spinlock

Thanks! This is a really helpful list of resources.

This is exactly right. In fact, Engineers can't blow the whistle on a company that's violating privacy law without harming our careers.

I think Engineers who carry water for unethical companies probably get paid more. Your next employer would much rather hire you if you kept your head down during the PR Nightmare than if you made noise and created a problem for management.

This is just ....

The people working on the political and PR areas at Facebook are badass. They come from places like the Obama administration. They now have a front-row seat in the negotiations for how governments around the world are negotiating with Facebook.

After the dust settles, these people will start charging $1k/hour to consult on "political or PR" sensitive business areas.

Is there any kind of organization for engineers that supports these types of ethical issues? I recently resigned from a job because because of similar privacy concerns and I found it really hard to talk to anyone. My situation was a very clear violation of California law but everyone I talked to said the same thing, "if you blow the whistle, you'll never work again."

I’m really talking about the mechanism of enforcement. Your point about the legal aspects are well taken. But, once those aspects have been resolved, as in Europe, I think there needs to be a better resolution than breaking search. Think about it, looking to Google as the solution assumes they have a monopoly on search.

I think you deserve better than just having google modify its search results. If a newspaper is slandering you, we need to make them stop.

That’s where I come down on this too. Google isn’t defaming anyone. And, what about Bing, duck duck go, or any other search engine?

The guy in the article could have put up his own website to correct the record. I don’t really like that solution. I really think there should be a way to get a judgement in the US to DDOS the defamatory site. If the hosting company won’t comply.

But, breaking search is a cover-up not a solution. I recently left a company with a cover-up culture. You’ve never seen such terrible code. Because, no one ever weeded out the real problem. They were just ok to bury their heads in the sand as long as google didn’t let them know there were problems.

This is great. I've just launched a product consultancy and I really need to start presenting at meetups about the technology we're using. It just seems like such a perfect way to get work that aligns with what you want to be doing in the first place.

I think that was Lyft's model but Uber was "everybody's private driver" for their first product. They were black cars with professional drivers who did do it as a full time job.

Now, "everybody's private driver" was 2x the cost of a cab (at least) so I think it was a better deal for the drivers. But, to your point, the barriers to entry were owning a black car, being licensed, and Uber vetted their drivers very carefully.

Totally different from what they're doing now.

But, I've also never met an Uber driver -- who used to be a cabbie -- that didn't think Uber was a _better_ deal than driving a cab. If you're a cab driver, you also have to rent a cab with a medalion which was an astronomical cost compared to just buying and maintaining a car.

So, I think this study comes off as disingenuous for not comparing Uber and Lyft to the traditional job of driving a cab.

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Hospitals have insurance for malpractice. My friend is an OBGYN so he gets sued every time a baby is born with complications. His view on it is that the family needs money to care for the child and the only way for them to get it is through his malpractice insurance.

But, what do you think the difference in net-worth is between these two men? I don't think the hospital is to blame that one of these children was going to have the best education and the other wouldn't but you have to blame them to get the insurance payout.

Plus, maybe the truck driver will do something like start a scholarship. In that case, I'd hope he gets much more than $300k.

I'm glad I wasn't the only one who noticed that. It's amazing how oblivious some people are to their bias.

because you give people who would make sure they can't bite you a hard time.

I think I understand why dogs bite you.

The fucked up thing is that if you put a muzzle on your dog so that they can't bite anyone, people will treat you like you're traveling with a dangerous animal.

This is basically southwest. Because you choose who you sit next to, people with service animals board first then people who like dogs, etc... board and sit next to them. It works really well.

The author has obviously never traveled with an emotional support animal. The difference between how you are treated by TSA with an animal and without is amazing. I travel with my dog and, as soon as TSA sees the vest, I am allowed to go through the pre-check line (I do not have pre-check) so I don't have to take off my shoes, etc... TSA is also much nicer to people traveling with animals. Rather than the typical surly bullshit, they are nice and want to pet your dog, etc...

