npinguy

It reminds me of the made-up but often used story of terrified audiences running for the exits upon watching a film of a train for the first time.

The cultural recontextualization of stories like this in my lifetime has been one of the most fascinating aspects of our modern world for me.

Of course, as I get older, I've seen my own stories and stories about events I participated in get told, re-told, and twisted and exaggerated without absolutely any malice. We also all see how people misrepresent news stories, social policies, and scientific studies (with various degrees of malice). So I think I know almost exactly how the Film of Train anecdote happened.

1. Theater owner starts showing Train film. Stands outside and yells "Come inside and see the wonderous train show. This new 'cinema' is so real that audiences have been reportedly running for the exits in terror!"

2. It's an obvious exaggeration and a joke. Passerbys laugh, but are intrigued nonetheless.

3. Someone writes a newspaper story about the cinema and the train film. Includes the quote as directly attributed to the theater owner. Everyone reading is aware of the context and the situation and the implicit tone, and chuckles appropriately.

4. Story gets picked up in another newspaper but without the context and removes the quote and instead represents it as a factual retelling of what happened.

5. Years later, someone writing a book uses the newspaper as a primary source, and then a cascade of books repeat and propagate the "fact".

Perfectly reasonable sequence of events. But here's where things get even more interesting to me.

There are *dozens* of similar stories that we've all heard and took as gospel growing up that required one person to stop, ask "Wait, does this really hold up to scrutiny?" and the whole house of cards comes crashing down. I'm talking about the "NASA spent $10M to design a space pen, the russians used a pencil", "Water flushes in the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere", and the like.

But why did it only happen just now? What prevented people from being more introspective and curious about these subjects 10, 20, 30 years ago? I guess the answer is we needed the Internet to hit a certain critical mass for enough people with sense to be able to reach the rest of us, but I don't know.

Do not try and compare an animal to a historically tragic event to justify word policing. Your use of tragedies to justify your woke word policing is quite frankly disgusting.

deanCommie was trying to get you to see that SLAVERY was also a historically tragic event that people are reminded of when they see terminology like master/slave.

Chaos monkey sounds completely fine and I can't see how any sane non-racist person would associate that with a black person.

They weren't trying to say that. This whole discussion is master/slave. This is precisely the point - chaos monkey is a fine neutral term that describes what is needed without any negative connotations. "Concentration camp guard" isn't.

Primary/replica is a fine neutral term. "Master/slave" aren't.

Honestly, your outrage about the comparison to concentration camps exactly proves the point that language matters regardless of intent.

Let's start from 80 hours a week spent at work. Red flag #1. Don't know why you would assume that's necessary

3.5 hours/week showering. Red flag #2. Even if you shower every single day, if you're spending 30 minutes in the shower each time you might as well call it a hobby. Unless you've got long luxurious hair, you should be able to get everything done in 10 minutes.

10 hours commuting, so 1 hour each way? #3 How much do you value your time? Clearly if you can't think of a hobby, not very much. If you did, you'd pay extra to not waste 2 hours every day wasted. But wait...why are you wasting that time? Can you read? Listen to audio books? Work on a side project? Even day dream and think? If you have to drive, can you switch from driving to motorcycling, and make that a hobby?

It sounds like you WANT to throw yourself into work, and spend all your energy and time into it as an excuse for lacking the ability to become a fully developed multi-faceted human being. And that is on you, not on your employer.

The same reason that the Civil Rights act had to be passed in the courts and the first students in integrated schools in the south had to be marched in with armed guard.

"Democracy" is frequently used interchangeably with freedom, but never underestimate the power of a close-minded majority to rule with tyranny and impose their will and discrimination on a minority - racial, sexually-orientatated, or otherwise.

Because it's bizarre and stands out. The clarifying sentence of marrying people that live elsewhere etc screams of "the lady doth protest too much". There's nothing wrong with saying "Over time, and over the natural turnover that happens at all companies, none of the original Wasabi designers are no longer working at FogBugz". Sure, some snarky people will make the comment "Oh yeah, I bet they left BECAUSE of Wasabi", but most will ignore them.

