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twinkletwinkle

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That's the core of the author's argument. Protobuffers optimize for something besides usability and maintainability, because Google cares more about incremental performance than developer-friendliness. Which is a fine thing to care about at Google's scale, but maybe others' calculations should be different.

Technically, there might have been N>2 parties involved in the switcheroo.

Someone expecting the antenna received shirts, someone expecting X received the antenna, someone expecting shirts received X, ....

You can't stop market forces.

Surely you can, we do it all the time. That's why we have subsidies on American sugar and tariffs on Chinese steel and higher taxes on cigarettes than on milk and... We have entire government agencies who spend all day thinking up ways to affect market forces.

The EmDrive claimed to violate conservation of momentum. To extend your analogy, instead of shining the light out the back of your spacecraft, you shined it inside the spacecraft at the back wall. It bounced around and came out as net positive thrust. Hence the extreme skepticism.

You're probably being sarcastic but I think the parent meant Curriculum Vitae. Making technical decisions based on what will look good on your resume instead of what's the best way to solve the problem at hand.

At the absolute bare minimum, hit the brakes and reduce the impact. An attentive human driver would have at least started to hit the brakes. The software should have had plenty of time (I'm estimating a full second) to do something productive.

Dropbox S-1 8 years ago

They could also call out the flip side though, right? Dropbox could negotiate deals with the ISPs to "box out" smaller competitors. Maybe it costs them upfront but it also solidifies them in the market.

I agree. Zero out the stockholders and send some executives to prison for negligence and fraud. The corporate death penalty is the only way we'll see companies take infosec seriously. If I were CEO at Transunion right now, looking at what's happened to Equifax as a result of the breach (nothing), I wouldn't spend a minute's time thinking about upgrading my security practices.

That has been Matt Levine's thesis for a while, "Private markets are the new public markets". The public markets used to be the biggest source of capital, subject to stringent rules and regulations. Now you can get just as much money from the private capital markets, and it doesn't come with all the pesky rules around reporting.

and if it isn't a fraud it will stay right where it is

I'm not actually qualified to give investing advice. But this part isn't strictly true. In a functioning market, the price could be depressed by the regulatory uncertainty. If that were the case and it was cleared up, you would see the price rise.

Every time you talk about building more housing in a desirable place, there's always someone who brings up the argument "But if you build more housing then even MORE people will want to move here". Nothing wrong with some empirical evidence.