ashelmire

Does the existence of other financial firms make Goldman Sachs worth any less? I don't think it does.

We're used to winner-take-all when it comes to these unicorns, but I'm not convinced it will stay that way. With many of these service niches, there's a ton of money to be made and enough needs / feature differentiation for competition.

> I think at one time the advice to “play the numbers game” was correct for online job apps. Not anymore.

Are you sure about that? Most of the posts I see from devs who just got well-paying jobs show them applying to 20+ companies. Usually more. Then they'll get interviews at several, offers from 1-5? It's absolutely a numbers game on both sides.

> Imagine that an author passes away between handing the manuscript to a publisher and the first printing hitting store shelves.

Why not ~20 years of rights to it like patents? Does the family really deserve to enjoy sole rights to someone else's idea for 70 years?

> But if you created a massive piece of work that did wonderfully well, would you deem it fair you family gets nothing, whilst if you'd have survived, they'd share in your success?

No. This is the heart of the problem with the capitalist economic system. The vast majority of wealth belongs to people who inherited it, not the people actually creating all the value in society today.

I guess some consider those of us building programs that actually do something useful for a business purpose to be "fake programmers".

As a senior dev: it will take years of experience and constant learning to get to this point, but it is attainable. You don't have to be a master of each part of the stack and each tech within it - you just need to be able to do enough, and solve the problems you face. You can build a professional SaaS product with a simpler stack as well.

You take a project like this one step at a time. Some bits of it are relatively easy - setting up a few postgres servers doesn't take much knowledge. ElasticSearch is a little more obscure, but for the most part, things like this are running a few commands, and setting up a few config files with the help of docs and google. Same for Redis, nginx... etc. Which isn't to diminish devops - you can dive deep into each of these configurations and develop pretty complex setups, but by the time you actually need to you hope to be making enough money to pay someone else to do it.

You won't get everything perfect all the time. You'll have to revisit parts of the stack and tweak them. But you can take it a day at a time and do what you need to do.

If you mean "the only way to USE it on Mac" is to install an app, I don't think that's true. At least, I've never done it. I use the browser extensions exclusively. Go to the extension store for your browser (example: chrome web store) and search for lastpass[1].

1. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lastpass-free-pass...

Click plus, click password, fill in fields. That's not too difficult, is it? Although that "click password" step wasn't needed before the recent update. I imagine the typical user is just doing that and using the search field. And most would primarily use the extension or mobile app.

I've seen plenty of awful registration flows, so I'm sure that's true. I haven't had to do that for a few years.

> Since they moved to a dedicated app instead of just a plugin on Mac, it is borderline unusable for me.

What do you mean? They still have browser extensions for all major browsers.

Really? I find this hard to believe, as a dev and internet user. Facebook, instagram, etc have far worse interfaces.

You add the extension, easily add/generate/create/autofill your login info. It's usually as simple as clicking an icon that appears in the relevant field.

Except that the potato paradox doesn’t apply here. What the business cares about is total signups and revenue, not the variation in rate of signups. The potato paradox only applies if you’re talking about the rate of misses, which, while interesting, is secondary or tertiary in importance.

An 80% decrease in missed signups only causes about a ~5% increase in revenue. That’s an important point if the team that produced that 5% revenue increase costs a large amount of money to run. At close to a million a year for the team, that’s only going to be worth it for some.

And that was the whole point of the article: this optimization usually isn’t worth the cost.

That’s not how this works though. The same number of people are landing on your site. You aren’t getting 80 more signups as suggested.

Does this just affect gig companies? What about other major tech companies that use thousands of contractors? What happens when they are contracted through an intermediary company?

Oh, huh. Thanks for the info, might open up the watch for me.

That's nice, but I already pay for spotify and use it on my non-Apple devices. Does Apple Music let me stream any song in their library?

Exactly. We want the watch instead of the phone, not in addition to. And I’d like them both to use the same account and number. Why don’t these companies get it? They’ll probably shut down the divisions and say “nobody wanted wearables” despite never having unchained them as consumers desire.

