throwaway0255

> Every time I hear people saying how much they prefer the git command line is because they never seriously tried to leverage the git features of their IDE.

I think this statement is much more powerful in reverse. People who prefer the git features of their IDE have probably never seriously tried to leverage the features of git...

I prefer the git command line. It supports every single feature of git, and as an interface it’s completely and totally frictionless.

People trying to create tools and UX around git usually do so under the false impression that git is the source of friction, when really they are.

> Also if you ever try to teach someone git, it's not as intuitive as you think [1]. Having a consistent UX can help.

Are there people who need this kind of help learning, but then go on to do well at it?

I’ve found programming in general is extremely binary. Either you’re the kind of person that can grasp it and has the motivation to track down answers yourself and hack away, or you aren’t.

Being able to pick up a new system or technology and understand it very quickly is what it means to be a programmer, even more so than the act of programming itself in my opinion. I think trying to find shortcuts around that to teach people is a bit of a catch-22.

I think the biggest problem with Markdown is that the spec is ambiguous and there’s no clearly prevailing standard.

Jeff Atwood tried to fix this, but the creator of Markdown does not seem keen to cooperate with any attempts to standardize it.[1]

Since he owns the trademark, standardization will likely be impossible without his cooperation. Not to come down on John Gruber, I understand his position and he’s a cool cat... it’s just an unfortunate shortcoming of markdown, which I otherwise love.

With the exception of ordered lists. I can never figure out how to get multiple paragraphs or interstitial content into ordered lists, and it always resets the counter to 1... but everything else is great!

[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...

I have two thoughts after reading your description of the turbulence.

One is that, flight attendants develop reflexes in response to turbulence, so for it to send 2 of them to the floor it must have been some extremely intense and sudden turbulence.

My second thought is that perhaps one of the greatest sources of your anxiety in that situation was seeing them hit the floor. They’re in a position of authority, part of their job is to make passengers feel safe and to protect them if anything goes wrong. And you just saw the people in that role hit the floor and become vulnerable in a moment of extreme duress.

I would suggest letting the airline know during check-in that you have an irrational fear of flying due to this incident. This will cause the attendants in your class to be debriefed on your condition (this is a daily occurrence for them), and they’ll often give you some extra attention during turbulence, or have the pilot make longer or more frequent announcements reassuring passengers during turbulence.

Another thing I might suggest is meeting up with current or former flight attendants in person. Let them know you’re trying to overcome an irrational fear of flying, and they’ll probably have some stories to tell, and I think you might find that reassuring.

You may have already seen most of the world, but your daughter likely hasn’t, and you likewise have yet to see most of it together with her. So I hope you’re able to overcome this fear, because the world’s cities and topography may not have changed much, but there’s still a whole world of new experiences out there. :) good luck!

This is only my experience, but personally I haven’t really found anyone who fits this “politically fractured and agitated” description in the real world.

People in person don’t really seem to care as much and are generally somewhat moderate/centrist and are perfectly capable of talking about these issues without reflexively hating the opposition.

The one thing everyone does seem to agree on is that they hate internet mobs and political extremism on both sides.

I don’t know. Regular people still seem pretty damn reasonable to me. I think the problem might be that we’re taking a very narrowly defined demographic (people who argue rudely with strangers on the internet) and extrapolating from that as if their sentiment represents everyone at large.

Media sources do this as a justification to report on population sentiment and create big narratives arcs out of it. Twitter and Facebook’s scale and visibility makes it very convenient for them.

But I really think the “write nasty comments on the internet” demo is too narrow and specific to extrapolate anything meaningful from it at all (unless perhaps you’re a psychiatric researcher...)

I won’t dispute that PHP is an objectively terribly-designed language and has many fundamental and unfixable flaws throughout its implementations and throughout the language itself.

I’ll also agree that the popularity argument is completely facile (bots cloning old WP stacks to create SEO spam does not make you popular, that spam being responsive does not make you the biggest mobile app language, etc), the people making those arguments know it, and they continue to say these things anyway...

