crdb

"Récoltes et semailles" (Harvest and plantings) by Alexander Grothendieck.

A couple years ago, I needed a front end developer to implement the work of our designer in a way the team could maintain. Not having a network in front end, I combed through the past 3 months of "Who wants to be hired" and freelancer threads, shortlisted 7 with the right skillset, got a quote from each, discussed their portfolios internally with the team, and hired the one we agreed on. The site is still up today. That was probably the fastest hiring cycle I've ever done, from start to payment in about a week or two.

I will browse the thread as a hiring manager but it is fairly rare that what I am looking for has relevant candidates. It is easier to advertise in Who's Hiring and get many qualified applicants with a much higher conversion rate than any channel except recommendations by existing employees.

Similarly, I found more relevant people faster in Who Wants to be Hired than on the regular sites for promoting one's design portfolio which felt a bit like browsing LinkedIn.

"I think, says that everything you do illegally, you do efficiently. This, of course, is perfectly obvious. For one thing, you do not write at all because writing on an illegal project is suicide. For another thing, you work with whatever equipment you have on hand, and of course, you do everything on your lunch hour, which starts at 8:00 in the morning and finishes at 5:00 in the evening. Another thing, when it doesn’t work well and it is illegal, you drop it very quickly and kill the project."

- Sidewinder: Creative Missile Development at China Lake, Ron Westrum

You'd want to put them in kind of nondescript areas to avoid taking out the historic stuff as mentioned in the article and maybe pay out 50% above market to existing buildings in the way so they are not too pissed off but it could be doable.

Already exists, see e.g. Croydon. Yes, not in Zone 1, but 14 minutes to London Bridge by Thameslink, about the same time it took me to go from South Kensington to Westminster/St James in the early 2000s and probably without having to wait out a couple trains at rush hour due to lack of space within.

At the time there were no other options in the niche, and it fitted well with what some of us wanted: huge battery life, few features that worked well, lightweight, robust... cheap! Meanwhile Samsung, Garmin etc. went after Apple looking for features at the cost of everything else.

Today there is a myriad of competitors; when pebble.com went down, I bought one with 45 day battery life and otherwise the same features as a Pebble HR+ at the same price, plus GPS. There's third party apps for a few bucks.

I do miss the always-on display and its clarity, but not dealing with the slow and buggy software and lack of sync or ability to export the data. And I have more confidence in Xiaomi being around in a few years, not that it matters with Google Fit, MyFitnessPal and local CSV backups.

My Amazfit Bip ($99) is supposed to have 45 days and lasts about 30 days on minute heart rate monitoring intervals (based on a month and a half of trying it).

I wanted something a bit smaller, to fit under the shirt cuff, so got the Mi Band 3 ($50) which lasts about 10 days (probably 20 days if you don't allow it to display notifications and set a higher HR interval).

The Mi app is pretty bad, which forces you to buy an extra app (for me, Notify & Fitness, for Google Fit sync).

The ironic thing about your reply is that it is crafted in exactly the type of management speak that executives used to convince stakeholders in both occasions.

"absolve relevant parties of their responsibilities" - what relevant parties? What responsibilities? It sounds great and responsible, giving a good impression of dismissal of the point made, but the wording is so general as to be impossible to act upon - just as with "a bank". I'm sure standardised checklists were ticked, committees reviewed the decisions and came to the conclusion that it was best, the board was satisfied with the new direction taken by the CTO's organisation, and the shareholders happy with the cost reduction at the time as described by the board. To paraphrase Thatcher, what colour trousers do the relevant parties wear?

You see this defection pattern everywhere. For example, the never ending stream of useless new features in most Google and some Microsoft products which coincidentally get slower and buggier every year, because you can get promoted for the visible addition of a feature as a PM, but it is much harder to prove that getting the Gmail app load time down by 70% has stopped the feeding of your best power users to the competition (Calendar is too easy a target for criticism).

The classic defector on the tech side is the "ninja rockstar developer" whose prolific output of code and visually attractive but functionally superficial features is matched only by the amount of frustration generated after they are promoted somewhere else or changes jobs if it doesn't happen fast enough, and the rest of the team has to deal with the technical debt and new, unrealistic user expectations.

Security is another good candidate for shortcuts, since there is no visible upside to good security (maybe you were just not attacked) and tons of downside for taking responsibility since you make yourself a visible scapegoat for blame when a crisis does happen.

