SeeDave

I like nano and prefer how it navigates text to vim. If vim works for you then great but... nano is just fine for me!

I'm not shivering in a cave drinking water, sitting in the dark, and wondering if I'll get lucky and catch a squirrel to eat tomorrow. That is, if I can walk on my broken ankle.

Sadly, there are millions of people who live in conditions not to dissimilar from this. Technology might not always help.

I actually know that intersection (3rd/Pike) quite well and think the issue is more the 7/11, cigar shop, and major bus transfer point than the McDonalds in attracting loiterers/criminals.

I was wondering how it was possible for Macy's retail employees to work in the mall prior to Amazon's purchase, but how it was unsuitable for software engineers. Surely at one point the Macy's employees were selling fancy clothes, perfumes, and housewares from that location...

I'm curious... how is it possible for mall/retail employees to work there but not engineering teams?

If you want to feel old:

2020 - 2006 = 14. 2006 - 14 = 1992. When the 'World Wide Web' first launched....

I once heard that Meetup is "one night stand for friends"

I promise, it wont be overnight, but it will be FAST. you will feel better, youll make friends without even trying. Its impossible to go through an hour of physical suffering every day with the same people and not end up gradually talking more and getting to know each other.

I really encourage people to try a martial art like boxing, muay thai, or brazilian jiu jitsu once COVID lockdowns are over.

These sports are extremely effective at fighting depression and loneliness for a couple of reasons:

1. You get plenty of one-on-one interaction

2. Shared suffering really does create bonds

3. There is a lot of positive validation ("great jab!", "nice hook")

4. You will see the same people 2,3,4 times a week

5. Exercise releases endorphins

6. You will be proud of how your body changes for the better

7. You will get many compliments on your new figure

8. You will get more romantic interest (looks do matter, and doing a fun/exciting sport can be bonus points in dating)

<Batch>batchid=363777811 status=Done dateandtime=09/18/2007 09:53:10 PDT activateditems=335 numberofwarnings=0 itemsnotacivated=17 </Batch>

Philosophically speaking, is this any different than 'syntactic salt' for a 'Batch' JSON object? ;)

Perhaps I'm missing something here, or may be an arrogant internet neckbeard, but I'm always confused as to why people are often so eager/excited by dark mode (e.g. Slack around a year ago, or GitHub today)

Isn't the implementation of 'Dark Mode' little more than a CSS Color palette and a toggle switch nested somewhere in user settings?

Are people celebrating the usability over the technical feat?

Seems like much ado about nothing :/

I would prefer a university structure where B.S. + M.S. is earned in four years by focusing on core major requirements to then have humanities courses offered at no cost via the alumni association as part of continuing education throughout one's twenties.

I was pretty unimpressed by Zoom as I used to think along the lines of "bro just open up a WebRTC connection. You can use socket.io it's super simple"

Then... I attended a "Zoom Nightclub" and saw over 200 attendees streaming video to one another. All encryption, routed through China, etc. issues aside; I was very very impressed.

UberEats is a real head-scratcher as almost all of the key players, from my perspective, have expressed dissatisfaction to some extent:

1. Restaurants as UberEats charges a fee often greater than the restaurant's own profitability

2. Restaurants as there is a real fear that Uber is gathering data for customer tastes/habits to then give priority to CloudKitchens™ or some other variant on commissary kitchen/virtual restaurants

3. Customers who are shocked by the fully-loaded cost (menu, fee, delivery, tip)

4. Drivers as they barely earn a living wage and put considerable wear and tear on their vehicles

5. Potential investors due to heavy losses generated by subsidizing this entire operation

6. White collar Employees as they are baited/strung along with generous RSU grants to then be overworked at a pace which would make a full vesting impossible

This is really strange because the Indian Dabbawala[0] industry has been operating continuously for 100+ years and one would think that across-the-board PPP/COL adjustments would allow for similar sustainability.

Is there any other industry where almost 100% of everyone involved is currently miserable or are at risk of being disappointed by long-run results?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala

Assets tend to be very large (double digits gigabytes), so having fast connectivity is expected in many situations, and slower home connections are rather painful for that.

If that were the case... I would probably look into using X-windows forwarding or remote desktop. Wouldn't it make more sense to keep all assets on the on-prem network instead of sending it back/forth to the employee's remote workstation?

Maybe this was just that night or just this one restaurant, but it kinda shocked me.

