Remote working can be great for companies that are large and/or in the development/web service sector. In large companies most people already interact remotely (i.e., emails and calls). With all that this entails: clear communication, well documented processes, etc.
So a good part of the work is already remote, in some sense.
You only need to understand what part of the rest can be made remote.
Companies that work primarily with development/web service probably already work in good part with (remote) software. So working remotely is an easy step.
In short, I think that basically companies like Facebook are the one that have it easiest in being remote-first companies. And the ones that would get the most benefit from it. So, it is great that they adopted a remote-first approach, when they literally had no alternative.
However, we should remember that there are still lots of companies and people that will never thrive in a remote-first environment. And these might very well be the majority.
It's hard to reform when many Americans are in an abusive relationship with their own party. A Pew poll in 2017[1] showed that the majority of the most partisan supporters choose their own party because they hate the other one, rather than they like their own. You cannot make reform on destruction and hate. There is little positive energy to create really new proposals.
And this is doubly sad considering how both parties are/end up in significant agreement about the US' huge military presence abroad, tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulated campaign finance etc. Which are subjects where most US citizens hold the opposite view to the bi-partisan near-consensus.
On the issue of campaign finance, there is the matter of the McCain-Feingold Act, as it was informally known. Senator John McCain tried for years to advocate for something of its like but was energetically blocked by his own party, such as in the 105th Congress when McCain gathered the support of <all> 45 Democratic senators and a few GOP allies, but still not enough to break a GOP filibuster on the bill, thus killing it.
It was around 2002 that there was sufficient political atmosphere for McCain to gather the support of nearly all Democrats and 11 GOP allies for the bare minimum of 60 votes to beat a GOP filibuster.
The bill had restrictions on: (1) soft money, or money meant to promote issues or parties, (2) hard money, or money meant for specific campaigns or candidates, (3) advertising in proximity to an election, and (4) foreign contributions.
President George Bush declined to take a stance and signed the bill into law without comment.
It was challenged by Citizens United, a conservative non-profit, challenging whether they could be restricted from airing political ads near the election date, and it was overturned 5-4 by the US Supreme Court conservative majority along known party lines.
All parties have their failings, but it would be a mistake to think that a vote for either party is equally meaningless with regards to campaign finance. In the GOP, it's only McCain and a scant few allies who paid for this issue. The Democrats as a whole spent severe political energy and opportunity on campaign reform, while McCain spent his own political currency against the energetic opposition of his own party.
I'm talking about a constitutional amendment to severely limit spending on elections, public funding for elections, non-exclusionary public debates, and perhaps Instant-runoff (ranked-choice) or other voting resolution mechanisms.
PS - Buckley v. Valeo made it clear that a regular weak-sauce bill wouldn't do.
I’m talking about which party has burned serious political opportunity for this issue at all. Alternatively we could say Obamacare is weak sauce and cannot do the trick for American health, but it’s also a reflection of a history of which party burned political opportunity in exchange for an issue.
That McCain’s legacy withered so soon after suggests the inadequacy of his reach, not that a vote for the GOP, which worked so tirelessly to filibuster McCain, is the same as a vote cast for Democrats. It was only until Enron and after his presidential run that McCain had the window to gain the bare minimum 60 votes to stop his own party from filibustering his bills to death.
And now we hear that the GOP are the same as the Democrats on campaign finance reform. Okay.
I'm a Democrat, but it's only because I'm a leftist and in the US, the Democratic party is "the left" and voting for any other party under the current system would only be implicitly supporting the party I disagree with more than my own.
I have some "friends" who will only vote trump, because the dems are talking about increasing restrictions around guns. Some people just have one issue they care about above all else, even if that is harming them
Which is odd given that Trump himself has talked about increasing restrictions for guns. Because Democrats and Republicans tend to support gun control.
Unfortunately decades of NRA and Republican propaganda have taught gun owners that no Democrat or liberal owns a gun or supports the Second Amendment.
I feel that these attacks on the rationality (and intelligence) of the average person are misguided. Rationality means evaluating the information provided to you. If you do not give importance to any qualitative information (e.g., taste), it makes sense to evaluate them on the quantitative information alone (i.e., lower fat) which is not relevant for many people.
I would go as far as to say that even in cases such as the gluten-free fad, people are somewhat justified. Producers started saying that their products were gluten-free to serve the customers that needed that information (i.e., celiacs). However, the average person did not know about celiac disease, so they reasonably thought that the information was for them. The logical conclusion was that gluten was bad. Now, that is wrong, but to be fair how are you supposed to know that? You are not a dietitian.
It's not a matter of rationality, but that is difficult to evaluate information if you do not understand the context in which is produced.
That seems great. I've read a comparison of different approaches to contact tracing. The one chosen by Singapore seems to be the best compromise between privacy and effectiveness: the data stays on your phone, but you can trace and warn people you have contacted.
I am not sure how much matters, but Italy has a high population density, higher than China: 201/km2. China has 145/km2, while United States has 36/km2.
This mean that people are more widespread, so it should be easier to isolate parts of United States than it is to isolate parts of Italy, in case there are problematic areas. In short, New York might become a center of epidemic, but probably not the whole United States.