And note that none of these examples are in "move fast and break things" i.e. "do illegal things and hope they become legal ex-post" territory! I personally take great pains to understand these dynamics so that I can avoid them in my own company, which is a matter of survival.

a bank fired some old people to pay a billion dollars to a contractor who would hire the same (!) people to do the job

"a bank" is technically incorrect. The decision was a perfectly rational prisoner's dilemma defection from one executive (cut costs by firing the "expensive employees" and hiring "cheaper and newer"), who went on to be promoted on that basis, and it was the next generation of executives who had to deal with the mess and "hired IBM" so they could absolve responsibility of a situation with no visible upside if successful and tons of visible downside if not.

ABC giants (ADM, Bunge, Cargill)

ABC(C)D. Dreyfus is in between Bunge and ADM in terms of revenue and quite influential in Africa and some parts of Latam (Cargill is the outsized one, twice as large as any of the other and culturally quite different). Continental (now ContiGroup) is about a fifth as large as e.g. Dreyfus so doesn't quite count.

I would recommend the ageing, but still relevant Merchants of Grains [1] for a better understanding of the dynamics of this industry. More modern books - such as Marc Rich's biography - are too sanitised. As you hint, it can't really be "disrupted" by technology - the advantages these companies have are more geopolitical than informational. My position reporting platform in the late 2000s dated from 1994 and had never been updated; despite 5-6 layers of control, some faulty trades (e.g. FX hedge the wrong way) were not caught for months. Some heads of trading desks could negotiate with ministers profitably, but had trouble understanding simple derivatives.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Grain-Profits-Companies-Cen...

They destroyed the tooling and already built prototypes as fast as they could. In particular:

The only airframe ever to fly, XR219, along with the completed XR221 and part completed XR223 were taken to Shoeburyness and used as targets to test the vulnerability of a modern airframe and systems to gunfire and shrapnel.

It was not just a project that was "cancelled" but an industry. At least the Olympus made it to the Concorde.

Sullivan's Cove was best whisky and one of the Limeburners best international whisky.

Despite this, you can't find the former at Sydney Airport's duty free (Heinemann) and only two NAS of the latter. These NAS are not even on sale on Limeburners' own website.

In comparison, both Kavalan and Amrut were widely, internationally distributed and marketed after their awards. I've seen both being aggressively pushed at whisky bars all around the world. The former is owned by a Taiwanese family group allegedly clearing half a billion a year in revenue, the latter by an Indian conglomerate specialising in the low end, high volume part of the market for half a century until they launched the eponymous single malt. And of course the Japanese names are all backed by giant keiretsus with the means to go big and global and even acquire the competition [1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jan/13/japan-sunto...

The impact has been negative for the following reasons.

First, the groups made whisky into a luxury good, expanding the customer base away from the amateur who bought the bottle for its contents. In certain industries, a bubble is a good thing as it draws a lot of talent into the industry. However, whisky is supply constrained - the older stuff is limited in quantity by the smaller market when they were bottled. The result has been a global rise in prices and cut in quality. See the NAS on all Japanese entry and many mid-level bottles, and Japanese houses importing after exhausting their own reserves; or the newly purchased and restructured Mortlach, which is also NAS despite its premium price tag. There is also a shortage of actual casks, particularly sherry, in this case limited by the Spanish wine market, leading to "creative" finishes or sub-par casks being systematically used to meet demand.

Second, from the POV of the house doing the acquisition, a brand has to fit in a portfolio of brands, and this can lead to intentional downgrading. For a well-known, non-whisky example, Longines has suffered post-acquisition, because the Swatch Group has decided that Omega should be their flagship mass market premium brand. You do not retain strategic independence or the ability to just "produce good stuff" after acquisition - the so called synergies can be negative for you.

Third, the massive influx of money into the industry has all but killed the apprenticeship model which is still alive and well in the wine world. If a distiller should show even a hint of skill, they will be rapidly discovered and acquired before they can grow. There is a parallel today in the startup world where everyone seems to be gunning for acqui-hires rather than building a company the scale of PayPal or Amazon (and WhatsApp showed that everyone has a price, and the industry will pay it); and Google etc.'s talent safari leads to a corresponding drop in great people contributing to open source research, which harms the commons (the advancement of collective human knowledge is slowed). There are hints of what could be; for some reason Australia has somewhat escaped the sights of M&A divisions, and Tasmanian whisky, not exactly the most well known thing to put in your shelf, is bid up to over $500/bottle (in Heartwood's case, for example) by amateurs with means. I wonder what a whisky market closer to France's wine industry would look like...

