relix

I read worryingly little (no?) counter to the sentiment expressed by the lyrics as part of your message and the comments here. And the implication that people in other countries wouldn't spend $10MM of government funds to save a family instead of watching them ditch in the water is ridiculous.

- "The World" has jumped in to help Americans often. It's just that USA, due to their advantageous geographical position, never being bombed to bits, and having economic and military absolute supremacy, hasn't often been in a position of need where other countries can help out significantly.

- An example of where the world has helped significantly: Post 9/11 wars

- A recent example of when the world has helped: Californian wild fires

- And separately from that, of those "five thousand times" where the USA has helped other people in trouble, I guarantee a lot of those actually had considerable benefits for USA, meaning it wasn't a charity thing but the USA got something they wanted out of it, as well. Which is fine but let's not kid ourselves about those motives.

Just opening Wikipedia on the San Francisco earthquake, under the heading "Relief" it gives some indication of the international support given:

During the first few days after news of the disaster reached the rest of the world, relief efforts reached over $5,000,000, equivalent to $169,560,000 in 2023. London raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. Individual citizens and businesses donated large sums of money for the relief effort: Standard Oil and Andrew Carnegie each gave $100,000; the Dominion of Canada made a special appropriation of $100,000; and even the Bank of Canada in Ottawa gave $25,000.

And if we're allowed to go back as far as the San Francisco earthquake to "judge" the world, maybe we can extend that just a little further towards independence, where France provided significant support to the fledgling nation.

"The Americans", is frankly, ridiculous, and anyone subscribing to the sentiments within betrays the same (and wrong) isolationist understanding of the world as they ironically indeed blame others to have.

Turboprops are awesome and underrated. They have some advantages over jet engines such as faster response times (they can angle the blades instead of having to rev up RPMs), easy reversing (no pushback mule needed), and higher efficiency. They fill a niche really well.

I don’t think this makes much sense in the real world. Shit happens and plans change. What if an aircraft needs to do a go-around, do they suddenly face 45m of delay or immediately need to divert, because The Sequence is immutable?

No, they’d move things around a bit. SFO decided that this plane wasn’t going to land there as soon as they asked for ILS, instead of doing their job and making a gap.

Of course. My point is that this exact same situation, at a different company, may have surfaced a Tim that actually should be PIPed because he wasn't doing what he was asked to do, or his contributions weren't as valuable from an objective point of view (but of course all his peers love him taking some load off and them being able to get all the credit), or he was forcing a team dynamic that should be "fixed" because Tim is actually a Brent (from Phoenix Project) that had to have his hand in everything and the team couldn't survive without him, yet it may be difficult to discern these situations from the situation described in the article where Tim (sounds like) he was definitely bringing more value to the team than a replacement would.

Yeah it's a few hypotheticals onwards, and there's probably better ways to surface those problems, but companies are messy and no one is without flaw or 100% competent, no engineer and no manager.

(Note that I'm not saying evaluating a person based on delivering story points is optimal, or even useful)

I agree that firing people based on delivered story points is probably wrong. I disagree that measuring the amount of story points someone delivers has no benefits. In this case, it surfaced a very interesting dynamic in a team that apparently the company wasn't aware of, and now that it is surfaced, it can align that team better to the goals of the company. I would really wonder, for instance, how Tim was evaluated on performance, if the expectations of him didn't align with the role he was doing.

I think the part in the article where a manager wanted to fire Tim because he delivered 0 story points, and the teamlead (?) refused, is made up for dramatic effect. I can't imagine any manager seeing those type of results and instead of asking the teamlead what's going on there, jumping to the conclusion that Tim should be fired.

As a manager in technology I'm starting to really detest stories like this, because they are often bandied around by IC's with a very narrow view or opinion of why it's bad to do new change X or Y "because here is a story", which on the surface may be similar to what happened here but is in fact a good idea. In reality things are always so much more nuanced, or require much more context to judge, than what people naively think.

