acrooks

My understanding is that the mainland to Vancouver Island routes are quite profitable, but almost every other BC Ferries route posts a loss annually.

BC Ferries is mandated to provide the loss-making routes for provincial accessibility reasons (and they get a ~$200 million annual government subsidy to do so).

The routes to the island are probably priced the way they are partially to cover the other losses, but also I think because the demand allows it. Those ferries during non-COVID times, although quite large, are often filled close to capacity; anything lower would certainly stimulate travel and lead to overcapacity.

Commodity firms and other businesses in the supply chain space (shipping, logistics) have a long history of trying to build platforms to simplify global trade. While a great goal, over and over again these initiatives have failed because of immense inertia in the industries and because of the fact that every single counter-party involved in a transaction must be on the platform for it to work.

For a merchant to use Shopify, connected to Stripe, connected to Visa, working with me, it’s relatively “easy”. Not many people involved in the process and some of them (me) don’t have any power to control how the flow works.

When Cargill ships a 100,000 MT parcel of grain to be processed, there are SO many people and organisations that touch the commodity in some form. From inspection companies like SGS, to rail lines, to customs authorities, to port representatives, to ocean transportation, to banks....the list goes on. And historically the vision has been an “all or nothing” style of platform.

One day we will figure out the solution to this problem, but not anytime soon and probably not with Splinter. Four of the world’s five largest grain companies, three of the world’s five largest iron ore companies, and many more use the product that I work on (www.SEDNA.com) to manage their global supply chains, and their workflows remain to be very email-based and driven by traditional ERPs.

You see this in action with businesses like Flexport who started with a very formidable vision to build a platform for third-party logistics, and ultimately had to pivot to become a very digital freight forwarder after being trapped by the traditions and slow-moving nature of the industry.

In these organisations there is incredible buzz and thought around digital transformation, but many of these companies are also only recently beginning to trust cloud software. So although there is a big desire to innovate and operate on the cutting edge, so many primitives and so much of the day-to-day process keeps them lagging behind.

I make it a habit, when I have an above-and-beyond customer experience, to reach out to superiors of whoever helped me to praise them.

This most often happens in hotels where a particular day-to-day employee is extremely helpful or thoughtful. Upon checking out, I will call the hotel and ask to speak to the GM. Ironically this is the hardest step, because most people who ask for the GM have something to complain about, and then I tell my story once on the line.

In the same vain, I think it should be pretty easy to reach out to somebody more senior than and in the same chain-of-command as this person - find out the name of their boss' boss on LinkedIn or something, then guess that person's email address (it probably has the same format as this employee), etc.

It is considered among the most "fun" tech companies to work for in Vancouver. Its beautiful office, nap rooms, free Yoga and other exercise classes, meals, rooftop happy hours, as well as a general party culture. The lifestyle side of Hootsuite attracted young people and made them willing to take some of the lowest tech salaries in Vancouver. However, my latest litmus test on this was admittedly around two years ago: all of my friends who worked at Hootsuite have since moved onto other jobs, the core leadership has completely changed over the past couple years, and most early employees are now gone as well.

You need to separately install a copy of RCT2 for the graphics / sounds / etc. It can be bought from Steam, too.

Back in the day here in Canada, cereal boxes often came with CDs of different games you could install and RCT2 was one of the ones regularly included - I probably have collected a dozen copies over the days that are now lost. So if you go digging around in your basement you might be able to install it for free instead.

I visited in December 2017 and was worried about altitude sickness, but was quite rushed the days before the trip and didn’t have a chance to get sickness pills from my doctor.

I personally didn’t feel any symptoms, and neither did my friends. We’re all active and healthy people in their 20s.

The only real impact was reaching a shortness of breath much more quickly: hiking and such was certainly a lot more difficult than I’m used to at sea level. I had the same type of experience ski touring in Colorado; never really feeling satiated from breathing during vigorous activity.

My usual strategy is to write PRs for the end-to-end functionality of a deliverable (meaning they can get quite large), but with many small commits that can be stepped through during the review process.

When I'm ready to submit the PR, I rewrite the commit history so that each commit is an independent and easily consumable chunk of code - many of them might be isolated additions of helper methods, etc. One commit may be a database migration, another the REST API to talk to the database, each one having full tests for that discrete chunk of code.

The result of this is a PR possibly with 30+ commits for a large feature where each commit could be independently merged to master that, when stepping through one-at-a-time, tells a logical story of how every commit combines to deliver the full feature. Each commit message also provides a detailed explanation of what I've intended to do and why.

This means that when I'm near delivery for a feature I have a lot of administration work to do, but I think that the small, discrete, and clearly explained commits provide great value when trying to reason about the codebase down the line.