Fourth, the Veblen good buyer may actually have so much impact on the industry as to change the product itself. The explosion in popularity of Bordeaux premier cru wines in the new world as part of a well balanced portfolio has led to a move towards massively tannic wines that lack the balance and elegance that used to be prized amongst the French experts (who by and large are priced out anyway). We have witnessed a similar drive in whisky towards peat, not just in the Scottish islands but globally. Peat can be measured, and bigger is better, after all: just ask Ardbeg (owned by LVMH).

Fifth, the marketing money screws with information discovery. The big brands can completely cover any buzz about independents with noise by paying for thousands of journalists (whether experts or not) to write reviews on their products, by sending free samples to anything that looks like it talks about whisky, by organising frequent events, through the usual SEO Google-undermining process, and so on. Censorship through abundance. Until one finds a good gatekeeper, it can be difficult to find good value, and most gatekeepers are co-opted.

Count me amongst those who prized the patina.

A significant number of people in the arts world decried the cleaning - some even petitioning the Pope to halt it.

Whilst skillful, part of the appeal was the passage of the centuries, like shoes or furniture acquiring a deep marbled appearance after decades of cleaning and waxing, or the statue on the Charles Bridge given a unique luster, like a spotlight on a few scenes, by millions of hands over the years. It would be almost criminal to either darken the spots or frequently clean the rest of the statue to the same brassy finish.

Anecdotally, I know of a Singaporean whose brother charged for taking the daughter with his kids on holiday. He didn't outright make it a billable item but made it a markup on flights and hotels. Both are HNWIs for whom the amount is as trivial as a dollar menu item at McDonald's.

Uber could operate at breakeven by raising prices slightly more than 10%. [...] Uber could be highly profitable by raising prices 20%.

No, because the demand would be different at those price points, and lower demand might not compensate for high fixed costs.

I got a timely reminder yesterday in (newly Grab-monopoly) Singapore, taking a Grab for $15 that used to cost me $3-6 on Uber.

I took public transport back. One ride was enough to shake me out of my years-trained habit of taking Uber/Grab everywhere when it cost only twice the MRT or bus ride, never really looking at the price.

Travis Kalanick's apparent vision was to create an enormous amount of demand for private drivers by dropping the price to the floor, thus creating the volume needed to make the numbers work, in the same way that Standard Oil's massive facilities dropped the price low enough for Rockefeller to bankrupt all his competitors.

Google Maps has been a lifesaver in Sydney CBD for me as a driver unfamiliar with the Byzantine lane timing required, lack of signalling, and frequent undocumented works and blockages (I do wish they'd incorporate the random M5 closures though). It does get laggy and imprecise once you get in the area with tall buildings though.

This happened with MP3s?

It happened to me with several hundred PDFs of sheet music from IMSLP that I was storing on iBooks. I couldn't work out where they had gone or why they were wiped. I switched to GoodReader and painstakingly had to rebuild the entire collection.

OBikes are wrecks in Singapore, because, it seems, oBike does not care about having staff to actually repair or maintain the bikes. We have a slightly more respectful population, perhaps, but it does not stop bikes from rusting, missing pedals or brakes, and so on. The rapid increase in the number of bikes has, thankfully, put a stop to the previous habit of taking out a part of the bike (usually pedal or seat) to put it out of action and thus "reserve" it.

Fortunately there are now so many bike startups in Singapore that you have a wide choice to pick from, and all of them are currently free. I went to the market yesterday with my mother in law, her riding a Mobike and me an Ofo, both checked out with my account.

Mobike seems the best run although I agree with the low seat problem (which is less of an issue in Asia). However, there are 3-4 different models at any one time so I suspect the company will iterate towards different models for different markets, including in size. Some of the engineering on the newer prototypes is quite interesting, and copied a few months later by Ofo, which seems to be the other company with actually active management (after a disastrous start with non-GPS-tracked bikes which were routinely "retired" by users).

As for bad parking, it is a function of enforcement. In Singapore, the companies are fined a substantial amount per bike if the government has to come and clear them. So there is apparently a sub half hour pickup time for most if you report it parked incorrectly (e.g. in a bus lane). It sounds like Australian cities have not yet put their act together in that respect. Fine the companies $500 per bike dropped in a creek and watch the problem disappear...

