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    1. How to gauge the degree of someone's self-awareness?

      It's common in my job - and likely many jobs - to require learning and correction. I've noticed that people who have stronger self awareness are more likely to improve and learn from...

      It's common in my job - and likely many jobs - to require learning and correction. I've noticed that people who have stronger self awareness are more likely to improve and learn from projects/mistakes/correction etc. I can say a lot more about the value of introspection, but I'll get to the point: I'd like to gauge someone's ability to do this by having a conversation with them.

      If you were interviewing a candidate to work for you, what would you ask them to find out how self-aware they are? I figure if you asked: "how self aware are you?", each candidate would respond "in addition to my strong organizational skills and quick learning, I am also incredibly self aware." So I'll need to sneak up on the idea a bit.

      12 votes
    2. My seventy-two hours Secure-Scuttlebutt experience

      Warning, this is a rant. Feel free to criticize me. As ESL speaker, there's a "butt" in the name. SSB is the protocol, you have to download client called "patchwork" which is not an attractive...

      Warning, this is a rant. Feel free to criticize me.

      1. As ESL speaker, there's a "butt" in the name.
      2. SSB is the protocol, you have to download client called "patchwork" which is not an attractive name either
      3. After setup patchwork, idk what to do next except staring at a blank "timeline" something
      4. So I grabbed documentations (you need manuals to use a god damn social network software), obviously you have to join pubs to dive in.
      5. After joined pubs, you start to stare list of "pubs followed you/someone else joined the pub" message explode.
      6. After a awkward self-post on "#new-people", I learned that you have to follow others to get content. So am I supposed to follow thousands of strangers on the Internet for a good degree of influx content?
      7. After several rounds following, I still dont get how to make new friends. I mean by what? I cant judge if I should follow someone because of random recent posts.
      8. So I started to search for stuff. The search is mostly broken, the results are not in chronological order, only English alphabet works, I dont know if reply someone's 2 year old post is polite or not. Engaging a conversation but expect no response feels wrong.
      9. The only way to tell if a "channel" is popular or not is through the search box. The "all channels" page does not show numbers at all.
      10. Channel names are a mess. The plural form and alternative spellings are killing me. I always feels worried that I might miss good content by not thinking of what creative "channel" names people invent. When making posts it gets worse, you have to paste dozens of bullshit channel names just in case.
      11. There's no way to tell if the software is functioning or not. Sometimes it took up to ten minutes busy downloading stuff, the rest times it's totally static. F5 does not work, Cmd+R reloads the whole electron app frame.
      12. When downloading stuff, I totally do not want old posts. There's not way to filter that.
      13. There's an "Active Channels" on the left side of the software, it jumps indefinitely for no reason. When I click one of the channels, I see old posts without any "activity". Again, you have to follow people in that channel to get fresh content.
      14. There's search for name tag function. Maybe there are people social with each other just by lookup Internet IDs. Since names can be the same on Secure-Scuttlebutt, you have to use public keys to identify people accurately.
      15. It's written in Nodejs/Javascript. I lost my motive to contribute.

      TL;DR barrier of harvest is wayyy too high.

      Anyone else using/tried secure-scuttlebutt? What are your thoughts?

      12 votes
    3. Best tablets for interactive training?

      Hi all, In light of our recent conversations re quality, I'm sorry that this is more of a "nothing" post. But I trust you all and I think you could give me some good advice. I've tried Googling,...

      Hi all,

      In light of our recent conversations re quality, I'm sorry that this is more of a "nothing" post. But I trust you all and I think you could give me some good advice. I've tried Googling, but it's hard to find anything I feel is trustworthy.

      I'm searching for a few tablets on which I can have employees view training videos and or SCORM training content. I believe all of this will be sourced from web-based companies with mobile platforms built-in. I know very little about tech stuff, so I don't know if a basic tablet would do, or if I need any certain specs.

      I believe our wi-fi is good enough to support this. We'll be purchasing 2-8 of these for intermittent trainings.