But, why do you think it’s impossible to write good software in PHP? How long has it been since you’ve written something big with it?

I would agree that it’s unlikely for a PHP project to result in good software, especially if it’s big and has had many contributors.

But in 2018, PHP has typing, it has packagist and composer, its community has agreed on a standards org and is rapidly adopting those standards. The ecosystem offers tons of solid open source libs and frameworks. PHP has all the language constructs you need to organize your code and scale it to multiple devs (namespaces, encapsulation, etc).

Facebook is still using PHP as it’s primary language (as hack, which is basically PHP7 with some differing notation).

Laravel is directly competing with Rails and Django and is easily in the same league.

So why can’t good (web-based) software be written in PHP in 2018?

I find it seriously scary how 23andMe markets itself.

Externally, they're a family company helping you understand your family history and equipping you to anticipate health problems so you can prepare for them.

Internally, in presentations to venture capitalists and in job interviews with engineers like me, the picture is quite different. They're building a genetic database and plotting world domination from a thousand different angles that most people could never have even imagined.

This stuff is straight out of a dystopian sci-fi novel.

23andMe is very similar to Google in this regard. We never imagined Google would have so much access to data, we never thought of the consequences. Now Google wields an absolutely unfathomable level of power over everyone in the world, and all anybody can really do is trust them not to abuse it.

And also trust that all future generations and governments that inherit Google will never abuse it.

23andMe is one of those companies, but we aren't just talking about your searches and communications, we're talking about genetics and humanity and life itself on a very fundamental level.

The ethical and moral dilemmas haven't been brought to light yet in a meaningful way, but it's inevitable, and they're some seriously next-level moral dilemmas. Even for Silicon Valley.

I know meta comments are frowned upon here, but why is the “or:” in headlines (borrowed from Dr. Strangelove I presume) so popular among programmers?

I see it done again at least once a week. Is it just because the movie is popular among programmers, or is there something more to it?

If my experience throughout grade school is an accurate reflection of US schools at large, nearly every upper-middle and above kid has a parent or tutor doing (or proofing) their homework for them.

The poor kids (myself included) don't even necessarily have a person at home asking them anything about their homework, and so often don't do it at all.

The kids with the tutors tended to have test scores that underperformed their homework scores. The teachers usually attributed this to abnormal stress levels due to the student being an over-achiever, or it was hand-waved as "he's just a poor test-taker", etc. A lot of them were given additional time to complete their tests as an accommodation.

The kids who didn't do their homework tended to have test scores that dramatically outperformed their homework scores. The teachers attributed this to a slacker mentality, the student "not applying themselves", the student not respecting the teacher's curriculum, etc. In my case, I was repeatedly threatened with not even moving on to the next grade due to homework, despite never getting anything less than an A on any test, and repeatedly demonstrating that I knew all the material really well, and having all of that acknowledged by the very people threatening the hold me back a grade...

That was a bit of a tangent, but yeah, a lot of kids have parents either doing their homework for them or proofing/correcting it before the teacher ever sees it. A lot of kids have parents doing entire projects for them using what is clearly hundreds or thousands of dollars in materials and equipment. It's a common thing, or at least it was in my districts growing up.

This topic is always a great opportunity to share stories about what childhood was like just a few decades ago, so I'll share mine.

When I was 5-10, a typical day for me was spent alone or with friends outside, from sun up to down, with zero adult supervision. There wouldn't even be an adult who knew where I was going or where I was. They simply gave me the responsibility of returning home before the sun went down, and over those years I always did, mostly because I was hungry. The only exception was one day when I traveled too far, realized too late that the sun was going down, and collapsed from exhaustion trying to get home. My family searched for and found me during twilight. I learned valuable lessons that day.

I recently looked up my childhood home on Google Maps to see how far I would go, and I would regularly travel within about a 3-mile radius. The surrounding area was heavily wooded and mostly vacant.

