ben_jones

Trying to be less cynical, couldn't there be several valid reasons other then hype?

1) People hate car dealerships

2) The cars/trucks are really innovative

3) People hate car dealerships

This seems like click bait to me - as if Github is censoring 666. But they aren't. It's just a really weird markdown bug having to do with the '.' which immediately follows the number. It's explained in the actual SO post.

It's a cool post but it has nothing to do with censorship. Am I the only one who was misled?

Damning comment from /u/caldos4 on reddit:

> Tons of breaches documented here [1], at least 14 000 trips with unlicensed (uninsured) drivers. Drivers with suspended licences were allowed to re-register with Uber, drivers were allowed to drive without insurance on their vehicle.

I genuinely wonder if Uber could keep enough drivers if they stopped allowing uninsured or suspended drivers.

[1]: https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/press-releases/2019/novemb...

Recently I read announcements that Google was making it harder to view internal projects/discussions on other teams [0] (suspiciously, this came after the leak that they were still working on a search browser for China [1]). Have you, as a Google employee, found it hard to audit or observe previously visible projects?

[0]: Couldn't find a quick source on this

[1]: https://theintercept.com/2019/03/04/google-ongoing-project-d...

To further this, to get a "good looking" Hugo site going I find myself going through shared hugo projects and pulling various features together in my project - a process that requires a fair amount of trial and error and plenty of frustrations. I haven't tried Jekyll, and I still think Hugo is a great project, but it didn't leave me with a fully satisfied experience such that my next static site will try out something else. I'm also a full-time go developer fwiw.

Honest question, aren’t the consequences for “real” researchers keeping their heads down quite severe? Won’t we have important policy decisions both public and private and billions in funding misdirected for years when they could best be put elsewhere? Sure the “real” researchers will have easier access to funding, which perhaps is a key motivating factor to not push back on the hype, but isn’t there a large opportunity cost to allowing hype and or bullshit to go unchecked because “they don’t have the time to write a book”?

Or complex nested queries, such as those frequently created in a CRM specifying many key value pairs with different comparators: =, >, <, !=, LIKE. Add complex sorting instructions, pagination instructions, etc.

The problem with emojis is that they render inconsistently in different mediums and there are better ways to communicate the same intent, especially to users less familiar with emoji usage. For a project like this I think its alright, it adds spunk to a already spunky project (I define spunky as gung-ho competing with a funded and mature project because you think you can do a better job - which I support). I disagree with their usage in the h1 tags and a few other places because I think it looks bad, but its not my project and not a massive deal regardless.

All said I don't like the name because it puts Postman in a tough situation, keep the gender pronoun if you want just don't make it near identical to them.

Emojis look different on different operating systems (and sometimes don't even render)...

Counterpoint, I bought my dad a chromebook and he bought a random printer on Amazon. Works fine after connecting both to the same wifi.

Same goes for Microsoft? Looking through https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/allproducts thats a real stretch.

I frequently ask myself, if Hitler took power today - how many of our government officials, engineers, and soldiers, would get in line behind him. He would have no problem getting the census data and locations of subversives.

"If I told you to murder an infant girl say, still at her mother breast’s, would you do it without question?"

Bronn then answers "Without question? No. I'd ask how much."

Most Google Cloud Products are in Beta for years, with many enterprise customers using them in Beta...

If you click on the article above, the marketing material very clearly stated "Enterprise-Ready". It seems likely some people may have bought-in due to the Google brand, but your right I don't have any sales numbers.

Two valid use cases I've found for interface{}:

Handling large arbitrary JSON objects where I need to operate on their keys but don't need to work with their values by unmarshaling to map[string]interface{}. The alternative would likely be code generation of struct definitions with JSON bindings, which is likely preferable if you already have code generation in your project, but can be an overhead in smaller ones.

It can also be used to create your own syntactic wrappers around API's which consume interface{} such as encoding/json and database/sql:

  Unmarshal(r *http.Response, dst interface{}) ([]byte, error)

and

  BulkInsert(tableName string, columns []string, values [][]interface{}) (time.Duration, error)

> We recommend that over the next year, you identify an alternative solution and execute a migration strategy.

Something enterprise customers love hearing. Ooof imagine being assigned to sunsetting the service and explaining to what enterprise customers it still has.

I currently keep a wework hotdesk and they do have a sizable headcount at each location - 3 rotating front desk people, a location manager, and maybe 3/4 rotating maintenance staff. I think they might contract out the maintenance staff, but that's still 4x number_of_locations just for that.

I disagree. There's a lot of shilling in the games industry and if you pull back even the first layer you'll see a lot of discrepancies crop up. The tear down of the controller, the fact that they didn't allow internet speed tests during live demos, and a lot of videos on youtube showing game-breaking latencies. I think it's still new and you may be proven right, that these are early quirks that are fixable. But I don't think they will be outside of ideal internet connections and very specific games.