      Needs:

      • Cheap-ish
      • Durable (We will be buying industrial Otter-box type cases as well)
      • Good volume/accessibility (Avg employee age is 52)
      • Standard video playback (don't need super hi-def anything)

      I posted in ~talk rather than ~tech or ~comp because I didn't think it would fit there. Thank you!

      4 votes
    4. Post your shelfies!

      Since I just moved into my apartment my shelf/book collection is sparse and I hardly have space for more. What I do have though keeps me busy. If anyone wants to know I ordered - history on the...

      Since I just moved into my apartment my shelf/book collection is sparse and I hardly have space for more. What I do have though keeps me busy. If anyone wants to know I ordered - history on the left, theory and sociology in the middle, and philosophy on the right. Anyone reading the same books I am?

      https://i.imgur.com/BW1BJ8z.jpg

      Post yours and discuss.

      12 votes
    5. Corruption and Rebuilding Trust in Brazil's Government

      For those not in the know, Brazil is going to be having a presidential election this year. The reason the title of this thread is what it is relates to the scandals that engulf all three of the...

      For those not in the know, Brazil is going to be having a presidential election this year. The reason the title of this thread is what it is relates to the scandals that engulf all three of the current and past presidents: Current President Michel Temer, and past Presidents (in order of most recently in office) Dilma Rousseff and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Lula was found guilty and began serving his 12-year jail sentence for accepting bribes in early April, maintaining his innocence and that his investigation and trial were politically motivated to prevent him from running in this year's election.

      There are few countries as publicly wrestling with corruption allegations in explicit quid pro quo deals between politicians and companies as Brazil.

      If you're interested in a pretty decent introduction into this wild ride, the wikipedia article on Operation Car Wash--and that is how this scandal gets referred to--is a good place to start.

      So, using publicly available evidence (in Portuguese if you have to), what role does corruption play in the highest political offices in Brazil, and how can Brazil begin rebuilding what seems to be a clearly shattered reputation?

      9 votes
    6. Daily Tildes discussion - quality concerns

      Yesterday we had quite a few topics posted in ~tildes related to "fluff" content and some similar topics. Today I want to talk about a few related things, and some changes that I'm planning to...

      Yesterday we had quite a few topics posted in ~tildes related to "fluff" content and some similar topics. Today I want to talk about a few related things, and some changes that I'm planning to make in the near future.

      Not a reddit replacement

      First, something I obviously haven't done a very good job of making clear (and needs to be added to the FAQ) is that Tildes really isn't intended to be a replacement for reddit. It's not my goal to have most people want to move here away from reddit. The goal is much closer to a complement—reddit is making a lot of choices to prioritize "quick entertainment" content, often at the expense of more in-depth content and discussions.

      Reddit wants to prioritize that kind of content because it works better for the business goals they have. "Fluff" content attracts the most users, and supports showing far more ads. You can show a lot of (in-line) ads to someone skimming down through hundreds of cat pictures, but you can't really show any to someone that spends an hour having an in-depth discussion inside a single post. So naturally they're going to prioritize quick content—it brings them more users, and directly makes them a lot more money.

      Tildes doesn't have the same incentives, so my goal is to be a better home for that in-depth content that's slowly getting pushed out. Reddit can keep the fluff. It's going to be better at it than Tildes ever will be anyway, due to displaying images and autoplaying gifs in-line, and many other design choices they're making to prioritize that type of content.

      Concerns about current quality, and some changes

      That being said, even though we're really not getting image posts or anything similar yet, we have been getting a lot of "what's your favorite?" type threads, which are especially prominent due to the default activity sort. For example, if I look at what a new user on Tildes would see right now, in the first 20 posts we have:

      • Favorite desktop environment for Arch?
      • Name the online accomplishment you are most proud of
      • What upcoming video games are you looking forward to?
      • What are some TV shows you find yourself constant rewatching?
      • Here's an idea. Comment something really unique (in a good or a bad way) and relatively unknown about a place you're living in or lived in.
      • Name a cool, mostly unknown feature of your OS of choice
      • What are the most influential books to you?
      • What's everyone's favorite movie?
      • So, what have you been working on?

