In the early days of the Coronavirus epi­demic, there were hopes that the dis­ease could be treated with a com­pound called hy­drox­y­chloro­quine (HCQ). HCQ is a long-es­tab­lished in­ex­pen­sive med­i­cine that is widely used to treat malaria. It also has uses for treat­ing rheuma­toid arthri­tis and lu­pus. There had been some in­di­ca­tions that HCQ could treat SARS virus in­fec­tions by at­tack­ing the spike pro­teins that coro­n­aviruses use to latch onto cells and in­ject their ge­netic ma­te­r­ial. Initial small-scale stud­ies of the drug on COVID-19 pa­tients in­di­cated some pos­i­tive ef­fect (in com­bi­na­tion with the an­tibi­otic azithromycin). President Trump, in March, pro­moted HCQ as a game-changer and is ap­par­ently tak­ing it as a pro­phy­laxis af­ter po­ten­tially be­ing ex­posed by White House staff.

Initial claims of the ef­fi­cacy of this ther­apy were a per­fect il­lus­tra­tion of why we base de­ci­sions on sci­en­tific stud­ies and not anec­dotes. By late March, Twitter was filled with sto­ries of “my cous­in’s moth­er’s for­mer room­mate was on death’s door and took this ther­apy and mirac­u­lously re­cov­ered”. But such sto­ries, even as­sum­ing they are true, mean noth­ing. With COVID-19, we know that se­ri­ously ill peo­ple reach an in­flec­tion point where they ei­ther re­cover or die. If they died while tak­ing the HCQ reg­i­men, we don’t hear from them be­cause…they died. And if they re­cover with­out tak­ing it, we don’t hear from them be­cause…they did­n’t take it. Our simian brains have evolved to think that cor­re­la­tion is cau­sa­tion. But it is­n’t. If I sac­ri­ficed a goat in every COVID-19 pa­tien­t’s room, some of them would re­cover just by chance. That does­n’t mean we should start a mas­sive holo­caust of caprines.

However, even putting aside anec­dotes, there were good rea­sons to be­lieve the HCQ reg­i­men might work. And given the se­ri­ous­ness of this dis­ease and the des­per­a­tion of those try­ing to save lives, it’s un­der­stand­able that doc­tors be­gan us­ing it for crit­i­cally ill pa­tients and sci­en­tists be­gan re­search­ing its ef­fi­cacy.

Why Trump be­came fix­ated on it is equally un­der­stand­able. Trump has been look­ing for a quick fix to this cri­sis since Day One. Denial failed. Closing off (some) travel to China failed. A vac­cine is months if not years away. So HCQ of­fered him what he wanted — a way to fix this prob­lem with­out the hard work, tough choices and sac­ri­fice of stay-at-home or­ders, masks, iso­la­tion and quar­an­tine. So ea­ger were they to adopt the quick fix, the Administration made plans to dis­trib­ute mil­lions of doses of this un­proven drug in lieu of tak­ing more con­crete steps to ad­dress the cri­sis.[efn_note]Al­though the claim that Trump stands to profit off HCQ sales does not ap­pear to hold much wa­ter.[/​efn_note]

This is also why cer­tain fringe cor­ners of the in­ter­net be­came fix­ated on it. There has arisen a sub­set of the COVID Truthers that I’m call­ing HCQ Truthers: peo­ple who be­lieve that HCQ is­n’t just some­thing that may save some lives but is, in fact, a mir­a­cle cure that it’s only be­ing held back so that…well, take your pick. So that Democrats can wreck the econ­omy. So that Bill Gates can in­ject us with track­ing de­vices. So that we can clear off the Social Security rolls. And this is­n’t just a US phe­nom­e­non nor is it all about Trump. Overseas friends tell me that COVID trutherism in gen­eral and HCQ trutherism in par­tic­u­lar have arisen all over the Western World.

It’s no ac­ci­dent that the HCQ Truthers seem to share a great deal of head­space with the anti-Vaxxers. It fills the same needs

* In both cases, the idea was started by flawed stud­ies. The ini­tial stud­ies out of China and France that in­di­cated HCQ worked were heav­ily crit­i­cized for method­olog­i­cal er­rors (although note that nei­ther claimed it was a mir­a­cle cure). Since then, larger stud­ies have shown no ef­fect.

* HCQ trutherism of­fers an ex­pla­na­tion for tragedy be­yond the ran­dom cru­elty of na­ture. Just as anti-vaxxers don’t want to be­lieve that some­times autism just hap­pens, HCQ Truthers don’t want to be­lieve that some­times na­ture just re­leases aw­ful epi­demics on us. It’s more com­fort­ing, in some ways, to think that bad hap­pen­ings are all part of a plan by shad­owy forces.

There is, how­ever, an­other crazy side that does­n’t get as much at­ten­tion be­cause their crazy is a bit more sub­tle. These are the peo­ple who have de­cided that, since Trump is tout­ing the HCQ treat­ment, it must not work. It can not work. It can not be al­lowed to work. There is an undis­guised glee when stud­ies show that HCQ does not work and a will­ing­ness to blame HCQ short­ages on Trump and only Trump.[efn_note]Not to men­tion the odd fish tank cleaner poi­son­ing that has noth­ing to do with him.[/​efn_note]

In be­tween the two camps are every­one else: sci­en­tists, doc­tors and or­di­nary folk who just want to know whether this thing works or not, pol­i­tics and con­spir­acy the­o­ries be damned. Well, last week, we got a big in­di­ca­tion that it does not. A mas­sive study out of the Lancet con­cluded that the HCQ reg­i­men has no mea­sur­able pos­i­tive ef­fect. In fact, death rates were higher for those who took the reg­i­men, likely due to heart ar­rhyth­mias in­duced by the drug.

So is the de­bate over? Can we move on from HCQ? Not quite.

First of all, the study is a ret­ro­spec­tive study, look­ing back­ward at nearly 100,000 cases over the last four months. That’s a mas­sive sam­ple that al­lows one to cor­rect for po­ten­tial con­found­ing fac­tors. But it’s not a dou­ble-blind trial, so there may be cer­tain bi­ases that can not be avoided. In re­sponse to the pub­li­ca­tion, a group do­ing a con­trolled study un­blinded some of their data (that is, they let an in­de­pen­dent group look up who was get­ting the ac­tual HCQ and who was get­ting a placebo). It did not show enough of a safety con­cern to war­rant end­ing the study.

It’s also worth not­ing that be­cause this is an un­proven ther­apy, it is usu­ally be­ing used on only the sick­est pa­tients (the odd President of the United States aside). It’s pos­si­ble ear­lier use of the drug, when the body is not al­ready at war with it­self, could help.

