whyileft

Or they are in a hurry. I will take the faster option every time and that usually means no human.

Correct, but this is the result of the store intentionally routing you through the self checkout by under staffing cashiers to save money.

What if there was no work to do? Amazon is exploring that concept and if it works as described (I haven't used it yet, but have walked by and it seems to) seems objectively better in every way.

Excellent point. I should have used "self service" instead of "automation". It was a poor choice of words on my part. Full automation to remove anyone from needing to do the work would certainly be objectively better. The article linked is more about self service than automation.

This shouldn't be downvoted. There is definitely at the minimum Microsoft employee vote brigading at this point. HN needs to start making upvotes, downvotes, and time of vote public.

Ban breeding. There are plenty of dogs available for adoption. Once we run out of those we can reconsider the ban. Pretty simple stuff.

Or its a flaw in market capitalism. "When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail"

Bingo. Automation is cheaper, not higher quality. The only people that consider not talking to service agents or cashiers an improvement in service have social anxiety issues or something similar. A checker at a grocery store actually does all of the work for you. Objectively it is better in every way unless you consider it a negative to be involved in human interaction.

I would highly recommend spending an evening reading through Martin Fowler's blog. Has has a gift of breaking down concepts into very pragmatic and digestible explanations.

A couple of my favorites:

https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/injection.html

https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/refactoring-dependenci...

http://caniuse.com/#feat=notifications

Every. single. other. browser. Including desktop Safari.

That is a very deceptive way to put it.

https://jakearchibald.github.io/isserviceworkerready/

Safari is intentionally crippled in several areas. Its very specific and obvious. It is dishonest for you to at this point pretend Apple is going full force for web standards while they are explicitly not implementing features that are available everywhere else. And how those specific features line up directly as features which allow web apps to compete with its native application market.

Edit: To anyone seeing this down-voted. Apple employees typically down-vote stuff like this so please do not take this being greyed as anything but manufactured opinion.

That's a valid point. I've updated it to be less flippant. Appreciate you bringing that to my attention as there is a lot of great discussion going on in this thread.

Almost smells like the ACA, doesn't it?

Edit: My apologies for sounding a bit antagonistic. The ACA is currently making use of high copays for that reason and more. It also hopes to force more transparency as well as most people want more than a icd-10 code when they have to write a check for $4k.

Most technology is useless. Its not a product of necessity, but a product of our chosen economic system.

In market capitalism we need at a least 2. Efficient, isn't it?

The main reason we haven't switched over is because switching is costly and it seems like there are better things we could do with our time.

In hindsight, do you feel that your potential customers made the same decision?

Yup. Voting on HN is very suspect in general and easy to manipulate because the votes are hidden.

Everyone quits at the same time. When they realize how much they owe in taxes or incur accidental cost like a car accident or a large maintenance bill to their home they were renting out.

When your contractors lose money working with you they eventually have no choice but to do something else because they run out of money.

Oh god. You just turned a thread about startup opportunities into one about diet fad wackos. You even got the ball rolling with your silly carbohydrates comment. Ugh

Things feel more fun when you're drunk with other people. Having a drink or two isn't. In that case its just kind of relaxing. Takes the edge off if you are feeling anxious or stressed about the earlier work day for example.

Considering how there are a lot more Amazon employees here on HN as opposed to Walmart employees, I doubt your contrarian opinion will be particularly well received. Regardless of its merit. Personally, I agree with you, but having a discussion about it here on HN is probably a waste of time.

The older I get the more I wonder how much it has to do with very few people making it 10 years without moving into an different industry that doesn't treat their talent like assembly line workers that they don't have to pay overtime.

For historical context

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

Based on your green colored name, you may not know that pg is Paul Graham http://www.paulgraham.com/

On HN the downvote button is definitely considered the disagree button. Downvotes are private whereas comments are public so it ends up actually being the most common action for disagreement. Also, you must have over 500 karma so it is typically older more conservative viewpoints that downvote.

EDIT: One thing I neglected to mention. You can probably tell based upon my comment being downvoted, you are not actually allowed to talk about downvoting. Its kind of like fight club.

Everywhere I've been begs for female applicants. I feel like the low numbers of women trying to get into tech is a fantastic example of how market forces do not solve everything. There is an enormous gap between the supply of female applicants and the demand for them with little change in sight. To any women reading this comment. Places are desperate to hire you so do not be afraid to apply at places where you feel you may be a little under qualified.

"non-literal" copying is garbage. We already have a legal term. Its called a derivative work. Which is what taking a Harry Potter book and changing the names of the characters is.

Lawyers create new terms like that to intentionally make it difficult to apply previous case law to the case at hand. Both for the opposing lawyers and any judges on appeal.

Bingo. First person I found in this entire thread that knows what actually happened.

That classic "well, nobody else has had a problem, so you must be the problem" response.

To anyone reading this that gets this response in a negotiation, this is the go to line for any experienced negotiator when you come to them with questions about a contract. Always. Its like negotiation 101. Do not take the response at face value. Its a canned line that doesn't mean anything on its own.

The typical response is to say that it makes a good impression on the organization that they have yet to have any contract disputes and then get back to asking about your specific issues.

Although, the harsh reality is that for them to change this contract means they need to bring a lawyer into the situation and that costs them money. So realistically you need to be in a situation where you have some kind of leverage in the situation. That is pretty rare when you are alone on the labor side as opposed to the capital side. Sometimes you have to decide between taking a risk of getting screwed or walking away. Unfortunate reality of our economic system as it currently stands. As unions learned a long time ago, labor protections via government regulation is typically more effective than private negotiation. Without that, most people just have to learn to accept they you are going to get taken advantage of and work around it.

I think being from the US you underestimate the scale and reach of the enormous vertically integrated corporations of Japan. The US has antitrust laws which allow for a lot more potential disruption. Japan does not.

The arbitrage is on the labor. Find someone who can build x for y and then sell it for z. The arbitrage opportunity comes from creating or obtaining a market you control. That market can be everything from a platform(Apple) to a collection of sales channels(Oracle) to a monopoly IP position(Microsoft). You do not need find people because they come to you because you control the market.

In that case, why not trade any random commodity?

Its much easier to gain control of markets that are new as opposed to established ones.

Because its still about building an overall market for Uber to capitalize on later. Lyft is burning through their own VC money helping Uber build that mass with little possibility of actually beating out Uber in the long run.

Not aquiring Lyft was such a masterful move that I completely missed at the time.

Considering it is illegal for companies to do what Trump ordered[0], I'm not sure that would be the best analogy.

https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/nationalorigin.cfm

That's actually a very valid point. I was not thinking as much about HTML/CSS as I haven't been involved in a lot of large scale frontend refactors.