kovacs

Exactly. Sure, some of the customers of these products are simply mismanaging their finances, a great deal of them are simply not getting enough value for their labor. How do we get to a form of capitalism that works for all people? Not an easy answer for sure.

If you can only read one book on the topic I'd make it this one - https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Rober...

It's not about sales it's about how people think, act, and make decisions. I would bet that most any book on sales will invariably touch on at least some of the topics covered in this book.

It's a fun read and I promise you will start to see these patterns being used in everyday life in verbal and non-verbal communication.

Asking that question seems to imply that you didn't really see the commenter's reasons for asserting that...

"instead of actually investing in things like capital expenditures, R&D, or higher salaries"

Specifically the last one. The pay gap is larger than ever. The efficiency gains over the last 20 years or more are systematically being funneled up the food chain to executives and shareholders. Even in tech there's a ton of wage stagnation compared to the real cost of living over this period.

I think this is the crux of the assertion if I'm not mistaken. It's broken that the share of increased prosperity isn't anywhere near equally distributed. I wouldn't call that throwing money at random shit.

Luckily Snapchat isn't in SV so the record of zero unethical behavior in SV remains in tact.

We have zoning laws for a reason. AirBnB is encouraging people to break those laws. It's no different than anyone running a business in a residential zoned area. Do people run small businesses out of their houses? Sure, all the time and technically they're breaking the law. But the main question to ask is are they impacting those around them? For AirBnB that answer is clearly yes. It disrupts the rights of the existing neighbors that are abiding by zoning laws. Just like you can't live in a store front, we can't have people just doing whatever they want because "eh fuck em I own this"... no, you kinda don't. You rent the land from the government and there are laws you are bound by when entering in that agreement. We're trying to have a society here.

I'm no attorney but to me it's pretty clear that AirBnB shouldn't be allowed to exist as a business the way it stands today. It's incredible they've made it this far.

I'd love to hear some concrete rebuttal as to why what they're doing is OK besides the "less government/regulation" angle.

Because SF is a town, not a city. And with the cost of doing business only on the rise there isn't room for places to be open during non-peak hours anymore. The number of coffee shops and restaurants that stay open later has noticeably decreased in my 19 years of living in SF.

Believe me I wish it were different but there are diners that are open late.

Dave Chappelle goes to Grubsteak when he's in town and they're open till 4AM. Or you can go hang out with the USF students at the 24hr Starbucks over in Laurel Hts.

Go read "Mythical Man Month", written in your selected year of 1975, and see how relevant it remains today. It's pretty startling isn't it? That a book written over 40 years ago remains relevant today. Dismissing things because they're "old" is unwise. You just need to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. Now excuse me while I get back to my "Speedcoding in 21 days" book... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedcoding

Satya agrees with you ;-)

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-satya-nadella-nonv...

Uber/Lyft are taxi services. They need to be regulated. The cars need to be marked, have numbers, drivers accountable to the community (not just the passenger), for bad driving.

As a driver who's lived in SF for a long time I've seen first hand the terrible impact these services have had to the city. They clog streets and disregard any and all traffic laws. Just yesterday an Uber driver made a left turn from the middle lane on Hyde street. He backed up traffic as he refused to move until someone let him make his illegal turn. He was the recipient of a lot of honks.

His response? Gave everyone the finger after he finally made his left hand turn. Lovely. He should lose his license, period. In the days before these services existed cab drivers were petrified of getting in trouble. Many Uber/Lyft drivers are modern day lawless pirates.

A modern medallion system driven by traffic/ridership data with as little chance for corruption as possible would be the best answer to these problems. Uber/Lyft as they exist today cannot be allowed to continue if we value quality of life/safety.

Oh... it's just her/him :-P

Nearly anything that's ideally one or two syllables, phonetically easy to say, and can have a reasonable brand built around it. Not that these are awesome but just examples off the top of my head so I'm not just saying "they suck" without providing alternatives...

Ivy - Naturally grows and spreads and often is seen climbing walls. Maybe in this case it climbs and covers a FB wall :-P Also a play on FB being started at an ivy league school.

Greenfield - Maybe a reasonable name for the protocol that those apps can be built upon? "Ivy's built on the greenfield protocol"

Anyway, that's what I came up with in 10-15 minutes of brainstorming and I would pose that those are much easier, approachable, and just better names than these others that simply don't elicit any sort of emotion (or negative ones).

Names matter, a lot. You need to be able to tell a story that moves people to action. That's what marketing folks do that adds a ton of value. Most open source projects don't have marketing folks so... :-)

Yeah and this is smart because this time around the licensing falls on Spotify where as back then TT had to negotiate licensing if I'm not mistaken. I'm not a lawyer but if that's true this seems much more viable using Spotify's APIs with the caveat that your entire business relies on them if that's your aspiration. Regardless, wish I'd thought of this :-P Seems like it would be such a fun app to work on :-) Best of luck to you!