With those caveats in mind, how­ever, this study at least makes it clear that HCQ is not the mir­a­cle cure some fringe cor­ners of the in­ter­net are pre­tend­ing it is. And it should make doc­tors hes­i­tant in giv­ing to peo­ple who al­ready have heart is­sues.

As you can imag­ine, this has only fed the twin camps of de­range­ment. The truther ar­gu­ments tend to fall into the usual holes that truther the­o­ries do:

* “How can this be a four-month study when we only learned about COVID in January!” The HCQ pro­to­col started be­ing used al­most im­me­di­ately be­cause of pre­vi­ous re­search on coro­n­aviruses.

* “How come all of the sud­den this safe med­i­cine that peo­ple use all the time is dan­ger­ous?!” The side ef­fects of HCQ have been well known for years and have al­ways re­quired con­sid­er­a­tion and man­age­ment. They may be show­ing up more strongly here be­cause it is be­ing given to pa­tients whose bod­ies are al­ready un­der ex­treme stress. Also, azithromycin may am­plify some of those side ef­fects.

* “They just hate Trump.” Not every­thing is about Donald Trump. If it turned out that kiss­ing Donald Trump’s gi­ant or­ange back­side cured COVID, sci­en­tists would be the first ones telling peo­ple to line up and use chap­stick.

The other cam­p’s re­sponse has ranged from undis­guised glee — that is, joy at the idea that we won’t be sav­ing lives cheaply — to bizarre claims that Trump should be charged with crimes for tout­ing this un­proven ther­apy.

In the end, the lu­natics do not mat­ter. Whether HCQ works or not, whether it is used or not, will be mostly de­ter­mined by doc­tors and will mostly be based on the ev­i­dence we have in front of us. If HCQ fails — and it’s not look­ing good — my only re­sponse will be mas­sive dis­ap­point­ment. Had HCQ worked, it would have been a gift from the heav­ens. It is a well-known, well-stud­ied drug that can be man­u­fac­tured cheaply in bulk. Had it worked, we could have saved thou­sands of lives, pre­vented hun­dreds of thou­sands of long-term in­juries and saved tril­lions of dol­lars. That it does­n’t ap­pear to work — cer­tainly not mirac­u­lously — is not en­tirely un­ex­pected but is also a tragedy.

We’ve de­tected that JavaScript is dis­abled in your browser. Would you like to pro­ceed to legacy Twitter?

This has to stop now

Collection of po­lice bru­tal­ity. This has gone on for too long and can not be al­lowed to carry on unchecked.

There are cur­rently 4 videos of po­lice bru­tal­ity on this site. That’s 4 too many.

WARNING: These videos are very dis­tress­ing but it is im­por­tant that they are seen.

Your browser does not sup­port the video tag

On May 25th George Floyd was mur­dered by a now ex po­lice of­fi­cer called Derek Chauvin. Four days af­ter this video was recorded Derek Chauvin was ar­rested and charged with third de­gree mur­der.

Your browser does not sup­port the video tag

A 14 year old boy is pinned to the ground and punched re­peat­edly by a po­lice of­fi­cer for not fol­low­ing his in­struc­tions. This whole in­ci­dent started be­cause the boy had to­bacco in his pos­ses­sion.

Your browser does not sup­port the video tag

Police of­fi­cer on horse­back tram­ples young woman who is hold­ing a sign in protest of re­cent po­lice bru­tal­ity

Your browser does not sup­port the video tag

Two po­lice SUVs drive into a crowd of pro­tes­tors that are throw­ing ob­jects at their cars.

When I was thir­teen and start­ing high school I read ESR’s blog post: How To Become A Hacker. I was ex­cited to learn about the com­mu­nity of pro­gram­mers work­ing to­gether to build things across the in­ter­net and it led me to try in­stalling Fedora Core 4 and even­tu­ally Ubuntu 6.06, through which I learned a lot about trou­bleshoot­ing on my own and try­ing to get things to ac­tu­ally work. This ended up be­ing crit­i­cal in de­vel­op­ing the skills that helped me get the job I have now. I read about Python and wrote triv­ial pro­grams, and de­cided I wanted to study com­puter sci­ence and un­der­stand how com­put­ers ac­tu­ally work. It was a pretty in­flu­en­tial post for me at a time when I was­n’t sure what I wanted to do.

Growing up in the sub­urbs of Buffalo, NY can be pretty iso­lat­ing - and while I was lucky that my dad pro­grammed an Apple II in col­lege for fun (so had some back­ground / hacker spirit), he did­n’t know a lot about more mod­ern soft­ware de­vel­op­ment. I liked com­put­ers and played with them, but I did­n’t know much about what was pos­si­ble or where to even look to un­der­stand more. When the search space is so large and there are a lot of un­known un­knowns it can be hard to even find good sources of in­for­ma­tion to learn from. Being able to se­lect good sources of in­for­ma­tion re­quires some ex­ist­ing knowl­edge and with­out the guid­ance of an ex­pe­ri­enced per­son it can be dif­fi­cult. I think things are prob­a­bly bet­ter now that the in­ter­net is more de­vel­oped, but in some ways there are even more op­tions to sift through now than there were then.

Sixteen years later, I thought it’d be fun to write my own ver­sion of How to Become a Hacker to sup­ple­ment ESR’s orig­i­nal: some­thing I would have liked to have read my­self at thir­teen that fo­cuses on some other as­pects I would have found help­ful too. A lot of posts about pro­gram­ming and re­lated top­ics are ral­ly­ing cries, try­ing to per­suade you to adopt a spe­cific pro­gram­ming lan­guage, frame­work, op­er­at­ing sys­tem, or spe­cific way of do­ing things. This post does less of that and while I make some sug­ges­tions, it’s a more tem­pered view. Its goal is to fill the niche of what I think I would have liked to have read af­ter ESR’s orig­i­nal post (so you should read that one first).

In the be­gin­ning I re­mem­ber read­ing ar­ti­cles and books, but not un­der­stand­ing a lot of the jar­gon - this is nor­mal. Things that at first seem in­com­pre­hen­si­ble slowly be­come un­der­stand­able as you’re ex­posed to more of it and dig into each thing you don’t un­der­stand. It’s good to just keep read­ing and pow­er­ing through, look­ing things up as you don’t un­der­stand them and ask­ing ques­tions when you can (ESR also has a good post about how to ask good ques­tions).

