ianstallings

Are you seriously calling me a racist or are you joking?

Edit: Sorry didn't see the greyed out comment above yours on my screen.

I pick through boxes of potatoes/carrots, throwing out the bad ones and bagging up the good ones, then throwing those bag into another box. I do things like this for 2 hours on the weekend at a local charity called harvesters.org. At the end I've worked up a sweat, but it's quite relaxing and I always meet friendly people there to chat with.

Agreed. Being of the Libertarian mindset, I was at first completely okay with it under the argument of personal liberty and personal property. It's a private company and they can do what they want.

But the closer I looked at it the more I realized that it truly is a public space. And then when powerful political figures started influencing what was okay to censor on it I realized they are trying to do an end-run around the actual law via technicality. No need for the government to censor anything when they can just get the technocrats to do it for them. And everyone seems okay with it, so long as it's not them.

It's a tough nut to crack. Think about fields like architecture and engineering, where the historical knowledge is well over three thousand years. Yet they still have failures, go over estimates, and generally suffer the same issues that we do, but at much greater costs.

We can still explore them. It's the contamination of them that is at question.

It's not that we can't or won't. It's that we should study and debate it before we do anything to change the environment. Given how humans have run roughshod over so many environments, I think carefulness might be warranted.

There is debate within the scientific community about changing other planets in general. Not everyone is convinced that we should alter or terraform to suit our needs.

Some related links:

https://planetaryprotection.nasa.gov/intpolicy/

https://www.astrobio.net/mars/should-we-terraform/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_terraforming

Get your arguments in order and come back like an adult and make your point. That wall of text is all over the place.

Do you think that government ownership would lead to more competence and benevolence? If so, just visit the inside of any government agency.

We do it currently. Holland is a good example of fighting back the sea, but at great expense. And not every country will be able to do this type of engineering.

The temp rises are another thing that we can adapt to. Maybe even some global engineering to thwart it. But again it will be at great cost. And this will probably have the bigger impact on all of us. Our eco-system is very susceptible to small temp changes.

Please explain how you put "reflectors in space" without putting them into orbit.

Basically what it comes down to for me - I don't want to be distracted by my laptop and only bring it to meetings if I feel it's necessary:

- Daily stand ups? My laptop is distracting and I use a paper notepad instead.

- Long planning sessions or tech meetups? I need my laptop in order to be effective.

Staying focused is a constant struggle. Example: Being on Hacker News "wasting" a few minutes right now when I have a long list of tasks to work through.

I was very skeptical of fasting for quite a while, but over winter I was on a contract with a guy that did intermittent fasting and his particular schedule had him eating after 3pm. The guy was like a machine. Just this sense of urgency in his work that was incredible to watch. He accomplished so much more than the other guys in the same position. I'm sure part of that was his own character and his work ethic, but when I talked to him he attributed a lot of it to his fasting. Turns out he's probably correct.

Agreed and I I think a lot of it comes down to financial factors. In other words, why are we paying someone so much to make design decisions and how can we be assured they are doing it correctly? Because of science.

I've spent a lot of time in software and I am looking to exit so I can spend more time away from the desk, but I have to say - this is a great attitude to have!

I've spent 24 years writing software professionally and I often think about my exit. I don't think I'll ever stop writing software, I truly love it. But the career itself is incredibly stressful. The money is compensation for that stress, but I'd much rather be outside and working with my hands. I'm going to create other channels of income and then move on.

It's not that I think people can't be happy at a desk. I've been very happy. Just looking for a change and some sunshine.

This seems to be a problem in general across all social media. They create a platform people like, people join up because they enjoy the format, then they tweak it until it's no longer recognizable. Twitter is a great example of this. No real UI improvements in years, just graphing gone wild. FB is the same.

The social media market seems ripe for a disruption, imho. It sounds crazy, to try and topple these current networks. But it's happened before.

This has to be the most insane shit I've seen in quite a while.

This dead argument seems to re-animate itself once a year or so. But my question is this: Why not learn both the IDE of your choice and how to use your terminal/vim? No need to arbitrarily limit your own knowledge and abilities. It just makes you stronger.

I would counter that those things are not to limit supply, but to ensure quality of service. When you're holding someone's life in your hands the profession can suffer greatly from bad actors or just those with limited skillset. It behooves everyone in those professions to make sure the quality of service remains as high as possible because bad service could damage everyone in the industry.

As we move forward and software does impact people's lives more and more and in some cases can lead to injury or death, we will see many more professional hurdles put in place. But it won't be to keep the profession pool limited.

One of the things I do to offset possible interruptions is to write things out or visualize them in some way. It helps me pick back up on the track I was interrupted from, but also has the added benefit of helping visualize the problem, which often leads to a greater understanding. It's a little bit of overhead that can pay off.

This may shock you but we have cities out here. I live in one and walk to work. Not the suburbs. That being said, what is your overall point?

Truth. I took a lower paying job in the midwest, and I can now save a lot more money, while also living a less stressful life. NYC is a really cool city and I enjoyed living there. But I "did my time".

I think more and more tech workers are going to wake up to the fact that while mega-city life can be cool, it's not the only way to live.

With new regulations like GDPR coming online FB's business model is basically kaput. They're going to need to rethink their whole stance if the world follows EU's lead. Given that Zuckerberg was called to testify in front of congress, I think we're probably going to see much more action.

This is my general response to most criticisms of other's efforts: What is stopping you from doing something better? In other words, don't talk about it, be about it. Lead by example. The world has enough critics.

GDPR interests US hackers too. I'm currently working on a SAAS that helps companies manage their data privacy, with GDPR being the main driver. I can't say much about our approach just yet as we're in stealth mode still, but imho the approach should be centered around awareness of what, where, and how data is stored. That's the very first step.

Good content in your guide to your new tech leads, laying out expectations right up front and giving them guidance. Most companies don't have anything like that, in my experience.

You said it yourself, by ignoring nonsense. I used to engage and I still do chime in once or twice a year. But overall I just ignore those posts and move on with my life. I've learned I can be close to people that have incredibly different life philosophies. It really is your choice and it comes back to the stoic philosophy of changing the things you can change and have a meaningful impact on your life, while ignoring everything else. That probably sounds like blasphemy in today's connected, opinionated, world. But it helps me cope.

This doesn't surprise me at all. The last time I was actually in a Wal Mart I had an employee yell right at me when I asked to get by their carts in the way. I complained to their corporate, expecting at least a call back. I got nothing. No phone call, no emails, nothing. They really do not care apparently. So I refuse to spend any $ there ever again.

Sam Walton once said "There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else"

But does anyone really think that they still follow this advice? Wal Mart has a well deserved terrible reputation.

That part about due diligence is what gets me. How do you sink $700M into a company without going over it all with a fine-toothed comb? Where were the scientists and skeptics for the investors? They fell for the "here's a single customer saying it's good, and here's us in the news" routine. I could understand if this was a seed round for a few million in some software venture, but $700M for healthcare tech? This is incredibly negligent.