646 karma · joined June 19, 2011
1) It has been repeatedly submitted to hacker news.
2) It is link-bait seemingly designed for hacker news
3) It is nothing more than a transparent Ad for their game that they "spent hours" developing.
4) Nearly every sentence of the article is hyperbole.
5) The author has no credibility, and undermines the benefit-of-the-doubt with every sentence.
6) It reads like it was written by a 13 year old.
Yet it is high on the first page of Hacker News.
Note the word "additional". So, this implies after regular corporate taxes are applied.
So, you form a corp in Chile under this program, then you leave after 6 months. You're no longer a resident of chile. You want to take your companies profits out of chile, then this tax would be applied. Depending on the industry, and the corporate tax rate, it looks like it could be as much as %52! (%35 plus corporate taxes.)
This is actually one of the key indicators of a regime that you should be wary of. Currency controls are what governments impose when they find their policies are driving businesses out of the country. I'm not saying that is the situation in chile, I'm just saying that this is the historical role these kinds of taxes have played.
This tax, and the others I mentioned are confirmed by the links you gave, so it is wrong to claim they are "uninformed speculation". Turns out I was quite well informed!
Chileans don't seem paranoid, or to have an inferiority, nor a superiority complex like many people. They're open, but not pushy. If you don't say anything to them, they'll leave you alone, but if you ask a question they'll try to answer it.
Santiago has a gay quarter which looked about comparable to the kind you'd find in an american cities. We were there during the day so I can't say anything about the scene, other than it isn't in the closet.
Oh, and they have the best food.
Highly recommend Chile as at least a place to visit. I could certainly live there.
Two problems with that statement. First, you're only looking at one side of the equation. You're ignoring the cost and damage to the economy that government spending does. I don't just mean by crowding out other, more efficient solutions, but the literal taxation and inflation that government uses to get the money in the first place inhibits economic growth. Both actions reduce the "bottom line" for consumers and companies and thus reduce the funds they have available when deciding to make capital purchases- whether it is a house or a car or sending kids to college or building a plant to create more jobs. All of the money government takes prevents those things from happening.
The second is that you're ignoring that much of that "investment" is actually spent on activities that are themselves net-harmful to the economy. Such as the overzealous regulators that shut businesses down, the agencies that spend their time inhibiting efficient running of businesses, or even make it impossible to operate your plant safely because government regulations don't allow the use of the latest safety equipment (only what was on the market at the time the regulation was created) or FDA examiners that drive costs thru the roof, and prevent access to drugs for dying people because the drugs are "experimental" and might kill them in 20 years (though their disease will get them a lot sooner) etc. Much of the money government spends is on programs that make people less safe and more on topic, undermine economic growth with no real benefit other than providing good political jobs to hand out.
"This is a lovely dream with little evidence to support it."
The entire history of the USA supports it.
"The idea that rich people getting richer helps the economy is not founded on fact."
The error you're making here is that you think that letting people keep their money only helps the rich. IF you take all of the incomes of the bottom %50 of the populace and you compare it to the incomes of the tope %50 of the populace, there are a lot more people in the lower half and they make a lot more money. Not squandering that money benefits them a whole lot more than it does the rich.
Frankly, the economics are not really up for debate. They don't support your side. The slogans about "rich people getting rich" are just rationalizations for theft.
That theft, actually, hurts poor people more than it does rich people. Rich people are insulated, the poor are not.
Bush's original Tax cut proposed reducing taxes for poor people by %50, IIRC, and the reduction for the richest was around %2. After the democrats managed to "compromise" it, what got passed reduced taxes for the poorest by %20. Why weren't the democrats in favor of the large tax cut for the poor?
And even still, even though every way you measure it-- dollar terms or percentage terms-- these tax cuts helped the poor more than the rich, ever since they've been passed, democrats have been calling them "tax cuts for the rich".
Frankly, from an economics perspective, lower regulation, lower taxes, lower inflation, no matter how unevenly applied, helps the poor. It always does, it always will, and in fact it has to-- the primary way you get rich is by improving the lives of the poor.
I don't understand why democrats constantly support policies that hurt the poor, are constantly trying to raise their taxes (While always, of course, claiming to only want to tax the rich) but they do.
