nickv

Sorry, I should have been specific. You are correct the Blade Stealth 13 comes with only 16gb of ram but I don't think it's in the same class as this S76 laptop because it doesn't have a 13" size equivalent.

The Blade 15 comes with 32gb standard and I thought that was a fairer comparison but should have been more specific. It also comes with much much better display options, is lighter, larger battery, user upgradable Wifi, hard drive and ram (up to 64) and is frankly just a much higher quality build.

My bad on the XPS 13 suggestion, I meant to say the XPS 15 which also does come with a Nvidia graphics card.

With this machine, I think you're paying a premium for a rebadged Clevo laptop here that runs Linux out of the box. If you are willing to spend a day you can get a Blade running Linux on much better hardware.

I know, I know - getting a laptop with linux running natively is great, but seriously folks - just go buy something like an XPS 13 or Razer Blade for the same cost and put Linux on it.

You'll get an infinitely better piece of hardware.

I don’t think your car comparison is a fair one. You don’t see your iPhone nag you to take it to an “Apple shop.” They usually update while you sleep.

My Tesla does the same thing, it’s a car that literally gets software updates while I sleep. And it’s AMAZING. I get new features (sometimes a new alarm system, one time a dash cam system, another time Spotify and once it made the car actually faster) for free! There’s no taking it to the shop or nagging or anything. This is an amazing feature.

On the android side you literally have phones that don’t get critical security patches - that’s the scariest type of “it doesn’t work anymore so you need to go buy new hardware” because you don’t even know you’re at risk.

Android devices not getting OS updates after two years, especially $800 android phones, is obscene. There’s no way to defend that.

What does that mean? Windows ships with an entire subsystem for Linux, you can literally install any linux distro you want and it will run native inside windows with access to each others file systems, ports, etc - with basically no performance penalty (that I see in WSL2).

It is more Linux than OS X is by orders of magnitude.

And at their last conference they previewed native X Windows support in Windows. So you can literally start gimp in Windows from a zsh shell inside Arch. Couple that with their new faux tiling window manager in Powertoys (FancyZones), VSCode, native docker and kubernetes support, NFS support, their new terminal, etc - developing in Windows from a unix perspective is way way way way better than OS X in modern times.

What proprietary tools are you talking about?

You're speaking past me.

Again, you listed a ton of compiled languages compared to an interpreted language. Want to throw X86 Assembler in there too? Should we write all software in Intel syntax x86 Assembler? It's faster than Rust - just manage the registers yourself!

Fact is, interpreted languages have THEIR advantages in lots of areas.

Nice random zend link. I literally took 100ms and found questions on Stack Overflow about writing async PHP code from 2013.

Python LITERALLY just added the async/await keywords and co-routines in 3.5 in 2015 (AFTER PHP did). I can also link to "Why you should use Async in Python articles" from 2020 and 2019. Hell, google that phrase and see what comes up. Look at the talk tracks at PyCon last year.

I can also link to an article on how to do asynchronous programming in C# on MICROSOFT.COM from May 20, 2020 (you know, a pretty authoritative community place for .net) But it's a stupid point. There are tutorials to learn how to do things in every language written every day.

I get it, you're a language snob. This conversation feels like "Man, fuck people who speak German. They don't know how to build cars the way people who speak Japanese do."

Languages are languages. You can write shitty things in any language and good things in any language.

The facts are, nearly all of the big sites on the Internet have PHP somewhere, some PHP is bad and some is good, and there is a wide variance of skill level among PHP developers.

Replace that previous paragraph with any language and the answer is the same.

You realize you are stereotyping a large group of people. You also know absolutely zero about modern day PHP, it seems. Let's argue about Perl 4.19 while we're at it.

I assure you the actual writers of Laravel know why Laravel (or Lumen) is good and why they made decisions they made. I promise you the Facebook PHP engineers who worked on HHVM and Hack know best practices and PHP really well (and know how to write a multithreaded socket server and understand TCP).

I also promise you that there are engineers that work all over the place (like non pure tech companies like banks and insurance companies) that don't look at Java as craft. They use Spring cause it's "good" and have written the DAO pattern 100s of times cause it "works". I bet the vast vast vast vast majority of Java Spring developers have not read Rod Johnson's Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development and actually understand WHY Spring was invented.

