throwboatyface

This is just an op-ed complaining about your average culture wars stuff. "Taboos exist for a reason" is such a thought-terminating cliche, and it seems like it should be anathema to free thinking startup folks.

1% fee and it doesn't even give you real money? At least the old-fashioned "pay with crypto" providers actually cashed you out.

I used to work with this guy and he used to send a bunch of these weird, rambling "thought leader" messages to the whole org.

Traditional bare metal involved complicated packaging and release processes. You would literally have a diagram of "these are the physical servers running this service (LB, web server, etc.)" and be able to point to them. You could overprovision workloads to tolerate failure but not just shuffle a service from one machine to another.

When I used to work in a similar environment we would develop code, then we would give it to a QA team. They would test it and give it to an Ops team. The Ops team would schedule a maintenance window and roll out the new code on each server. This happened maybe once a quarter because testing and releasing was a week-long process.

Racking new servers and provisioning them also required some manual labour. We had a process to use PXE to provision the machines but it was still toil. Virtualization was a big benefit because you could at least create and blow away VMs without having to re-image a whole server from scratch.

"Running your own cloud" implies that developers can treat instances like cattle and interact via an API. But it also means there's a standard set of tooling for fleet management. None of this stuff is entirely new but in small or mid-sized orgs it was out of reach 10 years ago.

What if we, I don't know, did something to fix the poverty?

Using a different identifier isn't sufficient to satisfy a right to be forgotten request. The user's identity could still be inferred from comments, for instance.

Companies are willing to pay more money to rent a computer from AWS than to send a computer to their employee, because of the risk the employee won't send it back. It doesn't actually make economic sense but it tickles their sense of "fairness" that these workers shouldn't get any more than absolutely necessary.

Bishops Gate has been a place before Watergate happened.

The guy who drove Sears into the ground also did the classic private-equity self-dealing to carve off all the valuable bits and saddle the company with debt. Berkshire Hathaway is an example of a company that owns lots of businesses which are mostly independent

Into what format in memory? You can't just mmap into a parquet file and access whole records, it's a columnar format.

Arrow is absolutely designed for Interop between languages - often devs want to develop their core in something like Python, and the platform devs want to work on Scala. Arrow lets you write all the distributed system and data shuffling in Scala, but then users can access the same records in their user-defined code with minimal overhead

This is just saying "union bad" in more words. The recent WGA strike and Teamsters strike at UPS both got terrific results for workers. The UAW and SAG-AFTRA are also very effectively striking right now.

This is not correct. The current UAW strike is to get back benefits the union voluntarily gave up during the 2008 recession because they wanted to keep the Big 3 alive. The union is absolutely willing to bargain in a way that is beneficial to both employees and the companies long term.

Wait, so most workers are alienated, and alienation makes a job bullshit. But most jobs are not bullshit?

> A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.

- Ursula Le Guin

> sign on for 15 years doing something more meaningful than making sure rich people get even richer.

I have some terrible news for you.

The square outage wasn't just credit card processing, it was their entire product. You couldn't log in, update your ecommerce site, accept online orders, book appointments, anything. Even things that had nothing to do with accepting payments were broken.

Yup. If you got your foot in the door at the right place and people in leadership liked you, you're on the track to be a director in 6-8 years. Usually the people who promoted you were themselves early employees with no experience being executives, who just peter-principled into senior director/VP roles.

I've watched these failsons get promoted to senior director/VP, leave before they were ever accountable for their bad decisions, and then bring all their cronies over to the new place at the same levels.

Computers have facilitated a second industrial revolution, and we're living in the "children crawling into giant machines, everyone is choking on coal smoke in London" phase. In today's economy it's precariously employed gig workers being exploited. Everyone's mental health is being poisoned by social media. There's a small upper crust of capitalist "factory owners" who are making bank by resisting any attempts by legislators and labour to reign them in.

If we compare today to the Industrial Revolution, this seems like a cycle - eventually the organized labour backlash occurs, some of the excess value from automation gets passed to the workers in the form of shorter hours and higher pay. The environmental harms are recognized and the externalities are regulated by the government.

Since I've been in the industry I've often thought of myself as a Luddite - someone who opposes the constant race to the bottom that technology is driving. The original Luddites were skilled artisans who protested cheap, low quality cloth woven by machines. They knew that unskilled, automated work not only produced worse goods, but it was bad for the souls of the workers. To quote Ursula LeGuin in The Dispossessed:

> A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.

Pretty sure the onus is on the manufacturer to produce cars in a repeatable fashion such that crash test samples are representative. If they can't make the cars consistently they shouldn't be making cars.

My pet peeve: "information wants to be free" just means the universe tends towards entropy. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, once information has been distributed it will take energy to "undistribute" it. Trying to extend this to "information wants to be encrypted" is both stupid and inaccurate - people want things to be encrypted, but the plaintext "wants to be free" as much as any other data.

Disagree. Avro makes messages slightly smaller by removing tags, but it makes individual messages completely incomprehensible without the writer schema. For serializing data on disk it's fine and a reasonable tradeoff to save space, but for communication on the wire tagged formats allow for more flexibility on the receiver end.

The spec for evolving schemas is also full of ambiguity and relies on the canonical Java implementation. I've built an Avro decoder from scratch and some of the evolution behaviour is counter-intuitive.

It's wild that a two-state solution was widely accepted 30 years ago, and now the Overton window has moved so much that Israel occupying the entirety of Palestine and killing or displacing all the Arab population is no big deal.

I sympathize with the desire for a Jewish state but the United States has supported them to the hilt in human rights abuses, war crimes and expansionism that aren't related to that goal.

My understanding is Shopify can be quite good for ecommerce but the PoS sucks. And they are very up front that there is no support to interoperate with other platforms. I would love to continue using my Square hardware for in-person

Pretty funny to say package management is table stakes and use go as an example. For a long time they had nothing, then hacky workarounds, and now they have a first party hacky workaround

As a Canadian who makes ~250k working for bay area companies from Canada, where can I make 500k-1M in the states?

IME most places will take you on as a contractor or use a PEO. If they're open to remote they'll find a way. Canadians are so cheap it's still worth the overhead

You don't even have to swear at all, the Constitution allows officials to swear or affirm. This is because some religious groups at the time of the drafting of the constitution were morally opposed to swearing oaths: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmation_(law)

Took celecoxib after major surgery and I can confirm it works great compared to Tylenol.

The cloud providers like to pretend their secret sauce is massive scale automation. They have tooling, alerting, etc. to make this all work with no people at all. Of course it's all BS, and the people I know who came from AWS were some of the worst for throwing bodies at problems and manually tweaking shit without trying to understand or automate solutions.

A post about PID controllers without a Bode plot? Honestly the post had a lot of promise and then didn't really get into the interesting bits. Building things up in terms of the proportional, then adding integral and derivative feedback is a fun exercise that helps you understand what those terms do (as you pointed out in your comment). OP would benefit from taking a control systems class and not just reading the wikipedia.

The period when Google owned Motorola was very interesting. The Moto G was a great budget device that I think was killed by carriers who wanted to push $1000 phablets that required consumers to finance them.