CoffeeDregs

My point about Pivotal was not about the investor; it was about the similar investment thesis.

    the rabid cost cutting is pretty typical.

True, if the thesis is around bloat, mal-investment, adventurism, etc. If the theory is something like "tech talent roll-up in the face of an industry-wide cloud migration", then cabid cost-cutting would be disastrous (modulo all of the SG&A position eliminating)...

    A PE firm usually buys when they think they see cost cutting opportunity.

The PE firm buys things in which it sees opportunity. Often-times, the opportunity is to cut: the management team's adventurist streak in markets; weak products; bloated staff.

Other times, they might recognize that a company needs capital to get bigger faster in order to address an expanding market. In this case, I think the thesis might be: cloud deployments and migrations are exploding; ThoughtWorks has the thought leaders; "roll up" other consulting firms into ThoughtWorks; dominate the market. A friend's consulting firm was just bought for this exact reason. Something very similar happened to Pivotal.

Wow. The status page is even up to date... They're often seriously delayed...

Unless I'm misunderstanding how it works, some questions about this idea:

  * Presumably, you have to fully empty and then fill your tank?
    Over twice as long to refill as for gasoline/diesel.  (Still:
    not terrible.)

  * How do you get refunded for your partially used "fuel"?
    I generally refuel around a quarter of a tank.  In this case,
    that means I'm sending back 25% unused fuel.
    (Pump it out, analyze the mixture, provide credit?  Seems seriously game-able.)

  * Is the power output constant regardless of charge?  Can I get 20kW
    of output at 25% charge?

What a bummer. This could have been "Kubernetes for organizations", how to manage diverse sets of containers-of-emotions/talents in a scalable fashion. There is so little nuance and quality thinking around this topic inside most organizations and Google could have done the community a great service by elevating and firmly grounding the discussion. And I think there are great discussions to be had that would lead to tech workers understanding and desiring diversity for actual reasons and not for PC/BS reasons.

But now no one will raise the topic.

Agreed. Just switched from X1 Carbon to T460s. Got it with 4GB of RAM and stuck a 16GB stick in the slot (total: 20GB). It's hard to tell the difference with the X1 Carbon and the extra USBs, HDMI and such are welcome.

Carfentanil is terrifying. Wound up in a Wikipedia hole looking that up. 10,000 times as potent as morphine. Only recently illegal in China. Therapeutic dose of one microgram. May have been the way the Russians subdued the Moscow Theater Attack (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis#...) by just spraying it over the crowd. It seems that many people died of asphyxiation when they passed out and flopped over. It's considered a chemical weapon.

Consider the mixing requirements of carfentanil: one insufficiently ground grain of the chemical is lethal. And the people making the end-product are amateurs.

One kilo from China was confiscated in Canada. Certainly a bit hyperbolic, but "According to the Canada Border Services Agency, the shipment contained 50 million lethal doses of the drug, more than enough carfentanil to wipe out the entire population of the country[...]". Divide that by ten and it's still terrifying. Dump a small bag over NYC Times Square or Mumbai and you'd create mass casualties.

This isn't some crazy, Bethesda-managed super-bug or insecticide. It's a bog standard, synthetic opioid.

From my dashboard: EC2 VPC network health intra AZ issue

The issue that began at Thu, 27 Jul 2017 13:53:00 GMT has been resolved and the service is operating normally.

Start time July 27, 2017 at 9:53:00 AM UTC-4 End time July 27, 2017 at 10:08:00 AM UTC-4

Football is only 5th on this list of dangerous sports: https://www.thetoptens.com/most-dangerous-sports/ The real issue is that football trauma has effects over longer time periods and the long term effects are discounted in the near term.

>Good riddance to a lame game of consisting of mostly low skilled athletes

Having played up to college, it's tremendous fun and has roles for a range skillsets. While not necessarily very intelligent, everyone is very skilled.

Amen. There was a great article about this in the The Atlantic a few years ago. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-ame...

Anecdote: my mother-in-law was a smoker, felt dizzy one day, went to the ER and died five days later from a brain tumor. Got the Statement of Benefits (or similar): the cost was $140k; Medicare paid $40k...

Unfortunately, few of the photos have anything to indicate scale and those few seem to range from 100m (small trucks on the far side) to 2-3m (the guy stepping on one). Still, those are incredible photos...

Would transpiling Scheme to Javascript and then executing the resulting Javascript on NodeJS give good performance?

I hugely agree. I've done a lot of web development in a range of circumstances and this current period is frustrating. I just started a new project at a new company; decided to use React; bought and downloaded a React Admin template; spent 2 hours trying to get it to "build"; gave up after I couldn't sort the node_modules conflicts among about 50 modules (totalling nearly 1GB!), each of which had 10+ modules as a dependency.

Angular did have its issues, but I dropped a reference to CDN's version into a web page and was off to the races very quickly.

I'm literally using Makefiles to build, test and deploy a set of about 7 microservices (including their web admin tooling). It's incredibly straightforward, flexible and clearly documented... Gulp, Grunt, WebPack... What are we doing?

I'm generally for Net Neutrality but you seem to be suggesting that regulation drives technological progress. Modulo things like natural monopolies, unaccounted-for externalities, etc, isn't the opposite usually true?

Also, are you suggesting that Ajit Pai represents "regulatory capture" and has no regard for the consumers of the industry he helps regulates? Perhaps it is the case that he's a terrible person, but it might also be the case that he has a different perspective on how best to drive innovation in the telecom industry.

