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alpsgoldenon The architecture of communication

I've seen this in the startup world, where as the company grows it becomes harder and harder to buck the conventional wisdom in meetings or on the internal discussion boards. If you say something negative about some project, you may not know who will offend.

But I'm not sure if anonymous boards are the solution. Without reputation, quality can quickly go down, and there is no incentive not to be needlessly nasty.

I think the best solution is for executives to actively solicit contrarian opinions via 1:1 meetings. An engineer might not want to speak out about why some project is doomed in a meeting of stakeholders. But if the exec comes to them privately and says, "give me your honest assessment, if this plan has holes in it, I want to know now," then they are likely to get an honest answer.

alpsgoldenon DigitalOcean gets $130M credit line because servers are really expensive

It doesn't seem like the author of the original article knows what they are using the credit facility for, note the "maybe":

This new credit line means two things. First, DigitalOcean is sill investing heavily in its infrastructure. Maybe existing users will get a performance upgrade with new servers replacing existing servers. Or maybe DigitalOcean will expand its product offering.

And if they have to take out a credit line simply to upgrade existing customers, without bringing in new revenue, that is bad news. That means they are losing money simply to maintain their current position.

alpsgoldenon DigitalOcean gets $130M credit line because servers are really expensive

I can understand the SaaS business model where you lose money in the short term to acquire customers, because that customer will be worth money over the next four to six years. If you are expanding aggressively, you will be losing money as a company for sales and marketing in order to acquire many long-term customers.

But I don't understand why Digital Ocean should be losing money. Unless I am mistaken, they do not seem to be spending on sales in order to acquire long-term customers. If they are losing money on operations, then doesn't that mean their business model is broken?

Perhaps they lose money on small-scale hosting as a marketing expense in order to acquire big long-term customers? Or perhaps they have big capital expenditures for data centers? Otherwise, this doesn't look good for Digital Ocean.

alpsgoldenon Obama Pledges $4B to Computer Science in US Schools

At the school I'm in, when a kid with any potential comes in, the only course of action is to to help her transfer out to a school where she will actually learn something. Sadly, this is not the exception - there are literally millions of kids around the country in similar schools.

Why aren't they learning anything in your school? What should the school be doing that they are not doing now?

alpsgoldenon New Style of Police Training Aims to Produce Guardians, Not Warriors

Even at that, it was not the 'chokehold' that killed Eric Garner. It was being placed on his stomach, with his arms behind his back. It's difficult for anyone to breathe in that position, and _very_ difficult for someone of Eric Garner's size.

Do we actually know whether that was the case? It seems like he might just died from a stress induced heart attack. The preliminary report said that he died of cardiac arrest in the ambulance. I never was able to find a full copy of the final medical examiner report. The summary of the final report was that he basically died of everything, which was not at all helpful.

alpsgoldenon Stronger Shell

Part of this was that I became an expert in python before learning much bash, so it was just much easier to write in the language I already knew, and I found the bash syntax strange with a bunch of gotchas. I'm sure though, that if I did a ton of bash scripting I would not even notice the gotchas.

You are correct that the main weakness of ipython is that it doesn't have pipes, and that chaining is very limited. But usually this does not impact me. And if all your scripting is in python, then you just import functions and run them, rather than chaining scripts together.

alpsgoldenon Stronger Shell

I've found that as soon as bash script goes to more than a couple lines, or as soon as it needs anything modestly complex, like "if" statements or functions, then it is almost always more efficient to write it in ipython. If you know python, then ipython is really superior way to do any ops and administration tasks. I've also found it easier to use for server setup than alternatives like ansible or puppet. I can just use standard, reusable classes and functions to do all my various activities.

alpsgoldenon The Post-Ownership Society

This is the problem with rolling up the human experience into a price index, and then using that index to judge changes in standard of living.

Purchasing power of electronics, appliances, etc, has gotten a lot better.

Purchasing power of food has somewhat stagnated, though variety has gotten better.

It is harder for a single earner to pay for a standard three bedroom house in a good school district that is close to jobs. It is also much more expensive to buy the education admission ticket to the job market, due to cost inflation of schools and credential inflation of job requirements.

A bunch of that non-wage compensation is just going directly into bigger healthcare bureaucracy that doesn't do anything the worker, it should be considered an increase in income that is offset by a bureaucracy tax. Healthcare has gotten better, but the things that have gotten better are generally related to where the money is going.

alpsgoldenon The Post-Ownership Society

In reality, though, these are the same types of services that have always been around—private drivers and taxis, hotels, rental car companies—but their services are sliced up into tiny bits and provided by underpaid contingent workers, which is what we are ourselves.

The "sharing economy" has always just been a PR term. I like Airbnb and Uber as services, but it's not a reinvention of human economic interaction. How does a "sharing economy" differ from a rental economy? How does a "sharing economy" differ from any market where people produce services for each other based on reciprocated exchange?

alpsgoldenon There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom (1959)

The big problem is that as you scale down the relative importance of different forces change. Surface tension and viscosity become overwhelming strong compared to any sort of mechanical force. Anything like a gear or propeller is useless, rather you have to rely on self-generated chemical gradients. No one has yet developed these forms of motion and power using entirely nanoscale physical principles.