loudin

Exactly. This proposal is absolutely soul-crushing for most people. Having extended daylight hours when people are actually awake in the evening is critical for positive mental health.

There's so many issues with large companies demanding people to return to the office, so it's at least somewhat refreshing to hear "do it because I said so", but this just isn't going to work in the long run. The toothpaste can't be put back into the tube. And this is because anyone who worked in-person at the office of a large tech company knows it's markedly worse.

For meetings, the process typically was: 1. Try to book a meeting room for a group large enough, succeed about 80% of the time and scramble at the last minute other times. 2. Wait for someone to finish up their call. If someone super senior was in the room, my meeting was guaranteed to start whenever they felt like ending their meeting, which would be 5-10 minutes late. 3. Inevitably dial into a video conference because at least one member of the team is working in a different office, so not even everyone was in person anyway 4. Run out of time at the end and having to dash to my next meeting room late.

And this doesn't even account for the fact that getting quality heads-down time in an open office floor plan was nearly impossible.

Just take the good with the bad. Make in-person meetings mandatory for important events that require in-person collaboration like design sprints, brainstorming, launches, etc.

They are not expressing themselves peacefully is the issue. They are calling for armed insurrection.

Absolutely incredible. I felt like I had a bird's eye view to humanity.

This study supports the notion that are all truly interconnected in ways that are beyond our conscious comprehension.

It's an important reminder we do not exist in a vacuum and our actions have an indirect impact on a large number of people.

I think this is a different beast. I personally loved shopping at Whole Foods because the food is high quality and their employees are treated well. These tenets are totally incompatible with Amazon's culture. Sure, now they say they will run it independently, but if Amazon were to struggle with Whole Foods, the first thing they do will be to lower labor costs and food costs.

Unions to protect workers are now more important than ever in this new age of monopolies.

A huge part of lower home prices in Japan is that they treat housing as a depreciating asset in their economy. So it's more like buying a car than making an investment.

http://freakonomics.com/2014/02/26/why-are-japanese-homes-di...

Serious question - why hasn't the Uber board replaced Kalanick yet? While it is indisputable he successfully brought Uber to where it is now, it doesn't seem like he has the good judgement to be leading Uber at this stage of the company's lifecycle. Wouldn't the best thing for the company at this point be a complete overhaul of leadership?

Thanks for clarifying the point about the bluetooth - this definitely got buried for me. The case is a good stopgap for improving battery life, but I still think they need to last 10 hours on a single charge to be really useful. For instance, 5 hours won't be enough for a plane trip if you include the time it takes to get to the airport/arrive at your destination. If they can just last a little bit longer, I'd be more on board with the change.

100% agree. I carry a pair of Apple earbuds with me to use interchangeably with my phone and my Mac laptop. The new lightning headphones that come in the box won't be compatible with my laptop, so I'll either need to use the old earbuds with a phone adapter or the new earbuds with a laptop adapter or I need to carry around both sets of earbuds with me.

That said, their vision for the world to go 100% wireless is absolutely right. However, I don't think their execution is great in this area. Their AirPods don't hold a long enough charge quite yet and they are highly susceptible to being lost. Also, while I think Bluetooth has many many problems, I wish Apple spent time improving that standard instead of introducing their own standard.

Why can't we compromise a bit here? I don't think many people have issues with folks renting out their place for a few weeks during the year, but buying property and using it to attract vacationers to a residential area is very different. It can change the city by causing businesses to cater towards more tourists and to reduce available housing stock.

What if people could only rent out their primary residence for no more than half the year unless the property is exempt as a vacation home? Perhaps this could be a good compromise for cities to encourage Airbnb while effectively banning the practice of buying homes exclusively for Airbnbers.

Hold on - a lot of these comments here are assuming that this probe will result in more regulation for AirBnb, but according to the article, it seems like these senators are only calling for the FTC to study the impact companies like AirBnB have on the short-term rental market and the housing market.

How is this a bad thing? Isn't gathering more data better than not having this data?

I don't think Uber is going to completely turf out, but I believe they will experience a correction in their valuation.

It looks like they last raised money at a $62.5 billion valuation [1], which suggests that investors are expecting the company to operate at a global level. Unfortunately, Uber is facing extremely stiff competition in China [2] and India [3]. There's also the well-publicized tension between Uber and various European companies. And that's not even taking into account increased regulation in US cities like San Francisco [4].

So, while Uber is clearly a successful company - how successful will it be? $62.5 billion dollars successful? My guess would be no, which would drive a correction for the company.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-03/uber-raise... [2] http://fortune.com/2015/07/08/uber-didi-kuaidi-china-funding... [3] http://qz.com/645258/uber-sues-ola-for-allegedly-using-the-s... [4] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SF-to-require-Lyft-Ube...

Which is completely absurd because not only were many of these laws recently enacted, but their the efficacy of some rules is also questionable (most notably the calorie count law).

I wouldn't be surprised if most of the difference cited by this study was due to walking. I know that I've had to exert extra effort living in SF to be more active than I had to when I lived in NYC.

I wonder if there will be a follow-up study looking into the actual reasons why life expectancy is higher in NYC.

I think this is why Tesla's home battery is going to be such a big deal in the near future. You could buy your own solar panel system and use it to charge your home battery, which would in turn power your electric car. You wouldn't be adding additional stress to the grid and it would probably be less expensive in the long-run. Not to mention that you'd be running on 100% renewable energy.