In this particular case, I can think of a few reasons why the original scenario that this team was in would still be considered "bad". For example, maybe Tim received tasks to do and he didn't do them, now the company is behind on things. Maybe the other people are not as good as their job as they should be, but because of Tim's interference that's being hidden. Maybe the expectation is that the other people are as good as Tim, so why are they not helping each other out as much as Tim is? Should Tim get a promotion, or are the other people performing badly compared to their position and salary? Maybe the tasks that Tim was supposed to do are more important than the ones he's helping others with. Maybe the company didn't budget this much investment (2 people) for a specific thing that needs doing, and as there's just so much engineering time going around, what other tasks are now receiving less time than budgetted?

There's so many ways where this story may fall apart in a real context. Obviously, something has to change (expectations, budgetting, salaries, job levels, etc...) to align reality with the direction that the company wants to go into, and that change is not necessarily (limited to) "keep Tim around and have him help everyone out and everyone will be OK and this is the optimal scenario and management bad".

The implication also being that "evaluating people on story points is bad", but that completely disregards the fact that doing this has surfaced an issue in the department that needs resolving (and before I get pitchforks thrown at me - that issue may very well be that Tim needs a change of job title and a promotion) - but obviously expectations and reality didn't align beforehand, and the story point metric surfaced it and allows for resolving it. In that sense, the story point thing yielded benefits that otherwise wouldn't have been had.

No, that's not the thing, they are already a business. They sell three tiers of the app, one of which is a subscription. The current price of the subscription is $13/year.

Additionally the outrage, as far as I am aware, has less to do with Reddit needing to make money rather it's way of going about making money is killing the user experience which kills the point of the website.

It's not killing the user experience, it's making the nice user experience "just" more expensive, which I covered in my first comment.

I personally don’t understand the outrage. Reddit obviously has costs, and if it wants to make a profit it should not subsidise third party apps that cost double - both no revenue and no ad views.

The cost of 0,00024 per request seems reasonable, and according to Apollo’s creator the cost per app user would be just 2,5 a month. Keep in mind that currently this app probably has no incentive to go light on the requests, so with some tinkering the creator could probably get that down. Maybe some proxy caching or what not.

Of course free is going away, but paying users at say 5/mo or 50/yr should still work for Apollo.

It’s 0,00024 per request

This is a very naive, simplified, and wrong take on a generally well accepted concept.

Point 1: increased demand for stocks will increase the price of it and thus the market cap. Point 2: the higher the market cap of a company the more capital it has available.

Of course, because every time it happens, unless I don't want the answer, in order to move forward I do need to explain the context.

So I do. And invariably either the original responder goes radio silence, or admits that my question is the correct one and they can't help me with it.

I think saghm really hit the nail on the head with his YZ answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36080243

I often encounter the opposite. I would have a complex problem that I can legitimately solve by something reasonably simple yet I don’t posses the expertise on. Asking how to do Y, I need to spend an godawful amount of time wasting to convince people that no, it really is not an XY problem, and could we just focus on the literal problem description, which you could answer in like 3 minutes, instead of you trying to score points by being able to claim it’s an XY problem.

This is because I was not up front about all of the context of course, but to fully explain the context and constraints that I’m working in, which I have already synthesised into my original question, would take two days due to complexity of the problem.

Let’s just get on with the problem solving instead of playing the meta game.

(I understand that knowing more context might be necessary to answer the question. I am referring to situations where that is not the case)

The extensive lack of database consideration in many decisions is indeed concerning, and obviously integrity checks should be standard and default.

(not a rebuttal on your comment, just a continuation of the conversation)

I found it an interesting criticism, and from what we know about the project I don't think I agree with the author.

In the space of what database to use, there are really few differences between Postgres and Postgres' peers, that "using what's available" is a perfectly sound reasoning to use Postgresql over, say, MySQL. I think around that time MongoDB was a possible alternative as well, however it was experimental and often mocked. Postgres and Mysql are pretty much feature parity, even in 2011, except for very niche use cases, which this project did not sound like it would have.

