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steve-howard

1,389 karma · joined December 7, 2010

Currently working at Dropbox. Previously at Microsoft.

Northwestern BA CS 2013

steve@stevenhoward.org http://stevenhoward.org/

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steve-howard··on Ask HN: How do you manage your day to day work logs?
I'll second this. I keep a fountain pen with my notebook because fountain pens make me want to write more.
steve-howard··on Kill sticky headers (2013)
You have to click it to make it do anything. It's a bookmarklet.
steve-howard··on Kill sticky headers (2013)
NYT is pretty obnoxious in other ways, though, especially with a touchscreen. If you click and drag to highlight something, it navigates to a different article. If you double-click to select a word, it changes the text size. If you accidentally hit the left or right arrow key while trying to scroll up or down, it again tries to load the next article.
steve-howard··on Automattic is closing its San Francisco office as most employees work remotely
I'm sure you're well aware that this depends on the workplace.
steve-howard··on Deis to Join Microsoft
TFS+git would be my guess.
steve-howard··on What happens over time if each year I fire all my below average programmers?
Their stock started climbing about 8 months before they got rid of stack ranking. I wouldn't chalk up Microsoft's stock growth to "they suddenly figured out how to treat people better."
steve-howard··on The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
What bugged me more was the snippets designed to show how hard it is to write shell scripts. It looked like the author just didn't know enough about their tools:

>How to touch all files in foo (and its subfolders)?

    find foo -print0 | xargs -0 touch
    find foo -exec touch {} \;
I agree with the other commenters who think it's fine to write whatever you like on your own blog, I just feel that it went from interesting historical warts to bagging on legacy systems because they're complicated.
steve-howard··on One in five of us may 'hear' flashes of light
I can pop my ears by plugging my nose and making a "k" or "g" sound. Comes in handy since my Eustachian tubes are essentially useless.
steve-howard··on New DEA Rule Says CBD Oil Is Really Illegal
CBD has absolutely no recreational appeal, so if you followed intuition rather than calling a lawyer it would make sense that it didn't fall under rules that consider marijuana a drug with a high potential for abuse.

That said, I'd hope anyone extracting and selling the stuff as a business would do their due diligence.

steve-howard··on Bose Hearphones
I tried with the tone generator linked elsewhere in the thread. One, there's no pulse, which isn't surprising because tinnitus is all in my head. Two, at least for me, tinnitus is not a single well-defined pitch. It fluctuates. Sometimes just by concentrating on it I can move the frequency up and down.

I found a frequency that was pretty close to what I hear (it's convenient that my left ear is mostly normal), and cranked it in my right ear. I now hear something like a distant swarm of bees, or a server room full of very loud fans.

steve-howard··on Bose Hearphones
I had basically the same problem, but was unable to adapt. I got my hearing aid when I was 17 or 18. Everything sounded tinny and harsh, and my hearing in my left ear is more or less normal.

I guess the bigger problem was that putting it in my ear made me very dizzy, but I'd have tried to deal with that if the sound weren't so bad.

steve-howard··on Chrome 56 Beta: “Not Secure” Warning, Web Bluetooth, and CSS Position: Sticky
I agree absolutely that this is exceedingly annoying. That said, it's popular among the people who control design decisions so it's here to stay, for now.

So do we use a javascript solution that also performs like crap, or accept that this is a common use case and provide a standard way to do it?

