undoware

I would like to suggest that the attempts to solve 'toxicity' in social media are actually an attempt to relativize the latent, normalized, usual-amount white supremacism, heteronormativity, ableism and patriarchy that most makers -- being privileged enough to have the resources to make -- are filtered for ahead of time.

Put a way that you find easier to read: You're halfway between 'oh shit I'm like that' and 'yes I appreciate the needs but we couldn't possibly XYZ' and you, like everyone else, is having to pick a side. That's not 'toxicity', that's just the ongoing war. And for those of us whose survival depends on the outcome, the war is not figurative; it is quite literal.

Beware, your bias is manifesting.

This.

Honestly, this article is fascinating to me for reasons that might discomfit its author.

Not that ignorance of the last 300 years of philosophy on this topic is something necessarily to be ashamed of, but this essay, and the reaction to it here, is of interest to me because (a) this is not an empirically-validated, or even merely well-argued, approach to reasoning about people, but (b) seems to be thought well of anyway, reading the room in this comments section.

I understand better the class of ontological and epistemological elisions system-thinking folks tend not to 'see', and I am reminded of the (now thankfully bygone) era of analytic philosophy where you couldn't make an argument in a respectable journal without translating your propositions into a symbolic logic (your choice of which).

An excellent kettleball to level up with. It's like geocaching but with unsupported assertions.

Well, I know which way this is going to go. The pawns who built the structure of this economic game are the ones being cleared; and every chess player knows what happens when you run out of pawns.

This is fascinating. As a writer and coder, I find the subsumption of longform culture into the a niche blogosphere genre gives me chills.

Say what you will about Condé Nast, this implosion is poignant for anyone who has dreamed of supporting themselves with mere words.

These days, the only "reader" that seems to pay enough for my keyboard time is Babel. ;)

Thank you <3 For reference, this reasonable, human exchange cost me 4 karma points, because as everyone knows, being a human on Hacker News is a 403.

(context: often shelters don't want you bringing your stuff, which means it disappears)

I sincerely hope they don't discriminate against the unhoused. This could be a game changer for folks who are used to putting together $20 per night for a shelter stay already (being homeless is very expensive, as I learned firsthand many years ago.)

[citation needed]

I don't feel attacked, and my knowledge of food is far from comprehensive, and I certainly didn't intend it as such. I stand by what I said: you can't learn anything about cooking in an hour except what you need to take the next class on cooking. Do that for a few months, or even a few weeks, and you get somewhere. Scope, my friend. Scope.

Perhaps, but I don't speak for myself -- I'm describing a practice that is well understood, like rules of the road.

in philosophy we say:

"Standardly, XYZ, but if I understand you, you're saying ABC, are you not? What motivates this difference?"

Key points:

-identify that you are making an explicit formal comparison to a usual solution

-convey a charitable attempt at understanding ("the Principle of Charity"), and how far it took you

- attempt to comprehend the problem being solved

No, the sim itself is not that impressive compared to Unity or similar. They are, however, impressive relative to legacy React, which, as a development modality, has an enormous amount going for it. React and React-likes are winning in the marketplace because the development style it opens up really is that much better than many competitors. Yes, it's average everyday use cases driving that; no, that is nothing to be ashamed of.

There are many reasons you don't write a shopping cart in Unity, but now you can get a taste of performance nevertheless.

Props to the React team. (Yes that is a joke; I am passing props to the React team ;D)

I'm reading a lot of commenters above chime in with explanations for why it's logistically hard for GOOG to maintain these scut-work keep-lights-on projects because they are so unappealing to their engineers and often involves e.g. boring, non-promotable work. This gave me a Radical idea.

So, I'm one of the lucky few trans folks who have managed to survive and flourish. I'm vividly aware of at least one reservoir of brilliant people who don't get a crack to show the world what they can do.

Instead of just shuttering projects that aren't sexy enough, or are too difficult to maintain, or don't contribute to your OKRs or promotions. Why not give them away? Why not give them to a team of folks with: disabilities, barriers to professional advancement; etc. Google could quality-ensure and knowledge-transfer, meanwhile doing social good, and getting ongoing support for a product that they would otherwise have to add to the increasingly embarrassing pile of abandonware?

I'm not saying it would be easy -- I can think of any number of places where this could go horribly wrong -- but it is quite obviously a step in the right direction to try.

There are lots of great minds that would kill for a chance to do something boring for a change, because financial (and then food, and then shelter) instability is anything but.

You can't learn cooking in an hour. Period.

learn how to tie a good knot. Just one. Practice.

I recommend the alpine loop or shoreline hitch.

This post occasioned me to coin "dunning-krugerbait".

If you think you have cooking sussed in an hour, you're doing it very wrong

Too bad a functional fourth estate is a dependency for, you know, western democratic capitalism.

Less puckishly: What I feel upon reading this is sort of like that feeling when you find out some bad piece of news about climate change. It's bad enough on its own, but what it implies about the overall health of the national and international socioeconomic context, which, as SWE I (like you) depend on for my survival, is enough to keep one up at night.

