harryf

To me the screwed up part is companies that sponsor this stuff like Red Bull.

I was working right next to this tragic Base jump - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ueli_Gegenschatz - we used to eat lunch in the Sunrise Tower and one day there's a really weird vibe in the room because 30 minutes earlier this guy had Base jumped from the roof and crashed; he was still alive when they took him to hospital but died later.

The screwed up part of the story according to what I've _heard_ - and which didn't really get well reported - the wind conditions that day were unpredictable. He shouldn't have been jumping at all, but decided to anyway because Red Bull - the sponsor - plus the press were there and he didn't want to disappoint everyone by cancelling. So you could argue it was his decision, but was it really? There should at least be some independent referee that makes the final call on stuff like this.

The endgame is like the burning of The Library of Alexandria. 2000 years from now scholars (assuming there are any) will talk of a "missing civilisation" that mysteriously left no cultural traces.

The story line may be being twisted by CNN but the idea of a CEO blaming his staff is fundamentally wrong. The message should be “I created a culture which meant an intern could put the whole company at risk. This was my mistake”

> What would be the first integration point you'd like to see? We've been discussing internally where to put our focus right now.

Think the first thing would be just some way to share read-only via a URL with people that don't have the app - unique ID but otherwise public - that's then easy to share with messaging apps - WhatsApp most of all I guess

Very cool - dictation seems almost perfect.

Some key things to get my to commit...

- feeling very “locked in” already ... ability to export notes is important

- search! With results ranked by a mix of most recent, most read ... relevancy also matters but not as much as the recency (a note I just created) or most read (a note I keep going back to) ... the latter implies keeping track of how often I read notes

- sharing outside of the app eg to Signal / WhatsApp

Side note: I’m a big Evernote user for personal use only. Positioning against Evernote’s ecosystem will be tough if you want to make a walled garden

> Food experts have churned up palm fat in cow feed as a likely culprit.

I think these type of stories are what journalists live for. "Did you see how I used 'churned up' in that sentence? Hahaha"

https://old.reddit.com is still out there and everything seems to work

You mean something like https://github.com/banjun/WSDL2Swift ?

Ah yeah - NOT a pyramid scheme - multi pronged is what I meant

There’s some cognitive bias in which we assume that when we regard some information as important, that anyone exposed to that information will fully absorb it.

The reality is - while learning how to communicate well is hard, actually getting anyone to listen is many times harder.

I used to joke that in any meeting with more than 4 people, at any given time at least 1 person is day dreaming.

And since mobile phones and social media all this has got many times harder; attention spans are shorter and there’s a higher expectation that information should be somehow entertaining.

These days communicating something simple like an important date to 10+ people inside a company requires multi level marketing; email, calendar invite, Slack, face to face time ... use it all and still one of the 10 will somehow miss the message.

Perfect example was the youtube-dl. Making an app to download videos from YouTube is relatively trivial for most semi-experienced developers but that doesn't mean I want to invest the time doing it, plus the effort of keeping it up to date every time YouTube changes something. So youtube-dl is enabling me and less technical people to download content from YouTube, and it's "going away" for a short time caused an outcry.

So there's a difference between "this is possible" and "this is a tool that makes it really easy"

> Duckduckgo is a competitor to Google. Its based on Yandex and Bing, two other competitors to Google.

Interesting. Can you elaborate? Like is DuckDuckGo using some of Yandex’s open source? Or the Bing search API?

I don't use the notifications - have them disabled. I just dip in when I have time and see what's happening. May not be the best strategy but works for me.

I guess so but that it’s groups not 1-on-1 probably means people behave better. Also video is a higher barrier entry in terms of awkwardness etc

It doesn’t it’s just that for me, living in Zürich Switzerland, it’s a type of conversation I would never get to hear / be part of

First time I went on Clubhouse, first got in a room with some Silicon Valley types talking about how to grow your startup. I get enough of that content so left to explore further and found a room with some African Americans discussing the best way to "snort crack from a booty hole". Perhaps it's my sense of humour but I laughed my head off and was immediately hooked. Felt like the Internet of the "good old days". Also I'm comfortable talking on voice from doing a podcast. Actually I usually hook up my Rødecaster Pro for better quality audio.

