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Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

When I was a foolhardy college student I figured out that if the cited vehicle make on my city parking ticket didn’t match my registration, I could get appeal the ticket via a web form very easily and succeed every time.

Naturally I removed the badges from my car and put on different badges from another manufacturer. After a while they started to cite me as “other” and the trick no longer worked.

pardavis, 23 hours ago


Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

Adult content is not our forte either, and it creates a huge number of potential issues with app stores, payment providers, trust and safety... it's a problem area best suited for companies fully dedicated to creating a great experience there. I personally have very liberal views on these things, but supporting adult content as a business is very different.

photomatt, 18 hours ago


Re: Three Years of Misery Inside Google, the Happiest ...

My eyes are hurting from seeing these articles whining about their misery while collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. Most companies have issues, and these issues are not "Company" issues but PEOPLE issues. Once you're large enough, you are going to have people with differing opinions, beliefs and values. These are going to clash. If you happen to be on the losing side and don't learn to accept it, you will find yourself miserable. Accept it and solider on to change if you truly believe in your fight.

There are folks out there working minimum wage jobs who are truly miserable, back breaking labor, standing on their feet all day, standing in the hot sun or out in the cold weather, avoiding dangerous machinery and avoiding trying to be maimed or worse loose their life. Dealing with stupid harassment and constant abuse from their boss who makes a $1 more above minimum wage.

Folks out there are really going through it. It doesn't mean that we don't have tough challenges in tech, but we have become spoiled and a bunch of whiners. The majority of the population are outside the industry and they roll their eyes when these type of articles come out and these incessant complaints don't endear them to us.

segmondy, 1 hour ago


Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

I'm closing in on 100 public, nontrivial, nonforked repos on github. Since github's inception, I've received a total of $200 in donations for my OSS stuff, 1 job from a company that uses a product of mine as the foundation of their business, and many job offers from people who are familiar with my work. I don't make money off OSS, and never have (at least not directly).

But I just. can't. stop.

I can't. I've tried suppressing the urge to create, but I just can't do it. Ideas, challenges, problems, unmet potential, are everywhere, and I can't unsee them. On many days I despair that I won't live long enough to build even a tiny fraction of the things I see in my mind. It's infuriating!

And so I do my best to keep my focus small. I have a full time job, so I try to keep my extracurricular coding down to at the very most 3 hours a day if I can, but my idea list just keeps on growing faster than I can keep up.

I keep thinking that maybe I'll calm down as I get older, but I started at 8, and I'm 44 now. If I had no financial pressure at all, I'd be doing this stuff all day. The only difference would be that I'd burn through my list faster.

But long story short, don't write OSS for money. Have a full time job and do OSS on the side.

kstenerud, 4 hours ago


Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

> "This means that if someone does @${channel_name} you will get an alert. MS have not implemented muting as a feature. Secondly, for all those automatic/admin channels, you can’t unsubscribe yourself (or at least not with the default policies). Brilliant, isn’t it? Unavoidable alerts that any idiot on any channel can annoy people with."

At my last job we figured out the fastest way to get your company off Teams: add the CEO to a chatty channel.

mullingitover, 11 hours ago


Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

For extra fun, block access to the telemetry endpoint and watch Teams' memory footprint bloat to crazy levels as the data accumulates and re-attempts the sending.

There's some fun inspecting this data, too..

heroprotagonist, 9 hours ago


Re: Ebola Is Now Curable

There is no news I enjoy reading more than that a clinical trial had to be ended early because the treatment was so effective that it would be unethical to continue with alternative treatments (or a placebo).

dankohn1, 2 hours ago


Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

That choice boggles the mind.

If you're worried about cross-links between non-adult and adult content tarnishing the platform, add better features for user flagging.

They (before the Yahoo and Verizon cluster&#-1s) were essentially sitting on a gold mine of training data, and ongoing training data generation, for an industry-leading porn detection engine.

A subscription filtering product that would be worth $$$.

Throwing that away because of some overly prudish concept of brand identity is hilarious.

ethbro, 4 hours ago


Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

So, the real question is: are the censorship policies going to be reversed?

To be specific, is adult content going to be kosher on Tumblr again? Because if not, I'd have very little faith in the platform (and I do have an account there).

romwell, 4 hours ago


Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

I'm super excited to have the Tumblr team and product join the Automattic family. We've been evolving Automattic to be more of a Berkshire Hathaway-inspired model and businesses with a lot of autonomy, and this continues that trend.

I was very impressed with the engagement and activity Tumblr has continued to have, and I hope that with this new ownership and investment the product will blossom.

photomatt, 1 hour ago


Re: A Bloomberg reporter’s account of trying to get ba...

What does "identity theft" have to do with the person being impersonated? They have nothing to do with these transactions. It is not my fault Wells Fargo was tricked into giving someone a bank account under false pretenses. Why in the world does that have anything to do with me? And why in the world is Wells Fargo not liable for damages?

momokoko, 4 hours ago


Re: Why has Examine.com disappeared from search result...

I was going to say that "examine.com is one of the best sites on the internet for information about supplements/nutrition". But it's not. It's the best site on the internet for that sort of thing. It's great that Google is attempting to fix the issue of bullshit nutrition sites ranking highly, but I sincerely hope someone at Google sees this and does something to help out Examine, which is a tremendous resource.

darawk, 2 hours ago


Re: A Bloomberg reporter’s account of trying to get ba...