So, if the author really thinks that animals are a bigger problem than TSA, they are probably one of those people who "cheats" security by paying for pre-check to avoid going through proper security. I am much more concerned with how the incompetence and rudeness of TSA is being used to extract money and personal information from travelers.

If airlines and airports want people to stop lying about the reason they are brining their pets on the airplane, perhaps we should start by making TSA stop lying about the benefit they provide. When we see TSA extracting billions of dollars from taxpayers for security theater, it's easy to assume that the only people still playing by the rules are suckers.

My experience with Datomic was that it is not appropriate for a system that has performance requirements. We developed a system using redis while the data team was developing the data service on Datomic. When we tried to integrate, the whole system slowed to a crawl and we needed to do a rewrite.

My advice is to develop with Datomic from the start and not separate it out into a service. Any other database will be so much faster that you won't know how bad your performance is until it's too late.

Another piece of advice would be to seriously consider if you need immutability in your database. If it's not a hard requirement, I would not use Datomic.

Also, if you _need_ SSR, rails might be a better approach. It's too bad the author didn't include it in the benchmark.

FYI - native americans aren't white.

Startups do not use H1B workers. A startup is actually hiring someone for a role and they can't take the risk that their guy will lose the lottery. Plus, the application is just beyond what most startups are going to have the time to do.

the way one process can feed into the next. you can setup data pipelines that are nice for ML projects.

Con-artists are the only people who want you to think that it's insulting to ask them how they are compensated. I've worked with plenty of lawyers over the years and none of the ethical ones have ever balked at explaining their fee structure.

The class against Equifax is huge and you should absolutely be aware that less than ethical lawyers are going to come out of the woodwork making all sorts of promises so that they can get their slice of what Equifax is going to pay out. The lawyers that I want to work with will either charge me an hourly fee or they will be upfront that my involvement in a class means that I'll be helping to punish Equifax but that I'll be forgoing most damages to do so.

Do you have a link? I looked over your website and I found no information about you fees.

That really doesn't answer my question. If I win $1000, how much do I then owe? I'm cool with not recovering anything but I don't even know if my liability is capped at the judgement against Equifax.

It's funny how many people are upset by my comment. The only thing I can say is that, when I hire a lawyer, the point is to have them clarify the law for me and translate it into plain english. If a lawyer won't even put their own fees into plain english, I don't believe they are working for me so I won't hire them.

FYI - when you dodge the question this way, you look as bad as equifax. What is in it for you? Do you take a percentage of the judgement?

I'll probably end up paying a lawyer to advise me on the best way to get back at Equifax. But, I'm not going to do business with you because you're shady and won't disclose your interest in this case.

this argument would make more sense to me if Lyft Shuttle were actually a bus. But, it's a car. How many SF homeless smoke crack in Lyft Shuttle? How many women are assaulted on Lyft Shuttle every day?

So, not a bus, no second hand crack smoke, and you don't get jizzed on. Call it an innovation if "invention" doesn't sound right to you but it's really different from public transportation.

There are already 3 main credit bureaus who have all of your data. It's not about the data it's about how unethical they are in preventing you from controlling the data.

Think about it: if every person in america put a freeze on their credit, all of these companies would go out of business because they would no longer have a product to sell. It gets even worse if you're a victim of identity theft because they cannot charge victims of identity theft to freeze or un-freeze a credit report.

That's not the issue. They are required to immediately remove incorrect information from your credit report. A freeze prevents them from reporting your credit to third parties (i.e. it prevents them from doing business). So, they hate people who freeze their credit. Their strategy seems to be to make having a credit freeze so onerous that you won't do it so they can continue to sell your information to their customers.

For many years I could not get a new credit card, overdraft protection on a checking account or a mortgage. I finally was able to completely remove the freeze so that I could secure a mortgage.