Everyone learns some­thing for the first time at some point and things will slowly build un­til you’re more com­fort­able with the ba­sics. I re­mem­ber not un­der­stand­ing lit­tle de­tails (like not know­ing to en­ter com­mands in the ter­mi­nal to run them, or that cd stood for ‘change di­rec­to­ry’). You pick up on these things from ex­po­sure and the more you play with them, the more you’re ex­posed to and the more ex­pe­ri­ence you’ll ac­cu­mu­late. If you’re lucky enough to live in an area that has a com­mu­nity of peo­ple in­ter­ested in soft­ware you’ll be able to learn faster.

Learning some­thing new that’s com­pli­cated of­ten feels dif­fi­cult at first - if it feels easy it may be some­thing you al­ready know or you may not re­ally be test­ing your knowl­edge (it’s a lot eas­ier to read about how to solve a physics prob­lem and think ‘this makes sense’ than it is to solve a prob­lem your­self with the tools you just read about). The strug­gle can be a good sign - it means you’re re­ally learn­ing and by fo­cus­ing on do­ing sim­i­lar types of things it’ll be­come eas­ier as you get bet­ter.

I think there’s even a bit of ad­van­tage that com­pletely new peo­ple can have with this: when I de­velop a lit­tle bit of ex­pe­ri­ence it be­comes easy and com­fort­able to just do the thing I al­ready know how to do rather than learn some­thing new. This can lead to get­ting stuck in a plateau where you just re­peat­edly do the thing you al­ready know how to do, like a per­son that can only play one song on gui­tar and al­ways just plays that one song. To a new per­son every­thing is hard so that’s not re­ally an op­tion.

Learning some­thing com­pli­cated for the first time should feel a lit­tle painful - you should get used to that feel­ing since it’s a good thing and means you’re grow­ing. Don’t let it scare you away be­cause you don’t think you’re smart enough. Since there’s so much to learn and a lot of dif­fer­ent av­enues to go down (just in com­put­ers there are things like com­puter graph­ics, se­cu­rity, ma­chine learn­ing, al­go­rithms, mo­bile, web, in­fra­struc­ture, etc.), hav­ing a mind­set where you al­low your­self to grow and get out of your com­fort zone to learn new things is crit­i­cal.

Learning to pro­gram by just read­ing a book about pro­gram­ming is like learn­ing to sky-dive by only read­ing a book about sky-div­ing. You prob­a­bly need to read the book (and in the be­gin­ning you’ll need it as a place to start) - but it won’t stick un­less you’re also writ­ing lit­tle pro­grams along­side it. A car­pen­ter gets bet­ter by build­ing things, a writer gets bet­ter by writ­ing things, and a pro­gram­mer gets bet­ter by pro­gram­ming things. This does­n’t mean you should­n’t read books or that good books aren’t ex­tremely valu­able (they are), but that it’s easy to fall into a trap where you read books about pro­gram­ming with­out ac­tu­ally do­ing any­thing your­self be­cause it’s eas­ier to read about it then it is to do it, and it can be dif­fi­cult to come up with some­thing to pro­gram in a vac­uum when you’re start­ing out.

I agree with ESR that Python is a good lan­guage to start with, and there’s a nice site on­line called learn Python the hard way that is fo­cused on be­gin­ners and uses ex­er­cises along the way to teach.

In the be­gin­ning the syn­tax is hard to un­der­stand and a lot of time is spent fo­cused on that when you’re learn­ing. Since every pro­gram­ming lan­guage has dif­fer­ent syn­tax, they seem very dif­fer­ent. Then you start to get a han­dle on syn­tax and it’s more about the gen­eral struc­ture of how prob­lems are be­ing solved and what data struc­tures are used. Eventually you get com­fort­able with com­mon data struc­tures and then the dis­cus­sion turns to higher lev­els of ab­strac­tion and more gen­eral de­signs or in­fra­struc­ture that make things eas­ier to man­age at scale or eas­ier to change in the fu­ture.

Learning about data struc­tures is the most im­por­tant next step af­ter get­ting a han­dle on a the syn­tax of a lan­guage and be­ing able to write sim­ple pro­grams. There are a few core data struc­tures that are pretty well de­tailed in the Cracking the Coding Interview book (along with ex­am­ple prob­lems). Confusingly, lan­guages tend to have dif­fer­ent names for their im­ple­men­ta­tion of the same data struc­tures (Python calls hash ta­bles ‘dictionaries’ for ex­am­ple), but most lan­guages will have some im­ple­men­ta­tion of the core data struc­tures even if they have a unique name.

Troubleshooting or de­bug­ging is also a core pro­gram­ming skill - most of pro­gram­ming is ac­tu­ally de­bug­ging, so if you like de­bug­ging prob­lems this is a prob­a­bly a good sign. Don’t get dis­cour­aged when you have to search around a lot to try and un­der­stand some­thing or when the doc­u­men­ta­tion you’re read­ing does­n’t work, or when you’re hit­ting some un­ex­pected er­ror in your en­vi­ron­ment - this is nor­mal (it is­n’t a re­flec­tion of your abil­ity).

Most soft­ware does­n’t work and there are con­stantly un­doc­u­mented er­rors, bugs, and lit­tle de­tails that are hard to get right. For ex­am­ple, most open source pro­jects on Github will have some sort of build sys­tem which han­dles get­ting the soft­ware con­fig­ured to run. This will do things like pulling in de­pen­den­cies (other code it re­quires to work), along with ex­e­cut­ing any nec­es­sary com­mands to ac­tu­ally get the thing run­ning. If you were to down­load an in­ter­est­ing pro­ject on Github and try to run it you’d prob­a­bly hit un­ex­pected er­rors with this process that are of­ten not doc­u­mented.

Running these er­rors down and work­ing through prob­lems is nor­mal and some­thing ex­pe­ri­enced pro­gram­mers have to deal with too (if we’re lucky we’ve just seen that type of prob­lem be­fore). I’ve seen peo­ple hit er­rors like this and think they’re do­ing some­thing wrong, but it’s not you - it’s just how things are. There are a lot of com­pet­ing tools and even in­dus­tries around build sys­tems and try­ing to make them bet­ter (which can make things more con­fus­ing for be­gin­ners since there’s no real stan­dard­iza­tion, and the right way to con­fig­ure soft­ware to run varies de­pend­ing on pro­gram­ming en­vi­ron­ment and lan­guage).

I re­mem­ber be­ing frus­trated that it was hard to find in­for­ma­tion about how a com­puter ac­tu­ally worked. Everything I looked for just talked about com­put­ers in un­help­ful over­sim­pli­fied analo­gies (the disk be­ing the ‘filing cab­i­net for files’), but noth­ing I could ac­tu­ally read to un­der­stand how things re­ally worked so if trans­ported into the past I would be able to ac­tu­ally ex­plain how to build one. This is more elec­tri­cal or com­puter en­gi­neer­ing than soft­ware specif­i­cally, but there’s still a lot of value in un­der­stand­ing the hard­ware as­pects (and it’s in­ter­est­ing!).

