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killedbydeath

Re:Slack refunds customers 100x amount paid during outage on Wednesday February 28, 2018 @09:32PM (#16489211)
Interesting approach. Maybe that should be the "real SLA" number: 99% = 100x refund, 99.99% = 10000x refund.
Re:TransferWise announces $280M investment on Thursday November 02, 2017 @02:15PM (#15612812)
Poland has 30x the population and likely 30x the number of immigrants to the UK.
Re:Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo on Tuesday August 15, 2017 @05:52PM (#15023021)
Poker is a niche hobby, not some metaphor of competition in life. That picture says more about poker as a way to spend time than about competing. You might as well show pictures from a fly-fishing competition. I don't play poker, yet I am pretty competitive in many aspect of life. All I know is that pretty much every woman I have talked to wants to be more popular, more famous, more successful. And I have seen girls compete for influence, and grades, and victory in sorts from a very young age.
Re:Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo on Tuesday August 15, 2017 @04:00PM (#15021801)
Are women not taught to compete? I do not remember girls being any less competitive (in school, in sports, etc.) Almost everyone wants to stand out and be better than others in some aspects and is proud when they can achieve that. Life is very competitive, I am not sure why need to de-emphasize it to much. Making it "us" vs "them" is the more problematic part, but individual competition is a pretty constructive force overall, for men and women of all colors.
For crypto/security people on this thread, what encryption could app developers use to wrap their API call so that the least amount of information is leaked to this kind of man-in-the-middle services? I.e, is it possible to: 1) hide which apps are installed on iOS/Android; 2) hide or obfuscate how frequently the app is used; 3) hide specific API calls

I assume at least #3 should be achievable with additional encryption.

