pythonistic

Related, don't miss the Reason feature on Larkin and Lacey. They purchased the Village Voice in 2005 and had a solution for the classifieds problem, Backpage.com.

Unfortunately, they ran afoul of some young politicians/prosecutors who needed to make a mark to get into national politics (Hello, Senator Harris), and some old political families they burned, and are now languishing without money to pay for attorneys before their 2020 trial.

https://reason.com/archives/2018/08/21/backpage-founders-lar...

We're trying to change the dynamic in my employer. There is still company-wide centralized planning, and our parent company still sets overall goals and expectations for profitability, but we're something of an experiment in self-organization where individual departments and teams have responsibility for setting and spending budget, setting policy, and selecting the work that needs to be done. It's as democratic as we can get without an employee board or becoming a Mondragon.

New and innovative initiatives are more often started from the mid- to low-levels of the company (three or four new lines of business have been started this way), and for the past year or so those initiatives are encouraged to become startups. The baby businesses are essentially put in an incubator where they have an initial budget and cash provided by the company but are encouraged to be individually profitable, report on their finances, are given coaching and regular meetings with startup business advisors, etc. And if they provide services back to the company, they're supposed to bill teams for those services. (The company still provides salary and benefits to the employees who start businesses within the company; there's some accounting magic to adjust which department budget actually pays for these.)

Examples of internal businesses started include:

* delivery of cafe drinks and food (with a delivery charge paid for by the receiving employee)

* conference room ownership and maintenance: these can now be permanently rented by teams, and the business that "owns" them is responsible for decorating, cleaning, providing technology services, etc.

* balloons, party supplies, swag, and desk toys, purchased either by the employee or their team

And businesses started with a focus outside the company include:

* providing detailed retail sales and product category data to suppliers and manufacturers

* tools to identify and encourage employee networks (who knows who, what skills does each employee have, who may provide an introduction to another employee)

* tools for polling and identifying employee sentiment

* self-organization consulting, training, mentoring, and software

* company tours (at $10 per visitor)

I had to disable Privacy Badger to get the other charts to show up. Disabling uBlock Origin didn't help (or hurt).

It's not just what you make of it: a lot of your experience there is going to depend on your manager. I had three: the first was awesome, so he left for another company; the second was good, but he cared too much and went back to his old (non-management) position to feel fulfilled; the third was a sociopath and did really well, promoted to upper management and a subsidiary and out to greener pastures. Working for the sociopath was awful and got me to leave (where I'd planned on a long career). And no, there was no escape from him except leaving Amazon: he sunk my performance reviews when I asked to leave to go to another team 'cause I told him I didn't think I was a good fit where I was.

There are a lot of amazing and smart people, like you said, but there is also a lot of stress, heartache, and trouble if you don't keep your ear to the ground and build a strong network of people to give you an early warning. Don't keep your head down and concentrate on tech and building cool stuff: Amazon can be way too political for pure techies to thrive without strong protection from management.

Most of the US cities I've lived in have poorly laid out bus systems; Seattle is a notable exception with plenty of cross-town and downtown routes, and riders are never more than a couple blocks from the nearest stop.

Most cities are laid out in a hub and spoke system, pulling from suburbs into downtown, but most employers are in office parks in a ring outside the downtown area. A public transit commute may mean nearly an hour into downtown, than another hour to the suburbs, followed by a long walk. In other cities, public transit is only available at certain hours: my parents, for instance, can only catch a bus to work before 7 AM and then won't have a bus back home until after 5 or 6 PM.

Yes, I'd rather just be alone. Some weeks I manage to get as many as four days in a row working from home, but most I end up just taking Friday as a WFH day so I can focus on getting things done.

As I type this in my open plan office at 1:39 PM, there's a vacuum cleaner 20 feet away, three different conversations going on around me, the stairwell door at my back opening every minute, people walking in front, behind, and to the side of me, and the janitorial service emptying garbage cans. Every few days we'll get noisemakers, screaming, and clapping and cake for birthdays or work anniversaries.

