2,500 karma · joined April 4, 2014
Each of those concepts has had a long time to become embedded, but the kind of globalised, "net-good" non-profit that still gives you as an individual benefits, has barely even reached the corners of HN yet (would assume there's people here who haven't yet discovered LetsEncrypt, for example).
Back when I was just hacking about on some SaaS ideas I looked into both Linode and DO. The positioning of both seemed quite separate to me, and DO "felt" more like the product I should be using.
Whether or not the tech was different, or that feeling was justified by anything other than an initial veneer is well up for debate - but entirely agree, they're discreet products, and this doesn't really reflect well on Linode.
I feel like this gets missed a lot when questions about price/value come up.
Just because something's useful doesn't mean you want to buy it, and things you don't want to buy, but need, are likely to be thought of more harshly when it comes to price.
The point made is 100% valid: men are more likely to work in the office than women, and if there's a systemic bias toward office-workers, that's very definitely a systemic bias against women. Not as the first order problem, but the second order problem.
Equity vs equality - equality has it that women should therefore work from the office. Equity questions why you're not actively seeking to address a bias that disproportionately affects a demographic.
There's currently a government in Westminster making laws and dictating to us that the vast majority of the country didn't vote for. The public also has the power to change a monarchy, with the only real difference being that the "election" and transfer of power is less peaceful.
Democracy is of course better, but representative democracies in large nations are about as participatory as a monarchy.
In theory, it'd then be shared as belonging to the nation. In practice, you'd get the political class lining their pockets in the short term, and leaving us worse off in the long term.
Between letting successive populist governments have free reign over what happens to certain wealth, institutions and freeholdings and spunking it on policies during their 4 or 8 years in charge, and letting a somewhat stable (if sometimes self-serving) hereditary monarchy retain stewardship over the course of centuries - I'm inclined toward the latter.
Documentation in the form of "I have a bank account at Bank X, and a will at Lawyer Y (or, I don't have a will, but there are established protocols to handle this)" (even if only verbally) is different than "here's my username and password to my trading account in case I snuff it".
This is merely an interstitial time until you can run from Bucharest to Leipzig with fast charge stations in every town and village along the route.
That being said, it'll only be a couple more generations of tech before we're getting fast charge in the 15-20 minute ranges. By the time you've done a full-tank fill, used the toilets, picked up a few Rom bars in the shop and paid - you probably wont lose much time.
(I'm still a car lover, but change is coming, and it'd be hard to argue with it in a few more years).
Railscasts and GoRails are some of the best resources out there - and without wanting to stan Chris too much, if you're looking for an easy to way to deploy Rails apps, I'm a very happy customer of Hatchbox [0] and Jumpstart Pro [1]. Should really get around to a GoRails subscription at this point...
[0] https://www.hatchbox.io/ (I feel like I sell this in every HN post about Rails, but it's a great tool and he deserves as many customers as possible)
Personally I have no interest in another current account (e.g. I'm not moving my main account to Monzo, dropped them like a hot stone when they did away with the top-up debit card system).
[0] Feature, not a company
Whether or not the free market has caused the use of private companies to provide project style social housing on the fringes of cities (short answer: of course it has) is somewhat irrelevant compared with converting city-centre commercial property into private accommodation.
>> sounds like the residents were placed in this building by government
> council didn't 'choose' to put people there
Again, your response isn't to the point being made really - no-ones really arguing against your point. Just because they didn't have any real alternative doesn't invalidate the point that they did it.
Would be nice to see, however I see it coming more from one of the major players screwing up - whether a large scale hack, huge amounts of downtime or a verrrry public issue migrating a high value customer, regulatory break up, or pushing prices just too high.
For a large amount of users of Microsoft's products in enterprises, local government, even SMBs, the experience will likely be better though. "Dumbed down" software is a feature, not a bug. Usage based renting is a preference, compared to large scale IT capex.
I'm just waiting for the O365 + Surface subscriptions to start (unless I've missed it and they have already?). Hardware, software and services for one monthly payment. They're already doing something similar for Xbox and the Game Pass in some markets I believe.
> rather than from any of the established tech giants voluntarily changing strategy within that time frame
They'll go where the money takes them. If the market starts moving, they'll undoubtedly stick their toes in the water. If the current picks up, they'll look to turn the ship to go along with it.
All of the above being said, it still I think reinforces the point that Microsoft's shift from boxed software to services is superbly well done. Whether or not we want that as our future, they've handled the shift toward the current vision of the future well.
They want to sell you an Office365 subscription for each user, whose computing needs are provided by a remote desktop served on Azure compute, which you access from a Surface device, where your business information is stored and accessed through databases on their servers and software they provide. They want your enterprise identity to be managed through their offering, and your warehouse automation microservices to run on their k8s platform.