I'm not a republican, so, put down that assumption I've just studied economics. What the politicians tell you about economics is designed to serve their interests, not yours.
But that money is in the economy. If these "Executives" put it into stocks, then it funds company growth. If they put it into municipal bonds then it funds cities. If they put it into a checking account, then it funds home loans. IF they were to turn it into cash and put it under their mattress-- then it still funds government spending (via inflation.)
The only possible way I can think of to take that money out of the economy-- and granted this is even if your assertion that "all the money" goes to these fat cat "executives" were true, and I'm not buying it--- the only way they can take the money out of the economy would be to buy actual physical gold bullion coins and put it in a basement.
So, if these guys really were like Scrooge McDuck and literally had a basement full of gold coins then it would be out of the economy. But that is pretty much nobody.
Apple replaced a friends phone that they abused and then made up a story about. Apple did this because Apple wanted to take care of their customer. Doesn't mean Apple is obligated to replace every phone, even when it is abused. Apple's only obligated to the terms of the warranty it promises. Apple promises little, but delivers a lot.
These are the incidents that test the true nature of a company. AirBnB is not coming off very well so far, and there is no negative ramification to doing the right thing-- except for the direct costs of doing the right thing.
If AirBnB thinks leaving their customer hanging is worth saving the money it would cost to "make things right" (Whatever that means) it is their right.
But lets not hide behind the spurious notion that the world operates like school.
Just because you give some gum to your friend doesn't mean you're obligated to give it to the whole class.
If it did, then I'd have the right to go to a party at the playboy mansion! Clearly other people were invited.
I saw that comment on tech crunch and felt that Chesky was begin dishonest (based solely on having ready he previous blog post from ej) and now we see that AirBnB tried to get her to shut up!
As a frequent AirBnB customer (staying in a place rented via AirBnB at the moment, in fact) I'm finding that I'm having less and less faith in the company as these incidents unfold. (I'm not just talking about this, but Kutchner, the Craigslist, the fact that they keep their customers in the dark, etc.)
Frankly, as someone who has been online for two decades now, talking to people I can get a good feeling for how trustworthy they are. AirBnB inhibits this because it inhibits communication-- it can only happen thru their service which is not conducive to having a dialog.
The sole purpose of restricting this communication and restricting customer's ability to assess the risk in any of these transactions is AirBnB's desire to prevent the possibility that a deal might happen off of their site.
Reality is, this is silly. We found an apartment on AirBnB once and then found it on the internet (wasn't hard given knowledge of the details of the apartment.) We could have booked it that way and saved the AirBnB commission... but we booked it thru AirBnB anyway because we wanted them to escrow the funds. (Little did we know how little protection AirBnB provides in that regard.) But we were able to find out more about that apartment by looking at its website compared to the info on AirBnB.
And more importantly, having the owner's email address allowed us to discuss a lot of possible issues about the situation, and assess their trustworthiness... something impossible or difficult to do thru AirBnB.
I hope, when Apple gives up the optical media drive, they will still continue to have a hard drive slot.
I'd much rather just buy the machine configured this way from Apple than have to rework the internals of my laptop (And undo everything if I have to take the machine in for support.)
Paypal ======
Note, I refuse to use the euphemism "freeze your account" because that is not what paypal does. Paypal steals people's money.
PayPal will steal your money for all kinds of reasons, including the people who buy from you. You don't even have to be doing anything "weird" (unless selling people software online is weird.) When paypal stole our money, one of their demands to get it back was that we provide an invoice from the manufacturer of our software proving we had enough units to fill customer demand. This invoice had to be paper based, and we needed to scan it. It needed to be signed in blue ink by someone at the manufacturer. I kid you not, those were paypals demands.
We're selling software that we created, we're the manufacturer, and it is downloaded so, it is "created" the moment someone buys it. There is no risk that we'll run out of inventory. We'd been doing good sales, we had very happy customers, and no complaints.
