Mixtape (u/Mixtape) - Readit News

Mixtape commented on Forced software updates just make everything worse theguardian.com/lifeandst... · Posted by u/drankl

gyomu · 4 months ago

> my maps app wouldn’t connect to my phone’s music player any more

Sorry a bit of a detail but I don’t understand this. What does it means for a maps app to connect to a phone’s music player?

Are we talking about 2 apps on the same phone? 2 apps on 2 phones? I use map apps on my phone all the time, while listening to music, but I’ve never “connected” the two.

Mixtape · 4 months ago

Just a guess, but Google Maps has (had?) an integration with Spotify that adds basic playback controls below the map view during navigation. It's meant to keep you from needing to switch apps while driving.

Mixtape commented on Every .gov Domain flatgithub.com/cisagov/do... · Posted by u/KoftaBob

xp84 · 10 months ago

> They just memorize "[municipality_website]"

Nah, even worse, they type “municipality” or some butchered typo of it into their browser, triggering a Google search, and click the very first link they see (sponsored or no) - so they can wildly easily be tricked into phishing websites.

Arguably we’re all victims of the decade or so when Google was so good at serving up the right site, so most people just got used to not knowing any URLs. People Google “YouTube” or “cnn” rather than type even the .com after those words.

Mixtape · 10 months ago

IMO, poor website UX plays a big part in this too. People are far less likely to Google "[city] public works" if "public works" is a top-level menu item on the city website. When you first need to click a hamburger menu, hover over the "departments" entry, select "other departments", and then pick "public works" from the site header though, Joe Public is just going to do a search.

Mixtape commented on Every .gov Domain flatgithub.com/cisagov/do... · Posted by u/KoftaBob

fencepost · 10 months ago

You say there are grants available, but given the current environment actually relying on those seems risky - even if you were actually to get the money up front it seems like it might get clawed back.

Mixtape · 10 months ago

You are correct. This is a consideration at all levels of government currently, with faith in those grants' persistence varying based on an individual recipient's responsibilities.

Mixtape commented on Every .gov Domain flatgithub.com/cisagov/do... · Posted by u/KoftaBob

prmoustache · 10 months ago

> The average non-technical user doesn't "see" "[municipality].[state].gov". They aren't familiar with the concept of a domain hierarchy at all. They just memorize "[municipality_website]" and move on with their day.

That mean they can easily be redirected to a phishing website.

Mixtape · 10 months ago

Absolutely, and that's a risk that we carry, especially in the public sector. That being said though, I don't know if adopting a better-regulated domain is itself enough to alleviate that.

The very unfortunate reality is that many (most?) users evaluate phishing attempts with the null hypothesis that "this is trustworthy". They are looking for evidence that something is wrong and assuming all is well if they don't find it. To that sort of user, the thinking goes something like:

* Some trustworthy sites use .com.

* My municipality is trustworthy.

* My municipality uses .com.

If you draw out the venn diagram, there's a clear gap in that line of thinking. That doesn't matter to someone's Great Aunt Linda though. She just knows that .com is what goes after Amazon and Google, so it must be good.

With that in mind, could using .gov help to protect those folks? To a certain extent. I can see the argument for keeping the more discerning few from getting scammed. For the broader group though, it won't change anything.

Offhand, the alternative solution that I'd offer would be providing clear communication standards to the public. Specifically, defining when, how, and from whom municipal notifications go out. Think of it like the IRS only sending physical letters; archaic as it seems, it makes it pretty obvious that an email "from them" is bogus. The clearer someone's understanding of where to find us is, the more optimistic I am that they'll get where they need to be.

Mixtape commented on Every .gov Domain flatgithub.com/cisagov/do... · Posted by u/KoftaBob

YPPH · 10 months ago

US government domains seem a little over the place. I'm surprised by the number of courts and counties that have random .org and .com domains. In Australia, it follows a pretty strict structure: Federal: entity.gov.au State: entity.wa.gov.au (example for State of Western Australia) Local: entity.stirling.wa.gov.au (example for a local government in Western Australia),

So, for example, the Federal Court is fedcourt.gov.au as it's federal.

Strange how the US has such a mishmash.

Mixtape · 10 months ago

Just my $0.02 as a net/sysadmin for a small municipality in the US:

A big part of why we haven't been able/bothered to migrate to a proper .gov domain boils down to the amount of technical debt we'd need to pay back in the process of doing so. Everything that we do uses our non-.gov domain, namely our Office 365 connectors. On top of that, end users' day-to-day communications with the public make use of the existing domain. Modifying that in any capacity could prove disruptive to ongoing communications and potentially render them liable for dropping the ball somewhere. Not to mention that every single internet account ever created by staff using the current domain would need to be migrated or risk being lost forever.

Additionally, we're a small team. Only myself and one other individual would really have the technical knowledge to migrate our infrastructure. The opportunity cost involved would be massive. There are grants available to help us with this, but obtaining/using those can get complicated at times.

Ultimately, the pros just don't outweigh the cons enough to make a huge difference. From a purely academic angle, should we have a .gov TLD? Absolutely. In practice though, the residents and staff are familiar enough with the current one to render it a non-issue. The average non-technical user doesn't "see" "[municipality].[state].gov". They aren't familiar with the concept of a domain hierarchy at all. They just memorize "[municipality_website]" and move on with their day.

Mixtape commented on Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting? · Posted by u/imadkhan

scarface_74 · 2 years ago

> I think my suggestion is, do what you can to stand out

Really, once you are unemployed and looking for a job, it’s too late to do anything to stand out. The time to do something to standout is while you are working.

