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Zaphod's just this guy - y'know?

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The first time I went to work here a few months ago I got out of the Lyft around 9am and two meters away a homeless man was injecting something into his veins. My office is in the Mission.

Some parts of San Francisco are very dirty and the homeless issue is not exaggerated. Everybody knows about the Tenderloin at night.

With that being said, I drove across the US two years ago and if you keep your eyes open you realize it is all over - Portland and Seattle are no better, just less talked about.

My rent is $1300, I live with one roommate on Russian Hill. I'm flexible and lucky so this is not representative. A girl I know who works at Google lives in inner Richmond (arguably a less desirable area) by herself and pays nearly triple for some reason.

It is hard to find a proper gym for less than a Benjamin and food is above average for an American city but hilariously expensive. Good way to gauge is pick some fast food chain and compare, Dennys is x2 here than the rest of the country.

All in all this place isn't the shiny happy city you'd imagine from watching Full House or or the counter culture epicenter of hippie times gone by. It doesn't suck, I'd definitely visit for a week or two if you have never been, and there's a lot of history here but in the end it is no longer a very remarkable place to live.

For a pinch of irony the founder is Israeli: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Neumann https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOb_ogQJWeI

tl;dw - "As of 2 years ago 98% only young entrepreneurs, as of today 30% of all of our members are enterprise, corporate America.

23% of all Fortune 500 companies are already in WeWork.

..If they want a satellite office they'll just put it in a WeWork, if they are looking for an HQ or they want to redo their HQ they'll ask us to do it.

And today we don't even take the space - we will redesign the space, build it, deploy our technology which is called WeOS and took a long time to create and put our community managers in there.

I would love to do it for city hall, in fact if any mayors are listening: we.co/mayors"

I believe in this instance it is the author wanting to level up on AWK and Go. The value is learning and fun.

An AWK interpreter written in Go is unlikely to be an improvement, except, well here is another blog post you might be interested in that has a similar sense of adventurous tinkering (it's about improving on grep): https://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/old-age-and-treachery....

That's from 2006 and the tl;dr was graybeards did things a certain way for a reason. And yet nowadays with have things like rg (and ag and a bunch of others).

Ah, darn, I'm a few hours late so you will probably miss it but I wanted to ask for a long time:

Sounds like a lot of stuff like this has accumulated. Your dedication to backwards compatibility (and testing) is always very impressive, but don't you ever get the urge to do a parallel "SQLite Next" effort as it were? Kind of like python had the 2/3 years.

Continuously the last two years, 30+ countries. :)

What kind of details are you looking for? I unbox at the Apple store and:

- Temporarily turn off Spotlight & Time Machine (Permanently) because it helpfully tries to index everything and tinker with a handful of system preferences while a memorized curl|bash runs

Mostly appearance related. This can also be automated but doesn't seem worth it as it only takes a minute. I don't use iCloud.

- Selective sync with Dropbox (which was just installed for me), mostly for the 1Password folder, while the rest of the script runs. Read HN or better yet about the new surroundings.

- Manually run software update and reboot into my now familiar machine

- Turn spotlight back on

I do forget to remap the esc key each time I do this, or the name of the thingie that helps you do that, that's about the only noticeable difference between old and new machines.

I have been using 12" MacBooks since they came out because I live out of a backpack and travel a lot.

I cannot find anything comparable in terms of size/weight/battery and build quality. Especially the trackpad, nothing is remotely close. Otherwise I'd get that and put Arch on it.

People complain Apple is expensive, not so sure. The TCO may actually be less because of the high resale value. It is also more convenient.

More than once when faced with crossing an annoying border (TSA, sigh) I'd sell the Macbook at my origin and simply pickup a new one at the destination. Thirty minutes in-and-out of the Apple store, they all seem to have exceptionally fast wifi, and setup handled via a curl-to-bash of mine gets me exactly back to where I started, down to the sessions..

Since my points of origin usually have higher Apple prices due to currency/taxes, I end up accidentally eking out a profit after months of use per machine.

If you can't be arsed with the above consider this: Their retail global presence is getting to be quite complete, even coming to Samsung land (Seoul, behold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt4ldH5vQCQ) and Tel Aviv finally along with some others. Most big airport hub cities will have an Apple store close by.

Stuff gets broken or stolen and yet with this setup I'm generally never 24 hours away from my exact laptop setup...

There is no alternative. I feel trapped.

Agreed.

With that said, some none negligible chunk of the issues you linked fall into cosmetic (better error message), proposals, works as intended (docs could improve) or self inflicted misconfigurations of running a go beta. 53 sounds worse than it is.

I don't know why this had so much drama around it to be honest. And yes, it is far from perfect, it will be approximately as crummy as python/ruby/node which is still an improvement.

Ever been to a place with a fancy receptionist exclusively running Google Calendar in one browser tab taking up less than 35% of a HUGE iMac screen?