China's population density is skewed lower due to uninhabitable and sparsely inhabited mountains and deserts in Xinjiang and Tibet that make up about half the country. Without those regions China's population density doubles to around 300/km2.
True, mine is a generalization. However Italian geography also lead to heavy concentration of people in limited areas. Lombardy, the worst hit region, has a population density of 420/km2. Look at this map of Italian geography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy#/media/File:Italy_topogr...
That's an issue as many live in pockets and those pockets are dense in populus. So population density needs to be looked at on a city/town basis as counting all those deserts and farming land etc, to dilute the numbers can skew perspective.
Basically this essay is about the issue that many internet services become monopolies and the negative effect of this phenomenon. The author argues that we have to create pro-market regulations and models of development (e.g., favors the creation of services that are open, like email, instead of one closed, like Whatsapp) that favors the creation of competition between different players.
I used to think that way. But the other day, I set up a mailserver (dovecot + postfix) on a DigitalOcean droplet and a domain I own. With proper configuration (SPF, DKIM), I had no problem with delivery of the mail I sent from it so far.
You will run into issues sending email to services that run very aggressive IP based spam filtering w/ white-lists. AT&T (att.net, bellsouth.net) is one example of a company that does this. They subscribe to the UCEPROTECT blacklists, which will sometimes include all of DO in a bad neighbor list. The only way to not get on this list is to pay UCEPROTECT. If you don't pay then you will need to contact mail admins at AT&T (and others) to get added to whitelists. When you move to a knew droplet and get a new IP you will have to do it all again.
I had looked into moving to a service where I could reserve and IP and assign it to an instance (vultr.com) in order to keep a consistent IP across instance migrations. I eventually decided it wasn't worth the time and signed up for a managed email account with runbox.com (they have the best family deal).
And just because you said: „reputable spam blacklists....“ I have to tell you the bad news:-)
UCEPROTECT is and was never a problem for mailservers with a good reputation.
If you are running a mailrelay, all that matters for delivery success is reputation.
That means you have to make sure your system can‘t be abused for spamming and you don‘t spam.
Doing so will ensure that your IP will never show up in UCEPROTECT Level 1.
Having a good reputation also means, you have to look at the reputation of your provider before signing up.
If your ISP is activeley preventing abuse originating from their networks and ranges, and acting quick on abuse, then you should also never run in trouble with UCEPROTECT‘s Levels 2 and 3.
It‘s really that easy.
But if all what matters to you chosing an ISP is the price, you don‘t have to wonder about the consequences.
You know: Lay down with the dogs, stand up with fleas...
HN readers voice real concerns over these issues regularly. For the Americans ready to take them seriously, there’s a long road of dusty books ahead. But we’re short on time so I’ll save you the hassle the only way I know how:
It was more of a lighthearted joke about the attitude that many have toward JavaScript than an attack on the language itself.
I have nothing against JavaScript, although it is not a splendid example of design it certainly works for what was designed for. But I think it also undeniable that would choose something else for many tasks, if they had the option.
If you wanted, you could also use JavaScript for an entire operating systems just for JavaScript[1]. However this does not mean that it is good idea to do so.
TypeScript was used as an example of a well-known language that currently is transpiled to JavaScript. I am not saying that TypeScript will surely be compiled to WebAssembly, just that it could.
TypeScript is designed for development of large applications. It is a superset of JavaScript both because this facilitates learning, but also because there was really not an alternative. In the end you had to compile to JavaScript.
It is not hard to imagine a language with the same objective of TypeScript that is compiled to WebAssembly. Furthermore, if TypeScript was compiled to WebAssembly you could use it wherever there was a platform for the WebAssembly format. So if somebody created a project to consume WASM binary files and execute them from within .NET assemblies[1], you could use TypeScript outside the browser and node.
I apologise. I'm just… rather surprised at such an idea.
> It is not hard to imagine a language with the same objective of TypeScript that is compiled to WebAssembly.
It is not hard to an imagine a strongly-typed language targeting WebAssembly, sure. But TypeScript is not that kind of language. TypeScript is just JavaScript, and JavaScript, as a highly dynamic language, is a very poor candidate for the kind of ahead-of-time compilation to a low-level target that WebAssembly was made for. I mean… it could, technically, be done, but why would anyone do so? The result would be bigger and slower than normal JS.
The end game is to have a WebAssembly module that you can load just like you now load a JS script.
When we get there, there will also be (probably[1]) easy methods to access the DOM from WebAssembly.
You are right only for the average website. If you are building applications delivered through the web, like games and advanced webmail, it can take a few seconds right now. With WebAssembly you could basically create all desktop applications on the web and it would be perfectly reasonable to take a few seconds to load one of them.
Companies that work primarily with development/web service probably already work in good part with (remote) software. So working remotely is an easy step.
In short, I think that basically companies like Facebook are the one that have it easiest in being remote-first companies. And the ones that would get the most benefit from it. So, it is great that they adopted a remote-first approach, when they literally had no alternative.
However, we should remember that there are still lots of companies and people that will never thrive in a remote-first environment. And these might very well be the majority.