ben_jones

Mass firings are seen as a opportunity to get rid of your "worst" employees because you have strong plausible deniability if the reason for firing is anything other then the massive layoff. Employee trying to start a union? Raising politically sensitive issues? Under-performing? Questioning management? Negative personality? Taking too many days off? Not popular on your team? Companies are aware of this and it contributes strongly to the negative signal assigned to be involved in a mass layoff.

It's the web trying to take back share from native by integrating more hardware related APIs i.e. storage, authentication, etc. - driven by large corporations with disproportionate voices in these working groups.

I doubt it's even this particular feature, just an ethos of: let's add as much as possible because it'll increase our relevance.

It introduces the feed feature as an integral part of a social network's success/failure, stemming from real domain experience. If GP included maybe one more sentence on how/why the feeds mentioned failed I think it would've been much better received. Sorry GP you didn't deserve it.

This comment is beautiful content marketing.

1) Start with a comment relevant to the actual topic

2) Identify a problem that resonates with the key demographic

3) Betray a personal failing

4) Convert the failing into a point of strength

5) Expand on your newfound strength

6) Compare yourself with larger more well-known and successful companies

7) Include a link to your product

This is like money laundering right?

In America you get a voter packet with detailed information on the Candidate's position on key issues, plans, etc. To me this is far superior to a 30s ad clip produced by some marketing agency that specializes in being hip for college students.

I wonder how decentralized Google accounts were before the Google+ unification process. Funny that management of that project is still having long lasting negative affects!

I disagree, here [1] is a small clip from a really powerful documentary on the subject of Venture Capital and finance.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbBD7VIJ4cc

Analytics, logging, "Artificial Intelligence", the latest Fad in devops/application development, System administration duties, help desk duties, hiring/interviewing duties (you don't get to 1500+ without A LOT of this!), the refactoring after the clusterf* of using the latest Fad in devops/application development.

"BIG" data pipelines, managing an Elasticsearch cluster, PM for the design of app 1, PM for the design of App 2, (for probably dozens of apps), QA teams, Design teams, Localization teams, Accessibility teams, SEO and marketing automation teams, teams to build out their CRM, and the all important management layer to interface all these teams together!

This, this ladies and gentlemen, is how Silicon Valley changes the world.

If only there was some method of exchanging money for the time of professionals capable of vetting a technical product and giving a summarized report.

It's good at moving bytes around. Turns out most networked applications are just moving bytes around. I've been using it for four years now and honestly would ask for an extra 10%-20% to be working in most other languages.

> After analyzing the user engagement statistics of apps that switched from semi-hidden navigation within hamburger menus to more visible bottom navigation bars, and apps that switched from more exposed to semi-hidden navigation, Wroblewski saw a trend. “Navigation is the manifestation of what is possible in an app and when people can’t see what’s possible, they likely won’t know what they can/should do in that app,” he told me in an interview about this idea. Increasing visibility boosts usage.

They have this highly data-driven process which optimizes for usage and engagement . The problem is I don't wake up in the morning and go "gee I really want to up my engagement with google maps today". The ideal information retrieval app consists of me retrieving information and closing it. This is antithetical to Google's monetization model, and thus Google Consumer design is not for my benefit.

That said each Google Product is like a different company and they do do good work here and there. Specifically the Google Cloud Console has improved tremendously over the years (no doubt due to massive investment). Is it perfect? Hell no. But I prefer it to AWS and Azure tremendously.

It gets smarter. Blizzard has dumped over $100M into Overwatch ESports. Of the 20 teams three are named after Chinese cities: Guangzhou, Hangzhou, and Shanghai. Now imagine if a symbol of Hong Kong freedom is played in any tournament against or for these teams?

Is it safe to assume those same bribes to game studios and gaming journalists have likely also been applied to Software start ups and tech journalists?

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists: “Damn they beat us to it!”

I support Hong Kong Protesters:

To play devils advocate, SMS is super wonky and it’s possible they have virtual limits for outgoing message volume at multiple points that they’ve hit at peak hours and caused this poorly worded error message.

Oh I absolutely agree, there is also a rich irony in the United States condemning financial imperialism when we literally wrote the entire playbook for it in the 20th century.

An enemy (eastern imperialism) of your enemy (western imperialism) is your friend. China was a victim in the Opium wars and then again to Japan in the 1930s and 1940s. This is all important context that needs to be considered.

To be clear I don't support China or Eastern imperialism in (significantly) Africa, the ME, or the US. But if you want to fight it you have to be informed, history repeats itself.

The NBA recently [1] condemned an employee's post on Twitter in support of the Hong Kong protesters - shortly after the tweet was deleted and an apology was issued by the employee. While there is not proof of coercion it is strongly implied. Leaks [2] also indicated that the employee's immediate termination was strongly considered.