Our crime? One of our customers had paid someone else via paypal, and that other person turned out to be a scammer. Paypal, when they went after that scammer, looked at everyone who paid him, and then everyone else those people had paid and then stole the money in those accounts as well. This was clearly an automated process and apparently happened instantaneously. It was clear from trying to talk to the "support" at paypal. by the way- attempting to work with paypal to resolve these things means dealing with people about as bright as the local DMV and MUCH less interested in helping you. As far as they are concerned, because their software decided so, you're a scammer trying to rip them off. They have no interest in actually telling you anything about what's going on. They just make arbitrary demands in the hope that eventually you'll give up.
Paypal was completely irrational, and dishonest. They lied to us many times. We did things they demanded and they just ignored it and then made more demands, or demanded the same things again.
As far as I'm concerned, Paypal boosts earnings by stealing their customers money. The only thing unusual about our account at that point, compared to previous periods, was we had left more money in it, since we'd not been withdrawing it to our bank account for a couple months. So there was a nice sum of cash for them to steal.
Amazon Payments ===============
We used Amazon at a different point in time. One day, Amazon just deleted our account, completely! Again an automated fraud thing, but they recognized the error. They mostly made things right. There ware a couple kindle books that had been purchased that they promised us a coupon to let us buy again and never delivered, but that's not a problem. Amazon's customer support was really disorganized and vague in their communication- they would often give us instructions that started with "Log into your account" when the account itself had been deleted. By trial and error we were able to figure out what needed to be done to get mostly everything back to where it needed to be. So, amazon, not really well organized, but not out to steal your money.
Google Checkout ===============
Used them for quite awhile. No real problems. No hiccups.. well, I think there was a problem with one order but we were able to resolve it, between us and the customer. Fortunately didn't ever have to deal with google "support" (since in my experience with other google products there isn't likely to be much.) Google's policies were much better than paypal, and they ran a tight ship that ran very well.
We looked at 2CO as well, and in our research they seemed to be a good place. If I needed to do this again, that would be my first choice, though I'd keep google checkout as a possibility, the real issue being more which one looked like a merchant account and which one looked like a branded pay button to our customers.
I travel full time. I'm a nomad. I would rent thru AirBnB for 365 nights a year if they provided the service that they originally set out to provide. I think they changed their focus, and rather than building an organic community of people renting their places to each other, they are pursuing the expensive travel market. This makes sense given the profits are higher and it is easier to get vacation rentals in the system than individuals. But they're not the ebay of travel anymore, they've become a HomeAway clone.
They also really need to change their policies on communication- they inhibit our ability to talk to the owners before renting, and this is worsened given that many owners may not speak english. Letting us call them or email them is not going to want us to cut AirBnB out of the deal, because the primary value AirBnB provides is the fraud protection of letting us pay by credit card.
There's no reason for any company of this size not to have a 24/hour hotline. It may be midnight in california, but it is 5pm somewhere. You have listings around the world.
AirBnB's priorities seem to have shifted away from building an organic "ebay of travel" with regular people to maximum growth in revenue, by going after the high end travel market, with a distinct lack of customer service. This may not be intentional, but I'm part of the market-- a heavy use part of the market- and that's how it is looking to me.
So, 24 hour hotline, policies for dealing with things that go wrong, to help customers, and letting the people use the site communicate are the changes I'd make. I bet you'll find that more communications means more confidence and more nights rented.
This whole line of argument is FUD From pro-google people who are trying to pretend like its hypocritical to want to defend Java.
Android was using Sun Java before the licensing dispute caused them to go their own way.
Don't get me wrong: I'm a software developer, and I'm a bit of a software snob. I have trouble (though I've mostly overcome it) seeing Managers, CEOs, marketing people, sales people, "designers", etc. as doing "real work" because they're not engineers.
Maybe designers feel the same way about me. They should.
But the reality is, good companies need good designers, and with experience I've discovered that designers can really blow your mind sometimes.
But the hiring process for a designer is not the same as the hiring process for an engineer.
One area where I've personally been very dissatisfied with google is the lack of customer support. I can't imagine asking programming questions to a customer support person who was expected to help people with their adwords account.
The person being interviewed here, and who wrote this blog post is one of those "customer support" type people. Not pretending to be an engineer.