When working from home, I get a good nine solid hours in with great focus and the occasional break to take pets out. From my, admittedly non-scientific reckoning, I get about three times as much done in one work day at home. I go into the office mostly just to be seen, to participate in social rituals, for physical meetings, and to be "available" for questions and drive-bys. It's not that I don't like my co-workers, it's that my office is noisy and distracting. And it's one of the quietest floors in the company.

When I worked for IBM and had a private, quiet office, it took some getting used to being alone. When I moved to full-time remote work, it was a really good balance for me: I could exercise during phone conferences, have a healthy and properly-proportioned lunch with my wife, and get a balanced amount of distraction and "away" time by taking the dogs out.

I'd tell you to get in touch with an Senior Architect but that's no guarantee that you'll get a good result. From my experience . . .

IBM sold a big outsourcing package to a major European insurance company: they would move ALL their stuff to the IBM Cloud (VMWare with a lot of custom BPM workflows to handle provisioning, etc.). None of this matched their other three big cloud projects, Bluemix, Softlayer, or their OpenStack project (Zenith -- my prior project), so it was all new from the ground up.

They needed to handle mass imports of DNS data from this insurance company (~1 million hosts) and other customers and they brought me in as a senior developer to do the grunt work. Since we were using ISC bind, I assumed we could use features like exporting zones with signed requests and take advantage of all the infrastructure work put into that server to scale up. Our Senior Architect poo-pooed that plan, so I started modeling the DNS records as structured data for consistent and complete import and export. Our senior architect also nixed that idea and said that we're gonna load the DNS structures with REST requests: the support people were gonna have a custom web application to load simple DNS export files (not zonefiles, mind you) into this system, and to make ad-hoc additions and changes. (When we had a new developer join, he had the same questions I had about why we weren't using all the DNS bind features since they were done and tested and perfect for our needs . . . it took a month to get him to stop asking.)

I got about 90% of the way through a solution with a Python Flask REST server at the center, high code coverage through unit tests (because it's Python and I was still finding edge cases that needed fixing to the very end), and Rabbit MQ for enqueuing the changes we've received before writing them out to DNS zone files. It works, but we certainly didn't need to blow April to August building out the architect's vision.

The reward I got was being pulled off the project when it was nearly code complete and would shortly go into production. I got a team based in India to manage in the mornings, while my afternoons and evenings were returned to developing Javascript for the BPM infrastructure jobs.

(When told I was going to leave for another company, IBM's counter-offer was to move me from my remote work-at-home location in Ohio, near family, to the Cloud Managed Services office in Rochester, MN, and then consider a raise.)

The US and it's relations with the UN were a focus of one of my senior seminars in History (1995). I'm a programmer, not a political scientist or attorney, so read this critically. In short:

* The UN Human Rights Council declares specific Human Rights. Countries choose to accept them or not.

* The US has a Constitution which defines specific limitations on the power of government. Rather than granting rights, there are limitations placed on what government can do. The Bill of Rights amends the Constitution to describe specific rights in some cases granted to citizens and specific limitations that the federal government has when dealing with citizens.

There's a fundamental disconnect in "governments grant these rights to people" versus "people inherently have rights and these are the curbs we put around them." An even bigger impediment is that the UN HRC would supersede the US Congress: these changes to the US Constitution and laws would be imposed without a treaty or legislative input. A committee in an extra-national organization (which has a history of, at times, not working well with the United States) would be imposing regulations on the US. Imagine one of our hard-working Congressmen abrogating power in favor of declarations from a UN committee.

For the UN HRC to have any impact on the United States, we'd need to amend our Constitution to grant power to an international organization, or establish a treaty to implement its recommendations. Importantly, we'd need to change the fundamental concept by which citizens have power and rights and government is restricted. (And I'm ignoring _Gibbons v. Ogden_ (1824) and the expansion of the Interstate Commerce Clause and Federal regulation throughout the 20th century.)

The underlying types are exposed to you, like C.

Go isn't adding sugar to handling numeric types: it's not autoboxing to help you with conversions, and it's not hiding the implementation like a scripting language. I'll admit, it's a real pain when trying to convert from one type to another (e.g., in graphics programming, where I'm changing types from internal representations to what gets drawn to the screen). For most "job" programming, it was a non-issue and I felt secure in knowing what types, sizes, and representations I'm really using.

