imajoredinecon

Working at a startup with a solid but not dramatically-better-than-the-others product, but an amazing sales org, did it for me. (Said startup is now worth many, many billions of dollars)

No, but other client-side measures could.

At least in my personal observation, it seems like star ratings elsewhere on the internet (I'm thinking particularly of Airbnb and Google Maps reviews) are probably pretty close to bimodal: by and large, people essentially use five stars as a "like" button and one star as a "dislike." Assuming this is the case, a rating of 4.8 stars is essentially a way of saying "95% liked this": why not just strip out the extra abstraction and complexity and instead use a simpler like/dislike model, just like that YT blog post argues?

Of course, there are other situations where ratings between 1 and 5 stars _are_ informative: think critic reviews of movies, video, etc. But I think most crowdsourced reviews have kind of converged organically to a like/dislike model.

> Only if you think your home is a lemon will you consider selling to Zillow.

What if Zillow just makes an offer that’s high enough that you think it’s unlikely you’d do better if you went through the hassle of looking for other buyers?

> Zillow gave homeowners a free put option: Whenever Zillow's offer was above market, the homeowner would take it; otherwise the homeowner could freely ignore it.

Sorry for the possibly dumb question, but doesn’t this just describe buying things in any financial market? Your offer will only be accepted in cases where nobody else is willing to pay more.

> So can I live my life and worry about own family and not someone’s I don’t know?

Unfortunately, no. We live in a society where sometimes we have to take collective action to prevent collective harm. Taking personally inconvenient measures to help fight an epidemic is a prime example.

I’m all in favor of making our cities more pedestrian- and transit-centered, but isn’t this a little of an unproductively absolutist stance? Is there much of a difference between a shareable self-driving car and a tram?

Is the Lord’s Prayer “straight-up youth brainwashing” too?

I went to schools in the US and UK where we said the pledge on occasion in the former and the Lord’s Prayer on occasion in the latter, and they both seemed like harmless traditions. (The UK school essentially had a religious cultural background, but turning us into observant Christians was most certainly not a goal of the faculty. Similarly I don’t think the pledge turns people into nationalists.)

More about his team’s work: https://www.chromium.org/teams/rendering

re "holding up the fix", another possibility is that Waymo wasn't aware of the problem, right?

If the cars were able to---albeit slowly---cope with the closed streets through this kind of cumbersome queueing in a dead end and turning around, it seems possible that Waymo might not have been aware there was an issue.

Disagree with the premise - you don’t have to sacrifice productivity to put time into finding good music. For one, you don’t have to do your music research during working hours. But even if you do, it doesn’t mean you’re trading off productivity in order to do it.

I'm sure this is true to a certain extent, but it'd be interesting to see how it varies in degree. For instance

* do some companies have good enough insider risk controls to make it expensive or risky to access particular kinds of sensitive data?

* not all nation state actors are equally well-resourced (and not all of them have equally large populations of computer science grads from which to recruit potential spies): is there a difference between what (say) KSA or Iran could get, vs US/UK/China/Russia?

Many of those juicy emails are from before the past few years' wave of tech lawsuits.

At least at the entry level, I think a lot of the "don't say the word 'competition'" training started as a reaction to relatively recent legal tangles - it wouldn't be surprising if people at the senior level also have gotten more careful about how they communicate.

I got a reasonable amount of value out of skimming Blind during a recent switch from big tech to a more niche role. The amount of signal definitely drops (as does the signal-to-noise ratio) but it was still useful to a certain extent.

> Apple really believes that their OS and Store are godsend to developers,

Or, at least, their lawyers have decided that is the line of argument likeliest to lead to a victory.

The desired outcome here isn't "persuading Apple to budge." It's using the democratic process to arrive at legal changes that make businesses cease an abusive practice. The first step on that road is better public awareness.

It's possible simultaneously for something to have a large societal cost, and for it to not affect any individual person enough to change their decisionmaking.

In that case, why not allow a camera replacement with a factory reset?

Is it potentially a little narrow to frame "one large corporation... profit[ing]" as the main result of consuming the water?

They're also:

- producing useful things

- employing people to do said production (and design the production process, and the thing that's getting produced)

- paying suppliers for the parts that go into the useful things getting produced

> Governments won't pay one highly skilled person 250k

How can we change this? As a taxpayer, I'd be perfectly happy allocating some of my tax dollars to pay efficiency wages in situations like the one in this post, where hiring someone with specialized skills can save the community millions of dollars.

Gotta say, "launching four civilians to orbit" definitely conjures up a certain mental image!

Happy ending here: he was admitted to the country a week later, on his second attempt, in time to start classes.

(I'm not making excuses for the---dire---state of our immigration policy as a whole. But I was happy to see that this particular case worked out in the end.)

> How can you regulate conspiring?

It seems to work pretty well in practice: testimony from other participants in the conspiracies, technical evidence (just because E2E-encrypted messaging exists doesn't mean it's the sole choice of people conspiring to commit crimes), ...

> people have the right to private channels of communication

This is an intuitively appealing idea (and something I think I personally agree with) but doesn't seem to be totally settled. But let's assume it is:

> [People have the right to] free speech over said communication

Well, no: free speech isn't absolute. That's why people are generally in favor of laws against plotting murders.

If they're _too_ lax, wouldn't their premiums eventually go up?

Should the first one be Google _Talk_, or was there another pre-Hangouts feature called Chat too?

The author has 3 children, and that's a _household_ income of $150000. 150 grand is not a huge family income to support 2 adults and 3 kids; as a country, we give people tax breaks to encourage having children and to help support people who make that choice.

Calling this "Houdini-like" (author's words) tax hacking seems like a bit of a misunderstanding of deliberate social policy!

I was! Looking at the reception, the single exclamation mark evidently wasn't quite enough to connote that. Ah well.

Rent controls!

Is it just me, or is the wording hugely misleading?

> To opt-out from our anonymization of your personal information to perform data analyses, please provide your Mastercard or Maestro payment card number

What we're opting out from is the use of the data, right?

I guess the charitable interpretation is that this was written by somebody incompetent, not by someone trying to be deliberately obfuscatory...

Reading that transcript actually left me thinking the system worked okay in this particular case, even though it led to a bad (in my opinion) policy outcome. The money bought access, not results: in the end, the legislators who voted against largely it did so because of personal belief the policy was bad or because of political pressure from an important campaign group (+), not because of money from Intuit (and it didn't take too much in absolute terms---$140K at full price---to equalize the lobbying power of a single-person pet project with that of a multibillion-dollar company with a strong vested interest in seeing the legislation defeated).

(+): I'm not personally a Grover Norquist fan, but he's influential because a lot of Americans really don't like taxes, and the argument that people will be more opposed to taxes if they're more burdensome does seem internally consistent.