A database would already provide a layer of security (most people, including many "professionals", would not know what to do with it).

Customer data is often stored in a large, denormalised table in an Excel file called "customers" which contains the entire set of customers past and present, including those who unsubscribed or have not ordered for years, with all attributes (phone, address, etc.).

There is also no oversight on who has access to this file, since "marketing needs it for Facebook" or "customer service needs it for returns" or whatever the excuse du jour is. Even the newly hired intern with a stronger than usual interest in every system's credentials gets a copy.

You get some measure of security when there are more than one million customers and they need to start partitioning.

The most secure setup I've seen was a company whose entire repairs department ran on paper slips. Since nobody had the time or inclination to enter the information somewhere digital, no internal staff knew how to find customer information, even if they walked to the shop floor. I think a couple of old timers knew how to navigate the pile of slips and were the de facto DBMS engine.

I'd frame 1) slightly differently, as there are many cases of bootstrapped unicorns.

Time is also a currency, so you make a trade-off between time (extra years of your life spent acquiring funds to scale, and delayed product launch) and control.

Time is also an issue when you have competition, in the sense that your competitors can get there first by raising money.

My Kindle account (based in France) is the only reason I still have a French bank account. I am terrified of losing the account and therefore all my e-books as I reallocate a "foreign" card and my account switches to that country.

The greatest thing about buying music on Amazon is getting MP3s which I can keep for life. I downloaded them, they are synch'ed to my various backup solutions, and form part of my music library, even if Amazon goes bankrupt and I lose the original download link.

I long for the day Amazon does this for books.

There is a wonderful opportunity for Microsoft right now.

Many managers have already switched to OSX for personal use and if they can (including at places like IBM) for work as well. The reliability is unbeatable especially as Windows becomes more and more unintuitive, unreliable and bloated.

The key factor to this switch was porting Excel, and to a lesser extent the rest of Office, to Mac. Even with the reduced feature set, it means non-technical and semi-technical people can now work from a mac. Excel probably runs in virtually all companies in the world today.

If Microsoft were to invest some time in porting Excel and the rest of Office to Linux/UNIX, which are today very user friendly to non-technical users (my mother uses Ubuntu on her desktop, for example), they will give people a way to avoid the high pricing and increasing unreliability of Apple. This should boost sales of non-macs which is good for Microsoft's competitive position, even if these devices are immediately wiped for a new OS.

In our case:

    - Referrals from the network (e.g. VC to portfolio)
    - Cold outreach, once
    - (mostly) old colleagues getting a new job and asking us for help

Interesting examples to pick.

I trained as a classical musician and when I picked up the guitar, I was too lazy to learn the notation and learnt the songs by ear and feel instead (this may be why my guitar is collecting dust in a corner). Conversely I know a lot of "amateur" musicians, some pretty advanced, who have learnt songs by ear and can't decipher musical notation of any kind, or understand any music theory.

Chinese looks complicated even to the Chinese, hence Simplified Chinese arriving in the 1950s (and according to Wikipedia, they've started another round of simplification in 2013). Without an alphabet, there are thousands of characters to learn (8,000 in the 2013 version). Ask any Western-born Chinese how fluent they feel and how easily they can read it...

I talked to a company that was building some kind of hardware to transcribe in real time what conversations people were having at bus stops (the round trip to the server was not fast enough).

They said the buyers used it for targeting ads, after the facial recognition stuff was considered not enough.

But please enlighten me. What kind of conversations could have possibly happened before this letter that could justify saying something like "You invested money (or time) and we've just lost all of it. You will be getting $0. But I need you to sign this so that other people CAN get some money. Oh by the way, it's a great news!"

This reminds me of when my father's employer went out in the wake of the 1999 bubble popping. A couple of years later, the CEO sent him a very nice email saying "hey, mind signing over your stock please" and he was about to do it. I thought it was fishy that the ex-CEO want something worthless back, so I called my uncle who invests in SMEs on the side of his job and he agreed that we should ask for something back in return.

So we asked, and got, a few thousand for his stock, without a whisper of complaint from the ex-CEO (guess we asked for too little).

Funny you should say that. I grew up in the UK (Central London, Cambridge) and found most interactions with the government difficult in their bureaucracy and sometimes sheer unpleasantness (airports being at the top of the list, until the merciful arrival of auto-gates).