(BTW it just pinned a Google chrome helper on my machine so I had to kill it. Not sure if you know anything about perf. with your app yet. Just FYI)

Hehe.. turntable.fm v2.0 :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turntable.fm

Just checked it out. This is really well executed! Definitely doesn't look like a one man operation. Congrats!

Is that where the data sits around waiting, eager, to be queried into action while watching data around them being used over and over again.... But that time never comes, thus leaving them to question their very worth?

You took the words right out of my brain as I was scrolling through the comments. My internal dialogue literally was "This is EJB all over again", which admittedly may be a bit too much but as they say history never repeats but often rhymes :-)

In this go around I think the value of discreet, well factored services clearly have merit but it's really a question of just how often you truly have something that's a good candidate for this pattern. From what I've seen in some places it's used as a reason to rewrite systems and not worry about doing a good job creating well abstracted software because the integrity of the overall system is some other team's problem.

This article is really well written and does a great job shedding light on the truth. Thank you for sharing.

The simple way to say it is that once your code gets too complicated to keep all the execution paths in your head (sooner than you think), tests are what enable you to make sure you didn't forget an assumption you made about how it should work.

Do you like going back to manually verify things still worked after you make a foundational change? Or do you just trust yourself to know you've not impacted anything negatively? Do you honestly believe that's good use of your brain power even if true? Do you enjoy being married to that code? Because that's exactly what happens as nobody but you can work on it. That strategy works out well for employees to become key men and get big retention bonuses so there is some merit to your approach :-)

Not to mention the team impact to cowboy coding. It's a selfish approach to software development and is often undertaken by bully developers that say things like "use the source" as a way to make you feel dumb for not wanting to spend all day trying to untangle their likely insane code. All because they were too lazy to use a little empathy and be a good teammate.

To recap: Tests document and improve your design, verify functionality, provide leverage to accelerate development, and reduce "bus factor" risk. I don't care what a small sample data set says to the contrary there's really little debate that when wielded properly these tools and techniques do improve software on multiple dimensions that go beyond the software itself and heavily impact the business.

20+ years of product development experience in lots of teams/products inform this opinion. Let's see the data on how your business grinds to a halt when these tools aren't used and the code base gets increasingly larger and complex and people leave. Tell me about how you don't need those automated tests as you approach technical debt bankruptcy and all your key people have left. "Use the source" is a terrible response to that problem.

Rewrites can be fun though so maybe that's the answer. It sure worked out well for Netscape. ;-)

I remember this from Twilio-con in 2014 or so. TwilioQuest was easily the best session I've ever had at a conference. It looks like they took that and went even further. What a fun project to work on! I wish every conference session was as well polished. To me this one is the gold standard, or maybe on HN the bitcoin standard, of conference sessions. Approachable, engaging, educational, and entertaining.

To be fair the director in charge of my group said to me at the start "You should help the customer. If it's not an Oracle solution that's fine. We'll eventually sell them something, we're too big with too many products not to." So at least he had the right intention. I did see the friction surface with reps though because they don't have the same agenda :-)

Paying someone to offload things you shouldn't be doing is a sound strategy when applied correctly. Unfortunately this message can't come from someone like Oracle whose entire business depends upon companies choosing to buy instead of build.

I used to work for Oracle in the field as an SE working on the largest enterprise customers they sell in to. What's left out of the rebuttal is how Oracle (or really any vendor), often sells solutions to problems that customers don't have. And even the solutions that do solve the customers problem on paper are often complicated, don't quite work right because of implementation problems, and lower quality because they're more general purpose. So you end up with a situation where it's dubious that you're any better off at the mercy of a vendor whose interests aren't well enough aligned.

The real trick is figuring out where the line should be drawn in buy vs. build for any given initiative and the underlying technology required to satisfy those requirements. Can a homegrown software org. handle the entire lifecycle of building and maintaining the products they build? The ideal place for these teams is at the margins and leveraging highly used products where there's as little custom code ownership as possible. Open source or otherwise. There's certainly a tipping point beyond which an open source project has better quality but it's not clear where that lies.

And if you're getting into bed with any software vendor without transparent pricing and good vendor management you risk subjecting yourself to renewal conversations that answer the question of "How much?" with "How much you got?"

Are people entitled to have the fruits of their work stolen from them?

This is a straight up corny idea but I do think there's a kernel of something that could pop if the market heats up. OK, I'm in too!

One more point is that in your monolith you actually have the option of crossing module boundaries. You don't have that luxury with microservices unless you want to introduce XA (God bless you). So you better get your boundaries right. :)

Actually I've worked on a great many monolith projects over the past 20 years, including a J2EE server (WebLogic). And yes that was a huge monolith that had technical debt that needed addressing. When I left there was this future "modularity" project that I'm certain didn't involve introducing network boundaries between the servlet, EJB, JCA containers, etc. to achieve that modularity. And I can tell you that there was a definite effort to enforce interface/package boundaries between the various server components. If you introduced an "illegal" dependency you were going to be talked to about removing it. I want to say that we actually had the build breaking on such infractions after I'd moved to product management.

