written by Rob Pike. added 7 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
We—Ken, Robert and myself—were C++ programmers when we designed a new language to solve the problems that we thought needed to be solved for the kind of software we wrote. It seems almost paradoxical that other C++ programmers don't seem to care. ... I believe that's a preposterous way to think about programming. What matters isn't the ancestor relations between things but what they can do for you.
written by Bill Gates. added 8 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
Well, Africa, of course, is not nearly as poor as it was in the past. The number of kids in education, the childhood survival rate, there has been quite a bit of improvement there. But in Africa, the geography is tough. The disease burden is tough. The ecosystems are very, very different. Asia, Europe, and the United States, those Northern Hemisphere areas, they developed in terms of getting rid of disease, being able to have infrastructure for very efficient transport, and having more than enough food to feed the population. They got into a virtuous cycle of high education, high discovery, high innovation, and generally quite strong governance.
written by Audrey Jiajia Li. added 9 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
china internet great-firewall censorship
I have tried to persuade people I know to switch to other messaging services that have end-to-end encryption — to no avail. Since most of their contacts are on WeChat and they are so reliant on its services, they see no reason to leave. Whenever I bring up privacy concerns, the usual response is, “If you have nothing to hide, why do you mind the government accessing your data?” Sadly, this echoes a statement by Robin Li, the chief executive of the Chinese search engine giant Baidu: If, he said, the Chinese people “are able to trade privacy for convenience, for safety, for efficiency, in a lot of cases they are willing to do that.”
written by David Smilde. added 9 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
venezuela democracy overthrow-dictators
The government’s crass manipulation and outright fraud in elections over the past two years have weakened the hand of opposition moderates and strengthened the long-term message of radicals: “you don’t remove dictators with votes.” But this idea is historically inaccurate. Pressure leading to a pact leading to a vote is the classic way to overcome authoritarian rule. It was through a plebiscite that the Chilean opposition defeated the dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1988. A year later, the Solidarity movement in Poland accepted a limited vote and stunned the government by sweeping the election, leading to its demise. And it was through negotiations, and a vote, that South Africa overcame apartheid.
written by Somini Sengupta, Tiffany May and Zia ur-Rehman. added 9 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
Is it because of climate change? Scientists with the World Weather Attribution project concluded in a study released Friday that the likelihood of the heat wave currently baking Northern Europe is “more than two times higher today than if human activities had not altered climate.”
written by Rod Nordland. added 9 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
casablanca cafe ww2 recreation
Like many visitors here, Mr. Kelley was surprised to learn that Rick’s Café Américain never existed, except on a Hollywood movie lot, where the classic film starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman was made. It was 1942, the world was at war, and the eponymous city was occupied by the Axis powers. Rick’s was just the figment of a writer’s imagination.
written by Anemona Hartocollis, Amy Harmon and Mitch Smith. added 9 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
harvard admission education us
But behind the curtain, Harvard’s much-feared admissions officers have a whole other set of boxes that few ambitious high school students and their parents know about — or could check even if they did. The officers speak a secret language — of “dockets,” “the lop list,” “tips,” “DE,” the “Z-list” and the “dean’s interest list” — and maintain a culling system in which factors like where applicants are from, whether their parents went to Harvard, how much money they have and how they fit the school’s goals for diversity may be just as important as scoring a perfect 1600 on the SAT.
written by Jennifer Haberkorn. added 9 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
pro-life democrats us-politics childbirth
In some ways, the Democrats for Life convention was similar to any other anti-abortion gathering: There were candles to honor aborted children; panelists generally (but not universally) knocked Planned Parenthood and physician-assisted suicide; and the whole conference had Christian, particularly Catholic, undertones. The main difference: Any mention of Donald Trump got, at minimum, an eye roll. Along with other non-Republican anti-abortion movements—such as Secular Pro-Life and Pro-Life Humanists—Democrats for Life likes to use the term “whole life” to describe their cause, a label that encompasses support for life from conception to natural death and everything in between, including child care, parental leave, health care and education. They argue that unlike Republican anti-abortion groups, they want to support children and their mothers once babies are outside the womb, too—even if that means they lead a lonely political existence.
written by Elizabeth Dias. added 9 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
Some of the names on the list were no surprise, as some priests had faced public criminal proceedings and were removed from ministry. Other priests had been the subject of rumors. But many, like Father Crowley, had died before their actions were publicly revealed. As national anger has boiled over, and as the Vatican insisted to victims that Pope Francis was on their side and dioceses rolled out crisis communications playbooks, the families of Holy Angels have grappled with what to do.
written by Jim Rutenberg and Rebecca R. Ruiz. added 9 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
trump election tabloids networking high-stakes
“You could read horrible things about Hillary Clinton and wonderful things about Donald Trump, and people were exposed to this at many supermarkets,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and professor of communication at the Annenberg School for Communication. “You might say nobody reads the tabloids, but actually most of us do — through inadvertent exposure.”