Factoring in that Heroku's PG UI is great, and to use an alternative would mean to have to set things up yourself (in 2011 the Heroku marketplace was not yet as expansive iirc), or at least have another account at another SaaS company with dubious maturity, the decision to use PG seemed to have been given the correct amount of critical thinking ("will it be able to support all that we need? most likely yes").

The author may also not have been aware that for RoR applications the code is pretty DB-agnostic, an unawareness he hints at in other parts of the story as well. Meaning that in the span of the year that they're working on rebuilding the site in RoR, if they discover a use case that another DB would be extremely helpful with, they could relatively easily switch over to this other DB without having to rewrite all of the code. At most it'd take rewriting of some migrations for FK's and possibly some (hopefully few) custom SQL queries. Remember that they had a one-time-switch-over when the site was done being built, so during this year of development time, the database did not accrue live user data that would have made such a change more difficult.

As everyone's "hate-boner" will be personal, to me a part that stands out is that Columbus seemed to be a conspiracy theorist akin to the flat-earther. The reason why his expedition took so long to get funding, is not because he was the only one who thought the earth was round, but it's that he used wrong calculations in order to calculate the size of the earth, and he was under the impression that it was much smaller than it actually is. Now at that time, similar to how everyone knew the earth was round, people had a pretty good idea of the actual size of the earth as well - it was already known in ancient Greece after all.

So when he claimed "I can reach the far east by sailing around the other side of the world in X days, as it's just a distance of Y miles" that was against common knowledge of that time, and everyone knew that a trip like that would take 2Y or 3Y miles, something unfeasible with the technology of that time.

The only reason his ship didn't perish halfway like everyone expected them to, is that there just happened to be a continent halfway that they stumbled upon. Columbus is a prime example of "task failed successfully".

I don't think this is the main reason. How many millions in licensing fee profit are they really earning? It seems like a drop in the bucket comparative to their total profit. And if that's the reason, why does the iPad have USB-C?

It's in the first point: "durable competitive advantage, or moats"

Maybe overpaying 50% for talent is an OK price to pay for what they were actually trying to achieve. Engineers are fickle - they'll complain about one side of an equation while ignoring the other N sides.

Maybe cost was never an issue, but collaboration was. Maybe the culture that this policy generated was more important than the extra dollars they had to spend.

Or maybe, just maybe, your "factual evidence" is actually just a casual quip Joel Spolsky threw out there that one time for quick laughs. I would really love to see your sources that state "if Facebook had single offices instead of an open plan office, there would be just as much innovation, collaboration and successful products, yet the total cost of payroll would be 30% less." I'm pretty sure that's impossible to prove, regardless whether you'll label it with "factual evidence" or not.

The most likely explanation is that your premise is wrong - top management of these companies is not low quality. Instead they are very good at their jobs, but what that means is just not be what you think it is.

hard to make that study work, it presupposes that users (a) understand that their battery life is decreasing and (b) understand that this application is responsible for it (and to what degree). Those are two big if's, it's more likely they'll chalk it up to battery aging than to a malicious application that used to be well-behaved. That doesn't however prove that users don't care - it only takes one article with a headline "Phone draining quickly? Facebook battery usage has increased by XX% the past year and responsible for majority of its users battery drain" to completely swing the pendulum to the other side where more users are deleting your app because of this new reputation, than would proportional to the actual battery drain; but without that trigger the study is not complete.

Make it broader - before take-off, pilots enter the expected destination (or expected distance). During cruising, computers keep track of how much fuel is being used (lost) per unit of time, and projects forward to see if they can still make their expected destination or not.

If the number does not reach within expected margins, then show an error.

This protects against leaks, but also miscalculation of fuel needed by the pilots, misfueling, or efficiency loss somehow.

That hasn't been a blocker in the past (see: all the other taxes that exist), why would it need to be going forward.