My gut reaction is that these boot camps are fueling some employment at early-stage start-ups because the graduates are far less expensive than more seasoned developers and the code they write is probably okay enough for a short while. Why would larger tech companies hire from this pool? I would imagine that there are enough CS grads in the market for them already.

Does anyone here hire graduates from these schools? If so, what has been your experience? If not, why not?

Why all the rage directed at Google and not, say, the government that institutes these policies? Something just feels 100% misguided about these attacks.

I really wish people talked to others working in the medical industry before jumping to conclusions about medical practices and norms.

Surgeons are increasingly portrayed by the media as greedy and worthy of increased oversight. The reality of the situation is that surgeons are just like you and me - in fact probably better than you in me in a lot of ways.

The vast majority assume a crushing amount of debt and go through 10+ years of schooling for an intensely demanding job that places them in life-or-death situations on a daily basis. And that's before dealing with the lawsuits, shrinking income due to insurance cheaping out on procedures, and the general distrust from the public.

The bottom line is that situations like these are rare. And instituting a system geared towards knee-jerk reactions is going to dramatically affect the ability of good doctors who make genuine mistakes. It's going to scare away intelligent people from the field who want to do good, but would be legitimately afraid of losing their livelihood in a lawsuit or protracted legal process. And it's going to affect the public, who will be likely left with a lower-quality medical system.

The 'sharing economy' described in the article is not so much about sharing as it is about making money. You don't share your apartment on AirBnb - you sell it.

I think it's worth thinking about how some routes would enjoy increased popularity given the existence of a hyperloop mode of transport.

For instance, the Chicago-New York route is roughly 800 miles, which is about an hour of hyperloop time. If the tickets were still priced in the $20 range each way, just think of how many more people would travel between the two cities.

People could live in Chicago while commuting to work in NYC. Others could live in NYC and impulsively decide to travel to Chicago for a fun night out on the town. Surely, the route would increase in popularity - perhaps vastly so.

What I love about the hyperloop is that it's like a physical embodiment of the internet - shrinking the geographical distance that separates us.

This is a genius way to tell a story. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

It's extremely clear that Twitter is turning its back on the developer community who helped the company reach success. We were the first adopters of Twitter, encouraged our friends to join, and made it mainstream. Now, when we want to build apps on their platform, Twitter tells us they're closed - that they don't want to return the favor.

So, yeah, I can see how Flattr, a service that revolves completely around a community of people who actually appreciate others for their work, is upset at the company whose notion of "thanks" is a Cease and Desist.

As developers, we should be alarmed - we shouldn't be blaming people for 'not reading the terms of service' or saying that 'Twitter has the right to do what it wants'. These answers might be technically right, but they don't capture the true feeling of what is right, which is that developers should build apps that enhance Twitter's ecosystem.

So, that's it for Twitter for me. I only expect Twitter to get worse about their developer policies in the future, and I don't want to be a part of a community that treats developers poorly.

This is why medical and scientific research should not have profit motives attached to them. It creates perverted incentives like the situation you describe above.

Well, this is frightening. Common sense dictates that human genes should not be patented, but with the current climate in this country, I'm not sure if common sense will prevail.

I'll believe it when I see it. I don't think AT&T is a capable enough institution to beat Google to the punch on this one.

NSLs remind me of the "deny and imply" clause in Super Sad True Love Story. It goes something like...

"By reading this, you have denied its [some type of government surveillance] existence and implied consent."

Very troubling news.

This is a very silly situation. Someone made a joke about a dongle and got fired. Another person posted that she was offended about the said dongle joke and it's flared up into a massive discussion about gender in tech.

Here's the bottom line - if such a tame joke can have this large an effect and warrant this type of a knee-jerk reaction from the tech community, our conception of gender equality is seriously fragile.

Better discussions about sexism in the workplace could revolve around the lack of female leadership, sexist working environments, an overabundance of male developers, company roles that appear to be gender-specific, etc.

We are so wrong on the major issues that we want to make the full situation as easy to digest as a dongle joke and a tweet.

It's far more complex than that. And this is the only thing I'm going to say about the situation because we all look like children for addressing this.

Did LayerVault try to contact Flat UI to discuss their grievances before sending a DMCA Takedown? If so, what was the result of that conversation. If not, why didn't LayerVault pursue that path before posting this to Github?

We in tech need to be good to each other because other corporate interests and patent trolls won't be. We should always give each other the benefit of the doubt and try to resolve issues without menacing legal language and the threat of lawyers. We need to show we can thrive without this garbage. Otherwise, it will only embolden our enemies and cause this type of confrontation to happen more frequently in the future - to everyone's detriment.

Yes and no.

Lean and Agile act as a "hill-climbing" algorithm. You start at point x and take an action in some direction. If you improve, continue. If you don't, change directions. Keep doing this until you can't improve any further and you've hit a local maxima.

The important concept here is that you hit a LOCAL maxima. There could be other vastly superior outcomes, but whether or not you reach these outcomes depends on your starting point.

I think Lean and Agile are fantastic for making improvements to a product. However, in order to change the game, you need to take risks by jumping to a new starting point and beginning again.

I think Google, as the article points out, espouses both philosophies. They take massive lateral jumps (Driverless Cars, Project Glass, etc.), but once they make that jump, their development is Lean and Agile.

All the people who support this keep saying how everyone else is going to use the tool to do x, y, or z, but they haven't said what they themselves would do with it.

So I ask, when you have access to Graph Search, what is the first thing you'll do with it?