SIGNIFICANT EDIT: it seems the NBA has walked back and is now supporting the employee in question, as a consequence China has banned all NBA broadcasts in the country.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21176976

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/deawtd/gonzalez_as_a_c...

[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/dewiuy/yu_fu_cctv_anno...

From /r/hearthstone

>https://truth.bahamut.com.tw/s01/201910/acd1e702747963b5e6d6... I'm a heartstone player from Taiwan. Just here to share information from another aspect. The picture above is the comment from the official hearthstone account on China social website. (the V means verified) translation:We strongly condemn the player and the casters on what happened in the game last weekend ,and we firmly DISAPPROVE people to state their own political POV in any tournament.The player will be banned from the tournament,and the casters will never be granted the chance to cast any official tournament from now on. Besides,we will firmly PROTECT THE PRIDE OF THE COUNTRY just like what we always do.

——

Remember Blizzard is also the company that prominently feature Pride during many Overwatch events on western streams - but didn’t show the same content on Eastern streams.

I’m deleting anything I have of Blizzard-Activision not because it’ll hurt their bottom line, but so I can know I’m doing the right thing for this particular situation.

> The tone of the answer was pretty combative and people downvoted for that reason (as noted in comments). OP interpreted downvotes as transphobia. There was another answer that said something like "cultural awareness / different cultures, as part of D&I" that was presented positively and got a lot of support. (I know gender != culture; I'm pointing out that another D&I answer, presented constructively, was well-received.)

Seems like an age old tale of management assessing a situations potential liability as high, and promptly responding with a zero tolerance policy and throwing someone under the bus to protect themselves.

This is an important reminder that it's important to periodically review default tooling whether they be chrome extensions, desktop apps, phone apps, etc..

Im definitely guilty and glad someone did the research!

My naive understanding is that governments profit from these bailouts. From this article:

> The final cost of the bank bailouts has still to be determined and there are a number of factors at play. Nama is projecting to return a surplus of €4 billion to the exchequer but that could go either way and we still don’t have a firm and fast date for its winding up.

The US did at least [1].

[1]: https://money.usnews.com/investing/articles/2017-01-19/finan...

> By law, we can only charge one price to all payers

My last visit to one medical for a pretty average checkup netted my a bill of ~$450. I checked their website, and saw a price for the same “procedure” for 100. When I called up they said that was the price for uninsured patients who had that procedure and that because I was insured, they were legally compelled to charge me $450. Ultimately the support agent hinted at me to say some magic line about financial hardship so she could lower it to ~250.

As a patient all the doctors and admins are pointing at the insurers and all the insurers are pointing at the doctors and admins.

It’s hard to trust any of you.

The real play must be to take a chunk out of medium right? “Companies that don’t like medium or Wordpress are rolling their own costly solutions, so here we are with the smooth transition”.

The problem is if they want to be profitable they will eventually have to incorporate the bad parts of medium and/or the bad parts of Wordpress and then we’re back to square one with some new minimal open source static site builder. This wheel is exhausting.

To play devil's advocate you could argue many web apps are small internal tools that provide lots of business value but only have small (even single digit) user numbers and thus shouldn't optimize in the slightest for db trips (and instead optimize for maintenance or simplicity).

I agree but can't ignore this idiom

> If you start without an ORM you end up writing a custom ORM eventually and often that custom ORM is inferior to the third party one you're considering

Funny enough this engineering problem becomes an HR one:

If your recruiting and training processes can consistently hire devs actually fluent in SQL and web application architecture you can completely avoid the ORM and just write good modular and testable code that avoids the chaos of poor SQL performance etc.

If you're like most organizations and have trash recruiting and training processes for developers, you don't have the luxury of trusting your teams not to fall over with technical debt, and may prefer to use an ORM for immediate short term complexity and also long term technical debt management (since the ORM effectively becomes a framework with consistent patterns that can scale across teams).

I’ve already started to see price gauging on UberEATS in SF. Not sure if I was an A/B test or not, but deliveries which include both a service fee and delivery fee totaling $7/8/9 AND the UI defaulting to a $3 tip before delivery, just has me scratching my head.

Throw in surge pricing which adds ~$15 for even close (<10 minute deliveries), and you quickly see it falling apart.

Any plans to open source / open core this software? I've always been interested in forum software (my first real web project was a Reddit clone in Flask and the complexities and edgecases abound - moderation tools, rate limiting, scaling write-load, finding the minimum front-end that doesn't make users puke).

Playing Devil's advocate imagine having potentially millions of dollars invested in tearing you apart - going through every piece on online history, video, etc., trying to find something juicy to tank the company you've tried so hard to build.