The point I was making is exactly what you're talking about. That sometimes deadlines force bad architectural choices and that's called technical debt. The laziness and lack of discipline comes with failing to acknowledge and address that debt in the future. As best I can tell people think that microservices are going to solve that problem and I'm saying they won't and that there's not enough thought going into the price of network.

Just like in real life when it comes to being in shape. Diet and exercise. There's no silver bullet there either and it seems to me as though microservices are the fad diet of the current tech cycle.

I realize this stuff isn't cut and dried and easy. If it were then none of us would have well paying jobs to figure out when to use what tool for what job. There's a time and a place for all solutions but I'm seeing the same groupthink I saw back when everyone was purchasing Sun, Oracle, and WebLogic for sites that didn't and would never need those tools. This is EJB all over again as best I can tell.

As far as your shared libraries comment goes, you wouldn't consider having any shared libraries ever? What you're describing are permutations of a shared library that either need to be addressed by the shared library's design by adapting or splitting into multiple libraries. I'd be interested in learning what you do instead of sharing components? Duplicating everywhere?

I've heard this exact argument at work in favor of microservices. I honestly think it's a lazy man's cop out to say it makes sense to insert a network boundary because it's just assumed somebody's going to violate a module boundary. That's a huge tax to pay for being lazy. If you lack discipline it's going to show up no matter how you decide to distribute your complexity. From what I'm seeing the idea that "devops" is going to offset the increased complexity of network boundaries as interfaces is going to be the downfall of a great many of microservice based implementations that simply didn't need to take that burden and risk. I suspect that a hybrid approach is going to end up being the right solution for a great many companies. One or more well factored monoliths with common shared libraries and orthogonal services that each of them use that make sense being a service vs. a shared library.

I'll be expecting my RSUs from Google for telling them this exact strategy in my PM interview 2 years ago when I was asked "What would you do with Google Glass?". Then again enterprise is a fairly obvious answer even before they tried the consumer angle. But, if they offer Gmail for people that colonize the moon, (another interview question I got), then I'm definitely going to need some retribution for telling them how to do that too :-P

Well luckily these customers have the money for the book because they were able to launch an actual business at least 2 months sooner and can move 5x more quickly than all the competitors still mulling over which lesser productive alternative framework they'd like to use.

There's nothing xenophobic about wanting to build a community of dedicated citizens. I didn't invent a new problem, you're just failing to account for it in your capitalistic solution. Zoning laws exist for a reason and AirBnB is in direct conflict with them.

Again it goes back to what you want to prioritize, a well knit community or a city of hotel rooms mixed with residential housing that encourages more rent seeking. You're willing to allow for a lower quality and further enriching an already rich upper class. So not only do renters have to pay high rents and never own, they now need to sacrifice any semblance of community as the incentives to AirBnB a place would displace all long term rentals.

Not everything that can be monetized and made efficient should be, but I realize that's super counter to the Ayn Rand HN crowd. I maybe would've agreed with you 10 years ago but I've since realized the flaws in libertarian thinking. Either that or I'm wrong and unbridled capitalism is the right solution to all the problems but I seriously doubt it.

No, AirBnB isn't a solution to this problem. The problem is there's a constrained supply of housing in Paris and the city wants to try to ensure that people who own housing there actually live there. You know, so there's an actual thriving community and culture instead of fly-by owners that aren't actually residents.

How in the world does a service that encourages turning residential housing into hotel rooms solve that problem exactly? Local wanna be residents are going to rent rooms in the homes of the wealthy absentee homeowners? Maybe some, but I suspect a vast majority are fine just letting them sit vacant. Even if they do, that's no way to build a healthy, thriving community. It's fast food housing. I, as well as many others, don't want to live in a building that's part residential, part hotel.

So your solution is "Let AirBnB enable the absentee owner to rent out their place to the local baker that is priced out of owning.", thereby giving the illusion of a solution but really not solving the problem because the fabric of the community becomes provisional at best.

Seems like a fairly poor solution to me. I hate red tape as much as anyone but I've come around to think that well crafted and executed policy that focuses on the common good is a better option to strive for than figuring out how to enable even more wealth concentration than we already have. The trick is "well crafted and executed" which I agree is rarely the case but we already know the end game with unbridled capitalism. Just ask the pope - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/10/poor-must-chan...

I use this app which used to be $5 but is now free - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mindfulness-app-meditation/i...

Apparently they too switched to a freemium subscription model. Having subscription models for meditation apps is like having a subscription model for a music service with 20 albums. I get that there's the whole tracking aspect of it but that's hardly interesting enough and there's not enough demand for new content to make sense to rent monthly. Clearly I'm in the minority because Headspace is hiring in Santa Monica and SF now.

I'll say this, if Converse changes to a subscription model for chucks there's gonna be trouble...