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shaftoe

935 karma · joined August 2, 2014

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shaftoe··on When murderers were hanged quickly (2014)
There death penalty isn't about deterrent: bad people rarely consider punishment when making the decision to commit a crime.

The death penalty exists so the decent don't have to suffer the truly evil to live.

This is why arguments weighing pros and cons fall on deaf ears.

shaftoe··on The Metrics of Backpacks
I abandoned about halfway through when I realized it wasn't going to get to a discussion of backpack design and I had no idea what the actual point was. You're not alone.
shaftoe··on What Happens Now That China Won't Take U.S. Recycling
Do what most people do: pick a bin at random and throw everything in there.

It's likely everything goes to the same place anyway (and the bins are a lie) or there's a separation process that will handle it for you.

Before you downvote me: am I wrong? What else should a consumer in this situation reasonably do?

shaftoe··on Teen Becomes First Hacker to Earn $1M Through Bug Bounties
When this actually happens, we link the duplicate reports together as proof.
shaftoe··on Link between health spending and life expectancy: US is an outlier (2017)
That's not how it works. Commercialization of drugs from University research is what already feeds a multi billion dollar industry.
shaftoe··on Practical Linux Hardening Guide
We've handled this by mandating password manager use and pushing length requirements to absurd levels to where it truly is easier to just use the manager, which has two factor.
shaftoe··on At China’s Internet Conference, a Darker Side of Tech Emerges
This article wasn't about some new film in China and jerks started interjecting with off topic issues. This article is literally about an Internet conference and the police state tech demos there.

Like most countries, there's much more to love about China than their government. It's a beautiful, amazing place and people. But, like most countries, their government is often a piece of shit.

shaftoe··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2018)
Patientco | Atlanta, GA | various Software Engineers | Full-time | Onsite

We are seeking integration engineers and full-stack software engineers with strong front-end skills. Patientco is a payment technology company headquartered in Atlanta, GA founded specifically to re-think the healthcare payment experience. We bring modern payment infrastructure together with intuitive consumer payment tools informed by analytics to create a superior billing experience to deliver more payments to Health Systems.

Apply at: https://www.patientcolife.com/careers/

shaftoe··on Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not
You don't get ahead by making excuses and you don't help people by defending straw men.
shaftoe··on States Can Require Internet Tax Collection, Supreme Court Rules
How about putting the onus on the party that wants to collect money off transactions between other parties. If a government wants a cut, they can make it reasonably easy to comply or they can get ignored.
shaftoe··on Mapping the Segregation of Metro Atlanta’s Amenities
This article completely fails to address the reality of visiting South DeKalb. Go drive around in Google Street view and you'll see abandoned commercial property after abandoned commercial property. Businesses struggle to exist there.

The problems there cannot be fixed by zoning more commercial real estate and the comments about healthy restaurants are laughable: look at the restaurants that thrive in the area in question and look at the areas with the abundance of healthy restaurants. There's zero overlap.

If a salad bar chain could do well in South DeKalb, they'd have no shortage of venues to consider. Atlanta is self-segregated in a multitude of dimensions that are much deeper than race.

shaftoe··on I've Paid $18,000 to a $24,000 Student Loan, and I Still Owe $24,000
So the solution to a problem of unaffordability is to have Uncle Sam pay for it and take it out of the tax payer's pocket? That lady couldn't pay for her expensive education, so I should?

Since I graduated 15 years ago, the public University I went to has increased costs significantly and massively improved student amenities. Baristas and rock climbing walls and whatnot. Why? It improves rankings and people will still pay for it, subsidized by student debt. If, say, people actually had to be able to afford the bill, I bet all the expensive nonsense and massive staff beuracracy would shrink in no time and the schools would go back to costs being classrooms and books.

shaftoe··on GDPR: Removing Monal from the EU
I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not, so I'll pretend it's not.

This is the broken window fallacy. You're not creating jobs, you're destroying wealth.

shaftoe··on Omaha man ‘liked’ a tweet, then lost his job
Three months is fascinating. That's a quarter of a year! We live in different worlds.

I've always found two weeks notice to be more than adequate in most cases and then, only as a courtesy to communicate, transfer in flight work, and alter schedules. If I'm truly mad, I'm resigning and dealing with picking up the slack is not my problem. If an employee tells me they're leaving, I want them gone soon anyway because mentally they've already left the team.

shaftoe··on Omaha man ‘liked’ a tweet, then lost his job
This is a bizarre take on a business relationship between two free entities.

Is an employee allowed to quit? What about the "violence" it does to the company, investors, and fellow employees? Must they stick around to provide continuity? If so, how is this not indenture?

