clentaminator

Well, do you have hobbies? Interests? Things that you think about wanted to do when you're at work? Things you have to stop doing because gosh darnit you need to get up for work tomorrow even though you'd rather carry on until morning? If you have those, then why not do them more?

All those things you enjoy and do without question or thought, or wanted to try, those are the things that you do.

A lot of comments in this thread are voicing concerns over the marketed cost/performance benefits of AWS and the reliability of their services in the case of region failure e.g. the API services goes down.

But are there benefits to using Amazon's more high-level services such as SQS and SNS which, supposedly, replicate their configuration state and data across multiple regions, in terms of reliability?

For instance, on a per-instance basis AWS might be more expensive than a bare-metal provider, and there's nothing to stop you running your own RabbitMQ instance. But SQS messages are replicated across three regions, so if you were building an equivalent service you'd need three instances in different regions and a reliable distributed message queue.

So does that additional complexity/cost make SQS at all worthwhile? Or does it come down to the fact that, while your own hand-rolled service would require more management, your potential message throughput at a given cost would be much higher than with SQS?

I think part of the reason why it seems that we're making the wrong decisions most of the time is that the actual decision-making is less obvious in a lot of situations.

While everybody knows that their mobile phone can be/is tracked as it moves between cell towers, it's far less obvious than an explicit vote for or against some kind of invasion of privacy.

In which case, raising awareness so that people can actively override the decisions being made for them seems like a good place to start.

Another few from BBC Radio 4 that might be of interest: - The Life Scientific - The Infinite Monkey Cage - Letter from America - Moral Maze

I think it just comes down to frequency, "necessity" of an activity, and context.

Someone might like driving, but are they going to enjoy driving to and from a work environment every day of the week? Perhaps. They might enjoy it so much that they love it. And the work might make it worthwhile. But making that thing a requirement seems like an easy way to transform it into something that's just not as fun as go-where-you-want-when-you-want free drive.

I think it just comes down to whether or not you you're forced into doing something as a means to an end. Cooking for subsistence rather than for pleasure, for example.

Anything you "achieve" while doing something else seems highly unlikely to be "meaningful". Useful ingame? Perhaps. Meaningful? I doubt it.

I don't think that ads as a way of finding things you may be interested in is necessarily bad, but it's certainly not the only way. If I want to find out what's current or upcoming in videogames I can go to Eurogamer, Polygon, Gematsu, or another site with that kind of focus. (Actually knowing which places are best for your interests and which should be filtered out is another issue, of course...)

If a random ad happens to be something I'm curious about then great, but I find that it's more often not.

2 is a fair point, though I wonder if your shared interests as friends (making assumptions here) couldn't guide your search?

Cable as 'a curated platform of best video content, being streaming 24/7' is interesting, but the current "best" just may not be someone's thing. Again I think it comes down to wanting to choose precisely what you watch, though I see your point that you don't always know (though if you don't know what you want to watch, maybe doing something else is the option?).

I never knew about that, so thanks. This is a significant argument against the traditional cable model, at least for me.

Are there other genres (for want of a better term) where this applies?

Aside from ads, freedom of choice with respect to just what you watch seem to be the other key motivator.

With the capability of streaming and on-demand services, why would any consumer put up with having to choose any channel with a fixed programming schedule? I almost certainly don't want to watch what you're trying to sell.

No other industry seems to operate in this manner. When it comes to books, games, music, etc, consumers choose specific products. With cable TV you don't get that granularity of choice. Netflix just brings the traditional TV model into alignment with seemingly everything else.

Anecdotally, cable prices seem to rise but the new channels that are sold to me as a benefit are the exact opposite of what I watch. More sports channels? Despite me having never tuned into a single one? If you're going to profile me, at least make an effort to do it well.

Metal Gear?!

I agree. The double dactyl verse form (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_dactyl) has far greater potential for comedy value.

Personally, I just want to know what love is.

Isn't the downside of using any information that is personal to you that it massively reduces the scope of potential words and phrases that you would end up using?

There might be >97 million songs, but how many songs does one individual know well enough to decide to use them for a passphrase?

Top for me are sites that silently truncate part of the end of a new password without informing you, then leaving you logged in thinking that the registration process completed successfully.

Exactly what I was thinking :)

“Nobody knows what it means, but we do it anyway.”

This one comment sums up pretty much the entirety of Internet "culture", see for example neknominate, the ice-bucket challenge, etc.

Just a humorous image I have in my head of a bunch of programmers with kids running around trying to apply "best practices" to everything in their households. Spouses, kids, not even the pets are safe from an agile methodology and microservices.

Not intending this to sound snarky, but only on HN could I expect to read the phrases "best practice" and "children" in the same sentence.

Carbon emissions, consumption of limited resources and physical inactivity. Few things are worse for the planet and for yourself.

Do you object to satire too? In the right context?

Did Netflix only analyse shows with more than one season? I'm surprised Fargo wasn't included as it had me hooked from the first episode.

Very interesting. A few questions:

- How similar is this to PageRank?

- Is it possible to implement this system anonymously?

- What happens if I don't want to state publicly that I respect X, for fear of backlash or more simply that, while I respect X's opinion, I don't want to be seen to be associated with X?

I don't understand your analogy. The Scrabble problem is people not knowing the words they use. The only Chess equivalent could be people not knowing or understanding the moves they make. It has nothing to do with someone moving a queen and not being a queen themselves.