Re:Incredible shrinking airline seat on Saturday July 29, 2017 @03:18PM (#14882614)
You can go really deep down the rabbit hole of seat knowledge with Seatguru, but it's quite time consuming. Their flight search is reasonable, and probably many people who care about seats do use them. But the majority probably does not even suspect that there are major differences in seat sizes between airlines and even planes. So having that information more visible across the board would change incentives more. I also suspect given how many booking sites make money they would be dis-incentivized to do this on their own.
Re:Incredible shrinking airline seat on Saturday July 29, 2017 @02:51PM (#14882496)
May be the first step of regulation should be requiring some standard disclosures around seat sizes, etc. If kayak or some other comparison engine showed that you would are getting 2 extra inches for the $40 more when flying Virgin instead of Frontier (hypothetical example), more people would pick Virgin.
Re:Raising a Truly Bilingual Child on Saturday July 22, 2017 @08:58PM (#14830323)
It's not obvious that speaking second language better will come out at the expense of English. I grew up bilingual and was at the top of my class for my second language compared to monolingual natives. There are whole countries of bilingual/trilingual people in Europe who speak their main language very well still. I think knowing a second (and later third) language gave me a better understanding of language structure. Same in sports, if you are athletic, you will have easier time picking up new sports.
Re:Google to add 'news feed' to website and app on Thursday July 20, 2017 @02:37AM (#14810446)
2020 election will be Larry Page running against Mark Zuckerberg
Re:Hampton Creek’s Entire Board Leaves Except for CEO on Monday July 17, 2017 @05:48PM (#14792552)
I almost bought their stuff once. The bottle looked nice, and I was looking for mayo. I was not looking to experiment, so buying their stuff would a a case of me buying something because it pretends to be something else. I want things to be called what they are. They could have called it "I don't believe it's not mayo" or something but they decided to try to trap people. I would feel cheated even if it does taste like mayo, I don't want vegan mayo in my chicken salad.
Re:Medium and the Scourge of Persistent Sharing Bars on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @12:24AM (#14592187)
Come on, is respecting US laws on US soil really that much to ask without the fear of alienating Turkey? There need to be boundaries, even if you care very much about diplomacy.
Re:Chicken tax on Wednesday May 17, 2017 @10:34PM (#14364463)
But why? Animals eat animals, and death is just part of life. Should humans really need to transcend what has been part of our nature for so long because we developed empathy for animals or should we stay close to what we have been all this time. I think that's very much open for arguing. Should we start preventing cats from eating birds? Should we replace every animals diet with vegetarian alternatives?
Re:Why are crime victims being jailed? on Saturday May 06, 2017 @04:04AM (#14279246)
I am amazed by the "lost his wife" part. What did she say in her wedding vows, "I take you as a husband from this day forward and until our combined income falls below 75% of the average income over the previous 3 years"?
Re:Milpitas BART Station to Open in December, VTA Says on Friday May 05, 2017 @10:41PM (#14278389)
Well in many big cities nobody expects to be able to sit on a subway train anytime during peak hours. Where I lived, seats were mostly for seniors, children, people with disabilities. That's just what mass transit looks like in a busy city. It is not unusual for cars to be packed so dense you can't move or even get on a train. And all that with trains coming every couple minutes.
Well that's a lot of data you have there. I did some GLM analysis and clearly weight is correlated with gender. Let me go tell some journalists.
There is a large difference in effort needed for being good at spelling and for becoming the best in the world. Not a perfect analogy but you wouldn't call competitive eating a very useful skill just because eating is useful. Also, as a side remark, in most languages I am familiar with competitive spelling would not be a thing. English is rather unique in that it does not enforce spelling or pronunciation rules on foreign words and prefers to take them as is instead.
You are misunderstanding. Bluetooth pairing is not foreplay, it's real sex.
Sorry but that narrative has a basis in reality. Islam was started with the goal of expansion and that has not changed enough. Every territory taken over by Muslim rulers underwent subtle or not so subtle islamization. I was born on the Eastern border of the Christian world and the tensions have been very real there for many centuries. My great grandfather was killed for refusing to convert into Islam and some of his murderers were his neighbors whom he trusted and lived with together for ages. This was in an area where my ancestors lived in for many centuries and that was periodically taken over by Muslim countries. There are many examples of peaceful coexistence and the majority of Muslims are great people, but I personally would not raise my kids in a Muslim-majority country.
Re:U.S. life expectancy declines for the first time since 1993 on Thursday December 08, 2016 @01:54PM (#13132982)
People die of cancer if they don't die of something more treatable before that so lower cancer contribution may be not for a good reason.
Re:Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson’s Epic Literary Feud on Wednesday December 07, 2016 @04:24PM (#13126349)
I am puzzled what you consider being sexist here. It's just consented sex between adults, no need to feel sorry for anyone. Both men and women who have had many partners often get cynical about that and I have heard this kind of language from people of both sexes. And it does not mean treating partners terribly. Two people can meet, have sex and part ways thinking that they had another "conquest" without having any bad feelings about the encounter.
Re:Peter Thiel To Join Trump Transition Team on Saturday November 12, 2016 @02:46AM (#12937044)
Words mean different things depending on the context. And analogy and hyperbole are valid tools for expressing ideas. Now "lynching" would definitely be a bad analogy and way too much hyperbole, but "mccarthyism" was appropriate to illustrate what I was trying to say. At the time people lost ability to be employed because of their political views. You seem to be calling for boycotting anyone who voted or supported Trump in this election because they are bigots. And that is a logical jump I cannot agree with as I tried to explain above. Clearly some people voted for him because maintaining status quo was less acceptable than getting over the things he said. I do think that we would have to get off the high horse of moral superiority and try to understand what happened if we want to avoid surprises like this in the future.
Re:Peter Thiel To Join Trump Transition Team on Friday November 11, 2016 @11:18PM (#12936560)
I don't think the definition of "McCarthyism" is as narrow as you define it. I used that word because I though the analogy was appropriate and illustrated well what I was trying to express. Accepted definitions do not tie it to the use of government force, see e.g. "the practice of making unfair allegations or using unfair investigative techniques, especially in order to restrict dissent or political criticism." from http://www.dictionary.com/browse/mccarthyism?s=t
Re:Peter Thiel To Join Trump Transition Team on Friday November 11, 2016 @01:46AM (#12928532)
We should value tolerance towards minority (in our circles) opinions. Unless you believe half of the country are bigots, you would conclude many people who voted for Trump did so reluctantly and despite all the stupid things he said, and not thanks to them. They prioritized his economic policies or felt Clinton is too indebted to the current establishment to be able to change anything. I know some people who did that and I respect their opinion. Regarding difference between McCarthyism having government support behind and our media/social media rage not, I am worried that popular opinions become policies in a democracy. If on both ends of the political spectrum people stop respecting each other completely, it won't end well.
Re:Peter Thiel To Join Trump Transition Team on Thursday November 10, 2016 @11:13PM (#12927710)
Left-wing mccarthyism is as bad as right-wing mccarthyism. People should be able to support one of the two candidates without having to stand up to so much shaming in SV circles. Given the binary choice there may be multiple reasons to pick Trump over Clinton even if you disagree with him on a lot of issues.
Re:Turkish government revokes ham radio licenses on Wednesday July 20, 2016 @11:02PM (#12134320)
Not necessarily. For example, Erdogan is currently more popular among Turks in Germany than in Turkey, 60% vs 50%[http://www.dw.com/en/i-stand-behind-erdogan-an-afternoon-in-...].
Re:Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In on Friday December 26, 2014 @03:36PM (#8800261)
Is "your" side US-born developers? I was born outside and was able to immigrate to the US on H1B. For the last few years it is very hard for my friends to do the same. I wish they were given the opportunity. In no way they are inferior to Americans. US became what it is because of openness to immigration. But these days it's easier for engineers to immigrate to Europe or Asia than the US. It may have long-term competitive consequences for the US companies as there is definitely a lot of programming talent outside the US. However if you view this as a zero-sum game with a "they came for our jobs" xenophobic vision, you of course would not care about that.
Re:Why I should have written ZeroMQ in C, not C++ (2012) on Thursday August 15, 2013 @09:00PM (#6221595)
Yes indeed. I always recommend doing the opposite in C++ projects: use reference counting and not use exceptions.
Re:Why I should have written ZeroMQ in C, not C++ (2012) on Thursday August 15, 2013 @04:19PM (#6220310)
Memory management in C++ is not tedious at all (with implicit reference counting).
move fast, brake often
Re:Postgres Demystified on Sunday March 24, 2013 @07:58PM (#5434448)
I also miss this feature however there are options: a) for small and mid-sized tables you can use a SELECT + conditional INSERT or UPDATE or INSERT-on-exception-UPDATE works b) write-heavy tables are worth being rearchitected to be INSERT-only as this helps avoiding any locks

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