I am a former Yelp engineer. I think the thing this story describes is dumb and bad and they should stop doing it. Inserting yourself as a useless middleman is a classic shitty startup move.
Here are some great reasons for current and former Yelp engineers not to engage in internet debates about accusations of nefariousness in other areas such as the review filter or sorting algorithm:
1. Being in internet debates mostly sucks in general, especially with people who by default hate you.
2. Yelp has a blanket policy that you shouldn't engage in these debates.
3. Yelp has been sued some number of times and might be again. I would be paranoid that something I said here would be used in another bullshit lawsuit, especially if I were truly in a position to know things.
4. It's pretty clear that the PR battle was lost long ago, regardless of the truth. Leaving a comment on a thread like this changes literally nothing and is a waste of time. Yes, that means I think I'm wasting my time right now. :-)
Every Yelp engineer I've met has intentions at least as good as, say, the average Google engineer. Sites like Yelp can have negative effects on small businesses the same way e.g. Spotify might have an effect on independent music or Airbnb has an effect on the apartment rental market in a city, and engineers aren't always good at recognizing those effects as problematic, but Yelp engineers are certainly no worse than your standard Silicon Valley type.
I still trust Yelp reviews more than I trust local business reviews on any other platform.
I found Nim to have a small but active and supportive community. The library ecosystem, while a little thin, has a lot of activity, and I was able to find what I needed or create wrappers for C libraries.
One difference between the Swift and Nim communities is that where Swift's is full of noobs answering each other's questions, Nim's is full of experts who are just as eager to help.
Nim also has pretty good, fairly complete docs and a decent book.
I really like the commitment to retro aesthetics. Last weekend I made an "imaginary astronomy" web app with nearly pixel-perfect Windows 95 theming. :-) http://steveasleep.com/keplverse/
Forth still seems like a language worth learning, not for practical reasons, but for technohistorical context. Maybe my first project should be a sqlite library?
At a startup that folded, $0. (Failing is an exit!) At a startup acquired by a larger company, about $20k. Neither made up for the delta vs market rate salary.
Cool! This is a superset of some things people misuse Literally Canvas[1] for. I look forward to pointing people toward it when they ask about these kinds of features.
The default sans-serif font in Firefox for Mac is Helvetica, but the default font for macOS is San Francisco. If you want to have your page use a system-looking font, particularly if you're building an Electron app like Slack, you might want to get past the browser defaults and instead use the system defaults.
I used macOS fonts in my example, but this applies to every platform.
As an experienced hobbyist game developer, I find Unity to be an incomprehensible airplane cockpit of bad UI.
For the kind of game presented in the article, Gamemaker Studio would be more reasonable. Unity has a lot you don't need, which obscures the path to making something simpler like this.
I'm sure there are other good options too. I think there's a JS-based platformer-oriented engine out there.
Having done a lot of work using both the old os.path library and new pathlib, the ergonomics of pathlib are much, much better. The behavior of the overloaded operator is well-defined, unsurprising, and otherwise intuitive.
If the project is maintained in someone's spare time, then the cost to monetize it, in time and effort, might exceed what they are willing to put into it.
In my own case, I have a silly JS library with 4,000 hits per month to the docs, but "monetizing" that just sounds like work, whereas working on the library itself is fun.
Well, assuming the small coffee shops are well-managed, then we still have to ask ourselves which is more important, the cheap good coffee or a living wage for the workers?
Whether the substance of this is true or not, it seems unwise to have posted it. It probably felt good to write, but now there's a real risk that future employers will perceive it as a negative signal. ("If we hire this guy, will he air all our dirty laundry in public if it doesn't work out?")
I have thoughts about whether his perceptions are accurate, but I mostly just want to say: kids, if you're thinking of writing something like this, probably don't. Go out for drinks with a friend and vent one on one instead.
This year I switched from streaming to MP3s for at-home listening, and I got fed up messing with 3.5mm audio cables, bluetooth, and switching between devices in general. So now I just run Summertunes and Spotify on an old Mac laptop hooked up to the speakers, and I'm happy as a monkey in a monkey tree.