This may be a "German thing"; I remember being a bit surprised when I ate lunch with a vendor from Germany and he ate a hamburger and french fries with a knife and fork.

pluto.tv and coursera are great free alternatives that can entertain and educate :)

Yet it's been shown multiple times that the games running on Stadia are running at less than promised quality, with techniques like upscaling being used for 4K instead of native 4K

I remember having tons of fun playing Portal and Left 4 Dead with buddies in my dorm room when 720p was pretty high end. Is 4K really that necessary to have a good time with a video game?

Or perhaps I'm... officially old :(

Boom de yada.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16732664

"Bro, I'll just get some other nerd to do it. Instagram was built by 12 guys and WhatsApp was acquired for $19B with only 50 engineers. Can't ship if you whine; so shape up and stop wasting time!"

/s

This is an extremely provocative title which I hope the mods will swiftly change and/or censure.

I often find myself thinking "Stallman was right!" when it comes to FOSS/privacy but there is a zero-percent chance I will ever defend Epstein's organized, systematic, and continuous abuse of children.

And shame on everyone who refers to him as a "disgraced financier" and his victims as "underage women."

This isn't a pearl-clutching instance of "think of the children" so much as a totally human response based on the litany of evidence that child abuse _ruins lives_ (Google 'Borderline Personality Disorder')

Hey, thanks for your response! Great article and you guys are definitely in a good place now (yay Dark mode!) Your iterative approach to course-correction was absolutely the way to go so hats off for a job well done.

When you're focused on maintaining and building toward better reliability, it's harder to slow down and centralize principles, components, etc.

Been there, done that, got the T-Shirt. Routing in Angular, API design and versioning, CMS integration, and more. I get it.

In the end, it's difficult to get people to agree to one thing, much more so when you're adding more and more people to the mix.

There are probably a dozen relevant Dilberts on design-by-committee which are probably amplified by the egos and inexperience of dozens of 2x-year olds working at $hottest_unicorn. I strongly suspect that you are a very kind, patient, and understanding man.

We're in a much better place now. More than just having an interface library, we've created a framework for debating the various parts of the system and reinforcing that understanding that was missing early on.

Congratulations, again. My sincerest apologies for focusing on the 'start line' when your article was about the race. Hindsight is absolutely 20/20 so hats off for a job well done and thanks for the follow-up.

In 2016, Slack was two years old and already used by millions of people. Our codebase had grown rapidly, and like many companies that focused on product/market fit, our code was built in a way that favored time-to-market over maintainability, consistency, or reusability.

What does a button look like in Slack? How do you build it? What words do you put in it? It was up to individual teams to make these decisions.

I am really surprised that their engineering org took so long to see the long-term payoff of common CSS components/styling when it comes to linting, minifying, and caching on web and sizing/spacing/scaling on native mobile. I am even more surprised that their product team didn't consider a unifying "brandfeel" from the get-go. If your goal is to _scale_ and _scale fast_ while being a judicious steward of VC monies... wouldn't you want to eliminate as much wheel-reinventing as possible?

I say this without any gratuitous negativity/internet holier-than-thouism... I just wouldn't expect this level of "bespoke craftsmanship" for a solved problem like common theming/styling in a engineering org at their series F stage with Accel, a16z, and KPCB already on the cap table. Weird.

I visited the Amazon Go store on Market St. in SF. I really enjoyed the convenience of not waiting in line.

With that said, the Richard Stallman in me still regrets giving Amazon the opportunity to capture HD video of me in meatspace that is linked to my customer profile.

I totally understand Waterfall vs Agile. Story points, grooming, estimates, continuous release, potentially shippable product, etc.

I actually agree with the Scrum Guide [0], so my problem isn't with Agile; it's with this specific Agile Consultant who doesn't seem to "get" that process is often a proxy for talent/trust/respect and is just winging-it/BSing us all.

Imagine Bill Lumbergh from Office Space with a ton of two-day CS[a-Z]+ certifications who has never written a single line of code, designed a relational database, spec'ed out an API, etc. micromanaging every meeting while fundamentally misunderstanding the concepts of "collaboration" and "cross-functional teams." He knows what to talk about but has such a superficial understanding that he doesn't know why it's useful or when to apply concepts. Google 'Cargo Cult Agile'

[0] https://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html

I am 'OK' in the sense that I like all of my colleagues and really do enjoy my work as a technical product manager.