Who, among folks smart enough to earn six figures writing code, will deign to don gumboots? And if they don't, who will?

And what happens to us when that person proves incompetent, irregular, desperate, uninformed, or lackadaisical -- all the things that (under capitalism) a healthy salary is supposed to ward against?

"In the old days" is just Argument from Tradition. We also used to treat infectious disease as demonic possession. Next argument, please.

_The Surface of Meaning_ by Robert Bringhurst is a good starting point

'CRM' stands for Customer Relationship Management, and in a sentence is usually short for 'a CRM app'. CRMs are what folks use to keep track of their relationship with a given client. E.g. when you call your bank, the person at the other end knows your info, what happened last call, etc. That's because of the CRM.

Lots of solo-entrepreneurs struggle with CRMs, because the existing solutions are geared for large corporations or specialty verticals (e.g. healthcare, banking). Formerly, singletons used solutions like Access and FileMaker, but these are obviously deprecated in 2019 for all the usual reasons, some of which are good.

OP has created a general-purpose CRM fit for solopreneurs. I'd throw down right away for this if I wasn't worried about what happens to my data if this offering disappears, which is the Usual Problem with SaaS and one not really addressed by this product (nor is it reasonable to expect it to be.)

Precisely to this end :)

in that role I would typically back up the deploy directory (/opt/foo) and the /etc/ and parts of /var/ every day to Glacier.

Of course this is all pre-docker and pre-k8s but this is 2013 we are talking about

What a great point, thanks!

I just went away, learned all about RxJS, and then about Connective, and I think I'm in love.

This is a simple, pure, and elegant way of expressing complex systems. The site makes a whole lot more sense when you catch up with the reactive paradigm and see what RxJS does and what Connective provides that it doesn't.

I'll use this for my next project.

Try drawing hands. (If you're a non-artist like myself.) It's impressively hard --- they are complex artefacts we can't quite see clearly because we are so used to them. There are a lot of, as it were, polygons.

If, after staring at these things for several decades, I still can't draw them with my eyes closed, I will assume that an AI would not find it easy to think about them either.

Going to assume you're in English-speaking North America, as I am:

Politics can no longer be kept out of any field whatsoever, because this is "a politically-charged era," in the argot of the day, but it might be more accurate to describe it as business-as-usual for a large Europe-derived civilization. Remember the Hundred Years War?

The post-war period of stability and consensus is an anomaly and has ended. Buckle up.

fantastic essay. thank you

I haven't tried this yet, but poking around the site, I'm wondering what mitigations you have for potential abuse? I'm concerned specifically about transparency to the end user about the costs of the packages that they've installed.

Thinking aloud:

* My user chooses to install my package with scarf, either because I force them to (by not making it easily available elsewhere) or because they want to support me (yay!)

* I make money from their install, and/or their use of the package (is this correct?)

In that case, as Mallory, as a bad actor, I:

* Want to make a package that looks affordable but pulls in dependencies

* I want to make those dependencies cheap at first, but then I'm going to make them expensive later, when you are, well, dependent (ahem)

* I want those deps to be, as much as possible, me and my friends

I'm not even going to get into the abuse potential I can imagine would obtain by preying on naive good actors; e.g. convincing some well-intentioned dev to use my dep and then effectively taking rents from all of their downstream users.

I haven't had a chance to play with Scarf yet but I'd love to hear about how you handle scenarios like this on its website. Because I'm pretty sure these scenarios are why something like scarf hasn't shown up before.

(Personal belief/stance informing this worry: FOSS got big by providing easily-reasoned-about costing structure in an industry that had hitherto been beholden to things like on-site auditors, per-seat licensing, hidden costs, submarine patents, etc; our value prop was "you always know your cost is gonna be $0, plus installer and maintainer salaries", which is much better than "We decided this now costs double". We didn't so much cost less as cost predictably.)

Nit, but PLEASE date your essays. I have no idea if this is from 1998, 2008, or 2018, and it matters to how I read it. A lot.

After nearly two decades of FOSS advocacy I've come to the conclusion that most consumers (a) already know about their gardens' walls, and (b) actually prefer it that way.

The view that freedom is always preferable over, say, the sense of security that folks get from having an avuncular corporation ensure that the tools in their lives have a limited range of use -- that someone is literally managing the possibilities of their personal devices, pruning them of (supposedly) dangerous apps and ensuring that they are within certain expectations, is a great comfort to people who are already used to their lives being managed in precisely this way by any number of powerful actors.

Stuff like this from the FSF makes me think they just don't understand the user. The user is typically is not an engineer. The customer is not interested in the responsibility that comes with that kind of power, and would pay good money to trade it off for predictability. And the success of nerfed, general-computing-incapable devices is market validation of this hypothesis.

I'm uncomfortable with this facet of human nature too, and it runs contrary to the prevailing narrative of our industry and even of the Enlightenment itself, but until we accept that many folks just want to be taken care of, we will keep being surprised.

Customer obsession means appreciating all the data, not just the data that is comfortable to behold.

reading HN as a woman is an exercise in managing fury