I agree with Harper on the opposition to niqabs.

Any religious symbology in public, most especially such an oppressive one as that, should be banned in a secular society.

Yep, I include Christian crosses in this. I’m most close to the view of this person, I think.

The face-concealing niqab, unlike the hair-covering hijab, hides an individual’s prime interface with the world, while denying her individuality. Of course, one could argue that a “choice” is involved here when a woman wears one, but it is also a symbol of cultural and religious diktat that goes against every tenet of an open and equal society. Let’s not forget about that.

I don’t know what prompts people to defend something that is so objectively and icredibly oppressive to women? Can’t wrap my head around that one.

I’m all for free expression but I can’t defend the indefensible and can’t jump on the liberal bandwagon of allowing a secular society to promote the silencing and oppression of so many people. Tolerating intolerance is not a liberal value, but rather one rooted in the desire not to offend anyone.

But I’m all about offending motherfuckers who make millions of people’s lives worse.

All about it.

Remember when ISPs want to put bandwidth caps (actually transfer caps, but everyone calls them bandwidth caps so I will too) on your connection that games, movies and other media are only getting larger. All the idiots and the clown car full of idiots at Wired who support these restrictions never seem to understand that.

An upcoming game that is sure to be very popular — Star Citizen — will weigh in as a 100GB download.

Some common bandwidth caps now are 150GB, 250GB and 300GB. One game then could use nearly all or a significant portion of your entire allotment for the month.

This is the plan, by the way — to ease people into paying more over time. Games will only get larger. So will movies. 4K is not the end. I expect movies to top at around 8K in 2025 or so, and then there will be VR which will require 20-100x the bandwidth of 8K.

The average connection in 2040 will probably use 100TB or so a month. Quite a lot more than even the most generous cap now. Think the ISPs are likely to expand caps at the same rate as usage?

If so, what are you smoking?

Working From Home Doesn’t Have to Cut You Off From Humanity.

What? That’s the whole reason I’d want to work from home!

I don’t understand people who get their social needs met in the office. But add it to the list, I guess.

Because there are more fat people in America now than normal-weight people (and I use the word “normal” very deliberately and I hope very offensively to my targets), it is becoming more common to shame skinny and healthy people than the opposite.

I was friends with a woman during the 90s who was very fit. She had a baby and gained 19 pounds during the entire pregnancy (I know because she told me). The baby was healthy and weighed 8+ pounds. She was back at her pre-baby weight (about 120 pounds at 5’8″) in less than six weeks.

She was a bit anomalous and I know that every person is different, but it is doubtful that during humanity’s history that women gained 60+ pounds for pregnancy as is the standard now.

Working out during pregnancy only helps you, if you can. Not gaining massive amounts of weight helps, not hurts. The evidence shows this.

Fat people aren’t disgusting, but the whole fat acceptance/fat celebration culture certainly is.

Only in America would you attempt to force people on a wide scale to something that is obviously harmful, deleterious to a good life and objectively terrible rather than making the damn effort to change and improve.

What a country!

I do not like articles that are so dumbed down that they do not use the scientifically-accurate words for phenomena.

What this article should have had — somewhere — is that butterflies are so colorful mostly due to aposematism and Batesian mimicry.

One of the reasons I completely stopped reading books aimed at kids at five or six is that I figured out they were completely stripped of real content that might help me be smarter. Though many of the books I tackled at that age were “over my head,” my head quickly grew larger and soon — within a year or so — no book was over my head.

I think most kids are probably capable of this, though in my near-complete disdain of what any adult said or thought was probably highly unusual.

Anyway, science articles should contain the correct terminology otherwise it makes it very hard for people to learn more if they choose to do so. This is particularly harmful to young people who are often more receptive and open to new knowledge and fun words than adults.

There’s this push lately in the IT world for DevOps. It goes by other names too but that’s the most common.

It’s not inherently a bad idea, but what most companies are attempting to force DevOps to be and what it will actually be is two very different things.  Companies are looking for a great developer who is also a great sysadmin. What they will get is either an ok to good developer who is a poor, dangerous systems administrator, or a ok to good systems administrator who is a poor, dangerous developer.

I’ve been in the IT world a while, and the number of people I’ve met — out of the hundreds to thousands I’ve known and also hired — who would make both good programmers and good systems administrators is — maybe — one. This guy was very probably an actual genius, though. IQ in the 160-180 range. The number who’d be great in both areas is none, not even that one dude.

Like I said, I have never met a single one. They may exist, but there aren’t many.

My partner is a great programmer. Don’t just take it from me — all her bosses have said so. But when I talk about the things I do at work she has no clue what I’m doing or what the terms mean or how to zone fiber channel (something I did today, and if you type even one character wrong in a few areas, the entire customer production environment will go down) or how to set up HSRB or automate a VMWare ESXi deployment.