Around the time of the Equifax breach, there was a discussion here that put it succinctly. "Identity theft" is just a clever name for "fraud" that shifts the responsibility away from the bank.

matmann2001, 2 hours ago


Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

I read years ago in comp.risks about a similar story. A guy in 1979(!) requested a personalized plate "SAILING", with second choice "BOATING". He didn't want a customized plate if he couldn't get those, so for his third choice he put down "NO PLATE". Of course, he ended up with "NO PLATE". He ended up getting 2500 parking tickets, since cars with no plate had "NO PLATE" written on the ticket.

References: http://www.mekabay.com/overviews/risks/risks03_1986_06-04-1986-10-30.pdf
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/licensed-to-bill/

kens, 59 minutes ago


Re: ‘No One Saw a Thing’: When a Midwest Town Banded T...

So my family actually knew the sheriff from the next county over. He picked up McElroy a couple times for various things. (I think being drunk etc.). Now when this was explained, this was 26-27 years ago, so my memory is a little fuzzy, but he explained that the man was a monster of an individual. (like huge.) The guy could pick up a hog from the other side of the fence and just walk off with it. Dead lifting a few hundred pounds, that's hard, and really scary to think someone can do that who doesn't like you. You don't cross an individual like that lightly.

You have to remember this was 35+ years ago when this all happened. Things aren't what they used to be now. People didn't make long distance calls back then, because it was too expensive. You lived out it in the middle of nowhere especially back then, you're on your own. No one is coming to help you if you're in serious trouble. My parents had this joke. They said the fire department had a perfect record around where we were. They hadn't saved a house yet. Don't get me wrong, they really respected the firemen. The point was that when you live 20+ miles away from the fire station, there is no possible way they are going to save the house in time. There was no GPS, and 911 had only been invented a little over a decade before. A lot of people didn't even own phones.

It's easy to talk about the rule of law, and how they should let the justice system work it out, but it's a different kind of law in those parts. In a town that size, everyone knows everyone, and you're always talking to someone's brother, cousin, sister, etc. Oh you filed a report against someone?...yeah word gets around. The kind you don't want. Evidence gets "lost", etc. A lot of times it was (and still is in certain places) easier to just keep your mouth shut and move on. I'm not saying I agree with what they did, and I wasn't in their position, so I don't know what I'd do. I can sure see why they thought that was the only recourse they had though.

kemiller2002, 2 days ago


Re: Xfce 4.14

I stopped using GTK applications a while ago, so I don't use XFCE anymore, but I still love it, just... from a distance. It's an increasingly uncommon breed of software, which gets better with every release. No pointless shuffling of user interface features in the name of UX "innovation", no rationalizing bugs so that they look like deliberate design choices, just steady improvement. All this by an independent team with basically zero funding.

IMHO, XFCE is one of the few relatively well-known projects that still embodies the spirit of free software as we once knew it. Kudos to the quiet and tenacious people behind it, who still manage to come up with one quality release after another, so many years down the road.

If you want to support (at least some of) their work, Sean Davis has a Patreon account: https://www.patreon.com/bluesabre . Sean is one of XFCE's core developers and the Xubuntu tech lead. I don't know if there's a more official XFCE donation sink (this one is the only one I know of), but hey, it would be a great start!

alxlaz, 7 hours ago


Re: CEOs Who Cheat in Bedroom Will Cheat in Boardroom:...

Or to put it another way: people who were dumb enough to use an app to cheat on their spouse were also dumb enough to get caught cheating in other aspects of their life.

They got their data from the Ashley Maddison hack and then cross referenced that with police records of people who got caught. I'm not sure this is a very valid study.

jedberg, 2 days ago


Re: The Problem at Yale Is Not Free Speech

I find this piece fascinating. To honor it I offer a tl; dr

1. Author recounts experiences of people lying about their class/wealth at Yale, often feigning less wealth.

2. Explains behavior 1 as style, safety, loss-of-perspective, and avoiding social responsibility

3. Retells several incidents where a vocal minority of students at Yale picked and won battles over verbiage (e.g. emails, Calhoun, "Master of college").

4. Interprets the battles in 3 as at best insignificant and at worst a distraction from real problems of class disparity in America. Contrasts these protests against Vietnam protests.

5. Proposes "American Elites" have no idea what they stand for anymore, are shirking their responsibility, and have no capability to be self-critical for fear of losing belonging in the in-group.

6. Rejects these Yale social movements: "This ideology is filled with inconsistencies and contradictions, because it is not really about ideological rigor. Among other things, it is an elaborate containment system for the theoretical and practical discontent generated by the failures of the system, an absolution from guilt, and a new form of class signaling."

7. Interprets the "inconsistent" Yale protests as an unproductive way for students to avoid guilt of their privilege and distance themselves from failing "legacy institutions."

8. Holds the Yale administration accountable for siding against a "vacuous" student cause instead of their own faculty. Demands more from "an institution older than the Republic"

9. Asks what it means if "Yale dies" and why this matters. Proposes it speaks to a more universal problem.

[All that said, I recommend reading the whole thing if you can find the time. This distillation has only a fraction of the value of the whole piece. Many tangential points are very interesting.]

alexandercrohde, 1 day ago


Re: Google Chrome Incognito Mode Can Still Be Detected

Alternatively, Google starts crawling the web in incognito mode; punishes websites that hide content.

underwater, 12 hours ago


Re: Python Is Eating the World

Holy Crap! What a lot of irrational, hyperbolic hate for Python.

I think everybody should spend their first couple of years working in Fortran IV on IBM TSO/ISPF. No dependency management because you had to write everything yourself. Or maybe [edit: early 90's] C or C++ development where dependency management meant getting packages off a Usenet archive, uudecoding and compiling them yourself after tweaking the configure script.

I'm not saying Python is perfect, but if it's causing your burnout/destroying your love of programming/ruining software development you seriously need some perspective.

Ensorceled, 1 hour ago

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