chrisdinn

What counts as notable success? The entire base energy load for Ontario, Canada comes from nuclear (see: live.gridwatch.ca) and the provinces high energy costs (such as they were) were directly caused by investment in renewables through guaranteed high rates paid to producers. This is not a political point, I supported those mostly-now-abandoned investments. They took down just-erected windmills near my house in recent years (Prince Edward County, Ontario).

Seems like you are seizing defeat here.

You want an off-grid builder-grade house like you’d buy in a suburb, it sounds like. Going to be a long time before that happens. The builder homes work (both price and reliability) because there’s hundreds of thousands of them virtually identical. Trades know exactly what to do, even affordable ones, because they’ve done it 1000 times before. That’s a mature industry producing a stable product.

Until there are thousands of these things and the kinks have been worked out you can’t have that. Every innovative architect home has one (or more) secret horror story/screwed up detail you haven’t heard about. When doing something new you need to bear the mental burden of making the house work, build yes but also maintenance which is also specialized and non-standard.

There will be a lot of customers learning this the hard way as the industry catches up with demand.

I agree 100%. It’s all about talent. The existence of the TN visa ensures this will continue to be a problem until founders/investors learn this lesson. Any Canadian university graduate can go work as a “computer system analyst” (but not a programmer wink wink) in the US at anytime. That means we are constantly competing with US startups for talent, any salary advantage you think you have is because your best team members haven’t realized that yet.

$100M was labelled "fraud" in this example, but there was more waste uncovered in the remaining $50M that didn't get that label.

I think CTD ads (click-to-download) are one of the exceptions. It's a great format for some cases, eg games. For game devs, trust that yours is addicting enough that you can safely show your users a competitor's game knowing they'll come back to you. For players, you were looking to play a game anyway and maybe you want to try something new. Click, download and play that instead.

Ya for sure. I was a Googler so my examples were biased, these aren't the only ad formats that work but there are fewer than most people (even in ad tech) realize.

I thought that at first. But like the original post points out, Uber was spending a lot of money, not just in absolute terms but in percentage terms, and it wasn't working for them.

There's an allure to making something measurable and setting goals against it. Often, those goals take on a life of their own. That's what I am suggesting happened here, I guess.

I think the problem is that the overwhelming majority of digital ad formats just don’t work. Does anyone who works in digital ad tech genuinely believe that these formats work? I have been here for the last ten years and have come to believe they do not, certainly not comparable like traditional linear TV or print in their heydays.

There are exceptions. I think Google search ad works so well it’s eating the product. I think YouTube’s TrueView is great for modern brand advertisers (safety issues aside). But by and large, banner ads, forced video pre-rolls, etc don’t work. The negative message of the format offsets any message you try to convey.

Yes, fraud is a part of this. But I think a lot of this evidence looks the same as if none of their targeted, performance-based advertising was doing anything at all, beside really weak branding.

Genuinely interested to hear from people who disagree.

I see raggi has patched, is this what they’re using in Fuchsia?

Why doesn’t Jeff just suck up his pride, apologize and hire her back rather than write increasingly thin rationalizations for his reaction?

High level research (and engineering) will involve egos and you should expect this kind of push back when you stop someone from publishing. Nothing here justifies how he handled it

Of course, I think many of us have seen this reaction before, maybe even done it ourselves. It’s bad for everyone, don’t do it Jeff!

As someone who buys almost all my produce from local farmers to eat, preserve, & ferment I totally agree with this. It’s not a good way to save money, really. Maybe a little but only if you are careful to avoid wasted produce, and that kinda ruins the fun. Industrial food supply chain is truly very efficient, probably thanks to scale.

You should still do it though, if you can (eg have access to real farmers and enough time). It’s very spiritually rewarding and helps to build communities. Farmers make more per pound at the farm stand and you pay less. It generates less landfill waste and, not sure how to explain it, but it’s very rewarding labor.

I’m headed to the farm stand right now to get some broccoli and brussels sprouts, fresh from the field, to freeze and eat in the spring.

The ad tech industry is basically this idea taken to its conclusion and it totally sucks.

Fuchsia is 3-clause BSD, not Apache, though Google does use Apache generally.

https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/refs/heads/master...

If even a handful of people see this comment thread and internalize this message we’ll have done some good today.

The tragedy is, as you and I know, it’s naivety like that in the parent comment sociopaths happily take advantage of. Reading it felt like watching someone give their money to a Nigerian prince.