This is possible, although hard, and is being done at a number of businesses. Most of my experience in this space revolves around working with this business in a consulting capacity a few years ago - https://truebearinginsights.com. The short answer is that it gets easier when you focus on particular types and sizes of vessels.

Ships are classified into size-based categories. For example, a "capesize" vessel is a massive dry bulk ship of 100,000+ ton (and often much bigger) carrying capacity. Since they are the largest ships, there are many fewer of them in the world, they are size-restricted on the ports that they can visit, it is only economical to carry particular types of cargo in these volumes, and because of the volumes, the ports often sit close to the source.

Now, when you collect AIS data for capesize ships, you'll see trade lanes from Australia to China - these mostly carry Iron Ore from Australia's Pilbara region to steel/etc. factories in China (companies like Rio Tinto, BHP and FMG focus on this space). You'll see a similar trade lane from Brazil to China - this is also iron ore and led by a company called Vale. By analysing the trade lanes, cross referencing that with the raw materials that come out of each company, using Google Maps to investigate what the ships might be loading, etc., you can infer what the vessels carry and begin to extrapolate these routes. The same applies for many types of commodities, and is not limited to dry bulk.

It can be easier in some cases to figure out the trading routes for ocean transportation of containers because the carriers often publish their routes in advance, but this obviously doesn't apply to the rail and trucking side of things, containers are often transported a fair distance before reaching a port, and containers will often be trans-shipped (i.e., transferred from one vessel to another at a hub port like Singapore), so it will be difficult to find the root nodes here.

As you go down in vessel size, it gets harder. A small ship like a "handysize" could carry anything really - grain, potash, windmills, yachts (yachts often aren't insurable when crossing the open ocean so the owners typically have them shipped around the world instead). And there are tons of them. And their cargoes might be shipped long distances to the port. You can still find these nodes of course, but it will take a lot more work.

I'm actually not so sure about this. Apple's gross margin target is in the ballpark of 38-40% and a savings of $200-800 per MBP would have a substantial upwards impact on that gross margin number. Apple carefully sets pricing to achieve a target gross margin without impacting sales too much (higher price = higher gross margin but likely lower net revenue because they're priced out of the market).

One of the two scenarios (or perhaps a mixture of both) are more likely, and I lean towards #1:

1. Apple decreases the price of the Mac to stay aligned with gross margin targets. This likely has a significant upwards impact on revenue, because a drop in price like this opens new markets who can now afford a Mac, increasing market share, driving new customers to their services, and adding a layer of lock-in for iPhone-but-not-Mac customers.

2. Apple uses the additional budget per device for more expensive parts/technology. They are struggling to incorporate technologies like OLED/mini-LED because of the significant cost of these displays and this would help open up those opportunities.

That doesn't take away from the absurdity (after enough time has passed from infection).

There is _no chance_ that somebody who has not contracted COVID-19 is safer than somebody who has.

In the case of no immunity, they're both equally dangerous. In the case of yes immunity, those being banned are safer.

, they're equally likely to contract COVID. At worst, the person who h

Once my phone learns that I never intentionally write the word "ducking" I will be happy.

I find that very surprising that you uncommonly pen test 3rd party vendors. Working at a company that delivers a product to the enterprise, pretty much every publicly traded company we work with requires us to go through a pen test, or requires that we provide a recent and independent pen test report.

If you rely on SOC2 compliance then you are indirectly requiring a pen test.

Lately, not at all. My iPhone screen time has reached absurd heights.

Prior to social distancing - if your hobbies generally involve computers then of course this will be difficult, but some strategies of mine...

At work:

- Instead of taking calls in front of the computer, put on headphones and "walk and talk" - for me, a number of my calls are taken while pacing around a meeting room or my living room these days. Video calls I try to do standing up and at a distance from the screen; it doesn't feel like "screen time" in the same way.

- In a meeting, laptops closed and take notes on a notepad, write on a whiteboard, etc.

Coding side projects:

- Not much you can do here, but you can do a lot of the planning and architecture work on paper or a whiteboard

Learning/research:

- The environmentally unfriendly method here would be to print articles/topics and read about these topics on a physical piece of paper

- Something like a Kindle would be a much better solution to the above - it tries to mimick the experience of a book and feels less like a screen

- Or try to find books that discuss these topics. On Amazon or from a friend or from a library

In general:

- Most of my hobbies for the longest time were computer-based which led to long hours behind a computer screen, but I've started to shift my focus to non-digital hobbies, trying to minimise screen time as much as possible. My ultimate goal (when this is technically feasible) is to have only an Apple Watch (with AirPods) that I use day-to-day and a MacBook that I use for work as little as possible (an iPad would be nice but the outlook to support software development doesn't look short-term), and hopefully no phone (the Watch roadmap is slowly inching towards being self-sufficient for calls, music, notifications, etc.)

