B-Con

Also because they exist. People who would move to CA but don't because of the housing problem can't vote to fix the issue.

You're over-thinking it. GMail's market pretense is large. The number of edge cases like this in the entire world combined is a rounding error to them. It would likely be easier to fix problems to minimize bug reports and keep community good standing than increase GMail's user base by 0.001%.

Oh, they're reading very old texts then. That wasn't the time frame I thought of when it said "classic".

I definitely had one too.

TBH it's dated pretty well. Still a cool asthetic.

> Era names typically come from Chinese classical texts, and are usually only revealed when one emperor has died and another has taken the Chrysanthemum Throne.

Chinese? I'm guessing that's a typo. Not only would Japanese obviously fit better, but considering the bad blood between Japan and China I think they'd sooner not choose a word than choose one from China.

The face that it can be used as a social signal doesn't mean it is exclusively used so.

> Online courses (and before that, public libraries) rendered institutions of higher learning unnecessary for, you know, learning. But the idea that massive open online courses, or MOOCs, will replace colleges is a complete misunderstanding of the purpose of a university degree.

I think the author misunderstands as well. Classic "if it's in a book then the class is worthless".

Information is not the teaching. The idea is that a teacher can instruct better than a mere textbook. YMMV, but there's no denying that having a pre-planned curriculum with instruction and 1:1 Q&As inherently supersedes walking into a store and hoping you can find and understand the right books in general. Never mind that books don't grade or provide feedback on homework, etc.

The problem is that university became a requisite for people who didn't want to attend. Standards for what the teaching we expect of universities has plummeted. That's why they work so hard to keep their brand. For the self-motivated and good learners, MOOCs and libraries can replace big parts of university. That's not for everyone.

> Despite being an intellectually rigorous institution, Caltech does not graduate many future elites. Alumni go on to be successful in their academic fields, but don’t tend to dominate finance, tech or politics.

A school exclusively for technical competence doesn't produce as many social elite [citation needed] as a school that's not focused on technical competence? I wonder why. How many of the financial elite came from mechanical engineering background at all? It's a silly comparison.

Side note: Don't forget it's an order of magnitude smaller, CalTech has ~2,200 students in contrast to Harvard's ~22,000.

> Successful parents in the upper middle class can leave money to their children, but that doesn’t guarantee entrée into the social elite. The more reliable way for powerful parents to buy power for their children is through a name-brand, exclusive education.

> Jared Kushner’s father famously secured Harvard acceptance for his son with a $2.5 million charitable contribution.

When did people making $2.5m donations become "upper middle class"?

Right, it's more commentary on how much of our society is built around ignoring life's pressures.

Not severe, but every so often I am reminded of the big picture of life. So many industries, economies, societies, nations, etc, have been upended throughout, leaving large numbers of well-meaning relatively prepared people in ruin.

I'm happy that the money is flowing into tech. But on the same token, maaaaybe it's a bubble? My brain won't dismiss that thought.

I think the fundamental lesson is that we can't take anything for granted, and the stability of the tech industry is just one of those things. Nothing guarantees the USD (my currency) won't plummet, the housing market won't implode, another financial crisis caused by psychopathic bankers won't happen, or ISIS won't nuke NYC.

It's part of "growing up", too. When you're young and have a decent set of middle class parents, you see the world as being very reliable and rigid. Thing are they way they are and you can depend on them. The grown ups take care of stuff, they practically make magic happen.

As you age, you see strong things now that didn't exist before, and weak things now that were strong before. You keep seeing the world as more fluid. And you learn about all the crap that's hit other people and you know, deep down, you weren't born specially exempt from it. The people who "take care of these things"? They're your peers. They can't work magic. And if they understand their job as well as you understand yours, things start to feel uncomfortably like a house of cards.

But hey, Netflix has a new season of $popularShow. That and a refreshing beverage sound like a good way to spend the evening.