The best book I’d rec­om­mend for this is Code by Charles Petzold. It walks you through the ba­sics start­ing with elec­tri­cal bits all the way up through the his­tory of Boolean logic and cir­cuit de­sign - with ac­tual draw­ings of sim­ple cir­cuits and how you can store bits in mem­ory. This builds on it­self in the his­tor­i­cal con­text of the dis­cov­er­ies un­til you’ve built a small CPU. He also goes into some as­sem­bly and ba­sic com­puter graph­ics. The au­thor is a re­ally clear writer and teacher so the book is sur­pris­ingly read­able for the amount of de­tail.

For more his­tor­i­cal con­text I’d rec­om­mend The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop and Hackers by Steven Levy. Narrative sto­ries make it eas­ier to learn and re­mem­ber things and I think the con­text of the dis­cov­er­ies helps in learn­ing how things ac­tu­ally work.

Tools are fun and it’s good to know your tools, but you can spend for­ever cus­tomiz­ing things and ar­gu­ing over lit­tle de­tails that don’t re­ally mat­ter that much. Customizing tools can be a fun way to learn when you’re start­ing out, but I’ve seen peo­ple spend enor­mous amounts of time on this when it gen­er­ates rel­a­tively lit­tle value com­pared to ac­tu­ally writ­ing pro­grams to solve prob­lems or just learn­ing more about the craft of pro­gram­ming in gen­eral (a good ex­am­ple book for this cur­rently is Designing Data Intensive Applications). I think fo­cus­ing on cus­tomiz­ing tools too much can hold you back.

Don’t worry too much about things like Vim or Emacs or which OS you’re us­ing - you can learn the core skills any­where (this is my biggest dis­agree­ment with ESR’s post). That said, play­ing with Linux was a re­ally valu­able way for me to learn a lot about trou­bleshoot­ing - largely be­cause it did­n’t work very well and I had to spend hours on things like try­ing to get wire­less in­ter­net to func­tion, get­ting the lap­top to sus­pend suc­cess­fully, even get­ting the UI to show up at all (things are a lit­tle bet­ter now).

I started with try­ing to in­stall Gentoo (which never ac­tu­ally suc­ceeded). This trou­bleshoot­ing skill was re­ally in­stru­men­tal in al­low­ing me to get the job I have now, so if it’s fun for you to play with a dif­fer­ent OS I’d def­i­nitely en­cour­age it, I just don’t think it’s a re­quire­ment. It is prob­a­bly eas­ier to learn on ma­cOS or Linux though since most of the ex­ist­ing tool­ing tar­gets those en­vi­ron­ments and most pro­gram­mers are us­ing one of those two.

One spe­cific tool worth men­tion­ing is ver­sion con­trol, specif­i­cally git. It’s worth spend­ing some time get­ting com­fort­able with the ba­sics, but prob­a­bly is­n’t some­thing to fo­cus on un­til af­ter you’ve been pro­gram­ming for a bit.

It’s easy to pro­cras­ti­nate by ‘researching’ op­tions for­ever be­fore start­ing a pro­ject - it can be fun to read about and ex­plore what’s avail­able and it’s good to do a lit­tle of this, but you can also get stuck do­ing this for­ever. When in doubt just pick the most pop­u­lar pro­ject that’s been around for a while and use that one. If it’s pop­u­lar it prob­a­bly has a de­cent com­mu­nity you can learn from and if it’s been around for a while it’ll prob­a­bly be more sta­ble (or at least it’ll be more sub­stan­tial and less likely to be aban­doned).

I re­ally en­joyed study­ing com­puter sci­ence and think it’s still prob­a­bly the best way to go for the most op­por­tu­nity (particularly if you live in a sub­ur­ban area like I did with­out a lot of soft­ware peo­ple around). If pos­si­ble I think it’s prob­a­bly good to try and get into the best CS pro­gram you can. There are also a lot of classes avail­able from good pro­grams on­line, but if your life was like mine was in high school it’ll be hard to ac­tu­ally take ad­van­tage of this at home.

If learn­ing is the naive so­lu­tion to get­ting good grades, then work­ing on cool pro­gram­ming pro­jects is the naive so­lu­tion to do­ing well in pro­gram­ming in­ter­views. To be in a good po­si­tion for pro­gram­ming in­ter­views at com­pet­i­tive com­pa­nies you need to get very com­fort­able with the prob­lems on leet­code and the Cracking the Coding Interview book. Programming in­ter­views re­quire a lot of prac­tice and are a dis­tinct skill to de­velop in and of them­selves.

You can go through an en­tire CS de­gree and still not know how to pro­gram - you can also get a CS de­gree and still not be able to do pro­gram­ming in­ter­views (both of these are prob­a­bly the de­fault case). Learning to pro­gram and learn­ing to do well in pro­gram­ming in­ter­views takes fo­cused time on your own. CS helps with some di­rec­tion and fo­cused pro­jects (Lambda School is prob­a­bly bet­ter at this on the pro­gram­ming side and maybe will end up bet­ter over­all), but you’ll have to own a lot of this learn­ing your­self.

There are lots of dif­fer­ent kinds of roles other than ‘software en­gi­neer’. There’s SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) fo­cused more on in­fra­struc­ture the code is run­ning on and writ­ing soft­ware fo­cused for that. There’s in­ter­nal tools and de­vops - devs that fo­cus on all of the tool­ing re­quired to au­to­mate how the soft­ware is built and tested (read The Phoenix Project for a fun nar­ra­tive story il­lus­trat­ing this). There are roles that in­ter­act more with users like de­vel­oper sup­port en­gi­neer (helping users with APIs and run­ning down bugs or con­fig­u­ra­tion is­sues). There are peo­ple that fo­cus on game en­gines, peo­ple that fo­cus on VR or com­puter graph­ics. There are peo­ple that write new com­puter lan­guages and new com­pil­ers.

In each of these roles there is even more spe­cial­iza­tion de­pend­ing on what prod­ucts are be­ing used and new tools that are be­ing cre­ated to solve new prob­lems. Computer se­cu­rity is also an in­ter­est­ing area that I don’t know too much about that I think ESR is too dis­mis­sive of in his post, but it’s also a hard place to start be­cause it re­quires a lot of ex­ist­ing un­der­stand­ing of how things work to know how things can be bro­ken. I re­mem­ber pick­ing up this book early on, but I did­n’t know enough at the time to re­ally un­der­stand it: Hacking: The Art of Exploitation

Of course there’s also start­ing your own com­pany and build­ing your own role that way too as a founder.

