If you really want to know, I can't recommend the book "Seeing like a state" enough.
TL;DR: For government officials who are charged with supervising regulations over tens of thousands of areas, it's already more than complicated enough if each of those areas has a single use designation. If you allow all of those to have multiple designations, it becomes too complex for humans to administer and so they don't allow multiple designations.
I suggest you read Bret Devereaux's "This Isn't Sparta" [0] series. He dismantles the myth the "hard times" cycle you mentioned.
For contemporary examples, just look at North Korea or Russia. Life is undeniably harder for citizens living in these countries, but where is the expected "strength" and "good times" that should result?
I've done too little SQL to be traumatized by it, but I experienced it plenty of times doing more complex data processing on the backend.
I would e.g. spend a week on first discussing a solution, then researching both theoretical background and relevant libraries, and finally writing code to do the math and render the answers (probability distributions). I eyeball them, they seem to all match expectations, so I declare victory, post some nice screenshots to team Slack, and close the ticket.
Feeling high on success, I expect the weekend to start nicely - except, winding down on that Friday evening, I follow that little thought at the back of my head, that I realize was there since the start, quietly poking for my attention. I run one more sanity check, different from the ones I did before. The results come out completely wrong. Only then it dawns on me that I made a terrible mistake early on - I misunderstood how to implement certain step and forgot about a theoretical assumption that must hold. And so, instead of a relaxed weekend, I now dread having to explain to everyone on Monday that a) I actually need another week for this, and b) the nicely looking graphs they saw are all pure bullshit, and the things that looked correct only seemed so, and only by accident.
After a few such cases - including one where the higher-ups were nonplussed, because after I corrected the mathematical errors someone made a long time ago, the pretty graphs that looked nice on the demo stopped looking so nice - I learned to sanity-check my understanding of the problem as early as possible, and then also sanity-check the code I'm writing, and then keep testing as I go. It's all too easy to write "trivial" code that "obviously" does what you think it does, only to realize some time later that it's throwing out an entire dimension of the input data, and nobody noticed because test examples are too trivial, results look roughly correct, and no one is paying attention.
I use the following bookmarklet to fix issues like this. It's similar to the browser addon discussed in sibling comments, but without installing a browser addon. Simply create a bookmark named e.g. "Don't mess with paste" with the following URL:
The underlying issues have been known for quite a while. There was a fantastic talk in CCC at 2016 about the airline booking systems and the various bits of information you can glean from them.[0]
The funny thing is, i always wondered how it would have been to live in the 30s. Mass media, populist movements and all of that. I kind of get it now. Social Media is the new mass media And as the last time something similar happened, smart populists used it to their advantage, industry supplied the tools and we all know how it happened. Not saying we are heading the same way just yet, but the possibility exists.
One could have propably made the same documentary about radio and TV like 80 to a 100 years ago. Just watching the film now, thanks for posting this question, I could have missed it otherwise.
EDIT: The guy having invented the LIKE-button is right up there with the guy having invented FCKW. Not that he had any bad intentions. Which worries me, that when a group of people with good intentions is doing good things can create easily exploited, dangerous things in the wrong peoples hands.
I work in the travel industry as a programmer (god only knows for how much longer) - I can tell you that Sabre and other GDS's are only used if you go through a travel agent or use some online reservation systems. If you book through the airline's systems or on online reservation systems they likely use the airline's systems to track travel instead of GDS since the GDS wants to take a big cut of every ticket sale. And obviously only legacy travel companies like Hertz and Mariott integrate with GDS's, new travel companies Uber and Airbnb likely don't have any relationship with Sabre.
You're only likely to be in a Sabre system if you've been booked by your company through a travel agent and rent using legacy car/hotel companies also through your company's travel agent.
> My manager is left in the dark about what I'm doing.
Then loop your manager in. I work for a marketing agency primarily doing consulting work, and operate semi-autonomously from my manager. For the clients and accounts I support, I am the face of my group. A client may not even know my manager's name, unless there's been cause for someone with a fancier title than mine to make an appearance. And account teams may have found their way to me directly rather than routing through my boss, so have no working relationship with him.
If I get a kudos via email, I either BCC him on my reply, or forward it to him as an fyi. If it's given verbally, I thank the person giving it, and let them know how much I'd appreciate if they could jot that down in writing and send it over. If it came through something like a Slack DM, I'd either screenshot it for something minor and pass that along or again express my appreciation and call out how much it'd mean if they could throw that into an email.
