philjr

For those in the know... what are the best patterns out there for doing this at the moment?

Talked with a founder building something in this space that was inspired by Matt's post in October. lynq.ai (no affiliation, I just know Paul).

I think when you look at this problem originally, you say - that's a bad idea. Why would you take structured data, output it to non-structured format and then have ML parse that. Lots of wasted CPU cycles all around.

However, when you think about the complex dynamics of standards around documents, tens of years of digital formats, hundreds of standards, lack of adherence to those standards, proprietary formats, hundreds of years of print and legal documents, the argument is akin to self-driving cars.

The state we have today around data & dashboards is a hugely emergent & dynamic system, just like our road transport infrastructure. We are closer to a machine being able to navigate the same way a human can, than we are to one simple (or one set of) standard that work more the way a machine would want to consume.

Screenshots as a universal API simply meets the world where it is vs assuming the world is going to change towards something simpler and more elegant.

I think part of the problem with how this comes across at first glance is how it's framed. "Screenshots" as an API evokes some dirty feelings for most of us in tech because the format is so unstructured.

I think if you think about the idea of building something once that both a human and a machine consume from the same target (the UI), this makes a lot more sense in many ways even if it feels like there's an expensive level of indirection in there.

Excited to see what'll happen here over time.

I remember interviewing there in 2009 and I stopped counting the number of languages I was told were being used on the SRO / backend side. I'm sure it wasn't, but it seemed like it was basically "everything" :-)

That’s a first world problem. The big problem is becoming successful.

Likewise. I did our wedding site in it with a wufoo form back in 2015. Spent an evening at it, sent out email. Done! Literally never touched it again. Simply done and well executed.

Anything you put "work" in to (like serious hobbies, sports etc.) can still be considered a hobby / leisure. Lots of competitive low end golfers, tennis players, basketball players etc.

I've found it one of the best outlets from work quite frankly, to have another committed side interest that requires dedication and commitment. You should try it :-)

The revenue multiple is probably not the metric they used to arrive at the valuation, but it's certainly a normalizer that people use to compare outcomes.

Multiples of trailing 12 months net profit would be more common for a smaller entity.

The key is to decouple the two.

When you are required to act, act and act decisively. If you are clear that the understanding could be deeper (and it usually can), you trigger a work effort to understand more. So the next time you need to make a decision you’re more informed.

You err on the side of cutting "too much", because a. as the original author suggested, you want to cut once and b. because the downside of cutting "too much" is better than the downside of cutting too little. For everyone.

My 2c - the key is that the focus should be on delivery and not some justification for the work you did yesterday. The idea being that you are standing up looking at the work in front of you and the TEAM itself should be focused on how to move things across the board (ie delivering it to whatever definition of done makes sense for you)

110% agreed

I've always felt a level of entitlement around that. You (the business) want me to learn and get better. You get more value over time that way.

The simple answer is that they (mostly) serve different markets

They ipo'd last year

>> Mr HashiCorp has gone way too far down the rabbit hole, by the sounds of it. It makes sense to set up a subsidiary when you have a larger group of staff in a single location.

Or when you want to do things like give them stock or healthcare or pensions

Dealing with real world data and applications means being liberal in what you accept.

If you're producing CSV files, then you can be more strict.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle

Kinda. It approximates cash flows for some types of companies. For others it doesn’t. Hard to generalize here. Ultimately the best measure of cashflow is cashflow. It’s a good normalized measure of a stable mature business, but it can overstate or understate the health of depending on the revenue and billings model. So, basically, YMMV

Get Quantum. Serious improvement

"Some days you are the dog, some days you are the tree / fire hydrant" is the canonical quote.

I would assume the fire plug is the name of one of the things that failed while he refueled. Doesn't quite go together in my head, but once you understand the original quote it makes sense. Some days you're on the giving end, some days you're on the receiving end.

We've started using this for simpler decisions ala choosing a restaurant or a movie to watch.

The 5-2-1 game... You pick 5 things, she selects 2, you select the final. Or vice versa. Stops the back and forth and shares responsibility. It's literally removed the mental drain and occasional arguments about simple decisions. Sometimes we simplify it to 3-1, if the choices aren't available ... I pick 3 and she picks 1 or vice versa.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/5whgvh/lpt_if_...

The difference between doing that and talking to 3rd party integrators is the ability to compare across vendors.

You really can't generalize across Europe

Bringing this on a small tangent, but I've never been comfortable with 'sudo !!' and I can't really articulate why aside from wanting to be as explicit as possible.

<up>, <ctrl-a>, type sudo and enter is nearly as quick and much more explicit for me.

These things are not really mutually exclusive. Defense in depth. Getting more information on building defensible software does not preclude the need to have someone knowledgeable try to rip it apart afterwards.

Thanks for these, something resonated with me reading his description. Any other recommendations on the strategy side?

Comparing compensation for experienced engineers and new grads between companies isn't apples to apples.

That would be an opt-out strategy, would it not?

Right. So most folks here aren't following the "enterprise" space too much, but disclaimer: I work at Workday, a direct competitor to Oracle in the Business Management (ERP) software space. My background's in hosting & infrastructure.

Oracle are losing a lot of Oracle database licenses at the enterprise level and when they look around, the "cloud" is one of the main reasons why. They sell a bunch of jumped up 1990's applications which are mostly thin, crappy wrappers around a sophisticated database and their database, despite a lot of accounting and sales tactics that say otherwise, is still their main earner. You can't, unfortunately, see that anywhere, however, so I can't cite anything :-) So, enterprise customers, who are mostly the people buying their database are moving towards the "cloud" eating some of Oracle's lunch.

As a result, Oracle sees a growth opportunity in the "Cloud" arena - both on the infrastructure (AWS) and the application space (ERP). https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/database-bench...

So they recently bought Dyn, Palerra & LogFire so you can see a pattern here. Dyn are just more "internet famous", but this is a pattern [1]

Lots and lots of talk recently from Ellison about their strategy.

http://www.networkworld.com/article/3123408/cloud-computing/... http://www.forbes.com/sites/oracle/2016/10/17/larry-ellisons...

It'll be interesting to see the duck tape and glue they use to jam all this crap together, but I think they're fighting an uphill battle with an incumbent that's years ahead of them on the product side. However, this is Enterprise world, and best product definitely does not always win. Oracle have a long history of selling successfully to Enterprises through fairly aggressive sales tactics. I'm not surprised if they see a market opportunity given how unfriendly AWS & GCE can be from an enterprise perspective.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle

You send them to bed early without dinner

returning multiple values was the key part of the sentence

I don't disagree, although I'm sceptical that's intentional on Google's part. I think if you applied some common sense to the situation and you were able to get off your moral high horse about what's correct vs answering the questions he needs you to answer to get to the actual proper interviews.

Dale Carnegie wouldn't have approved, I'm sure.