Some random tips I've found make Clubhouse more entertaining...

- Follow lots of people - don't be like Twitter, Instagram etc. trying to have more followers than follows. The more people you follow, the more diverse your room suggestions become

- From the home screen of the app, scroll down and find the little "Explore" button ... this will take you to more rooms. Smaller rooms tend to be lower down

- If you want to get involved in a discussion, go to the smaller rooms

- Can be interesting to tap on the profile of who "Nominated" someone... and keep tapping until you get to the center of the graph. This is an interesting take on social graphs I think (which I'm guessing they will disable)

- Most of all, get out of your comfort zone, when it comes to your normal interests / ethnicity etc. It's very low friction to talk to anyone and people are largely polite. It's a great to get to know groups of people you'd otherwise avoid and get new perspectives.

If you want to connect hit me up on @harryfcks in the app.

I think the bit I was remembering was the Terminfo Case Study on page 149 of the Art of Unix Programming - https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.62... - read it a long time ago though and re-reading now, it's not exactly what I was remembering but that's memory for you...

Agreed to I'll bite...

> The intuition is that for datasets commonly and frequently joined on a known key, e.g., user events with user metadata on a user ID, we can write them in bucket files with records bucketed and sorted by that key. By knowing which files contain a subset of keys and in what order, shuffle becomes a matter of merge-sorting values from matching bucket files, completely eliminating costly disk and network I/O of moving key–value pairs around.

I'm actually surprised that this should be regarded as "novel" in data science.

It reminds me of something in Eric Raymonds "The Art of Unix Programming" (I don't have time to find the link right now) where it discussed an approach from the earlier days of Linux filesystems where you had a limit on the number of iNodes that could exist in a single directory and corresponding performance. The work around was to create a subdirectory structure to store files based on the filename. But then you tended to get many files starting with the same characters all in the same directories. What turned out to be a better way to distribute the files evenly in the directory structure was to take the first and _last_ character of the file name and use those to create the subdirectories. This way you were more likely to spread the files evenly across the structure.

This really shouldn’t come as a surprise. The average mobile user will give you app less than 30 seconds of their attention after first install so you’d better deliver some kind of result in that time or they’re gone, probably for good.

Also chat users care more about GIFs than security.

So the product better be good.

Very true! Aside from all other benefits, bringing the Dev team to meet customers is highly motivating to everyone, including the customer

Having done all three roles either formally or informally (after 15 years development) the key thing a product manager has to do is follow Steve Blanks advice and get out of the building.

OK not in times of COVID but there has to be someone who actually talks to customers or potential customers in person and builds _qualitative_ opinions / insight into what really needs to be built and where the real opportunities are. And that’s not to knock analytics, surveys and various other forms of customer feedback ... it’s just if you’re not directly talking to customers product development becomes an echo chamber of unvalidated opinions about how the world works. And there’s always huge and surprising insights to be gained from direct communication with customers...

From there you have to sift out signal from noise and create product vision and priorities.

Doing this PM function well quickly becomes full time and conflicts with the job of being a PO and working closely with developers.

I think you put that extremely well. One thing ...

> until the concept of power itself is what is at stake

You mean we need a reach a point where power is not needed? If so that’s a fascinating idea. Thanks!

One thing I've seen smart developers do on multiple occasions is unknowingly throw out their ability to reason about their code while adding caching ( https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/3512... ). Then when some weird bugs start showing up it's like "Ummm... this shouldn't be happening" and then end up having to restart _everything_ because the interplay between layers of caching and the rest of the program no longer make any sense.

We like to assume they are many orders of magnitude more intelligent than us. But it might be that the human brain represents the optimum size and capability possible for a living organism to sustain, based on requirements for energy consumption and evolutionary competitiveness.

We know that Neanderthals may have had bigger brains, and may have been pushed to extinction by homo sapiens. A bigger brain will require more food and take longer to develop, potentially putting Neanderthals at an evolutionary disadvantage to humans.

Assuming the laws of Physics do not vary throughout the universe and that evolution, if "run more than once" will eventually lead to similar outcomes, that could mean aliens capable of space travel are not significantly more intelligent than us, they've just had longer to develop technology.