By completely negating the possibility that any of those people left for any reasons not involving family, it actually seems to INCREASE the probability that Wasabi was more unpopular within FogCreek than Joel would prefer to admit.

The ability to do something does not hold any weight with the people you're trying to convince. "Oh sure, Apple can revoke my access time, but they never would!"

It's the same thing as "Oh I'm sure the government COULD access all my data, but why would they want to?"

Region-locking affects more people than you might think, just not with DVDs anymore. Most of the world using reddit/hackernews/the internet is constantly faced with the frustration of clicking on a youtube link and seeing the copyright notice that says the content is restricted to US-only.

Off-topic question: Why do people insist on calling The Hoover Dam "one of the top engineering marvels".

Surely, a dam that doesn't even make it into the top-25 tallest dams in the world, and is 57th in the world in power generation is not that impressive? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_dams_in_the_wor... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_hydroelectric_p...

He also authored one of the two competing standards for JSON: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7159

It's kind of how people are scared of dying in plane crashes but not in car crashes - the illusion of control. One easily imagines doing something to avoid a car death but not a plane one.

I think the same applies here: Death by starvation feels easier to avoid to a layman wilderness expert: forage more, hunt effectively, conserve supplies better, etc.

But death via an obscure chemical even while in possession of a book on edible seeds...that's scary and much more likely to give one reservations about their confidence.

Your comparison is bang on, except that's the point. Amazon isn't trying to be Ikea. It is absolutely trying to provide the building blocks for small companies and large to use their cloud platform in a very foundational manner. Yes, the onboarding cost may be high, but Amazon doesn't mind if customers end up using Heroku or EngineYard instead - they are customers too.

AWS is a lot like Linux that way: Deeply challenging initial learning curve, but the only thing worth considering for serious mission critical architecture. Stability and scalability does come at the cost of user-friendliness.

Clickbait article. Not a single explanation to be found. Just some history and background

You can criticize Amazon for a million things, but underpayment is not one of them.

Are you insane? VK has horrendous UX (best and simplest example: Browsing through image galleries resizes the image viewer so that the next and previous buttons constantly move)

And they call it a Facebook clone because it was a direct copy of the Facebook UI, and while Facebook has innovated and polished, VK has been stuck in the same decade-old look and feel.

It may be faster to use in Russia because of geographical proxmity, but I assure you it is nowhere near as Facebook is from North America.

Real problem.

Terrible article.

“What these techies don’t realise though is that we’re no different to them - they’re just one misstep, one paycheck away from being us.”

I don't presume to know Jimmy's life, and everyone goes through hard times. However, unless it's your first job out of poverty, if you are one paycheck away form being homeless, you are doing something considerably wrong with your life.

More atrocious quotes: > “You see camps of people sleeping rough just two miles from Sergey Brin’s (Google co-founder) house,” he says. “And the irony is, not even his engineers get paid enough to live here."

Yes, the employees of large companies do not tend to live in the same neighborhood as the CEO of those companies. And?

“We are trying to get tech billionaires involved in what we’re doing. They donate millions to good causes, but almost nothing to the local community they are helping destroy."

We really can't accept these kinds of statements without pushback. Just how are tech billionaires "destroying" communities? Is it their fault they have come up with ideas that are worth millions and billions of dollars so they can afford to pay a lot of money to the best and the brightest to work for them, who then want to live in these neighborhoods? Blame the landlords who giddily raise the rent and drive people out of their homes. Blame the Government for not spending the billions of additional tax revenue they get from these companies on better social programs. Blame the republicans for equating "social programs" with "socialism" and therefore "communism" and therefore "evil". Blaming the "techies" is moronic.

"At their weekly meeting, the team leader makes an announcement to the some-100 guests gathered - Google is hiring. The company is holding a jobs fair in a few weeks’ time and they are looking for chefs, cooks and cleaners. Some groan, but most are keenly listening and a group stay behind after to sign up. In desperate times you cannot be too proud to “make a deal with the devil”, one guest says."

Oh, cry me a river.

Is it just me or is stuff like this way harder to appreciate these days (with the ubiquity of CGI), unless you work in the industry, or see a behind-the-scenes look like this?

This is simply incredible, and yet I don't normally pay the title sequence any attention at all...

