One of my first successful programming tasks was editing the code of lemonade stand so it could recognize my name and my sister's name. It would give me more super-hot days, and while it didn't change the rate of days for her, every once in a while it would flash up a message saying "Meghan is a stupid head!" and then blink 3 times, then go away. That way when she got my parents, they wouldn't see that it was insulting her.

It was great fun.

I've got to agree with you wholeheartedly. The standard is that you won't normally be told why you haven't been selected while you're expected to indicate when you're no longer interested. This is not 'ghosting' by the company, it's simply how the employment process works. If they've got a good HR department, you'll get a "Thank you for your time," message, but don't count on it.

Ghosting - people or businesses, is disrespectful, unprofessional, and speaks poorly to your ability as a person to handle even minor conflicts. It doesn't matter what actions the other party has taken.

This is different from actually blocking someone after you've requested someone, or avoiding contact because of legal issues (like hiding from an abuser). It's even different than not responding to an initial first contact or robo-posted form letter.

Just say, "I'm not interested, sorry. Good luck with your candidate search," or "I didn't feel any sparks, so I don't really want another date," for your interpersonal version. Not only is it easy, it'll make your life easier too, so you don't have to dodge people in public or avoid a zillion calls or texts or emails or tinder messages or whatever it is you're avoiding because you're incapable of acting like an adult.

It's so unrelated to the concept he is trying to describe - that (primarily the citizens of advanced nations) encounter or operate some sort of microcontroller or computer so many times in their daily life that they can be considered ubiquitous and having a great impact on our life - that it's not a useful metaphor nor phrase.

Pick any other technology that's done the same. Like, I dunno, cars.

"It's amazing to think of a world as a car. I think that's the right metaphor for us as we go forward."

Look how stupid that sounds. Same with just about every other transformational technology; radio, tv, cell phones, airplanes, etc. It's not a useful abstraction or insightful discussion point. It's pure pablum.

These three hour workdays are killing me!

(Pedantic note: The Jetson's have represented George's work hours randomly, from 3 hours above (assumed this is 'overtime'), to 2 hours, 3x a week, to 1 hour, 2x a week)

The big takeaway I had was that people are deriving identity from self-labeling far more than other places in the country I've lived, and I've lived all over. It seems like it's so terribly important to live up to your label in the bay area that it really defines you, and is how others define you. Everyone is a type of extremist and like any extremist, they place overlarge attention and emphasis on their key issue well past the point of rationality, to the detriment of any other issue, no matter whether it's related or not.

So the people there made it a horrible place to live.

I wrote this https://slashdot.org/comments.... about my experiences in the bay area back in the heady days of 1998. It even has some examples.

I don't think we need to invoke Trump, as per the article. The bay area has always been up it's own ass, though I'll concede it may be getting worse.

"It's tempting to think that these devices, with their endless ability to stimulate, offer salvation from the type of mind-numbing boredom that is so core to the teen experience."

The core teen experience is mind-numbing boredom? Are you sure? Having a nearly infinite range of possibilities and potential may result in some form of analysis paralysis - IF you're the sort of person that needs to obsessively analyze and think through all the ramifications - but we're talking about teens. Not exactly the folks who are keen on analysis and thinking things through. There's a world of things you've never done, and so many of them are so immediately accessible!

Have you actually experienced life outside of school? Having to work for a living? Do you understand where the movie 'Fight Club' is coming from?

Lemme ask you this, when's the last time you got REALLY excited for your birthday? For getting to drive a car? For hanging out after ? For dating? For getting a paycheck (vs. relief that you can pay the bills != excitement). Exploring a new genre of music or band or even just a new release? Hell, just for making a purchase you had to save up for?

There's nothing out there that compares with the experience of all those firsts, at a time in life when you're first able to exert your own agency.

The fact that entertainment is now hand-held, personalized, varied, ubiquitous, introduced early in life and increasingly psychologically designed to promote addictive behavior does mean that we're training people to have short attention spans with a need for ever-more-attention-getting, ever-more-intrusive, ever-changing sources of entertainment. But that STILL doesn't mean the core teen experience is to be bored. It just means that they're losing interest with each specific thing more quickly, and even that's not a definitive characteristic of teen life.

