News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

daphneokeefe

Re:A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe on Thursday March 17, 2022 @01:54PM (#30714001)
How timely on St. Patrick's Day. How about people's names that contain an apostrophe? I married O'Keefe. It is just so aggravating.
Re:Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @06:35PM (#30171326)
When I set up a contact, I change the ringtone for them. Then, I ignore calls from non-contacts, which are currently dominated by offers of help with my non-existent student loans (it used to be the warranty on my 20 year old car).
Re:Tesla suffers network outage disabling vehicles’ mobile app on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @01:09PM (#24569320)
Nope
Re:Don’t rely on contact-tracing apps on Friday May 15, 2020 @01:59PM (#23195215)
that archive link is also paywalled
Re:Shelter in place for Bay Area counties on Monday March 16, 2020 @05:32PM (#22598128)
How do we think health workers and sanitation workers and police/fire and other vital workers should get to work? Not everyone has 24-hour public transportation available.
Re:GPS Is Going Places on Friday December 27, 2019 @05:36PM (#21895378)
That app has great potential, but it's not really ready for prime time. Its rating in Google Play is 3.1 based on over 3,500 votes.

Today, they are apologizing for a problem wherein the app reported a 6.1 quake as being located somewhere in the United States, which is not very helpful.

Other reviewers have complained that the app is a power hog that drains a phone's battery pretty quickly.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=edu.berkeley.b...

Re:How tracking pixels work on Thursday December 19, 2019 @02:33PM (#21838365)
I use a browser extension on Chrome called PixelBlock to (hopefully) kill those email tracking pixels. The extension displays a small icon on emails where blocking occurred.

This is the description supplied for the extension: "PixelBlock is a Gmail extension that blocks people from tracking when you open their emails."

Nobody has mentioned StartPage.com. I believe that uses Google Search in the background, while not sending your personal data or returning a bunch of advertising garbage.
Re:Google plans to partner with banks to offer checking accounts on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @12:01PM (#21526355)
So you have your paycheck direct-deposited, and you pay all your bills on this account, so Google now knows your income, your rent, your indebtedness, where you have all of your accouts (mortgage, auto loan, credit cards).
Re:Google plans to partner with banks to offer checking accounts on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @11:57AM (#21526310)
But wouldn't they just delay the process, appealing forever?
Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010) on Saturday November 09, 2019 @07:39PM (#21495590)
Apostrophed person here. This happens SO often.
SF is not at risk for grass fires and forest fires. It's a big city.
Re:A Sociology of Steve Jobs (2011) on Sunday October 06, 2019 @09:07AM (#21171789)
Another way the comment could backfire would be losing karma points here.
Re:Stand Out as a Speaker on Thursday August 22, 2019 @07:17PM (#20773244)
There's one in San Francisco on Thursday nights that's all comedy speakers. Boost your confidence and make some fun new friends.
Re:Off-Facebook Activity on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @04:55PM (#20752024)
We know that FB tracks us just as much as the people who have accounts. But we have less access and fewer rights.
I am speaking of my experience in the US.

When I was a senior manager in a Fortune 100 company in the South, I was taken aside by one of my peers, who advised me that I should "speak more deferentially" to my male peers and staff BECAUSE I was a woman. It just would not be acceptable for me to act like any man's equal.

When I was a software engineer in SF, my Indian manager took me into a conference room with his American manager, and told me that I should always, always frame any request to any team member as a plea for them to do a favor for me. No matter what I was asking, no matter who they were, whether in person or email or on Slack.

You ask do these people actually matter? Yes, they were my peers and bosses.

Women managers are particularly encouraged to phrase their orders in soft terms like "Could you please...?" because otherwise we may be see as harsh, demanding, and the unforgivable "acting like a man". Some of us struggle with this. A lot.
Re:How Slack Harms Projects on Sunday August 18, 2019 @02:15PM (#20731842)
What I most disliked about using Slack on a dev team was that there was no way to locate the information later. Suddenly, a discussion about the project requirements or technical implementation would take place. That decision became embedded in the project. But if you weren't there for the discussion, you had no input. And later, when you wanted to review the decision and the underlying facts, there was no way to find it.

So I would spend a lot of time reading back through the discussions in the various channels. And sometimes those micro-decisions were later contradicted with no acknowledgement.

Re:Tech Interview Handbook on Sunday August 18, 2019 @01:59PM (#20731746)
> we included what we thought was a trivial nested for-loop problem and virtually nobody could even get started on it.

If no one can answer the question, maybe they don't understand it? Maybe there's something unclear in the way it is worded?

Re:The Titanic Compared With a Modern Cruiseship (2014) on Sunday July 28, 2019 @10:50AM (#20547829)
Big fan of cruises, but only on ships with 200 or fewer passengers (Wind Star, Viking River Cruises and their ilk).

I think it's kinda sad that we don't have many cruises along our wonderful American rivers and coasts. You have to go to Mexico or the Caribbean or Hawaii or Alaska. My understanding is that they are cost-prohibitive because of a federal law requiring that any ship making a second stop in another US port is required to pay basically union pay scale to all workers.

Re:Hell Is Other Internet People on Sunday July 28, 2019 @10:39AM (#20547771)
If you rush over to Amazon to download the book on Kindle, you may find that it is broken on all Apple Kindle apps. (See the reviews there.) I found that I was able to get past the fatal error by going to the Table of Contents and clicking on the first page of text.

Surely, Amazon is going to fix this soon. I'm surprised that they seem to do no testing at all of their product on even the most common devices.

For people unfamiliar with the acronym (from Wikipedia): "A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturing..."
Re:Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel on Friday June 28, 2019 @03:45PM (#20308145)
I love Google's Keep for this. It's very simple. Text notes or checklists, organized into major categories (labels). I have a set of shopping lists (grocery, hardware, office supply...), another set of bars and restaurants (by location/neighborhood), checklists for so many activities. Works seamlessly on my MBP and Android phone.
No, that doesn't stop the videos from playing. It only mutes them. You still have the visual interference of the animation, along with unwillingly downloading massive amounts of video data.
What is your contingency plan for when that physical key is lost, stolen or damaged?
This is why many of us use ad blockers.
Re:Your Android Phone Is a Security Key on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @03:27PM (#19627955)
I am interested in how frequent travelers manage these security measures (especially abroad). For SMS: quickly obtain a burner phone, log in to Chrome, something something SMS or Authenticator? For Authenticator: log in to Chrome on any machine you can locate that you can trust? For the printed backup codes, you carry them with you as you travel, and through security?

I am trying to develop a security process that I can rely on. It only has to be better than what I have now, it doesn't have to be bulletproof.

Re:Your Android Phone Is a Security Key on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @03:09PM (#19627794)
Can someone explain how TFA (or any security feature that relies on my phone) works when the phone is unresponsive -- dead battery, no cell or internet reception, hardware failure.
After a career in finance, including an MBA + accounting certification, I learned programming at my kitchen table nights and weekends, entirely from books (this was in the '90's). No formal CS education. I didn't perceive any issues with the lack of the CS degree, but I also refused to consider FAANG. Even being the less-favored gender, I agree with the SF salary data. It conforms to my experience here.
Re:A Magician Explains Why We See What’s Not There on Friday March 29, 2019 @03:55PM (#19525037)
Totally agree. You have to heed your location.

Here in SF, if you look the driver in the eye, you have yielded the right of way to him. Even though state law gives the pedestrian the right of way when they are in a crosswalk.

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