I would see a black bear probably once a month. My parents just told me to make noise as I traveled, to keep them scared off of my position. I knew never to play with their cubs. I knew never to run from them. I knew to stand ground and be loud and aggressive if I was ever approached or charged by one.

I fell off my bike and skinned my knees probably 40 or 50 times. I have many memories of limping my bike home on foot for a mile while sobbing in pain, and then squeezing my dad's hand as hard as I could while he poured hydrogen peroxide or rubbing alcohol over my bleeding knee. Every time this happened, he would just tell me I was going to heal up fast and get right back on the bike.

A common route for me was to ride my bike along the side of the highway a few miles to a corner store so I could buy chips or candy, or visit a waitress my family knew at a local breakfast spot for some free eggs. Nobody ever stopped their car and tried to "rescue" me. The people at the shops knew how I got there, they were not concerned.

When I was about 10, my family moved to a rich white suburb outside a major city. Their policy of letting me be independent and go wherever I wanted unsupervised continued, but in this new town I was regularly approached by adults asking if I was lost, strangers asking where my parents were, and adults on golf carts with walkie-talkies reprimanding me and sending me home for no particular reason.

I found their concern for my well-being incredibly insulting. I was insulted that they thought I couldn't handle myself, and later I was insulted by the way I realized they were judging my family and my parents. As a result, I was downright rude to a lot of them, and kind of earned a negative reputation. Ended up getting blamed for a lot of vandalism despite never vandalizing anything, and causing problems between my family and other local families, simply by locals assigning blame to me for all kinds of things based purely on my reputation of being out unsupervised a lot and being rude to certain adults.

So I got a taste of both worlds just by moving. I don't think the problem of over-parenting is restricted to time and trend. I think it has a strong geographical and cultural component, too. I suspect that if I went back to my hometown, I might still find kids unsupervised, riding their bikes and skinning their knees in the summer. I've also heard from people outside the country that this helicopter parenting thing seems to be largely restricted to the US.

With Netflix, there doesn’t seem to be any amount of seeing something and not clicking on it that ever gets the system to stop showing it to me.

Every time I log in, there’s a big wall of 20 posters I’ve seen a thousand times and never clicked on once and have zero interest in.

And the whole user experience seems about finding my way around that wall.

I can find stuff I’m interested in, but the platform never surfaces it for me. I always have to dig.

I always use the feedback system, too.

Netflix always brags about paying mid-six in pure salary and hiring top of market. Their internal presentations on content discovery and demography are something people tell stories of like they glimpsed a magical relic or something.

As a user I honestly cannot fathom where all that money and research could possibly be going.

Maybe my account is broken or something.

If all the questions were relevant and had objective solutions, they would be put into a lot of situations where they have no justifiable reason to reject somebody that they would prefer to discriminate against.

I've found that usually when people say they're "passionate" about something, what they're really saying is that they have a deep yearning for the high social status they would attain if they were great at or well-known for that thing.

Also, that they believe their status is higher because they're passionate about that thing, and they wanted to remind you of that.

Half the time it's something they don't even devote very much time to, and aren't even that good at.

That might be why these "follow your passion" speeches are so effective. Everyone in the audience can have a different high-status activity in mind, and the word "passion" is like a global variable that maps straight to whatever every individual believes is the best way to achieve high social status. So you get the whole audience, and everyone can start daydreaming in unison.

Optimistic visions of how government services should work need to take into account the dysfunctional and extraordinarily inefficient nature of the system you're plugging those responsibilities into.

If you have the State of California implement this system, it's going to add 10 hours of paperwork and phone calls to every year of every adult's life in perpetuity forever with no hope of ever being improved or rolled back.

Whatever you initially think should form the basis for these tolls will be completely thrown out 5 years later, and the tolls will be used as a generalized fungible revenue source for the state.