Developers — who tend to be pretty arrogant — think what they know about systems administration is all that there is. What they generally know is the person who comes to fix their PC (not a systems admin) or that it involves like clicking a button in Active Directory or something. Hell, anyone could do that!

(There was some utter tool on Hacker News who insisted that installing and managing Microsoft SQL server could be done by anyone, and was easy. Yep, anyone can click through the wizard and install it. And it’ll be full of security holes, configured incorrectly, and completely not scale. But he clicked through the wizard on his single-user dev box, so that’s all there is to it!)

But here’s what being a systems administrator really involves.

It means understanding deeply the systems an environment uses, and how they interact. It means being able to hold the entire picture of the network in your head and knowing almost by magic (really experience) where a fault is located, and then find it in minutes where your DevOps might find it in hours or days (if ever). (Been there, done that by the way!)

It means being able to design scalable, reliable solutions that are cost-effective and comprehensible.

For instance, I just designed and built a solution for a company I’m consulting for. Right now it can only support about 20 users. More than they actually need, by the way.

But with a few clicks, a few PowerShell scripts and some more money, it could support 10,000+ users. I figure we’d have to move to another solution at about 15,000 users. But if this company gets 15,000 users I’ll be so rich I won’t fucking care.

And right now it only costs $500 a month (absolute peanuts in this space). And I did it just like that, in hours.

I’d like to see the fucking joke of a system a developer would put in place compared to what I built. It’d be more explosion-prone than a Pinto and more likely to fall over than a giraffe mainlining Absolut.

Think your DevOps can do that? Do not. Fucking. Make me laugh.

A lot of this — most of this — is an attempt by companies to save money. But much of it is the belief that everyone should be a programmer and everything else should be a side concern.

While I do find myself writing more scripts than ever before these days, being a programmer is not and never will be what a systems administrator is all about.

Developers and systems administrators are very different fields with very different concerns, and it will always be thus.

Why would I care if Comcast bought Netflix?

Netflix was once useful; now it is not. For people like me who want to watch specific often obscure things Netflix has gone from genius to fucking worthless in a few short years.

Comcast and Netflix are not that dissimilar now. Sounds like a pretty good match to me.

My greatest joy lately has been using µBlock — which is much better and svelter than AdBlock Plus — to eradicate destroy extirpate and annihilate all the top and bottom completely useless navigation bars that sites like the New Yorker, Salon and others have created that impinge on the content and offer absolutely nothing to me.

It’s a lot of fun. It’s like a video game but infinitely more useful.

Modern design trends have all been about punishing the user and removing control. But I’m taking back control since I can’t actually punch every designer in the face who had anything to do with these trends (though I would enjoy that if I had the time).

I recommend µBlock. It works great and it offers a much improved interface for choosing what to nuke on a page. And it hasn’t sold out to the ad companies.

This article is about software engineers, but in my field — high-level infrastructure design and operations — the same thing happens.

Yet in engineering, we expect people to do live engineering on a white board under stressful interview conditions because, well, because that is what we have always done. Most programmers need StackOverflow, Google search, or Dash in order to be effective, yet you get to an interview and are expected to spontaneously remember the positional arguments for some esoteric function. And we keep doing this even with people who have years of experience in the field!

Yep. It’s weird when I go into an interview having 15 years of experience and having accomplished now some really major things in my field and get asked what port SSH is on.

First of all, I know it. Knew it since SSH itself was new, nearly. But who the crap cares what port SSH is on? What does that even have to do with my job, and why could I not look it up if I needed it, assuming I did not already know it?

I know, there must be some basic test of competency (I guess), but is that really it? Is that the best you can do?

People are always surprised when I do interviews and I don’t ask a single technical question. Instead, I chat with the candidate about some projects they’ve done, what technologies they like and why, and what they are looking forward to in the field. I might ask them to show me how they might design something if they had complete control and tell them there are no wrong answers, but that ideally they should be able to explain why they’re making the choices they are.

It’s not perfect but so far I have a good record of hiring people and them not being duds.

But trivia questions? Come on, what are we, in 9th grade and in some Brain Bowl competition?

The by many measures best mathematician in the world married one of his students.

Grace Tao gave her son and his wife, Laura, the book after they were married. “Because I’m a terrible cook,” says Laura, who was a student in one of Tao’s classes at UCLA in 2000 and went on to work at the solar system research and development group JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) after graduating as an electrical engineer.

He is therefore irretrievably and incontrovertibly evil.

Historically speaking, sexual panics and paranoias last 30-50 years. We’re about 20 years into this one — it started in about 1994 or so — so at best we have another 10 years and at worst another 30.

I hope it is not the latter.