A life­time is a long time and a spe­cial­iza­tion is­n’t for­ever, so dive into dif­fer­ent things - play with a lot of new things and have fun along the way.

ESR talks about join­ing a lo­cal Linux users group, but at least for me that was not re­al­is­tic when I read his post, both be­cause there aren’t re­ally that many of them and be­cause I could­n’t get any­where my­self that eas­ily since I was too young to drive. There are some on­line com­mu­ni­ties that I find in­ter­est­ing now that I think I would have found in­ter­est­ing then too.

Hacker News: Ycombinator’s news site (startup in­cu­ba­tor in the bay area). Comments can be hit or miss, but the good ones are re­ally good and a lot of peo­ple in the in­dus­try hang out there. Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston were the founders of Ycombinator and Paul writes a lot of in­ter­est­ing es­says.

Twitter: Largely de­pen­dent on who you’re fol­low­ing, but can be a great place if you want it to be. It can be hard to know who to fol­low start­ing out, but you can look at every­one I fol­low for a start.

Less Wrong: Not pro­gram­ming fo­cused, but there’s a de­cent amount of over­lap be­tween the ra­tio­nal­ity com­mu­nity and the pro­gram­ming com­mu­nity and I like a lot of the writ­ing there, it’s def­i­nitely some­thing I would have liked to have found around the same time I found How to Become a Hacker. Here’s an ex­am­ple post I like a lot: Disputing Definitions

I have more ar­ti­cles and books that I liked linked in my about page.

I re­mem­ber ESR re­spond­ing to some email I sent about get­ting an iPod to work in Fedora Core 4 around the time I read his post and I’m pretty sure Richard Stallman re­sponded to some email I sent around that time too. I thought that was nice. In the spirit of con­tin­u­ing that, feel free to reach out to me with spe­cific ques­tions if you like.

Solid is a de­clar­a­tive Javascript li­brary for cre­at­ing user in­ter­faces. It does not use a Virtual DOM. Instead it opts to com­pile its tem­plates down to real DOM nodes and wrap up­dates in fine grained re­ac­tions. This way when your state up­dates only the code that de­pends on it runs.

* Real DOM with fine-grained up­dates (No Virtual DOM! No Dirty Checking Digest Loop!).

* Declarative data

Function Components with no need for life­cy­cle meth­ods or spe­cial­ized con­fig­u­ra­tion ob­jects.

* Function Components with no need for life­cy­cle meth­ods or spe­cial­ized con­fig­u­ra­tion ob­jects.

* Fast! Almost in­dis­tin­guish­able per­for­mance vs op­ti­mized painfully im­per­a­tive vanilla DOM code. See Solid on JS Framework Benchmark.

* Small! Completely tree-shake­able Solid’s com­piler will only in­clude parts of the li­brary you use.

im­port { ren­der } from “solid-js/dom”;

const HelloMessage = props => ;

ren­der(

A Simple Component is just a func­tion that ac­cepts prop­er­ties. Solid uses a ren­der func­tion to cre­ate the re­ac­tive mount point of your ap­pli­ca­tion.

The JSX is then com­piled down to ef­fi­cient real DOM ex­pres­sions:

im­port { ren­der, tem­plate, in­sert, cre­ate­Com­po­nent } from “solid-js/dom”;

const _tmpl$ = tem­plate(``);

const HelloMessage = props => {

const _el$ = _tmpl$.cloneNode(true);

in­sert(_el$, () => props.name, null);

re­turn _el$;

ren­der(

() => cre­ate­Com­po­nent(Hel­loMes­sage, { name: “Taylor” }),

doc­u­ment.getEle­ment­ById(“hello-ex­am­ple”)

That _el$ is a real div el­e­ment and props.name, Taylor in this case, is ap­pended to it’s child nodes. Notice that props.name is wrapped in a func­tion. That is be­cause that is the only part of this com­po­nent that will ever ex­e­cute again. Even if a name is up­dated from the out­side only that one ex­pres­sion will be re-eval­u­ated. The com­piler op­ti­mizes ini­tial ren­der and the run­time op­ti­mizes up­dates. It’s the best of both worlds.

You can get started with a sim­ple app with the CLI with by run­ning:

> npm init solid app my-app

npm init solid is avail­able with npm 6+.

Or you can in­stall the de­pen­den­cies in your own pro­ject. To use Solid with JSX (recommended) run:

> npm in­stall solid-js ba­bel-pre­set-solid

Solid’s ren­der­ing is done by the DOM Expressions li­brary. This li­brary pro­vides a generic op­ti­mized run­time for fine grained li­braries like Solid with the op­por­tu­nity to use a num­ber of dif­fer­ent Rendering APIs. The best op­tion is to use JSX pre-com­pi­la­tion with Babel Plugin JSX DOM Expressions to give the small­est code size, clean­est syn­tax, and most per­for­mant code. The com­piler con­verts JSX to na­tive DOM el­e­ment in­struc­tions and wraps dy­namic ex­pres­sions in re­ac­tive com­pu­ta­tions.

The eas­i­est way to get setup is add ba­bel-pre­set-solid to your .babelrc, or ba­bel con­fig for web­pack, or rollup:

“presets”: [“solid”]

Remember even though the syn­tax is al­most iden­ti­cal, there are sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences be­tween how Solid’s JSX works and a li­brary like React. Refer to JSX Rendering for more in­for­ma­tion.

Alternatively in non-com­piled en­vi­ron­ments you can use Tagged Template Literals Lit DOM Expressions or even HyperScript with Hyper DOM Expressions.

For con­ve­nience Solid ex­ports in­ter­faces to run­times for these as:

im­port h from “solid-js/h”;

im­port html from “solid-js/html”;

Remember you still need to in­stall the li­brary sep­a­rately for these to work.

Solid’s data man­age­ment is built off a set of flex­i­ble re­ac­tive prim­i­tives. Similar to React Hooks ex­cept in­stead of whitelist­ing change for an own­ing Component they in­de­pen­den­tally are so­ley re­spon­si­ble for all the up­dates.