So your proposal is effectively "raise taxes and create more jobs that don't actually produce anything and make it more expensive to drive."

Now I and other non-mathematicians can look into Euler's totient function and RSA, and learn more. Thanks for answering.

So is there really never a proof in pure mathematics with more obvious or immediate near-term applications?

Are there any historical examples of that? A major breakthrough in mathematics that once understood, it was immediately obvious that it was going to make X work better, and then it did?

> This is a huge deal, if true.

What's the potential benefit to humanity that could come about if this is true, without any other dependencies, over the next 30 years?

I used to know someone who worked for one of the companies behind those "We'll Fix Your Credit Score, Call Us" and "We'll Buy Your House, Call Us" signs on the side of street intersections (among other things), and I asked her to explain to me how those signs could possibly make any money.

The way she explained it was (mostly her words), way less than 1% of people are dumb enough to dial the number, but of the people who do call, 100% of them are people who are dumb enough to call.

In other words, if the signs appeared more credible, they would be much less effective, because they'd end up wasting a lot of time screening the calls of people who are unlikely to accept the terms they offer.

She also said that scaling up (and going up market) would increase their likelihood of litigation.

It seems to me like that's what's happening with these timeshare seminars. The car isn't just there to mislead people about the potential upside of the contest, the car is really there to screen the marketing process for gullible people attracted to large financed purchases.

I laughed too hard at this. Reminds me of that famous Jim Reekes story:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5d151lqJsA#t=2m4s

Do you happen to remember what the copy was on that page?

I'm sure it had to be something better than "Hey we made your cookie too big. Can we delete it? Ok thanks sorry about that."

I bet they went with something subtle and vague, make the problem a little unclear and complicated-sounding, maybe take a little credit for Websphere doing a good job in detecting the problem.

Like how I word all my work emails.

> Personally, I think we'd all be a lot better off if we adopted open and polyamorous relationships in a large way.

How is this different from being single? And what indication do you have that this would be a good idea?

Anecdotal I guess, but people who label their relationships this way have been without exception some of the most dysfunctional people I’ve ever met living in extremely unstable living conditions and breaking up and moving constantly.

Comparisons in Google Trends are extremely easy to manipulate (or just interpret wrong). The ".js" you added to Vue is killing its results, and the generic term "react" is propping that one up.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

or how about

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

Maybe alexa matters?

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/vuejs.org

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reactjs.org

Or maybe one community uses their respective primary domain more than the other for one reason or another.

React also has more than 4x as many dependent packages in npm, which could be propping up its install count.

> There are plenty of benefits to a service like this

Are they greater than the benefits of simply never tweeting at all?

Really interesting content but this site has one of the most aggressive, unpredictable and annoying slide-down headers I've ever seen.

Displaying written content on the web should be so simple, yet all the content producers have invented their own special blend of ways to fuck it up.

Slide-down headers. Share links widgets that overlap content. Video plays without asking and follows you down the page. Entire page lags while 800 javascript snippets load. Text is some stylish but unreadable low-contrast color. Modals begging you for your email.

I manually edit the DOM and CSS of sites on an almost daily basis now just so I can read it.

Probably not the best example.

Maybe you're talking about a different kind of shirt, but I tried Amazon's brand of collared long-sleeve button-up shirts and found the quality so low that I'd consider them unwearable.

The material was very thin, extremely wrinkle-prone, the collars were wilted and didn't keep their shape at all, and the cut wasn't very good.

I'm not the type to be easily fooled by marketing/branding psychological tricks, quite the opposite. But every off-brand collared shirt I've ever bought in my life has been a cheap unwearable disheveled mess.

I know designer brands are just cranking these things out of Cambodia for $3/unit, but no-name brands still just can't seem to compete at all on quality. They're not even trying as far as I can tell.

> If you’re not using chat, and someone is hoping for a response faster than email, they’re likely to interrupt you in a way that’s far more disruptive than chat, like walking up in person or calling on the phone.

