Haven't you guys ever seen The Wire? Is this seriously a surprise to anyone?
Readit NewsI remember very clearly when something or other about this company got posted here awhile ago and almost immediately thereafter someone submitted a blog post explaining in basic physics terminology that the company's premise was in no uncertain terms total bullshit, and reamed the entire startup community for heaping attention and praise on them without thinking through what (to the author) were obvious faults in their plan.
I enjoyed that piece. I like it when the discussion reverts to basic math and physics to resolve points of contention.
At any rate, it continues to amuse/distress me in the time since then that the company is still around and still has investors, etc. Do people still not get it? It won't work.
On some level, moreover, it disturbs me that people are actively pursuing a technology that would effectively be torture to household pets. Does that mean nothing to anyone? Do they get that dogs and cats would be able to hear this as a siren in their skull?
At some point every piece of technology that we use was impossible. It's very easy to sit on the hilltop and say "it's not possible". What's not easy is climbing the hill anyways and figuring out a way to make the impossible happen.
I'm not here to defend this company. I don't know a thing about them or their technology. I'm just saying... "what kind of world would we live in if we never looked past what we thought was possible?"
EDIT: I think that a few of you have missed an important piece of this post, so once again...
I'm not here to defend this company. I don't know a thing about them or their technology.
I think it's a little naive to "give up" on a language early on, but on the same note, I've walked away from several for periods of time because they lacked the maturity I needed.
I did enjoy the article and the linked article that spelled out ways to increase performance with Python. With any environment there are dramatic performance improvements to be had with a little bit of engineering and knowledge.
I've seen a bit of an odd shift towards Julia - People seem to be adopting it in droves from my perspective. That means that the development team is doing something very right. Given some of the people I've heard talking about Julia, I don't think it's going away any time soon.
This kind of feedback is good for the team. If you are going in another direction for the time being, stating why is always helpful. Glad to see a developer here in this thread.
This thread makes it seem like the general opinion is that an automatically generated news feed would be better.
It wouldn't. Not for end users anyways. It would be a marketer's dream.
If you feel like that's the way things should be, write one. Make it popular. Sell it to Facebook. (And use the money to buy stock in your roommate's new online marketing firm)
Gratsby commented on California's generation of electricity from coal drops dramatically latimes.com/business/la-f... · Posted by u/Osiris30
The LA Times' title for this article is wrong. California does not generate electricity from coal, however, California uses a lot of electricity generated from coal. As the article notes near the end, California uses electricity from coal generated out of state.
According to SNL, "at times, as much as 50% of Southern California's electricity still comes from coal-fired plants, Steve Homer, director of project management for the Southern California Public Power Authority, or SCPPA, told SNL Energy." https://www.snl.com/InteractiveX/Article.aspx?cdid=A-3411331...
This really is a reminder that the writers of articles frequently do not write the headlines. That's a big reason why titles of articles are frequently misleading.
Per the article there is one coal power plant still active.
It's run by Argus (the sometimes good, sometimes bad company from Arrow) near San Bernadino.
To be fair, captains gotta sleep sometimes. Thats why copilots exist. Its more important for the captain to trust his copilots in a strange situation. I would argue that more errors have been made by captains / managers who start micromanaging when they panic, instead of trusting their lieutenants.
The captain woke up eventually, returned to the front to check out what was going on, and then trusted his pilots to explain to him what was going on. Unfortunately, one of his pilots was incompetent and his actions was confusing the other (actually competent) pilot.
The issue is that the ignorant copilot didn't know the issue about stalling out, nor how to get out of a stall. It takes specific training to pull a plane out of a stall. It goes against human instinct (you have to push the plane down, THEN after certain velocity is reached, pull up later).
The competent pilot was overruled by the incompetent one (the incompetent one was in the primary seat). The rest is history.
Pulling up immediately is the human panic response that needs to be "trained out". And its what one of the two pilots did in the situation.
Pulling the plane out of a stall used to be a part of basic training required for your license. That doesn't go on anymore?
Gratsby commented on Ask HN: How do I deal with the first sexual harassment complaint at my startup? · Posted by u/milfseriously
As someone who's done a lot of hiring and firing, the part that stands out most to me is not the sexual harassment part, but the fact that he was just hired and already is causing problems.
Normal people tend to be cautious and respectful at first. By immidiately jumping in and pushing boundaries, this person is demonstrating that he doesn't care about your company, he doesn't care what you or anybody there thinks about him, and he doesn't care if he breaks things and gets fired.
I would fire him as soon as I could without the lawyers getting up in arms. People like this tend to be very destructive. The smart ones will wreak havoc in your organization for years before you figure it out.
I second this sentiment. Especially someone in a biz-dev role. Can you imagine if he crossed the line like this with a customer? It's not something a budding business wants to ever deal with.
Someone who feels casually about this kind of misconduct with another employee - in my mind is someone who would feel casually about lying on an expense report and other things you just don't expect people to do.
I suspect the lawyers would have you fire for no cause, give a good reference, support unemployment benefits, and potentially offer a small departure package. None of that is really necessary - when confronted with the facts, nobody in their right mind is going to say "I didn't deserve to be fired. I'm going to sue!" But in the end, protecting your business is your highest priority.