If you only hire engineers and your hiring process is engineer focused, you're going to miss out on a lot of really good people, and you're going to have non-engineering roles staffed by engineers who just want google on their resume so they can go get an engineering job later.
And these are not the people you want helping others with their adwords account.
(Of course I'm not familiar with the internal structure of google, so I'm giving examples meant to be representative of the problem, but that might not actually be true.)
Of course there is a wide array of subcontractors involved in NASA projects. I don't think anyone who accuses NASA of being inefficient thinks that NASA workers do all the manufacturing, etc.
If that is correct, how were SpaceX and Scaled Composites able to do so much with such limited resources?
That core problem is misalignment of incentives. Or in short, politics. When you've got a public budget and your goals are political ones, you're going to pursue a specific set of capabilities and policies that help your political career. This is true from the President all the way down to the lowest level of managers at NASA. I think the real cost, and thus tragedy, of this era is the thousands upon thousands of good engineers who were sucked up into NASA because they believed in the dream of human space flight, and were never able to accomplish much over the courses of their careers.
The solution to this problem is very simple: No government agency with control over space. Outsource everything. If government wants to fund scientific research or exploration, great- give grants to institutions that then have effectively complete autonomy. For instance, JPL, could be a separate institute with little connection to government other than primarily getting its funding from the government. If politicians want to send a probe to Mars, let JPL be the master contractor, where JPL hires the scientists, while subcontracting out the design, development and production to private entities.
SpaceX is much more efficient getting to space, cost wise and reliability wise (I believe) than NASA ever has been, and they are using (IIRC) a discarded russian design, off the shelf as the basis for their system (though certainly they've done a lot of engineering work.)
The commercial space industry in the USA has suffered under the government control over all things space since the beginning. I remember when Richard Branson-- the founder of Virgin Galactic, and the one who funded the design and development of SpaceShipTwo was prevented from seeing the design he'd paid for because he was a british national!
In fact, I'm certain that the only reason Burt Rutan and Virgin Galactic were successful is that their "launch" requires only a runway, and thus they can easily do it from just about any country. Previously, NASA and the FAA has made it very difficult for private entities to pursue space access, by denying them the necessary permits to do testing.
After the X prize was won, when commercial operation plans were announced, there was a flurry of congressional noise about regulating the space industry ("for safety" of course.) I think the only reason that died down is that there is literally nothing stopping Virgin Galactic from flying off and launching from a newly crated "space port" in, say, Panama. (Well, except that the government apparently considers their designs "National Security Secrets".)
It is time to dismantle NASA. Let the capitalists pursue profit in space, and government can get whatever it needs launched (or built) by the same contractors under whatever terms the government wants-- but at much lower costs.
I think people get taught in high school to chase after "top flight" schools for their education, and you went to stanford so you've done that.
It isn't the same in the working world. You don't need to work for google.
I am sure there are dozens of startups who would appreciate you much more, and where your talents would be able to express themselves to a much fuller extent than at google.
Of course, my crime is much worse. I have pointed this out. But there it is. (Do it too many times and you'll get banned completely, so beware, and log out periodically to make your your contributions are actually appearing on the forum.)
Doesn't appear to be from the link you gave.
From your link: "You will be an evangelist for our newest technologies in the outside world, as well as a vocal advocate for developers' needs within Google. You will be an engineer who thrives on the cutting edge of technology and loves seeing exciting, new applications and business that other developers are building. Your job is to drive momentum for exciting new technologies such as Chrome, Android, App Engine, Google Wave, Google Maps API, HTML5, and our core Google Apps and Ads APIs. "
Guy Kawasaki was one of the first evangelists. He was a jeweler previously. Of course Guy has a great many talents, but I don't think anyone would call him "highly technical." Notice the middle sentence says "you will be an engineer", but the rest of it talks about being an "Advocate" and "your job is to drive momentum", etc.
The requirements don't seem to be highly technical either. (most of the languages are scripting languages, for instance.)
From the description: BA/BS in Computer Science or a similar technical degree preferred. Experience blogging and writing technical articles, ideally with an existing follower base. Strong command of web application or mobile application development landscapes. Experience working directly with large partners, or with press and bloggers preferred. Considerable success as a software developer, architect, technology evangelist, CTO, or consultant working with web or mobile technologies. Strong command of web application or mobile application development landscapes. Solid programming abilities in one or more of the following languages: Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, .NET, JavaScript.
