ppseafield

Indeed, React got to version 0.14.x before the major number became 15 after a total of three years since the first public release.

More accurate: Intuit told the federal government they would absolutely offer a free e-file tax service next to their pay service, and then they used several lies and manipulative techniques so that folks could not find it or even discover its existence.

Pocket link recommendations appear on the new tab page on new installs. You can turn them off, but they are there by default. Additionally the Pocket button persists in the address bar, but is also removable. It's indeed minuscule in comparison with what Chrome does.

It's hard to see this as a fail fast experiment when:

> In more than two dozen interviews, scientists whose ideas fell outside the dogma recounted how, for decades, believers in the dominant hypothesis suppressed research on alternative ideas: They influenced what studies got published in top journals, which scientists got funded, who got tenure, and who got speaking slots at reputation-buffing scientific conferences.

It's one thing to go all-in on a hypothesis, but another to undermine other folks' hypotheses directly. Especially when your hypothesis has not produced any results for decades.

Perhaps also the demand for them is large, and the 'big boys' either ignoring or actively hampering their development requires others to step in.

Did the previous plumber install a timer on a pipe, ensuring it would leak every 6 weeks?

The bill [0] Says you can't write more than 35 articles per company excluding content that is provided on a recurring basis on a general topic, to be specific. So you could write 2-3 articles (of a non-recurring format) a month and still get paid. But of course if the company policy now becomes "We just don't want to keep track of the article count done by contractors, so we just won't ever hire any contractors", then you can't contract with that company. Is that on California's legislature?

> Together, over 200 people on California sites wrote thousands of blog posts in 2019 [1]

Even if "thousands" is 9,999 and "over 200" is 201, that's about 50 a year on average. Likely there are some contractors that are way above 35, and some are below. If that's the case, they could have continued hiring contractors for some things and hired full time / part time for others.

Will it cost more to hire 20% of these folks full time and pay benefits, etc., or would it cost less to create a policy that people can apply to be full time employees after their 35th article, or 30th article? Could they hire some people full time, some people part time, and simply contract with the rest?

Was this really their only option? Their best option? Only hiring full timers can also limit the kinds of things they can report on sine they always have to send a full time employee.

AFAICT here's the relevant section of the bill. [0]

> (x) Services provided by a freelance writer, editor, or newspaper cartoonist who does not provide content submissions to the putative employer more than 35 times per year. Items of content produced on a recurring basis related to a general topic shall be considered separate submissions for purposes of calculating the 35 times per year. For purposes of this clause, a “submission” is one or more items or forms of content by a freelance journalist that: (I) pertains to a specific event or topic; (II) is provided for in a contract that defines the scope of the work; (III) is accepted by the publication or company and published or posted for sale.

[0] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

[1] https://www.sbnation.com/2019/12/16/21024100/thank-you-calif...

Indeed. As an example for a long time you had to have Flash to play a video on your page. The HTML5 video support eventually ended the need for Flash to do this, but it came much later and very slowly became supported cross-browser.

Taiwan as well.

They already did something similar for Experts Exchange a long time ago. They threatened to delist EE because of their deceptive SEO (including answers in search results, but requiring accounts when going to their page from Google). Google insisted the actual answers be listed. Deceptive search results made their service worse. Arguably Quora, Pinterest, et. al. are doing the same.

Maybe a flag for the pages that require accounts would be in order. But for the shills on Quora, well, why would Google show ads for businesses' services as top results for free - especially since that's the vast majority of their revenue?

I think the article takes issue with "Microsoft loves Linux" as a blanket term, where it's more like "Microsoft loves† Linux‡"

(† supports in only a very specific way because of losing to Linux on the server side.)

(‡ Linux as used only for servers. Linux as a desktop OS can still get bent, and we're trying to get devs to abandon it when working on code that deploys to Linux servers.)

At my previous job we had a method that became known as a "superset". It would fetch a record and all data related to that, and then a lot of other data related to that. It would return tens of MB of XML every time. It was huge, but so many services came to depend on it because it always had that piece of data someone needed.

All the data you needed was there, but every request caused a lot of memory usage and lots of database queries. GraphQL allows you to just ask for the fields you need without necessarily incurring the cost of returning anything else.

Or rather, tried to do?

https://www.smh.com.au/technology/apples-future-wont-be-brou...

I wondered this myself. However my work got me an XPS 15 at my request (with Windows), and I installed Ubuntu on it. I can switch between NVIDIA and Intel graphics just fine. I haven't tested the USB-C video output though, just the HDMI.

I agree in part. However, there is an advantage to the same boring designs being popular: they're actually readable. Some Tumblr themes in my experience are more of an artsy flex rather than a conscious, well thought out design. E.g. small text, low contrast, links that move, the menu being in any number of places. This isn't exclusive to Tumblr - I remember many horrible MySpace sites that were nigh impossible to read.

At least Tumblr has an archive view that doesn't throw you visual curve balls.

It made a lot of sense to me as an undergrad philosophy student, reading it shortly after I graduated. IMHO the book is somewhat better if understood as a criticism of the Socratic pursuit of universal Truth if you are familiar with the context. But unfortunately this book is recommended to a general audience, for which I think it is a poor novel.

Pirsig did have at least some formal academic knowledge of philosophy though.

From Wikipedia [0]:

> Pirsig earned a bachelor's degree in 1950 from the University of Minnesota.[8] He then attended Banaras Hindu University in India, to study Eastern philosophy and culture. At the University of Chicago, he performed graduate-level work in philosophy in the Committee on the Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods but he did not obtain a degree there. In 1958 he earned a master's degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._Pirsig#Early_life

I thought it was OK, but I felt it was more a critique of philosophy as shoe-horned into a purely analytical method than something that would appeal to most folks.