      And a few more that are similar as well. None of these are bad topics at all (especially the ones in ~talk where that should be expected), but they're pretty much all just "casual discussion" and not really what I'd consider particularly high-quality content. I don't want to discourage these or start removing them or anything, but I do think we probably need some changes to make them less prominent (or at least easily avoidable if people don't want to see that type of topic right now).

      So here's my plans for the short term (all three should happen today, I think):

      1. Implement filtering for topic tags - I have a basic version of this almost done now, which will allow people to set up a (global) list of tags, where any posts with any of those tags will be filtered out of their view. There's a "show unfiltered" toggle as well that allows you to easily see everything.
      2. I'll start editing tags on other people's posts and/or giving other users the ability to do this. Primarily, all "what's your favorite?" type topics should have a common tag so that they can all be filtered easily. I'm thinking "ask" or "survey" or something similar, suggestions are welcome.
      3. Allow users to set their default sorting method for the home page and individual groups, and then probably change the default away from "activity".

      Let me know what you think of these plans, or if there's anything else you think we should consider doing.

      89 votes
    7. Markdown live preview for Tildes

      Hacked together a simple markdown live preview, which works for both comments and also new posts submission. To use, just install the extension and start typing on Tildes, you will see live...

      Hacked together a simple markdown live preview, which works for both comments and also new posts submission.

      To use, just install the extension and start typing on Tildes, you will see live preview. No settings to configure.

      The code is open source and released under MIT. I am not really a JS dev, so any feedback is welcome.

      Chrome extension - link

      Firefox addon - link

      Source code - link

      20 votes
    8. Daily book: Seveneves by Neal Stephenson ( Hard Science Fiction )

      At some unspecified date in the near future, an unknown agent causes the Moon to shatter into seven pieces. As the remnants of the Moon begin to collide with one another, astronomer and science...

      At some unspecified date in the near future, an unknown agent causes the Moon to shatter into seven pieces. As the remnants of the Moon begin to collide with one another, astronomer and science popularizer "Doc" Dubois Harris calculates that the number of collisions will increase exponentially. A large number of moon fragments will begin entering Earth's atmosphere, forming a "white sky" and blanketing the earth within two years with what he calls a "Hard Rain" of bolides; this will cause the atmosphere to heat to incandescence and oceans to boil away, destroying the biosphere and rendering Earth uninhabitable for thousands of years. It is decided to evacuate as many people and resources as possible to a "Cloud Ark" in orbit, including a "swarm" of "arklet" habitats that will be able to avoid the debris from the moon—both to attempt to preserve the human race and to give the remaining doomed inhabitants of Earth something to hope for, to prevent civil disorder from breaking out on Earth before its surface is destroyed. Each nation on Earth is invited to choose by lot a small number of young people to become eligible to join the Cloud Ark.

      The Cloud Ark is to be based around the International Space Station (ISS), currently commanded by American astronaut Ivy Xiao. The ISS is already bolted onto an iron Arjuna asteroid called Amalthea, which provides some protection against moon debris. Robots are used to excavate Amalthea to provide more protection in a project run by mining and robotics engineer Dinah MacQuarie. Technicians and specialists, including Doc Dubois, are sent to the ISS in advance of the Hard Rain to prepare it to become the headquarters of the Cloud Ark.

      The plan is that the Cloud Ark must be self-sufficient for 5,000 years and capable of repopulating Earth once it is habitable again. A Human Genetic Archive is sent to the Cloud Ark, with the intention that it will be used to rebuild the human population. Approximately 1,500 people are launched into space in the two years before the Hard Rain begins.

