taneem

I always find that sharing those little tedious details is what creates visceral understanding of a situation. In this case, the true horror of being a liberated Black person in the 1800s and having to relentlessly work to rescue others, while surrounded by people who truly don't care.

On a lighter note, I use the same approach in understanding user needs as a product builder. I focus on letting people share the minutiae of their day rather than have them editorialize the big topics. By doing so, I get a lot of visceral insight and intuition.

Thanks for sharing this. I really enjoyed reading it.

The way to think about it is that you're processing a list, where the first argument is an operation, and the subsequent arguments are numbers to add. Clojure, and other Lisp based languages use this structure (a list) for representing everything - both data and functions. It turns out to be a very simple yet endlessly flexible and extensible concept.

It's hard to stare in the face of the abyss.

I moved to Mars! My family immigrated to North America soon after and I studied and worked in tech ever since.

During 1999-2000, I helped hundreds of people learn how to use Flash. I was, looking back now, probably one of the top experts on Flash 4 at the time in the world. The twist - I was a 15 year old living in a tiny African country called Lesotho.

Lesotho is pretty isolated from the world. Nobody even knows it exists. Living there, Silicon Valley might as well be on Mars.

However, we used to get issues of Wired Magazine from South Africa, and these came with shareware CDs. These CDs included 30-day trial editions of Macromedia Flash.

Flash was amazing at the time. Being able to create interactive animations blew my mind. I learned Flash 4 completely inside and out. I knew every single feature, every single quirk.

Of course living in Lesotho, there was nothing I could really do with all this. Most people around me didn't even know how to use computers. Flash was several layers of abstraction away from that.

So I used to spend all my time on Yahoo Chat's Web Design chat rooms. Mainly hanging out with nerds in the US. We used to have countless people drop by in the rooms every day asking questions about Flash. Mainly people working for web design agencies in the US. I was the resident Flash expert. Flash questions always were referred to me.

In the 2000s Flash rightly got a lot of flak. I'm not sad it's gone. But it was really something special, especially in the late 90s.

Yes - City would be great for people doing stuff around activities, events and local places. But Country would be more powerful for e-commerce I suspect (my usecase).

Hi Josh - it would be incredible to have this filtered by location, and I think you can get that from Google Trends.

Stories like this are often instigated by someone inside the organization with an agenda. They reach out to a journalist, give some quotes anonymously, and put them in touch with others in the company that are allies and will also give supporting quotes.

This article feels like an article designed to pressure Marc Lore to leave.

Losing $1B on $22B in revenue, after just 3 years of really starting this bet is nothing!

Title is incorrect. This is not on Mechanical Turk. Tasks like this are not allowed on MTurk as per TOS. The original tweet author says so on the thread.

I do vaguely remember "good kings" and "bad kings" ... some kids were forgiving and more than fair, and others were vindictive. So not everyone gravitated towards tyranny and some did report "nothing happened" more or less.

As a child in primary school (in Lesotho, southern Africa): when a teacher left the classroom everyone was supposed to silently complete work. To enforce this, one student would be appointed "name taker". This person would write down the names of anyone who spoke while the teacher was out. Punishment for being on the list was often physical.

One day I was made the name taker while the teacher was out. Most kids stayed quiet, but two other segments emerged: the scycophants and the outlaws.

The sycophants would attempt to "help" me identify noise makers by pointing them out. In exchange they would hope to be safe from the list, and would use that immunity/privilege to lord over other kids.

The outlaws were kids who, once they were added to the list, talked and joked freely, knowing that they were doomed anyway. They felt they were fearless, and they goaded others to join them.

I've always remembered this experience, for how quickly a group of children organized themselves into social dynamics that echoed human systems more generally.