Knowing Java doesn't create some magical space where you suddenly know the TCP protocol state diagram. That's just a silly statement. I promise ANY average developer of ANY language can NOT spit out a bare metal implementation of TCP. Hell, I bet the average Java developer doesn't know the difference between UDP and TCP (or the average php developer, average python developer, average ruby developer, you get what I'm saying)

PHP is a language. One that is as performant as it's peers, has a large presence on the internet, and is battle-tested. If you instinctively shit on PHP developers, that's something you need to work on.

And, just to be clear, I don't CODE IN PHP and never have. I just know people who are brilliant who do and also deal with some PHP buried in my company to this day (like pretty much every tech company).

Again, is it as performant as compiled/byte code languages like C, Java, GoLang? No. I'm not making that statement. This is why most real reverse proxy caches are not written in Ruby or Python.

Does it compare favorably or equally to most interpreted languages? Yes, it is not an outlier in performance (and tends to be one of the fastest cause of all the tuning it's had from use at high load companies). And yes, large chunks of the code in these companies still, today, run PHP. I guarentee you Wikipedia's global editor activity is higher than you think it is. Same with Tumblr and Slack's entire channel communication pipeline (which was an offshoot from Glitch).

It generally scales better than Ruby and Python. You can write shitty code in all of these languages and you can write clean code in all of these languages. And every language has it's warts (Python, which I LOVE and had a startup built around it, is FULL of these warts too).

Facebook? (I know, it's technically HHVM but the language is basically PHP)

Wikipedia?

Wordpress?

Tumblr?

Large chunks of Slack?

That's a lot of traffic.

Fun fact: Companies typically leave PHP not for performance reasons (it's faster than Python and Ruby, for example) but because it's hard to hire people who know PHP since there's a strong bias against it.

(To be fair, I was one of those anti-PHP people, but after seeing PHP7, Laravel, etc, I acknowledge it's vastly improved from the early 2000s).

Can you name a company that failed because of a bad codebase as the number one reason?

I feel like people walk through hypotheticals like that, but I've not heard people say "Company X failed because of that scenario."

No way. Berlin passed a FIVE YEAR RENT FREEZE in January. Our protections aren't on the same planets as Germany's.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/world/europe/berlin-gentr...

That's a good question, it's why, for example, Bloomberg Media is still private.

The only two reasons I can think of are:

It gives your employees a cash out plan if you used RSUs/Options/Ownership in the company as an incentive for hiring.

Some businesses benefit from going public by it adding credibility (and open financial books). Some very large enterprises (Fortune 100, major governments) tend to look more preferably to publicly traded companies so it makes sense for the business to go public to go after these customers.

There are also ways to defend against "public involvement" in publicly traded companies that have been around forever. Look at Facebook and the NYT's stock class structure, for example.

It's also finally easier to get liquidity when you aren't desperate for it, and the public markets position you for it in a good way.

Honestly, this is EXACTLY the problem with the current tech scene in SF.

SF used to be a place people moved to because they wanted to live in San Francisco, they wanted the culture, the access to nature and its beauty, the arts scene that was traditionally more cutting edge (citylights, burning man), the cutting edge food and wine scene, the walkability.

Nobody moves to San Francisco for that anymore. They move to San Francisco for work not life. They move to San Francisco to extract value from a job and then leave.

San Francisco is too amazing a city to be relegated to becoming a company town. If there is a positive outcome from this, it will hopefully result in a recalibration and people who want to be in SF because they WANT TO BE IN SAN FRANCISCO will stay and the people who came here to just smash and grab some cash will leave.

But companies report your salary and withhold income for local taxes. How would that work?

For example, my paycheck literally has withholdings for California every two weeks.

Or, at that point, you use industry standard solutions and hire the best subject matter experts on that solution. Like, for example, using Cockroach DB and hire one of the core committers cause you're big enough. It's what MSFT did with things like the Python extension for VSCode and DBOX did by hiring Guido since they're a Python shop.

I still shake my head whenever I hear about how Uber built an entire Slack clone for "Uber-scale".

14 new residential high rises were built in SoMA in the past 5 years. 3 more are going up as we speak and opening in the next few months. That's a LOT of residential construction in a very short amount of time.

(Mind you that's just a 15 block area in East Cut/SoMA - I'm not even talking about ALL of Mission Bay which didn't exist 10 years ago or the Van Ness corridor or Mid-Market.)

The problem here is we only started building about 10 years ago (with One Rincon being the first major new building in a long time) and the rest of the Bay Area (for example, Brisbane notoriously) is nowhere near doing its fair share of building.