I've never had anyone balk at or refuse to do the above. If someone has taken the time to give you kudos for your work, they're usually appreciative enough with what you're doing that they are perfectly happy to put it in an email for you if prompted. And more often than not, the writeup that comes through talks you up far more than the informal shout out they originally made, as they're well aware of why you're asking for it.
Too many users were using options to hit the 'defer updates for 365 days' button.
Microsoft can't let them do that ("...Star Fox!"), they NEED the newest features, security updates, and telemetry.
Cynical: The stupid users don't know what's good for em, that's for MS to decide now, not the users.
However, there is an opt out via GPO for now. Of course if that gets used enough it will be ignored.
"If you wish to continue leveraging deferrals, you can use local Group Policy (Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update > Windows Update for Business > Select when Preview builds and Feature Updates are received or Select when Quality Updates are received)."
It is racism (or sexism, but we'll stick with racism for the sake of rhetoric and the article) though. Calling it "not racism" is pandering to white fragility because people think of themselves as "not racist". Calling it "not racism" gives people an out to not confront their own internalized racism.
It's humiliating for the "victim" because this probably happens on a daily basis. Tell me that wouldn't kneecap your confidence to constantly have to correct people and massage their egos and reassure them you're not offended just so they give you money. It's forcing the victim to perform the emotional labor of remediating the offense. It's wrong and we let people off the hook far too easily for it.
Those "associative generalizations" are racism, sexism and homophobia in a nutshell. You (not you in particular, but yeah, kind of) have certain associations bound to race. Acknowledge it, confront those feelings, and deal with them. It's your problem, not theirs; yet we constantly give people a pass on their own internalized racism because the people who are systemically oppressed by said racism aren't really in a position to call them out.
I'm not saying you should be fired from your job or anything; just that you should acknowledge that your generalizations do harm to people. Educate yourself on the things they go through to build empathy. Don't make them do the work you should be doing yourself. And don't assume that because they're exhausted from dealing with this daily and so don't act offended that they're not harmed by it.
The anti-racism movement is about white people not giving other white people a pass for casual racism. We have forced marginalized people of color to do the work on this front for too long, when it's a problem within the white community. Expect to be called out aggressively on this stuff from here on out until you educate yourself on why it's harmful.
I love my home in SF and have been deeply enjoying the COVID-induced work from home life. Many people don't invest in making their home comfortable and enjoyable to be in and it shows when it comes to these types of conversations.
It really does remind me of the .com bubble in many ways. The quote from Scott McNeely[0] has sprung to mind a lot lately.
- MSFT 10x sales
- V 17x sales
- MA 16x sales
- NFLX 9x sales
- BYND 23x sales
- ZM 68x sales
Some of those are obviously great companies with fat margins and well worth above average multiples. But ZM at 68x sales?
The market feels a bit out of touch.
[0] "At 10 times revenues, to give you a 10-year payback, I have to pay you 100% of revenues for 10 straight years in dividends. That assumes I can get that by my shareholders. That assumes I have zero cost of goods sold, which is very hard for a computer company. That assumes zero expenses, which is really hard with 39,000 employees. That assumes I pay no taxes, which is very hard. And that assumes you pay no taxes on your dividends, which is kind of illegal. And that assumes with zero R&D for the next 10 years, I can maintain the current revenue run rate. Now, having done that, would any of you like to buy my stock at $64? Do you realize how ridiculous those basic assumptions are? You don’t need any transparency. You don’t need any footnotes. What were you thinking?"
You can be correct, or you can get traction.
I think a lot of technical people don't understand this. They get mad at people like say, Greta Thunberg, for not being purely clinical, accurate, scientific and dispassionate. But, meanwhile the people working to make the world believe climate change is fake are emotional, manipulative, and actually get traction against pure, reasoned, calm argument.
So do we want to be correct, or do we want to win?
In enterprise sales, the price is not the main decision maker, you will usually only disclose the price at the end of the sales cycle.
Not showing the price on the website is one way to push people to contact you. You don't want people to decide on their own if they should buy your product, you have a big sales team to help them do that.
Obviously everything I say is personal experience and opinion.