      Suspecting that some architects of the Cloud Ark are interested only in pacifying Earth's inhabitants with false hope (rather than creating an environment that will actually survive in the long term), a billionaire named Sean Probst realizes that the Cloud Ark will need a ready supply of water in order to provide propellant for the space station and to prevent it from eventually falling into the earth's atmosphere. He embarks on a two-year expedition to extract ice from a comet nicknamed Greg's Skeleton, using a nuclear reactor to provide power to bring it back towards Earth.

      The Hard Rain begins approximately two years after the destruction of the moon as predicted; human civilization as well as nearly all life on Earth is obliterated, although some try to take shelter underground (such as Dinah's father) or in the deep ocean (such as Ivy's fiancé). Markus Leuker, appointed leader of the Cloud Ark, declares all nations of Earth to be dissolved, and imposes martial law under the Cloud Ark Constitution. Despite a worldwide agreement that members of government will not be launched into space, the President of the United States, Julia Bliss Flaherty, manages to get herself sent to the Cloud Ark at the last minute. Shortly afterwards the main cache of the physical Human Genetic Archive attached to the ISS is ruined by the thrusters of an arklet passing too closely, leaving only samples that had been distributed amongst the arks.

      There is disagreement on the Cloud Ark about the best way to organize its society and avoid the debris of the moon. Some "Arkies" favor converting the Cloud Ark into a decentralized swarm of small space vessels at a higher orbit out of range of debris, rather than maintaining the central authority of the ISS. Doc Dubois wants to shelter in the "Cleft", a crevasse on the now-exposed iron core of the moon. Others want to go to Mars. Julia Flaherty starts to acquire a coterie of followers and encourages the proponents of the decentralized swarm plan.

      Sean Probst's expedition has succeeded, and he has brought a comet into an orbit that will soon pass by Earth. His radio has failed and he has built a replacement by hand, and is able to communicate with Dinah MacQuarie by Morse code. However, he and his party die of radiation sickness caused by fallout from their nuclear reactor long before the expedition is complete. Markus Leuker and Dinah travel to the comet with a small crew to take control of it and bring it back to the Cloud Ark, in order to provide sufficient propellant to reach the Cleft on the moon's core. Just before Dinah returns with the ice as the sole survivor of the mission, Julia Flaherty persuades the majority of the population to abandon the ISS and move to higher orbit in a decentralized swarm, and sends a preliminary expedition to Mars. In the course of their sudden, unauthorized departure the ISS sustains catastrophic damage to many sections. The surviving portions of the Human Genetic Archive are carried along with them, but due to the Arkies' ignorance, these surviving portions are discarded or ignored. Only the digital version of the Human Genetic Archive survives aboard the ISS. The ISS and remaining third of the cloud ark combine through reshaping the ice into a support structure, and is rechristened Endurance.

      During the three years that it takes for Endurance to reach the Cleft, the majority of its population die of various causes (cancer caused by cosmic radiation, suicide, bolide strikes, etc.); by the time they are within range of the Cleft, only about 30 survivors remain. Julia Bliss Flaherty's Swarm splits into two factions, who fight; Flaherty's faction is defeated. Running out of food, the Swarm resorts to cannibalism, and by the end of three years only 11 survive, including Flaherty and the leader of the opposing faction, Aïda. Aïda requests to reunite the remnant of the Swarm with the Cloud Ark before it reaches the Cleft, but secretly plans a battle for control of Endurance; as a result of that battle the population is diminished even further.

      By the time Endurance reaches the relative safety of the Cleft, there are only eight surviving Homo sapiens in space, all of whom are women. One, the sociologist Luisa, has reached menopause, and the remaining seven (Dinah, Ivy, Aïda, Tekla, Camila, Moira, and Julia) come to be known as the Seven Eves. The Human Genetic Archive has been destroyed, but they have sufficient resources to use the surviving genetics laboratory to rebuild the human race by parthenogenesis. They agree that each of the Seven Eves gets to choose how her offspring will be genetically modified or enhanced. Aïda predicts that, hundreds of years from now, this project shall result in seven new races.