steve-howard··on Linux kernel maintainer says no to AMDGPU patch
I'm sure there's at least a few who saw this coming, argued against writing a HAL that the kernel developers didn't want, and feel at least a little vindicated right now.
steve-howard··on Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff
Good teams can form within bad organizations, but it's a vulnerable position to be in as an employee. One reorg and suddenly it's all bad.
steve-howard··on What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp
I'm not shocked that nobody looks at your GitHub. Reading other people's code takes time and energy that a lot of people aren't going to spend if they have a ton of candidates to sift through.
steve-howard··on Microsoft Replaces Command Prompt with PowerShell in Latest Windows 10 Build
Windows 10 actually has some fancy linux emulation stuff ( https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/03/30/ubuntu-on-windows-the... ). Personally I wanted to like PowerShell but its syntax and semantics were infuriatingly confusing.
steve-howard··on ESPN Loses 621,000 Subscribers; Worst Month in Company History
Do you mean the all-22? I don't think they actually have 22 different camera feeds.
steve-howard··on ESPN Loses 621,000 Subscribers; Worst Month in Company History
Yep, the one thing everybody hates in baseball is the national broadcast. Interviews during the game, commentators getting lost in the stories they're trying to tell while important things are happening on the field, generally a lower emphasis on the actual sports.

ESPN's in an interesting position right now because of slim cable packages. If I could get the Big Ten Network on Sling, I'd have very little use for "real" cable. And I don't have to pay for Sling year round if I don't want to use it outside football season.

steve-howard··on Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?
This is changing. They believe that open offices are the Future of the New Collaborative Workforce or some similar nonsense.
steve-howard··on The Problem with Modern Romance Is Too Much Choice
Every new dating app that comes out is an attempt to make dating apps not suck. No one has succeeded so far. There are a small number of people with a ton of success who know how to market themselves, and there are a lot of good people who don't have that skill that find themselves shouting into the void.
steve-howard··on Akamai takes Brian Krebs’ site off its servers after ‘record’ cyberattack
Protecting unpopular organizations is taking a principled stand for free speech. Protecting people who profit from breaking people's web services is not.

"We don't take it down unless it's illegal" is a simple policy, but to be a good policy it needs judgment as well.

steve-howard··on House Passes Employee Stock Options Bill Aimed at Startups
In addition to the other helpful replies there's some more information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-dollar_salary

>In the United States, this approach impacts personal tax liability, because although stock and option grants are taxed at federal income rates, they may be exempt from some portion of payroll taxes (typically 7.65%) used to fund Social Security and Medicare.

They're still considered highly-compensated, just not through payroll.

steve-howard··on Gonorrhea Is Becoming Untreatable, U.N. Health Officials Warn
On the other hand, "Immune Boosting†" products are rampant and they get to make all kinds of unsubstantiated claims about their capacity to Boost the Immune System so long as they either claim to be homeopathic or market themselves as supplements and include the boilerplate disclaimer that never seems to harm sales:

†These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

steve-howard··on Grateful Dead Fan Timothy Tyler Has Been Granted Clemency
It's kind of creepy to watch that in light of the link on Mr Skinner's history, which included allegations that Ms. Cole was an enthusiastic participant in the brutal torture of Brandon Green. The details are fairly disturbing. The narrator's awestruck tone sounds pretty nauseating in that light.
steve-howard··on Lake Nyos suffocated over 1,700 people in one night
I think people just have different modes when it comes to tragedy. The first is empathy, where you think "holy shit a thousand lives ended suddenly." The second is a sort of abstraction where the people are more like characters in a story. I don't think people who tell dead baby jokes are actually thinking of how terribly sad it would be for an infant they loved to die.
steve-howard··on Classic Shell hacked with compromised update that erases your partition table
From the linked forum post:

>When I installed it said it couldn't be trusted, I installed anyway but it did nothing.

Users have no way of knowing which things are safe and which things aren't if almost everything comes with a "this isn't safe" warning.

steve-howard··on When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All
That's true, and I think this article was just using Uber as a jumping-off point to talk about doing business in China. I worked for a company not long ago that did business there, and the hoops they had to jump through were enormous.
steve-howard··on Microsoft to Cut 2,850 More Jobs in Exit from Phone Business
You realize they do that every summer and it's part of their recruitment pipeline?
steve-howard··on KB261186: Computer Randomly Plays Classical Music
"Clippy don't surf."
steve-howard··on The Majority Illusion in Social Networks
At the very least, the political issues and programming language fads have changed in the last few centuries.
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