The problem with most technical interviews is that they end up asking trick questions, where the answer is more important than the process (and thus the "process of problem solving" is not even relevant.) You'll notice, this guy actually solved the problem in question, immediately, but that wasn't acceptable because it wasn't a technical solution.
Critical thinking is very important, I agree. Far more important than problem solving, and one of the real problems is, that people think that these kinds of interviews actually reveal ones ability to think critically. They are not the same. Problem solving is more of a process one can learn, critical thinking is more of a talent, or maybe a willingness, to step outside the problem and evaluate, for instance, whether it should even be solved.
In my experience- but I could be wrong- I would say there is a very strong correlation between being able to solve mathematical brain teasers and having trouble with critical thinking. (Unfortunately, these people do not realize that they have trouble engaging in critical thinking.) I can't find a correlation between solving the type of problems on google billboards and being good at critical thinking. Its mostly about awareness of obscure (to the mainstream, anyway) math.
Being able to solve problems is good for an engineer. All good engineers can do this.
Critical thinking, however, makes the great engineers great, and it eliminates the need to solve large numbers of tough problems. Engineers can end up in the weeds because they chase tough problems to solve (they're fun!) rather than employing critical thinking to keep focused on the important business problems.
The examples from this blog are not very illustrative of my point, but there it is.
I once created a LinkedIn account to see someone's profile. It was meant to be a throwaway but I didn't delete it. The account had no activity, no "insightful blog posts", no open source contributions, nothing but a single job listing under a previous position.
Not being a real person, nobody contacted this account... except google recruiters. And they did it persistently. It was right out of glengarry glenross. They were very smug, which I thought was amusing because, well, they were chasing a non-existent entity. (even if I didn't have my own startup, I have no interest in ever working for google.)
When I didn't answer the first recruiter, after many emails, I was handed off to another guy who felt this event was significant enough to send me, yet another email about it. In it one of the things he said was: "I identify top-tier engineers for Google"
Of course, when looking at his profile, his background is in recruiting, not engineering, and his degree is in accounting, not engineering. (No disrespect to accountants.)
I'm completely burned out on recruiter hyperbole, and absolutely have spent the last conversation I'll ever have with a non-technical recruiter whose trying to "evaluate" me. Here's how the last one went (before I started refusing to deal with recruiters, which, by the way, produced better job leads and better jobs.)
Her: Do you have oracle experience? (having not told me anything about the job, other than it was a "coder" job.) Me: Well, I was writing java that generated SQL dynamically to talk to an oracle database. The SQL had to be dynamic because... Her: (interrupting) which oracle? Me: Uh, the one from Oracle corporation. Her: What was the version number Me: (just because I'd happened to see it in passing) 8i I believe. Her: OH, sorry, the client wants 9i experience. (9i, I later discovered had been released within the previous 3 months.) I'll keep you in mind and let you know if I find anything that matches your level of qualifications. (From tone of voice, it was obvious I wasn't "up to speed" in her eyes.)
Later I was awarded a patent as sole inventor for the technology I'd tried to describe in her question.
Anyway, getting tired of constant emails from google recruiters, and irritated at this non-engineers belief that he "identifies" "top flight" engineers, I asked him what he looks for in a phone interview.
Here's a direct quote of his answer. Because this is obvious nonsense (he can't evaluate any of these things from the perspective of an accountant) he's clearly just playing buzzword bingo, and in the hopes of getting other engineers past this fake "evaluation" to talk to real engineers, this is all you have to say:
"The l things I look for when I'm having a phone conversation with an engineer (at a high level): - What big problems are they solving (large scalability and storage issues, advanced algorithms, etc...) - Involvement in complete product development (are they shipping products or are mainly doing integration) - Technical coding, % of time they spend coding, languages they're coding in. - use of data structures and algorithm writing. - Educational background and motivation for making a change."
Note that "I got tired of being harassed by google recruiters" is probably not a good answer for the last one.