      The narrative jumps to 5,000 years later. There are now three billion humans living in a ring around the Earth, and they have indeed formed into seven races, each one descended from and named after the Seven Eves who survived the events of Part 2. These races have quite distinct characteristics, including "Moirans" who can undergo "epigenetic shifts", radically changing their bodies in response to new environments. The iron core of the moon has mostly been used to build space habitats, but the Cleft itself has been turned into "Cradle", an exclusive piece of real estate attached to a tether that occasionally "docks" with Earth.

      Humanity has divided mostly along racial lines into two states, Red and Blue, which are engaged in a form of Cold War characterized by cultural isolation, espionage and border skirmishes, mediated by treaty agreements more honored in the breach than the observance.

      The orbiting races, the Spacers, terraform Earth by crashing ice comets into it to replenish the oceans, and seed the planet with genetically created organisms based upon re-sequenced DNA data saved from the escape to orbit. Once a breathable atmosphere is recreated, and sufficient plant and animal species have been reseeded, some members of the orbiting races ("Sooners") resettle the planet, in violation of treaty agreements.

      A "Seven", a group of seven people with one member from each race, is recruited by "Doc" Hu Noah, to investigate mysterious people who have been sighted on Earth. As the story unfolds, they discover that some humans did indeed survive the Hard Rain on the planet by living in deep mines ("Diggers"), while others survived in ocean trenches using submarines ("Pingers"). Although these survivors have also evolved socially and biologically to form two additional races, the survival of root stock humanity separate from the Seven Eves causes turmoil in Spacer high politics. Ground conflict eventually occurs because each of the orbiting camps (Red and Blue) wishes to establish a preferential or exclusive relationship with the Earthbound races: the Diggers, although descendants of Dinah's family, interpret the Blue state's presence on their territory as an act of aggression and develop an alliance with Red, prompting Blue to seek out an alliance with the Pingers on the strength of Ivy's connection with one of their founders. Matters are further complicated because the Diggers claim all of the Earth's land surface as their own, and initially hold the Spacers in disdain (despite their high technology) for having fled the planet eons ago.

      In an epilogue it is revealed that a separate, secret underwater ark had been created concurrently with the cloud ark, leading to the development of the Pingers, based on analysis of the "selfies" Ivy's fiance had sent her, using diagrams and sketches in the background as clues. Ty invites the surviving Seven (along with Sonar and Deep, representatives of the Diggers and the Pingers, respectively) back to apartments at his bar in the Cleft with the intent of forming the first "Nine".

      7 votes
    9. What do you see the world as in 50 years?

      Just random discussion out of boredom. What do you see the world as in 50 years? Possibly war with different countries, economics, technology advancements(of course), space exploration, etc. What...

      Just random discussion out of boredom. What do you see the world as in 50 years? Possibly war with different countries, economics, technology advancements(of course), space exploration, etc. What does everyone think?

      18 votes
    10. Feature request: edit notifications

      I know this doesn't happen often, but I've seen it happen a few times and I think it would be useful to have a notifications page for edited comments. When someone replies to me I get a...

      I know this doesn't happen often, but I've seen it happen a few times and I think it would be useful to have a notifications page for edited comments. When someone replies to me I get a notification, I can reply to it and/or mark it as read, and forget about it. Sometimes the person that replied to me edits the comment to add extra information, but since I've already marked it as read I may never see the added info. I'd like to receive a notification whenever one or more editions are made to a reply I received that I've already marked as read.

      19 votes
    11. Opinions on Kubernetes and Cloud-Native

      I don't want to start a flame-war around this, but I am curious to hear about other peoples opinions. I've been working in 'the cloud' for a few years now and love how convenient and easy it is to...

      I don't want to start a flame-war around this, but I am curious to hear about other peoples opinions.

      I've been working in 'the cloud' for a few years now and love how convenient and easy it is to build on. My work is 100% cloud-based, and we host absolutely nothing. From internal tooling (slack, payroll, email) to what we sell (kubernetes, orchestration, some custom-tooling).