written by QUOCTRUNG BUI and CLAIRE CAIN MILLER. added 9 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
children woman divisions anthropology
Women who have children young tend to live in areas that view family ties as paramount. Parents might be physically healthier because of their youth, and the children’s grandparents are younger and often live nearby. But parents are less likely to have significant savings or a college degree and career. Their pregnancies are more likely to be unintended, and three-quarters of first-time mothers under 25 are unmarried.
written by Michael Kruse. added 9 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
trump government thinking trump-history
It’s a truth Trump knows well based on the life he’s lived. He was reared by a father who made millions of dollars by doing business with the Brooklyn Democratic machine. Practitioners of this cynical, self-serving strain of politics “knew how to buy and sell loyalty, a valued skill in the culture of the clubhouse that required a sense of timing. One had to know how to inspire loyalty in others, and how to give it to the bosses who could nurture your career. But a player in this game also had to know when to jump ship, abandoning career-long friendships suddenly, without emotion, and with a ready and usually petty alibi,” New York investigative reporters Jack Newfield and Wayne Barrett wrote in their 1988 book, City for Sale.
written by Li Yuan. added 9 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
When asked whether she would consider having a second child, Li Keli, an accountant at an electronics maker in the southern city of Huizhou, said, “Absolutely not.” Her factory laid off two-thirds of its workers in June when the United States-China trade war escalated. Her monthly pay of $500 was cut by 10 percent. She used to take her son, 7, to visit nearby cities on weekends. Now she takes him to the playgrounds of big residential complexes because they’re free.
written by Steven Lee Myers and Olivia Mitchell Ryan. added 9 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
“To put it bluntly, the birth of a baby is not only a matter of the family itself, but also a state affair,” the official newspaper People’s Daily said in an editorial this week, prompting widespread criticism and debate online.
written by Zeynep Tufekci. added 9 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
attention technology social-media 21-century online-world online
Security isn’t just about who has more Cray supercomputers and cryptography experts but about understanding how attention, information overload, and social bonding work in the digital era. This potent combination explains why, since the Arab Spring, authoritarianism and misinformation have thrived, and a free-flowing contest of ideas has not. Perhaps the simplest statement of the problem, though, is encapsulated in Facebook’s original mission statement (which the social network changed in 2017, after a backlash against its role in spreading misinformation). It was to make the world “more open and connected.” It turns out that this isn’t necessarily an unalloyed good. Open to what, and connected how? The need to ask those questions is perhaps the biggest lesson of all.
written by Heidi Waterhouse. added 9 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
Be reasonable about your expenses, but not chintzy. This is not human travel, it is business travel. The value of business travel is that you arrive in a place capable of interacting with humans. ... There are a lot of other tips I have, but those seem like the most salient. Just keep in mind that you are worth shipping across the country carefully because you are a precious and hard-to-replace part of the company, and they want you to arrive undamaged, functional, and able to do good work.
written by Mark Bergen and Jennifer Surane . added 9 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
google shady mastercard credit-cards
Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Mastercard Inc. brokered a business partnership during about four years of negotiations, according to four people with knowledge of the deal, three of whom worked on it directly. The alliance gave Google an unprecedented asset for measuring retail spending, part of the search giant’s strategy to fortify its primary business against onslaughts from Amazon.com Inc. and others.
written by Moira Vetter. added 9 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
This is particularly important if times are good. There’s an old adage that there are stumps and garbage at the bottom of a pond, but no one sees them when the water is rising. When the water—or the cash—starts to dry up, it makes it far more obvious where the problems are. Take time regularly, especially in good times, to look for areas to save and improve efficiencies.
written by Doc Searls. added 9 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
The Castle doctrine has been around a long time. Cicero (106–43 BCE) wrote, “What more sacred, what more strongly guarded by every holy feeling, than a man’s own home?” In Book 4, Chapter 16 of his Commentaries on the Laws of England, William Blackstone (1723–1780 CE) added, “And the law of England has so particular and tender a regard to the immunity of a man’s house, that it stiles it his castle, and will never suffer it to be violated with impunity: agreeing herein with the sentiments of ancient Rome…”
written by Doc Searls. added 9 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
advertising online-ads differences
Another false adtech assumption is that “big data” can “know us better than we know ourselves.” This is worse than wrong: it is delusional, and an insult to our sovereign humanity. All of us are not only different from each other, but from how we were ten minutes ago. To be fully human is to learn and change constantly. “I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass,” Whitman writes. “I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood… I was never measured, and never will be measured… The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me. He complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed. I too am untranslatable. I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
Cutouts is an open source application. Code licensed under the MIT license. Copyright 2018 Siddharth Kannan