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crashedsnow

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I don't see it as a relic, or a bad one. Some people can't just up and move to a cheaper location for a job they don't know they'll have in a year's time. How do you decide what to pay? Paying based on "experience and merit" needs to be anchored on something, so you just end up either massively over-paying someone in a location that's cheap, or massively under-paying someone in an expensive area. If you want to pay everyone like they live in Zurich, then more power to you but doesn't seem sensible from a business management standpoint and the person in North Carolina would probably be over the moon at half that. Any company with shareholders is accountable first to them (for good or bad) and I'm not sure your board or CFO would agree that paying peak makes sense

+1. Outside hourly contractors, if you have a clear sense of what impact/outcome you're seeking, time of day or number of hours shouldn't matter. Often I suspect it's a proxy for NOT having a clear idea of the desired outcomes. Removing a requirement for "8 hours a day" can even be a good forcing function to ensure you DO have a clear and well-communicated set of goals and outcomes. Indexing on time (IMHO) can also have unwanted side effects like people just filling in the time "because they have to", which is pointless for everyone involved.

The Light Phone 7 years ago

Feels like a solution looking for a problem to me. Not only are phones trending away from being "phones" (rather portable internet terminals) but I'd wager the largest portion of smartphone use is content consumption, rather than content creation/collaboration. Both of which would suggest this device is a long, long way from product-market fit.

I don't think the main point being made is that deadlines are a PITA, I think it's that the trade-off is unmeasured. Successfully meeting a sales deadline looks the same as signing the same contract after the deadline (other than the deadline), but the argument for deadlines in software being bad is that they materially erode quality and long term viability (shortcuts, tech debt, bugs, usability). The product delivered within the deadline is materially worse than the one delivered after. The problem is that it's hard to attribute these issues to "deadlines" although the intuition is that they are a major cause.

Curious as to why having an external IP/URL is a problem. If you're using almost any cloud service that has an API for adminstration (e.g. an API to tear down a VM), then is that really different to a public endpoint secured with platform-managed authentication? (which Cloud Run provides). Is it because you need firewall rules?

It doesn't "exactly" work that way. The instance doesn't disappear after the request is served. It hangs around in case there's another request (for a while), but you only pay while the request is active. In practice "cold starts" are single-digit percentage of most common workloads (# of requests that are cold). Also FWIW it's not just scale to 0. Scaling any number of instances up will hit cold starts, the difference is this happens automatically versus fixed cluster sizes which have to either be pre-provisioned for peak, or tend toward much slower scale up times.

Disclosure: I work for GCP

It's extremely difficult to correlate this to long-term happiness or well-being. If parents can accelerate their time to retirement they get to spend more time with children as teenagers or young adults. Is that better or worse? More or less memorable? I don't remember much before I was 5-ish. Do we really know that having stay-at-home parents during that time alters a lot? Does having the extra money for "better" college outweigh time in "formative" years? How about having more wealth to transfer to children when you're gone? What if the stay-at-home parent is desperately unhappy with staying at home? Is it better to have a happy, harmonious environment?

It's complicated, and just saying it's better to have a stay-at-home parent versus "minimum wage daycare workers" (who in my experience are actually often highly qualified), is an incomplete perspective (IMO).

Terra Nullius 7 years ago

The migration of humans out of Africa?

Usually land ownership emerges as a concept alongside the development of agrarian cultures. If you're going to spend time cultivating land, you tend to want to defend it.

Yeah! I should have rent control! I should be able to live where I want and pay below the market value. Screw the free market, I want to live in someone else's house and pay them less than it's worth. I don't care if their costs go up due to increased maintenance costs, or inflation, or wage increases. I don't care if the value of their property increases due to basic, fundamental, elementary economics like supply and demand, and their property taxes increase. Screw them. It's my right to live where I really really want to live. I especially don't care that nobody else can move to where I live because there are no new houses being built, and therefore no new money into the local economy. I'm not moving to a more affordable area, why should I? And I'm definitely not going to save money for a deposit so I can borrow money at some of history's lowest ever interest rates. Then I'd be working for the man. Screw that, I've got avocado toast to pay for.

The whole of the internet is a patchwork of ad blockers and ad block mitigations which come in the form of both aggressive JavaScript and the much-more-insidious passive aggressive "sponsored content". Possible that this fingerprinting is all in service of trying desperately to monetize. Unfortunately we only have ourselves to blame.

Memory is a difficult one, especially in garbage-collected languages which have a habit of filling up the heap even when it's not used, so it's not always obvious how much memory is actually being used without having language/runtime specific signals. The mitigation in Cloud Run is both concurrency, and that you're only billed while a request is active.

(Disclosure: Google Cloud PM)

Is that really equivalent? Anti-vax arguments risk convincing someone to put their children, and those around them in grave danger on the basis of fundamentally flawed arguments that can be made to sound compelling. I don't think the argument for hand washing ever met this criteria.

I've been down the flat earth rabbit hole a few times, and find it equal parts hilarious and disturbing. I'm not sure it doesn't affect anyone though.. Critical thought and actively avoiding confirmation bias are real issues and when adults present arguments [e.g. to children] that effectively abandon these objectives, well.. that might be generally bad. I'd love to have a "crazy tinfoil hat" filter I could turn on or off.

Lidar Is a Crutch 7 years ago

There are numerous new and different opportunities that emerge which create different dynamics. Insurance companies might want to invest in tech that reduces accidents because they can lower their premiums and be more competitive, for example (which btw, would be a side effect of a "capitalistic" system)

I'm often surprised by the number of totally valid reasons apps need to connect to the interwebs where you'd think they have no business. Clocks need to sync with time servers, dialers want to get updated lists of spam callers.. not sure what "finder" is but seems plausible that a search operation would need an index to search and even more reasonable that it be server-side. Not to mention reporting telemetry, analytics, errors etc so devs can improve the product. Not saying everyone's a good actor, but just connecting to a server doesn't make them a bad one.

It's not trying to hide the street necessarily, it's recognizing that it can't display the street AND the business name because the text would either overlap or be too cluttered to read. Not being able to prioritize street names over place names, or not being able to switch off place names entirely would be a valid criticism, but I suspect there's an attempt to make the "default" experience the best balance without requiring that people tweak a wall of knobs and levers. It's not going to please everyone, but that may not be a realistic goal anyway

Amazon Hub 9 years ago

We have a security gate and I installed a network-enabled lock for which I can remotely add temporary security codes that we then specify in the order from Amazon. This results in the UPS guy completely ignoring it and leaving the package outside the gate in plain view for package thieves. Delivery drivers are like cab drivers used to be before Uber/lyft. There's no accountability baked into the process. Someone please invent Lyft for deliveries.

You nailed it. It's in Google's interest to provide the best user experience and a large part of that is optimizing for the "best" result. Whether or not a user returns to search results, or executes a subsequent search are some of the many signals used to determine this.

I agree that AI != ML/DL, that's not what I'm saying. Tests like the Turing test don't prescribe anything about implementation. I mean, if you could roll together some Excel macros that passed the test then great. My point is that if you do pull the curtain back on most "AI" systems today, at worst you'll find some sort of basic adaptive learning system and at best you'll find a [deep] neural net that supports both supervised and/or unsupervised learning.

I think the general spirit of the root of this comment thread is valid though. There's a lot of "we're using AI and machine learning!" going on when in fact all they're doing is remembering how frequently you pushed the blue button, then recommending the blue button.