloudflare, please consider who their other customers are. Cloudflare today provides services for many white supremacist websites; they kicked off the Daily Stormer in 2017 after widespread criticism, but still receive money from many others.

From what I can see, their senior leadership genuinely believes that, morally, they have an obligation to provide services for horrible people in exchange for money[1]. If you agree, use them! But if you think it's bad to defend these sites in an era of white nationalist terrorism, look elsewhere.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-cloudflare/

If I am on a limited PTO plan, California law guarantees me the right to cash out my unused vacation days when I leave the company.

It seems to me like it would be fair for companies to offer unlimited PTO as long as employees can cash out unlimited money when they leave. But for some reason, this is not often offered.

Washington has no state income tax, which is why their attempts to fund basically any program always seem so out there. If they just taxed like normal states did, they wouldn't look either goofy or regressive every time they tried to raise money.

I'm not sure I quite grasp this argument. Google is a popular, high-demand employer, and lots of people want to work there. But Google still found it useful to conspire with other tech companies[1] in order to hold down wages. The reverse should also be true: The sorts of engineers who can get a job at Google are in high demand. But, if they bargained as a group, they could probably get even more money.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/apple-google-ruling/u-s-judg...

Collective action by employees can be more effective than a boycott. These Google employees clearly believe there is a chance they can change Google's actions by writing this open letter. Employee activism has changed Google's behavior before, so there is reason to think this strategy might work.

dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18453958

This is required in some European countries. For example, in Germany, workers have a right to 50% of the board for companies with more than 2,000 employees. (Ties break for shareholders, due to the way the chair position works.)

https://www.worker-participation.eu/National-Industrial-Rela...

Obviously, this hasn't destroyed Germany's economy, so it's doubtful it would hurt Google's profits much either.

Google has a lot of tools are are best-in-class— if you spend a large fixed cost setting them up and get everyone to use them. Obviously this is easy for Google to justify: they spent the fixed cost once ten years ago, and now that everyone uses the product, it's easy for new products to integrate too. But it makes them hard to spread outside Google itself.

Bazel, Google's build tool is a good example of this. Google actually open-sourced most of Bazel a few years ago, but as far as I know, it hasn't gotten much uptake. It requires doing a bunch of boring configuration work to use it. But as someone who used it internally I definitely prefer it to all the alternatives, due to its speed and reliability.

How much of the money donated to organizations like CNCF or the Linux Foundation goes to the individual contributors who build these products?

They do help in some respects: I don't think Kubernetes would be as successful were it not for the big conferences put on by the CNCF. And, of course, lots of companies actually are contributing code back to Kubernetes particularly (and Linux, and some other projects). But there are also a lot of popular open source projects which are used by lots of big companies but don't get either code or money from them.

Here's a study:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28093386

"Our results showed that overall, the use of Facebook was negatively associated with well-being."

Naturally, even if this study is accurate it isn't definitive; the causation could go in the other direction, that the unhappy use Facebook more often than the contented. But it's still quite suggestive.

I saw this study referenced from this article: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/21/17144748/c...

Google is a fascinating test case for Elizabeth Warren's plan to create board representation for workers. Googlers have a very distinct culture that would advocate for very different positions from the ones Google is making right now. If Google employees had 40% of the board, they'd be able to do a lot more to stop decisions like this one.

37,461 people were killed by motor vehicles in the United States in 2016[1]. Whether it's more pleasurable to live in a city or a suburb is beside the point; our only options are to encourage the use of cycling and mass transit, or to condemn 37,461 more people to death every year from now on.

[1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/8124...

Your solution doesn't have much to do with your problem. In general, the Republican party treats lowering taxes on the rich as a major policy goal. On the other hand, the Democratic party doesn't, and politicians and activists on the left side of that party tend to favor increased taxes on the rich.

The problem isn't polarization: the problem is that the wrong pole is getting elected.

Gawker always said it was in the business of publishing true stories. Here is one last true story: You live in a country where a billionaire can put a publication out of business. A billionaire can pick off an individual writer and leave that person penniless and without legal protection.

If you want to write stories that might anger a billionaire, you need to work for another billionaire yourself, or for a billion-dollar corporation. The law will not protect you. There is no freedom in this world but power and money.

- Tom Scocca, "Gawker Was Murdered by Gaslight"