From the original article: "I guess that’s why when I interviewed for my transfer, I was told I was “not technical enough” to do the job I’d been doing for 3 years already, supporting the Freebase community."
Google literally told this guy he was not capable of doing the job he was already doing, and given that it was a startup, a job he had likely created himself.
"There are plenty of fresh-faced kids from Stanford and MIT and whatever other elite universities are on Google’s preferred list, who can solve stupid puzzles and tell you the O notation of anything you want."
Well, when your founders were graduate students at Stanford, and they implemented a hiring policy right out of school, it shouldn't be surprising that they have an arbitrary filter like that, and a focus on identifying personalities that are nearly identical to the founders.
Finding people like yourself is orthogonal to finding good employees who will find the best position. In the worst case it can result in a monoculture where literally every employee is blind to a solution that would be obvious to at least somebody if you had more diversity.
I've not worked with google, so obviously I'm just giving my impressions based on my experiences being recruited by them (and this has happened ore than once, the LinkedIn example was just the most recent.)
It seems that people who think this is embarrassing to Oracle think that Schwartz is talking about google's VM rather than the Sun one in this blog post.
I think Oracle has been eradicating all signs of Previous Management of Sun from the internet. Not because of the litigation with google but because Sun's management was kinda embarrassing-- at least from the perspective of Oracle.
This post isn't actually damning because it reinforces the fact that Google was a Sun customer, and thus had access to Sun IP, prior to doing their own thing.
This is why I trust Apple. They might be slow, or silent, but they've never left me hanging (and I've been a customer of theres for decades before google existed.)
That said, my iCloud account is where media and non-essential information will get stored. If Apple disappears it one day, at most I'll have lost music and movies. But everything real lives somewhere I can control and backup.
I use GMAIL, but with POP access, and I store my email locally.
However, it is time to get off of gmail and move anyway. It is just such a PITA to manage your own email servers....but I expect a company that does it for a living will provide better support than a company where I'm the product rather than the customer.
For instance, there was no child molestation at Waco, yet people think there was. (nor were they suicidal. Koresh, when he heard the ATF was asking about him in town, called up the local ATF office and asked to set up a meeting so he could answer any questions they had. Yet, the media reports that he was "hiding out" necessitating the "raid" on the "compound".) I picked waco as an example because it is long enough ago that maybe it can be considered objectively.
The day of the incident is when spin is the most effective. Getting out the "official story", even if it turns out to be absurd or outright false in retrospect, is paramount. It doesn't matter when the truth comes out-- most people will never hear it, and many who do won't believe it because the person spreading it, no matter how much evidence they have, is going against the "official story" and therefore is a "conspiracy theorist" and thus has no credibility.
This is how the public is manipulated into believing disprovable things.
I use modern iOS devices and the worst that's happened to me is one would claim that something wasn't an "authorized" cable when I plugged it into a USB port that didn't provide enough current. (plugging it into one that does-- totally off brand USB power plug) works, though.
There's even an open source community of people making iOS software. They're chinned by the "open source" community because they're hacking for iOS, but they exist.
CNN or ESPN don't have to jailbreak. A big part of the problem is that you assumed they did, because the "open source" community is running around pretending like everything is locked down and you have to jailbreak to run arbitrary software. You don't, you just become a developer.
The bonus of becoming a developer is that you also get to hack on pre-release versions of the OS and stuff like that.
There's no serial port on the iOS device connector. So it isn't really as you represent.
The iOS device connector has a USB client port. This requires the other side of the connector to be a USB host. Thus to make this cable ,they have to put in a little micro controller that has a USB host port (which many of them don't since micro controllers are more likely found in devices than in hosts, hosts are usually PCs and laptops, etc.)
And then that host micro controller talks to a RS-232 serial chip (or has a serial port integrated to it).
Its possible that to save money that micro controller is slow enough that talking to USB at 12mbit/s takes up most of its time since this is likely done in software, and it can only flip the bits for the RS-232 at 57k. In fact, they might not even have an RS-232 port on it and they might be simply literally flipping generic IO pins up and down to produce and RS-232 compatible interface.
Would have to reverse engineer it to know.