I always wonder about people like you. How do you manage your receipts for all these things? And what about the additional time to go back and return lightbulbs. Does that not more than cover the money you save from the bulb?

No, don't work at AWS, for the record. But responses like this is why I'm a big fan of the Amazon platform and the point I was trying to make. Oh well.

I apologize for your poor experience with Amazon, and have no doubt that many mistakes were made with your account.

But you should recognize that your experience is the exception not the rule. The vast majority of customers have nothing but good things to say, and Amazon works tirelessly to maintain that reputation.

Interesting idea. Certainly a large percentage of our smartphone usage is turning on the screen to glance at a notification, then dismiss it. Smartwatches allow you to not have to do that. But the notification still comes to your phone, and still needs to be beamed to your wrist. So you don't save on any network usage battery. It's basically only the screen. Now the screen is expensive, no doubt. But even so, how much additional battery life would you get out of a phone from turning the screen on 50 times less over the course of a day?

Tesla was launched with the investment and vision of a man who's already made billions in the industry, not some teenagers with an idea and a garage.

Sounds like it fills a need effectively for the Disposable Income San Francisco Dweller.

But "everyone" has got to be misleading, right? No way this is cost-effective for someone whose shipping margins are thin like an eBay seller.

And there is no way to scale this across the country without essentially needing a warehouse full of packers, at which point you are basically in Amazon territory competing with them at their own game.

I guess this can be successful as long as the company stays small.

From 5 days ago: http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/2eawhw/how_serious_is_...

Someone white needs to die, and maybe people will start giving a shit.

That is because any new product has an upfront fixed cost in investment.

Amazon is investing like crazy into growth, and as a result all their new costs are new products.

Quarter to quarter their loss numbers are so low that it seems like they would only need to slow down their growth by a couple of percent and they would be instantly profitable.

Not a bad spot to be in.

I would really like to see some data on the memory savings using this technique. How significant are they?

A lot of common expressions don't hold up to scrutiny when examined in their most "literal" explanation.

This particular one has been used to associate with social civil rights. The implication is that 50 years from now gay and trans acceptance will be such a non-issue, that members of future generations will ask us why it took so long for us to pass such obvious legislation protecting human rights. Exactly the same way that we today look back at segregation and the civil rights movement and shake our heads.

Whatever people's personal or religious beliefs are on gay marriage, it is GOING to be 100% legal in the entire western world whether they like it or not. Desegregation wasn't very popular at the time it was put in either.

Since noone is explaining it to you honestly, I'll tell you.

By implying that the LGBT interests are a campaign to be bought, or convinced by, or tricked into, you are showing a complete lack of understanding of the true reasons why people in the tech industry (who tend to be socially progressive) find the idea of fighting against gay marriage (which is what Brendan Eich did) completely appalling. You are also revealing yourself as an anti-progressive dinosaur who is on the wrong side of history when it comes to LGBT human rights.

Since noone is explaining it to you honestly, I'll tell you.

By implying that supporting gay marriage (which is the opposite of what Brendan Eich did in his active campaign against it) is a "campaign by the elite" you are revealing yourself as an anti-progressive dinosaur who is on the wrong side of history when it comes to LGBT human rights.

I've been using Simple Workflow (in particular, the Flow framework: http://aws.amazon.com/swf/details/flow/) a lot recently to manage complex asynchronous distributed workflows, and it's a revelation. Some people laugh about the "Simple" part in the name, but it's kind of true - once you get over the initial learning curve. It's a bit like Git that way (First a lot of banging your head, then a lot of bang for buck)

Firstly, the premise of that scenario, is the house is cold while the person is gone. That means SAVING on energy costs by not heating the house unnecessarily while no one is inside, which is the current de facto standard. (Do you turn off the heat when you go to work? I certainly don't)

Secondly, it's silly to object to innovation that allows humanity to be frivolous or wasteful according to their desires. Where do you draw the line? Why have central heating in the first place? Is it that difficult to wear a sweater indoors? If people want to be warm, they will utilize technology to be warm. And if that technology progresses to allow this process to be simple, efficient, and automated, people will use it. And not just those in the luxury market.