What's not 'OK' is that a snake-oil salesman/professional bullshitter who calls himself an 'Agile Consultant' has embedded himself in the organization. He's an all-talk arrogant blowhard with a savior complex centered around rescuing us from 'Waterfall'.

What's not 'OK' in my personal life: I've been having a difficult time attracting and maintaining the interest of intellectually/romantically compatible women in the brutally competitive SF Bay Area dating scene for late 20s/early 30s geeky dudes. That's my fault though... I really need to start working out, eating healthier, whiten teeth, dress better, get a life outside of work, buy a car, and learn how to _have fun_ again.

Will the US economy experience a recession in the next...

100 years? Yes!!!!

50 years? Yes!!!

25 years? Yes!!

12.5 years? Yes!

6.25 years? Yes

3.125 years? Yes?

1.5625 years? Maybe

.78125 years? Maybe?

.390625 years? No?

0.1953125 years? No

0.09765625 years? No!

I think you're onto something; which is why I tend to keep my neckbeardy know-it-all skepticism to myself. I've got an angel on one shoulder (ALL ABOUT THE EXECUTION, BRO!) and a devil on the other (who more closely resembles 'Comic Book Guy' from The Simpsons) and would tend towards optimism and hope that the founders pull it off.

With that said... I see Amazon Fresh/Prime Now and think... "WebVan" I see UberEats/DoorDash and think... "2 Go Services" formerly "Dinner Delivery Plus" I see Carvana and think... CarMax

But then there are the exceptions which have turned out to be truly exceptional. Think Facebook/Myspace, Instagram/Flickr, Google/AltaVista, AirBNB/Couchsurfing, reddit/digg, AWS/Rackspace.

With that said... I'm really not so hot about WeWork. I hope it works out but there is so much weirdness around the company and founder that I will not be investing. Very entertaining to see article after article about it, I hope things work out for the honest rank-and-file, but I really do suspect that the WeWork IPO (or lack thereof) will have a much needed chilling effect on the overheated tech economy of the last decade.

N3 Cattle Ranch with 50,000 acres of land is on sale for $72m.

Proposition C will raise $300m per year.

Why not buy this cattle ranch and build all sorts of mental health, addiction treatment, job training, etc. facilities?

[0] https://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/N3-Cattle-Company-...

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/SF-Prop-C-homel...

Thanks for the clarification! I was really scratching my head there based on the apples to oranges comparison of 'customers' to 'users' and you were right... my revenue estimate was indeed way off.

Upgrading Slack from 'WTF' to "Let's see how this plays out and if it's priced accurately' because $30m in losses on $145m in revenue for cloud enterprise chat with a long-tail of free-tier users seems pretty promising!

Thanks again!

I don't know enough about the Slack product or business model to comment authoritatively, but I'm really confused how they're losing money (and so much of it) and I sense a bit of "weirdness" around unit economics/user conversion/pricing.

I've long thought that they've essentially built beautiful native/mobile/web clients for IRC-type chats and provide hosting/IRCOp services. Charging per-seat to enterprise seems like a very, very lucrative proposition for this type of product/service.

There are a couple of eyebrow-raising financials:

1.) 100,000 paid users @ $6.67-$15/mo = $667k-1.5m MRR = $2m-$4.5m QRR

2.) 13m DAUs @ $0/mo (free tier)

3.) They lost $30m Q3 '18

4.) They lost $300m Q4 '19 due to 'stock based compensation' (which from my perspective should have been accrued Q4 '15 onwards)

And for all the above... a $5billion unicorn valuation considering chat is a solved problem?

Three major questions:

1. Has any other SaaS or company in human history ever had a 1:130 ratio of paid:free users with a hard cap of $15 on MRR?

2. Does quarterly losses between $30-$300m on $4.5m in revenue make sense considering the unit economics of cloud-based chats?

3. Does 100k paid subscribers seem a bit low for a 6 year old company?

Really weird situation from my "knows enough to be dangerous" perspective and I'm all ears because from my perspective:

1.) There's really not enough innovation or a big enough TAM (considering competitors) to drive a unicorn valuation

2.) Which shouldn't matter because this is still a potentially lucrative market

3.) And yet... they're losing money hand-over fist

Weird, weird weird. Feel free to share your thoughts, I just ask that you consider this message comes from a perspective of "confused guy trying to make sense of these crazy times"

You most likely received a discounted interest rate on your loan in-line with anti-typing exceptions outlined in 12 CFR 225.7

For reference: https://www.occ.treas.gov/news-issuances/bulletins/1995/bull...