Over the years, we've seen reddit increasingly turn into an echo chamber. I've been personally voted down for telling people in a general subreddit that the anger they feel about ${Political Party A} is the same way that the opposition feels about ${Political Party B}.

What mechanisms are you planning to implement to, for lack of a better phrase, increase exposure to and improve tolerance of different points of view? Is strict moderation the only way to keep groups, or entire sites, from becoming friendly to only one point of view?

Third Avenue downtown, yes.

Former Seattle (now Las Vegas) resident here. To make the buses run on time, the planners build in "time stops." These are locations where the bus should go through at specific times to not be too early for the rest of the schedule, and they also provide some buffer for buses to recover time lost due to bike loading, disabled passengers, and traffic congestion. If you're getting the bus after a time stop, you'll likely almost always get it on time. If your stop is before the time stop, bus arrival times will vary wildly.

It gets even more interesting when you add transport of the bus: the Seattle (King County) Metro also serves Vashon Island, so some of the buses travel on ferries with their associated delays and peculiarities.

I think I first saw one of those nearly a decade ago: it was definitely high-end, catering to men, and all designer labels. I honestly don't know if it survived or failed because the category isn't interesting to me.

Returns are the problem: returns may not get the nice discounts for shipping, they require manual review of the products (are it the correct SKU, the correct size, is it in a resellable condition, etc.), restocking and reinsertion into buyable inventory, etc. And then refund processing, which may take 7-10 days or more.

But it doesn't address the problem of renters: they won't buy a subscription box if there's a monthly fee associated with it. They like being able to get new shoes, clothes, and accessories to wear once and then return for free. Identifying renters and either directly contacting them to change their behavior (this is high touch, but the company culture encourages this) or removing them as customers are the best solutions I've seen to date.

Working at an on-line shoes, apparel, and accessories retailer, my understanding is that there are four categories of people regularly returning items:

* Stylists - they buy for a client (celebrities, wealthy people) and send back things that don't look appropriate

* Entertainment - TV and movies regularly buy a lot of clothes and return most of them

* Renters - people who may spend tens of thousands of dollars per year but only have $2,000 in lifetime sales -- everything else is returned

* Legitimate customers - they might buy two or three of the same item to find the one that fits

There are things we do to help with the last case and to help people figure out what will fit before they purchase the item, and those have been proven to work. Stylists and Entertainment buyers are tolerated. Renters get picked out with data analysis, but the queries tend to be expensive in time and resources and require human discretion, something missing in the Best Buy story.

The Dark Ages were named such, in retrospect, because of the loss of knowledge and recording of history of that period. Western Europe suffered from a split or break in government (the Eastern Empire was significantly more wealthy), a collapse of civil authority (Germanic tribal migration into Western Empire territory forced by Hunnic invasions to the east, withdrawal of Roman authority and eventual military collapse), and looting and destruction of knowledge centers. Thank the Irish monks for preserving Western Civilization until the Carolingian Renaissance.

We're at risk for creating a new dark age (mid-to-late 20th century onward) though the use of excessive encryption, proprietary file formats, abandoned digital storage media. and abuse of copyright.

This is purely anecdote, but I found Seattle to be significantly less diverse than Cincinnati or Columbus. The larger cities in the Midwest tend to have governments with goals that are hard to distinguish from any of the Democrat controlled coastal cities.

It sounds like an X12-style EDI format. They'll frequently have fields (or parts of fields) that can enable alternative blocks that may be of a different size. I had to write and maintain EDI interfaces for four years at a major retailer: there's a good business in transforming those documents.

I could argue that Mr. Lynn is crying "sour grapes" over this, but he also came very close to a point Bryan Lunduke made recently about Google[1]. Google has the power to stop people using their products from making a living, and a collapse or compromise of Google's infrastructure would cause untold economic harm to the nation and world. If Google as an "information provider" fails (search, email, telecommunications, DNS services, cloud services, etc.) a lot of other businesses stop or collapse.