But it is true that smaller towns are almost a different country. British big government has always been oppressive in nature, and rather unconcerned with the collateral damage to the average citizen - see the current NHS restructuring, or how the trains were privatised into the laughing stock of Europe, or remember how you felt when you received your first TV tax letter making you feel like a suspect about to have a SWAT team enter your bedroom... there is this assumption that the citizen is naughty, a feeling of nanny state in a 1984 way. I don't know if that's a recent phenomenon, but it is part of the reason I left for good. Love the Brits though.

The Hitchhiker's Guide is quite an accurate representation, I think, of how I felt about government there at the time. A recent letter from my empty, but extant Lloyd's account intimating me to surrender a ton of private information to HMRC just reinforced the feeling - meanwhile, the Singapore government auto-calculates my (low) taxes and thanks me for "contributing to nation building" with a heart warming picture of a child at school.

My point, which I admittedly did not make very clear, is that it is not about the CCTV but the government behind them. What is the relationship between the government and the people? Is it one of trust? Are words like "necessary evil" used? How do people feel when they see a cop, or a border agent?

The US was built on the idea that politicians are inherently untrustworthy, and the government should be weak and decentralised, with states having the freedom to do what they like (with some exceptions, c.f. the Civil War, eventually leading to the current strong Federal government situation) and competing with each other for residents and businesses. This sort of acts as a balancing mechanism avoiding the most egregious abuses of individual rights in the very long term, whilst leaving room for experimentation on what those rights actually mean in practice.

Singapore is the polar opposite - Lee Kuan Yew structured an immensely powerful and centralised government to solve a number of problems ranging from being invaded by neighbours and Mao's attempts at subversion, to opium gangs and a country so poor hawkers slept on the street behind their cart. However unlike most other new nations at the time, he specifically built a ton of safeguards and structurally made the government as impervious to corruption and meritocratically oriented to customer service as possible. The PAP walked in the streets dressed all in white to symbolise that philosophy when they were first elected. Whether it will last is an interesting question, but today, the government is trusted, so people don't mind seeing CCTV or a police patrol...

Yeah, the hard thing about commenting on the US is that it's really 50 separate countries which do a lot of regulation locally. Cannabis being the obvious example today - in some of the country, you can smoke it in front of the police station, in other parts, you can get jail terms of years...

Funny how these things work... I've lived in Singapore for close to 7 years, have permanent residence, and it is when I travel to the US that I feel slightly uncomfortable.

It starts with the immigration agent who sometimes feels the need to ask me questions for 20 minutes as if I were a criminal, there's the part where they get to look through all your social media accounts and hold you indefinitely, and then there's the thought of a traffic stop by a bored cop "degenerating"... it's tough to travel to countries like these when you're used to a polite government whose agents treat you, the foreigner, with consideration and like a customer.

For example, when I went to my PR interview, my medical checks had expired (and it was transparent I had hoped to get away with it); the lady very helpfully opened up a slot for me a few hours later and recommended me a range of clinics nearby to do the missing medical checks. A breath of fresh air after dealing with the French and other "first world" governments...

No CCTV in my street except for the hedge that borders the Istana 100m away. We do get the odd police car patrolling the perimeter, but since the President lives there and the Prime Minister works there, I can understand. As for the US, I've never been in a building with more than a couple storeys that did not have CCTV, so I'm curious about your frame of reference there (most of Singapore consists of 20+ storey buildings). I've never been in a US mall or office building without CCTV. The only reason my residential building in NYC did not have CCTV was because it was pre-war; it also didn't have working heating, and I'd rather have had both.

I do agree that Singapore is probably not the place to move if you enjoy a suburban lifestyle in a big house with a garden.

edit - here's something you can't do in the US: my friend and I bought a couple craft beers from a Japanese supermarket, then sat down on public benches in front of the Asian Civilisations Museum (opposite CBD and the Fullerton Hotel), cracked them open and sipped them slowly in front of the view.

Excellent news!

The last time I tried to take the RER (early 2010s), I was in a train full of graffiti, with drunks (or drug users?) passed out across the seats, and few escalators/lifts for my 20kg suitcase. So after this I thought it was less painful to pay for a taxi, the experience put me off trying the RER again.

This round, the problem was a strike which surge priced the fare into 8 minutes ETA and 2x the usual.

It's funny that CDG is actually a TGV station - you can probably reach other cities faster (and more comfortably) than Paris as a result.