I also get the sense that this is your real desire.
What is the benefit for an existing CS student to switch to Emacs who is already comfortable with using IDEs like Visual Studio, Eclipse or IntellijIDEA?
I'm an emacs evangelist and I'll use Eclipse or IntelliJ for Java. I have half a mind to just use a windows VM for visual studio because I think it's a great Python IDE.
But then there's everything else.
I've looked a great deal for a decent javascript IDE and I have yet to find one outside of Emacs. For a lot of languages I end up using in short spurts, I appreciate having a text editor that can do what I need it to do, and can do it consistently regardless of what I throw at it.
If I have boilerplate that I need to set up, building a yasnippet template is a piece of cake. If I need syntax highlighting, it's almost guaranteed that someone has gone down that road and has a mode already set up. If I need to migrate to a new machine, I pull in my .emacs from my git repo.
Little things that might be a challenge - like opening a file over SSH or needing kerberos authentication in order to edit a file - are challenges that have long since been dealt with.
There were two videos that brought me back to Emacs after years of using other editors - one was about python development in Emacs when I was looking for a python IDE, the other was a video about org-mode.
It took me two weeks of forcing myself to use Emacs before the muscle memory came back and I started preferring Emacs over vi again.
I wouldn't be too concerned about whether or not you should migrate to it. Use what you know. When you have a need for the power of emacs, you can safely ignore it the first five or ten times it pops up.
Eventually, you'll wander into a video how-to like I did and turn to the dark side. Or not.
Gratsby commented on Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News gizmodo.com/former-facebo... · Posted by u/uptown
To get two points right out of the way:
1. I completely agree that the mainstream media in the U.S. (and in most parts of the world) is very biased and partisan.
2. I also agree that, as private companies, both Facebook and the mainstream media are in their complete right to proceed with their business as they see fit, within the legality of it anyway. I don't believe whatever it is that they do is a First Amendment (the rule forbidding the government from suppressing freedom of speech, assembly, etc) matter although it can be a freedom of speech (the natural right) matter.
With that out of the way the main reasoning of this post.
The great promise of the Internet in general and social media in particular is that, maybe for the first time in history, the natural rights of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly come together in this amazing technological manner and, at least in principle, without the need for authorization and without the interference of powerful third parties like the government or the elite.
People can exchange thoughts and ideas, coordinate, and interact instantaneously all across the globe without the need of long travel or intermediaries relaying those messages.
There was even an implicit promise, an unrealized one when, in many of the big public manifestations of the beginning of this decade the so called "Social Media Revolution" helped to magnify the voice of the people in the streets, to help them to coordinate outside the graps of their governments (that usually have full control of both the media and the old means of communication like landlines and mobile phones).
And these new companies (like FB, Twitter, Reddit to name a few) capitalized on that claim too, posting themselves as bastions of freedom of speech, the tools for people to change the world, one hashtag at a time.
Now, the damnedest thing: with each revelation like this one it becomes apparent that "the king is dead, long live the king".
These companies, far from providing the means for people to communicate, to freely exchange thoughts and ideas, they try to shape and mold these ideas just like the very tools the government and the oligarchy uses to control the people.
If it is real that Facebook does that (and there is no reason to doubt) that betrays the people a lot more than the examples you mention. I believe people, after all these centuries since the printing press (now synonymous with journalism) are used to the idea that it is biased, partisan and, in general unreliable.
But when it is their very words and thoughts that are being distorted, the ones from their friends, their neighbors, whose opinions and ideas can be amplified or muted at will depending on whether they conform or not to the gateway controllers agenda, that in my opinion is the ultimate betrayal by those companies.
Assuming this and many other suspicious about their behavior is true Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and the social media in general is betraying the people a lot worse than the mainstream media are.
[1] The Social Media Revolution: Exploring the Impact on Journalism and News Media Organizations [2010]: http://www.studentpulse.com/articles/202/the-social-media-re....
[2] If You Doubt That Social Media Has Changed The World, Take A Look At Ukraine [2014]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregsatell/2014/01/18/if-you-dou....
[3] Welcome to the social media revolution [2012]: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-18013662
(recycling this post made to the duplicated thread, but still appropriate to this one)
I would agree that the free exchange of ideas is the great promise of the internet, but I disagree that Facebook or any high traffic website has any responsibility to blindly post what is popular.
That kind of thing is relegated to smaller and active communities that can decide for themselves what content to exchange.
A highly trafficked global community has to be managed differently, and a system that is completely democratic will be gamed because of the eyeballs it has in front of it.
Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, etc. are all sites that have been heavily targeted by astroturfing campaigns. They've all attacked that problem in their own ways, and they all have failed spectacularly.
One way of attacking the problem is curating popular content. It works but it doesn't. Show me the website that has more than a few million daily visitors that has democratized information, and I'll show you a website that is being gamed by marketers. (Seriously... because if it isn't already, I'd love to make a quick buck)
It's pretty much the same thing that happened here. They knew the discussions were happening, they knew where the discussions were happening, and since it was in a public space they didn't need a warrant. It's not like they are running around town putting microphones in all the bus stops hoping to catch anybody saying something. They were looking for a specific type of criminal activity and they placed the mics accordingly.