From Wikipedia [0]:

> The narrator examines the modern pursuit of "Pure Truths", claiming it derives from the work of early Greek philosophers who were establishing the concept of truth in opposition to the force of "The Good". He argues that although rational thought may find a truth (or The Truth) it may never be fully and universally applicable to every individual's experience. Therefore, what is needed is an approach to life that is more inclusive and has a wider range of application. He makes a case that originally the Greeks did not distinguish between "Quality" and "Truth"—they were one and the same, arete—and that the divorce was, in fact, artificial (though needed at the time) and is now a source of much frustration and unhappiness in the world, particularly overall dissatisfaction with modern life.

Socrates in Plato's writing focused acutely on finding these capital-T Truths that were universal. The book argues that focusing exclusively on this can't fully inform you on how to live a good life.

Note that arete means both quality and skill. To simplify a bit a person's character was believed to be built on virtue, and someone who was a "skillful" (arete) at being a person was a virtuous person.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_...

> If the programming language is as natural as the human language,

In my experience, it isn't. Computers are much more pedantic and less forgiving than other people. Computers won't understand "what you meant to say".

Additionally people often have trouble communicating effectively with other people in their natural language. So a DSL being in that language doesn't necessarily guarantee the user's success in using that DSL correctly.

Indeed, making maintainable software is difficult.

To share your analogy: many folks have trouble with algebra. It's not that it's categorically impossible for them to do it; there could be any number of factors (bad math education, home troubles making school more difficult, etc.).

With a lot of time and dedication many of these folks could eventually get pretty good at doing algebra. I've tutored these folks before. Some of them have enough time and dedication to get better at it. But without that (and at least time is outside most of these folks' control), many of them will struggle.

So I don't think the parent comment was saying "Most people can't program in the same way a gorilla can't speak English", but instead "Most people can't program because they don't have the acquired skills to program." I would add that these folks' goal is often not programming but their original job.

This is something I really appreciated in IE for Windows Phone. It's such a small change, but I found it much more pleasant to use. Especially if a phone has a > 5" screen.

Maybe just one extra line like this?

    Prelude> print 2 + 3

    <interactive>:3:1: error:
        • No instance for (Num (IO ())) arising from a use of ‘+’
        • The expression `print 2` :: IO ()
        • In the expression: print 2 + 3
          In an equation for ‘it’: it = print 2 + 3

Just adding the one line telling telling you what was `IO ()` is helpful. ghci obviously knows what it was here.

It also takes cooperation to build cities, and octopuses aren't terribly social.

They think they're technical users, but really they aren't. Generally these folks are people who have skills in other areas and have a partial or basic ability to use some complicated software. However, they don't have well-developed computer skills but are convinced that they do.

The orange line becomes the yellow line, which also crosses the Steel bridge.

Agreed. Portland's light rail is quick until you get to downtown, where it shares the road with cars. Where I lived at one point, taking the bus was much faster. Additionally every train line has to cross one particular bridge, which is a massive choke point. A subway or elevated would be much quicker.

I think it's worth discussing this comment instead of downvoting it.

There was a lot of controversy around the copyright expiration of Mein Kampf in Germany a few years ago. The Bavarian government owned the copyright and refused to allow it to be printed. When the copyright expired, annotated versions were released, putting the book in context. There are certain disadvantages that not printing had: making the book more mysterious and taboo, and leaving the text to stand on its own when it was acquired (thus having no space for rebuttals, historical comments, etc.).

Personally I lean toward keeping these kinds of things but annotating them and providing ample context - the equivalent of a study on history or a museum exhibit. Maybe we as a species can learn from our mistakes. It's not like forgetting these texts will prevent the same conditions that created the rise of fascism and genocide.

Of course they would acknowledge a stain. I meant that the word Fleck encompasses both stains and intentional spots including blind spots, spots on a map or drawing, spots in an animal's fur pattern, and stains on one's shirt. [0] Just because you don't have an exact word for something, doesn't mean you can't recognize it or try to express it - but that distinction must come from context around the word.

Conversely in English stain has to be distinguished in cotext from the words for shirt stains, wood stains (Holzbeize) and stained glass (Buntglas).

Perhaps a better word to demonstrate it is Gemütlichkeit. [1]

Zeitgeist and Schadenfreude are exactly words imported into English because no words in English came close to capturing these words' meanings. You'd have to say "pleasure derived from another's misfortune" every time.

[0] https://www.dict.cc/deutsch-englisch/Fleck.html

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gem%C3%BCtlichkeit#Similar_wor...

To provide a more literal response to your comment: there's no exact word for stain (as in: on clothing) in German. You can say Fleck, but it means spot in a more broad sense. Also, a date, in the relationship sense, has been imported. Verabredung is closeish, but more like an appointment.

Likewise from German there's not a direct translation for Backpfeifengesicht, a 'face that is asking to be slapped', more literally 'face slap face'. Is there a more Englishy way to say Zeitgeist that captures the same meaning? You could replace it with "spirit of the time", but it feels a bit too general and clumsy. Is there a succinct English equivalent to Schadenfreude that isn't too long or clumsy?

The article also mentions the folks who are made wealthy by working for those few thousand families.

> A class of enablers has arisen to help Moneylanders perform parts two and three of what Bullough describes as their eternal cycle: “steal-hide-spend”. London overflows with lawyers, bankers, accountants, estate agents, public relations advisers, luxury-goods sellers, restaurateurs and art dealers who make their living servicing criminals. They see themselves as neutral, highly skilled professionals who (mostly, anyway) work within the law.

Building houses can help prevent homelessness, but it can't treat the socioeconomic causes that makes folks homeless in the first place. You can't "just" build houses - you have to treat income disparity and the massive wealth gap at the same time.