A healthy economy is a lot like a healthy ecosystem: some parts are weaker, some will fail when stressed, but allowing the system to react naturally to inputs will likely result in a better outcome. But when you encourage a monoculture, single stresses can result in a complete collapse[2]. We're experimenting with establishing monocultures in our economies with potentially even more impact than those of the 19th and 20th centuries (like Standard Oil) that inspired the anti-monopoly regulation and legislation: if Samsung were to shut down tomorrow, what would be the impact on the Korean, regional and world economies?

An all-powerful Google that can't accept criticism or action to "trim it back" to preserve the overall economy represents a danger and Mr. Lynn was right to point this out.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwzJlvx4ndk [2] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/04/the-w...

You don't have to go too far to find dark skies.

My wife and I rented a cottage at Sheep Dung just outside Boonville, CA, a few years ago. Ukiah was on the far side of the hills to the east, another range blocked the coast to the west, and the next closest big city was Santa Rosa -- far enough away not to cause light pollution. I got lucky because the Labor Day wildfires were east of Clear Lake and blowing smoke east toward I-5. It was the first time in my life I got to actually see the Milky Way with my own eyes.

Only if you create a channel with no buffer: then it becomes blocking send or receive. Go channels block when they have nothing to do, either no room to send anything (in the case of a default channel with no buffer) or nothing to receive (when the channel has no messages).

It's not uncommon to use a select statement to allow work to continue (it may act like a loop) and wait to receive a message on a channel. This is the common pattern for handling timeouts: create a timer goroutine that will wake at a set time and send a message to a timeout channel, keep checking to see if work is done, and if the timer fires then cancel the select with an appropriate message (function call or return an error value).

This does make me wonder if it makes it impossible for those companies to be considered "common carriers" or able to enjoy "safe harbor" laws. By acting to censor legal (however distasteful) content, they could be considered to be policing what their customers do (asserting a custodial role) or refusing based on moral grounds (c.f., Indianapolis "111 Cakery") and subject to a discrimination suit.

I had bench time when I was a "consultant." I used it for skills improvement (like learning a new framework or billable service), creating and presenting training materials for formal courses we offered, interviewing candidates, creating white papers, creating internal training materials on new frameworks or new versions, and infrastructure work like pulling cables, setting up hardware, or working on internal tools.

If you're still getting paid, they likely see you as a valuable asset for future projects. It can't hurt to ask if you can help with sales calls to build new skills and relationships, or if there are smaller projects where you can be billable.

Note that this page is separate from a landing page (like the front page or a category) and a product page. Those have very strict requirements for how long a page component can take to render. This one is allowed to break the rules.

I wonder what they've got backing these pages. DynamoDB? memcached in front of S3? Redshift or AWS Lambda?

This front-end is new, but they've been crunching sales hourly for each category for over a decade. They've made the bestseller list both more prominent and less specific (you can infer less data from these charts than you could by tracking Zeitgeist lists).

It looks like a new front-end on Zeitgeist (which looks like it's completely disappeared from the category pages).

I'm using Google Fi as my voice provider. It's not an awesome solution and requires a very specific phone, but I do get three things that really help with the spam calls:

* I can manage a list of spam and blocked callers online in addition to on the phone. This lets me move blocked call management off the phone and onto the carrier.

* I never have to answer my phone or listen to my voicemail: the transcripts have gotten to be very good, and appear relatively quickly after a call is received.

* Calls are flagged when I receive them, and probable spam calls are marked as such when the phone rings.

My Subaru Outback is technically a station wagon, even if it resembles a SUV. The significant differences are fuel economy (+3 MPG for the Outback), headroom (+0.6" for the Forester), cargo capacity (+1.4 cubic feet for the Forester), and size (+1.7" width/+8" length for the Outback). Surprisingly, the Outback can also tow a heavier trailer (2700 lbs).

Go 1.7: 1.05 MB (statically bundles a stdlib; target Linux, amd64)

I'd forgotten what search engines were turning into before Google. Excite is a real blast from the past.

Firefox Reader view has been my savior both on laptops and on my mobile phone. It doesn't work on every page, but where it does, it removes the styling and JavaScript and I get to concentrate on the content.