The fine arts are great, after you've put food on the table and a roof over your head. Most people are much happier to have stable employment than esoteric knowledge. The economy and society are better for it too.

School's primary purpose is to prepare people to be functioning members of society.

I completely agree.

As another comment pointed out, the price comparison is poor. What changed is the value of the phone and what people are willing to spend. When phones got good enough many were willing to replace a traditional computer with the phone.

Don't forget that social networks were a thing back at the release of the first iPhone. I suspect far fewer people would be see as much value in a smart phone if they couldn't access Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Reddit on it.

A lot of these kinds of systems are decentralized. It's not a magic bullet.

"killed" implies it ceased to exist, so I think it's misleading to include rebrandings or relaunches where functionality gets folded into another product.

At a glance...

* Nexus wasn't killed, it was re branded into Pixel. Nexus had been trending toward premium and the Pixel switch cemented that.

* Googles was more-or-less replaced by Lens. Not a pure rebrand, but two products with the same idea.

* Google Now has essentially been folded into the expanding behemoth that is Assistant. I don't care for that kind of feature, but AFAICT they're fairly similar.

* Quickoffice was an acquisition that was promptly folded into Docs/Sheets/etc.

When I interviewed for SRE at Google, they'd had a non-trivial cross product outage days before. Good conversation starter, but I couldn't get many details out of them.

They already had built it. Google Videos (was that it's name?) was a thing and I remember it being turned down not too far from the YT acquisition.

Nobody said he did.

Turns out people are very happy to reward results. No one needs to do everything them self.

Not the first time he's been unable to get a Visa in time for a big conference: https://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2013/10/shamir/

Some of these are ambiguous without the function signature. calc? hypot?

Conversely, there are a lot of really good plumbers, they just don't know it.

There's a reason why they didn't be come a plumber.

There's a reason why they didn't become a programmer.

I think this thread greatly overestimates people's desire to do things themselves rather than just consume the products of other people's labor. There are a million things in my own life that I could do but don't.

I don't like the word "efficient" in contexts like this, I prefer "effective".

Yes, some people are simply 100x more effective than others.

We're in an age where it's scary to lose access to an e-mail addresses or phone number are at the top of that list.

I don't mean to change it, I mean to lose access to it. If you change it, find a way to hold onto access to the last one.

I learned this lesson relatively easily. I had a vanity domain that also received my e-mail and I eventually replaced it with a different one. I ran the new domain and e-mail for a few years before allowing the domain registration on the old one to expire. I hadn't received (non-spam) e-mail on it in a couple years, seemed safe enough.

Turns out I've had a few websites over the year since that I wanted to login to and I needed to recover my password, either because I forgot or the site had forced a reset due to a breach. I hadn't updated my e-mail on a few of those sites.

I don't think I'll let go of a main e-mail address or phone number again.

> In his influential 2011 book The Lean Startup, Eric Ries advises companies entering a new market to develop a "minimum viable product"—the simplest product good enough to attract paying customers. This strategy allows a company to begin selling real products to real customers—and get real market feedback—as quickly as possible.

I think the problem is that they're only interested in selling fully autonomous self-driving vehicles. There's very little market advantage in selling a "mostly" self-driving car, and Waymo doesn't want to be in generic car sales for years until they're ready. So they have to hold out for the 0 to 100 switch flip.

And they don't get to make mistakes and iterate on core functionality, so they have to wait. People's lives and schedules will be at the mercy of these vehicles, in a wide variety of operating contexts. They have to get it 100% right. If they kill people the brand itself is potentially dead.

So the picture is they need to go 0 to 100 with near 100% accuracy. Anything less is at best brand dilution or at worst corporate suicide.

Tesla's approach matches the MVP idea more closely since they can add small features incrementally. Presumably their eventual goal is to be able to say "with this update your car is now fully autonomous". But they're in the business of selling cars to begin with, so every release short of full autonomy is A-OK. Autonomy is a feature, not the product.

A lot of the article focuses on DMs sent from eventually deleted/suspend accounts being accessible from the receiving account.