Solid’s State prim­i­tive is ar­guably its most pow­er­ful and dis­tinc­tive one. Through the use of prox­ies and ex­plicit set­ters it gives the con­trol of an im­mutable in­ter­face and the per­for­mance of a mu­ta­ble one. The set­ters sup­port a va­ri­ety of forms, but to get started set and up­date state with an ob­ject.

im­port { cre­at­eS­tate, on­Cleanup } from “solid-js”;

const CountingComponent = () => {

const [state, set­State] = cre­at­eS­tate({ counter: 0 });

const in­ter­val = set­Inter­val(

() => set­State({ counter: state.counter + 1 }),

1000

on­Cleanup(() => clear­In­ter­val(in­ter­val));

re­turn ;

Where the magic hap­pens is with com­pu­ta­tions(ef­fects and memos) which au­to­mat­i­cally track de­pen­den­cies.

const [state, set­State] = cre­at­eS­tate({ user: { first­Name: “Jake”, last­Name: “Smith” }})

cre­ate­Ef­fect(() =>

set­State({

dis­play­Name: `${state.user.firstName} ${state.user.lastName}`

con­sole.log(state.dis­play­Name); // Jake Smith

set­State(‘user’, {firstName: “Jacob” });

con­sole.log(state.dis­play­Name); // Jacob Smith

Whenever any de­pen­dency changes the State value will up­date im­me­di­ately. Each set­State state­ment will no­tify sub­scribers syn­chro­nously with all changes ap­plied. This means you can de­pend on the value be­ing set on the next line.

Solid State also ex­poses a rec­on­cile method used with set­State that does deep diff­ing to al­low for au­to­matic ef­fi­cient in­teropt with im­mutable store tech­nolo­gies like Redux, Apollo(GraphQL), or RxJS.

const un­sub­scribe = store.sub­scribe(({ to­dos }) => (

set­State(‘to­dos’, rec­on­cile(to­dos)));

on­Cleanup(() => un­sub­scribe());

Read these two in­tro­duc­tory ar­ti­cles by @aftzl:

And check out the Documentation, Examples, and Articles be­low to get more fa­mil­iar with Solid.

Solid is mostly fea­ture com­plete for its v1.0.0 re­lease. The next re­leases will be mostly bug fixes API tweaks on the road to sta­bil­ity.

WASHINGTON — Twitter, Reddit, and Internet Association filed an am­i­cus brief late yes­ter­day in sup­port of a law­suit filed last year by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, the Brennan Center for Justice, and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP on be­half of plain­tiffs Doc Society and International Documentary Association, chal­leng­ing rules that re­quire nearly all visa ap­pli­cants to reg­is­ter their so­cial me­dia han­dles with the U. S. gov­ern­ment and con­nected poli­cies per­mit­ting the re­ten­tion and dis­sem­i­na­tion of that in­for­ma­tion.

The brief ar­gues that the so­cial me­dia reg­is­tra­tion re­quire­ment and con­nected poli­cies “unquestionably chill a vast quan­tity of speech” and harm the First Amendment rights of their users, par­tic­u­larly those who use pseu­do­ny­mous han­dles to dis­cuss po­lit­i­cal, con­tro­ver­sial, or oth­er­wise sen­si­tive is­sues on the plat­forms.

“[M]any speak­ers use Internet fo­rums like Reddit and Twitter to make state­ments that might pro­voke crit­i­cism or re­tal­i­a­tion from their com­mu­ni­ties. Some em­ploy anony­mous Twitter ac­counts to con­vey dis­fa­vored po­lit­i­cal views or other in­for­ma­tion that could ex­pose them to so­cial stigma or loss of em­ploy­ment,” the brief notes. On Twitter alone, at least a quar­ter of ac­counts do not dis­close a per­son’s full name, and many other ac­counts use pseu­do­nyms. Twitter and Reddit poli­cies clearly pro­tect speak­ers’ anonymity.

Concerns that some users may suf­fer re­tal­i­a­tion be­cause of the re­quire­ment “are par­tic­u­larly acute now, as gov­ern­ments around the world have cracked down on on­line speak­ers who ques­tion au­thor­i­ties’ han­dling of the COVID-19 health cri­sis,” the brief states.

In a state­ment, Jessica Herrera-Flanigan, Twitter Vice President, Public Policy and Philanthropy, for the Americas, said: “Defending and re­spect­ing the voices of the peo­ple who use our ser­vice is one of our core val­ues at Twitter. This value is a two-part com­mit­ment to free­dom of ex­pres­sion and pri­vacy. We be­lieve the gov­ern­men­t’s pol­icy re­quir­ing visa ap­pli­cants to dis­close their so­cial me­dia han­dles in­fringes both of those rights and we are proud to lend our sup­port on these crit­i­cal le­gal is­sues.”

Reddit’s VP & General Counsel Ben Lee said: “Reddit, since its in­cep­tion, has held user pri­vacy as a foun­da­tional value. With this brief we in­tend to de­fend not just our users but all users who are de­ter­mined to main­tain their pri­vacy on the in­ter­net from in­tru­sive over­reach by the gov­ern­ment.”

Read the so­cial me­dia com­pa­nies’ brief here.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and faith-based or­ga­ni­za­tions also filed am­i­cus briefs yes­ter­day sup­port­ing the law­suit, ad­dress­ing, re­spec­tively, how much in­for­ma­tion the gov­ern­ment can glean from so­cial me­dia and the im­pact of the reg­is­tra­tion re­quire­ment on re­li­gious mi­nori­ties around the world. Read the briefs here and here.

Doc Society and the International Documentary Association, U. S.-based doc­u­men­tary film or­ga­ni­za­tions, sued the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security last December. The State Department’s so­cial me­dia reg­is­tra­tion re­quire­ment, which took ef­fect a year ago, ap­plies to an es­ti­mated 14.7 mil­lion visa ap­pli­cants each year, com­pelling them to dis­close all so­cial me­dia han­dles that they’ve used on any of 20 plat­forms, in­clud­ing Twitter and Reddit, in the last five years. The State Department and the Department of Homeland Security can re­tain the col­lected in­for­ma­tion in­def­i­nitely, share it broadly among fed­eral agen­cies, and dis­close it, in some cir­cum­stances, to for­eign gov­ern­ments.

The suit ar­gues that the so­cial me­dia reg­is­tra­tion re­quire­ment forces plain­tiffs’ for­eign mem­bers and part­ners to choose be­tween en­gag­ing in con­sti­tu­tion­ally pro­tected speech and as­so­ci­a­tion and re­main­ing in or trav­el­ing to the United States, frus­trat­ing plain­tiffs’ abil­ity to fos­ter the cross-bor­der cul­tural ex­change at the core of their or­ga­ni­za­tion mis­sions and de­priv­ing their American mem­bers and part­ners of op­por­tu­ni­ties to en­gage with their for­eign coun­ter­parts. In April, the gov­ern­ment filed a mo­tion to dis­miss the law­suit. On Wednesday, the Knight Institute, the Brennan Center, and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP filed a re­sponse. Read the brief here.