Only reason I don’t have an Apple Watch is because you can’t stream Spotify over cellular, you need to have your phone with you. What’s the point? I want to go for a run and stream music with just the watch to my Bluetooth headphones. I don’t need the watch if I have to bring my phone with me.

Express is not a framework. It's a library that just lets you set up routes, and a pretty minimal one at that. Calling express a framework would be like calling the routes.rb file in Rails a framework - it's not. It's a small part of a framework. NodeJS the runtime is great (although the number of deprecated functions in core is depressing). Node the ecosystem is a nightmare.

I'd echo the sentiments of the other developers here. Building a backend or full-stack app in Node is painful at every step of the journey. You're writing basically everything by hand, while using sub-standard orms and route handlers.

I've decided I like React enough to continue using it. But I'll be sticking to Rails for the backend.

Seems totally reasonable.

“cors - today is going to be bleak” as the first search of the day resonates with me on a deep level. Our field is incredibly complex, and some parts of it we just like to not think about too much.

Paying hundreds of thousands to restore 158 backed up machines would be absurd. Surely a week of work for those 158 employees isn't worth that. They've gotta put a financial analyst on these issues, and not leave it up to panicking executives.

And look at how greedy the attacker was. Missed out on a 400k payday.

Awesome. Wattenberger's blog is also really good (from a cursory glance). Really impressive stuff, can't wait to read it all.

That might be the most optimal solution, but I wouldn't take it as a given. You may have less individuals getting things delivered, but then you're giving up prime real estate and causing more decentralization of population, which brings its own inefficiencies.

Why not create a dotfiles repo instead and keep it on GitHub? That’s what I do.

I think a contributing problem is the inadequate features of mobile browsers. It's harder to get to the pages you want to - harder to set multiple pages to launch on start; manage open windows; quickly navigate to apps you use without typing. Sure you can do the latter two things, but it's not nearly as easy as it is on desktop.

That's definitely not true. McDonald's and Burger King were both markedly worse in my experience. A shame in-n-out isn't abroad, and haven't found a Taco Bell or Wendy's yet. Not that I would really go out of my way to eat fast food overseas now that I'm an adult... I don't even eat these things in the US.

There's wide variability within the US anyway. I've noticed that affluent suburbs tend to have great fast food, while urban and rural environments have awful fast food.

That isn't the heart of the issue. The issue is US products being produced in China and sold in the US. We import > 500 billion from China and export under 130 billion to China.

There are probably a few ways the president could do it unilaterally, legally:

1) Raise tariffs to absurd levels (like, 10000% tax on anything from China).

2) Some sort of national defense justification. He could probably put all employees, companies, and executives on terrorism or customs watch lists and make life difficult for them.

3) Use existing sanctions on other nations as a way to forbid doing business with various entities in China.

There's probably also another way to do it that would, presumably, be illegal:

4) Unilaterally blockade the nation, since he's chief of the armed forces (this is an act of war).

So let’s get what you’re saying: the will of the people is reflected in the person who got less votes winning, because of archaic rules created by ancient oligarchs?

That is cognitive dissonance of the highest order.

What exactly are you asserting? I get that you're reiterating the Trump talking point about "Deep State" nonsense, but the majority of people in this nation have voted for Democratic candidates in the last several elections, including both 2016 and 2018. If anything, the electoral college and gerrymandering are what dampen the will of the people.

I don't think it's a tech crash at all. Sure, we've got companies being propped up by VCs that are doomed to fail (Uber, etc), but the fundamentals of other big tech companies are sound. They have customers, they sell products, and demand for some of those (advertising and support services) are and will be perpetual. The signals for the downturn don't really seem to have anything to do with tech in particular.

In a crash, I'd expect the VC money to become more cautious... for a bit. But that can be a good thing, too, because it means you aren't competing with garbage companies that are always operating at a loss.