      I'm not sure what side I stand as I still run all of my own tooling myself on a dedicated box. I love being able to have my own server to tinker with, and run my own websites/rss-aggregators/VPN servers/etc.

      Having used AWS/GoogleCloud, I can see huge value in the automation and reduction in overhead that they provide when it comes to setting up and managing infrastructure.

      I am genuinely interested in different opinions and viewpoints on the way computation and data are managed, especially with companies that deal with sensitive information.

      As an aside, I would be interested in opposing ideas regarding containerisation (ie. Docker/Rkt).

      Edit: I realise this probably should have been posted on ~comp

      4 votes
    12. What's your favorite Spongebob episode?

      There are so many unique episodes in the series and a lot humor in my life originated from Spongebob. I'd love to hear what others see as their favorite episode and how that humor carries over...

      There are so many unique episodes in the series and a lot humor in my life originated from Spongebob. I'd love to hear what others see as their favorite episode and how that humor carries over into your everyday humor.

      My favorite episode is Shanghaied, there are so many subtle jokes in the episode that will always make me laugh. Easily my favorite line is the interaction between Squidward and Spongebob as Squidward is climbing the anchor rope up to the Dutchman's Ship; "Well, I'm gonna get to the bottom of this thing. Wouldn't that be the top?".

      11 votes
    13. Thanks for all of the great discussion in the philosophy thread the other day!

      As the title says, thank you to everyone who participated in the philosophy thread that I put up the other day. It was really great to get to talk to people about interesting questions and see the...

      As the title says, thank you to everyone who participated in the philosophy thread that I put up the other day. It was really great to get to talk to people about interesting questions and see the different ideas have on issues like determinism versus free will.

      I'm really loving this site because of the great, reasonable discussion that's been going on, and I hope that we keep it going!

      P.S. If anyone has some more interesting philosophical questions, please make a post about it! Based on the response to the thread the other day, I think a ton of people would be interested in discussing with you. I know I would be.

      9 votes
    14. Be nice to your DevOps team by not using Maven or kitchen sink frameworks.

      Maven tries to be the kitchen sink in a lot of ways - rigid requirements to use plugins instead of scripts, trying to wrap your scm, and even act as a docker wrapper... this is insanely...

      Maven tries to be the kitchen sink in a lot of ways - rigid requirements to use plugins instead of scripts, trying to wrap your scm, and even act as a docker wrapper... this is insanely frustrating and an anti-patter for the rest of the software space. I would rather find a new job than work at a company that keeps pumping out maven and jhipster apps. It doesn't play nice with CI, it uses an insanely ugly configuration (xml) and most java developers don't even really know what they are doing when they are using it.

      Making a micro-service api? You don't need jhipster or maven or even java - there are so many other better alternatives. Need something simple? flask. Need something performant? go. And there are so many others in between that won't give you a NullPointerException, require you to download the entire internet just to serve some serialized json, or make your devops team hate you.

      Interested in hearing rebuttals and other peoples alts and overall preferences.

      5 votes
    15. Suggestion: Being able to post psuedo-anonymously.

      I don't know if I'm the only one here but sometimes I want to say something but I don't want it tied to my account, my reasoning being the more details I let slip eg: I've worked in IT I've lived...

      I don't know if I'm the only one here but sometimes I want to say something but I don't want it tied to my account, my reasoning being the more details I let slip eg:

      I've worked in IT

      I've lived in that town

      I own a labradoodle

      ..these things all piece together till you can profile it down to one person, you essentially de-anonymize yourself the more comments you make. Being that this is a public forum anyone can scan this information now or in the future building a profile on users possibly identifying them as a person, this is an unintended side effect as we don't post online comments expecting them to be traceable to our person. Consider the fact that advancing computing power and AI may eventually make it trivial to do such a thing.

      Sure you can regularly create new accounts but then you reset the trust system.

      My suggestion is having the ability to post a comment but not display your username, you would still be accountable to the trust system it's just that outside Tildes's server you wouldn't be identified. This would still discourage people from being a jerk because they're still affected by the trust system.

      32 votes