Am I allowed to fire a painter I hire to paint my house if I think he does poor work? Do I need to document his performance and discuss an improvement plan? Does this change if I own a house big enough to keep him painting for a month? For a year?

Employment represents a contract between two parties. Basic freedom of association and contract law means both parties can enter and leave under the terms they negotiate and have a rational self interest in acting in good faith.

shaftoe··on Gopher Reading List: A curated selection of blog posts on Go
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)#Decline

"In March 2017 Veronica indexed 133 gopher servers"

https://blog.golang.org/8years

"Go has been embraced by developers all over the world with approximately one million users worldwide. In the freshly published 2017 Octoverse by GitHub, Go has become the #9 most popular language, surpassing C. Go is the fastest growing language on GitHub in 2017 in the top 10 with 52% growth over the previous year. In growth, Go swapped places with Javascript, which fell to the second spot with 44%."

shaftoe··on Adopting a more active lifestyle could benefit your personality decades from now
Run laps with someone with a stopwatch timing you.

The "Pacer" test.

Either play basketball, just slowly walk circles around the gym while chatting with your friends, or secretly hide under the bleachers and hang out.

We were either doing things like running a couple miles when we'd never done that before so it felt horrible or we were screwing off and passing the time.

shaftoe··on When baby monitors fail to be smart
This is a common problem in areas with multiple new parents: turning on your video baby monitor and watching your neighbor's cam.
shaftoe··on Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’
No, but it certainly makes you mainstream.
shaftoe··on The full-time job of keeping up with Kubernetes
I completely disagree. The complexity and risk of a change goes up with the square of the size of the change. Having moved from upgrading when forced to (almost) continuous upgrading, the number of moving parts in any given change is small and the frequency means we become skilled at rolling out changes safely.
shaftoe··on Bill and Melinda Gates Are Paying Off Nigeria's $76M Debt to Japan
He died recently and I'm helping his lawyer transfer his money out of the country. I'll email the lawyer and see if he might be willing to donate some of the royal estate to a humanitarian cause like this.
shaftoe··on Docker for Mac with Kubernetes
We found the same thing after the package management stuff caused issues in prod.

We rolled our own go program that just does go tpl substitution in yaml with overrides like helm. Works on charts out of the box, but instead of talking to a service, it outputs a yaml manifest ready to kubectl apply.

We've thought about open sourcing it. It took us literally a day to put together and had worked without flaw for 8 months in production.

shaftoe··on Why I love Go
I actually like this feature. If I truly don't need a field, I leave it out. If I do need it, I have a clear definition of what it is.

This feels so much easier to work with than untyped scripting languages where I basically get a hash bag and read values out ad-hoc, checking what they are as I go.

shaftoe··on Inside the Revolution at Etsy
You're assuming that in the first example, they'd be unemployed. Instead, they're freed up to do new initiatives that generate new wealth that would not exist in the second scenario.

More activities across the same labor pool makes more wealth in a society than fewer activities which consume all available resources. This is why we're much richer now that 70% of workers aren't farmers.

shaftoe··on Nationalize the internet
Generally, when you want something to remain free from coercion or interference, nationalization isn't the way to go.
shaftoe··on PoC||GTFO 0x16 [pdf]
Funny how different communities use language differently.

The few times I've encountered that usage of PoC, it took me a minute to figure out that we weren't talking about proof of concepts having unique challenges.

shaftoe··on The Downside of Full Pay Transparency
That would work if people were Vulcans.
shaftoe··on Google removes Catalan referendum app from Google Play after court order
And don't forget the buearacrats and government employees. They're certainly lumped in there because they're party of the giant apparatus.

I'm curious now what Europeans call them.

shaftoe··on Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
"We didn't really plan it like this, something happened, but in the end I think it's a good opportunity for our family."

Welcome to the experience of parenthood. Best of luck to you, your wife, and your child(ren).

shaftoe··on Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
I'm amazed that, in all of the debates stemming from the Google Memo, I haven't seen anyone point their finger at the unhealthy tech culture as a female repellant.

Look at the work/life balance of your typical engineer in the tech industry. Compare this to the reality of a mother of small children. In our culture, women disproportionately bear the brunt of child rearing.

When there's a work emergency and the kids HAVE to be picked up at daycare, who goes? When a kid is sick, who stays home? When a child is born, who takes several months of leave to care for them?

Consider that many women leave the tech industry or stay away from the all-consuming work culture because they have or will eventually want a family life. It doesn't matter what are people's abilities when they see a job as incompatible and contrary to their life goals.

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