- Woodworking: instead of buying furniture I build it

- Fitness: great for both your physical and mental health

- Reading: non-fiction for learning (as discussed above, somewhat replaces online reading), fiction for entertainment (helps replace watching TV)

I could list a number of other non-screen hobbies but really just find what works for you. It's likely there's a way you can make that work without a screen.

In the advanced settings you can disable plane usage for the bots, and then restrain yourself from using them. This forces you to build an efficient network using trains, trucks and ships. I recommend in general poking through the advanced settings to see what else could increase the difficulty.

Also, early stage I try to optimise for high profits, late stage my mission focuses on the company performance score: there’s a maximum score of 1,000 which is actually quite tricky to achieve. Aligning your goal to get as high as you can faster than the bots is definitely a challenge.

As far as I can understand, the point of layoffs vs. reducing hours/etc. is so that the person losing their job can apply for unemployment benefits. In Vancouver, for example, I have a number of friends who work as fitness instructors and have been impacted by layoffs.

For these people, however, they will be hired back by these studios immediately once the studios reopen. In the meantime, they are able to get EI benefits from the government.

It is great to see businesses like Starbucks commit to paying their staff without revenue during these times but this is untenable for some of the most impacted industries. Most restaurants, fitness studios, etc. that I come across locally operate on very precarious balance sheets where a single crisis will make the wheels fall off. Though fortunately, the government is also working on programs to help these businesses weather the storm.

As it relates directly to the article for those businesses that continue to operate during COVID-19 and struggle to decide whether to trim the fat. I worked at a company during my career that was working on a Series A raise which took about 2x longer than expect (as they do). The end of the runway was looming and the executive team made an offer to the entire team: anybody who is willing to forego a paycheque right now will get a xx% bonus once the raise completes. Many team members took this option (surprisingly based on the statistics of how many people live paycheque-to-paycheque) and it allowed the business to continue at full headcount until we finally closed the round.

Not as of January 01 - there's a new regulation this year that imposes a sulfur cap on fuel burned by cargo ships [1]. Most ships must now burn more expensive and cleaner fuels. Some ships - mostly larger ones - still burn HSFO but they can only do so because they've installed "scrubbers" which clean the emissions to reduce the amount of sulfur emitted into the atmosphere.

It's an open question whether scrubbers are really helping or just a diversion from purchasing higher quality fuel, but it's only economical to install scrubbers on the very big ships and so the large majority of the ~50,000 strong merchant marine fleet don't have them installed.

[1] https://ihsmarkit.com/topic/imo-2020-regulation.html

I can definitely attest to the poor customer support - the wait times for car2go were unacceptable across the board. My credit cards on file expired twice during my time as a customer of the service and each time that put my account into negative balance which took literal weeks to resolve.

That said it wasn’t common that I needed to contact them so this frustration didn’t come up too often even as a $200+/month customer over the past six or so years.

From the west coast, there are non-stop flights to SG from LAX, SFO and SEA.

There are rumours that either Air Canada or SQ will create a direct flight to Vancouver as well, which I will welcome with open arms :) I live in Vancouver and need to go to Singapore once a month, so I still need to connect - usually through Hong Kong or Taipei and sometimes through Seoul and Narita.

This is available on cars manufactured by Holden - I rented one a few weeks ago and it let me set a maximum speed on the cruise control.

I actually found this to be far more intuitive than cruise control with a minimum speed, because I just kept my foot constantly depressed on the accelerator, and the car never went above the maximum. But when I needed to slow down slightly, e.g., for a car in front of me, I could lift off the pedal and let the car natually slow down.

Conversely with minimum speed cruise control it always feels to me as if I'm zooming along and constantly need to disable it/etc.

I work at a company where most of our contracts are for larger enterprise businesses and, as a result, we have a training component to our launches.

As much as possible we try to bring a person from Product (dev + design + PM) to be involved in the launch project. The benefit here is that the product team gets direct access to the users. And they get "early access" to the challenges our customers face: in the early days of using a new product, the issues shine very bright compared to later when the users have found a suitable workaround. This has and will certainly continue to be essential to building empathy between the people who build the product and those who use it.

Maybe a little bit picky, but the average size of a crew on a, say, 9000 TEU container ship is actually closer to two dozen. 20-24 most of the time.

The number can rise further with more complex cargo.

I suspect that you want to move on from your jobs after a year or less because of burnout, etc. Perhaps if you join a company that has a sustainable working culture and minimal office politics then you would not encounter the same problem.

