taneem

I always find that sharing those little tedious details is what creates visceral understanding of a situation. In this case, the true horror of being a liberated Black person in the 1800s and having to relentlessly work to rescue others, while surrounded by people who truly don't care.

On a lighter note, I use the same approach in understanding user needs as a product builder. I focus on letting people share the minutiae of their day rather than have them editorialize the big topics. By doing so, I get a lot of visceral insight and intuition.

Thanks for sharing this. I really enjoyed reading it.

The way to think about it is that you're processing a list, where the first argument is an operation, and the subsequent arguments are numbers to add. Clojure, and other Lisp based languages use this structure (a list) for representing everything - both data and functions. It turns out to be a very simple yet endlessly flexible and extensible concept.

It's hard to stare in the face of the abyss.

I was looking for an Org-Mode type solution for vscode, and was surprised to find that it's basically no longer being actively developed! [1]

Really surprised by this. I would have thought there would be at least a small and thriving community of people that want to use org-mode, but with vscode. What gives?

[1] https://github.com/vscode-org-mode/vscode-org-mode

I moved to Mars! My family immigrated to North America soon after and I studied and worked in tech ever since.

During 1999-2000, I helped hundreds of people learn how to use Flash. I was, looking back now, probably one of the top experts on Flash 4 at the time in the world. The twist - I was a 15 year old living in a tiny African country called Lesotho.

Lesotho is pretty isolated from the world. Nobody even knows it exists. Living there, Silicon Valley might as well be on Mars.

However, we used to get issues of Wired Magazine from South Africa, and these came with shareware CDs. These CDs included 30-day trial editions of Macromedia Flash.

Flash was amazing at the time. Being able to create interactive animations blew my mind. I learned Flash 4 completely inside and out. I knew every single feature, every single quirk.

Of course living in Lesotho, there was nothing I could really do with all this. Most people around me didn't even know how to use computers. Flash was several layers of abstraction away from that.

So I used to spend all my time on Yahoo Chat's Web Design chat rooms. Mainly hanging out with nerds in the US. We used to have countless people drop by in the rooms every day asking questions about Flash. Mainly people working for web design agencies in the US. I was the resident Flash expert. Flash questions always were referred to me.

In the 2000s Flash rightly got a lot of flak. I'm not sad it's gone. But it was really something special, especially in the late 90s.

Yes - City would be great for people doing stuff around activities, events and local places. But Country would be more powerful for e-commerce I suspect (my usecase).

Hi Josh - it would be incredible to have this filtered by location, and I think you can get that from Google Trends.

Stories like this are often instigated by someone inside the organization with an agenda. They reach out to a journalist, give some quotes anonymously, and put them in touch with others in the company that are allies and will also give supporting quotes.

This article feels like an article designed to pressure Marc Lore to leave.

Losing $1B on $22B in revenue, after just 3 years of really starting this bet is nothing!

Title is incorrect. This is not on Mechanical Turk. Tasks like this are not allowed on MTurk as per TOS. The original tweet author says so on the thread.

I do vaguely remember "good kings" and "bad kings" ... some kids were forgiving and more than fair, and others were vindictive. So not everyone gravitated towards tyranny and some did report "nothing happened" more or less.

As a child in primary school (in Lesotho, southern Africa): when a teacher left the classroom everyone was supposed to silently complete work. To enforce this, one student would be appointed "name taker". This person would write down the names of anyone who spoke while the teacher was out. Punishment for being on the list was often physical.

One day I was made the name taker while the teacher was out. Most kids stayed quiet, but two other segments emerged: the scycophants and the outlaws.

The sycophants would attempt to "help" me identify noise makers by pointing them out. In exchange they would hope to be safe from the list, and would use that immunity/privilege to lord over other kids.

The outlaws were kids who, once they were added to the list, talked and joked freely, knowing that they were doomed anyway. They felt they were fearless, and they goaded others to join them.

I've always remembered this experience, for how quickly a group of children organized themselves into social dynamics that echoed human systems more generally.

I had a page up on the iwarp.com domain too from the late 90s! http://counterwave.iwarp.com/ -> it was pure Flash (Flash 4) so it doesn't really even work anyway. It was so much fun. I miss those days.

I think to be fair, he said two things:

1. There is no way governments will just let an unregulated currency take over in a meaningful way.

2. Thus, the current Bitcoin rally is simply speculation and is being driven up by those who will profit the most from it (which is fraudulent in the way the Tulip mania was fraudulent).

I get that he's the CEO of the horse and buggy company dismissing cars, but I don't think he was that tone deaf.

I will be curious to see if people belonging to different internet subcultures develop their own accents.