Some of the Google Cloud Products are quite good in my opinion. Spanner, BigQuery, GKE. They have pretty high price points, but that's what you get to have with a good product. With GCP Google gets to show off what it is actually top of the world at, with these one-off consumer products Google Employees are just being naive to what their strengths really are.

When Stadia announced I think the general consensus was cautiously optimistic. They promised a lot, 4k game streaming on any device - seemingly anywhere in the world. A lot of people familiar with the challenges were especially skeptical. But the marketing kept going with its promises. Now it comes out and many of these fears are validated - it only really works in tightly controlled situations with very specific types of games. The sticker price and ridiculous marketing remains.

The current negative sentiment as seen on HN is about Google dropping products. But I think the negative sentiment outside of our bubble is due to Google blundering into this with dishonest marketing. Google tried to force this into a viral success on day 1 and that's not going to happen. This strategy also eroded trust that it will be fixed to the point it was originally promised either.

Finally, it didn't help that they didn't vertically integrate the games themselves and are charging full price for the game on top of the service. Microsoft is a good example of how it may have been done, by investing heavily in studios and exclusives to get the people going. To be fair though, Microsoft has decades of experience with this with xbox alone.

EDIT:

Because of a sibling comment I just want to mention how I think this may end. I think Google is now between a rock and a hard place, they either dump immense resources to get it right, or they dump the product and face even worse consumer reputation decline (this time in an entirely new market segment!). I suppose there may be a third alternative of putting it on life support. Either way there is no clear win here, I do empathize with the team which probably has a lot of passionate members who just want to do a good job. It'll be a good PM lesson to watch how it shakes out.

Your comment is a punch to the gut for me, I've been developing an internal CRM for two years that embodies many of the philosophies you describe. But while it is somewhat depressing, I'm left with questions about how bad it really is.

First, is it possible to develop software without inconveniencing business users with temporary (let's assume the ultimate products are better then the linux/vim/emacs they are superseding) regressions and inconveniences? And what is the cost in terms of time to route around such pitfalls? Would we still be able to have startups at all if products required thousands of hours of QA or perfect test suites in order to launch?

Second, if we were to set a hard rule 20 years ago that all software was to avoid this phenomenon during its development, what valuable tools and services would never have been developed at all? Would we still have Twitter? Reddit? Steam? Whatsapp? I don't have to dig far into the history of any of those tools to find near revolutions by their userbases over braindead UI or adversarial practices in the name of "vision".

I don't know, these are open questions. I just think avoiding all such frustrations you mentioned is wishful thinking and at some point it is just part of the process of experimentation and iteration. Or perhaps this process is entirely different in a small corp. versus a big corp. environment.

In this context it's about mass public transit options and walking distance between a safe residence and wherever "downtown" is. Eugene and adjacent Springfield combine for a population of ~220,000 over ~88 square kilometers with limited late night transportation options other than sketchy and unreliable taxis.

I wonder if this is just because developers aren't testing or using firefox frequently enough to catch such bugs? I maintain several internal web apps for my current company and am guilty of this, all our users use chrome, all our developers use chrome, so our app unintentionally works best in chrome.

Not Portland but I lived/drank in Eugene for awhile when Uber/Lyft were still banned (IIRC they've since been let in). Outside of metro areas there is only one answer to that question in my opinion, lots of drunk driving.

That makes sense though. An aggressive recruiter overusing their work email to contact cold leads will get flagged a lot, even if the domain is clean I imagine they also train based off of individual addresses.

Is that true though? When I buy (and install) a game on steam it gets put into a downloads folder with an executable I can use outside of Steam to start the game. Are you saying that Steam would be legally obligated to delete this directory should they go out of business?

If you're a serial entrepreneur trying to get rich, or maybe a corporate product manager trying to get a juicy bonus, ya you'll have no clue what the users want because you'll be forcing it. But if you are one of the users you are very much aware of what your problems are and what might solve them - even if you don't have whatever domain experience is necessary to solve them.

I agree with your overall point, that things are worth trying even if they don't inherently scream success. But that doesn't mean we need to try everything and abandon common sense at the door. In this case I don't think Stadia defies common sense, I think it defies consumer benefit: gamers should own the games they buy, freemium services powered by ads are dubious, and products which need to be advertised dishonestly to sell well probably shouldn't be sold at all.

Stadia is marketing the platform as if the technology is rock solid and reliable when there are a lot of indicators that it may not be. If it was marketed for what it is, I'd probably be rooting for it. But my gut says this is going to disappoint a lot of kids and college students who are attracted to the bottom barrel pricing. Also if game studios buy in and build key infrastructure and it disappears, a lot of human hours are going to evaporate into oblivion.

Does Google BUY consumer data as Facebook does? Do any of Google's acquired companies buy or sell user data? Do any of Google's expanding enterprise products buy or sell user data?

If the answer is yes to these questions Google may have a clear competitive reason to lobby for pro data selling/buying legislation to the detriment of users which may signal that these privacy advocacy groups may not actually be privacy advocacy groups as the article alludes to.