npinguy

> It reminds me of the made-up but often used story of terrified audiences running for the exits upon watching a film of a train for the first time.

The cultural recontextualization of stories like this in my lifetime has been one of the most fascinating aspects of our modern world for me.

Of course, as I get older, I've seen my own stories and stories about events I participated in get told, re-told, and twisted and exaggerated without absolutely any malice. We also all see how people misrepresent news stories, social policies, and scientific studies (with various degrees of malice). So I think I know almost exactly how the Film of Train anecdote happened.

1. Theater owner starts showing Train film. Stands outside and yells "Come inside and see the wonderous train show. This new 'cinema' is so real that audiences have been reportedly running for the exits in terror!"

2. It's an obvious exaggeration and a joke. Passerbys laugh, but are intrigued nonetheless.

3. Someone writes a newspaper story about the cinema and the train film. Includes the quote as directly attributed to the theater owner. Everyone reading is aware of the context and the situation and the implicit tone, and chuckles appropriately.

4. Story gets picked up in another newspaper but without the context and removes the quote and instead represents it as a factual retelling of what happened.

5. Years later, someone writing a book uses the newspaper as a primary source, and then a cascade of books repeat and propagate the "fact".

Perfectly reasonable sequence of events. But here's where things get even more interesting to me.

There are *dozens* of similar stories that we've all heard and took as gospel growing up that required one person to stop, ask "Wait, does this really hold up to scrutiny?" and the whole house of cards comes crashing down. I'm talking about the "NASA spent $10M to design a space pen, the russians used a pencil", "Water flushes in the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere", and the like.

But why did it only happen just now? What prevented people from being more introspective and curious about these subjects 10, 20, 30 years ago? I guess the answer is we needed the Internet to hit a certain critical mass for enough people with sense to be able to reach the rest of us, but I don't know.

> Do not try and compare an animal to a historically tragic event to justify word policing. Your use of tragedies to justify your woke word policing is quite frankly disgusting.

deanCommie was trying to get you to see that SLAVERY was also a historically tragic event that people are reminded of when they see terminology like master/slave.

> Chaos monkey sounds completely fine and I can't see how any sane non-racist person would associate that with a black person.

They weren't trying to say that. This whole discussion is master/slave. This is precisely the point - chaos monkey is a fine neutral term that describes what is needed without any negative connotations. "Concentration camp guard" isn't.

Primary/replica is a fine neutral term. "Master/slave" aren't.

Honestly, your outrage about the comparison to concentration camps exactly proves the point that language matters regardless of intent.

Let's start from 80 hours a week spent at work. Red flag #1. Don't know why you would assume that's necessary

3.5 hours/week showering. Red flag #2. Even if you shower every single day, if you're spending 30 minutes in the shower each time you might as well call it a hobby. Unless you've got long luxurious hair, you should be able to get everything done in 10 minutes.

10 hours commuting, so 1 hour each way? #3 How much do you value your time? Clearly if you can't think of a hobby, not very much. If you did, you'd pay extra to not waste 2 hours every day wasted. But wait...why are you wasting that time? Can you read? Listen to audio books? Work on a side project? Even day dream and think? If you have to drive, can you switch from driving to motorcycling, and make that a hobby?

It sounds like you WANT to throw yourself into work, and spend all your energy and time into it as an excuse for lacking the ability to become a fully developed multi-faceted human being. And that is on you, not on your employer.

The same reason that the Civil Rights act had to be passed in the courts and the first students in integrated schools in the south had to be marched in with armed guard.

"Democracy" is frequently used interchangeably with freedom, but never underestimate the power of a close-minded majority to rule with tyranny and impose their will and discrimination on a minority - racial, sexually-orientatated, or otherwise.

Because it's bizarre and stands out. The clarifying sentence of marrying people that live elsewhere etc screams of "the lady doth protest too much". There's nothing wrong with saying "Over time, and over the natural turnover that happens at all companies, none of the original Wasabi designers are no longer working at FogBugz". Sure, some snarky people will make the comment "Oh yeah, I bet they left BECAUSE of Wasabi", but most will ignore them.

By completely negating the possibility that any of those people left for any reasons not involving family, it actually seems to INCREASE the probability that Wasabi was more unpopular within FogCreek than Joel would prefer to admit.

The ability to do something does not hold any weight with the people you're trying to convince. "Oh sure, Apple can revoke my access time, but they never would!"

It's the same thing as "Oh I'm sure the government COULD access all my data, but why would they want to?"

Region-locking affects more people than you might think, just not with DVDs anymore. Most of the world using reddit/hackernews/the internet is constantly faced with the frustration of clicking on a youtube link and seeing the copyright notice that says the content is restricted to US-only.

It's kind of how people are scared of dying in plane crashes but not in car crashes - the illusion of control. One easily imagines doing something to avoid a car death but not a plane one.

I think the same applies here: Death by starvation feels easier to avoid to a layman wilderness expert: forage more, hunt effectively, conserve supplies better, etc.

But death via an obscure chemical even while in possession of a book on edible seeds...that's scary and much more likely to give one reservations about their confidence.

Your comparison is bang on, except that's the point. Amazon isn't trying to be Ikea. It is absolutely trying to provide the building blocks for small companies and large to use their cloud platform in a very foundational manner. Yes, the onboarding cost may be high, but Amazon doesn't mind if customers end up using Heroku or EngineYard instead - they are customers too.

AWS is a lot like Linux that way: Deeply challenging initial learning curve, but the only thing worth considering for serious mission critical architecture. Stability and scalability does come at the cost of user-friendliness.

Clickbait article. Not a single explanation to be found. Just some history and background

You can criticize Amazon for a million things, but underpayment is not one of them.

Are you insane? VK has horrendous UX (best and simplest example: Browsing through image galleries resizes the image viewer so that the next and previous buttons constantly move)

And they call it a Facebook clone because it was a direct copy of the Facebook UI, and while Facebook has innovated and polished, VK has been stuck in the same decade-old look and feel.

It may be faster to use in Russia because of geographical proxmity, but I assure you it is nowhere near as Facebook is from North America.