A pretty enclosure can be worth more than its contents, just accept it as a piece of furniture.

I'm sure you wouldn't scoff at PC gaming rigs with pretty flashing LED lights after all.

You actually want to "brew install pyenv" And then "pyenv install 3.7" or whatever version you're after.

Multiple versions of programming languages don't require docker, containers, or Nix, that is utter insanity.

Wellington is like a smaller (and much more windy) San Francisco. Having just finished driving 12,000km tip-to-tip, that might be the one spot that's dense enough to amount to something.

I can't emphasize enough how rural the rest of this country is.

New Zealand is a victim of its success in tourism. Everything is geared towards that. Imagine living somewhere like Denver, CO but with SF prices and depressed software salaries. It's a wonderful place but even with all things being equal bureaucracy wise (and they aren't), the list of places ahead of Wellington is two miles long.

"The result was a system composed of many wavefronts of change: some systems were automated with Puppet, some with Terraform, some used ECS and others used straight EC2.

In 2012 we were proud to have an architecture that could evolve so frequently, letting us experiment continually, discovering what worked and doing more of it.

In 2017, however, we finally recognised that things had changed.

AWS is significantly more complex today than when we started using it. It provides an incredible amount of choice and power but not without cost. Any team that interacts with EC2 today must now navigate decisions on VPCs , networking and many, many more."

Of course, this time, it is different.

My pet theory is that valuation is in part derived from engineer head count.

Please note that this isn't a "I could build twitter in a weekend, why do they even have so many people" comment. I am not privy to the scope of work inside of AirBnB and can't really comment whether a large amount of inefficiency exists - but if it does, perhaps this is a plausible explanation as to how that can be.

For an earlier stage company some mental gymnastics can justify the statement that in the event the startup doesn't become a unicorn 100 engineers are still "worth $100m" to big corporate buyers as a sort of big acquihire. This provides a hedge against failure.

It also provides arguably necessary redundancy during a volatile growth stage. A higher bus factor if you will. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

And so a slightly inflated head count early on based on the above principals ensures that bureaucracy, having reached critical mass, keeps on expanding.

At the present point, there's no plausible scenario for 100 to be reduced to 25 when the company is growing and doing well.

If AirBnB suffers a calamity and its network effects somehow start disintegrating, holding on to these people could ultimately increase the sale price - the brand would have suffered, the apartment inventory is reduced, but you're still left with IP and engineers to hawk.

In the event there are no buyers you could significantly stretch out the runway by multiple rounds of layoffs from this group, claim a successful turn around with the fat trimmed, and raise a new round of financing.

This is beta.

250,000 map initializations 25,000 service requests

Per day. Correct me (it is quite late here) if I'm wrong but isn't this x10 the Google maps free tier?

No pricing information beyond this so far, they just suggest you contact them if you want more. They're probably still deciding.

Edit: I think Apple are specifically releasing it now because this week was the week the new Google Maps Platform (https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/) pay as you go pricing kicks in, the deadline has been pushed back by a month.

Under the new pricing you get $200 worth of credits as a monthly free tier which approximately maps (har har) to what this Apple beta gives you a day.

I can't decide if celebrity suicides are just more frequently reported these days or suicides overall have actually increased because we live in, what we collectively perceive as, darker times.

I suspect it is the latter, but I don't have the heart to google it.

Every Robin Williams, Chris Cornell, Anthony Bourdain no doubt causes a bit of a ripple of none famous suicides and thus this news is doubly sad.

In Defense of Puns 8 years ago

There is no kind of false wit which has been so recommended by the practice of all ages as that which consists in a jingle of words, and is comprehended under the general name of punning.

It is indeed impossible to kill a weed which the soil has a natural disposition to produce. The seeds of punning are in the minds of all men, and though they may be subdued by reason, reflection, and good sense, they will be very apt to shoot up in the greatest genius that is not broken and cultivated by the rules of art. Imitation is natural to us, and when it does not raise the mind to poetry, painting, music, or other more noble arts, it often breaks out in puns and quibbles.

..I shall here define it to be a conceit arising from the use of two words that agree in the sound, but differ in the sense. The only way, therefore, to try a piece of wit is to translate it into a different language. If it bear the test, you may pronounce it true; but if it vanish in the experiment you may conclude it to have been a pun. In short, one may say of a pun, as the countryman described his nightingale, that it is a "vox et prczterea nihil"–"a sound, and nothing but a sound."

Here's the bit that resonates with issues often discussed on HN:

"I believe that Marx and Engels would have regretted not anticipating the manifesto’s impact on the communist parties it foreshadowed. They would be kicking themselves that they overlooked the kind of dialectic they loved to analyse: how workers’ states would become increasingly totalitarian in their response to capitalist state aggression, and how, in their response to the fear of communism, these capitalist states would grow increasingly civilized."