968 karma · joined October 3, 2011
My favorite detail was that having spent all this time on extra credit, they only managed to complete their primary task an hour before the presentation - an unmistakable mark of a true hacker if there ever was one.
And I assure you I pay way more than $2/ month. In fact, AT&T's cheapest unlimited plan starts around $65 - and thats the advertised price, which is always before taxes and fees, so its realistically around ~ $80 monthly once all of those ludicrous surcharges are tacked on. Once again, this is for their cheapest plan.
In theory, what could possibly be wrong with explicitly warning users that they're being tracked with a hidden piece of data stored on their machines? However, in practice this has just led to a proliferation of popups on every website on earth. I'd bet that pretty much everyone just annoyingly clicks through whatever button gets them to the content. I wonder how many could even describe what a cookie is, let alone how it affects their privacy. And at the end of a day, people are perfectly willing to give up a little bit of their privacy in exchange for all the services available for free to the general consumer on the web.
I wish that the powers that be could see that the law has not had its intended effect and has instead just led to a degraded web experience for everyone.
Its also a good sign that they might be into technology for its own sake, which also doesn't hurt.
And once I got used to it, I couldn't really imagine using computers any other way. I'd go so far as to say that the 'home row' concept of vim is the ergonomic ideal of keyboard based computing, and I now try to mimic that behavior everywhere -- the vimium extension in chrome, various vim plugins for vs code and sublime etc. If you're on the fence, I'd urge you to give in!
I remember the first Unity demos appearing on these orange pages at least 4 or 5 years ago, and promptly blowing me away. But, after an eternity in JavaScript years, I still dont know what the killer app is, technically or business wise. (Side note - I encourage people to prove me wrong, in fact I'd love to be! Thats whats so engaging about discussions here. I'd love to see examples of what WebAssembly makes possible that wouldn't exist without it.)
The other day I got a facebook notification on my phone, which said something along the lines of "You have 4 new messages". Of course, thinking it was from my friends I opened the app to look at them. 3 of my 4 "messages" were notifications for friend requests from people I had never met. The last one was a photo someone had posted of cake she'd baked (not to me specifically, just in her feed). To someone sitting at her desk at facebook, looking at an engagement metrics chart, the notification would seem to have served its purpose - another data point, another person enticed to open the app in response, engagement maximized. But of course, this was deception. I found this experience distasteful enough to disable notifications entirely - probably another data point for their metrics team - and annoyed enough to complain about in an HN comment.
For those unfamiliar with their product, it is a drone that uses some cool computer vision tech to fly itself. You can set it to track you so that it will follow along while you go about your business hiking / mountaineering / kayaking or whatever - all the while dodging obstacles and navigating completely autonomously. First time in a while that I've been truly blown away by technology that feels damn close to magic.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-23/the-japan...
https://twitter.com/KateClarkTweets/status/12302421245005701...
As a manager, I want people who are hardworking, sure, but how I can I know that they're working on their assigned tasks instead of studying up for interviews and trying to jump ship? Also, I want to work with people who are creative, empathetic and collaborative (the latter is a hugely important trait perhaps even more important than raw algorithmic interviewing ability in a highly teamwork driven discipline like Software Engineering) - none of which these kinds of interviews help with. Or maybe I want a mixture of people with different strengths and weaknesses, like a team with an algorithms expert paired with a creative problem solver that can figure out new approaches to business problems. Applying a uniform standard involving mostly rote memorization and practice of the same set of interview puzzles to everyone is in my view antithetical to building a strong engineering organization. But you're right that it works "well enough" and no one has found alternative solutions that work better so it is unlikely to change in the near future.
What would these people find more compelling? A slow, systemic process like global warming, which involves incremental changes taking place over decades - or the spectacle of exploding oil refineries, armed drones, and the drama of conflict.
Probably the latter, even if the first is far more catastrophic.
It is important for the field to be welcoming and open to curious individuals who want to learn, but there is also a very real need to have literature to communicate ideas that industry professionals encounter, and that necessarily implies some level of baseline knowledge. In other words, there are already plenty of resources to begin learning CSS, and not every article has to assume absolutely no proficiency in it. Every discipline of course has plenty of specialized writing. If you pick up a Quantum Mechanics paper, for instance, you'll find that it doesn't spend much time building up mathematical fundamentals like tensor algebra or topology even though it may well be required knowledge for someone to understand the paper.
Most of the stores are optimized for in store shopping. What this means in practice is that the actual back rooms where the products are stored are relatively tiny (on the order of less than 10-15% the floor space of a typical Supercenter). The whole operation is designed so that the trucks can be unloaded as quickly and efficiently as possible, and most of the stuff can be stocked straight on the shelves where it is available for purchase. Inventory held in back rooms are minimal, and all the items in the entire store turn around extremely quickly.
Contrast this with an e-commerce warehouse, which has to deal with a large 'long-tail' of demand. People are used to having a huge range of choice available, and they expect same or next day shipping on whatever they order. Now instead of having say 20 boxes each of 8 different kinds of toilet paper now you need maybe 10 boxes of 100 different kinds, and they all have to be organized such that they're easily accessible to the packing crew. To make an efficient warehouse, you simply need a different layout and assortment of products than is available in your average store. At the same time, the stores continue to generate the vast majority of revenue for your business so you can't mess up their operations too much.
Not implying that it is an impossible problem to solve, simply a difficult one. I'm sure amazon will run into similar issues as they continue to integrate whole foods.
But it is important to call it what it is and not be distracted by their nonsensical reasoning. They want less development because they want their housing values to increase. And in this process, they don't care about the lives of other people who'd want to move here or about the long term negative consequences of reduced growth and economic activity as a result of their greed.
Think of all of the companies that don't get started or the things that don't get invented because they simply can't get the workers they need -- It is a sort of 'negative externality', little different from pollution or lung cancer, of the reliance on housing equity to fuel savings that we've come to rely on.