- there is no 'True Hacker'
- Individual developers have their own preferences to working alone or in groups, both occur, but it seems that many (most?) prefer teams
- Atheism does not disallow altruism nor require attack on churches
- You didn't read the article, it has nothing to do with the network used by the church, it's a standard hackathon sponsored by the church.

Wow, that's a pretty racist stereotype sentiment you yourself expressed. Every janitor in california has to be an illegal mexican immigrant?

I have no idea what his nation of birth was. There are more nations that speak spanish than just Mexico, and he could have been from any one of them or Brazil or heck, not even from middle or south america. Not every hispanic is of Mexican descent, and not every illegal is Mexican, and not every janitor is any of those.

That, and the stock tips he gave me were not really tips. He was just repeating something he overheard, jumbled up a bit because he didn't understand it, and spit it out because he thought that would be what I was interested in. He had been conditioned by the environment to think that instead of saying "nice day," or even "hello," that the first thing you do is say, "How about *** stock?," where *** was the name of some million dollar funded bio-engineering company that was considering IPO at the time but quickly went bust instead, so long ago I can't even remember it.

He was talking about stocks rates of a company that didn't even have stocks available, and not even understanding that, because he had been conditioned to believe you must bring up stocks when starting conversations with people. The environment he was in did that to him. That's the whole point.

It wasn't the weather - that was great.
It wasn't the traffic - I grew up outside of chicago and lived all over the country. It's not fun, but it's not a big deal.
It wasn't the cost of living - pay was commiserate with the increased costs.

I loved that the Frys was right down the street, that I could get great food from a million different cultures easily, and that there was so much to do and see and hear.

It was the people, though, that made it horrible. Shallow, money-oriented, image-driven, always so focused on labeling everyone: Suit, Hippy, LGBT Activist, Clubber, Gang Member, Artist, etc.

Story time: I worked at a big company in the area, we had 3 buildings on the campus I was on, each 3 floors, each with at least 1000 employees. At 4:30, I was working on my floor by myself. How do I know? The overhead fluorescents were sensor based, and only the one by my cube was still on. I was organizing test results in an excel sheet when I heard the mechanical 'ka-chunk' and humming noise that indicated another group of lights had just spun up.

It was the cleaning staff. I watched as each bank of lights turned on as they made their way down the path, a slow snake of lights as they explored the bin in each cube, till they arrived at mine.

He was an illegal. I'm not judging. He radiated it without shame. He wore that identity like a comfortable sweater, and exuded it in his body language and broken english. Folks like that probably don't get the acknowledgement they deserve, so I made it a point to always smile, make eye contact, and nod to them when I see them.

So I smile, make eyecontact, and nod at him. He looks at the screen, sees numbers, looks at me - young, working late by the standards of my coworkers - makes some sort of decision about social interactions - and starts giving me quetionable stock market tips in a thick Latin (or maybe Portuguese) accent.

So I thank him for that, smile broadly and make sure to include my eyes in the smile so he knows I appreciate it, make some statement about how work never seems to end for folks like us, and go back to it.

But internally, I'm putting him in the bucket with everyone else. He can't even speak english, and what he wants to do is talk stocks? This is a guy who - and yes, I am judging here a bit - probably hasn't got a legitimate bank account, much less trading account, and he vacuums office buildings for a living. Given his current situation, he does not instill within me the belief that he is a highly successful backchannel stock market advisor. ... but that's not his fault. He seemed like a hard working, genuine person in all other ways. See, that's what this area does to you. You end up getting hollowed out, till you're focused on the money and outer appearances. You start thinking those are the most important things, the things that defines you and allows you to relate to others.

The mail guy (we were big enough to have an actual mail department) bought an 80,000 dollar car. He HAD to. He couldn't afford it, but he HAD to have it. He couldn't justify it any other way except that it was expected, knowing he had to, to be known, caring that others cared about him for his car.