Their consumer play is looking more and more like it's Xbox focused, and some personal software interoperability with their enterprise offering. The consumer OS layer is less important now they missed mobile - they get end consumers by selling the cloud [0] to the business who sell to them, not providing the shopfront to the end user.
The model they're moving towards is that the "desktop" is largely going to go. You want some software? Here's a dumb terminal and a burst of virtual CPU from the cloud to run it for the 45 minutes you need. "Installing" things (from an end user perspective) is going to seem old hat within many of our working lives.
That being said, am sure a shopfront will emerge at some point, but for cloud based software, not for installable onto an OS software. That only really comes after this whole transition is complete though.
[0] and "cloud" in this context not being commodity access, but the vertical software integration to go with it.
Most would be present were you in a regional office and "corporate" were calling the shots, or your manager's manager is in your New York office and doesn't see what their skip levels are doing locally.
A lot of them are even present when your desk is only a row over from the rest of your colleagues, and you're at a tangent with the flow them.
The problem here isn't so much working from home, it's going from visibility to non-visibility. Open plan offices to, essentially, private offices. These feelings would begin to manifest themselves if they simply rejigged the office design, and mitigating and building resilience of this is needed whether in the office or otherwise.
That being said, having children at home is hard. And a lack of appreciation of the impacts of those I feel falls under my point about toxic environments.
Well, yeah. That's the turnaround. And it's worked. It's not easy to get a large company, fat off the proceeds of boxed software to actually reinvent their business model to shift to what lots of companies actually want (easy-in/easy-out licenses on their whole software stack to scale with their workforce, like with O365).
Ballmer and Nadella have pulled it off remarkably well - few legacy companies manage to stay in with their existing clientele whilst also adapting themselves to changing landscapes like that.
I find this really hard to relate to though, I know the lines do get blurred and overworking by a bit is easier (personally, I maybe close the lid at 6:10pm rather than 5:59pm), but I can't see how (in any non-toxic work environment) the boundaries can get so blurred in such a short space of time to extend the working hours in a day by 25%.
If it was perfectly acceptable to log off at 6pm when you were in the office, I don't see how it's "the fault" of homeworking that's pushing that to 7pm. Likewise - if you were in the office for 9am, why log on at 8am at home?
If the only thing stopping some people from overworking themselves are simple environmental cues, that sounds like something that needs to be solved, and solved quickly for homeworking (and by any non-asshole manager). It's unlikely it's not going to be a major part of knowledge working in the future. For a lot of us, we're already months into doing this full time by now, and likely, months away from even venturing back into the office part time.
What's the externalities here? Why has 2 hours downtime turned into 2 hours more work, rather than 2 hours of downtime at home?
I admit the OP was blunt, but it's not a ridiculous question - where has the time gone?
I'm certainly not defending the way it worked out, but we focus on an idealised education from the perspective of the learner (i.e. curiosity, passion, zest for self improvement), it might not prepare them if they end up in more traditional scenarios. Fully support the notion of it being taught like a traditional subject, just that it's important those lessons don't get lost (which I can foresee happening).
If the light behind your eyes hasn't been diminished by the experiences at school, it's likely it'll be extinguished in less than ideal real-world scenarios. I'd hate to see the joy of someone who genuinely has a zest of learning and curiosity to be crushed the minute they come across the things a lot of us deal with on a daily basis.
Most definitely - however it's also worth bearing in mind that if you happen to fall into a more traditional life path afterwards, those social elements will rear their heads again.
The sink or swim mentality of school social interactions sadly mimics quite a lot of interactions post school as well. In an ideal world my shitty experience at school wouldn't have been relevant as an adult, but it has actually helped navigate quite a number of toxic situations.
As sad a world as it is, I'm (somewhat perversely) glad I was able to learn how to cope with those as a teen.
> Apple is already on it's way to the trashheap.
That's why. Even if they're lost some of their lustre (and, if we're being literal, could be "on it's way" in the sense that it was the most valuable company in the world and might've dropped a few percentage points).
Not only the past few years, heck, they launched a phone you couldn't hold properly and people lapped it up. That's not stopped their offerings not only being the best in their class, but often the only products of note (AirPods, iPads, Watch...).
Apple doesn't have to beat Apple. They just have to beat the best of the rest - and apart from perhaps Samsung and Huawei in phones, they're looking pretty peachy still.
Lack of content, lack of engagement, lack of reason to keep returning. Healthier for the world, but, potentially a very hard problem to solve from the platform provider side to keep it going long term.
There will be models that get it right, but would require quite large shifts in user behaviour.
It'd definitely be nice though.
As far as I've understood, it's a game with a game builder inside that allows users to create their own games, that can then be shared. This viral loop, especially among the main demographic of tweens, has propelled it pretty strongly.
Like Tik Tok, the concept is abstract, but the execution and usage seem off the charts regardless.
[0] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-06-29-roblox-pla...