I think the layoffs were long overdue and should've happened sooner. There was a general understanding between my coworkers and I that Uber definitely over hired in 2016. Thanks to that a lot of engineers ran out of things to do which led to political infighting over roadmap, ridiculous redundant resourcing - every single team had mobile/web, severe shortage on infra teams since head count was already taken by main Uber teams. We even started building and maintaining our own chat app. I disagree that all the cool eng project that we put out and share here is a waste of time or resources. Those project was initiated by real needs on Uber and only the best make it out into the rest of the world. Engineers that shipped those projects are still here and we would've done it regardless of whether the 435 people that were hired in the first spot. I fully realize that it's an insensitive thing to say but I think it's important that it's expressed somewhere.
I think the lesson here is to grow responsibily, and it's real people's lives that are being affected. Don't hire people to alleviate your current engineer's burnout and stress. Learn to plan better and to prioritize aggressively instead of just hiring and getting everything done.
The tests don't not work (I believe that within the middle of bell-curve they accomplish their goal well), but at the extremes they are prone to gamification, especially to those in the know. For example, the pre-2017 SAT had some well known (and some lesser known) tricks that you would only know by studying the test, rather than the material:
- ALL sections (and sub-sections) have questions that strictly increase in difficulty / projected "miss-rate" as time goes on. This is to keep test takers from coming back to answers they're unsure about but may themselves know how to solve -- so if you find yourself struggling with questions in a row, it's better to stop and go back rather than miss out on what you may already know trying to solve questions that you don't. For the reading section, the scale is scoped to each passage. For the vocab section, where there are 3 sections (vocab, grammar, and multiple-choice fill in the blank), the scale is scoped to each subsection. For the math section, it is scoped to the whole thing.
- The "Free Section" (e.g. the one that doesn't count toward your score, which instructors tell you before you start that section, so you can use it as a break if you wish) is usually section 4 or 5 of the test, to help plan your breaks. Some students, not previously-knowing or confused that the "free section" is ungraded, still take it thinking there must be a penalty of some sort.
- The word "equivocal" is tested within the SAT Vocab in around 60% of tests. Unequivocally, these questions have some of the highest wrong-rates of any question on the test.
- Within the grammar questions, Choice (e) "None of the above" is 99% of the time NEVER the answer. This is one of the most certain things on the test.
- The math questions will usually have (1) answer that is an outlier. 95% of the time, this is not the correct answer; (2) will be similar to the correct answer in different ways; and (1) will be the correct answer (e.g., say you're supposed to subtract "x" by 5 to get to the real answer. The obviously fake one might be multiplied by 5. One of the slightly-wrong answers might have 5 added rather than subtracted, another might just be off by 1). If you're ever in doubt, you can drastically increase your chances at guessing on a question by picking the question "most similar" to all of the others -- something like 65% chance, rather than 25% in the naive case.
- Again for math questions -- particularly the "word riddle" type ones -- the SAT will generally purposely pick questions that could have multiple seemingly-correct questions if you plug in 1, 2, 5, or 10 for the variables. 3 is almost always a safe bet, though I particularly liked to choose 7, because who thinks you'd ever choose to plug in 7.
- The essay is funny. Per the SAT's own published rules, they are not graded on fact at all; purely rhetoric, vocabulary choice, and clarity. All of the prompts also usually include a historical figure or event of some sort -- you don't need to know anything about them other than what the prompt tells you, but a well-known and easy way to win points with the graders is to make up a fake quote from someone adjacent to the event / historical figure as a hook: e.g. "Disconsolate upon hearing the tragedy of [EVENT X], [FIGURE Y]'s au pair journaled 'His life was short, but his memory will last forever'. Previously unknown to historians until then, Y's au pair embodied Y's belief that [SOMETHING FROM THE PROMPT]. [then THESIS STATEMENT on 3rd or 4th sentence, always]." (this is an objectively wrong and terrible sentence that I would hate to read in any other context. This is, however, similar to the SAT's example of a top-tier intro).
This is just the tip of the iceberg, too. It's a very predictable format and pattern (it has to be, as it's given multiple times during the same academic year; tests must be similar, lest one session of test takers do statistically significantly better than an equally-talented group which takes the test a month later)
So yes, while I believe the SAT does attempt to test for knowledge, it's that same pursuit of a bell curve that makes it easily gamifiable for those who know the test and not the material -- who are, once again, usually already the wealthy and connected.