I'm not sure how I feel about Trump but he's a new President and I'm going to root for him and for his team until he makes an actual mistake and not a maybe-could-turn-into-a-mistake-someday choice.

I didn't get anything negative from GP. I think they were just wondering at the lack of comments from a likely over-represented HN Indian population about Trump nominating a decent number of Indian Americans... I had not noticed (yes, I'm a white guy) and now I have so I appreciated the comment.

Why would you assume that software-as-a-whole has lost money? The industry is full of un-subsidized, non-cyclical, high profit companies... Microsoft, Apple, Google, Oracle, Autodesk, IBM, EMC, CA Technologies, Saleforce.com, etc.

Not sure why it's a silly way of looking at an industry's long term performance. It shows that, while occasional profits are made, the industry is prone to brutal, un-differentiated price competition...

So you're saying you believe the Delta CEO when he says "Industry May Never Again Lose Money"? [1] Considering the above, I'd be skeptical they're experiencing more than temporary, cyclical profitability.

[1] https://skift.com/2016/06/14/american-airlines-ceo-says-indu...

    That is clearly not true. See, for example: [Industry publication]

A clarification: I meant that if you would show a net loss if you summed the net income of each airline in the industry since inception.

To be fair, while it definitely isn't clearly not true, my statement certainly is not clearly true... ;) Some non-industry pubs backing my not-clearly-true statement:

http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/borenste/download/AERPP11Ai...

http://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/031714/why-airlin...

https://priceonomics.com/can-airlines-make-money/

I'm not sure how usefulness-when-traveling-internationally is relevant when the vast majority of the market for Uber, Lyft, etc will never board a plane more than a handful of times in their lives...

EDIT: typo ("irrelevant" -> "relevant")

The commercial airline industry has lost money over the whole of its existence. If I'm flying from NYC to DAL, I'm flying the cheapest carrier (with a slight nod to Frequent Flyer programs).

I'm not sure how Uber, Lyft, etc are any different than Southwest, American, etc. Cab companies (which I hate) and airlines saw this years ago and promoted regulations to protect their fees (and, thereby, wages). Airlines lost those regulations under Reagan.

To wit, I had dinner with a few friends in SF and it was raining when we left: "I'll call an Uber and we can share. ewww... 250% surge pricing or $90. Lemme check Lyft. Sweet, Lyft is about $50. Our Lyft will be here in 3 minutes." There was zero friction switching from Uber to Lyft.

Winning in this market seems to require a Level 4+ autonomous car [1] monopoly. Level 4+ autonomous cars are not going to be here anytime soon and Uber's not going to have a monopoly. So it's going to continue to be a gnarly pricewar, made worse by Level 3 (in which the "driver"/pilot is a student doing his homework for $5/hour, taking over driving once or twice per hour).

Not sure I agree so much with the body of TFA but I certainly agree with its conclusion.

[1] http://www.techrepublic.com/article/autonomous-driving-level...

Ev was right about social (micro-) blogging with Twitter and the VCs backing him did well as Twitter figured out how to monetize content. Ev says he's got wind of a similar opportunity in long form blogging. I'm not sure why we'd be surprised that VCs would back him strongly, even while they understand the monetization risk.

Actually, the lead investor says it better: https://knowledge.sparkcapital.com/our-investment-in-medium-...

I think you're referring to "Jake Braking", which is very noisy and is banned in many towns (in California).

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

The Car Talk guys addressed this and agreed with you. It's better to use the brakes to slow down since they're ablative and designed to be replaced with wear. Causing the engine to do extra revolutions means extra wear on something that's quite difficult to replace/repair...

That said, I drive a manual and use the engine for braking...

I've been using Lenovo X1 Carbons for about 4 years (since they came out) and love them. Super light, enough RAM and CPU, great keyboard (after 3rd Gen...), has a TrackPoint (which I require). I'm been using Debian exclusively since 2008 and Gnome 3 since 3.4 or so. Highly recommended, though HiDPI support is not perfect...

I greatly appreciate the Myers-Briggs test, but I've only seen it applied as a tool for self-understanding: I think I've been given the test a couple of times by schools and universities. Taking it has helped me understand a little bit more about myself and there are very few tools in the world that help you learn anything about yourself.

AFAICT, the only reasons for a company to administer it are: employee development (same as universities); to attempt to fix a deficient interview process (which is BS).

Great to see that one of the key contributors looks to be an employee at JetBrains (https://github.com/alexeykudinkin), increasing the chance that this may already be or may grow to be an official project.

Interesting. While not an official Google product, this is in Google's GitHub repo. Seems to prove a nice validation of Rust's growing success.

+1 for Cassandra and KairosDB. We use Instaclustr to host Cassandra on AWS and do time series data management with Kairos. It's been a hugely scalable, robust system we use ingest about 5B datapoints per day.

Also, Brian (project leader of KairosDB) agreed to a small consulting project for us to help us configure and tune Kairos. He's a very nice guy and was very helpful.

So you would you sell your house and take an Ethereum contract in return?

Note: I loved Charles Stross's suggestion of code-as-contract in Acccelerando, so I dig the concept.

If you want to play with 3D fractals in WebGL, you can also try:

http://www.alsonkemp.com/geekery/webgl-fractals/

I'm confused. This was on the front page a moment ago. Now it is not.

This article was

119 points @ 3 hours

Current front page contains (sampled):

38 points @ 2 hours

87 points @ 4 hours

59 points @ 3 hours

26 points @ 2 hours

110 points @ 6 hours

35 points @ 7 hours

Or am I just not seeing it?