When you send a message to another account, it's in their account now. Of course it's not going to disappear along with your account.

This had been the canonical behavior of messaging clients for forever. Email obviously, but also IM, chat find, etc. (Trying to remember about BBSs.) Once you press send it's not yours anymore.

This should 100% be the expectation of users anywhere they go. Once you press send, do not count on being able to withdraw it under any circumstances.

Does this genuinely surprise people or is it a slow news day at TechCrunch?

Arch Linux's approach is similar. The only version of the OS that is blessed is the current version. Every package install should come with a full system update. Package downgrades aren't supported.

In the case of an irreconcilable "X requires Z v1 but Y requires Z v2" they fork package Z.

Yes, for sure. I have done this before, but I'm long overdue for another. I have to make it a conscious dedicated effort, otherwise I'm too lenient and I don't trim nearly as much as I ought.

I've done the same thing with tab backlogs. Once I accidentally closed a window and went to re-open it. I couldn't remember any specific thing in that window. I left it closed and moved on.

I have so many queues of stuff I want to get to. I feel guilty how little of it I consume. Sometimes just looking at my backlog is somewhat anxiety inducing.

I have 245 videos in my YouTube "Watch Later" queue. (Turns out some parts of the Android YT UI has a max of 199 videos.) And a lot of those are 30min+ lectures. I probably have at least 50hrs of content queued on YT alone. And that's what I haven't watched.

Sometimes I can't choose when I do have the time. I'll have the time to consume 1-3 hours of content and I'll freeze, unable to choose. And half the time I choose something new that's not on my list yet.

> I don't disagree with the rest of your thesis, but this seems off by an order of magnitude. They would have to conduct 4 interviews every working day to reach even 1000 interviews. Counting the time needed to write feedback for every interview, that person would be a full-time interviewer who occasionally writes software/does product management/project management.

I admit it's hearsay, but yes, I've heard that some people supposedly conduct 1,000+ interviews.

To be fair, I'm sure some of those are the online "solve this coding puzzle in 30 minutes" type that can be watched later at 3x speed and don't require human interaction. I don't know the ratio, maybe the power interviewers are heavily sandbagging with those.

What's the difference? If it's desirable to reserve the right to disallow third-party frontends, why push the burden onto them (and everyone else) enforcing it through technical measures?

Monopoly rent implies (near) monopolies, which Facebook is not.

What's more, this is a conversation around individual users. Facebook's economic rent is paid by their customers, which are advertisers and not the subject of this conversation.

This expresses a worried thought I've had in the back of my mind for a while.

Power interviewers do a lot of interviews. They can do them in their sleep and crank them out like an assembly line. But assembly lines aren't nuanced, I fear power interviewers lose the ability (or desire?) to assess candidates through their performance instead of strictly assess the performance.

Power interviewers concern me. I think they end up with too much influence over a company's hiring practices.

I've heard of people at big companies who conduct thousands of interviews a year. This gives them a lot of sway in company hiring practices and culture.

The problem, though, is these large companies are hiring at scale. Growth + attrition yields a lot of hires. Google itself just announced in their earnings call nearly 20k more employees in the past year. That means 100k+ interviews conducted. It's hard to have every interview stay personal an nuanced at that scale.

> I imagine that people don't like to talk about them because of how powerful they are. And so all this talk about the 1% is actually a very useful smokescreen for the <0.01%.

No joke. Who's the actual 1%? In my personal experience of friends and family: My doctor, a VP of a big company you've never heard of, another doctor, a higher-up at a corporate law firm, a business consultant, a very senior engineer.

They don't run the world from the shadows. They don't hoard the world's wealth. They pay cash for almost everything, some drive nice cars, and they don't need to worry that their kid won't qualify for financial aid if they get into an ivy league college. Half the ones I know started life either middle class or in poverty.

Yeah, let's focus all our attention on them. I'm sure they have all the answers to fixing the world's inequality.