For more in­for­ma­tion, con­tact: Lorraine Kenny, Communications Director, Knight First Amendment Institute, lor­raine.kenny@knight­co­lum­bia.org.

Since the pan­demic started, there’s been ap­prox­i­mately 61,260 tech lay­offs [1]. Close to 30% of the lay­offs came from pub­lic tech com­pa­nies, 85% of those com­pa­nies are un­prof­itable.

No deep in­sights here, just the sim­ple fact that the once growth hy­per fo­cused star­tups grew to be pub­licly traded com­pa­nies with­out ever sort­ing their unit eco­nom­ics, and now their medioc­racy has real con­se­quences on real peo­ple.

This in­cludes house­hold names such as Uber, Lyft, Casper, and Eventbrite which we’ve all used, and begs the ques­tion: why did we al­low so many un­prof­itable com­pa­nies IPO? When did los­ing money be­come ac­cept­able and the new nor­mal for pub­licly traded com­pa­nies?

Chamath Palihapitiya’s “VC Ponzi Scheme” mono­logue comes to mind. It also makes me won­der why we made such a big deal about WeWork’s IPO fi­asco yet we don’t talk about the de­plorable shape of some of the ma­ture tech com­pa­nies and their con­se­quences on our com­mu­nity.

Here’s to a new gen­er­a­tion of en­tre­pre­neurs who pri­or­i­tize build­ing sus­tain­able busi­nesses.

Microsoft has now ad­mit­ted it failed to give due credit to Canadian de­vel­oper Keivan Beigi for his role in the new WinGet Windows 10 pack­age man­ager.

Last week, Beigi, who built the open-source AppGet pack­age man­ager for Windows, ac­cused Microsoft of copy­ing his work for WinGet with­out ac­knowl­edg­ing his pro­duc­t’s in­flu­ence.

Beigi says Microsoft copied large parts of AppGet to de­liver WinGet, the Windows pack­age man­ager an­nounced at Microsoft Build 2020. Last week, he de­tailed his dis­cus­sions with a se­nior man­ager at Microsoft named Andrew who ap­proached him in July 2019 with an in­vi­ta­tion to meet and dis­cuss “how we can make your life eas­ier build­ing AppGet”.

Andrew Clinick, a group pro­gram man­ager on the team re­spon­si­ble for how apps in­stall on Windows, has now ad­mit­ted Microsoft failed to give Beigi proper credit for AppGet’s in­flu­ence on WinGet.

“Our goal is to pro­vide a great prod­uct to our cus­tomers and com­mu­nity where every­one can con­tribute and re­ceive recog­ni­tion,” wrote Clinick.

“The last thing that we want to do is alien­ate any­one in the process. That is why we are build­ing it on GitHub in the open where every­one can con­tribute.

“Over the past cou­ple of days we’ve lis­tened and learned from our com­mu­nity and clearly we did not live up to this goal. More specif­i­cally, we failed to live up to this with Keivan and AppGet. This was the last thing that we wanted.”

Beigi said he did­n’t mind that Microsoft copied his open-source Windows pack­age man­ager but ar­gued that Microsoft should have at least prop­erly at­trib­uted WinGet’s de­sign to AppGet, rather than de­scrib­ing it in Beigi’s words as only “another pack­age man­ager that just hap­pened to ex­ist”.

AppGet got one pass­ing men­tion in Mi­crosoft’s WinGet an­nounce­ment af­ter Microsoft de­scribed ri­val Windows pack­age man­ager Chocolatey as hav­ing a “vibrant com­mu­nity with a mas­sive col­lec­tion of ap­pli­ca­tions, and a rich his­tory sup­port­ing both open-source and en­ter­prise cus­tomers”.

“There are many oth­ers like AppGet, Npackd and the PowerShell based OneGet pack­age man­ager-man­ager,” Microsoft added.

Despite the be­lated credit, Microsoft’s han­dling of AppGet and WinGet has been clumsy, in­sen­si­tive and spoiled by “slow and dread­ful com­mu­ni­ca­tion speed”, per Beigi’s ac­count.

Some would ar­gue that Microsoft should have given Beigi proper credit with­out the de­vel­oper rais­ing the is­sue in the first place — es­pe­cially given Microsoft’s efforts to shed its im­age as an evil com­pany that waged war on open source and which once fol­lowed the mantra “embrace, ex­tend, and ex­tin­guish”.

Sometimes Microsoft buys de­vel­op­ers’ side pro­jects, like the VisualZip util­ity, which was ac­quired from the same Microsoft en­gi­neer who also cre­ated Windows Task Manager in his den back in the 1990s.

The pass­ing men­tion of AppGet was an­other sore point for Beigi, who in 2018 wrote how prob­lems with Chocolatey in­spired him to re­vive the AppGet pro­ject that Microsoft would even­tu­ally be in­ter­ested in. AppGet cur­rently has over 800 pack­ages that it can in­stall on Windows.

The Canadian de­vel­oper says Andrew emailed him a week af­ter their first meet­ing and told Beigi he had “an op­por­tu­nity to help de­fine the fu­ture of Windows and app dis­tri­b­u­tion through­out Azure/Microsoft 365”, po­ten­tially as an em­ployee where he would join Microsoft and it would get AppGet.

He went for an in­ter­view at Microsoft’s Redmond head­quar­ters in December, which ap­par­ently “went well”,  but Andrew did­n’t in­form him he would not get the job at Microsoft un­til six months later —  on the day be­fore the WinGet pre­view would be un­veiled at Build 2020.

“We give AppGet a call out in our blog post too since we be­lieve there will be space for dif­fer­ent pack­age man­agers on win­dows,” Andrew told Beigi.

“You will see our pack­age man­ager is based on GitHub too but ob­vi­ously with our own im­ple­men­ta­tion etc. Our pack­age man­ager will be open source too so ob­vi­ously we would wel­come any con­tri­bu­tion from you.”

Fortunately for Beigi, he was­n’t sure he wanted to work for such a big com­pany and he was­n’t ex­cited about the prospect of mov­ing from Canada to the US. However, Beigi has de­cided the prod­uct and pro­ject will now be re­tired on August 1 be­cause of the ex­is­tence of Microsoft’s WinGet.

Clinick’s post, which is­n’t an apol­ogy, con­firms Beigi’s ac­count and de­tails how AppGet helped Microsoft achieve a “better prod­uct di­rec­tion” for WinGet:

* No scripts dur­ing in­stall — some­thing that we com­pletely agreed with and don’t al­low with MSIX.

* Rich man­i­fest de­f­i­n­i­tion within GitHub — the power of be­ing open com­bined with rich de­clar­a­tive meta data about the app is so im­por­tant to meet goal #1.