If they have to physically stand up to bother you, I think that also makes them more likely to answer the question for themselves without bothering you at all.

Some people ... when they have chat, their bar for interrupting you is so low. I have a coworker who it almost seems like he'll interrupt me every time he sees an error message or exception on his screen.

So, Googling "they're all from turnip town" led me to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuKvUf7cr0s

And I still don't know what it means to be from turnip town.

That video has 300 views and is one of the weirdest things I've ever seen.

Oh yeah, insurance and financial products in general are just silent murderers of people's finances. Families get wrecked financially for generations to pay for this stuff and they don't even realize it's happening.

And in order to even be eligible to become an Uber or Lyft driver, you first must navigate through that minefield of auto loans and auto leases and insurance companies. And Uber and Lyft is the opportunity that convinces you that it's a good idea to do that (more similarities to Herbalife).

I say all this as someone who uses Uber and Lyft almost every day. The drivers think I'm paying them to drive me somewhere, but what I'm actually doing is paying for them to take on the liabilities/debt/depreciation associated with owning a vehicle. That's where the value is for me, it has nothing to do with them driving.

This doesn't surprise me at all and it's because of hidden costs incurred by the driver, combined with an implicit bidding system that drives down wages.

Hidden costs:

1. Vehicle wear and tear (cars cost you money when you drive them)

2. Vehicle depreciation (cars cost you money even when you aren't driving them)

3. Interest and fees associated with auto loans and leases

4. Insurance premiums

5. Gas

6. Unexpected/unplanned for tax bills

But the feedback you're getting about your income is just the dollar figure that shows up in your account, which is vastly higher than the true amount you could reasonably keep as profit. It makes $10 feel like $100.

Combine that with the implicit bidding system. And by this I mean, market forces will naturally saturate Uber and Lyft with drivers until the price falls low enough that drivers won't accept it. And because of the factors I listed above, that natural price point is practically guaranteed to be well below minimum wage.

The whole setup is just beautifully engineered to trick poor people into thinking this can be a career. I've often thought about which is worse, this or Herbalife. I think Uber and Lyft might impact more people than Herbalife, and generally those people start with less, so I might give it to Uber and Lyft.

Actually, it's also a profession that has one of the highest rates of workplace fatalities, so I'd definitely give the title to Uber/Lyft over Herbalife.

Tell that to the white and asian males who get rejected on the basis of their race and gender despite having worked their entire lives to be the most qualified and technically adept candidate.

I'm pretty sure impostor syndrome is a problem they would love to have.

Instead they got the entire course of their careers (and lives) stepped on by bigoted racists and sexists.

I know your comment has to be the top one because it turns this whole thing back into more sympathy for women and minorities, but this is literally an article about white and asian males being overtly discriminated against on the basis of race and gender. Can some of the conversation be about that?

People outside of tech think there's this silent discrimination and hostility against women and minorities, but it's the complete opposite. If you could choose your race and gender going into these interviews, you would be a complete idiot to choose male or white or asian.

It's not just in hiring either. Another thing I've noticed is if you fail as a male engineer, you get fired. If you fail as a female engineer, you get reassigned to product management. These positions seem to be reserved for non-males. Women get reassigned, men get shown the door.

It's getting to the point where all of this is so overt and so undeniable. It's all to avoid lawsuits, but what if they're just exposing themselves to more lawsuits on the other end of that pendulum?

I have to think at some point the race- and gender-based meddling these companies do in people's careers will have to stop.

You don’t get skipped past phone screens, you still have to do those.

I don’t think you skip resume filter either. They claim they don’t share the resume, but on multiple occasions I had someone from the company magically view my LinkedIn soon after I was paired with them.

It’s not difficult for them to find you, there’s not really much anonymity built into TripleByte after you’re accepted.

You do get to skip remote technical screens, which is the primary benefit imo. That might be the only benefit to the job seeker, actually.

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