That's a completely different concern.

That's a ridiculous argumentation. This infrastructure was not built or maintained "just do idenfiy those 10 people in a neigbourhood that have "saved" 300 bucks a year". It exists for lots of different, likely more useful use cases, and this is just another added usecase that can utilise already existing infrastructure for no added cost.

Your statement is comparable to calling it ridiculous that we have roads "just so an ice cream truck can sell ice cones to neighbourhood kids during the summer". That's obviously not the main use case for roads.

This ignores many of the main reasons why an application does email verification - to improve chances that the user is not a robot, that the stack is setup correctly, that the user actually can receive and open email, and that the user is who they claim they are.

It's not "just" to verify that this user controls the email address.

Kobo's default OS has Dropbox and Pocket support. You can just drop a book in your Dropboox and it'll appear on your Kobo through wireless sync.

If no country is specified you can assume it’s an American talking about their country. So west coast, USA (California or Washington)

Beyond what everyone else has said here, it's also just not as easy to interpret GPS location on maps.

Say you're in the middle of an ocean, nothing but water everywhere around you. You're rocking on pretty good waves, going a nice 8 knots. You look at your GPS. You can see where you are right now. You can see a bit further away there's a dangerous rock which you should avoid. How do you interpret from looking at the map whether or not you're going to hit it?

Your GPS might show you your bearing, but because of the waves it's oscillating 10 degrees every 5 seconds. You don't know your leeway (drift because of the wind) nor if any current might still push you into the rock. This is, of course, all calculable.

But still, according to the map it's not that far away. It's hard to interpret on a feature-less ocean, and on a GPS map, whether something is 5 or 10 or 20 meters away. You're getting closer, but according to your calculations you shouldn't hit it. Hmm, did you calculate it correctly? Has the wind changed? Have the currents shifted? You look at your GPS again, the rock looks a bit closer now, but you're not sure whether that's to be expected or whether that's indicative that you might hit it.

Either way, this hypothetical situation might give you a bit more of a sense on what it's like to be on a boat. Things are pretty vague, and even if your phone could say "that rock is 30 meters away", it probably won't be able to say whether you're going to hit it or not with a degree of certainty that you want to risk your life on until you're well away from it. It's hard to explain how it feels like to navigate "by instrument" on a featureless plane like this.

But if there's a buoy floating, marking that rock, you can see it right there. Your human brain can easily interpret whether you're going to hit it or not, and it gives you confidence that you won't if you can see it really clearly. It's also a mark that you can use to navigate to, e.g. "I need to keep bearing X, that's approx in the direction of that lighthouse on the horizon right there" (or "I need to keep it 20 degrees off the bow"). That is much less fatiguing than steering based on a compass that is continually shifting due to the waves.

I guess it's a bit similar to the difference of flying planes through clouds on instruments versus using sight. Using visuals is much easier, and much less prone to errors, which is important because if you do make a mistake it can be very dangerous indeed. Not like with a car where you can just stop or you see when you're going to run into a wall or a pond.

If that's fake, you can make an easy 50% profit by arbitraging it. If you are somehow practically unable to arbitrage it, then you just discovered the reason why the conversion rates are so different.

I do wonder the effect it has on "total leisure time spend". My hypothesis is that piracy drops total spend in dollars, but maybe not necessarily on the category that was pirated. This would fit and counter the oft-claimed "if I couldn't pirate this I wouldn't have bought it anyway, so it's not a lost sale".

I hypothese there would be two reasons:

- because piracy enables more consumption of some media than the person otherwise would have done, it means they have less leisure time available to spend on other media which they would have spent money on. E.g. instead of buying a book and reading it, they would watch a low-value movie they pirated, affecting book sales but not movie sales

- because piracy decreases the perceived value of an hour of entertainment, the person would be less willing to spend money in other categories as well and would rather fall back to cheaper options

The result would be that the amount a person spends on _total_ entertainment drops, but the drop would be in other categories than the category that is piratable.