Already different groups of people are quite isolated in terms of the video and audio they consume everyday (vloggers and podcasters).

What disturbs me is the potential for a government, like in Iran or Russia, to use this technology to automatically screen and label people, as a precursor to mass-scale systematic repression.

I get that this study is problematic, but there is no reason to automatically assume it's not possible. What evidence do we have that there is no correlation between ML consumable physical characteristics and our sexuality?

Exactly. When getting started initially, it can be a huge time savings to get your basic full text experience running in Postgres directly, if that's already your main storage DB. Setting up ES is not at all trivial for the average developer and can waste a lot of precious time too early in a product's lifecycle.

Postgres supports a sophisticated full text search featureset while mysql does not. Implementing full text search on Postgres is not that difficult and can prove to be a much cheaper alternative to Elastic Search up to a certain scale. This was a major reason for me to recently pick Postgres over any other storage technology.

The subcontractor dependency is thought provoking. I hadn't thought of that.

The online demo is amusing/creative: https://try-hy.appspot.com/

* Capital: https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2016/10/07/why-thera...

Theranos raised $750 million, including $633 million last year.

* Social Network: Theranos raised money from a wide range of influential investors who can support the company's efforts to secure new customers and who stand to lose to varying degrees if instead Theranos completely folds, even if it returns the remaining balance of funds raised.

* Core organizational processes: the company still has hundreds of employees on the payroll, most of whom are qualified professionals in this field. It is not trivial to recruit and bring together an organization like that. It's unlikely that most of those hundreds of people were directly involved in the shenanigans of the company.

I think those are 3 assets the company would use towards a pivot like I described. But you can't do it without removing the leader who got them here.

I suspect we are going to see Theranos pivot to becoming a conventional medical technology company, probably focusing on lab tech for blood work analysis etc. They are likely to disappear from public consciousness until we hear about an acquisition by a Siemens type company.

They got here through hype, smoke and mirrors, but they now have the capital, social network and core organizational processes in place to do this and it is a rational path to recouping time and $ investments from everyone involved.

However it will be difficult/impossible for this to pivot to happen without Elizabeth Holmes' resignation.

Does this support JSONB column types? I was using Jetbrains Datagrip, which I've been very happy with except for the fact that it doesn't seem to support JSONB columns. I've switched back to PgAdmin 4, but the UI lag is really distracting.

Send me a link to your resume/LI profile and I'll be happy to try and give you some pointers (I'm a PM and I work with devs and have hired devs before).

I added a link to my linkedin profile - can you send me a message through that?

I'm a Sr. PM at Amazon. Typically PMs start out in a technical role, such as writing code, then get an MBA and switch into a PM role.

My path was a little different, as I am neither a developer nor someone with an MBA - I worked on some personal projects early on (startups, tech focused non-profits) where I demonstrated basic PM/getting the right things done skills, and I combined that with some early experience I had as a program manager at Microsoft and as an undergrad intern within PM groups at other companies.

In terms of how to start, the 3 ways I can think of are:

1) Work as an engineer for some time, try to pick up roles such as being the scrum master, managing sprints etc. (or whatever equivalent your team is doing), then get an MBA - many companies will hire you for PM right out of MBA school with no prior experience

2) The program manager role at Microsoft is one of the few places where you can start in a role that is essentially junior product (they hire undergrads right out of school). If you can find other companies that have roles like this, that's one way to get into the PM role. Another one is Expedia I think, an MS spin-off.

3) Another way would be to go work at a startup where you can add PM input and grow into the role. This is what I would pick if I were to start over again.

Generally speaking I think companies are open-minded when hiring for the PM role - you don't have to fit an exact formula. In my experience people look for evidence of the following in your background:

1) Being able to think big and be truly creative

2) Being able to ship products (preferably you've actually shipped something already)

3) Being comfortable working with data (though my 2c is that we're over-doing this)

4) Having good decision-making frameworks for why, what and when the org should be building things

5) Being able to dive into the weeds of any domain without hesitation.

My team at Amazon is hiring PMs by the way. If you're interested in talking, feel free to send me a note.

What a patronizing and condescending piece. All I got from this is that Microsoft has launched something in this space that is really worth taking a look at, if it prompts a competitor to write and publish something like this.

(he -> she)

Why is it a good idea to get off the grid? Genuinely curious. I would think that a networked connection of energy input/output nodes that is globally optimized would be a good thing. Not sure why it's better for anyone to have every node (home) operate independently.

This is likely the beginning of the end. With such a massive loss of trust, especially in the healthcare space, it is hard to see how the company could ever recover in the eyes of customers, investors or employees.