* Seamless up­dates for ap­pli­ca­tions in the repos­i­tory.

As mil­lions of peo­ple across the coun­try take to the streets and raise their voices in re­sponse to the killing of George Floyd and the on­go­ing prob­lem of un­equal jus­tice, many peo­ple have reached out ask­ing how we can sus­tain mo­men­tum to bring about real change.

Ultimately, it’s go­ing to be up to a new gen­er­a­tion of ac­tivists to shape strate­gies that best fit the times. But I be­lieve there are some ba­sic lessons to draw from past ef­forts that are worth re­mem­ber­ing.

First, the waves of protests across the coun­try rep­re­sent a gen­uine and le­git­i­mate frus­tra­tion over a decades-long fail­ure to re­form po­lice prac­tices and the broader crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem in the United States. The over­whelm­ing ma­jor­ity of par­tic­i­pants have been peace­ful, coura­geous, re­spon­si­ble, and in­spir­ing. They de­serve our re­spect and sup­port, not con­dem­na­tion — some­thing that po­lice in cities like Camden and Flint have com­mend­ably un­der­stood.

On the other hand, the small mi­nor­ity of folks who’ve re­sorted to vi­o­lence in var­i­ous forms, whether out of gen­uine anger or mere op­por­tunism, are putting in­no­cent peo­ple at risk, com­pound­ing the de­struc­tion of neigh­bor­hoods that are of­ten al­ready short on ser­vices and in­vest­ment and de­tract­ing from the larger cause. I saw an el­derly black woman be­ing in­ter­viewed to­day in tears be­cause the only gro­cery store in her neigh­bor­hood had been trashed. If his­tory is any guide, that store may take years to come back. So let’s not ex­cuse vi­o­lence, or ra­tio­nal­ize it, or par­tic­i­pate in it. If we want our crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem, and American so­ci­ety at large, to op­er­ate on a higher eth­i­cal code, then we have to model that code our­selves.

Second, I’ve heard some sug­gest that the re­cur­rent prob­lem of racial bias in our crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem proves that only protests and di­rect ac­tion can bring about change, and that vot­ing and par­tic­i­pa­tion in elec­toral pol­i­tics is a waste of time. I could­n’t dis­agree more. The point of protest is to raise pub­lic aware­ness, to put a spot­light on in­jus­tice, and to make the pow­ers that be un­com­fort­able; in fact, through­out American his­tory, it’s of­ten only been in re­sponse to protests and civil dis­obe­di­ence that the po­lit­i­cal sys­tem has even paid at­ten­tion to mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ties. But even­tu­ally, as­pi­ra­tions have to be trans­lated into spe­cific laws and in­sti­tu­tional prac­tices — and in a democ­racy, that only hap­pens when we elect gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials who are re­spon­sive to our de­mands.

Moreover, it’s im­por­tant for us to un­der­stand which lev­els of gov­ern­ment have the biggest im­pact on our crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem and po­lice prac­tices. When we think about pol­i­tics, a lot of us fo­cus only on the pres­i­dency and the fed­eral gov­ern­ment. And yes, we should be fight­ing to make sure that we have a pres­i­dent, a Congress, a U. S. Justice Department, and a fed­eral ju­di­ciary that ac­tu­ally rec­og­nize the on­go­ing, cor­ro­sive role that racism plays in our so­ci­ety and want to do some­thing about it. But the elected of­fi­cials who mat­ter most in re­form­ing po­lice de­part­ments and the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem work at the state and lo­cal lev­els.

It’s may­ors and county ex­ec­u­tives that ap­point most po­lice chiefs and ne­go­ti­ate col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing agree­ments with po­lice unions. It’s dis­trict at­tor­neys and state’s at­tor­neys that de­cide whether or not to in­ves­ti­gate and ul­ti­mately charge those in­volved in po­lice mis­con­duct. Those are all elected po­si­tions. In some places, po­lice re­view boards with the power to mon­i­tor po­lice con­duct are elected as well. Unfortunately, voter turnout in these lo­cal races is usu­ally piti­fully low, es­pe­cially among young peo­ple — which makes no sense given the di­rect im­pact these of­fices have on so­cial jus­tice is­sues, not to men­tion the fact that who wins and who loses those seats is of­ten de­ter­mined by just a few thou­sand, or even a few hun­dred, votes.

So the bot­tom line is this: if we want to bring about real change, then the choice is­n’t be­tween protest and pol­i­tics. We have to do both. We have to mo­bi­lize to raise aware­ness, and we have to or­ga­nize and cast our bal­lots to make sure that we elect can­di­dates who will act on re­form.

Finally, the more spe­cific we can make de­mands for crim­i­nal jus­tice and po­lice re­form, the harder it will be for elected of­fi­cials to just of­fer lip ser­vice to the cause and then fall back into busi­ness as usual once protests have gone away. The con­tent of that re­form agenda will be dif­fer­ent for var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ties. A big city may need one set of re­forms; a rural com­mu­nity may need an­other. Some agen­cies will re­quire whole­sale re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion; oth­ers should make mi­nor im­prove­ments. Every law en­force­ment agency should have clear poli­cies, in­clud­ing an in­de­pen­dent body that con­ducts in­ves­ti­ga­tions of al­leged mis­con­duct. Tailoring re­forms for each com­mu­nity will re­quire lo­cal ac­tivists and or­ga­ni­za­tions to do their re­search and ed­u­cate fel­low cit­i­zens in their com­mu­nity on what strate­gies work best.

But as a start­ing point, here’s a re­port and toolkit de­vel­oped by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and based on the work of the Task Force on 21st Century Policing that I formed when I was in the White House. And if you’re in­ter­ested in tak­ing con­crete ac­tion, we’ve also cre­ated a ded­i­cated site at the Obama Foundation to ag­gre­gate and di­rect you to use­ful re­sources and or­ga­ni­za­tions who’ve been fight­ing the good fight at the lo­cal and na­tional lev­els for years.

I rec­og­nize that these past few months have been hard and dispir­it­ing — that the fear, sor­row, un­cer­tainty, and hard­ship of a pan­demic have been com­pounded by tragic re­minders that prej­u­dice and in­equal­ity still shape so much of American life. But watch­ing the height­ened ac­tivism of young peo­ple in re­cent weeks, of every race and every sta­tion, makes me hope­ful. If, go­ing for­ward, we can chan­nel our jus­ti­fi­able anger into peace­ful, sus­tained, and ef­fec­tive ac­tion, then this mo­ment can be a real turn­ing point in our na­tion’s long jour­ney to live up to our high­est ideals.