That's my takeaway from the bay area. Nice place to visit, but for the people.

Ah yes. There's many, many, oh-so-many reasons to /not/ use open seating. Many studies have been done on this. For your HPE - 'High Productivity Employees', it's awful. For some groups, like marketing or sales, it may actually be helpful, some of the time. For any workers that don't need to continually and constantly collaborate and only occasionally need to get marching orders or coordinate, they have these things called 'meetings' that occur in an open-seating layout called 'meeting rooms'.

Yet for a design concept that originated in the 70's, with as much consideration as the design of the liver-shaped coffee table, it is still held to be a sign of a future-forward progressive workplace - and I don't even know what that's /objectively/ even supposed to mean. Seriously. I've asked. No one can point to a metric that you'd want to go up that's actually been shown, even in a subjective questionnaire form (like, before and after "Rate your morale on a scale of 1-10").

No, what you get is design firms convincing management that this is the right thing to do, and how happy they'll feel, and how empowered and collaborative and cross-project-discipline-y their workplace will be, and management eventually swallows the kool-aid and starts believing it.

This is worlds away from IBM's actual workplace design studies in the 50's and 60's where they found out that employees are 0.13% (or something, don't quote me on that) more efficient when the walls are painted a sort of pale yellow, and thanks for that trend, jerks. At least that was scientifically determined. This is just pretty-to-look at junk that no CEO worth their salt should ever consider signing off on, unless they NEED to make their workplace less functional.

"Some staff started to stick Post-It notes on the glass doors to mark their presence. However, the notes were removed because they detracted from the building's design, the people said."

Sure, you could make it FUNCTIONAL, but that's not what it's there for. It's there to look pretty, set standards, and impress folks for whom functionality is not a concern.

Design over functionality. *checks apple product line for the last decade* Yup. Pretty consistent.

Note, there is a thing called 'Good Design' that actually marries looks and functionality, but apple hasn't had a horse in that race for a good long time.

Facial morphology refers to the various traits and features in a face. For example, the distance between the eyes, or the eye slant, or cheek gaunt or whatever.

'White' people have the broadest range of diversity, in part because aside from the skin color, there's a lot of differences. Certain Asians, like the Han Chinese, have some of the least diversity (google for iphone face recognition matching two Chinese co-workers).

If you pick 20 key features as your unique code, and each of those key features has 20-30 distinct possible values, you can rely on reasonable uniqueness, even when some of those values have inter-relationships. When the diversity goes down, and 10 out of the 20 are not unique, and when the range of values those have is between 3 and 5, well, you'll have a lot more trouble differentiating people.

In fact, a studies shows that among a given ethnic group, actual real life people perform facial recognition on only a few features, but those features are always those traits that show the most variation. When you apply that same algorithm to another ethnicity, it doesn't work so well. You get racist-seeming phrases like, "They all look alike to me," when really the issue is that your specialized detection algorithm was never meant to deal with their differences. ... and every group has this blindness. The one thing that's amusing is that because whites tend to have a large variety, they're the easiest to uniquely identify regardless of your personal/cultural/ethic technique. So, you can say things like "I can tell all you white people apart, you're racist for not being able to identify ME!" and think you're on the moral and ethical high road, when in fact, the situation is different from the other side.

The summary reports, "The investigators left without any evidence." They had a warrant, they could have grabbed the physical machinery. Depending on the type of data, they could have compelled the company to turn over access methods... Why no evidence?

Ah.

Because what they wanted was not physically present in the jurisdiction the warrant was issued in. They were trying to gain legal-on-their-side but likely considered unauthorized use and access of the company's intranet via an employee's existing login session. Like how some people might consider it totally fair to send themselves a copy of all the email you've ever sent because you left your phone unlocked or a browser open.

This is all based on an assumption, but I can't think of anything else that fits the bill. If so, that's pretty shady work on the part of the police. Replace 'Quebec' with any other country, or Uber with any other corporation (or agency) and the justification falls apart.