And given their apparent tendency to crash their spaceships while visiting earth, you might have a reasonable case for "alien idiots"...

You may be assuming too much of our great-grandchildren. Based on what we can see of mobile phones today, they will be having their attention spans minutely controlled at all times, and may not be thinking anything.

The problem for them is the “we threw amazing design at this so it’s better” sales pitch stopped being convincing in 2018. Good design is nice yes, but it doesn’t change the fact that email is email and email is broken.

Email continues to suck because the one company that dominates it (Google) has stopped trying to innovate. The most promising attempt to improve E-Mail in years - Google Inbox - was shutdown and officially “merged” into Gmail but it reality what got merged was lip service to Inbox.

The basic problem with E-Mail still today after years is 80% of the time spent in it is wasted time. Everything from junk to conversations you didn’t need to be part of, people you don’t even know contacting you to “misuse“ by connecting things like the build system to your email so you get the same message every day that you never read. Add to this that 40%+ of people now ignore their emails so you never know if you’re getting a reply.

And from a user perspective - email doesn’t scale - the moment you start interacting with 100’s or 1000’s of people, the brokenness of email turns into insanity.

So making you “faster at emails with our beautiful design” is not solving the real problem, it’s just making a faster hamster wheel. The real problem is most of the emails you read every day were a waste of your time.

And what’s even crazier is you have people saying “well I’ve developed my emailing system over the years that allows me to survive” when in fact people should be screaming “email is broken and needs to die”.

Phew ... first email rant of 2021 done. Next up... JIRA

Remember wandering up to the Zynga booth at LeWeb years ago - perhaps 2010 - and asking them if employees at Zynga ever wondered if what the were doing might be evil or if the games were actually any good. It was unfair as the booth was actually manned by people from Dextrose AG who Zynga had just bought.

To cap it off I made them watch this FarmVille parody which they were awkwardly amused by https://youtu.be/odBDAcOEKuI

In retrospect I was being a righteous prick but I couldn’t stand Zynga - their games or their addiction based business model.

Ah Threema. Threema is a perfect example of why successful global startups can't happen in Switzerland today

Apologies upfront to anyone at Threema reading this but I have rant a little (PS: I live in Switzerland although I have no connection to Threema)...

Threema was launched in 2013 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threema#History ), 4 years after WhatsApp. Threema was always a paid app who's USP was security. After WhatsApp was bought by Facebook in 2014, Threema dominated the paid iOS app listings in the the German speaking world (posted about that before here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18840587 ) showing a significant minority care about their privacy and are willing to pay for it.

Given this strong signal from it's user, you'd think Threema would realise there's a huge opportunity to become a leading app in messaging... Sadly not. In fact Threema coasted, allowing Signal to launch an iOS app in 2014 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)#History ) and basically come from "zero" to "the app" for people that care about their privacy. Meanwhile Threema seemed to decide enterprise was the future in 2016 ( https://threema.ch/en/blog/posts/threema-for-organizations-t... ) ... perhaps inspired by Slack that had launched in 2013 and already had traction?

Seen from a distance, Threema had every opportunity to become a major player in messaging but failed to do so. Why? I'm guessing because the founders lacked the experience or the right people to guide them from startup into massive growth. The market told them they had a product / market fit. The next stage was product / channel fit and them pour in the marketing dollars for real growth, but sadly Switzerland lacks the people with that kind of experience. There are few that even have the experience of growing a company from 10 to 100 employees...

In the last 10 years Switzerland has become a great place to launch tech startups, with the ETH and EPFL plus Google and others having engineering offices here. But sadly from there what's lacking is people with the experience growing startups. That needs to change...

The petition says...

> D400 (for 40 metric tons) instead of D125 (for 12.5 tons)

...but D125 is incorrect! It should be B125 (e.g. see https://www.wrekinproducts.com/british-standard-groups-and-c... ). Has humanity reached the point where we can't rely on Germans to get their facts correct?

Thanks for explaining! I wish these types of takeover announcements didn’t always assume the reader already knows what the product / company does