If you use the ad manager, try setting the demographic to people interested in a specific ski magazine, not in 'skiing' as a hobby. Notice how the number of potential audience reach is equal to the number of people who liked 'SKI magazine'. [0] Also, if starting out, limit the geography to the most wealthy of urban centers like within a mile like Foggy Bottom in DC or the Upper East Side of NYC, if college students get all the colleges where skiing is a big interest around Amherst, MA, for example. It's about getting creative to limit the number of the audience to around 20,000 or 30,000 using the interest technique. Only show the ad once per day per user. Use A/B testing with different ads and creatives at a TOTAL of $5 a day for a few days. Take the most effective ads and run them at $10 a day. If you have a page, post stories that will gain traction and interest. Boost them using this specific audience for a $1 or $2 to see if people share them. If not, stop promoting them. If they gain traction invest $20 to help them go viral. Facebook rewards high quality content ads by making them much, much cheaper to run. How do they know? People click and interact with them. Find the ads that people interactive with the most and throw the rest out. It only costs a $1 or 2 to know if they are successful.
I keep my account disabled unless I need it to run ads. I feel dirty having reactivated. Im going to disable it again.
I've been using a userscript called Googles Hit Hider by Domain from Jefferson Scher that allows you to blacklist sites since Google removed the ability to do it natively (it works with all the major search engines, not just Google as the name implies) : http://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/
Out of curiosity how do you guys think they managed to scrape LinkedIn on such a large scale?
I've been wanting to do some social graph experimentation on it (small scale - say 1000 people near me) but concluded I probably couldn't scrape enough via raw scraping without freaking out their anti-scraping. (And API is a non-starter since that basically says everything is verboten).
This is an aside, but I think it's interesting: The Information is a hard-paywalled site with a very expensive subscription ($39 USD monthly or $399 annually). Normally you can't read any articles on the site without a subscription.
However, the query string on this link bypasses the paywall for this specific article:
If you remove the pu= variable, you'll hit the usual paywall.
The submitter's profile says "Director of Growth @ The Information". They've been submitting The Information articles to HN for the last couple of weeks with paywall bypasses to try to attract new subscribers.
It's good content, but it's also definitely advertising. Is that a problem? I'm not sure, this is a pretty unusual situation.
Although it's nice that Git is Git and we can all mostly still work, it still seems foolish to rely on a single point of failure like Github. I've been toying around with the idea of creating a tool that would map the Git api to work with two+ hosting services at the same time. The effect would be something like, run "$git push" and it pushes to Github, Bitbucket, and Gitlab. I can't imagine something like this would be too difficult and would eliminate having to twiddle your thumbs while you wait for things to come back up.
They're coming from outside. They establish routes that are many meters long through all available seams and cracks. Use Amdro ant bait (not 'blocker') in the spring around the structure perimeter when temps get above 10C/50F, avoiding wet weather. They carry the bait back to the nest and wipe it out. Follow the directions scrupulously and be patient; it will take a week. If you have a lawn keep it thick and healthy; ants usually prefer bare ground for nests. It's possible, with good landscaping and aggressive use of a caulking gun (assuming the structure is otherwise in good condition,) to keep them out, but that is often not feasible, and some ants are more industrious than others.
HN seriously overestimates the technical capabilities of the average person.
Facebook now has enough reach that it includes many people who don't know how to use technology properly. Finding an answer through Google takes a little bit of skill to frame the question and pick the result that will give you the answer.
Roughly 70% of adult Americans use Facebook [1]. This study [2] is from 2015, but it says that only a third of America adults are capable of medium-difficulty technical tasks, such as tasks where you need to '[evaluate] the relevance of a set of items to discard distractors'.
Remember, 20% of American adults have below basic or no literacy skills [3], which means they are not capable of tasks such as:
- "using a television guide to find out what programs are on at a specific time"
- "comparing the ticket prices for two events" [4]
William Langewiesche is a pilot himself, and has written many other articles over the last 2 decades detailing accident investigations (among other things). As much as the technical details, he often explains the organizational and political circumstances that are just as interesting. Some that stick with me: the late-90s ValuJet and EgyptAir crashes, and the Space Shuttle Columbia.
Tangentially related: there is a cool app called Tunity that "shazams" a muted TV, e.g. at a bar, finds the game and lets you play the audio from your phone - syncing it perfectly to the video picture that you shazamed. So you can sit at a bar or waiting room or somewhere with muted TVs, and listen to the audio of the game.
TL;DR: For government officials who are charged with supervising regulations over tens of thousands of areas, it's already more than complicated enough if each of those areas has a single use designation. If you allow all of those to have multiple designations, it becomes too complex for humans to administer and so they don't allow multiple designations.