* It was okay for the _Foreign Government_ to access all the _Domestic Government agency emails_ because they (legally) confiscated a laptop that was still logged in.
etc.

You might think this is the right thing to do when the target is someone you feel is morally bankrupt, like drug dealers, terrorists, uber, or westboro baptists, but that justification can just as easily be used by bad actors against peaceful protestors, political opponents, spouses, and so on.

I'd be more surprised if something like this isn't widely set as policy in any multinational company, especially those with subtle or overt government pressure against them or their country of origin. It's just good policy.

As long as we provide for eventual access to the secured location/object/mechanism/whatever, there will always be a way for an unauthorized person to overcome it. However, each layer reduces the number of individuals capable or willing to overcome it. Some of these may be small gains, but as long as the cost in accessibility (the legitimate user impact) is low, there's little reason not to add it.

To put it another way: if you're not going to lock it, it shouldn't matter much whether or not you leave your front door wide open, right? The reality is though, that you're lowering the opportunity cost for a thief, and it makes it more likely you'll be broken into.

Don't believe me? Leave your car door open the next time you're out shopping for food, and something valuable on the passenger seat.

So, yes, it's not providing much, but it's providing something at almost no cost.

I've been at this programming thing for 20 years. I've seen the cycles, I've worked for startups, I've worked for fortune 100 companies, I've been the grunt and the guy writing the script grunts use, I've managed, I've had to deal with every client from the guy who wrote the software I used to write his, to customers who couldn't spell IBM. I know this problem, and it still is a hard one to get right every time.

Like elegant programming constructs, it's obvious after the fact, so you're not going to be shocked about how to talk to them about it: Use terms that you both understand, in a CONTEXT you both understand.

99% of the time, that's a business context. "What did you do today?":
  - "I wrote software to produce custom sales brochures so our sales people can personalize their pitch to the client: they're up 10% year over year!"
  - "Ever get an alert on your phone saying someone might be using your credit card? I made it so you can say 'It was me,' by responding to the text message."
  - "You know how a company has to keep track of everyone's payrolls and vacation days? Yeah, that was me."
  - "Our warehouse has to scan thousands of packages, and I simplified their process so it takes a few seconds less. Sounds like nothing, but we can now handle nearly twice as many packages with the same number of people!"

They're not going to care if you used the flash in the pan framework of the week, or that you optimized a sort, or that you managed a tricky event based distributed caching mechanism, with all the problems cache invalidation requires you to solve. They won't even want to know that you identified a compiler issue and submitted a patch. They don't understand those things.

See ljw1004's post above, they get it.

Maybe this will clear things up in a context you're familiar with: You're tasked with integrating a single sign on solution from a vendor. Their spec shows a very basic REST API, and when you discuss it with the vendor's guys, they confirm it's pretty straight forward. So you write it up. But for some reason, the response looks like it's a SOAP response (and aside from you not sending a properly formatted request, it looks like there's an unrelated error that hints at a bad client configuration on their end) and when you talk to the tech on the other end and ask what you need to do to get SSO running with the REST interface, they say, "Oh, the problem is that you're not using a web UI with React and mongo to backend your data," and points you to an example he has running on his own personal desktop. He sends connection info with screenshots showing raw diagnostic screenspam - whipped up for personal debugging obviously. When you can't connect because it's internal to their network he explains that the fix is to migrate it all to the cloud, both your app and his.

Get the feeling that the guy on the other end has no idea what you asked, what your goal is (to get SSO working with REST), and in fact, he might not only be completely wrong - besides going off in the wrong direction - but that spending time dealing with him is now a liability to your work and workday? Like he's too enamored with his own pet project to actually treat you like a person?

This is what it's like for non-developers to hear developers speak about development in purely technical terms to non-developers. You don't need to 'bring it down to their level" - you're just speaking the wrong language. There's a crud load in their domain that you're not going to understand either, so you have to use terms, metrics, and values from the perspectives you do share.