How will emailing someone directly help if he doesn’t have a unique set of skills that helps him stand out? If he is just another generic developer (no offense intended I don’t know anything about him and that’s how I would have described myself until 5 years ago) why would emdilokb

Mixtape · 2 years ago

> The time to do something to standout is while you are working.

This is an issue I ran into recently during my post-undergrad job hunt. Having exited college without an internship, it was difficult to distinguish myself in any meaningful way. In my opinion, major, career-defining work needs to be at least six months' worth of dedication to be of any importance on a resume. Most people don't have the savings to go that long between jobs.

I was fortunate enough to secure a well-paying internship over the next six months, but in all honesty I think I got lucky. It's tough out there if you don't have the existing background to set yourself apart.

Mixtape commented on Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children scratch.mit.edu/about... · Posted by u/khochesh_kushat

cgk · 3 years ago

Full disclosure: Principal Software Engineer here on the Scratch backend...

Scratch is not built to be a "teach your kid programming languages" system, it is based on the work and ideas of the Life Long Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab (the director of this group is Professor Mitch Resnick, the LEGO, Papert Professor of Learning Research). The Papert part is where the term Mindstorms comes from (https://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerfu...) and was used by the Lego Group when branding those products, and our philosophy is heavily influenced by that.

I can say that the https://scratch.mit.edu/statistics/ are real and we have a substantial footprint of backend services and custom software to support it. We handle on the order of 15-20 million comments/month.

The primary design philosophy is:

Passion: You have a strong interest in a subject/problem to solve/explore Projects: Build something based on your passions, gain directly interactive experience with it. Peers: Share your work with folks who are interested and provide feedback to you Play: It should be fun!

Note that there is nothing in there about STEM/STEAM nor application development. We build and support Scratch to provide creative tools for anyone to explore computation in a from that is relatable and has a low floor for understanding/entry. Having said that, the complexity of what Scratch can do rises sharply the more you work with it and the concepts behind "forking" and opensource are built in via the remix ability on individual projects.

A lot of design thinking goes into the frontend of Scratch to build on a creativity feedback loop that is not focused on learning Python or any other specific language (or the syntax of them, i.e. avoid "why isn't my program working... oh, one too many tabs... or maybe this semi-colon, or maybe this .")

Another part I think is worth raising, the Scratch frontend is a sophisticated virtual machine interpreter that has it's own machine code and model that is executing in a Javascript environment in browser and it is still open source. Google's Blockly project was based on the ideas of Scratch 1.4 and when we ported Scratch 2 away from being Flash based, we partnered with the Blockly group to fork their code base and create Scratch Blocks.

Based on the TIOBE index, we're usually somewhere in the top 20 most popular "programming languages". _eat it Fortran!_

Mixtape · 3 years ago

While I have the chance here, I want to say thanks to you and your team for the amazing work that you all are doing. I doubt you need further validation, but believe me when I say that the ideas you're describing do work. My entire career in CS started with Scratch in intermediate school (somewhere between 2010 and 2012). Having an interface with a low barrier to entry, particularly for someone whose economic situation didn't allow for engagement with more sophisticated tools, allowed me to begin engaging with computing in ways that I'm not sure I would've been able to otherwise. It was also a bonding experience for my peer group and provided me with a shared interest to meet people over. At the precipice of graduating with a bachelor's in CS, I've been reflecting a lot on how I get here, and Scratch certainly played no small part in that process.

Mixtape commented on More students are turning away from college and toward apprenticeships wsj.com/articles/more-stu... · Posted by u/lxm

mkl95 · 3 years ago

Lately I have worked with many junior / mid level guys who studied CS in college. Meaning they graduated at some point in the last 3 to 5 years. All of them struggle with basic communication and tasks that involve working with other humans. It's like they spent all those years in some cave with no exposure whatsoever to the real world.

I get that the goal of a CS degree is not to prepare you for the software industry, but it's the main goal of most CS students. I can see why college degrees are not as attractive as they used to.

Mixtape · 3 years ago

Would you be willing to elaborate on what you've seen a bit? I'm on the last semester of my CS degree now and have definitely seen a lot of similar effects as a result of Zoom courses and general isolation during COVID lockdowns. There's generally less willingness to reach out to people than there used to be, and people seem to prefer dividing up tasks and working independently over collaborative work (e.g. each person in a group project having a "role" rather than working jointly on a large segment). There's also a general preference towards working at home without any external interaction whatsoever and a lack of willingness to form study groups. As I start moving into the job application phase of things, I can definitely see how these traits can be seen as off-putting to hiring managers, and I'd like to avoid falling into similar traps. Is there anything else you've noticed that would be worth avoiding?

Mixtape commented on Python One-Liners pythononeliners.com/... · Posted by u/zweig

timfi · 3 years ago

This is not strictly true. Python expressions are in fact Turing complete. For example, you can implement an entire Brainfuck interpreter [0] in a single expression.

[0] https://gist.github.com/6bab3480ab439f0e98f18d88750d3b38

Mixtape · 3 years ago

This is fascinating and absolutely could be its own submission. Excellent work.

Mixtape commented on Ghost boat with GPS leads father-son duo to man overboard garmin.com/en-US/blog/mar... · Posted by u/hnburnsy

sitkack · 3 years ago

> an app on their phone to shut the motor off.

The failure risk here is the phone doesn't go with you and it keeps chugging along.

Mixtape · 3 years ago

This is doubled by the fact that lots of boaters will try to keep their phone as far from the water as possible for safety's sake. In practice, using your phone is better than using nothing at all, but a dedicated waterproof device that you can clip onto your clothes and forget about is by far the better option.