Chuck Marohn is a well-respected planner with decades of municipal experience. He’s written books on this topic. You can watch him give his usual anti-suburb talk on YouTube. He’s especially good at reaching tough, conservative audiences, I think.

In his broader body of work he does a good job of talking actual numbers and why they’re a lot higher than you’d think.

Underrated idea but very complex in practice. Contextual is coming back regardless as third-party cookies go away. But, I think “traditional” in this sense means brand advertising with broad reach, not micro-targeted messages for narrow audience. Like, why don’t you see nearly as many Coke ads online as you do IRL?

Hypothetically, this kind of advertiser wants “brand safe” context (high-quality, inoffensive, not-too-weird) but is otherwise mostly looking to reach as many people as possible in its core demographics. Figuring out if something is brand safe at the margin is pretty tough and you actually can’t trust ad exchanges for this signal, so that’s what at least some of that JS from advertisers is for. Also, “the margins” on the internet are huge, likely most of the page. Internet has not done well here, traditionally.

These advertisers traditionally loved primetime TV and glossy magazines, with high production values and usually safe content. A surprising amount of this brand money is still in traditional linear TV advertising, despite the fact that most key demos have already given up on linear TV.

All buildings require significant ongoing maintenance to avoid demolition and many have a way of mysteriously burning down when the insurance value exceeds the market value. To learn more from recent US history search “The Bronx is burning” and dig a little.

The issue you describe is not something you should design around. I have written/reviewed hundreds of thousands of lines of Go on projects large and small and have never encountered this problem. However, in practice there are very good reasons not to use interfaces as you suggest.

If you make an interface the contract with the user you will find it is now very hard to change. Everyone who had once implemented it no longer does. If I return a struct and consumers use tightly-focused interfaces for only the methods they depend on, I can continue to add methods or modify the struct as I see fit.

Think of all the engineers who will create special versions of your interface for testing. You add a new method and every single one of those needs to be updated, even if the overwhelming majority have no interest at all in the method you've added.

Why would you return an interface type? My advice is don't. Interfaces should be tightly scoped and defined by the consumer not provided by your package.

This my personal go-to project for testing in Go, popular with the rest of my team as well. Even when I'm not using the plugin directly I read the test files themselves as a guide to "correct" testing syntax. Highly recommended.

> Dash basically takes all of the good stuff from HLS and gets rid of the bad pieces.

Not sure I would use that sentence to describe a standard that replaces the extended M3U file format (it really whips the llama's ass) with yet another complex XML document.

MPEG-DASH is less of a video standard itself and more of a set of guidelines for new set of adaptive-bitrate streaming standards like DASH-AVC/264.

Starting your business in Canada also limits your exit options, or makes them a lot more difficult. As someone who just survived an acquisition that required the entire engineering team to relocate from Toronto to NYC I can tell you that it's much harder to move a company across the border than you'd think.

dhh has spent so much of his career actively leading Rails that it's tough to tell the difference between his personal evolution as a developer and general trends in the industry. I don't think he even attempts to make a distinction in this essay.

I worry about a push away from unit tests. I can't imagine having to refactor a large application with only system-level integration tests to work with, especially in a dynamically-typed language like Ruby. I haven't written a Rails app in a long time though, maybe these days it's easier to just start over than to refactor.

But any bad day for dogma is a good day for the rest of us. Write software using whatever methodology works for you and always question the value of so-called "best-practices".

They seem to be blaming a 6h+ outage on a bug in Postgres but they don't reference which bug specifically. Anyone have any idea what they might be referring to?

Virtual office address, no individuals identified anywhere on the site. Should I be suspicious?

I've worked with John in the past and will happily vouch for his expertise. Over the past several years John has worked with a broad variety of start-ups in the early-to-mid development stage on both sides of the Atlantic. He's come away with a great understanding of the challenges start-up founders face leading up to launch.

I regularly turn to him for advice on engineering management. I'll definitely be buying this book.

(For the record, John didn't ask me to write this nor did he know I was going to.)

Getting a "Sorry, this tree took too long to generate." from Github on this project. Was working fine earlier, what gives?

Quite a leap from food trucks as parasites to racism. Racism is serious business and I don't think that criticism was in good faith.

I was refreshing constantly after 1pm. I saw the sign-in button but got an error trying to access the store.

Looks like it sold out in the exact amount of time it took to process a transaction.