I happen to work for (and know of others) a Canadian company that values very highly work-life balance and isn't targeting its hiring towards people who work a lot. This creates a culture where you don't need to take several months off to recharge, because your day-to-day is already sustainable. Similarly I don't see any reason why you couldn't take a few months off every so often for personal reasons, but still be able to return to the same job once you felt recharged.

Email me if you want to learn more (email in profile).

That sounds like a dream for me! As a Canadian who spends a lot of time on the road it’s not uncommon to see $200-400 phone bills at the end of the month. Getting a local SIM isn’t really an option because having my normal phone number is important. If there was something like Fi I could have some consistency and a lot of savings!

I love the data of Waze, the UX of Google Maps and the iOS integration of Apple Maps.

If only we could have all three benefits out of one solution.

Do Not Disturb has a great option to allow calls but ignore everything else. You can also set it to ignore calls unless there are two in a row from the same person.

I keep DND on all hours of the day, every day, but never feel like I'm missing anything by just allowing phone calls. When I really need focus, and at night, I'll turn on the more restrictive setting, but at the end of the day if somebody really needs to get in touch with me the option is there.

(An aside, it would be nice to be able to have a separate schedule for the "only allow double calls through" option so it could be on during sleeping hours)

Probably the most frustrating thing for me is when I’m connected to another terminal via ssh and am typing in a command (without using autocomplete). When I am on a poor internet connection the latency between rendering each keystroke makes me want to throw my computer out the window.

It would be cool if the local terminal could render text at the speed of typing and while lazily sending that back to the other machine.

I use Instapaper for reading online articles and the Safari extension adds a handy link below each submission to add the article to Instapaper.

I've really been trying lately - especially the busier I've been - to use that link exclusively and save all of my reading for later. And then I only engage with the topics I'm actually interested in.

But of course here I am in a comment thread :)

I normally leave everything until the last minute which means I have no choice but to be incredibly focused and motivated to deliver on my commitments.

I've always had a reputation for delivering late but this has gotten better over time as I learn to account for unknowns and my definition of "last minute" has gotten more realistic.

Over the years I have tried fruitlessly to make myself more proactive and have consistently failed. I do my best work under pressure and am now focused on embracing who I am and finding a way to make that successful instead of trying to change it. There is a name for this - the Eisenhower method - but it's not a strategy I do deliberately, it's just naturally who I am.

So how do I focus? When there's no time to waste it just comes naturally. I take mini-breaks too, but then my subconscious very quickly kicks me back into gear.

I work at a company (https://www.stage3systems.com) that builds software for the marine shipping industry.

Currently we are expanding one of our products for a large container ship owner so we can import these loading condition files into the product for both long-term analysis and also short-term alerting. Once this project is complete, a fleet superintendent will be able to set up alerts so that they get a push notification when we calculate that a load is risky or unbalanced. Hopefully this sort of thing will add an extra layer of validation before a ship sails from port.

Fortunately, for our customer, they build quite robust ships and do not skimp on cost. But due to the economics of shipping right now, a number of owners in the world cut costs wherever they can. This includes reducing the amount of steel used in critical support beams which could increase the risk of a vessel breaking in half [1]. Sadly this makes a hack like this even more risky, because the combination of marginal errors, bad weather and a frail ship could be more than enough to cause a big problem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOL_Comfort

Given a set of questions - e.g. "how's the food" "how's the atmosphere" "how's the service" etc. - you could figure out how the restaurant scores relative to others by stack ranking based on the % of answers to a particular question that got a "Yes". The numbers should hopefully reflect a normal distribution and from there you get your /5 rating.

If everybody answers "yes" to all of the questions - good value, service, food, atmosphere - then that suggests to me that it's a great restaurant. And you can have a lot of questions that are even asked randomly to limit the number of questions per user.

I rate a lot of places highly that have great a lot of things but not great service, because I don't think the service is bad enough to bring it down. But that's data that is being lost.

I like your idea of stack ranking but with a different flavour. I think that "in your all time top 5" is a hard question to answer. How about this though - if we know you've been to Taco Place X and now you're going to Taco Place Y, maybe the question is "are the tacos at Y better than X", "is the atmosphere at Y better than X" or even "is Y better than X" (but I like the idea of collecting more granular data).

If you collect this^ data to stack rank. Then it definitely gives you a better distribution of restaurants relative to each other in each category.

As a consumer, with this level of granularity, I can select what I care about tonight. If I'm grabbing takeout for lunch at work, does a five star rating even matter? I should ask Siri "show me the top fast and delicious takeout restaurants near me" and she should do: "select name from restaurants where distance < 500m order by (speed + flavour) limit 3;" and from there I will pick something from that list that looks nice. That seems like a nice UX.