This reminds me of a quote going around a few weeks ago: "If we have done a good job, everyone will say we over-reacted."

As a counter point, NYC did _not_ do a good job and at it's peak COVID-19 killed more people than heart disease and cancer during the month of March [1].

[1]: https://www.newsweek.com/coronavirus-becomes-number-one-caus... (This is a national number but its even worse when you consider the vast majority of cases are in NYC/NYS)

Housing is considerably more than 2x.

Average cost of a house in America is around $380k, average cost of a house in San Francisco is $1.7M according to Zillow. San Jose is $1.2M. Fremont is $1.1M. The cheapest (and not a great place to live and horrible commute) place in the Bay Area is Vallejo and that's still $450k.

So 3-6x more expensive depending on where you look generally.

That site is completely wrong about property taxes in California. The property tax is 1% plus a county and city level supplemental. For example, my property tax in Oakland is 1.3688%.

I have no idea how that SmartAsset got that rate. Literally it makes no sense and is comically wrong.

Top 1% in San Jose is $964,238 (with the average person in the top 1% making $2,732,379), so right on target.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/14/how-much-you-have-to-earn-to...

This reeks of smug engineering superiority.

I promise you the marketing team does serious competitive intel and probably knows more about the competitive landscape than the engineers themselves. That's true at my place of employment (also a bay area tech company), and I'd be shocked if it's not true at Google.

Call me naive, but I genuinely believe Sergey and Larry believed in it (especially Sergey)

Google, in my mind, is the quintessential "You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain" story.

(To be fair, since this all is subjective, I do believe Google 2009 would consider this behavior counter to it's values and the values of the people it attracted.)

The question I have is are there ways to stay true to values (which in some cases might be in direct opposition to growth and profit taking) with the way our society is structured? Has any major company pulled this off? (This reminds me a bit of the Boeing story posted a few days ago where quality lost out to dangerous shortcuts for profit)

Sorry, I know. It's a very spoiled statement. I mean they're just unexpected in SF (especially the western side of the City).

It tends to be cold, wet, damp, foggy and bone chilling early morning. Not like Winters/Summers in Chicago brutal, but definitely the time I struggle with most (as a new yorker who clearly has to weather acclimated here, I know it sounds ridiculous)

Except its going to be 84 and sunny today. Summers are brutal but the rest of the year is pretty nice.

As a reminder, Microsoft is the largest company in the world and has a 25% larger marketcap than Google.

I find it funny that so many people think Microsoft was "stopped" by Google. They adapted and they are stronger now than in the 90s as a business.

Huh? Hawaii is a part of the United States?

To the point that the last US president is from there.

Which china? If the world was truly fair and honored the original signatories, it'd have gone back to the ROC and not the PRC. But it didn't because of might is right.

I saw you made a comment earlier that both countries say "China" on their passports missing the point of this whole conflict.

I think you should spend at least an hour reading about the history of this conflict (not through China's censored Internet).

Because Music isn't TV or film. The vast majority of revenue for most artists come from live performances.

It's not like the cast of Stranger Things can go and tour the world and perform a live Stranger Things inside stadiums. It doesn't work that way.

Additionally, Spotify, especially, has done wonders for obscure discoverablity with Discover Weekly which incentivize smaller bands to support it (because again they make their money from tours). Discoverablity is much easier tho when it requires a 4 minutes time commitment while commuting with headphones as opposed to a multi hour commitment of film or TV.

They're not at all even remotely the same beast.

Quite the opposite, they're basically saying "we use Google for ads and know what it does but if google changes what it does we don't have much control - watch our policy for changes"

Does any company in the world that serves ads from Google not do this or state this?

How would you technically host ads on your site without "running arbitrary code"? How would you add an analytics solution without doing that?

And also, focusing on this defeats the actual purpose of this article. I assume it means you agree with it's message and are just nitpicking? (Or don't and are deflecting.)

As I said in another comment, you are seriously underestimating the size of the NYT. By many metrics, it's the largest global news organization based in the US and one of the largest in the world. Certainly larger than CBC, CNN, FNC, NBC News and about the same size of the BBC (and a bit smaller than Reuters and AP).

Their data collection helps them decide where to build new news bureaus and news rooms and also what content they should surface to their readers. I get a very California focused NYT vs my friends who live in NYC and London.

Also, I'm sure a chunk of their privacy policy is actually impacted by using Google as their ad service and a passthrough from Google's to them.